Changing Obama's Mindset : Information Clearing House - ICH

Changing Obama's Mindset : Information Clearing House - ICH

Democracy and State Capitalism Exposed

This article was first published in The Irish Times and re-published by ZMagazine.

Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed
By Noam Chomsky

THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as "a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close", as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf.

The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient", as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on "to themselves". Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others - the "externalities" of decent survival - if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalization has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programs and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalization. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organization. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicized by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labor parties". Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalization of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures".

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalize the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied Second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the "reserve currency" for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

Christmas & The Economy

Washington Post Headline, October 9, 2008
Make-or-Break Holiday Season Looms Large
Each day of financial tumult is bringing more pressure to bear on the nation's retailers -- and time is growing short.

Perhaps, Gov. Sarah Palin might wish to address how she feels about end-of-year retail profits being determined by how much people spend on gifts to celebrate the birth of Jesus that she, and others, are so greatfully born-in-again in their desire for life hereafter.

Bail-Out Mortgage Holders?

This following article is from a contributor to Portside - http://www.portside.org/. To Blakley's suggestions, I add that Congress should also consider giving a tax break for those who rent. This would enable them to save for a down-payment to purchase in future.

From Sandra Blakely

Re: Wall Street Bailout

If anyone was watching The View the other day, Whoopi Goldberg made an interesting suggestion. As I heard it, she said that Wall Street may or may not need to be bailed out, but if they are, than every American with a mortgage should have their mortgage cut in half. The audience was ecstatic, and so was I. I wouldn't be
trying to sell my house if I received a government bailout. As a single women, this economy is killing me, and single women homeowners are being adversely hit
in this vile market.

Whistleblower Tried to Prevent Iraq War

The Whistleblowers of the world need our support. And, for any of you contemplating blowing the whistle on government or corporate fraud, malfeasance and illegal activities, before doing so please contact Government Accountability Project: http://www.whistleblower.org/. The following article was originally posted on http://www.truthout.org/

Story of the Whistleblower Who Tried to Prevent the Iraq War
Thursday 25 September 2008

by: Norman Solomon, t r u t h o u t Perspective


Katharine Gun worked at the British intelligence agency when she discovered an NSA memo that she used in an attempt to stop the invasion of Iraq.

Of course, Katharine Gun was free to have a conscience, as long as it didn't interfere with her work at a British intelligence agency. To the authorities, practically speaking, a conscience was apt to be less tangible than a pixel on a computer screen. But suddenly - one routine morning, while she was scrolling through email at her desk - conscience struck. It changed Katharine Gun's life, and it changed history.

Despite the nationality of this young Englishwoman, her story is profoundly American - all the more so because it has remained largely hidden from the public in the United States. When Katharine Gun chose, at great personal risk, to reveal an illicit spying operation at the United Nations in which the US government was the senior partner, she brought out of the transatlantic shadows a special relationship that could not stand the light of day.

By then, in early 2003, the president of the United States - with dogged assists from the British prime minister following close behind - had long since become transparently determined to launch an invasion of Iraq. Gun's moral concerns were not unusual; she shared, with countless other Brits and Americans, strong opposition to the impending launch of war. Yet, thanks to a simple and intricate twist of fate, she abruptly found herself in a rare position to throw a roadblock in the way of the political march to war from Washington and London. Far more extraordinary, though, was her decision to put herself in serious jeopardy on behalf of revealing salient truths to the world.

We might envy such an opportunity, and admire such courage on behalf of principle. But there are good, or at least understandable, reasons so few whistleblowers emerge from institutions that need conformity and silence to lay flagstones on the path to war. Those reasons have to do with matters of personal safety, financial security, legal jeopardy, social cohesion and default positions of obedience. They help to explain why and how people go along to get along with the warfare state even when it flagrantly rests on foundations of falsehoods.

The emailed memorandum from the US National Security Agency (NSA) that jarred Katharine Gun that fateful morning was dated less than two months before the invasion of Iraq that was to result in thousands of deaths among the occupying troops and hundreds of thousands more among Iraqi people. We're told that this is a cynical era, but there was nothing cynical about Katharine Gun's response to the memo that appeared without warning on her desktop. Reasons to shrug it off were plentiful, in keeping with bottomless rationales for prudent inaction. The basis for moral engagement and commensurate action was singular.

The import of the NSA memo was such that it shook the government of Tony Blair and caused uproars on several continents. But for the media in the United States, it was a minor story. For The New York Times, it was no story at all.

At last, a new book tells this story. "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War" packs a powerful wallop. To understand in personal, political and historic terms - what Katharine Gun did, how the British and American governments responded, and what the US news media did and did not report - is to gain a clear-eyed picture of a military-industrial-media complex that plunged ahead with the invasion of Iraq shortly after her brave action of conscience. That complex continues to promote what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the madness of militarism."

In a time when political players and widely esteemed journalists are pleased to posture with affects of great sophistication, Katharine Gun's response was disarmingly simple. She activated her conscience when clear evidence came into her hands that war - not diplomacy seeking to prevent it - headed the priorities list of top leaders at both 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 10 Downing Street. "At the time," she recalled, "all I could think about was that I knew they were trying really hard to legitimize an invasion, and they were willing to use this new intelligence to twist arms, perhaps blackmail delegates, so they could tell the world they had achieved a consensus for war."

She and her colleagues at the Government Communications Headquarters were, as she later put it, "being asked to participate in an illegal process with the ultimate aim of achieving an invasion in violation of international law."

The authors of "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War," Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, describe the scenario this way: "Twisting the arms of the recalcitrant [UN Security Council] representatives in order to win approval for a new resolution could supply the universally acceptable rationale." After Katharine Gun discovered what was afoot, "she attempted to stop a war by destroying its potential trigger mechanism, the required second resolution that would make war legal."

Instead of mere accusation, the NSA memo provided substantiation. That fact explains why US intelligence agencies firmly stonewalled in response to media inquiries - and it may also help to explain why the US news media gave the story notably short shrift. To a significant degree, the scoop did not reverberate inside the American media echo chamber because it was too sharply telling to blend into the dominant orchestrated themes.

While supplying the ostensible first draft of history, US media filtered out vital information that could refute the claims of Washington's exalted war planners. "Journalists, too many of them - some quite explicitly - have said that they see their mission as helping the war effort," an American media critic warned during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. "And if you define your mission that way, you'll end up suppressing news that might be important, accurate, but maybe isn't helpful to the war effort."

Jeff Cohen (a friend and colleague of mine) spoke those words before the story uncorked by Katharine Gun's leak splashed across British front pages and then scarcely dribbled into American media. He uttered them on the MSNBC television program hosted by Phil Donahue, where he worked as a producer and occasional on-air analyst. Donahue's prime time show was canceled by NBC management three weeks before the invasion - as it happened, on almost the same day that the revelation of the NSA memo became such a big media story in the United Kingdom and such a carefully bypassed one in the United States.

Soon, a leaked NBC memo confirmed suspicions that the network had pulled the plug on Donahue's show in order to obstruct views and information that would go against the rush to war. The network memo said that the Donahue program would present a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." And: "He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." Cancellation of the show averted the danger that it could become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

Overall, to the editors of American mass media, the actions and revelations of Katharine Gun merited little or no reporting - especially when they mattered most. My search of the comprehensive LexisNexis database found that for nearly three months after her name was first reported in the British media, US news stories mentioning her scarcely existed.

When the prosecution of Katharine Gun finally concluded its journey through the British court system, the authors note, a surge of American news reports on the closing case "had people wondering why they hadn't heard about the NSA spy operation at the beginning." This book includes an account of journalistic evasion that is a grim counterpoint to the story of conscience and courage that just might inspire us to activate more of our own.

--------

This article was adapted from Norman Solomon's foreword to the new book by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion

Open Letter to Hon. Sarah Palin

The following letter was posted by registered airmail and sent via E-mail on 20 September 2008.


Dear Governor Palin:


I strongly support your right to not use birth control, to oppose sex education for your children, to carry a Down Syndrome embryo to term, and to have a career while raising a family. I do this as a founding mother of the current feminist movement, a mother of two, grandmother of four, great-grandmother of one.

In support of our U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which grant citizens the legal means to debate and resolve fundamental disagreement within the Rule of Law, I defend your legitimate right to seek repeal or amendment of current laws and to enact new ones that would change the status quo—a status quo that once:

• Denied women the right to vote;
• Denied women access to education;
• Prohibited both men and women from access to birth control measures that would prevent unwanted pregnancies;
• Gave women no choice over whether to carry an embryo to term, even in cases of incest or rape;
• Failed to hold men accountable for children they fathered;
• Destroyed or tainted the reputation of a woman who had sex outside of marriage, but not the reputation of her male partner;
• Prohibited legal sanction of marriage between people of different races;
• Banned teaching of Darwinian evolution in elementary schools;
• Blocked civil service employment and most civil rights to homosexuals and lesbians; and
• Banned from public libraries books disapproved of by pressure groups.

Governor Palin, it is my understanding that YOU seek, or have sought, to:

• Prohibit sex education being taught in schools;
• Repeal laws that allow women the right to use birth control, including the “morning-after” pill, even in cases of incest or rape;
• Ban from public libraries books that do not conform to your religious and/or political beliefs;
• Seek to have Creationism taught alongside Darwinism in public schools.

If I have misunderstood your positions on the above, please correct me. Also, please inform me of your position regarding:

• Enforcement of equal pay to women for equal work?
• Provision of social and economic support for unwed or single mothers?
• Establishment of affordable and freely accessible child care?
• Enactment of legislation to ensure maximum Social Security retirement benefits for women who are stay-at-home mothers?
• Rigorous enforcement of a man’s responsibility to provide monetary support for any and all children he fathers?
• Provision of universal health care, including maternity care, for all U.S. citizens?
• Strengthening and expansion of public education?
• Free or low-cost tuition for higher education?
• Re-institution of inheritance taxes (currently mislabeled as “death taxes”)?
• Provision to renters of the same State and Federal tax write-offs now given to home-buyers, thus enabling renters to save down payments for homes?
• Banning excessive profiteering by manufacturers of military weapons?
• Banning arms sales by U.S. citizens to currently proclaimed terrorist organizations?
• Blocking the sale of guns without strong background checks on potential buyers?
• Rescission of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act that abolished firewall regulations which formerly governed transactions between commercial banks, insurance companies, securities firms and investment institutions?
• Citing and fining commercial and agricultural businesses that hire illegal immigrants?
• Abolition of trade agreements that permit U.S. businesses to close facilities here and re-establish them in countries where workers’ rights and wages undercut those guaranteed in the United States?
• Sanction the right of trade unions to organize workers?
• Granting overseas professionals work permits that will greatly reduce or abolish jobs for similarly qualified U.S. citizens?

I am a U.S. citizen currently residing in the Republic of Ireland. I will be voting in the November 2008 election via absentee ballot. Therefore, Governor Palin, I respectfully await your response prior to Wednesday, October 24, 2008 to enable sufficient time to return my absentee ballot.

Sincerely,
Margie Bernard

Wolfowitz Resigns From World Bank - New York Times

Wolfowitz Resigns From World Bank - New York Times

This issue was first exposed by the Government Accountability Project which can be found at: www.whistleblower.org

Community Arts in the Aftermath of Genocide: A Potential Strategy for Healing

I’ve not written to this blog for several months due to my annual visit with family and friends in California. While in Los Angeles, I, along with Pauline Ross, Executive Director and founder of The Playhouse in Derry, N. Ireland, attended a four-day conference on ‘Arts in the One World: Culture and Identity’, subtitled ‘Shape and shape shifting – How the arts and culture help destroy/create the sense of self and other’. The conference was held 25-28 January 2007 at California Institute of the Arts in Torrence, CA.

Over the past several years, students from various CalArts departments have collaborated with artists in Rwanda to develop a new paradigm of community art. They have done this under the direction of Eric Ehn, Dean of the School of Theater at CalArts and Jean-Pierre Karegeye, Director of Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies, Kigali, Rwanda. This collaboration is facilitated by using the arts as a neutral language to aid the process of healing between the perpetrators and surviving victims of genocide and their families.

The focus of the CalArts conference expanded beyond the work undertaken by community arts practitioners in Rwanda to include those engaged in similar projects in other countries where genocide has occurred notably Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Uganda. And, although retroactive acts of genocide are not covered under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, representatives of Native Americans were also panelists.

Situated on rolling hills overlooking San Fernando Valley, the tranquillity of the CalArts setting contradicted the horror described by panelists of their family, friends and neighbors being driven from their homes and hacked to death with machetes, or dying due to suffocation, lynching, torture, or starvation. Alice Buhikare, a Rwanda genocide survivor, told of fleeing the carnage in her village after finding remnants of her parent’s bodies which she put into a suitcase and carried with her. Other Rwandan survivors did likewise because their tribal culture forbad their abandoning their ancestors without proper burial. Alice’s description of that ordeal, told in her calm, matter-of-fact monotone, signaled to me she was still in a state of profound shock 14-years after the ordeal which resulted in the killing of one-million people in a three-month period. Alice’s ‘telling’, like the telling by other genocide survivors in Rwanda and elsewhere is a personal political act that she, like they, use to free themselves from the unspeakable horrors they witnessed, to free themselves from the guilt of their survival, as well as unlock the denial of these events.

However, perpetrators of genocide also need to tell their stories to gain an understanding of why they so willingly slaughtered neighbors, friends, even relatives. They both, survivors and perpetrators, need to tell their stories in a public forum so they can begin the process of healing themselves, each other, and their community. In Rwanda this is being accomplished by the Gacaca Courts. For me Alice’s ‘telling’ was reminiscent of a remark by a panelist at a Playhouse-sponsored conference I attended at Monaghan, Ireland in November ‘06. During her presentation about being a refugee, Oraib Toukan, whose parents were forced to leave their home in Palestine to live in a Jordanian resettlement camp, stated that she needed others to ‘remind me to remember to forget’ (See my 7 December 2006 Blog).

Most of us became aware of the full horrors of the Rwandan genocide only after watching the film, Hotel Rwanda in 2004, which Belfast-born Terry George directed, produced and co-scripted. (George is a former member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party. (1) However, former colleagues of mine at the National Security Archive have obtained documents, released via Freedom of Information requests, confirming that the U.S. State Department had early information of the killings in Rwanda but failed to act on this knowledge. (2) But this failure to act in spite of knowledge comes as no surprise to victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Serb victims in Bosnia and Kosovo, or the genocide of Kurds in Iraq.

In Cambodia, it took the Khmer Rouge nearly three years to murder some two-million people because they were bureaucratically more efficient in their methods by
taking photos of their victims before killing them so they would have a record of those murdered. At the CalArts conference, a segment of a play, ‘S-21', was performed by its drama students. In the play, two of the Khmer Rouge victims, a man and a woman, whose photos are on exhibit in an art gallery, come to life and attempt to determine where they are and how they got there. S-21 is also in the title of a film, ‘S-21:The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine’, made in 2003 by Cambodian-born filmmaker, Rithy Rahn, who was 11 when his family died in that genocide. S-21 was the name given by the Khmer Rouge to Tuol Svay Prey High School in Phnom Penh when they turned it into one of their numerous security prisons – today it houses the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

In her article in Peace Review, Chantal Kalisa, reminds us that we have all participated in the theater of genocide: ‘Perpetrators and victims played their role while the rest of the world watched the "spectacle" live on television.' (3) The question I pose is this: As spectator, how will I, we, respond, react, reflect when witnessing yet another act of genocide in yet another country on nightly television news? Have we played a part in its unfolding because after watching newscasts highlighting the precursors of genocide – forced community relocations, reports of torture, assassination of dissident leaders, accounts of ethnic cleansing – we ignored these warnings? How can I relate to ‘them’, whether victim or perpetrator, who might, one day, be me? Can ways be found to pressure for an end to human rights violations, such as those occurring today in Darfur? One small way I've alopted to put pressure on the government of offending nations is to aid the work of:

Amnesty International: http://www.amnestyinternational.org/
Global Exchange: http://www.globalexchange.org/
Human Rights Watch: http://www.humanrightswatch.org/

By the simple act of adding my name to one of their petitions aids their efforts to inform the leadership of offending nations that their actions are being watched around the world, that these violations are not to be sanctioned or tolerated.

(1) For a description of the formation and early years of the Irish Republican Socialist Party see my book, Daughter of Derry: The Story of Brigid Sheils Makowski (Pluto Press, London, 1989)

(2) See http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ for the following documents: The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994 The Assassination of the Presidents and the Beginning of the "Apocalypse"
The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994 Information, Intelligence and the U.S. Response
The US and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994 Evidence of inaction

(3) Chantal Kalisa, 'Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide', Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, Vol. 18-4, Winter 2006, p. 515.

Drug Traffficking

On 17 January 2007, BBC Two Television broadcast ‘The 12-Year-Old Drug Smuggler’. This was a documentary of a 12-year-old girl in Bolivia tried as an adult and sentenced to one year in prison for attempting to smuggle cocaine. She was caught with several soap-cake-sized bars of cocaine paste strapped to her body with masking tape after the bus she was on was searched at a police checkpoint.

The girl was carrying the drug at the request of her mother who needed the money her daughter would receive when she delivered the drugs to the next level dealer. If the delivery had been successful, the drug would have continued up the chain until it reached the streets of Los Angeles, London and Dublin. There the cocaine would have been sold to addicts who might themselves end-up in jail for purchasing it or for stealing the funds to make the buy, thus, the cycle of cocaine trafficking that started with the destitute would have ended up with the destitute.

Over centuries in Bolivia the coca leaf has served as a component of traditional ritual and for use in medical treatment. Chewing the leaf also provides energy and relieves perpetual hunger fueled by the lack of income-producing work for a large segment of the population. Thus, the promise by agents of the drug cartels to subsistence-living individuals that processing cocoa leaves to produce cocaine would provide an end to their plight, fell on eager ears. However, urged on by diplomats of the U.S. government, this processing was made illegal under Bolivian Law. Thus, today Bolivian prisons house generation after generation of women because of the minimal part they play in the cocaine trade. Furthermore, because so many of these women have children, the prisons also house their youngsters whose formative years are now spent in this environment. Meanwhile, the profits from cocaine production, transportation and sale end up in the hands of the profiteers.

In addition to the drug cartels, an internal CIA investigation has confirmed they covered up covert crack cocaine trafficking by the Nicaraguan Contras that helped finance the US Government’s secret military assistance to Iran during the Ronald Reagan presidency that was overseen by Oliver L. North. See: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14704.htm, http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1213-31.htm, and
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB210/index.htm

When an intoxicating substance is made illegal, covert and criminal drug profiteers enter full-force as they need to ensure customer demand to enhance profits. Therefore, a major part of their operation at street level is to entice others to escape reality by ingesting their product with the most vulnerable target being disenfranchised and disillusioned young people. Therefore, it is my firmly held belief that until governments abolish laws that make drug-use illegal we will continue to have this vicious cycle repeated ad infinitum. Certainly, the U.S. government should have learned this lesson during Prohibition when the 18th Amendment made alcohol use illegal, thereby, providing a means for organized crime to increase its wealth and influence.

Stoning Iraqi Women

By Tina Ehrami
December 20, 2006
Submitted to WFAFI

There is no saviour
From the soil,
That swallowed you like quicksand.
Don't blame Mother Earth,
She damns humanity tonight.

There is no saviour
When your hands are tied,
And your body suffocates, cold and dark,
While your head is left out to bleed.

There is no saviour
From the sharp stones that hit your face
Until your crimson blood enrages the madman,
So he can empty his bucket of guilt over your virgin veil

There is no saviour
When the stars and the moon turn their backs
To hide away from this orgy of insanity
Don't blame the sky,
She cries for all you, your sisters and mothers.

There is no saviour
When your face is gone and your scream
Reaches only as far as the valley of the deaf
And the only thing that remains,
Are the seconds of your sobs echoing in our ears.


This poem is from the website http://www.wfafi.org

The Execution of Saddam Hussein

In a Washington Post article (30 December 2006), on the death of Saddam Hussein, a concluding paragraph had this sentence: ‘Nevertheless, the year-long trial further deepened Iraq's sectarian divide, as Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds reacted to Hussein's case along the fault lines of sect and history.’

I congratulate the author of this sentence. Yes, Hussein was executed but this means he will not be brought to justice for the remainder of his crimes–namely the genocide of Kurds. Justice is done only when justice is seen to be done. And I fear that Hussein's death will prevent the full disclosure of other human rights abuses that occurred during his regime. Executing Hussein further occludes the blind eye that the Reagan, Carter, and both Bush governments turned toward these human rights abuses because it served their foreign policy objectives to do so.

Furthermore, we, as individuals, chose to ignore what our government was doing in our name. We did so because our government’s activities in that region satisfied our collective need for its supply of oil. Much injustice has been done and will continue to be done to maintain our energy-dependent lifestyle. Hussain’s death will not resolve this dilemma.

Jimmy Carter's Book -- Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

Quite a flap has occurred over what former U.S. President Jimmy Carter meant or didn’t mean by using the word apartheid in the title of his latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. No matter what Carter meant, it is clear the Israeli Zionists do not want to accommodate Palestinians and what the Israeli government is doing by building their walls is akin to re-ghettoizing its Jewish citizens.

In the current web-entry from Truthdig, http://www.truthdig.com/, Joshua Scheer interviews a longtime friend of mine, Stanley Sheinbaum about Carter’s book. In 1988, Sheinbaum led a delegation of five other prominent Jewish leaders to meet with Yasser Arafat. That meeting succeeded in getting Arafat to agree to renounce the use of terrorism and recognize Israel. For this, both Sheinbaum and Arafat were denounced as traitors by their respective ethnic communities. In Sheinbaum’s case some of his detractors threw dead pigs on the driveway of his Santa Barbara home to signify their belief he had betrayed Israel. To drive this attitude home David Ifshin, former legal counsel for the America Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), once said to me: ‘The day that Stanley Sheinbaum dies, the people of Israel will dance on his grave’.

In the Scheer interview, Sheinbaum stated the title of Carter’s book was unfortunate as it detracted attention from the serious questions Carter posed and diverted efforts from holding a serious debate about the current state of affairs in the Middle East. Furthermore, in my opinion, rather than get sidetracked by a lengthy discussion of what Carter meant by ‘apartheid’ we should concentrate more urgently on the growing link between Israeli Zionists, AIPAC, and born-again Christians – something Jimmy Carter has also written extensively about.

In a separate but a related vein, the current London Review of Books has an article by Corey Robin entitled ‘Dragon-Slayers’, in which he discusses the writings of Jewish philosopher and totalitarian theorist, Hanna Arendt. In it he quotes her as having said in the 1940s that without ‘Arab Jewish co-operation the whole Jewish venture [to create the State of Israel] is doomed' and that, ‘only [Zionist] folly could dictate a policy that trusts distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours’. Robin states that by 1948, Arendt had come to oppose Zionist politics and that this opposition was rooted in three concerns: "the correspondence [Arendt] saw between Zionism and Fascism, the Zionists’ dependence on imperialism, and her growing awareness of what she called ‘the Arab question’."

Robin also cites a prescient article Arendt wrote in 1944, ‘USA – Oil – Palestine’, in which she held that the US foreign policy post WWII would be determined by its need to control the world’s oil supply. To see Robin’s entire article go to: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/print/robi02_.html.

I, for one, refuse to be labeled an anti-Semite when I highlight human rights abuses by the current Israeli government toward its fellow citizens and neighbors.

Dirge for Pinochet

Celebrate Pinochet’s Death!
Yet mourn its injustice
that denied his appearance
before a Chilean Court.

A trial where all is exposed:
The murders of Salvador Allende,
Orlando Letelier, Ronni Moffitt, Rodrigo Rojas
his victim’s names roll off my tongue.

My voice chants names of the disappeared,
those thousands buried under Chilean soil
red with their blood.

My ears ring with Canto Libre.
A song by Victor Jara whose
guitar strumming fingers were severed
by soldiers in Santiago’s stadium.

My eyes weep for my country’s soul;
assassinated by Nixon and Kissinger
who planned, financed and supported
Pinochet’s rape of Chile’s democracy.

Margie Bernard
12 December 2006

Helicopters Over Derry

Every Wednesday for the past six years, I have facilitated Derry Playhouse Writers, a support group for writers of all genre. This past Wednesday as we were meeting, we once again heard the irritating, constant, dull thud-thud-thud beating sound of British Army helicopters whirring overhead. As they hovered above our location for close to half-an-hour, the noise was so loud it was near impossible to verbally share our writings of this week.

I haven't heard this irritating sound in years. This was the sound of Derry I remember so well from my first visits here in the early 1980s. Those sounds and the sounds of women banging their metal garbage bin lids on the sidewalk to warn others living in The Bogside that British Army patrols were in the area once again are reminiscent of my initial experiences of life in war-torn Derry, N. Ireland.

So, although there has been a drastic sea-change since those days, Wednesday was a déjá vu day of remembrance. That helicopter whirring blades were the sounds I remember from those early days; the other memory is the fragrant smell of burning turf that blazed in the fireplace of every Bogside home.

Transforming Arts: Transcending Beliefs

A Personal Summation
Margie Bernard

The YouCAN conference, Transforming Arts: Transforming Beliefs, was a joint international conference of Boomerang Theatre in Cork and The Playhouse in Derry held in Monaghan on 1-3 November 2006. For me, the event was an artistic and intellectual feast of concepts and practices that enriched my spiritual/activist soul. In my summation, I have taken the liberty of changing its title, as I don’t believe we should be about the business of ‘transforming beliefs’ but rather coming to transcend our beliefs to open ourselves to exploring our differences so we can begin the process of healing and reconciliation.

This conference enhanced my understanding of what is community art and how its expression and execution differ from that of traditional fine art. A difference, I felt, that was highlighted in the opening talk by Mark Patrick Hederman and the final presentations on Thursday by Claudia Bernardi. For me they summed up the schism between egocentric individual art and ego-free collaborative art.

I would agree with Mark Patrick Hederman, an Irish Benedictine monk, that art can be propaganda and entertainment as well as a means of excavation and exploration. He theorizes that we are urgently in need of new symbols to explore the ethical contradictions we face in the 21st Century. In this regard he feels the arts present one means of expressing our confusion and furthering our search for meaning.

Where he and I may differ is in the realm of what constitutes ‘good’ art and what criteria are used in this determination. Long dominated by European male artists and their wealthy patrons who financed its execution, the definition of what is artistic has been undergoing tremendous change as we rediscover the long neglected artistic expression of women and cultures other than those of a western European perspective. There has been a huge transition from seeing art as only individual expression, to that of appreciating folk art, to the current ephemeral expression of community art that is as much about process as product. (There has been a long-standing understanding within feminist circles that numerous works attributed to ‘anon.’ are actually artwork by women that was denied recognition.)

The elite fine arts’ world has long determined what is ‘acceptable’ art whereas community art is seeking recognition and appreciation by a wider audience. Too long have the arts been jailed in marble lined halls where the masses either fear to tread or are not welcomed. Defined by Wikipedia, community art:
Also known as "dialogical art" or "community-based art," is an art form based in a community setting. Artworks from this genre can be characterized by interaction and/or dialogue. The term was defined in the late-1960s and spawned a movement which grew in the United States, Canada, UK, Ireland and Australia. Often the work is based in deprived areas and covers all the art forms, but with a community oriented, grassroots approach.

The presentation of Oraib Toukan, a Palestinian living in Jordan, gave recognition to the fact that an artist can use visual art as a means to convey both the communities’ as well as the individual’s expression of a shared experience. She posed the question of what should be the role of the artist in a conflict situation. Her statement, ‘remind me to remember to forget’, poses a conundrum on which I can gnaw and attempt to unravel.

Oraib demonstrated how the use of the crossed ribbon could be a means to give visual promotion of an entrenched political view as well as give expression of social change visionaries. (And, if memory serves me right, the first group to use a crossed red ribbon was the gay/lesbian movement to signify those who were opposed to homophobia attitudes and was also linked to AIDS prevention awareness.)

Julie Jarvis, a Canadian, demonstrated the need for the individual artist to suspend ego when engaged in collective artistic expression. She illustrated that the collective vision is more important than the personal when using art as a healing mechanism in a rehabilitation context. She also highlighted the importance of using recognizable icons that convey traditional folk images, i.e., the image of the crow as a source of wisdom and knowledge. Her presentation also highlighted the meaningful role the arts can play in educating the community on the link between one’s ecological environment and physical/spiritual healing–a quest for well-being which is both cross-cultural and universal.

Claudia Bernardi, a self-exiled Argentinean, presented the concept that art provides a new paradigm for social interaction. The collective work she and the community in El Mazote, El Salvador, have been engaged in demonstrates that collective community art can give expression to traumatic events that our psyche would rather suppress: that community artistic expression can be a means of enabling collective healing while also providing expectations for a better future. Like Julie, she affirmed how vital is ego-suppression of the artist when seeking to awaken other individuals, and the collective, to the awareness that we all have the ability to give artistic expression to emotion, be that emotion negative or positive.

The process that Claudia and the El Mazote community engaged in, also demonstrated the vital importance patience plays in an attempt to gather all viewpoints of all individuals in a community in order to give collective expression and execution of, an end product–in this case a memorial mural of vibrant rainbow colors sanctifying the 384 genocidal deaths of the women and children at the site of their mass grave.

Roberto Varea, who fled his native Argentina during its ‘dirty war’, demonstrated the need to document the silent voices of the immigrant, in this case the plight of the undocumented in search of work, who cross the border from Mexico to the US (much of which at one time formed parts of their ancestral homeland). In the case of California, where Roberto is currently based and I once lived, without the underpaid neo-slave labor of the undocumented workers, the seasonal produce of the Central Valley fields of plenty would rot; the hi-tech offices in Silicon Valley and Hollywood would not be nightly cleaned; the garbage on the streets and refuse from residences would not be collected.1

Himself an immigrant, Roberto talked about being the ‘other’ whether living in the US or when visiting his native land. And, although light complected, he is regarded as a person of color in California. In the US he has joined other hyphenated residents who live a schizophrenic existence with regard to their citizenship. But as Roberto reminded me he may be the other but the other is part of me–one more conundrum for me to ponder.

Roberto emphasized that community art resides at the demarcation point of transition from the old to the new. It gives voice to those who are seeking economic change and social justice. Community art provides a means of giving this yearning a voice that expresses the underlying unrest with the status quo. Community art also provides a means of nonviolent resistance to social injustice.

Regarding religious belief, Roberto commented that for the Latino's of Central and South America, the Catholic Church has been regarded as one segment of European colonization and foreign occupation. However, in the US, among both documented and undocumented immigrants from these same countries, the Church provides both religious solace and communal sustenance to those in cross-cultural limbo. An attempt to provide a voice for the voiceless in Central and South America was contained within the Liberation Theology movement led by Bishop Romero who was assassinated for implementing it and Pope, Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Joseph Ratzinger, bears responsibility for its suppression. However, on an informal level, liberation theology lives on in the actions of individual community-based priests and nuns.2

In a one-on-one conversation between Claudia, Roberto and myself, we discussed how difficult it is for those who are multi-language to convey thoughts and concepts with a universal voice. I, hindered with only English, find difficulty enough expressing myself in just the one language so don’t know how I would cope with finding meaning within two or more. However, as Roberto pointed out in his talk, a new dialect is emerging in the USA, ‘Spanglish’ which is providing minor linkages of communal expression between the two languages–Spanish and English. This was also the case with earlier Jewish Yiddish language immigrants. In both cases, Yiddish and Spanglish have enhanced the English language. Certainly I give evidence of both in my own use of language along with recently acquired words of Irish garnered while living here during the past six years.

In his presentation, Phil Mullen, an Irish community musician based in London, reminded us that given the right circumstances we also could become the person who justifies inhumane acts with the words, ‘I was only following orders’. This was aptly demonstrated by the experiment in which a subject suspended their moral conscience when ordered to do so by someone they perceived to be an ‘authority figure’. Furthermore, there are no innocent bystanders: we also aid and abet injustice when, in the words of Mumia Abu-Jamal, “ . . . a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it–at that moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice."

Or, as that perceptive cartoon character Pogo remarked, We have met the enemy and it is us. Or as Roberto reminds me, the evil I abhor in others also resides in me. All that it takes for this diabolical other to emerge is fear–fear of the unknown, fear of the other. However, as former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt once stated, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’, a useful daily mantra in this age of fearful uncertainty.

Having attempted to give some personal meaning to the various ideas expressed during this conference, for me they boil down to the importance of the arts to provide a method to explore our shared similarities rather than our differences. Perhaps community art practitioners, working in a tandem with grassroots communities, will provide one means to further understanding between peoples and make accessible to us all the riches contained within our various cultures.



1 On a personal note: The plight of migrant field workers has long been a major concern of mine stemming from my Michigan childhood where I and my family competed with migrant stream of workers (mainly displaced southern whites) who annually made their way north from Belle Grade, Florida to harvest crops.

To my pre-teen eyes these families seemed to live an exotic nomadic existence that belied the backbreaking, sweat-producing labor engaged in by my family and me to supplement our poverty-level existence. These migrant southern workers also helped form my first prejudice that was to regard any white with a Southern US accent as ignorant (a prejudice of which I still harbor vestiges). In an attempt to examine this prejudice, my first political essay was to document the plight of these migrant workers and later to support the efforts of Caesar Chavez in the 1960s, to form the United Farm Workers Union in California.

It was during this latter period that I was exposed to El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers Theater) begun by Louis Valdez. He devised a political drama that highlighted the plight of the undocumented Mexican workers in California. The play was staged on the back of a flatbed truck that traveled around California serving as a means to educate the general public about the inhuman working conditions of these field workers. Valdez’s drama was my first exposure to the positive impact of community art on the general public.

This was heightened years later in Washington, DC where Chilean exile friends of mine, José and Francisco (Pancho) Letelier, painted political murals satirizing racism and prejudice on the sides of buildings in the interracial Adams-Morgan neighborhood where I resided.

José and Francisco were exiled when their parents, emigrated from Chile after the coup that displaced the elected socialist government of Salvadore Allende. Because he continued to speak out, their father, Orlando, was murdered, along with a college Ronnie Moffitt, when the car they were in was blown up in September 1976, in front of the Irish Embassy in Washington, DC. Orlando’s assassination was carried out under orders of the coup leader Augusto Pinochet. Ronnie was an innocent victim; her husband, Michael Moffitt, survived the blast. Today, Pinochet is under house arrest in Chile, where he is awaiting trial for the crimes he ordered in Chile following the coup that covertly aided by the US government.

In memory of Orlando and Ronnie, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, where Orlando was a Fellow and Ronnie his associate (and I, later, an Associate Fellow), has established an annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award. Orlando and Isabel Letelier’s eldest son, Juan Pablo is currently a Senator in the Chilean Legislature. In Chile, 11 September is remembered as the day of the 1972 ‘Coup of the Generals’ that resulted in the assassination of Allende and brought Pinochet to power

2 Today both the Catholic and mainstream Protestant Churches in Central and South America are being supplanted by US based fundamentalist ‘born-again’ Christians who use community art as one means to infiltrate communities and entice adherents. They arrive in deprived communities armed with balloons in one hand and the New Testament in the other in their quest to convert people to take Jesus as their savior.