Have A Nice War

As the current crop of apocalyptic films, documentaries and books stridently predict the end of life-as-we-know-it; it may not be a such a bad idea to have a look at the actual developments on the geo-political stage. As usual, in our bi-polar society, there will be the establishment view of the global media empires; and then there's the persistent, everyman voice of John Pilger:

Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.

According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the Taliban’s “command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker movie was real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.

“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one “who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to values” (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today’s public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.

Western war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the antiwar instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested Israel’s assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police “kettled” (corralled) thousands, first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry custodial sentences. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.

Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of famous writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the “market” or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq’s clean water system and lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease”. So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted Unicef, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.

Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a “pre-fascist era”. Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. “Fascism” is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is “more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent.”

This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state within the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.

In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud “our boys”. The candidates are almost identical political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite loves America because America allows it to barrack and bomb the natives and call itself a “partner”. We should interrupt their fun.

The Value Of Nothing

A top ten list of things of everyday items and services that aren’t as cheap as you may think.


#10 Bottled Water – Bottled water sounds like it should be cheaper – it’s 200 to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water. In the US alone, the annual energy wasted on bottled water adds the equivalent to 100,000 cars on roads and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And the price we pay for water doesn’t begin to address the longer term issues of global shortage, for something that everyone needs to survive.

#9 Cellphones – We’ve all got them. The trouble is that one of the minerals inside our high tech toys, Coltan, is bought very dear indeed. With around three quarters of the world’s reserves of Coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo, our demand for gadgets fuels bloody conflict and vast human suffering.

#8 Double cheeseburger – A value meal is a great way to eat if you’ve neither time nor money, but this cheap food turns out to be ‘cheat food’. What if we had to pay the full environmental, labour and health costs of a burger? Some researchers think we’d end up paying over $200, and that doesn’t include the modern day slavery represented by minimum wage food workers.

#7 Fish fingers – The world’s oceans are being emptied. A generation ago, fish fingers were made of cod. Now the species is commercially extinct, and we’re within a generation of killing everything in the seas. Yet the price of fish is still just a few dollars a kilo.

#6 A Free Lunch - Rudyard Kipling came across the free lunch in the nineteenth century in San Francisco, where he “paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. But the marketing freebie ends up being a way to reel you in to consume more.

#5 Googling – Would it shock you to know that two Google searches produces the equivalent greenhouse gases of making a cup of tea? The London Telegraph reported this last year and, while Google denies it, it’s certainly true that global information technology is responsible for 2% of all greenhouse gases.

#4 Toxic waste – Larry Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, was once a senior economist at the World Bank. When he was there, he wrote in a confidential [but since widely cited] memo: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDC’s [Less Developed Countries]?” He argued that poor people valued a clean environment less than the rich, and so pollution should flow to them.

#3 Low income jobs. Part of the reason that food and energy are cheap is so that working peoples’ wage demands are kept in check. In Canada, average real wages have increased by just 1% in two decades – and in the US similar long term trends for working class people (and severe declines in the value of minimum wages). But around the world, minimum wages fall far below what families need to survive.

#2 Petroleum – The way we live today depends on our not paying the full costs of fossil fuel – with thousands already dying and many billions being lost right now. While figures of $65 trillion a year for the real cost of fossil fuel are almost certainly wrong, with 300 million people affected, it’s already a disaster.

#1 Women’s work – The world wouldn’t turn without the work of raising children, and caring for family and community. But it’s the work that is most often and quite literally taken for granted. If the work that women did were to be paid, how much would it cost? Researchers put it at $11 trillion in 1995, or half the world’s total output. Valuing women’s work would, more than any other single thing, transform the way we think about our economy and society.

South Africa's Class Apartheid

Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society; and wrote the following piece after Jacob Zuma's State of the Nation address to parliament.

For cultural reasons, President Jacob Zuma is today at his weakest since taking office last May. He is suffering severe delegitimization amongst progressives and traditionalists alike, even within his majority-faction in the ruling African National Congress (ANC), thanks to a child secretly born four months ago. The revelation last week suddenly recalled his 2006 rape trial - and acquittal - immediately after which Zuma publicly apologized for his 'mistake' in having unprotected sex (she said rape) with an HIV-positive daughter of a friend. The misogyny on display at Zuma's trial followed his firing as deputy president for corruption (via a sprawling arms deal) by his then boss, Thabo Mbeki. Zuma was then charged with scores of bribery counts, which were conveniently wiped off the books a few weeks before the 2009 election by an accommodating state prosecutor (since duly rewarded).

Of apparent dismay to even his strongest supporters, the new child's mother is the daughter of Zuma's old friend Irvin Khoza, a very rough and tough Soweto tycoon who happens to be the 2010 soccer World Cup organizing chairperson. In Zulu tradition, Zuma's obligation is to pay for damages done to the Khoza daughter's reputation, a task apparently carried out discretely by underlings last December. At the point of conception in early 2009, Zuma had recently married for the fifth time (three wives are current, while one - the current Home Affairs minister - divorced him and one committed suicide), while also becoming engaged to a (different) woman. Thus many citizens believe the president now must confront his sex-addiction as a medical condition.

In short, South Africa's leader is a laughing-stock; even his most pro-polygamous nationalist base is expressing disgust, just four months before he hosts the world's most visible sporting event. Weak presidents are generally welcomed by African progressives, given the need to open space for counter-hegemonic practices and ideology. But recall that Zuma came to power last year as a result, mainly, of labour and SA Communist Party mobilizations in 2006-08, culminating in the rude but welcome dismissal of Mbeki. And now, because he is unable to galvanize momentum for any sort of political project aside from survival, Zuma appears to be drifting rightwards, to the ANC's solid financial-support base of white capital and aspiring black entrepreneurs.

Last Thursday, the twentieth anniversary of Nelson Mandela's release from prison, was the day that Zuma was meant to fight back, by delivering a stunning State of the Nation speech in front of Mandela and the nation. Instead, he displayed "no appreciation of the full extent of the massive crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality," according to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). Statistics justifying this charge were revealed three weeks ago by middle-of-the-road economists at the University of Cape Town (UCT): "Income inequality increased between 1993 and 2008. SA's GINI coefficient inequality measure raced ahead of Brazil's to become the world's leader among major countries: from 0.66 in 1993 to 0.70 in 2008. The income of the average black person actually fell as a percentage of the average white's from 1995 (13.5%) to 2008 (13.0%)."

How could a democratic government adopt socio-economic policies that amplified apartheid race-class inequality? Leaders of a decent society would immediately find out the answers, then ban labour brokers and at the same time increase state-subsidized employment creation; especially for badly-needed green jobs such as construction of solar hot-water heaters and community facilities and environmental maintenance. But as the inequality data show, South Africa is just not that kind of place; it's a society in which the ruling party's crony capitalists ally with those who grew wealthy during racial apartheid and then together promote class-apartheid policies and practices to accumulate yet more wealth.

Zuma is apparently not to be trusted, for as Cosatu observed, his speech contained "nothing on the creation of decent work, the spread of casualization of labour and the scourge of labour broking, and nothing to explain how he intends to implement the 2009 manifesto commitment to 'avoid exploitation of workers and ensure decent work." What Zuma did do, however, was threaten more police brutality against the victims of his macroeconomic policies, such as was witnessed in the most militant peripheral town (Balfour) last week when police hunted down and tortured community activists. South Africa's per capita social protest rate continues to lead the world, and scenes of road blockades, burning tires and repression reminiscent of the film District 9, may prove yet more embarrassing to the SA ruling class when three billion viewers tune in to the World Cup starting on June 11.

Zuma also promised Eskom's partial privatization, notwithstanding SA's universally miserable experience with the likes of Telkom's Texan-Malaysian rip-off landline phone partners, the disastrous Suez municipal water takeover in Johannesburg, the crash of a SA Airlines-Swiss Air deal, machinations by the US energy firm AES, toll roads and many others. Privatization will, Cosatu replied, "ultimately wreck a crucial public national service and we shall continue to campaign vigorously to prevent the sell-off of a vital public asset." Many others agree. This Tuesday morning, South Durban community organizers and Climate Justice Now!-KZN activists will protest massive electricity price increases (likely to be approved by the National Energy Regulator of SA on Wednesday), vast greenhouse gas emissions from proposed coal-fired power plants, and the threatened $3.75 billion World Bank loan at Eskom's Durban headquarters.

The unity of consumers, communities, environmentalists and workers both formally employed and outsourced might prevail. An international coalition is forming to deny Eskom access to the World Bank, and if that fails, to deny the World Bank access to the $250 billion in capital it will be asking for at its Spring 2010 meetings in Washington just ten weeks from now. A decade ago, Ngwane and the late Dennis Brutus were instrumental in launching the World Bank Bonds Boycott, which followed the South African divestment movement of the 1970s-80s by lobbying institutional investors to avoid profits and interest from apartheid - or in this case, global apartheid. In this and similar struggles now intensifying here, we riff-raff are up against formidable opponents from Pretoria to Washington, including world-class experts well practiced in the art of generating poverty and inequality. Calls for solidarity against all these class-apartheid manifestations will soon ring out.

Gift Culture

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins talks about the culture of giving, that existed in Stone Age life, as being an expression of abundance. This is evidenced by the very fact that people shared everything they had with each other in times that we, in our modern reality, see as being a time that was extremely 'poor' with only basic survival needs being considered. And yet Stone Age Man was a giver. So why, when resources were seemingly so scarce, did he share? Because the act of giving kept the community strong and built stone age man's reputation. Being highly regarded meant that you were taken care of when times were tough. Back in the Stone Age it was important not to hoard when resources were flowing, because living as part of a group was an essential part of your survival.

Fast forward to the Black Rock Desert, home to the Burning Man Festival, and a very modern take on the concept of a Gift Economy. At the festival, participants are not allowed to buy or sell anything, and must arrive with everything they need to survive for a week in the desert. But they bring more that that, and they do more than survive - they thrive. Massive art projects spring out of the dust, created by teams of volunteers, and camps with every theme imaginable are created for one week, and then disassembled and brought home, or burned right there in the desert. People meet in the middle of nowhere and share what they have with each other, taking joy in the very act of giving. Musicians play, dancers dance, artists make art; and philosophers speak, even those who are highly paid professionals in their “real” lives, at Burning Man they do it without any money exchanged.

Economist Bernard Leitaer tells us “the origin of the word 'community' comes from the Latin munus, which means the gift, and cum, which means together, among each other. So community literally means to give among each other.” ( from an interview with Bernard Lietaer by Sarah van Gelder). So the idea that you give within your community is built into the very entomology of the word. And yet for most people the concept of giving gifts is something you do during the holidays, and only to your close friends and family. So what has happened to this circle of giving which started at the beginning of man's cultural roots in the Stone Age? In some places it survives, with indigenous rituals and even Open Source Software, but it certainly isn't the norm.

The most surprising thing about the lack of giving in our culture is that most people will say it feels really good to give. So it feels really good, it builds community and it meets people's needs, and yet we don't do it. Why? Because the message that we receive from the media tells us that there just isn't enough to go around and that someone, somewhere is going to have to go without, and in order to ensure that isn't you (and your family) you should save up for a rainy day, keep your resources close in, not rely on anyone, and not give anything to anyone without getting paid. We are given the impression that to give a gift is naïve, and that people who give will be taken advantage of.

Looking back at all these successful examples of gift culture, it begs the question- what are elements that exist in these models which can be transferred into modern culture, loosening people's grip on scarcity and giving them first hand experience of how good it feels to give?

Shared Goals - Stone Age man wanted to survive, and that goal lead them to share what they have. Agrarian cultures join together and share resources to build granaries. At Burning Man, camps collaborate on creative projects, and share the bigger vision of creating a temporary city in the desert. Having a shared goal means that you are likely to have shared values, and therefore you can feel good about giving your gifts.

Reputation Building - Although your gift is given without expectation of a direct exchange, if you give freely and openly to your community, your reputation will build and elevate your status. Even if you are not intentionally giving to gain reputation, the only way to avoid it is to give anonymously. If a person gives within their community, then it will inevitably lead to people having higher opinions of them.

Trust Building - Some people need to know that when they give a gift, it's received by someone who they consider to be worthy of it. They are afraid they they will be taken advantage of, and so need to build trusting relationships within their community in order to give.

Gathering Together - Giving gifts is a reason to gather, and being in a physical space together means that we can fully experience what it is to give and to receive. Community is strengthened when we celebrate together and get to know one another.