Postmodern News Archives 8

2006-08-21T21:52:00.000-07:00

Serving Capital: A short history of Canada in the Caribbean

By David Evans
From Third World Traveler
2006

If all the rhetoric about the new Governor General were true it would appear she is bent on destroying the country. Allegedly a separatist at heart, it has been suggested that she is disloyal to Canada and she sees the country as an imperialist oppressor. Sadly, this is probably not the case, although having been born in the Caribbean one would hardly think it unreasonable for her to be disposed in that way.

While Canada's relationship with the Caribbean is hardly that of an imperial overlord, it has certainly never been that of an agent of kind benevolence. The most significant aspect of Canada's relationship to the Caribbean has been its outstanding service to the working interests of British and U.S. capital.

Halifax, Nova Scotia was often known as the "Warden of the North", the sentinel of the British Empire in the Americas. This was because as a prime naval installation it helped assure the British control of its Caribbean possessions. As a well fitted central supply depot and shipyard for the British Royal Navy and the British Slave trade, Canada's east coast ports were unique and invaluable. The cod fishery of Newfoundland was of central importance as a food supply to the British plantation economies of the Caribbean both during and after the abolition of slavery.

As the nineteenth century developed the uses of Canada became more than merely a safe port to re-supply the massive imperial fleets of the British Empire. Canada started to develop services to both American and British businesses that were exploiting the wealth of the Caribbean. Canada's transportation industry, built on the basis of serving the British Empire, now constitutes a significant portion of our GDP and has been estimated at over $60 billion, 80% of which is external.

How this role developed and expanded into other services to the working interests of capital is a result of Canada's unique role as a sympathetic colony of Great Britain and Great Britain's business interests in the United States. This relationship became important because London's capitalists had extensive financial control over the U.S. after the revolution and well into the nineteenth century. Canada's weak political nature as a servant to London became essential as it acted as a trusted conduit and malleable obedient connecting third party between the interests of U.S. and British capitalists. This servile role is clearly demonstrated in the exploitation of the Caribbean.

Although the relationship with the territory of Canada and the Caribbean is a long relationship going back to the first events of the European conquest, the relationship of Canada as a nation starts with its inception and the first prime minister of Canada, Sir John A. MacDonald. While Prime Minister, MacDonald founded an insurance company through an act of parliament and then made himself its managing director. In doing so, Sir John A. MacDonald tied his financial wealth, in part, to the American and British profits drawn from the plantation economies of the Caribbean.

Paul Martin, the outgoing Prime Minister of Canada, owes his family's wealth to the Caribbean transportation services offered to the interests of British and American capital (Canada Steam Ship Lines) that started in the nineteenth century and continues today.

As the tide of American invasions swept the Caribbean, Canada's business elites followed in their wake. The Bank of Nova Scotia went so far as to set its policy for expansion in the Caribbean in step with the invasion and solidification of control by the American military. Continuing in this tradition, Canadian businesses could count themselves as part of the invasion. Alternately, American businesses became dependent upon the long experience and the connection to British Capital Canadian services provided.

These services can be split into three interrelated areas; finance, transportation and military. All three had one thing in common in that they were developed to facilitate the expropriation of profit from the Caribbean to the absentee owners in the financial centres of London and New York.

The reasons for these connections are partly due to the nature of the laws created immediately after the American Revolution. Wary of the power of financial institutions, the banks in the U.S. were subject to far more control than those in Canada, a situation that continues today, with Canada's financial services abroad currently estimated at over $10 billion annually. Coupled with this, in order to do business in the Caribbean, the U.S. businesses were obliged to trade in British currency, as the British dominated trade throughout the Caribbean. Canadian banks and other financial institutions such as insurance companies not only traded in British currency and U.S. dollars but by comparison had far more power to do as they liked than their American counterparts.

Added to all of this, they possessed another more significant advantage as well: they were located throughout the Caribbean and throughout the US. The experience helping the British to run their slave plantations and support its Caribbean naval supremacy was a great boost in that Canadian businesses had well developed transportation, supply and financial services throughout the Caribbean. The ethics of supporting and gaining profit from imperialism was not a significant issue either in support of the British or the United States.

The result of Canada's sympathetic relationship with British and U.S. control in the Caribbean can be seen in two ways. First, Canada developed its trade within the framework of American and British Capital interests, and the countries of the Caribbean were often forced to develop their industry in an environment where Canadian corporations were significantly powerful if not the dominant business interests in certain areas. Favoured by British and American Capital, Canadian corporations would often dominate the sectors where they were involved. In Cuba, Canadian banking interests operated with the power of a central Bank.

As power has shifted from Britain to the U.S., Canadian services have also shifted from one client to another. Today, Canadian banks can be found throughout the Caribbean and Canadian businesses are deeply synchronized and intertwined with U.S. capital interests in the Caribbean. As Haiti received its first branch of the Royal Bank of Canada in 1917 after the U.S. invasion of the island, so today one can find Canadian transportation and financial services throughout the Caribbean serving the interests of capital.

The interests of the powerful elites of Britain, the U.S., and even their subordinates in the Caribbean, is based upon the low rate of pay in the Caribbean. Their ability to continue their operations and rates of profit is contingent upon mitigating control of labour regulations, trade unions and the power generally of Caribbean people to affect political and economic control of their society. The owners of capital and their servants owe their ability to perpetuate this situation by the use of force. It is in this capacity that Canada has been as dutiful a servant as it has been in other capacities.

The Canadian military was an integrated arm of the British Empire and used throughout the Caribbean. Its role in the interests of U.S. capital has been no less integrated. When the U.S. was dissatisfied with the Haitian government in the early 90s it was a Calgarian, Lynn Garrison, with admitted connections to the CIA, who became known as a major strategist behind the coup. Later, in 2004, it was Canadian troops who facilitated the U.S. expulsion of the democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Throughout the Caribbean, the influence of military force has played a decisive role in shaping political and economic structures that perpetuate the worst poverty in the hemisphere and some of the most brutal human rights crimes in the world. Canada, throughout its history, has been involved in the use of military force throughout the Caribbean.

Often, in situations where some degree of political and economic control is exercised by the peoples of the Caribbean, Canadian businesses have been subject to the criticism that they are both exploitative and destructive. In present day Cuba, there is at least some hint of what a progressive relationship Canada could have with the Caribbean. Approximately 900 million dollars of trade exist between Canada and Cuba annually. The two societies have contributed to each other's development and exchanges of science and the arts have been beneficial for both countries.

It is true, of course, that those Canadian businesses presently form a conduit through which the interests of U.S. capital can and do operate in Cuba. Our relationship, however, is tempered by the larger degree of political and economic control that this Caribbean society has as compared to others. In the Cuban revolution there is at least some hope that Canada's relationship with the Caribbean will not always be that of mere servants of capital and that Canada will not be seen as the oppressors' friend by the peoples of the Caribbean.

2006-08-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

Class Warfare: The Assault on Canada's Schools(speech excerpt)

By Maude Barlow
FromThe British Columbia Teachers' Federation.ca
1995

Many myths are gaining cheap currency. Dropout rates are terrible. Johnny can't read. Canada is falling behind internationally. Our schools aren't turning out scientists and mathematicians. That none of these myths is substantiated by fact is lost in the school reform zeal. In the absence of a cogent alternative for what ails our society, schools and educators are the new target. The diagnosis: schools are failing because they are monopolies exempt from competition. The remedy: force schools to act more like businesses and they will turn around.

There is compelling evidence that we are experiencing a systematic, intentional and purposeful effort to restructure schools in precisely the same ways other Canadian institutions not devoted to increasing profit have been transformed and disfigured. The big players are big businesses, mostly transnational corporations, following a global agenda. They are aided by a confluence of interests with the ideological right and Christian fundamentalists. These efforts are well on their way to success; if Canadians do not wake up to what is going on, our debate about the finer points of educational philosophy will be irrelevant.

THE COMPETITIVE ECONOMY
The targeting of public education is part of a larger picture. We are currently living through an unprecedented assault at every level of government in Canada on our public sector, public institutions, and world-class social programs. This assault is leading to the privatization and Americanization of our social services, including education. In the name of 'choice,' governments are openly discussing publicly-funded for-profit schools, allowing unprecedented corporate intrusions in the classroom, and attacking teachers and other frontline educators as adversaries of 'advancement.'

The ideology behind this assault views the nation-state as the cause, rather than the solution to its citizens' problems. Everyone is a consumer; students, parents, and those who will employ the final product - value added children whose future utility in the world of work can and must be measured. Proponents of this ideology insist that liberty and democracy require the unlimited right to consumer choice, even if it will destroy the public systems upon which Canada was built.

Public schools do not preach competition; they do not cut their losses, exploit their advantages, or publicize their strategic plans. Established to meet collective goals of democracy and equality, public schools have little in common with the new theology of individualistic consumerism and competitiveness that characterizes the global economy and has taken deep root in North America. This fact, and the steady erosion of public funding for education, has made our public schools very vulnerable; for today, if you are out of the marketplace, you are out of the loop.

THE MYTHS
The vulnerability of public education, aided unwittingly by the passive stance of its gatekeepers, has left it open to false and continuous charges of failure so toxic that it reduces the public's faith in its own judgement. In the most recent U.S. Gallup poll, 72% of parents gave their own children's schools an A or B; when asked about the nation's schools overall, positive ratings fell to 22%. Canadians continue to be lied to about the costs and benefits of education, the number of graduates we produce and their quality, their level of literacy, the drop-out rate, our standing in international comparative testing, how students are evaluated, the training and preparation of teachers, the length of the school year...and on and on.

While many, particularly in the media, now repeat these myths innocently enough because they have heard them so many times, others who should know better are using them for personal advantage. The workbook published to accompany Lloyd Axworthy's social security review claims that there are over 7 million adult illiterates in Canada (the same workbook also blames social programs for high unemployment.) Senator Joyce Fairbairn, in kicking off Literacy Week, recently claimed that 38% of us can't cope because of illiteracy. The magazine Western Report, a strong proponent of for-profit schools, claims that a million more illiterate young people will be released into the job market by the year 2000; for this prediction to be true, more than one third of each class in the country would have to be illiterate!

The biblical source of this disinformation is the Economic Council of Canada which misrepresented a Stats Canada Literacy survey and has been repeatedly quoted by business lobbies to "prove" that public education is failing. Not only did this survey never claim that 38% of the population is illiterate, it emphasized that it is those over 55, educated in a different time, and often in a different place, who make up the bulk of those at the lower end of the literacy scale. In fact, only about 6% of Canadians aged 16 to 34 have limited reading skills, and half of this group was not born in Canada.

A recent federal Liberal party fundraiser echoes another so- called "fact" that is repeated like a mantra by the business community and the school reform movement: our drop-out rate is over 30%. In fact, the most recent Stats Canada figures on our drop-out rate are a real compliment to our public educators: 18% in 1991, compared to 48% in 1971, and 60% in 1956. The list goes on: Canada does not spend more than all other countries on education - our spending on elementary and secondary education is the fourth-lowest of the OECD countries; Canada does very well in international testing - scores that are used to prove the opposite compare the majority of Canada's students with a small group of students from countries that test selectively.

THE REALITY
These false accusations help to deflect public debate from the real problems facing Canada's schools, and derail the kind of school reform we really need.

Gerald Caplan, co-chair of the Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, refers repeatedly to the "40% factor" - the estimated 40% of all Ontario students who come to school with one or more problems so severe that ordinary assumptions about their ability to progress make no sense. Eighty-nine% of children under the age of 7 who live with single-parent mothers live in poverty. Says the Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy, "Our schools, in every community, and to an unprecedented degree, are being expected to cope with physically and emotionally unhealthy children, neglected children, children whose parents lack the time and energy to be with them, substance-abusing children, children with minimal social skills, children from a vast range of bruised, stressed and fragile families."

But government economic policies are not only not confronting this reality, they show an increasing callousness toward those who cannot make it in the new society. Repeated Stats Canada reports show that we are developing an entrenched underclass in Canada. During the 1980s, the income gap between high and low-end workers and between generations grew dramatically and the problem will accelerate through the 1990s. The United Nations, while ranking Canada as the best place to live in the world, warns that our country is doing very badly in terms of income distribution. On the "income distribution-adjusted index," Canada fell seven places in the last year.

As a result, Canadians are experiencing a profound demographic and class-based shift in our population. Once shaped like an egg, with a large middle class, our country now resembles a pear, with fewer Canadian families and companies holding the bulk of wealth at the top, and more Canadians falling relentlessly toward the bottom. The rich are getting richer, paying fewer taxes, and are the almost exclusive beneficiaries of the recovery.

Rather than deal with the growing class divisions of our society, many find it easier to trash schools. Blame education for our economic ills, and the social and economic policies that are failing our young can be left intact. Blame the schools for unemployment, and the corporate sector is off the hook. Destabilize the public's faith in education, and then our schools can be molded to reflect the values of the new economy. And there are those very ready to take up the task. Says a former Xerox CEO, "It is time for business to take ownership of the schools."

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
It is important to understand that Canada is not undergoing these changes alone. As globalization relentlessly proceeds, the monoculture of its values is reflected everywhere.

The world is experiencing a social and economic watershed transformation as great as the agricultural and industrial revolutions - the third great transitional wave of modern history. Nation-state authority is being replaced by transnational corporations operating outside national law and protected by global trade agreements.

Of the world's 100 largest economies, [over 50] are now transnational corporations. That means that about 136 countries are substantially smaller than the giant companies - like Mitsubishi, American Express, Cargill and Northern Telecom.

In every sector, companies are merging to kill competition and only a handful will dominate the large sectors, like airlines, banking, pharmaceutical, and oil companies. Ford's economy is bigger than Saudi Arabia's and Norway's. Philip Morris's annual sales exceed New Zealand's GDP. These companies seek what they call a global level playing field; they want to be free to move across borders with little interference; be governed by the lowest common standards and regulations regarding food safety, the environment, or social security; and they want governments to get out of the way.

Governments everywhere - including ours - are complying. Because they can no longer tax the huge profits from big business, they are left bankrupt and are implementing the kinds of economic "reforms" that will attract corporate investment. They are setting about to divest themselves of the responsibility to set standards, laws, and regulations, turning social and economic decisions over to the free market. This is not ideology, they assure us. Ideology is dead, replaced by pragmatics.

In developing countries, programs called "Structural Adjustment" are imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as condition for debt relief. They force nations to dramatically cut back on public health and education spending, as well as deregulate their public sector, lower protection for workers, and establish corporate-friendly policies for transnational corporations. UNICEF says that at least half a million Third World children have died as a result of this program and the poorest have paid their debt with the health of their young.

Quite simply, the so-called economic "boom" cited to support the world-wide ascendance of market ideology is, in fact, fueled by deep inequities, excessive consumerism by the world's economic elite, and ecological crime. In every nation of the world, a "global south" is appearing, as the majority of citizens are left out of the emerging economy. Mexico, where working wages have dropped 60% in a decade, where one quarter of the population lives in abject, street-level poverty, where almost 50% of the population is un- or -marginally employed, boasts that it has boosted its number of world-class billionaires from 1 to 24 in just 7 years. These 24 people have a combined wealth greater than the poorest 33 million Mexicans. For this economic "miracle," Mexico has been admitted to the OECD, and former president Salinas is the front runner to become the first head of the World Trade Organization that will replace the GATT.

EDUCATION FALLS INTO LINE
The triumph of unfettered capitalism has had a dramatic effect on education everywhere in the world. The substantial progress made to educate the world's young -an effort spanning from the 1950s to the late 1970s - is in retreat. In 1970, universal education was the first priority of publicly-funded social programs in most OECD countries and a fundamental goal in the developing world. Now, however, governments everywhere are shutting schools, slashing teacher salaries, and severely cutting back on funding for public education.

There are 900 million people in the world today who cannot read and write, two-thirds of them women. An estimated 400 million school-age children will never have an education. There has been a steady decline in the growth of public education spending in all OECD countries since 1975. In Canada, as a percentage of the GDP, public education expenditure dropped from 10.2% in 1970 to 6.7% in 1991.

While there are, of course, many reasons for this, the clear trend that emerged in my research was that as countries all over the world shift to a market economy, they lose their commitment to equality and universality in education, and instead, are turning to their schools to produce the workforce for the new global economy. As our societies are becoming more pear-or- pyramid-shaped, they are adapting their education systems to reflect a new class division. Governments are restructuring education in order to ensure that those at the top have access to the best education possible; however, in the name of deficit fighting, they are diverting public funds to the private sector.

Goals and priorities for education in a world that accepts this economic model are different from the goals and priorities for a world seeking equality. As education is becoming a marketable product, it is becoming available only to those who can afford it.

No where is this more evident than in the U.S. The United States of America houses the best and some of the worst public schools in the world. The children attending these schools are subject to what educator Jonathan Kozol calls "savage inequalities" based on race and class. The disparity is greater in 1994 than it was in the 1960s, when the effort to eliminate racial and class inequality began. The startling difference in the quality of education offered to Americans of different ethnic and economic backgrounds mirrors deep class divisions.

In my research, I found public schools that offer fencing, horticulture in designer greenhouses, elective courses in Nobel winners, aeronautics, music suites, computer language courses, and university-bound graduate rates of 90%. I found other public schools with raw sewage and dead rats in the cafeterias, 20 year- old textbooks, classes held in boiler rooms and closets, classes without teachers, no art, music, or physical ed, and drop out rates of over 50%. One school board used a standard text that boasted, "some day, man will walk on the moon."

Education Professor Emeritus Arthur G. Wirth of Washington University describes the future of education in America: "Well- educated elites will withdraw further into their secure enclaves, living a life with excellent health care, challenging work, effective schools, global travel, and international electronic linkages. The urban and rural poor will live largely out of sight in their decaying communities. The despair and hopelessness of their children will be facts of life. "

BIG BUSINESS TO THE RESCUE
Enter big business. All over the United States and in many other parts of the world, impoverished schools are turning to corporations to supply them with the technology and curriculum they can no longer buy. Children in New Zealand now write exams on corporate letterhead. The European Community has directed that all 300,000 schools, 4 million teachers, and 67 million pupils in the European Community be placed in "partnerships" with transnational corporations within the decade. What does their involvement mean for schools and children?

A grade nine student in a California high school flicks off the light. NBC 'Newshour' music fills the room. Award-winning former NBC anchor Jim Hartz, appears: "We've made hasty conclusions about what is good for the environment," Hartz intones, sitting in what appears to be a newsroom. "We're here to explore the facts." The 'facts' he gives the students are that plastics are ecologically "ideal material" - to produce, recycle, burn or toss in landfills. "The experts all agree that polystyrene plastics [styrofoam] rate well on environmental criteria." "Polystyrene, Plastics and the Environment" is owned, produced, and distributed free of charge to schools by Mobil Corporation, one of the world's largest manufacturers of plastics.

Procter & Gamble provides a full environmental curriculum called "Decision Earth." It teaches that "clear-cutting removes all trees to create new habitats for wildlife. It opens the floor to sunshine, thus stimulating growth and providing food for animals. " Convicted polluter Louisiana Pacific, a giant forest products company now moving into Canada, assures students in another program that clearcutting paves the way for "supertrees." The American Softdrink Association assures kids not to worry so much about sugar in its curriculum program; soft drinks are a part of a balanced diet. Orvill Redenbacher is listed by his popcorn company, along with Louis Pasteur and George Washington Carver, as one of the history's all-time greatest inventors in another school book.

"They're ready to spend and we can reach them!" advertises one company. "Kids spend 40% of each day in the classroom where traditional advertising can't reach them. Now you can enter the classroom through custom-made learning materials created with your specific marketing objectives in mind." 'Consumer Kids,' a two-day workshop in Toronto, offers corporate executives workshops on 'Marketing in the School System' and 'How to Grow Your Customers From Childhood.' A Madison Avenue company promises to help develop brand loyalty even before "a girl becomes a serious shopper. To put your product in her hands, call us." "His first day job is in kindergarten" says another.

Burger King academies - fully accredited quasi-private high schools - are now operating in 14 U.S. cities. At a high school in Boulder, Colorado, McDonald's supplies not only the food, but also the curriculum. Students study McDonald's inventory, payroll, and ordering procedure in math; McDonald's menu plans in home economics; and its marketing practices in business class. McDonald's also sponsors a school program on nutrition in which it claims the Big Mac represents all four food groups, the vegetable component being the exposed lettuce leaf.

These companies are vying with Dunkin' Donuts, Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen, and Taco Bell for the $5 billion U.S. market of the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs. Pizza Hut engineered the exemption of its meat-topped pies from meat- inspection regulations that apply to all U.S. federally funded school lunches.

Entrepreneur Chris Whittle's Channel One televises daily commercial news and advertising called infotainment or edutainment - to more than 12,000 junior and high schools all over America - 40 per cent of the nation's students. Whittle Communications charges $200,000 for each thirty-second commercial spot; advertisers are willing to pay for a captive audience. The contracts state that 90 per cent of the children in a school must watch the program 90 per cent of the time; each program must be watched in its entirety - a show cannot be interrupted - and the teacher does not have the right to turn it off.

What is this all about? What does big business want from our schools? I believe there are three factors.

The ideological allegiance of the young to their values
They want to influence young people on transnational corporate views of the environment, the economy, and the role of the state. Environmental concerns and abuses are covered over. Transnational business values of competition and privatization are openly conveyed in these materials, as are attacks on the "welfare" state, public "dependency" on social programs and the whole notion of co-operation and equality.

In effect, children are being raised not to question the dominant values of a corporate-driven society, one in which government, and therefore, democracy, has a greatly reduced role. They are being taught to be self-reliant, individualistic, competitive and entrepreneurial.

Access to young consumers and the education "industry"
Public education and health are the last remaining areas of public enterprise ripe for the profits of privatization. As it is now, education in Canada is big business -larger than the mining, forestry, food, beverage, rubber, plastics, and clothing industry combined. As future jobs for our children remain scarce, education will increasingly be viewed as an added competitive advantage in the workforce. The growth potential for educational "services" will continue to expand, and parents will be ready to spend private money to give their kids an edge.

The fabled "information highway" is causing the furious merging of cable, retail, television, phone and computer sectors. It will be delivering all sorts of educational materials and these industry giants are already poised to work with schools to bring their products into the classroom. They are also actively lobbying for the deregulation of Canadian content and public accessibility rules.

And then there are the hearts and minds of millions of young consumers. Already children are saturated with ads. Since children's TV was deregulated a decade age, 85% of it is brought to us courtesy of toy companies. The goal is brand identification at a young age. And kids have more purchasing power than ever. In the U. S .,the direct income of children is $9 billion a year, and children aged twelve and under now annually influence $132 billion in purchases.

The commercialization of the classroom and the corporate intrusion into education is producing a generation of children who are, in Ralph Nader's words, "growing up corporate." Bereft of childhood, they are treated as consumers-in-training, pre- workers, future entrepreneurs, the consumers of tomorrow.

A workforce for the new economy
During the federal election, both Jean Chretien and Kim Campbell repeated a common current complaint of big business in Canada and the U.S.: there is a serious mismatch between the skills young people have and job vacancies. Schools have failed to produce the workforce business needs and must be transformed to do so. The subtext here is that educators are responsible for high unemployment. Both politicians cited the oft-quoted figure of 300,000 to describe this skills shortage "crisis" until a sharp- eyed reporter challenged them for the source of the number. It turns out that this was simply the current job vacancy rate and was in no way proof of a skills mismatch.

In fact, closer examination reveals the opposite. Canada is producing a glut of engineers, scientists and mathematicians. UNESCO says we're first in the G7 countries in graduates in these areas per population. While growth in post-secondary education far outstripped general population growth in the last decade, an examination of the so-called "new economy" sectors supposedly crying out for workers found a substantial drop in job openings. The Canadian Council on Social Development recently reported that the number of poor families in which salary earners have a post secondary education has doubled in the last decade. And in a recent survey of 5,000 Canadian manufacturers, less than one-half of 1% said that a shortage of unskilled workers is a problem.

The truth is that job growth in taking place almost exclusively in the contingency workforce jobs that are low paid, part time, with minimal benefits, and no security.

2006-08-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

Pharmaceutical corporations accused of Genocide before ICC in The Hague
(excerpt)
From News Media Explorer
2003

Pharmaceutical corporations and individual executives have been accused of genocide and crimes of war before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The charges, which also involve accusations of war crimes against US President George W. Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and other top political figures, are contained in a detailed complaint filed with the ICC by Dr. Mathias Rath.

Pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Amgen and Astra Zeneca are accused of deliberately preventing life-saving natural alternatives to drug based treatments from being applied in prevention and cure. A worldwide disinformation campaign undertaken by these companies is said to have caused the death of millions of people. Their role in getting both Bush and Blair into power and in determining the policies of their respective administrations with respect to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is cited as evidence for a case made for violation of Human Rights.

Financial interests behind misdirected health policies world wide and behind the drive for war are also named in the complaint, filed by Rath and others during a two-day Conference in The Hague on 14 and 15 June.

IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD
Complaint Against Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity
Committed in Connection With The Pharmaceutical 'Business With Disease'

This complaint is submitted to the
International Criminal Court by Matthias Rath MD
and others on behalf of the people of the world
The Hague, June 14, 2003

To the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court,
Senator Louis Moreno-Ocampo,
c/o International Court, Maanweg 174
NL-2516 AB Den Haag/The Hague

SUMMARY
This complaint brings before the International Court of Justice (ICC) the greatest crimes ever committed in the course of human history. The accused are charged with causing injury to and the death of millions of people through the 'business with disease', war crimes and other crimes against humanity. These crimes fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

The accused know that they will be held accountable for these crimes and they have therefore embarked on a global campaign to undermine the authority of the ICC in order to put themselves above international law and continue their crimes to the detriment of all mankind.

Therefore, the current complaint must be considered by the ICC with utmost urgency. Moreover, every natural person and every government is hereby called upon to join this complaint with the goal to once and for all terminate these crimes.

The Cartel
The charges presented in this complaint relate to two main fields of crime:

* Genocide and other crimes against humanity committed in connection with the pharmaceutical business with disease.

* Crimes of war and aggression and other crimes against humanity committed in connection with the recent war against Iraq and the international escalation towards a world war.

These two fields of crime are directly related and connected by one factor: They are committed in the name and interest of the same corporate investment groups and their political stakeholders. In order to establish the evidence and show the common motives of the accused a short historical review is imperative.

Throughout the 20th century, the pharmaceutical industry was built and organized with the goal of controlling healthcare systems around the world by systematically replacing natural, non-patentable therapies with patentable and therefore profitable synthetic drugs. This industry did not evolve naturally. To the contrary, it was an investment decision taken by a handful of wealthy and unscrupulous entrepreneurs. They deliberately defined the human body as their market place in order to generate further wealth.

The driving force of this investment industry was the Rockefeller Group. They already controlled more than 90% of the petrochemical business in the United States at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century and they were looking for new global investment opportunities. Another investment group active in this field was formed around the Rothschild financial group.

The Cartel and the Second World War
After Rockefeller's Standard Oil (today EXXON), the second largest pharmaceutical/petrochemical corporate conglomerate during the first half of the 20th century, was the IG Farben conglomerate headquartered in Germany. This corporate conglomerate was the single most important factor for the political rise to power of Hitler and their joint conquest of Europe and the world. In fact, the Second World War was a war of aggression planned, started and conducted on the planning boards of IG Farben. IG Farben was the parent company of IG Auschwitz, the largest Industrial plant of this chemical cartel outside Germany. Much of the wealth of this cartel was built upon the blood and suffering of slave laborers, including those from the Auschwitz concentration camp. IG Farben promoted and used the unscrupulous political rulers of Germany as their willing tools to seek economic dominance over Europe and the rest of the world.

IG Farben was the largest shareholder in Rockefeller's Standard Oil and vice versa. The victory of the Allied Forces over Nazi-Germany at that time terminated the plans of IG Farben to become the leading pharmaceutical and petrochemical conglomerate in the world. At the same time, Standard Oil and the other pharmaceutical/petrochemical corporations of the Rockefeller consortium became the controlling financial group of this industry and remained so ever since.

In the Nuremberg War Tribunal of 1947 against the managers of the IG Farben Cartel several of them were found guilty and convicted for committing crimes against humanity including mass murder, plundering and other crimes. The Nuremberg War Tribunal also dismantled the IG Farben Cartel into the daughter companies Hoechst, Bayer and BASF. Today, each of these companies is larger than the parent company IG Farben was at that time.

Today the United States of America and Great Britain are the leading export nations of pharmaceutical products in the world. In fact, two out of three pharmaceutical drugs currently marketed globally derive from corporations in these two countries.

Fundamentals of the Pharmaceutical Business
The accused are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people who continue to die from cardiovascular disease, cancer and other diseases that could have been prevented and largely eliminated long ago.

This premature death of millions of people is neither the result of coincidence nor negligence. It has been willfully and systematically organized on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry and its investors with the sole purpose to expand a global drug market worth trillions of dollars.

The market place of the pharmaceutical industry is the human body and its return on investment depends on the continuation and expansion of diseases. Its profits depend on the patentability of drugs rendering this industry the most profitable industry on planet Earth.

In contrast, the prevention and eradication of any disease significantly reduces or totally eliminates the markets for pharmaceutical drugs. Therefore, the pharmaceutical corporations have been systematically obstructing the prevention and the eradication of diseases.

To commit these crimes, the pharmaceutical corporations use a maze of executors and accomplices in science, medicine, the mass media and in politics. The governments of entire nations are manipulated or even run by lobbyists and former executives of the pharmaceutical industry. For decades, the legislation of entire nations has been corrupted and abused to promote this multi-trillion-dollar "business with disease" thereby risking the health and lives of hundreds of millions of innocent patients and people.

A precondition for the rise of the pharmaceutical industry as a successful investment business was the elimination of competition from safe and natural therapies because they are not patentable and their profit margins are small. In addition, these natural therapies can effectively help prevent and eliminate diseases because of their essential roles in cellular metabolism.

As the result of the systematic elimination of natural health therapies and the takeover of the healthcare systems in most countries of the world, the pharmaceutical industry has brought millions of people and almost all nations into dependency upon its investment business.

Pharmaceutical Industry as an Organized Fraud Business
The pharmaceutical industry offers "health" to millions of patients - but does not deliver the goods. Instead it delivers products that merely alleviate symptoms while promoting the underlying disease as a precondition for its future business. To cover the fraud, this industry spends twice the amount of money in covering it up than it spends on research on future therapies.

This organized deception is the reason why this investment business could continue for almost a century behind a strategically designed smoke screen as 'benefactors' to humanity. The lives of 6 billion people and the economies of most countries in the world are held hostage by the criminal practices of this industry.

Exposing the Pharmaceutical 'Business with Disease'
Over the past decade, I have led the effort to unmask the organized fraud of this largest investment industry on earth. I have been instrumental in pointing out that the biggest obstacle for improving the health of the people of our planet is the pharmaceutical industry itself - and its nature as an investment industry driven by the expansion of diseases.

As a scientist, I was privileged to discover the true cause of cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases. Together with my colleagues and others I have also been instrumental in documenting the effective, natural and non-patentable alternatives to the pharmaceutical 'business with disease.' The identification of the natural molecules that optimize cellular metabolism enables mankind to prevent and largely eliminate most of today's most common diseases including cardiovascular disease, cancer and many others.

Background of the Current International Crisis and the War of Aggression Against Iraq
Four main factors are currently threatening the survival of the pharmaceutical industry and thereby the very basis of a long-term investment industry worth hundreds of trillions of dollars:

1. Unsolvable legal conflicts, resulting in an avalanche of class action lawsuits against many pharmaceutical corporations for product liability

2. Unsolvable scientific conflicts due to the breakthroughs in natural, non-patentable therapies that effectively and largely eradicate diseases as a market place.

3. Unsolvable ethical conflicts, resulting in the loss of credibility for the entire pharmaceutical business due to the fact that their exorbitant patent fees limit access to medicines for the majority of people and risk premature death for millions.

4. Unsolvable corporate conflicts. The unmasking of the pharmaceutical business model as an organized fraud.

For decades, the Pharma-Cartel has made every effort to protect its global business with patented drugs and to ban the dissemination of competing non-patentable health alternatives. This effort is conducted at the international level, by infiltration of the European Parliament and the abuse of the World Health Organization and other United Nations Organizations.

Now, with the largest investment industry on planet Earth being exposed as an organized fraud business - haunted by tens of thousands of liability lawsuits - immediate and global industry protection laws have become an urgent measure to cover up these crimes and to cement the continued control of the investment "business with disease" over human health worldwide.

These far-reaching protection laws for an organized fraud-business implied the curtailing of civil rights and other drastic measures that could not be implemented during peacetime. The implementation of these measures required the escalation of an international crisis, a series of military conflicts that deliberately factors in the use of weapons of mass destruction and the triggering of a World War. Only then would there exist a global psychological situation that would allow abandonment of civil rights, passing of martial laws and the global implementation of protection laws allowing the accused to continue their 'business with disease' and other crimes.

In this situation, the pharmaceutical industry became the single largest corporate donor to the election of George Bush in order to exert direct influence over the most powerful political and military center in the world. With the election of George Bush, the Rockefeller investment group had direct access to the White House, the Pentagon and the political decisions taken there. A similar influence was exerted by the Rothschild group on the government of Tony Blair in Great Britain.

Thus, it was no surprise that the two largest export nations of pharmaceutical products, the United States of America and Great Britain, spearheaded the current international crisis and instigated the war against Iraq. The alleged necessity for this war was presented to the people in America, Great Britain and the world under the false pretence of a global fight against 'terrorism', elimination of rogue governments and the crusade against proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Thus, the same corporate interest groups and the same political stakeholders responsible for millions of deaths from the continued business with disease are now also responsible for risking the unnecessary death of tens of thousands of innocent people in Iraq and for the death of young soldiers in America, Great Britain and other countries. They are responsible for starting and conducting a war of aggression against Iraq without any international mandate. They are responsible for the enslavement, plunder and other crimes currently being conducted in occupied Iraq.

If these interest groups and their political stakeholders are not held accountable for these crimes immediately, they are likely to continue the escalation of the international crisis with the ultimate risk of a war with weapons of mass destruction.

In this critical and historical situation I am bringing these crimes against humanity, these war crimes and crimes of aggression and of genocide to the attention of the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and urge him to take immediate action to prevent further crimes and the ultimate disaster, a world war.

Every individual person, government, corporation or organization from anywhere in the world who has suffered from these crimes or wishes to terminate these crimes is called upon to join this complaint.

Criminal Charges
The charges in this complaint relate to crimes in two main fields:

* Crimes perpetrated by the pharmaceutical "business with disease" including the crime of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

* Crimes related to the 2003 war against Iraq and the international escalation towards a world war including crimes of war and aggression as well as other crimes against humanity.

These two fields of crime are directly connected because they are committed in the name and interest of the same corporate investment groups and their political stakeholders. The accused are charged with the most serious crimes committed against all mankind and are therefore subject to the principle of international prosecution.

1. Crimes Committed In Connection With The Pharmaceutical 'Business With Disease'

1.1. The Crime of Genocide
The accused are guilty of the crime of genocide for which they are liable to prosecution under Article 6 of the ICC Statute. This includes but is not limited to the following specific crimes:
1.1.1. Genocide by Killing (Article 6a)
1.1.2. Genocide by causing serious bodily or mental harm (Article 6b)
1.2.3. Genocide by deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction (Article 6c)

1.2. Crimes Against Humanity
The accused are guilty of the crime of genocide for which they are liable to prosecution under Article 7 of the ICC Statute. This includes but is not limited to the following specific crimes:

1.2.1. Crime Against Humanity of Murder (Article 7a)
1.2.2. Crime Against Humanity of Extermination (Article 7b)
1.2.3. Crime Against Humanity of Enslavement (Article 7c)
1.2.4. Crime Against Humanity of Severe Deprivation
of Physical Liberty (Article 7e)
1.2.5. Crime Against Humanity of Other Inhumane Acts (Article 7k)

Summary Of The Substantiation Of The Charges In Relation To The Crimes Connected With The Pharmaceutical 'Business With Disease' (Charges 1.1. - 1.2.)

1. The accused willfully and systematically maintain cardiovascular diseases, including high blood pressure, heart failure, diabetic complications and other diseases, cancer, infectious diseases including AIDS, osteoporosis and many other of today's most common diseases that are recognized to be largely preventable by natural means. The accused have deliberately caused the unnecessary suffering and premature death of hundreds of millions of people.

2. The accused systematically and deliberately prevent the eradication of cardiovascular disease, cancer and other diseases by obstructing and blocking the dissemination of life-saving information on the health benefits of natural non-patentable therapies. Thereby, the accused have deliberately caused further unnecessary suffering and the premature death of hundreds of millions of people.

3. The accused deliberately and systematically expand existing diseases and creating new diseases by manufacturing and marketing pharmaceutical drugs with short-term symptomatic relief but with known and detrimental long-term side-effects. Thereby the accused have deliberately caused further unnecessary suffering and premature death of hundreds of millions of people.

Details are provided in the evidence section.
2. Specific Crimes Committed In Connection With The War Against Iraq And The Current International Crisis

2.1. The Crime of Genocide
The accused are guilty of the crime of genocide for which they are liable to prosecution under Article 6 of the ICC Statute. Under the terms of this statute genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. This includes but is not limited to the following specific criminal charges:

2.1.1. Genocide by killing (Article 6a)

2.1.2. Genocide by causing serious physical or mental harm (Article 6b)

2.1.3. Genocide by deliberately inflicting living conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction (Article 6c)

2.2. Crimes Against Humanity
Under the terms of Article 7 of the Rome Statute, crimes against humanity mean any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack. This includes but is not limited to the following specific criminal charges:

2.2.1. Crimes against humanity of murder (Article 7a)
2.2.2. Crimes against humanity of extermination (Article 7b)
2.2.3. Crimes against humanity of enslavement (Article 7c)
2.2.4. Crimes against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer of population (Article 7d)

2.2.5. Crimes against humanity of imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty (Article 7e)
2.2.6. Crimes against humanity of other inhumane acts of a similar nature intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to the body or to mental or physical health. (Article 7k)

2.3. War Crimes
Under the terms of Article 8 of the Rome Statute, war crimes mean grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12th August 1949 (Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Geneva Convention for the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War).

1. The accused deliberately started a war of aggression against Iraq without any mandate by international law.

2. The accused deliberately escalate an international crisis situation including psychological warfare and actual military warfare. The goal of this escalation strategy is to create a global emergency state that allows the abandonment of civil rights on global scale - including establishment of far reaching protectionist laws. The war of aggression against Iraq on the false pretence of a global fight against "terrorism" and the crusade proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is part of this strategy.

3. The accused deliberately committed the crimes of genocide, murder, mutilation and other serious bodily and mental harm during their war of aggression against the people of Iraq.

4. The accused deliberately committed the crime of destroying and seizing public and private property during and after the war of aggression. Iraq has the second largest oil resources in the world and these resources are being plundered on behalf of the accused for private gain.

Details are documented in the section "Evidence"
Historic Precedent For This Complaint
The Nuremberg War Tribunal against executives of the pharmaceutical/petrochemical cartel IG- Farben

More than half a century ago, the Nuremberg War Tribunal took place against the executives of the IG Farben Corporation, the largest pharmaceutical-petrochemical cartel in pre-world-war Europe. The Nuremberg War Tribunal brought to justice those responsible for the Second World War and set the precedent for international prosecution of war crimes and ultimately the International Court in The Hague.

Unbeknownst to most people today, the Nuremberg War Tribunal did not only sentence the political and military leaders, but also the corporate executives who brought Hitler to power. 24 executives and managers of IG Farben were indicted in this War Tribunal. US chief prosecutor Telford Taylor stated in his opening statement: "The indictment accuses these men of mature responsibility for visiting upon mankind the most devastating and catastrophic war in human history. It accuses them of wholesale enslavement, plunder and murder. These are terrible charges."

And he continued, "These accused corporate executives, not the Nazi lunatics are the principal war criminals. If their crimes are not brought to the daylight and they are not punished, they will commit even larger crimes in the future than Hitler could ever have committed."

In 1947, the main charges against the IG Farben managers were:
* Charge 1: the planning and conduction of a war of aggression and the conquest of other countries with the result of unprecedented destruction in the entire world, the death of millions of people and the continued sufferings of millions more.

* Charge 2: deportation, plundering and spoliation of public and private property in the occupied countries with the purpose of permanently exerting economic control in these countries and other severe crimes.

* Charge 3: slavery, mistreatment, terrorizing, torture and murdering of millions of people.

Now, half a century later, the charges in this complaint, are strikingly similar:

* Planning and conduct of a war of aggression against Iraq under the pretence of fighting international terror and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction with the result that vast areas of the country are devastated, thousands of people have died and hundreds of thousands were injured.

* Plundering and spoliation of public and private property in the pursuit of economic power and control in entire regions of the world by escalating an international crisis. Against this war of aggression the accused were deliberately factoring in the use of weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

* Genocide by killing, by causing serious bodily harm and by inflicting conditions of life to bring about physical destruction and crimes against humanity of murder and of other inhumane acts.

Evidence For The Crimes Committed
The evidence for the charges brought in this complaint also relate to two main fields of crimes

* Evidence of genocide and other crimes against humanity committed in connection with the pharmaceutical business with disease.

* Evidence for crimes of war and aggression and other crimes against humanity committed in connection with the war against Iraq and the escalation of the international crisis to a world war.

1. Evidence Of Genocide And Other Crimes Against Humanity Committed In Connection With The Pharmaceutical 'Business With Disease'

Specific evidence is presented that the accused are responsible for deliberately maintaining and expanding diseases, purposefully causing new diseases as well as expanding the use of drugs once registered for one disease to as many other diseases as possible.

To accomplish those goals, the accused have strategically designed, implemented, conducted and organized a business fraud scheme on a global scale that by its economic magnitude is unmatched in human history.

1.1. The Deliberate Expansion of Disease
The following specific evidence is presented that today's most common diseases are deliberately maintained and expanded by the accused, despite the fact that these diseases could have been effectively prevented and largely eradicated saving millions of lives.

1.1.1. Coronary heart disease
The primary cause of coronary artery disease and heart attacks is a structural weakening and impaired function of the artery wall, which - similar to scurvy - develops as the result of long-term deficiencies of vitamins and other essential nutrients.

In contrast, pharmaceutical approaches to the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease deliberately ignore this cause and focus rather on the treatment of symptoms, such as the reduction of cholesterol levels in the blood.

Whilst deliberately avoiding curing the disease for which they are marketed, the detrimental side effects of these pharmaceutical drugs cause new diseases. The worldwide death toll from cardiovascular disease as a result of these deliberate crimes of the accused is in excess of 12 million lives every year.

1.1.2. High Blood Pressure
The primary cause of high blood pressure is an increased tension of the artery wall due to a deficiency of essential nutrients in the arterial smooth muscle cells, leading to narrowing of the artery diameter and a rise in blood pressure. A multitude of clinical studies is available documenting the benefits of non-patentable micronutrients, in particular the amino acid arginine and magnesium. They correct the underlying deficiency in millions of vascular wall cells thereby relaxing the blood vessel walls, increasing blood vessel diameter and helping to normalize high blood pressure,

Pharmaceutical drugs sold for the treatment of high blood pressure purposely focus on the treatment of symptoms. For example, beta-blockers reduce the heart rate and diuretics reduce the blood volume. These pharmaceutical drugs deliberately avoid correcting the 'spasms' of the blood vessel walls as the primary cause of high blood pressure. Thus, whilst deliberately avoiding curing the disease, these pharmaceutical drugs have long-term detrimental side effects potentially causing a multitude of new diseases - and thereby new drug markets.

Worldwide several hundred million high blood pressure patients remain uncured as a direct result of these actions by the accused and their death toll is rising daily.

1.1.3. Heart Failure
The primary cause of heart failure is lack of cellular biocatalysts, certain vitamins, minerals, carnitine, coenzyme Q10 and other bioenergy carriers in millions of heart muscle cells. This results in impaired heart pumping function and accumulation of water in the body.

In contrast, pharmaceutical approaches for the treatment of heart failure deliberately ignore this fact and focus on symptoms. Diuretics marketed for the treatment of heart failure not only eliminate water accumulated in the body but also wash out vitamins, minerals and other water-soluble bioenergy carriers. Thus, the pharmaceutical drugs marketed for heart failure actually worsen the disease and they are responsible for the short life expectancy of heart failure patients once diuretic medication sets in.

Whilst deliberately avoiding curing the disease, these pharmaceutical drugs flush out essential nutrients from the body, thereby aggravating the underlying cause of the disease. Worldwide over one hundred million heart failure patients remain uncured and eventually die prematurely as a direct result of the actions by the accused.

1.1.4. Irregular heartbeat
The primary cause of irregular heartbeat is lack of micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, ubiquinone and other bioenergy carriers, in millions of electrical heart muscle cells. This results in impaired generation or conduction of the electrical impulses required for normal heartbeat. A recent double blind placebo-controlled study has unequivocally documented that the therapeutic use of micronutrients is an effective safe and affordable way to correct the health condition underlying irregular heart beat.

In contrast, pharmaceutical approaches for the treatment of irregular heartbeat deliberately ignore this fact and focus instead on symptoms. Anti-arrhythmic drugs marketed to treat arrhythmia frequently worsen the irregular heartbeat and cause cardiac arrest and the premature death of patients.

A decade ago the author Thomas Moore documented in his book "Deadly Medicine" that one new class of anti-arrhythmic drugs in the USA alone had caused more deaths than the number of US casualties in the Vietnam War. Worldwide over one hundred million patients with irregular heartbeat remain uncured as a direct result of these actions by the accused and their death toll is rising daily.

1.1.5. Cancer
Until recently cancer has been considered a death verdict. Recent advances in natural health and cellular medicine have fundamentally changed that. For this disease too, it is now obvious that medical research with non-patentable therapies has been deliberately neglected and excluded by the accused in favor of ineffective drugs that allow the continuation of the cancer epidemic as one of their most profitable markets. Because of the extraordinary significance of the crimes committed by the accused in connection with the cancer epidemic it is presented here in more detail.

It is a scientific fact that all cancers spread by the same mechanism, the use of collagen digesting enzymes (collagenases, metalloproteinases). The therapeutic use of the natural amino acid lysine - especially together with other non-patentable micronutrients - can block these enzymes and thereby inhibit the spread of cancer cells. All types of cancer studied thus far respond to this therapeutic approach including breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, fibroblastoma, synovial cancer and any other forms of cancer.

The only reason why this breakthrough in medicine has not been investigated further and applied in the treatment of cancer patients worldwide is the fact that these substances are not patentable and therefore have low profit margins. More importantly, any effective treatment of any disease ultimately leads to its eradication and to the destruction of a multi-trillion-dollar market of pharmaceutical drugs.

The pharmaceutical drug marketing for cancer patients has been particularly fraudulent and malicious. Under the pretence of treating cancer using the cover-term 'chemo-therapy' toxic substances, including derivatives of mustard gas, are applied to patients. The fact that these toxic agents also destroy millions of healthy cells in the body is deliberately factored in.

Knowing this fact, the following consequences were deliberately taken into account: First, cancer would continue as a global epidemic, providing the economic basis for a multi-trillion-dollar continued business with this disease. Secondly, the systematic application of toxic agents in the form of chemotherapy causes an epidemic of new diseases in cancer patients receiving these toxic substances.

As a result of this strategy, the pharmaceutical drug market from treating the dangerous side effects of these drugs - including infections, inflammation, bleeding, organ failure etc. - is even bigger than the market of the chemotherapy drugs itself. Thus, the accused also applied their organized deception scheme to the detriment of hundreds of millions of cancer patients with one purpose only: their financial enrichment.

1.1.6. AIDS and other Infectious Diseases
Similar deliberate deception schemes were applied for the treatment of one of the most deadly epidemics in human history, AIDS. Already 10 years ago scientific studies have shown that vitamin C is able to reduce the replication of the HIV-Virus by more than 99%. This fact has been known to the accused for more than a decade.

Deliberately ignoring and bypassing this safe and affordable non-patentable treatment, the accused developed patentable drugs against AIDS, with severe side-effects and - due to their exorbitant patent royalties - unaffordable to the great majority of the people on this planet. Thus, by applying their criminal business scheme, the accused are guilty of risking the lives and causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in Africa, South America, Asia and all the other regions of the world.

In a similar way, they have boycotted the information that the single most important measure to enhance immunity against infectious diseases is an optimum intake of vitamins B6, B12, Folic Acid and certain other essential nutrients. It is a scientific fact that these biocatalysts of cellular metabolism increase the production of leucocytes, the body's main weapon against any infection. By systematically withholding this information, particularly from hundreds of millions of children and adults in the developing world, the pharmaceutical industry deliberately risks the lives of hundreds of millions of people in these areas of the world. All the accused know that hardly anyone in these areas of the world can afford pharmaceutical treatments and they will consequently die.

Withholding this lifesaving information about natural, non-patentable alternatives to prevent and fight infectious diseases, not only leads to the death of millions of people, but also to the ruin of the economies of many developing countries. As a direct result the already existing imbalance in the current world economy is dramatically aggravated. These countries are deliberately placed in a conflict where they can only lose.

1.1.7. Other diseases
In a similar way, other degenerative, inflammatory, infectious diseases and many other of today's most common diseases only continue to exist as health problems because the accused have defined them and protect them as the markets for their criminal 'business with disease.'

1.2. EVIDENCE ABOUT THE CRIMINAL MARKETING SCHEMES OF THE ACCUSED
1.2.1 Deliberately Expanding Diseases and Causing New Diseases in Patients to Expand Pharmaceutical Drug Markets

To expand their markets the following groups of drugs are manufactured and marketed by the accused deliberately, in spite of their known detrimental side effects. In a criminal manner, the accused are deliberately causing new diseases under the pretense of fighting existing ones. The fact that these new diseases caused by the side effects of these drugs surface many years later is used as an additional cover for this deceptive scheme:

Cholesterol-lowering drugs, particularly statins and fibrates are mass-marketed under the pretense of preventing cardiovascular disease. These drugs are known to induce cancer at doses currently administered to millions of patients worldwide.

Chemotherapy drugs are marketed to allegedly treat cancer. In fact, they cause a series of severe side effects the most frequent of which is setting off new cancers. The entire criminal marketing scheme around chemotherapy can only work because the accused have rendered cancer a death verdict - and even a few month's survival of a patient on chemotherapy is being marketed by the accused as a success story.

Aspirin is mass-marketed under the false pretense of preventing heart attacks and strokes, whilst long-term use of this drug is known to cause destruction of collagen and therefore to gradually increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes as well as other diseases such as stomach ulcers and gastrointestinal bleeding.

Anti-inflammatory drugs are used to treat pain and inflammation, e.g. in arthritis. However, many of these drugs destroy connective tissue, e.g. the joints. With their long-term use these drugs aggravate the health problems rather than healing them.

Calcium antagonists are mass-marketed under the false pretense of treating high blood pressure and preventing heart attacks, whilst long-term use of these drugs is known to cause an increase in heart attacks, strokes and other diseases.

Estrogen and other hormone drugs are mass-marketed under the false pretense of preventing osteoporosis and heart disease, whilst long-term use of these drugs is known to cause cancer in more than 30% of the women taking them. Particularly frequent forms of cancer caused by these drugs are hormone dependent cancers such as cancer of the breast and uterus.

Tranquilizers and anti-depressants. Another mechanism by which the accused systematically expand their markets is to deliberately cause addiction in order to increase drug sales. Many tranquillizers and anti-depressants, including widespread diazepam ('Valium') are known to cause dependency and addiction. In order to expand their global sales of these addictive drugs, the accused even praise them through full-page adverts directly to the public.

Other drugs. Since patentability is a precondition for the pharmaceutical investment business typical pharmaceutical drugs are synthetic molecules and therefore toxic to the human body. For almost all drugs the same fraudulent business principle is valid - alleviate symptoms short term whilst, at the same time causing damage and gradually generating new diseases as the basis for new drug markets.

1.3. Expanding their drug markets to new diseases
In executing their crimes, the accused deliberately extend their existing pharmaceutical drug market by inventing new health conditions for which they recommend the drugs that had previously been recommended for other diseases. As first evidence the following examples are presented here:

Headache pills allegedly prevent heart disease. Aspirin was developed as a headache and pain relief pill and is now being mass-marketed and recommended by the accused for long-term use, even by healthy individuals for the alleged prevention and treatment of heart disease and other severe health conditions.

Antibiotics allegedly fight coronary heart disease. In order to extend the global market for their antibiotic drugs, the accused fabricated and spread the so-called "bacteria-theory" of heart attacks on a worldwide scale. Without any clinical evidence that chlamydia or other bacteria actually cause atherosclerosis or heart attacks the accused criminally promoted the general use of antibiotics even for healthy individuals with the false pretense of preventing heart attacks.

These are just a few examples of the practices by the accused to systematically expand the use of their drugs to other diseases. In fact this marketing scheme is not the exception, but the rule. The list of crimes committed in this context should be amended and completed during further investigation.

1.4. Crimes Connected With The Systematic Infiltration Of Various Sectors Of Society With The Purpose To Facilitate Committing These Crimes
The accused have systematically and deliberately infiltrated medicine and the health sectors of most countries in the world to create financial and other dependencies in order to conduct their 'business with disease' and commit other crimes. Medical research is not performed with the primary object to find the most effective, safest and most affordable treatment against a disease, but with the goal to identify the largest disease markets and to achieve the highest gains in that market for the drug manufacturer. As part of this strategy over recent decades, the accused systematically removed from the training programs at medical schools the knowledge about effective, but non-patentable natural therapies. They are purposely producing generations of doctors with little or no knowledge about the life-saving health benefits of these natural therapies. Simultaneously, therapeutic education at medical schools was taken over by the newly created departments named pharmacology. Thus, over decades generations of doctors have been leaving medical schools practically as a trained sales force for the pharmaceutical 'business with disease'. In order to hide this strategy, patented drugs were portraid as 'scientific' and even baptized 'ethical drugs' whereas non-patentable natural therapies were discredited as 'unscientific.'

In a similar way the accused have systematically and deliberately infiltrated the mass media around the world, creating financial and other dependencies, disseminating deceptive and false information in order to conceal their criminal practices, promote their 'business with disease' and commit other crimes.

The accused have deliberately and systematically abused the legislative and political system of most nations to pass laws, establish regulations and promote other measures with the purpose to expand their sales of ineffective, unsafe but lucrative pharmaceutical drugs. The accused abused their political influence to coerce legislation that would allow them to appropriate trillions of dollars under the cover of 'health insurance' and other public and private health funds. By promoting their fraudulent 'business with disease' they have taken this money from individuals, corporations and governments around the world by requesting payment for ineffective and harmful therapies. Thereby, the accused secure exorbitant gains for the pharmaceutical industry and causing unnecessary suffering and premature death of hundreds of millions of people.

The accused have purposely and systematically infiltrated and abused the European Parliament and other regional and international bodies including the United Nations Organizations, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and other national and international political bodies to commit their crimes against humanity.

1.5. Crimes Connected With The Systematic Obstruction Of Effective, Non-Patentable Health Measures
To protect their artificial investment business with disease, the accused tried to strategically eliminate access of the people of the world to non-patentable natural therapies. To accomplish this goal the accused used several strategic measures:

1. Withholding life saving information about non-patentable natural therapies. The accused have deliberately and systematically withheld and blocked the basic health information from millions of people that the human body does not produce its own vitamin C (ascorbic acid). Because of the lack of this knowledge almost all humans suffer from vitamin C deficiency and are susceptible to cardiovascular and other diseases. In a similar way, the accused have systematically and purposefully withheld and blocked the basic health information from millions of people that the human body does not produce the natural amino acid lysine. Because of the lack of this knowledge almost all humans suffer from lysine deficiency and are susceptible to cancer and other diseases. Thereby, the accused deliberately cause further unnecessary suffering and the premature death of hundreds of millions of people.

2. Publicly discrediting non-patentable natural therapies. The accused have willfully and systematically deceived the public by disseminating false, misleading and fabricated information discrediting non-patentable health therapies with the goal to protect and expand their 'business with disease' based on patented drugs and to commit other crimes. Thereby, the accused deliberately cause further unnecessary suffering and the premature death of hundreds of millions of people.

3. Outlawing the dissemination of health information related to non-patentable natural therapies. The accused have deliberately abused their political influence trying to implement legislation at the national as well as the international level that would essentially outlaw the dissemination of preventive and therapeutic health information related to non-patentable natural therapies. At the same time, this legislation seeks to establish arbitrarily low 'upper limits' for the amounts of these natural and safe therapies, a step intended to prohibit their use as natural therapeutic agents. By abusing the United Nation's 'Codex Alimentarius Commission', the accused have even been trying to establish such laws for all member countries of the UN - that is worldwide.

1.5.5. Now that all peaceful efforts to protect the pharmaceutical 'business with disease' have failed, the accused adopt another strategy. They are deliberately escalating an international crisis, including wars, in order to create the psychological and legal precondition that would allow an immediate and global implementation of protectionist laws and cement the continuation of their 'business with disease' and the other crimes of which they are accused.

2. Evidence Of Genocide, Crimes Of War And Other Crimes Against Humanity Committed In Connection With The War Of Aggression Against Iraq

The accused are committing the crime of deliberately escalating an international crisis including wars of aggression towards a war that includes weapons of mass destruction.

The accused have been consistently abusing the tragedy of September 11th for the purpose of building up an international crisis scenario, which they ultimately used as a justification for their war of aggression.

Whilst the accused maximized the psychological factor of this tragedy they have blocked an official investigation into the actual events and the background of September 11th. It was The White House itself that blocked the institution of an independent commission for over a year.

Thus whilst the facts about this tragedy are not fully disclosed to the public the events of September 11th have been abused as the justification for the international crisis situation ever since.

Whilst failing to disclose any convincing evidence about September 11th they abused this tragedy to conquer the country of Afghanistan. The military conquest of Afghanistan was followed by the plundering of its natural resources, by the accused, for their financial gain.

In a similar way the accused used this pretense to conquer the next country, Iraq. Under cover of fighting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the accused were trying to coerce the world community into a war of aggression against Iraq.

Despite the fact that the great majority of the UN Security Council, the vast majority of the member states of the UN and overwhelming world opinion opposed this war, the accused still launched their attack.

The war planned, started and conducted by the accused was a war without any international mandate and therefore constituted a war of aggression and a crime against humanity. If the accused are not brought to justice for this crime, the entire system of international law as designed after the Second World War to protect mankind from destruction, will collapse.

In the absence of any international mandate the only justification left for the accused to commit this criminal act, was to fabricate a pretense - their alleged search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Today the entire world knows that this too was a deception.

During their war of aggression against Iraq, tens of thousands of Iraqi people - soldiers and civilians alike - were killed. Killing of that magnitude during a war without any international mandate constitutes the crime of genocide.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of innocent people - many of them children - were injured, mutilated, or suffered physical or mental harm caused by the criminal acts of the accused.

Moreover, the accused purposefully and systematically seized the oil fields and other natural resources of Iraq with the purpose to exploit them to enrich themselves. To cover up their crimes the accused disseminate the false justification that their seizure of the oil resources would be in the interests of and to the benefit of the Iraqi people.

With the occupation of Iraq and the appropriation of its resources in a war of aggression, the accused also committed the crime of plundering and seizing the enemy's property.

The accused systematically promoted this crisis escalation to further curtail civil rights through so-called 'anti-terror' laws. To deceive the people while committing their crimes these laws were deliberately given deceptive names, e.g. 'Homeland Security Act', or 'Patriot-Act', thereby coercing political support for the abandonment of civil rights.

Whilst systematically organizing this escalation the accused also deliberately abused the media distraction and made their first moves trying to implement protectionist laws on behalf of the pharmaceutical cartel. Largely unbeknown to the US Congress at that time, a provision was inserted into the Homeland Security Act granting immunity to drug makers from product liability law suits.

This is but a short synopsis of the crimes of war and crimes against humanity committed by the accused and of their strategy to abuse these war crimes to continue crimes of even larger magnitude, such as cementing their global 'business with disease'.

In the course of the further investigation of these war crimes, all available resources must be used to bring the accused to justice. This includes particularly all information available through the United Nations organizations, the UN weapons inspectors, documentation of war crimes from Iraqi and international sources and all other available sources.

The people of the world will demand to be part of this process and contribute documentation about these war crimes in order to accelerate the process of justice.

The Accused
The accused are the following persons from the corporate, military and political sectors of different nationalities:

1. George Walker Bush, U.S. President. He is the main political executor of the interests of the pharmaceutical/petrochemical cartel. He is the main political executor of the war crimes against Iraq and the other crimes of this complaint.

2. Anthony Charles Lynton ("Tony") Blair, Prime Minister of the U.K. He is the political head and executor for himself as well as an accomplice of George Bush in committing the crimes listed in this complaint.

3. Richard Bruce ("Dick") Cheney, U.S. Vice President. Cheney was the chief executive officer of the oil service provider Haliburton & Company from Dallas, Texas. After the conquest of Iraq, Haliburton became the key company for the economic plundering of Iraq under the pretence of reconstruction.

4. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld was Chief Executive Officer of several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, among others the pharma-concern G. D. Searle, today part of Pharmacia. For several decades, he had the role of strategic organizer of the pharmaceutical "business with disease". He received several awards of the pharmaceutical industry. Beside George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld was one of the main instigators of the war of aggression against Iraq.

5. John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General. He is one of the strategists of the so-called Homeland Security Act, one of the organizational instruments by which the accused are systematically curtailing civil rights in the U.S. He is responsible for protectionist legislation that would essentially grant immunity to the pharmaceutical industry from being held responsible for their crimes in the U.S.

6. Tom Ridge, Secretary of Homeland Security, an accomplice of John Ashcroft in cementing the political and economic control of the accused with the purpose to continue their unscrupulous business with disease and other crimes by systematically curtailing civil rights in the U.S.

7. Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Security Advisor. She is a former director of the petrochemical concern Chevron and was instrumental in promoting the war of aggression of the accused.

In the pharmaceutical sector, the following companies are accused:

1. Pfizer Inc., the Chief Executive Officer Henry A. McKinnell, Ph.D., the other Executives and the Board of Directors.

2. Merck & Co., Inc., the Chief Executive Officer Raymond V. Gilmartin, the other Executives and the Board of Directors.

3. GlaxoSmithKline PLC, the Chief Executive Officer Dr Jean-Pierre Garnier, the other Executives and the Board of Directors.

4. Novartis AG, the Chief Executive Officer Dr Daniel Vasella, the other Executives and the Board of Directors.

5. Amgen Inc., the Chief Executive Officer Kevin Sharer, the other Executives and the Board of Directors.

6. Astra Zeneca, the Chief Executive Officer Sir Tom McKillop, the other Executives and the Board of Directors.

7. Eli Lilly and Company, the Chief Executive Officer Sidney Taurel, the other Executives and the Board of Directors.

8. Abbott Laboratories, the Chief Executive Officer Miles D. White, the other Executives and the Board of Directors.

9. Other pharmaceutical companies, their Executive Officers and Boards of Directors that maintain and promote the investment "business with disease" and other crimes.

In the petrochemical sector, the following corporations and their executives are accused:

1. ExxonMobil Corporation, its Chief Executive Officer Lee R. Raymond, the other Executives and its Board of Directors.

2. British Petroleum (BP), its Chief Executive Officer The Lord Browne of Madingley, FREng, the other Executives and its Board of Directors.

3. Chevron Texaco Corp., its Chief Executive Officer David O'Reilly, the other Executives and its Board of Directors.

4. Other petrochemical companies that benefit from the plunder and spoliation of the war of aggression against Iraq.

The financial groups behind these corporate multinationals:

1. The Rockefeller Financial Group and the members of the Rockefeller Family in benefiting from the crimes committed.

2. The Rothschild Group and all its members financially benefiting from these crimes.

3. The JP Morgan Group and all its members financially benefiting from these crimes.

4. The Trilateral Commission and its members, a body founded by David Rockefeller to coordinate the interests of this investment group in the three areas of the world, U.S.A., Europe and Japan - hence, the name "trilateral" - including all members of this commission individually who are found guilty of participating in these crimes or benefiting from them financially.

5. The members of other corporate lobby and interest groups who in the course of further investigation will be found to have participated in committing these crimes or financially benefited from them.

6. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, its Chief Executive Officer William B. Harrison Jr., the other Executives and its Board of Directors.

7. Other financial institutions their Executive Officers, Boards of Directors and shareholders and others who in the course of further investigation will be found to have participated in committing these crimes or financially benefited from them.

8. Politicians as well as national and international political bodies who in the course of further investigation will be found to have participated in committing these crimes or financially benefited from them.

9. Members of the military who participated, or in the course of further investigation will be found to have participated in committing these crimes or financially benefited from them.

10. Pharmaceutical health executives who in the course of further investigation will be found to have deliberately and systematically participated in committing these crimes or financially benefited from them.

11. Members of the media and others who in the course of further investigation will be found to have participated in committing these crimes or financially benefited from them.

12. Any other individual person, organization or body that in the course of further investigation will be found to have participated in committing these crimes or financially benefited from them.

International Treaties Applicable For This Complaint

Beside the Rome Statutes for the International Court of Justice the following international treaties and declarations are applicable for the severe charges of this complaint:

1. The United Nations Charter

2. The Declaration of Human Rights of December 8, 1948

3. The Geneva Convention on Human Rights of August 12, 1949

4. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of January 12, 1951

5. The Convention on Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity of 1968

6. The Principles of International Co-Operation in the Detection, Arrest, Extradition and Punishment of Persons Guilty of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity of 1973

The Jurisdiction Of The International Criminal Court Over The Accused

The accused committed the crimes outlined above, knowingly and deliberately and in full knowledge of all the circumstances surrounding their actions.

The crimes reported here have been committed against all mankind. The ICC in The Hague is the court governed by international law addressing these urgent issues.

Moreover, the ICC was established after WWII and the Nuremberg Tribunal, with the goal to prevent another tragedy from happening - possibly a world war.

1. Liability to prosecution of those bearing office

The accused can be both sentenced and punished by the International Criminal Court.

The Statute applies equally to all persons without any distinction based on official capacity. In particular, official capacity as a Head of State or Government, a member of a Government or parliament, an elected representative or a government official shall in no case exempt a person from criminal responsibility under the Statute of the ICC, nor shall it, in and of itself, constitute a ground for reduction of sentence (Article 27, Paragraph 1 of the Statute).

Immunities or special procedural rules which may attach to the official capacity of a person, whether under national or international law, shall also not bar the Court from exercising its jurisdiction over such a person (Article 27, Paragraph 2 of the Statute).

2. Exclusion of criminal responsibility
None of the accused may invoke any of the grounds specified under Article 31 of the Statute for excluding criminal responsibility.

The accused were acting in full knowledge about the illegitimacy of their actions. Thus, any claims to the contrary are null and void.

Equally null and void are all efforts by the accused to retroactively justify their crimes by forming 'coalitions' of opinions with other nations.

3. Power to inflict punishment over members of the US Government and citizens of the USA

Even those of the accused, who hold citizenship of the United States of America, cannot claim immunity from criminal prosecution before the International Criminal Court, just because the United States of America in contrast to 90 other countries around the world (i.e. almost half of the members of the United Nations) is not amongst the signatory states to the Rome Statute.

The accused have long been devising plans to try and evade the power to inflict punishment of the International Criminal Court. This, however, does not exempt the accused from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, because the mere performance of the crimes involved in the acts to be judged before the ICC constitutes liability to punishment under the terms of the Statute.

It does not matter if you belong to a specific Member State, because the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over natural persons and not over States and establishes individual responsibility and liability for punishment (Article 25 Paragraphs 1 and 2 of the Statute).

The ICC Statutes render attempts by the US Administration to coerce smaller nations into bilateral 'immunity pacts' redundant.

In addition, the UN Security Council did rule that the US Government and therefore also the majority of the accused could not and should not decide themselves whether the International Criminal Court could take action against them or not.

This decision was taken for good reason: One can only imagine what would have happened if the main figures accused in the Nuremberg Trials had been allowed to choose whether they had to stand trial before the Nuremberg Tribunal.

For these reasons the accused, even if they are citizens of the United States of America, are still subject to the power to inflict punishment of the International Criminal Court.

Final Appeal
The individuals named should be indicted before the International Criminal Court on the basis of the valid grounds specified in this complaint.

The investigations into the individual responsibilities of the accused are to be taken up and continued by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

These investigations will also be continued and intensified on our side, the side of the people of the world.

2006-08-21T12:02:00.000-07:00

Chocolate and Slavery: Child Labor in Cote d'Ivoire

By Samlanchith Chanthavong
From The Trade and Environment Database

There is a surprising association between chocolate and child labor in the Cote d'Ivoire[The Ivory Coast]. Young boys whose ages range from 12 to 16 have been sold into slave labor and are forced to work in cocoa farms in order to harvest the beans, from which chocolate is made, under inhumane conditions and extreme abuse. This West African country is the leading exporter of cocoa beans to the world market. Thus, the existence of slave labor is relevant to the entire international economic community.

Through trade relations, many actors are inevitably implicated in this problem, whether it is the Ivorian government, the farmers, the American or European chocolate manufacturers, or consumers who unknowingly buy chocolate. Discussions have arisen regarding how to respond to the problem. Issues mentioned include causes of slave labor relating to the economic system and to the country's dependence on an unstable export crop. There are also debates concerning the appropriate response from the chocolate industry, government officials, and consumers concerning whether there should be boycotting, establishment of government legislation to put "made by slaves" labels on products, or whether some type of international cooperation is needed to ensure improved working conditions. The complexity of the problem makes finding an effective solution a challenging task.

Slavery and the Link to Chocolate
Slave traders are trafficking boys ranging from the age of 12 to 16 from their home countries and are selling them to cocoa farmers in Cote d'Ivoire. They work on small farms across the country, harvesting the cocoa beans day and night, under inhumane conditions. Most of the boys come from neighboring Mali, where agents hang around bus stations looking for children that are alone or are begging for food. They lure the kids to travel to Cote d'Ivoire with them, and then the traffickers sell the children to farmers in need of cheap labor.

The horrendous conditions under which children must toil on the cocoa farms of the Cote d'Ivoire are even more jarring when the facts are juxtaposed with the idea that much of this cocoa will ultimately end up producing something that most people associate with happiness and pleasure: chocolate. The connection serves to illustrate that the existence of misery in one part of the world and joy in another part are no longer divorced as nations are connected together in a globalized web of trade. Thus, the pleasure that people from various nations around the world are deriving from these chocolate confections could possibly be at the expense of child slaves in Africa. The problem of child slavery then is not simply a faraway abstraction with no immediate implications for anybody else except those who are directly affected, but rather it is an issue that everybody around the world should be concerned about and demand action to eradicate.

Although news of child labor abuse in Cote d'Ivoire has only recently garnered public attention, these situations did not arise suddenly. Many interlocking factors have contributed to both creating and perpetuating conditions that have led to this form of modern slavery. In order to better understand the situation, this case study will explore the different aspects of Ivorian child labor and the cocoa trade. The case study will begin by providing an overall review of the problem. Afterwards, the case will examine some of the causes and effects of the situation, as well as efforts developed as a response to the abuse.

Human Trafficking and Slavery in General
In 1994, the United Nations General Assembly defined human trafficking as "the illegal and clandestine movement of persons across national and international borders. . . With the end goal of forcing women and children into. . .Economically oppressive and exploitative situations for profit…"(UNICEF). Although most people may not be aware that in the 21st century slavery still exists, reports declare that the number of slaves at present is the highest it has ever been (Free the Slaves). Presently, about 700,000 children and women are trafficked around the world annually. The UN says that profits for this trafficking amount to approximately $7 billion a year (Anti-Slavery International).

Slavery, the Cote d'Ivoire, and the Rest of West Africa
A UNICEF study reports that 200,000 children are trafficked yearly in West and Central Africa. The trafficking occurs across many countries including Cameroon, Nigeria, and Ghana. Some countries are mere transit points, while others are either the suppliers or receivers of the children.

In addition to the nations mentioned previously, two countries that are especially implicated in child trafficking in the cocoa trade are Cote d'Ivoire which is the receiving country, and Mali which serves as the supplier. Cocoa farms in the Cote d'Ivoire are violating children's human rights in two ways: they are involved in trafficking the children and are also the site of forced labor (Save the Children Canada).

There are about 600,000 cocoa farms in Cote d'Ivoire (Child Labor Coalition). Estimates of the number of children forced to work as slaves on these farms are as high as 15,000 (Save the Children Canada). In addition to the very illegality of trafficking and hiring children workers, the implicated cocoa farmers subject the children to inhuman living conditions. Besides overworking them, the farmers do not pay the children nor feed them properly-often times they are allowed to eat corn paste as their only meal. The denigration also includes locking the children up at night to prevent escape. Although it is only one of many occurrences of bonded labor, Aly Diabate's experience on a cocoa farm still illustrates how this torture strips away the dignity of children.

Aly Diabate, who is from Mali, was eleven years old when he was lured in Mali by a slave trader to go work on an Ivorian farm. The locateur told him that not only would he receive a bicycle, but he could also help his parents with the $150 he would earn. However life on the cocoa farm of "Le Gros" (or "Big Man") was nothing like Aly had imagined. He and the other workers had to work from six in the morning to about 6:30 at night on the cocoa fields. Since Aly was only about four feet tall, the bags of cocoa beans were taller than him. To be able to carry and transport the bags, other people would have to place the bags onto his head for him. Because the bags were so heavy, he had trouble carrying them and always fell down. The farmer would beat him until he stood back up and lifted the bag again. Aly was beaten the most because the farmer accused him of never working hard enough. The little boy still has the scars left from the bike chains and cocoa tree branches that Le Gros used. He and the other slaves were not fed well either. They had to subsist on a few burnt bananas.

Yet when nightfall came, Aly's torture did not end. He and eighteen other slave workers had to stay in their one room that measured 24-by-20 feet. The boys all slept on a wooden plank. There was but one small hole just big enough to let in some air. Aly and the others had to urinate in a can, because once they went into the room, they were not allowed to leave. To ensure this, Le Gros would lock the room.

Despite the horrendous conditions that he was living in, Aly was too afraid to escape. He had seen others who had attempted escapes, only to be brutally beaten after they got caught. However one day, a boy from the farm successfully escaped and reported Le Gros to the authorities. They arrested the farmer and sent the boys back home. The police made Le Gros pay Aly $180 for the eighteen months he had worked. Now Aly is back with his parents in Mali, but the scars, both physical and psychological still remain. He admitted that after he first came back from the farm, he had nightmares about the beatings every night. Aly was fortunate that the authorities were alerted about the slavery that was present at Le Gros' farm, but many other children are not as lucky and are still being subjected to the beatings and overall dehumanization on these cocoa farms.

Exploitation like Aly's is able to exist because of the secretiveness of the abuse. The Ivorian farms are usually small and located in areas around which most people do not travel. In fact, many actors in the cocoa trade have never even visited these remote farms. Even if one were able to visit the farms, sometimes it is difficult to tell whether the children have been bought or are part of the family.

Causes
While the complexity of such a grave situation as bonded labor prevents the simple categorization of the definite causes of the problem, there are some push and pull factors that many experts consider to be at least partly responsible for creating conditions ripe for slavery on cocoa farms.

Pull Factors
Historical and continuing dependence: Cote d'Ivoire has historically been reliant on exports, whether it was coffee, timber, or cocoa as the country focused on an outward-oriented pattern of development. Cocoa first appeared in Cote d'Ivoire in 1880 on a plantation. Initially only the Europeans owned cocoa plantations there until World War I. As cocoa prices increased on the world market during this period, Africans themselves began to grow cocoa. However, initially after independence, coffee was the leading export good for Cote d'Ivoire. By the latter part of the 1970's though, cocoa supplanted coffee as the major commodity when a cocoa boom occurred as the government encouraged cultivation by offering various price incentives. This emphasis on cocoa production has been entrenched in the economy to the extent that many farmers are dependent on cocoa for their livelihood.

At present, a substantial one-third of the Ivorian economy is based on cocoa exports, which has meant continued dependence on the world market prices for cocoa. This has not boded well for the country since cocoa is considered one of the most unstable commodities in terms of fluctuating market prices. The profitability of cocoa depends on world prices that farmers' cannot control and also on natural conditions that affect cocoa yields, such as droughts. For instance, since 1996 the price for a pound of cocoa beans has dropped from sixty-four cents to fifty-one cents. Consequently this negatively affects the farmers as they get less profits, so then they look for ways to cut costs by using cheap labor, driving them to even resort to use slave labor (Child Labor Coalition).

Poverty
Although some children come from Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Togo, most of the trafficked children come from Mali. Since Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world with a GDP of $850 per capita (CIA Factbook), people travel to Cote d'Ivoire to find jobs. Of the estimated 15,000 child slaves, the majority are from Mali (Save the Children Canada). With so few opportunities in their own countries, people often travel elsewhere in search of jobs, like the Malians do. If people are able to secure work, then they could send money back home to help their families for daily subsistence. Therefore, families allow their children to go away with people who turn out to be slave traders (Save the Children Canada).

Most of the West African countries have extremely high levels of poverty, ranging from 40% to 72%. Consequently families need the contribution of their children's earnings to survive. These areas are precisely where the traffickers prey for desperate people (International Labor Organization). Many families work in the informal sector in order to earn a living because the economy has been experiencing such a low level of growth. The sluggish economy also provides disincentives for parents to send their children to school since an education does not automatically result in being able to secure a job.

Culture
There is a cultural variable associated with the situation as well. The children of Ivorian farmers also help cultivate cocoa beans, so some farmers do not see why it is wrong to use the labor of other children. Aside from the implicated farmers though, in the culture of much of Africa, the sight of children working is quite common and not necessarily seen negatively. In fact, the percentage of children between 5 to 14 years old in the work force hovers between 40-50%. Men have multiple wives and many children, so the kids start working at an early age to help their families. Schooling is so expensive for many of them, that the only alternative left is to work. Even in instances where forced labor is not involved, children in Africa help in the work of their parents, who are contracted laborers.

In other situations, families used to traditionally send their children away to live with another family in order to learn a special skill, as a substitute for formal-and more expensive-education. Thus, Cote d'Ivoire has been this destination of promise to where children traveled in hopes of making money or of learning something new and useful. However, with the deteriorating economic conditions, farmer's are "perverting" this tradition. Meanwhile, many families still live in traditional communities and they have yet to become wise to a new reality, where their children could be abused the way that they are. Without realizing that society has become dangerous in this way, they entrust the locateurs with their children.

Effects on Children
The effect of being sold into slave labor has the obvious physical scars from the constant beatings the children receive, their inhumane living conditions, and the practical starvation that the farmers impose on them. However, the effects of slavery do not merely affect the physical well-being of the children. They also suffer from emotional scars. Psychologists say that children subjected to slave labor are irrevocably changed. "Being a slave is often a process of systematic destruction of a person's mind, body, and spirit." Not only are families separated from each other, but the child slaves become more emotionally isolated (Free the Slaves). Even after they are no longer in slavery, the children are more fearful of other people and less confident of themselves. They also have trouble readjusting to their families. For the children that are lucky enough to escape, their physical and psychological scars will need a long time to heal.

Domestic and International Response
Cote d'Ivoire exports 43% of the cocoa beans used to make the world's chocolate. Americans alone spend $13 billion a year on chocolate. The beans are shipped to processing companies in the U.S. and then they are transported to the chocolate manufacturers who make the chocolate confections. Because of the globalizing implications, domestic actors are not alone in taking action to resolve the problem. Consumers in the cocoa importing countries are demanding that their governments as well as the chocolate industry take definitive action to stop the human rights violations. Therefore, the issue of slave labor is not merely one that requires unilateral action. Rather, international actors such as foreign governments, NGOs, civil society participants, as well as other actors implicated either in supplying the labor or consuming its products are multilaterally helping the Cote d'Ivoire address the problem.

In the spirit of regional cooperation espoused in the human rights conventions, the Cote d'Ivoire has signed an agreement with Mali in September 2000 in response to the problem of child trafficking from Mali to Ivorian cocoa farms. The countries have pledged to punish people who use and exploit child workers and to send the children back to Mali. In addition, a program addressing the trafficking aspect of the problem is being established in the Cote d'Ivoire, called the UN Global Program against Trafficking in Human Beings (Global March).

Meanwhile when news of how chocolate made from Ivorian beans could be linked to child slavery, people everywhere were outraged. There was an attempt by concerned US senators to add an amendment to the 2001 Agricultural Appropriations bill that would require chocolate products to carry the label confirming that slaves were not used in cocoa production. However, the chocolate industry protested that the action would cause consumers to boycott the chocolate products, which would then hurt the cocoa producers even more. The less revenue they received, the more they might continue to use slaves. The bill never reached the House-Senate conference committee though, as the chocolate industry joined together to take action regarding eliminating child labor on cocoa farms to preclude official government action.

The new action plan initiated by the U.S.'s Chocolate Manufacturers Association is called the Harkin-Engel Protocol, and it will be implemented with the support and cooperation of the US and foreign governments and various NGOs around the world. The plan's goal is to conform to the ILO Convention 182 in establishing mechanisms to end the worst forms of child labor. (Chocolate Manufacturers Association). In the first step of the plan, the industry implemented a formal survey conducted under USAID to examine the pervasiveness of child slavery in the West African region. They examined 3,000 cocoa farms during fall 2001. An advisory group consisting of the ILO, UNICEF, World Bank, Free the Slaves, USAID, and West African governments, have the responsibility of overseeing the survey. They are to monitor the survey, analyze its results and suggest actions.

After the industry finishes its survey, it plans to use the survey as a guide in creating pilot programs aimed at improving the economic conditions of cocoa growers. Other future plans include the creation of a system that monitors labor conditions and publicly reports labor violations. What is more the industry will fund a foundation that will play the role of keeping up with continuing actions that address child slavery. By 2005, the chocolate industry plans to establish a system that publicly certifies cocoa as not having been produced by children, using a process that traces from where cocoa is supplied (Chocolate Manufacturers Association, "Signed Protocol").

2006-08-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

Its Time for Fair Voting in Canada

Proportional Representation vs. First Past the Post
By Larry Gordon
From About.com

Have Canada’s political leaders finally realized it’s time to address our nation’s appalling democracy deficit? After 136 years, will Canadians finally get a fair political system, where every citizen’s vote is equal and parliaments truly reflect the views of the electorate? It may be too early to sing the hallelujah chorus, but the first rays of light are now poking through the clouds. In fact, the clouds are rolling back faster than anyone could have imagined.

In April 2001, electoral reform activists gathered in Ottawa to launch Fair Vote Canada, a citizens’ campaign to bring fair voting and fair democratic representation to Canada. Many veteran political observers greeted the development with amusement. Great idea, folks, but Canada’s political leaders will never let it happen.

Many of the cynics didn’t disagree with the need for reform.

Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system is notoriously unfair. The system is based on the winner-take-all principle, which means votes and voters are not treated equally. The only voters who win political representation are those who share the most popular partisan viewpoint in their riding, as expressed at the ballot box. The other voters lose their right to political representation.

Because the voting system disregards so many votes, the overall results are distorted. In most federal and provincial elections, the system produces phony majority governments, where a party wins a majority of seats without winning a majority of the votes cast. Canadians have only enjoyed true majority governments, elected by a majority of voters, four times since World War I.

The first-past-the-post system is so bad, most major democracies scrapped it between fifty and one hundred years ago. Not one of the new Eastern European democracies chose a first-past-the-post system. Today, seventy-five nations, including most of Europe and almost all major industrial democracies, use voting systems based on the principle of proportional representation.

Under proportional representation systems, every citizen can cast a sincere and effective vote for the party or candidates they truly support. Parliaments become just what they should be in a democracy – representative of the political views of the voters. A party winning 40% of the votes will gain 40% of the seats. A smaller party winning 20% of the votes will gain 20% of the seats, and so on. If no single party wins a majority of votes, then two or more like-minded parties have to compromise and share power in a coalition government. Yes, share rather than hoard power. That’s the way most major democracies operate and studies show that the resulting governments are very effective, more in tune with the views of the electorate, and citizens are happier with the way democracy works.

Is fair voting a pipe dream for Canadians? Not at all.

Electoral reform is now on the political agendas of half the provinces in Canada. The new Quebec government has announced it will table legislation this spring for a proportional voting system. British Columbia is convening a citizens’ assembly on voting system reform. The BC assembly will be considering a new provincial voting system and their recommendation will go to a referendum in May 2005. Prince Edward Island is looking into alternative voting systems and New Brunswick will soon join them. In Ontario, with an election underway as this article is written, both the Liberals and NDP are committed to a referendum on a new voting system sometime before the next election.

With these and other opportunities emerging, Canadians who want a stronger democracy will have to make their voices heard. Every major democratic reform of the past two centuries has faced vigorous opposition. As the calls for fair voting grow, so will the maneuvering by powerful and well-resourced opponents.

Fair Vote Canada was formed in April 2001 as multi-partisan citizens’ campaign to press for a national referendum on a more proportional voting system. Those who are rallying to the campaign are from all backgrounds, all points on the political spectrum, and supporters of all parties. Why the unusual coalition? Because this isn’t about left vs. right, or east vs. west, or anglophone vs. francophone. It’s about one citizen, one vote, one value. It’s about building a level playing field in our political arena.

The Fair Vote Canada campaign has been endorsed by groups as diverse as the Canadian Labour Congress and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. The campaign has an advisory board of thirty-three prominent Canadians from a wide variety of backgrounds, including notables such as Pierre Berton, Ed Broadbent, Hugh Segal, Claude Ryan, David Suzuki, Karen Kain, Maude Barlow, Tom Kent, Walter Robinson, Lincoln Alexander and current and former MPs from the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, Alliance and NDP.

Further information about this important issue and the Fair Vote Canada campaign are available at www.fairvotecanada.org writing to Fair Vote Canada, 26 Maryland Blvd., Toronto, ON M4C 5C9, or calling 416-410-4034.

2006-08-19T22:26:00.000-07:00

It's Not Easy Being Green

Canada now ranks behind the United States for environmental protection
By PHILIP PREVILLE
From The Front

Gary Gallon remembers the good old days of the Canada-USA environmental wars. It was the early 1980s, Gallon was Ontario's deputy minister of the environment, and Canada was at the forefront of the world's nations in terms of environmental protection. This country was leading the fight against acid rain, forcing polluters to cut back on emissions. But south of the border, the Reagan administration refused to follow suit: America was so desperate to avoid any regulation, they even manufactured "studies" which said acid rain did not exist. Canada, securely standing atop the moral high ground, was indignant. Yep, them's was the good old days.

"The tables have turned," says Gallon, now director of the Montreal-based Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment (CIBE). "Canada used to lead the U.S. and all the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] nations. Now we're a follower."

The CIBE released a report last week analyzing Environment Canada's budget estimates for the coming year and comparing them with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The CIBE's analysis shows that, even taking into account the differences in population and economic activity, Canada spends less than half what the USA does on ecological protection and enforcement.

In the coming year, the report says, the EPA will spend $7.6 billion on such activities. Since the USA's population and economic activity is 10 times larger than Canada's, Environment Canada should spend about $760 million.

Instead, Environment Canada's budget for the coming year stands at $551 million. And that figure includes some creative government bookkeeping: of that amount, $193 million is used solely for monitoring and forecasting the weather, leaving only $358 million for environmental protection.

"Since 1990, the United States has moved way ahead of Canada in terms of environmental protection," concludes Gallon. "Just look at the state of California: they have roughly the same population and economic activity as all of Canada, and they will spend $876 million on environmental protection this year.

"And that doesn't include the weather."

The CIBE's analysis follows on the heels of two other highly critical reports about Canada's failure to protect its environment. On May 26, the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Environment issued a report that made a mockery of Canada's enforcement activities. The very next day, Brian Emmett, Commissioner on the Environment and Sustainable Development, issued his annual report criticizing the government for failing to live up to its international commitments.

Now this. Gallon says the Americans are taking notice. "The Washington Post did a story last week about Canada backing out of its environmental commitments, and as word spreads our reputation will suffer. Canada has always been an exporter of expertise and technology in this field. We were sought after because we were clean and green. Now that we're dirty and yellow, pretty soon we'll be importing the technology."

The CIBE report also states that, out of Environment Canada's total budget, only $16.9 million is spent on compliance and enforcement. "They only conducted five prosecutions last year," Gallon notes. "I suspect they're spending even less than that." He says Environment Canada spends more and more money on information campaigns rather than real enforcement.

Environment Canada disputes the CIBE's findings. "Comparisons with the EPA aren't necessarily reliable," Mark Colpitts, press secretary for Environment Minister Christine Stewart, told the Mirror. "Provinces in Canada have more power and responsibility over the environment than states do in the U.S. So the EPA does more in the U.S. than Environment Canada does here."

Colpitts admitted he had not yet seen the CIBE's analysis. "They might be playing with numbers, they might not. I don't know. We will have to study it before I can give a more concrete response."

Numbers aside, other policy experts say it's clear that Canada is playing second fiddle to its southern neighbour. "Canada has definitely fallen behind the U.S., for two reasons, " says Director Paul Muldoon of the Canadian Environmental Law Association, "One, they're underfunding the program. And two, they're moving to a voluntary approach to enforcement, letting companies set their own goals and monitor themselves."

Says Muldoon of the Canada-USA spending figures: "Statistics are never totally reliable, but as a raw comparison, they say an awful lot. Environment Canada is in serious trouble."

One policymaker, who requested anonymity, said some of the blame for the problem lies squarely on the shoulders of corporate lobbyists. "The resource and energy industries have been telling Ottawa, 'Get us out of our recession, remove the red tape,'" the individual told the Mirror. "They said they couldn't stay competitive when the government was increasing their costs with more and more environmental regulation. And it's true that there was some over-regulation. But now they've thrown the baby out with the bath-water. They're regulating far less than they should be."

Environment Canada has been a primary victim of Finance Minister Paul Martin's budget cuts. After taking a $22-million cut last year, the Environment Ministry's budget was slashed by another $48 million in this year's budget.

From his years with Ontario's Environment Department, Gallon thinks he knows the answer to the problem. "You want to save money? Okay, let's save money: revamp the entire department. Turn it into a monitoring and compliance agency that does enforcement and nothing else."

2006-08-19T15:30:00.000-07:00

The Violence that Indigenous Women Face

By Anna Hunter
From Canadian Dimension
2005

The city of Port Coquitlam is currently primed for the much-anticipated B.C. Supreme Court case concerning the serial murders of 15 women (from a list of 61) reported as missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside since 1983. In northern British Columbia there are increasing demands for official answers about the “Highway of Tears,” a section of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert along which predominantly Aboriginal women have gone missing, and are presumed dead. Last year in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, a young native woman was dragged to her death by a pickup truck after a racialized alteration outside a city bar.

These are just a few of the stories behind the troubling statistics of violence that face Indigenous women in Canada. According to records held by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, there are currently at least 500 Indigenous women that have been murdered or missing, and are presumed dead, across the country. These numbers do not address the multitude of unreported and under-investigated cases of extreme violence routinely perpetuated against Indigenous women.

The root cause of this murderous violence and mainstream society’s seemingly casual indifference is structural and systemic. It lies in the interconnections between one’s race, culture, class and gender, which have routinely marginalized so many Indigenous women beyond any reasonable expectation of security of life and person.

In October, 2002, Amnesty International released a report, Stolen Sisters, an investigation by Mohawk lawyer and activist Bev Jacobs into the issue of violence against Indigenous women in Canada. The report makes a compelling argument that violence against women, and certainly violence against Indigenous women, is more than a criminal concern or social issue; it is a human-rights issue.

All women have the fundamental right to be safe and secure from violence. Why, then, does this heightened state of violence against Aboriginal women continue to cross inter-generational and geographic boundaries in such a pervasive manner?

The Colonial Underpinnings
To understand violence against Aboriginal women, the situation must be situated within the surrounding legacy of the colonization of Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women have endured countless legislative intrusions directed at assimilating and controlling the four spheres of everyday tribal life: political, social/kinship, spiritual and the land. Most Canadians have come to realize that the federal government has promoted an agenda of assimilation and control of Indians though policies such as the Indian Act and residential-schools policy.

This increasing awareness must be matched by an understanding that colonial practices take many forms and varieties that stretch beyond government actors to include those with institutional capacity to legitimize the colonial order, including educators, media personnel, lawyers, judges, police officers, literary authors and publishers, historians and scientists. The cumulative result of the insidious phenomenon of colonization is the extreme marginalization of Indigenous women from the social safety nets of society. Not only do Indigenous women face the routine dispossession of their inherited rights, lands, identities and families, they also face disenfranchisement from institutional and societal protections designed to protect them from violent predators.

Indigenous women live with the knowledge that legislated and institutional responses are typically creations of the colonizer state with its patriarchal underpinnings, which leaves them fundamentally inadequate in terms of addressing the violence specific to Indigenous women. Indigenous women remain fully aware of the inherent limitations of turning to a justice system that has enabled a series of competing inequalities based upon one’s gender, race, culture and economic standing. Think about it. How likely is an Aboriginal woman to turn to the same system that has manifested its judicial powers against Indigenous people to such a degree? Is there really an expectation that she may turn for assistance to the same systems that may have incarcerated her family members or removed her children from her care? The state has been used for generations to undermine family and community life for Indigenous people, which has in turn led to a fundamental lack of trust in the system that must be acknowledged.

Even when this barrier of trust is removed and crimes against Indigenous women are reported, there are further competing issues within the institutions of public redress. Anyone who enters the systems must be ready to deal with prejudicial determinations about occupational and lifestyle choices. Police routinely dismiss reports of missing women on the basis of lifestyle issues, like prostitution, drug use and addiction. In Vancouver, the police dismissed reports of women missing from the Downtown Eastside for over a decade, citing the transient nature of the women’s lives. Family members of the missing women knew that these women had broken from the patterns of their lives in fundamental ways, including failure to collect prescriptions and to cash government benefit cheques, but officials refused to duly investigate.

And, then, once investigations begin, Indigenous women find themselves under the judgmental gaze of the media. Society is fed sensational media reports that focus upon the character of the victim, and even the character of the victimizer. These mainstream media reports do not make the underlying connection to the series of colonial and patriarchal government policies that have wreaked havoc in Aboriginal communities, and that have left many Indigenous people trapped in a downward spiral of a combination of poverty, homelessness, prostitution and addiction.

The most dangerous aspect of this situation is that there is an increasing awareness that serial killers and violent offenders are also aware of the built-in limitations of the institutionalized justice systems. In a special investigation on how American police fumble missing-persons reports, Mike Barber of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes that experts know that serial killers, the sexual psychopaths and sociopaths whose crimes generally appear random and motiveless, are adept at using the system against itself. According to Barber, predators target vulnerable people, usually those that have been marginalized — prostitutes, drug users, homosexuals, farm workers, hospital patients and the elderly. Because Indigenous women also find themselves within these vulnerable fringes of society, they find themselves in the role of prey.

Envisioning and Enacting the Changes We Want to See
Similar to most social-justice advocates, activists working to end violence against Indigenous women know that when change is necessary there is a need to envision the necessary changes and then work vigorously to enact them. As a result of these efforts, we have safe houses in Aboriginal communities across the country that provide shelter and care to Indigenous women in crisis.

We also have documentary filmmakers like Audrey Huntley and Christine Welsh, who chronicle the many stories of the missing and presumed-dead Indigenous women. And the MissingWomen.net website continues to compile and document the stories of the missing women for the World Wide Web to see.

These actions are joined by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, which is wrapping up its year-long “Sisters in Spirit” Campaign in March, 2005. NWAC has been gathering the names and stories of Aboriginal women who have disappeared in large and small communities across the country, in order to honour these Indigenous women who have gone missing and been brutally murdered.

This national campaign has been joined by an international human-rights campaign through Amnesty International. With the release of the 2004 Stolen Sisters report and an international action appeal, Amnesty International is also actively involved in the campaign to urge immediate government action to ensure the safety of Indigenous women in Canadian cities.

Each of these examples affirms the individual and collective responsibility that we each share to ensure that this untenable situation of violence against Indigenous women will not be tolerated any longer. We need to consider these individual stories of pain and hardship within a deeper understanding of the societal impacts and colonial underpinnings of the particular situation. As the “Sisters in Spirit” campaign website states, “Now is the time to take concrete steps to ensure that the lives of Aboriginal women in Canada are no longer treated as disposable.”

Anna Hunter is a member of the Ktunaxa Nation, located in southeastern British Columbia, and is the mother of a beautiful young daughter, Alexandra. She joined the faculty of the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan in July, 2002. Her area of academic specialization is public administration and Aboriginal governance and politics. Her latest research is focused upon the participation of Aboriginal peoples in federal elections.

Grade Two students petition to “set the record straight”

By Barbara Barker and Tyler McCreary
From Briarpatch Magazine
2006

Every school child knows that you should respect a person’s name. And in accordance with this simple maxim, Grade 2 students in the town of Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland are petitioning to change the name of the Mary March Museum – named after a Beothuk woman captured by European settlers in 1819 – to her real name: Demasduit.

Demasduit was captured by European settlers in 1819 and was renamed Mary March. A minister selected the name in respect to the Blessed Virgin Mary and in memory of the month in which Demasduit was kidnapped in a settler’s raid on a Beothuk camp. Demasduit’s husband was killed trying to prevent her capture, and her infant son died a few days after she was taken. Within a year of her capture, Demasduit died of tuberculosis, and her people were extinct within a decade. The last known surviving member of the Beothuk people was Demasduit’s niece, Shanawdithit, who died in St. John’s in 1829.

The initiative to change the museum’s name began some four years ago when Megan Wells, then a grade two student, went to work with her mother at the Mary March Museum as part of a class assignment. Wells was struck by the fact that a museum commemorating Demasduit and her people did not honour the Beothuk in their own language. In her report on the visit, Wells wrote, “Maybe some day, they will change the name of the museum to the name she was born with, ‘The Demasduit Regional Museum.’ That would really help us to remember who she really was!”

Ever since Wells wrote her report, students in Anne Warr’s grade two classes have called the museum the Demasduit Museum. Then, this year, her grade two students started a petition to change the name of the Museum to the Demasduit Centre of the Founding Peoples. Warr says, “The kids realize the injustice which was done to the Beothuk and the need to set the record straight. Their empathy is unbelievable.”

Moved by the story of the Beothuk and of Demasduit, grade two student Connor O’Driscoll helped collect signatures on the petition by going class to class in his primary school. O’Driscoll stated in a CBC interview,

“We cannot right the wrong that our ancestors did to the Beothuk people as a whole, but we can do something for Demasduit. We all think that Demasduit is a beautiful name. We feel that it wasn’t nice to take her real name away from her. One way to start making it up to her is to put her real name on a building for all the world to see.”

The class wrote a number of letters asking for support for the petition. The local Member of Parliament Scott Simms, the town’s Member of the House of Assembly (MHA) Anna Thistle, the Mayor and Town Council, the Beothuk Institute, and the Sple’tk First Nation have all endorsed the petition.

Some resistance, however, was voiced by Megan Skinner, daughter of Irene Skinner, one of the original founders of the museum. “The name Mary March was chosen because it was so representative of the links between the Beothuks and the white man,” Skinner told CBC News.

Warr, however, maintains that “any connection which would symbolize and celebrate the injustice that was done should be removed. Why would Demasduit want a European name?”

The petition will be tabled by MHA Anna Thistle in Newfoundland and Labrador’s House of Assembly in September. The final decision lies with the Tourism Minister, but Warr maintains that she is optimistic. “The name should have been changed a long time ago. The children have raised the consciousness of the community.”

2006-08-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

Reshaping History

By Noam Chomsky
From Chomsky.info
2004

The fundamental principle is that "we are good" -- "we" being the state we serve -- and what "we" do is dedicated to the highest principles, though there may be errors in practice. In a typical illustration, according to the retrospective version at the left-liberal extreme, the properly reshaped Vietnam War began with "blundering efforts to do good" but by 1969 had become a "disaster" (Anthony Lewis) -- by 1969, after the business world had turned against the war as too costly and 70 per cent of the public regarded it as "fundamentally wrong and immoral", not "a mistake"; by 1969, seven years after Kennedy's attack on South Vietnam began, two years after the most respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall warned that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity... is threatened with extinction...[as]... the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size"; by 1969, the time of some of the most vicious state terrorist operations of one of the major crimes of the late 20th century, of which Swift Boats in the deep South, already devastated by saturation bombing, chemical warfare and mass murder operations, were the least of the atrocities underway.

But the reshaped history prevails. Serious expert panels ponder the reasons for "America's Vietnam Obsession" during the 2004 elections, when the Vietnam War was never even mentioned -- the actual one, that is, not the image reconstructed for history.

The fundamental principle has corollaries. The first is that clients are basically good, though less so than "we". To the extent that they conform to US demands, they are "healthy pragmatists". Another is that enemies are very bad; how bad depends on how intensively "we" are attacking them or planning to do so. Their status can shift very quickly, in conformity with these guidelines.

Thus the current administration and their immediate mentors were quite appreciative of Saddam Hussein and helpful to him while he was just gassing Kurds, torturing dissidents and smashing a Shia rebellion that might have overthrown him in 1991, because of his contribution to "stability" -- a code word for "our" domination -- and his usefulness for US exporters, as frankly declared. But the same crimes became the proof of his ultimate evil when the appropriate time came for "us," proudly bearing the banner of Good, to invade Iraq and install what will be called a "democracy" if it obeys orders and contributes to "stability".

The principles are simple, and easy to remember for those seeking a career in respectable circles. The remarkable consistency of their application has been extensively documented. That is expected in totalitarian states and military dictatorships, but is a far more instructive phenomenon in free societies, where one cannot seriously plead fear in extenuation.

The death of Arafat provides another in the immense list of case studies. I'll keep to The New York Times (NYT), the most important newspaper in the world, and The Boston Globe, perhaps more than others the local newspaper of the liberal educated elite.

The front-page NYT think-piece (12 November) begins by depicting Arafat as "both the symbol of the Palestinian's hope for a viable, independent state and the prime obstacle to its realization". It goes on to explain that he never was able to reach the heights of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt; Sadat " [won] back the Sinai through a peace treaty with Israel" because he was able to "reach out to Israelis and address their fears and hopes" (quoting Shlomo Avineri, Israeli philosopher and former government official, in the follow-up, 13 November).

One can think of more serious obstacles to the realisation of a Palestinian state, but they are excluded by the guiding principles, as is the truth about Sadat -- which Avineri at least surely knows. Let's remind ourselves of a few.

Since the issue of Palestinian national rights in a Palestinian state reached the agenda of diplomacy in the mid-1970s, "the prime obstacle to its realization", unambiguously, has been the US government, with the NYT staking a claim to be second on the list. That has been clear ever since January 1976, when Syria introduced a resolution to the UN Security Council calling for a two-state settlement. The resolution incorporated the crucial wording of UN 242 -- the basic document, all agree. It accorded to Israel the rights of any state in the international system, alongside of a Palestinian state in the territories Israel had conquered in 1967. The resolution was vetoed by the US. It was supported by the leading Arab states. Arafat's PLO condemned "the tyranny of the veto". There were some abstentions on technicalities.

By then, a two-state settlement in these terms had become a very broad international consensus, blocked only by the US (and rejected by Israel). So matters continued, not only in the Security Council but also in the General Assembly, which passed similar resolutions regularly by votes like 150-2 (with the US sometimes picking up another client state). The US also blocked similar initiatives from Europe and the Arab states.

Meanwhile the NYT refused -- the word is accurate -- to publish the fact that through the 1980s, Arafat was calling for negotiations which Israel rejected. The Israeli mainstream press would run headlines about Arafat's call for direct negotiations with Israel, rejected by Shimon Peres on the basis of his doctrine that Arafat's PLO "cannot be a partner to negotiations". And shortly after, NYT Pulitzer-prize winning Jerusalem correspondent Thomas Friedman, who could certainly read the Hebrew press, would write articles lamenting the distress of Israeli peace forces because of "the absence of any negotiating partner", while Peres deplores the lack of a "peace movement among the Arab people [such as] we have among the Jewish people", and explains again that there can be no PLO participation in negotiations "as long as it is remaining a shooting organisation and refuses to negotiate". All of this shortly after yet another Arafat offer to negotiate that the NYT refused to report, and almost three years after the Israeli government's rejection of Arafat's offer for negotiations leading to mutual recognition. Peres, meanwhile, is described as a "healthy pragmatist", by virtue of the guidelines.

Matters did change somewhat in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration declared all UN resolutions "obsolete and anachronistic{", and crafted its own form of rejectionism. The US remains alone in blocking a diplomatic settlement. A recent important example was the presentation of the Geneva Accords in December 2002, supported by the usual very broad international consensus, with the usual exception: "The United States conspicuously was not among the governments sending a message of support," the NYT reported in a dismissive article (2 December 2002).

This is only a small fragment of a diplomatic record that is so consistent, and so dramatically clear, that it is impossible to miss -- unless one keeps rigidly to the history shaped by those who own it.

Let's turn to the second example: Sadat's reaching out to Israelis and thereby gaining the Sinai in 1979, a lesson to the bad Arafat. Turning to unacceptable history, in February 1971 Sadat offered a full peace treaty to Israel, in accord with then- official US policy -- specifically, Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai -- with scarcely even a gesture to Palestinian rights. Jordan followed with similar offers. Israel recognised that it could have full peace, but Golda Meir's Labour government chose to reject the offers in favour of expansion, then into the northeast Sinai, where Israel was driving thousands of Bedouins into the desert and destroying their villages, mosques, cemeteries, homes, in order to establish the all-Jewish city of Yamit.

The crucial question, as always, was how the US would react. Kissinger prevailed in an internal debate, and the US adopted his policy of "stalemate": no negotiations, only force. The US continued to reject -- more accurately, ignore -- Sadat's efforts to pursue a diplomatic course, backing Israel's rejectionism and expansion. That stance led to the 1973 War, which was a very close call for Israel and possibly the world; the US called a nuclear alert. By then even Kissinger understood that Egypt could not be dismissed as a basket case, and he began his "shuttle diplomacy", leading to the Camp David meetings at which the US and Israel accepted Sadat's 1971 offer -- but now with far harsher terms, from the US-Israeli point of view. By then the international consensus had come to recognise Palestinian national rights, and, accordingly, Sadat called for a Palestinian state, anathema to the US-Israel.

In the official history reshaped by its owners, and repeated by media think-pieces, these events are a "diplomatic triumph" for the US and a proof that if Arabs were only able to join us in preferring peace and diplomacy that could achieve their aims. In actual history, the triumph was a catastrophe, and the events demonstrated that the US was willing only to accede to violence. The US rejection of diplomacy led to a terrible and very dangerous war and many years of suffering, with bitter effects to this day.

In his memoirs, General Shlomo Gazit, military commander of the occupied territories from 1967-1974, observes that by refusing to consider proposals advanced by the military and intelligence for some form of self-rule in the territories or even limited political activity, and by insisting on "substantial border changes", the Labour government supported by Washington bears significant responsibility for the later rise of the fanatic Gush Emunim settler movement and the Palestinian resistance that developed many years later in the first Intifada, after years of brutality and state terror, and steady takeover of valuable Palestinian lands and resources.

The lengthy obituary of Arafat by Times Middle East specialist Judith Miller (11 November) proceeds in the same vein as the front-page think-piece. According to her version, "Until 1988, [Arafat] repeatedly rejected recognition of Israel, insisting on armed struggle and terror campaigns. He opted for diplomacy only after his embrace of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991."

Miller does give an accurate rendition of official history. In actual history Arafat repeatedly offered negotiations leading to mutual recognition, while Israel -- in particular the dovish "pragmatists" -- flatly refused, backed by Washington. In 1989, the Israeli coalition government (Shamir-Peres) affirmed the political consensus in its peace plan. The first principle was that there can be no "additional Palestinian state" between Jordan and Israel -- Jordan already being a "Palestinian state". The second was that the fate of the territories will be settled "in accordance with the basic guidelines of the [Israeli] government". The Israeli plan was accepted without qualification by the US, and became "the Baker Plan" (December 1989). Exactly contrary to Miller's account and the official story, it was only after the Gulf War that Washington was willing to consider negotiations, recognising that it was now in a position to impose its own solution unilaterally.

The US convened the Madrid conference (with Russian participation as a fig leaf). That did indeed lead to negotiations, with an authentic Palestinian delegation, led by Haidar Abdul- Shafi, an honest nationalist who is probably the most respected leader in the occupied territories. But the negotiations deadlocked because Abdul-Shafi rejected Israel's insistence, backed by Washington, on continuing to take over valuable parts of the territories with settlement and infrastructure programs -- all illegal, as recognised even by the US Justice, the one dissenter, in the recent World Court decision condemning the Israeli wall dividing the West Bank. The "Tunis Palestinians", led by Arafat, undercut the Palestinian negotiators and made a separate deal, the "Oslo Accords", celebrated with much fanfare on the White House lawn in September 2003.

It was evident at once that it was a sell-out. The sole document -- the Declaration of Principles -- declared that the final outcome was to be based solely on UN 242 in 1967, excluding the core issue of diplomacy since the mid-1970s: Palestinian national rights and a two- state settlement. UN 242 defines the final outcome because it says nothing about Palestinian rights; excluded are the UN resolutions that recognise the rights of Palestinians alongside those of Israel, in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the US since it took shape in the mid-1970s. The wording of the agreements made it clear that they were a mandate for continued Israeli settlement programs, as the Israeli leadership (Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) took no pains to conceal. For that reason, Abdul-Shafi refused even to attend the ceremonies. Arafat's role was to be Israel's policeman in the territories, as Rabin made very clear. As long as he fulfilled this task, he was a "pragmatist", approved by the US and Israel with no concern for corruption, violence, and repression. It was only after he could no longer keep the population under control while Israel took over more of their lands and resources that he became an arch-villain, blocking the path to peace: the usual transition.

So matters proceeded through the 1990s. The goals of the Israeli doves were explained in 1998 in an academic study by Shlomo ben-Ami, soon to become Barak's chief negotiator at Camp David: the "Oslo peace process" was to lead to a "permanent neocolonial dependency" in the occupied territories, with some form of local autonomy. Meanwhile Israeli settlement and integration of the territories proceeded steadily with full US support. It reached its highest peak in the final year of Clinton's term (and Barak's), thus undermining the hopes of a diplomatic settlement.

Returning to Miller, she keeps to the official version that in "November 1988, after considerable American prodding, the PLO accepted the United Nations resolution that called for recognition of Israel and a renunciation of terrorism". The actual history is that by November 1988, Washington was becoming an object of international ridicule for its refusal to "see" that Arafat was calling for a diplomatic settlement. In this context, the Reagan administration reluctantly agreed to admit the glaringly obvious truth, and had to turn to other means to undercut diplomacy. The US entered into low- level negotiations with the PLO, but as Prime Minister Rabin assured Peace Now leaders in 1989, these were meaningless, intended only to give Israel more time for "harsh military and economic pressure" so that "In the end, they will be broken," and will accept Israel's terms.

Miller carries the story on in the same vein, leading to the standard denouement: at Camp David, Arafat "walked away" from the magnanimous Clinton-Barak offer of peace, and even afterwards refused to join Barak in accepting Clinton's December 2000 "parameters", thus proving conclusively that he insists on violence, a depressing truth with which the peace-loving states, the US and Israel, must somehow come to terms.

Turning to actual history, the Camp David proposals divided the West Bank into virtually separated cantons, and could not possibly be accepted by any Palestinian leader. That is evident from a look at the maps that were easily available, but not in the NYT, or apparently anywhere in the US mainstream, perhaps for that reason. After the collapse of these negotiations, Clinton recognised that Arafat's reservations made sense, as demonstrated by the famous "parameters", which, though vague, went much further towards a possible settlement -- thus undermining the official story, but that's only logic, therefore as unacceptable as history. Clinton gave his own version of the reaction to his "parameters" in a talk to the Israeli Policy Forum on 7 January 2001: "Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations."

One can learn this from such obscure sources as the prestigious Harvard-MIT journal International Security (Fall 2003), along with the conclusion that "the Palestinian narrative of the 2000-01 peace talks is significantly more accurate than the Israeli narrative" -- the US-NYT "narrative".

After that, high-level Israeli-Palestinian negotiators proceeded to take the Clinton parameters as "the basis for further efforts," and addressed their "reservations" at meetings in Taba through January. These produced a tentative agreement, meeting some of the Palestinian concerns -- and thus again undermining the official story. Problems remained, but the Taba agreements went much further towards a possible settlement than anything that had preceded. The negotiations were called off by Barak, so their possible outcome is unknown. A detailed report by EU envoy Miguel Moratinos was accepted as accurate by both sides, and prominently reported in Israel. But I doubt that it has ever been mentioned here in the mainstream.

Miller's NYT version of these events is based on a highly-praised book by Clinton's Middle East envoy and negotiator Dennis Ross. As any journalist must be aware, any such source is highly suspect, if only because of its origins. And even a casual reading would suffice to demonstrate that Ross's account is wholly unreliable. Its 800 pages consist mostly of adulation of Clinton (and his own efforts), based on almost nothing verifiable; rather, on "quotations" of what he claims to have said and heard from participants, identified by first names if they are "good guys". There is scarcely a word on what everyone knows to have been the core issue all along, back to 1971 in fact: the programmes of settlements and infrastructure development in the territories, relying on the economic, military, and diplomatic support of the US, Clinton quite clearly included. Ross handles his Taba problem simply: by terminating the book immediately before they began (which also allows him to omit Clinton's evaluation, just quoted, a few days later). Thus he is able to avoid the fact that his primarily conclusions were instantly refuted.

Abdul-Shafi is mentioned in Ross's book once, in passing. Naturally, his friend Shlomo ben-Ami's perception of the Oslo process is ignored, as are all significant elements of the interim agreements and Camp David. There is no mention of the flat refusal of his heroes, Rabin and Peres -- rather, "Yitzhak" and "Shimon" -- even to consider a Palestinian state. In fact, the first mention of the possibility in Israel appears to be during the government of the "bad guy", the far- right Binyamin Netanyahu. His minister of information, asked about a Palestinian state, responded that Palestinians could call the cantons being left to them "a state" if they liked -- or "fried chicken".

This is only for starters. Ross's view is so lacking in independent support and so radically selective that one has to take with a heavy grain of salt anything that he claims, from the specific details he meticulously records verbatim (maybe with a hidden tape recorder) to the very general conclusions presented as authoritative but without credible evidence. It is of some interest that this is reviewed as if it could be considered an authoritative account. In general, the book is next to worthless, except as giving the perceptions of one of the actors. It is hard to imagine that a journalist cannot be aware of that.

Not worthless, however, is crucial evidence that escapes notice. For example, the assessment of Israeli intelligence during these years: among them Amos Malka, head of Israeli military intelligence; General Ami Ayalon, who headed the General Security Services (Shin Bet); Matti Steinberg, special advisor on Palestinian affairs to the head of the Shin Bet; and Colonel Ephraim Lavie, the research division official responsible for the Palestinian arena. As Malka presents the consensus, "The assumption was that Arafat prefers a diplomatic process, that he will do all he can to see it through, and that only when he comes to a dead end in the process will he turn to a path of violence. But this violence is aimed at getting him out of a dead end, to set international pressure in motion and to get the extra mile." Malka also charges that these high-level assessments were falsified as they were transmitted to the political leadership and beyond. US reporters could easily discover them from readily accessible sources, in English.

There is little point continuing with Miller's version, or Ross. Let's turn to The Boston Globe, at the liberal extreme. Its editors (12 November) adhere to the same fundamental principle as the NYT (probably near universal; it would be interesting to search for exceptions). The editors do recognise that the failure to achieve a Palestinian state "cannot be blamed solely on Arafat. Israel's leaders... played their part..." The decisive role of the US is unmentionable, unthinkable.

The Globe also ran a front-page think-piece on 11 November. In its first paragraph we learn that Arafat was "one of the iconic group of charismatic, authoritarian leaders -- from Mao Zedong in China to Fidel Castro in Cuba to Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- who arose from anti-colonial movements that swept the globe following World War II."

The statement is interesting from several points of view. The linkage reveals, once again, the obligatory visceral hatred of Castro. There have been shifting pretexts as circumstances changed, but no information to question the conclusions of US intelligence in the early days of Washington's terrorist attacks and economic warfare against Cuba: the basic problem is his "successful defiance" of US policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine. But there is an element of truth in the portrayal of Arafat in the Globe think-piece, as there would have been in a front-page report during the imperial ceremonies for the semi-divine Reagan, describing him as one of the iconic group of mass murderers -- from Hitler to Idi Amin to Peres -- who slaughtered with abandon and with strong support from media and intellectuals. Those who do not comprehend the analogy have some history to learn.

Continuing, the Globe report, recounting Arafat's crimes, tells us that he gained control of the south of Lebanon and "used it to launch a stream of attacks on Israel, which responded by invading Lebanon [in June 1982]. Israel's stated goal was to drive the Palestinians back from the border region, but, under the command of then-general and defense minister Sharon, its forces drove all the way to Beirut, where Sharon allowed his Christian militia allies to commit a notorious massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camp and drove Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian leadership into exile in Tunis."

Turning to unacceptable history, during the year prior to the Israeli invasion the PLO adhered to a US-brokered peace arrangement, while Israel conducted many murderous attacks in south Lebanon in an effort to elicit some Palestinian reaction that could be used as a pretext for the planned invasion. When none materialised, they invented a pretext and invaded, killing perhaps 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, thanks to US vetoes of Security Council resolutions calling for ceasefire and withdrawal. The Sabra-Chatilla massacre was a footnote at the end. The goal that was stated very clearly by the highest political and military echelons, and by Israeli scholarship and analysis, was to put an end to the increasingly irritating Arafat initiatives towards diplomatic settlement and to secure Israel's control over the occupied territories.

Similar reversals of well-documented facts appear throughout the commentary on Arafat's death, and have been so conventional for many years in US media and journals that one can hardly blame the reporters for repeating them -- though minimal inquiry suffices to reveal the truth.

Minor elements of the commentaries are also instructive. Thus the Times think-piece tells us that Arafat's likely successors -- the "moderates" preferred by Washington -- have some problems: they lack "street credibility". That is the conventional phrase for public opinion in the Arab world, as when we are informed about the "Arab street". If a Western political figure has little public support, we do not say he lacks "street credibility", and there are no reports on the British or American "street". The phrase is reserved for the lower orders, unreflectively. They are not people, but creatures who inhabit "streets". We may also add that the most popular political leader on the "Palestinian street", Marwan Barghouti, was safely locked away by Israel, permanently. And that George Bush demonstrated his passion for democracy by joining his friend Sharon -- the "man of peace" -- in driving the one democratically elected leader in the Arab world to virtual prison, while backing Mahmoud Abbas, who, the US conceded, lacked "street credibility". All of this might tell us something about what the liberal press calls Bush's "messianic vision" to bring democracy to the Middle East, but only if facts and logic were to matter.

The NYT published one major op-ed on the Arafat death, by Israeli historian Benny Morris. The essay deserves close analysis, but I'll put that aside here, and keep to just his first comment, which captures the tone: Arafat is a deceiver, Morris says, who speaks about peace and ending the occupation but really wants to "redeem Palestine". This demonstrates Arafat's irremediable savage nature.

Here Morris is revealing his contempt not only for Arabs (which is profound) but also for the readers of the NYT. He apparently assumes that they will not notice that he is borrowing the terrible phrase from Zionist ideology. Its core principle for over a century has been to "redeem The Land", a principle that lies behind what Morris recognises to be a central concept of the Zionist movement: "transfer" of the indigenous population, that is, expulsion, to "redeem The Land" for its true owners. There seems to be no need to spell out the conclusions.

Morris is identified as an Israeli academic, author of the recent book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. That is correct. He has also done the most extensive work on the Israeli archives, demonstrating in considerable detail the savagery of the 1948- 9 Israeli operations that led to "transfer" of the large majority of the population from what became Israel, including the part of the UN- designated Palestine state that Israel took over, dividing it about 50- 50 with its Jordanian partner. Morris is critical of the atrocities and "ethnic cleansing" (in more precise translation, "ethnic purification"): namely, it did not go far enough. Ben-Gurion's great error, Morris feels, perhaps a "fatal mistake", was not to have "cleaned the whole country -- the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River".

To Israel's credit, his stand on this matter has been bitterly condemned. In Israel. In the US he is the appropriate choice for the major commentary on his reviled enemy.

2006-08-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

The Top Ten Agents of the Corporate Agenda in Canada

By Asad Ismic
From Asad Ismi: Index of Articles and Publications

1. The Alliance of Manufacturers and Exporters of Canada (AMEC)

The Canadian Manufacturers' Association merged last year with the Canadian Exporters' Association to form this Alliance. AMEC now represents some 3,000 manufacturers, service companies and exporters. President Stephen Van Houten acts as their main spokesperson, with the aid of a $6.5 million operating budget. Like its predecessor, the CMA, AMEC strongly promotes free trade and favours lower wages and reduced social benefits for Canadian workers in order to make their products "more competitive" in world markets.

2. The Business Council on National Issues (BCNI)

The BCNI was formed in 1976 by corporate leaders seeking to exert more influence over a state they felt had become too large and interventionist. The CEOs of 150 transnational corporations joined to set up the BCNI as a vehicle for them "to contribute personally to the development of public policy and the shaping of national priorities."

The fact that these huge corporations have assets of over $1.2 trillion, earn annual revenues of $400 billion, and (despite mass layoffs) still employ about 1,300,000 Canadians helps explain why the BCNI has become the most powerful and influential interest group in the country. Represented by its president, Tom d'Aquino, and guided by its goal of reducing the size and role of the state, the BCNI has led the fight to cut government spending, keep inflation down, and boost corporate profits.

3. The Canadian Bankers' Association (CBA)

The CBA was established more than a century ago to promote the interests of Canada's chartered banks. Typical of most such industry associations, it provides information, advocacy and operational support services to its members. One of its chief functions is to try to justify ever-rising bank profits. Its current president is Raymond Protti.

4. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce (CCC)

Established in 1925, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce is the country's largest business organization with 170,000 members, including 500 local chambers of commerce and boards of trade, over 95 trade and professional associations, and several thousand corporations. While the size and diversity of its membership enhances its claim to speak for the Canadian business community, it also sometimes makes it difficult for the CCC to reach a consensus. Nevertheless, when its position coincides with those of the BCNI and AMEC (which it does most of the time), the policy demands of this "Big Three" effectively dictate the corporate agenda in Canada.

5. The C.D. Howe Institute (CDHI)

This institute is named after the prominent Canadian industrialist who became "Minister of Everything" in post-war Ottawa, and was most noted for using American investment to develop Canadian industry. Although it claims to be an independent think-tank, the C.D. Howe Institute consistently represents the view of the elite. It is funded almost exclusively from Bay Street, and its board of directors is drawn from Canada's largest corporations, including Noranda, Alcan and Sun Life Assurance.

The institute's main focus is on economic issues, but it has also recently led the attack on Canada's social programs. It also played a major role in fuelling the hysteria over the deficit by claiming the problem was caused by government "overspending" rather than high unemployment and high interest rates. The institute's president and CEO is Tom Kierans, who commands an annual budget of nearly $2 million - and a lot of respect at the Globe and Mail and the Financial Post.

6. The Canadian Taxpayers' Federation (CTF)

The CTF claims to promote the responsible and efficient use of our tax dollars by acting as a watchdog over government and providing taxpayers with information about "wasteful spending and high taxation." The federation identifies "special interests" as being responsible for "runaway spending" which led to "continuous annual deficits" and "job-killing public debt" that hurt "the silent majority" (taxpayers).

The CTF's proposed solution is to control government spending through legislation that would force governments to balance their budgets. It counts among its achievements several "Tax Alert Rallies" it has organized across Canada, its exposure of "lucrative pension plans" for provincial politicians, and the balanced budget and taxpayer protection laws passed in Alberta and Manitoba.

7. The Fraser Institute

For many years after the Fraser Institute was established in Vancouver in 1974, it was considered to be a radically right-wing think-tank on the fringes of the policy community. However, since the political terrain has shifted so far to the right, the Fraser Institute, led by its founder and prominent spokesperson, Michael Walker, has gained more acceptance and credibility, and has become much more prominent in public policy debates.

The Fraser Institute publishes books and news-letters, and is particularly effective in disseminating its views among high school and university students and involving them in its market economics programs. Besides its own staff of 22, the institute hires academics to develop right-wing positions on free trade, taxation, government spending, health care, and other major economic and social issues. Supported by tax-deductible donations from more than 2,500 individuals, corporations and charitable foundations, the institute has an annual operating budget of $2,350,000.

8. The Investment Dealers' Association of Canada (IDA)

As the Canadian investment industry's national trade association, the IDA represents about 120 member firms employing more than 24,000 people. It is responsible for regulating the industry and policing the activities of its member firms. The IDA's stated mission is to foster "efficient capital markets" by encouraging participation in the savings and investment process, and by ensuring the integrity of financial markets.

9. The National Citizens' Coalition (NCC)

The NCC claims to have more than 40,000 supporters, but has no fixed membership. It advocates individual freedom and responsibility under limited government and a strong national defence, but has no democratic internal structures. Independent of all political parties, the NCC neither seeks nor accepts government handouts, preferring to obtain its funding from wealthy business people.

The NCC promotes privatization and contracting-out, citizen-initiated referenda, the reform of pensions for MPs and federal public employees, free trade, government spending cuts, Senate reform, and the use of market forces in health, education and welfare. It also opposes "forced unionism" and pay equity, calling them violations of civil liberties.

10. The Public Policy Forum (PPF)

This Ottawa-based organization was formed in 1987 to promote private sector participation in public policy development, an "efficient" public service, and mutual understanding among leaders from government, business, labour and the academic community. When the Forum talks about increasing cooperation and greater consensus in public service reform, it means infusing government with the values, needs and priorities of the big corporations.

About 70 percent of the Forum's funding comes from business, which it uses to organize conferences, seminars, and an annual awards dinner where it honours journalists, bureaucrats, academics, and others who have most effectively, in the Forum's view, advocated and supported the corporate agenda.

2006-08-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

Is the U.S. empire collapsing?

By Asad Ismic
From
Asad Ismi: Index of Articles and Publications
2005

Empires collapse usually due to a combination of military overreach and economic weakness, and, judged by these criteria, the U.S. imperial order seems headed for an imminent fall. Washington's occupation of Iraq has been a disaster. Even after two years, the U.S. military has failed to subdue the Iraqi resistance. A recent report by Knight Ridder Newspapers declared the war "unwinnable."

Developments on the economic front are even more dangerous for the U.S. Its power rests on two main buttresses: 1) military superiority, and 2) the role of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Iraq is making a mockery out of the first, and the second is in jeopardy. The U.S. massive trade and budget deficits ($630 billion and $500 billion, respectively) are driving down the dollar to such an extent that its status as the global reserve currency is imperilled. Since world trade is largely conducted in U.S. currency, most countries have to export goods and services in order to earn these dollars, but all the U.S. has to do is print more dollars. As economist James K. Galbraith explains: "[The U.S. gets] real goods and services, the product of hard labour by people much poorer than ourselves, in return for chits that require no effort to produce."

The purchase of massive amounts of dollars by the rest of the world allows Washington to borrow cheaply, keep interest rates low, and run up a trade deficit that no other country could get away with. The world thus pays for U.S. overconsumption and underproduction. This arrangement, as economist Andre Gunder Frank puts it, is "a global confidence racket" -- a racket that can continue as long as other countries keep on buying dollar assets such as U.S. Treasury bills, thus financing Washington's enormous deficits.

But, if the value of the dollar keeps going down, why should anyone continue to invest in it? The dollar has dropped by 47% against the euro since 2001, and by 24% against the yen. The greenback hit a record low of $1.37 against the euro in December 2004. There is no end in sight to the dollar's fall, since the Bush administration is content to let it drop (in the hope of reducing the trade deficit) and has shown no inclination to rein in overall spending. The dollar is expected to shrink by another 30% during the second Bush term, which, according to one observer, "will wipe out anyone holding dollar assets and bury the dollar as a global reserve currency."

With these dire prospects, surely anyone in possession of a lot of dollars would be inclined to sell. As U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned in November 2004, "foreigners may tire of financing the record U.S. current account deficit and diversify into other currencies or demand higher U.S. interest rates." He repeated this warning last March. Currently, Washington needs to borrow $2.6 billion a day -- 90% of it from foreigners -- to finance its trade deficit and to prevent a dollar collapse. The main lenders are Japan and China, whose central banks hold the largest amount of U.S. dollars ($720 billion and $600 billion, respectively). Taiwan owns $235 billion and South Korea $200 billion.

If these countries were to move away from the dollar, the U.S., with its immense borrowing needs, would face bankruptcy. Yet this is precisely what is happening. On January 26, 2005, prominent Chinese economist Fan Gang announced at the World Economic Forum that China had lost faith in the U.S. dollar. "The U.S. dollar is no longer in our opinion...(seen) as a stable currency, and is devaluating all the time, and that's creating trouble all the time," Fan said. He added: "So the real issue is how to change the regime from a U.S. dollar pegging... to a more manageable reference, say euros, yen -- those kinds of more diversified systems... If you do this, in the beginning you will have some kind of initial shock, you have to deal with some devaluation pressures... Now people understand the dollar will not stop devaluating."

Fan is director of the state-run National Economic Research Institute in Beijing. He is not a government official, but for traders the connection was close enough and they found "great relevance" in his statement. As Paul Donovan, senior global economist at UBS AG, said, "This in fact is a scenario we consider to be highly likely." And the dollar promptly dropped. Japan's Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, also made clear in March that "diversification is necessary" when a parliamentary committee questioned him about the dangers of holding too much of one currency. China and Japan have lost hundreds of billions of dollars during the past two years because of the greenback's decline.

According to the Financial Times, "Central banks are shifting reserves away from the U.S. and towards the Eurozone in a move that looks set to deepen the Bush administration's difficulties in financing its ballooning current account deficit." The Asia Times (Hong Kong) confirms that Asian central banks have been replacing their dollar reserves with regional currencies for the past three years. A report by the Bank of International Settlements states that the ratio of dollar reserves held in Asia declined from 81% in the third quarter of 2001 to 67% in September 2004. China reduced its dollar holdings from 83% to 68%, India from 68% to 43%, and Thailand from 80% to 50%. A January 2005 report sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland states that 39 nations out of 65 interviewed were increasing their euro holdings, while 29 were reducing the amount of dollars they owned.

Significantly, the move from the dollar to the euro has spread to the central banks of OPEC countries, which own the most valuable traded resource: oil. The Bank for International Settlements reported in December 2004 that OPEC members' dollar-denominated deposits fell to 61.5% of their total deposits in the second quarter of 2004, from 75% in 2001. During the same period, euro deposits increased from 12% to 20%. Russia, the biggest non-OPEC oil producer, has switched 25% to 30% of its currency reserves from dollars to euros.

At the end of February, comments by South Korea's central bank sparked another round of dollar declines. The bank announced its intention to move away from the U.S. dollar and increase holdings of Canadian and Australian dollars. The New York Times described the impact of this "innocuous" statement: "As the Korean comment ping-ponged around the world, all hell broke loose, with currency traders selling dollars for fear that the central banks of Japan and China, which hold immense dollar reserves... might follow suit. That would be the United States' worst economic nightmare. If it appeared that the flow of investment from abroad was not enough to cover the nation's gargantuan deficits, interest rates would soar, the dollar would plunge, and the economy would stall."

Economic Armageddon
The global move away from the dollar portends economic devastation for the U.S. Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, one of the world's leading investor firms, has told clients that the U.S. does not have more than a 10% chance of avoiding "economic Armageddon." He points out that the $2.6 billion the U.S. has to import every day to finance its trade deficit constitutes an incredible 80% of the world's net savings. Obviously it's an unsustainable situation. According to Roach, the dollar will keep falling due to the U.S.'s record trade deficit. To attract foreign capital and check inflation, the Federal Reserve's Greenspan will be forced "to raise interest rates further and faster than he wants." U.S. consumers, already deep in debt, "will get pounded." The record U.S. household debt is now equal to 85% of the economy [the U.S. national debt is $7.7 trillion, while total U.S. debt is an unfathomable $43 trillion]. Americans already spend a record proportion of their income on interest payments, and interest rates have not even substantially increased yet. Thus the stage appears set for massive national bankruptcy.

According to the Los Angeles Times, higher interest rates "would be disastrous for a country weaned on cheap credit." A rise in interest rates would particularly affect a real estate market built on low interest and mortgage rates. This market is now the main engine of U.S. consumption. Millions of Americans have taken out loans against the rising value of their homes and use them (in Roach's words) as "massive ATM machines." As Andr頇under Frank explains, higher interest rates threaten "a collapse of the housing price bubble [which] with increased interest and mortgage rates would drastically undercut house prices, thereby having a domino effect on their owners' enormous second and third re-mortgages and credit-card and other debt, their consumption, corporate debt and profit, and investment."

Echoing Roach, Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker puts the likelihood of a financial disaster at 75%, while the U.S. Comptroller-General (head auditor), David Walker, "makes no bones about the fact that the situation is dire." For Martin Wolf, associate editor of the Financial Times (U.K.), "The U.S. is now on the comfortable path to ruin. It is being driven along a road of ever-rising deficits and debt... that risk destroying the country's credit and the global role of its currency."

Paul Krugman, economics professor at Princeton University who writes a column for the New York Times, told Reuters in January: "We've become a banana republic... If you ask the question, do we look like Argentina, the answer is a whole lot more than anyone is willing to admit at this point." Argentina defaulted on a $100 billion in debt in 2001, with catastrophic effects: its currency plunged and the economy collapsed, bankrupting thousands of businesses within weeks. National income plummeted by 67%, pushing half the population below the poverty line.

Professor Laurence Kotlikoff, chairman of the economics department at Boston University, agrees with Krugman, saying: "This administration [Bush] and previous administrations have set us up for a major financial crisis on the order of what Argentina experienced a couple of years ago." Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin similarly warns that "the traditional immunity of advanced countries like America to the Third World-style crisis is not a birthright," and that the U.S. faces "a day of serious reckoning."

Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, also thinks that the falling dollar could mean major financial disaster. According to him, "This looming dollar crisis cannot be prevented, only delayed, and only at the expense of exacerbating the collapse." Schiff told Forbes magazine" in January that he expects the dollar to drop by 50% against the Chinese and Japanese currencies. This will wreck U.S. consumption. As Schiff states: "Spending on cars, clothing, and electronics will all drop dramatically -- perhaps right out of the economy."

An abrupt drop in the dollar could cause a stock market crash and make the real estate market dive. "When the dollar collapses," says Professor Immanuel Wallerstein, "everything will change geopolitically... it will be a vastly different U.S--no longer able to live far beyond its means, to consume at the rest of the world's expense. Americans may begin to feel what countries in the Third World feel when faced with IMF-imposed structural readjustment: a sharp downward thrust of their standard of living."

Paper Empire

The weakness of the dollar and the huge deficits are symptoms of the decline of U.S. manufacturing. "Americans don't produce enough and don't save enough," says Schiff. U.S. manufacturing is only 13% of GDP and, according to Roach, "Manufacturing employment currently stands at only about 13% of the U.S.' private non-farm workforce--down sharply from 23%...in the mid-1980s." Since 2000, the U.S. has lost close to three million manufacturing jobs. Between 1989 and 2004, the U.S. savings rate fell from 6% to 1%. Foreigners now produce most of the goods Americans are consuming and lend Washington the money to buy these goods, leading to skyrocketing deficits.

An important factor behind the manufacturing decline is the abandonment of the U.S. by its own corporations, many of which have relocated operations to Asia from where they export to the U.S. John Chambers, Chairman of Cisco, said recently: "What we're trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company." Cisco is the leading U.S. supplier of networking equipment for the Internet. The company manufactures $5 billion worth of products in China, where it employs 10,000 people.

In fact, the U.S. economy has been in decline for more than three decades, accounting for a plummeting share of world economic output. The first dollar crisis occurred at the end of the 1960s when U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam war led to increasing public deficits. This coincided with the rise of Western Europe and Asia as strong exporters, to whom Washington lost its manufacturing lead. To retain its global domination, the U.S. then depended on its military superiority and the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. As the U.S. deficits rose due to the Vietnam war, France demanded gold in exchange for the dollars it held, since at the time the greenback was backed by Washington's gold reserves. Other countries followed suit and, as U.S. gold reserves were drained, President Richard Nixon delinked the dollar from gold and floated it against other currencies.

This coincided with the oil crisis of the 1970s, when crude prices shot up 400%. Suddenly, oil became the most important traded resource, and Nixon linked the dollar to it. In June 1974, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a deal with Saudi Arabia (the biggest OPEC oil producer) stipulating that oil could only be bought in dollars. In return, the U.S. agreed to militarily protect the Saudi regime. In 1975, OPEC (following the Saudi lead) officially agreed to sell oil only in dollars. The age of the petrodollar was thus born. As long as oil was traded in dollars, so would other goods, and the dollar would remain the world's reserve currency. This arrangement allowed the U.S. to continue its dominant imperial role despite its crucial economic weakness: the inability to compete with the European and Asian countries in manufacturing and export capacity. But now the U.S. position became highly vulnerable to the whims of the oil-producing countries and to the fate of the resource itself.

The first challenge to the petrodollar system came with the Third World debt crisis. Awash in petrodollars, Western banks loaned hundreds of billions of these to developing countries, which could not repay the loans when Washington raised interest rates to nearly 20% in 1979 to save the falling dollar. It was crucial for the future of the petrodollar system that this money be recycled back to the West, and so the U.S. used the World Bank and IMF to ensure this would happen. The loans were repaid several times over (the payments continue), and the petrodollar system was saved -- but at the cost of decimating Third World economies with structural adjustment programs that devastated their industry, employment, and health and education sectors. As F. William Engdahl perceptively points out, the U.S.'s petrodollar hegemony "was based on ever-worsening economic decline in living standards across the world as IMF policies destroyed national economic growth."

The second challenge to the petrodollar system came from Iraq when it started trading oil in euros in November 2000. If other OPEC countries followed suit, that would be the end of the reserve role of the dollar. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was partly aimed at staving off this possibility by forcibly returning Iraq to the dollar, warning other OPEC members not to switch to the euro, and starting the process of physically controlling Iraqi and Middle Eastern oil in order to gain leverage over European countries.

This strategy has clearly failed, and it now appears that in the military arena, too, the U.S. cannot prevail, not even against lightly armed Iraqis. The petrodollar system is falling apart as the world rejects a U.S. imperialism in which it expects other countries to not only supply it with a massive amount of consumer goods in exchange for increasingly worthless bits of paper, but also wants them to pay for its gigantic military machine with which it attacks or threatens them. As American journalist Seymour Hersh said in a recent interview: "The minute the rest of the world gets tired of our belligerence, they can turn us off economically as easily as flicking a light switch."

A New World

The collapse of the dollar and that of the U.S. economy will end American superpower status as Washington becomes incapable of financing a colossal military machine that currently occupies 725 bases around the world with 446,000 troops. Economic power will centre around the European Union, China and India, which are already creating new global structures that exclude the U.S. These endeavours show that the U.S. is already, to some extent, a "has-been" global power whose desperate military aggression only makes it weaker on the world stage.

The Financial Times explains: "A new world order is indeed emerging -- but its architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe at meetings to which the Americans have not been invited." In contrast to Washington's endless military ventures, Europe and China emphasize economic might as the main instrument of foreign policy. As Newsweek points out, "the strongest tool for both is access to huge markets."

In April 2004, 10 new countries joined the European Union and six more are expected to in the near future. Newsweek lauded this development by emphasizing that "no single policy has contributed as much to Western peace and security." This is a highly important statement. It recognizes that Europe has changed the very definition of security. After two world wars, the Europeans appear to have realized that the best guarantor of security is economic inclusion, not mass murder. And now the EU is considering Turkey's membership, which would actually make Europe part of the Middle East, and vice versa. According to Newsweek, "When historians look back, they may see this policy as being the truly epochal event of our time, dwarfing in effectiveness the crude power of America."

Similarly, China and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) are creating an Asian trade bloc to rival the EU. The ASEAN Plus Three (China, Japan, and South Korea) summit meeting in December 2004 laid the groundwork for an East Asian Community (EAC) that "should build a free trade area, cooperate on finance ,and sign a security pact... that will transform East Asia into a cohesive economic block." This is a significant defeat for the U.S., which scuttled a similar intiative in 1990. The Asian agreement creates a market zone of two billion people, the largest global trading bloc "dwarfing the EU and NAFTA." India has also become an ASEAN summit partner and wants an economic zone stretching from its borders to Japan.

No single country has posed more of a challenge to Washington than China, which recently replaced the U.S. as the leading consumer market in the world. Beijing has economically displaced the U.S. all over Asia and is now doing so in the latter's so-called back-yard, Latin America. China is now Chile's largest export market and Brazil's second biggest trading partner. In November 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao went on a tour of Latin America and agreed to invest $30 billion in the region. Most importantly, China and Venezuela signed a bilateral energy pact in December 2004, under which the latter agreed to supply Beijing with 120,000 barrels of fuel oil a month. China pledged to invest in 15 Venezuelan oil-fields. China has become the world's second largest importer of oil after the U.S. Venezuela is the U.S.'s fourth largest oil supplier, and the deal with China cuts into one of Washington's "few remaining relatively stable sources of crude." China intends to make a similar move towards Canada, the U.S.'s biggest oil supplier. What can Washington do about such incursions into its "vital interests"? Not much, since Beijing could cripple the U.S. economy simply by stopping its purchase of American Treasury bills.

The demise of the United States as a superpower will be particularly beneficial for the Third World -- the 80% of humanity that has suffered most under Washington's economic and military heel. Since 1945, the U.S. has unleashed a reign of death, destruction and plunder on developing countries, killing more than 20 million people through wars, coups, bombings, assassinations, massacres, embargoes, and economic destabilization. The purpose was to ensure that 80% of the world's wealth was owned by 20% of its people. Third World countries have fought back, inflicting significant defeats on Washington. It was the Vietnam war that started the U.S.'s economic downslide, and today Iraq is an important nail in Washington's financial coffin.

Third World resistance has made it impossible for the U.S. to continue dominating the world economically and militarily. Without U.S. muscle behind them, Washington's client states all over the South will have to give way to nationalist regimes that want to use their countries' resources for the benefit of their own people: A wave of Venezuelas is likely, leading to a redistribution of global wealth in the developing world's favour. The European Union will have to come to a new arrangement with a resurgent South, and the result could lay the basis for an egalitarian world.

2006-08-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

How much oil do we use and what do we use it for?

From
National Ocean Service Education

The United States uses about 700 million gallons of oil every day. The world uses nearly 3 billion gallons each day. That this much oil must be transported evey day is truly hard to imagine. However, if you think about all the ways we use oil, perhaps these numbers are not so surprising. We use oil:

to fuel our cars, trucks, and buses, and to heat our houses.

to lubricate machinery large and small, from bicycles to printing presses.

to make the asphalt we use to pave our roads.

to make plastics, such as the toys we play with and the portable radios and CD players we listen to.

to make medicines, ink, fertilizers, pesticides, paints, varnishes, and electricity.

Heating your Building with Solar Energy

Efficient, Simple and Cost Effective
From Canadian Renewable Energy Network

Solar Air Heating
One of the inescapable realities of doing business in Canada is the cost of heating. Long, cold winters mean that for a good part of the year, Canadian businesses have to spend money to heat air brought into the workplace. That directly affects the bottom line.

A simple technology can dramatically reduce fuel consumption and heating costs, particularly for buildings with a high demand for fresh air. The concept: use solar energy to preheat outside air before it is introduced into a plant or other facility. The warmed air can be distributed as is, further heated in a building's primary heating system or used as combustion air for industrial furnaces.

Facilities that could benefit from this technology include warehouses, large institutions such as hospital and schools, industrial plants, garages, even apartment buildings.

It Simply Works
The simplest, most efficient - and least expensive - way to preheat outside air for industrial and commercial applications is through the use of a perforated-plate absorber or a solar air heating system, such as the Solarwall ® . "It's an easy way to bring fresh air in a building and save money at the same time," says Sylvain Roy of Beaulieu Canada, a company that installed solar air heating technology in 1998.

'Simple technology' is an understatement. Dark metal cladding, usually unglazed corrugated aluminum, is mounted over a south-facing wall. Sunlight hitting the cladding warms the air near its surface, which is then drawn through thousands of small perforations in the cladding into a narrow space between the wall and the building. The heated air rises to an overhanging canopy plenum, where it is drawn into the facility by fans and dampers.

A preheat solar air heating system directs warmed air to a building's primary heating system, which further raises its temperature. Because the air going into the system is already warm, less energy is needed to heat it further. That saves money for the company, and conserves natural resources for the community at large. A solar air heating system augments rather than replaces a conventional heating system.

A stand-alone solar air heating system delivers fresh air directly into a building, where it mixes with recirculating plant air. The introuction of a steady supply of fresh air helps to make up for building exhaust air, which in turn means fewer drafts, a more comfortable working environment and savings on energy lost through uneven heating and cooling.

Another advantage of a solar air heating system - and something no other technology can boast - is that it recaptures heat lost through exterior walls. Heat escaping through a plant's wall is picked up by the solar col-lector and brought back into the building. In recapturing this heat, a solar air heating system effectively doubles the R-value of the existing wall.

Efficiency + Simplicity = $Savings
A solar air heating system can be incorporated into the design of a new building with a minimum of additional capital costs, and can take as little as 2 years to pay back the initial investment.

Payback for a retrofit typically takes longer, but it is still measurably cost-effective. Retrofitted systems are simply mounted over the existing building - the original wall serves as one side of the plenum space, while the new perforated solar cladding is the other.

"The solar wall technology is essentially an energy producing building cladding," says Bill Hawkins of Enbridge Consumers Gas, a company that recently installed a retrofit solar air heating system. "If you're going to put on an addition, instead of just putting on regular cladding, you put on solar wall cladding. The incremental cost is minimal, and the benefits are tremendous."

A solar air heating system:

° preheats make-up air, thus reducing heating costs

° improves indoor air quality
° is relatively easy to install or retrofit
° increases the R-value of the existing wall and reduces insulation costs

° is virtually maintenance free, with no liquids or moving parts other than the
ventilation system fans.

There are other, less obvious cost saving benefits; for instance, a business using a solar air heating system will need a smaller primary heating system, which reduces both original capital costs and fuel consumption.

Solarwall technology is more efficient than older style glazed collectors. Contrary to common belief, it even works on cloudy days and at night, although at a much lower capacity.

Enbridge Consumers Gas

A solar air heating system installed at the Enbridge Consumers Gas vehicle repair facility in Toronto is providing all of the fresh air they need - and saving the company money at the same time.

"One of the important requirements in industrial facilities is providing make-up air to replace air that's exhausted for process reasons," says Enbridge Consumers Gas' Bill Hawkins. "And this is a natural fit."

The facility needed large volumes of fresh air to dispel fumes from trucks and other vehicles under repair. Enbridge Consumers Gas installed a Solarwall ventilation heating system, which has been fully operational since January of 1999. A study done for the company estimates that the system will save the company from having to purchase over 11,000 cubic meters of natural gas annually. That translates into carbon dioxide emission reductions of more than 20 tonnes a year. It also translates into cash: Hawkins estimates that the Solarwall ® will save Enbridge Consumers Gas between $5000 and $6000 in its first year of operation.

Energy cost savings were part of the reason Enbridge Consumers Gas installed a solar air heating system; environmental considerations were another. "One of our very important mandates is to help be a catalyst to introduce solar technologies into the market place", says Hawkins. By using the technology, Enbridge Consumers Gas is setting an example in the use of solar and alternative energy sources.

Solar air heating raised the average temperature of the air brought into the Enbridge facility by 9° C., which meant much less energy was expended heating it to a useful temperature. The system also solved a problem that had been plaguing the facility for years: "If a building has a very high level of temperature stratification, this technology is a great way to destratisify that building," says Hawkins. "We had offices in the upper mezzanine level of the building where it was installed, and even in the wintertime we would often get into a situation where we'd have to turn on the air conditioning because the heat would stratify so much it made working uncomfortable. All of those issues have been resolved. It's a much more comfortable working environment." Comfort, savings, environmental concerns - all covered by the most abundant energy source of all.

Putting Solar Air to Work
Solar air heating uses proven technology, and recent improvements have made it even more cost-effective. In addition to Beaulieu Canada and Enbridge Consumers Gas, other large Canadian companies have installed solar air heating systems, including Bombardier, at the Canadair facilities in St. Laurent, Quebec, GM of Canada, at the Battery Plant in Oshawa, Ontario, and Ford Canada at their automotive assembly plant in Oakville, Ontario.

Solar air heating systems are designed primarily to preheat ventilation or combustion air for commercial and industrial facilities such as factories, warehouses, and hangers, but the technology can benefit any facility needing large volumes of fresh air:

° hospitals, school and gymnasiums
° government and military buildings
° vehicle maintenance shops and hazardous waste storage buildings

° multi-story residential buildings
° crop drying facilities
° central heating plants

A perforated wall cladding facing within 20 degrees of due south is optimally oriented, but virtually any wall that gets sunlight is suitable. An east-facing wall will generate heat in the morning, while a west wall is more effective in the afternoon. There are different colours of wall cladding available to suit aesthetic considerations, although the darker the colour - black or brown, for instance - the more solar energy is captured.

Of course, individual cost effectiveness also depends on fuel costs, fuel types and local utility rates.

An added bonus is that the federal government, through the Renewable Energy Deployment Initiative (REDI), provides an incentive for businesses that purchase and install solar air heating systems on their facilities.

Beaulieu Canada
Beaulieu Canada is one of Canada's largest manufacturers of rugs, carpets and yarn. Four hundred and fifty employees work at its Coronet Carpets plant in Farnham, Quebec. In 1998, Beaulieu installed a solar air heating system in a new warehouse at Farnham. The warehouse has 15 large docking bays and a 10.5 metre ceiling, and the company was looking for a system that could heat large volumes of incoming air and destratify heat build-up near the roof.

"We are always looking for the opportunity to install new technology that will help us save money and energy", says Sylvain Roy of Beaulieu Canada. "We saw several proposals; this was an easy way to bring air in with simple technology."

The "simple technology" is the solar air heating system called Solarwall, developed by Conserval Engineering Ltd. of Downsview, Ontario, with funding from Natural Resources Canada.

The capital cost for the system at Farnham was $175,000, of which 25% was contributed by the Renewable Energy Deployment Initiative (REDI). After the first complete winter of using the technology, Roy estimates that the company saved between $35,000 and $50,000 on annual heating costs - while reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 200 tonnes annually.

"The environmental considerations are important for us, for Beaulieu Canada, and for Beaulieu of America," says Roy.

The success of Beaulieu's solar air heating system means that the company continues to explore other energy-efficient projects that offer both capital savings and environmental benefits.

REDI for Business
REDI for Business will supply 25% of the purchase and installation costs of a qualifying solar air heating system, to a maximum contribution of $50,000.

Recoverable costs include solar collectors, fans (excluding destratification fans), control equipment and ancillary systems including elements of the energy transport system.

Other expenses covered under REDI include general design costs, feasibility and simulation studies, commissioning costs, and costs related to certification of a qualifying system.

Other qualifying systems under REDI include solar hot water and high-efficiency/ low-emissions biomass combustion systems.

Solar air heating systems make use of simple, proven technologies to harness the sun's energy. Business saves by reducing fuel costs. The community benefits by conserving Canada's natural resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Find out more about how REDI can help your business save energy and money. Give us a call at our toll free line 1-877-722-6600 or visit our web site at http:// www.nrcan.gc.ca/es/erb/reed.

[For more about using Solar Energy see: Canadian Renewable Energy Network/
Applications of Solar Heating

2006-08-19T10:31:00.000-07:00

How Air-Powered Cars Will Work

By Kevin Bonsor
From Howstuffworks.com
2000

Have you been to the gas station this week? Considering that we live in a very mobile society, it's probably safe to assume that you have. While pumping gas, you've undoubtedly noticed how much the price of gas has soared in recent years. Gasoline, which has been the main source of fuel for the history of cars, is becoming more and more expensive and impractical (especially from an environmental standpoint). These factors are leading car manufacturers to develop cars fueled by alternative energies. Two hybrid cars took to the road in 2000, and in three or four years fuel-cell-powered cars will roll onto the world's highways.

While gasoline prices in the United States have not yet reached their highest point ($2.66/gallon in 1980), they have climbed steeply in the past two years. In 1999, prices rose by 30 percent, and from December 1999 to October 2000, prices rose an additional 20 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Europe, prices are even higher, costing more than $4 in countries like England and the Netherlands. But cost is not the only problem with using gasoline as our primary fuel. It is also damaging to the environment, and since it is not a renewable resource, it will eventually run out.

One possible alternative is the air-powered car. There are at least two ongoing projects that are developing a new type of car that will run on compressed air. In this edition of How Stuff Will Work, you will learn about the technology behind two types of compressed-air cars being developed and how they may replace your gas guzzler by the end of the decade!

Two Cylinder Air-Compression Engine
Within the next two years, you could see the first air-powered vehicle motoring through your town. Most likely, it will be the e.Volution car that is being built by Zero Pollution Motors, in Brignoles, France. The cars have generated a lot of interest in recent years, and the Mexican government has already signed a deal to buy 40,000 e.Volutions to replace gasoline- and diesel-powered taxis in the heavily polluted Mexico City.

Makers of the e.Volution are marketing the vehicle as a low pollution or zero pollution car. However, there is still some debate as to what the environmental impact of these air-powered cars will be. Manufacturers suggest that because the cars run on air they are environmentally friendly. Critics of the air-powered car idea say that the cars only move the air pollution from the car's exhaust to somewhere else, like an electrical power plant. These cars do require electricity in order for the air to be compressed inside the tanks, and fossil fuel power is needed to supply electricity.

The e.Volution is powered by a two-cylinder, compressed-air engine. The basic concept behind the engine is unique (see this page for details) -- it can run either on compressed air alone or act as an internal combustion engine. Compressed air is stored in carbon or glass fiber tanks at a pressure of 4,351 pounds per square inch (psi). This air is fed through an air injector to the engine and flows into a small chamber, which expands the air. The air pushing down on the pistons moves the crankshaft, which gives the vehicle power.

Zero Pollution Motors is also working on a hybrid version of their engine that can run on traditional fuel in combination with air. The change of energy source is controlled electronically. When the car is moving at speeds below 60 kph, it runs on air. At higher speeds, it runs on a fuel, such as gasoline, diesel or natural gas.

Air tanks fixed to the underside of the vehicle can hold about 79 gallons (300 liters) of air. This compressed air can fuel the e.Volution for up to 124 miles (200 km) at a top speed of 60 miles per hour (96.5 kph). When your tank nears empty, you can just pull over and fill the e.Volution up at the nearest air pump. Using a household electrical source, it takes about four hours to refill the compressed air tanks. However, a rapid three-minute recharge is possible, using a high-pressure air pump.

The car's motor does require a small amount of oil, about .8 liters worth that the driver will have to change just every 31,000 miles (50,000 km). The vehicle will be equipped with an automatic transmission, rear wheel drive, rack and pinion steering and a 9.5 foot (2.89 m) wheel base. It will weigh about 1,543 pounds (700 kg) and will be about 12.5 feet (3.81 m) long, 5.7 feet (1.74 m) tall, and 5.6 feet (1.71 m) wide.

In October, the e.Volution made its public debut in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the Auto Africa Expo 2000. Zero Pollution said that the car will go on sale in South Africa in 2002, but didn't say when the car would be available in other parts of the world.

Cryogenic Heat Engine
Another version of an air-powered car is being developed by researchers at the University of Washington using the concept of a steam engine, except there is no combustion. The Washington researchers use liquid nitrogen as the propellant for their LN2000 prototype air car. The researchers decided to use nitrogen because of its abundance in the atmosphere -- nitrogen makes up about 78 percent of the Earth's atmosphere -- and the availablity of liquid nitrogen.

There are five components to the LN2000 engine:

A 24-gallon stainless steel tank.
A pump that moves the liquid nitrogen to the economizer.
An economizer that heats the liquid nitrogen with leftover exhaust heat.
A heat exchanger that boils the liquid nitrogen, creating a high pressure gas.
An expander, which converts nitrogen's energy into usable power.
The liquid nitrogen, stored at -320 degrees Fahrenheit (-196 degrees Celsius), is vaporized by the heat exchanger. The heat exchanger is the heart of the LN2000's cryogenic engine, which gets its name from the extremely cold temperature at which the liquid nitrogen is stored. Air moving around the vehicle is used to heat the liquid nitrogen to a boil. Once the liquid nitrogen boils, it turns to gas in the same way that heated water forms steam in a steam engine.

Nitrogen gas formed in the heat exchanger expands to about 700 times the volume of its liquid form. This highly pressurized gas is then fed to the expander, where the force of the nitrogen gas is converted into mechanical power by pushing on the engine's pistons. The only exhaust is nitrogen, and since nitrogen is a major part of the atmosphere, the car gives off little pollution. However, the cars may not reduce pollution as much as you think. While no pollution exits the car, the pollution may be shifted to another location. As with the e.Volution car, the LN2000 requires electricity to compress the air. That use of electricity means there is some amount of pollution produced somewhere else.

Some of the leftover heat in the engine's exhaust is cycled back through the engine to the economizer, which preheats the nitrogen before it enters the heat exchanger, increasing efficiency. Two fans at the rear of the vehicle draw in air through the heat exchanger to enhance the transfer of heat to the liquid nitrogen.

The Washington researchers have developed a crude prototype of their car, using a converted 1984 Grumman-Olson Kubvan mail truck. The truck has a radial five-cylinder that produces 15 horsepower with the liquid nitrogen fuel. It also features a five-speed manual transmission. Currently, the vehicle is able to go only about two miles (3.2 km) on a full tank of liquid nitrogen, and its top speed is only 22 mph (35.4 kph). However, because a liquid nitrogen-propelled car will be lighter, the researchers think that a 60-gallon (227 liters) tank will give the LN2000 a potential range of about 200 miles (321.8 km).

With gas prices soaring, as they have over the past two years, it might not be long before many motorists turn to vehicles powered by alternative fuels. Although air-powered vehicles are still behind their gasoline counterparts when it comes to power and performance, they cost less to operate and are arguably more environmentally friendly, which makes them attractive as the future of highway transportation.

[For More on Alternatives to oil engines see:

A History of the Diesel Engine

Wikipedia/Biodiesel]

2006-08-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

Passion and Propaganda

An Interview with Howard Zinn on the Role of Art During Wartime
By Chris Pastor
From Clamor Magazine

Howard Zinn is a professor emeritus of Boston University. He wrote A People’s History of the United States, which has sold over a million copies; the only book published by Harper Collins that keeps selling more copies each year. He released Voices of a People’s History, a companion book in 2004, and a documentary film on his life, You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train, has just been released on DVD. Noam Chomsky said of him, “it is no exaggeration to say he has changed the consciousness of a generation.”

CLAMOR: How do you see the relation between the arts and politics?

HZ: Almost anything in world of culture is inevitably political in one way or another. You might say it’s political even when it isn’t political, that it makes a statement even when it doesn’t make a statement. If you perform or create something that doesn’t say anything about society, you’re still saying something. You’re saying it’s OK to stand off from what is going on. There’s no such thing as neutrality in art. And what is true of art is true of other things. It’s true of history, of education. Art is emotional. Art adds passion. It adds feeling in that way it enhances everything it touches. And because of that, art has a power beyond the power of simple language or gesture. That is, when the language or gesture becomes artistic, when a prosaic set of words becomes poetry or song, or when gestures become dance, suddenly whatever is being communicated has a greater power than it had before.

I see art as playing a sort of special role in social movements, evening the odds. In society, power is held by people with wealth and who have special powers. Social movements don’t possess that wealth, they don’t possess the guns, the weapons, that people in power have. Therefore social movements need something special to remedy the imbalance. And art, because it has this special power, plays a role in creating a more equal field of competition between the establishment and the opposition.

CLAMOR: How do you see the relation between the arts and war, or the arts and war/peace?

HZ: It’s very clear that people who make war recognize the power of art, because they try to utilize the arts to mobilize the population to war. Martial music is an example of this; posters glorifying military heroism are another. The establishment understands that if you want to mobilize people for war, you have to use every possible technique, and art, they know, is very useful for that. I recall mural in the halls of Widener Library at Harvard. I would walk up the stairs and there I would see this painting showing a fallen soldier, not as a horrible thing, but as heroic. Along with the painting, there was inscribed, “Happy is he who in one embrace clasps death and victory.” That is how art gets mobilized for war.

CLAMOR: Kurt Vonnegut said that during the Vietnam war any artist worth a damn was speaking out against the war. Do you think it’s an artist’s responsibility to take political stands?

HZ: Put it this way, an artist is a human being, and every human being has a responsibility to take a political stand. The fact that one is an artist doesn’t exempt one from that. You might even say the artist has a special responsibility because the artist’s work can affect people in very intense ways. And because the artist has this power, and because the artist is a human being with values, concerned about whether people live or die, the artist has a responsibility to use that power, to use that talent on behalf of a peaceful world. Of course, Vonnegut himself was an example of that in all of his books, but certainly in Slaughterhouse 5, where he writes about the bombing of Dresden in World War 2. You could write, and books have been written, about the bombing of Dresden which are very powerful. But there’s something about what a creative writer can do, what a novelist can do, that raises the awareness of war to a higher level. Vonnegut did that for World War 2. It was very difficult– with the aura that has surrounded World War 2, the Good War– very difficult for somebody to suddenly write a book criticizing it. But you could write a novel like Slaughterhouse 5, which would lead people to begin to think critically about “the Good War.” Whereas if you came out and wrote a non-fiction book against the war, you probably would have been greeted with an enormous amount of harsh criticism.

CLAMOR: Once, you were interviewed simultaneously with Thom Yorke of Radiohead, about politics and art. It seemed in that interview that he was far more reluctant to embrace the idea of art being political than you were. What do you think might make an artist hesitate to make political statements?

HZ: Well, I think that an artist might think that it might corrupt or diminish her art, that she would not be free to express herself in the way she wants to. It would somehow distort, aesthetically, her art. The writer might believe that if he writes political things, it might come out sounding like agitprop, that it would lose the aesthetic quality of good writing. And, of course, there are examples of that. There are people whose politics so overwhelm their art that the artistry is lost in the process. But it’s not inevitable.

Then, of course, there are professional fears. By professional fears I mean fears that you will be marginalized. Because, in our society, as soon as you step outside of the boundaries, you risk your job; you risk your reputation. If you’re in the arts, and you use your music to make a statement, you risk the possibility that the corporations that control the airwaves will try to punish you. I mean, look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they spoke out against the war. Suddenly they found that Clearchannel, which controls 1,000 radio stations in the country, was giving orders not to play their music. So, an artist takes risks professionally by speaking out against the war. It takes special courage on the part of artists to do that.

CLAMOR: Commercial success is often pitted against artistic and political integrity, and many artists have been accused of compromising their core values to reach a broader audience. Some see this as betraying the movement, while others see it as a strategic move. Is there such a thing as selling out?

HZ: There is such a thing as an artist selling out. If an artist tailors her art to curry favor with people in power, if an artist deliberately stays away from saying anything political, anything that might be considered critical, that’s selling out. On the other hand, there are, I suppose, compromises that artists may make which are a kind of tactical device to reach a larger audience. Not by going over to the other side, not by being silent, but perhaps by couching their language in ways that they think will not offend too many people, or trying to find common ground with people who are on the other side of the political fence, without sacrificing their integrity. In other words, there are different levels of political statement, different levels of boldness. And an artist might seek to find a level that is not quite so bold, but which still makes a statement in order to reach a larger audience. I wouldn’t consider that selling out.

CLAMOR: Do you think artists today are more limited by censorship and media ownership concentration, or are the actually less limited due to an increased amount of outlets, with the internet, etc?

HZ: Well, I think both [statements] are true. That is, the traditional outlets are more closed, because of the monopolization of the media. The major television networks are closed, even public television is closed, because it has become so much more like the commercial networks. The book publishing industry and newspaper ownership has become more concentrated. On the other hand, the internet has opened up an enormous field of possibility where corporate control of the traditional media can be bypassed by all the information that can flow through the internet, and all the organizational work can be done through the internet, so we have a double phenomenon. And one, I guess, provokes the other, that is, the monopolization of the traditional media provokes the use of the internet in order to bypass [those limitations].

CLAMOR: When and how is what is gained by signing onto a big record label, or with a big publisher, reconciled with the negative impact this has - the dilution of a message to make it palatable or working with corporate media instead of independent media?

HZ: That’s a very important question, and a very difficult one. Just recently, I was on Democracy Now! In New York, talking to Amy Goodman. She raised the same question. She had just published her book with a big publisher, [owned by] the Disney Corporation. And She had been criticized by some people on the left for doing so, and not publishing with a small independent publisher. The problem is that, if you have something important to say, you want to reach a lot of people, and a big corporate entity will enable you to reach fifty times as many people, or, let’s say, a big record label will enable you to reach fifty times as many people. Then, I think, if you are not compromising what you are saying or what you are singing or what you are writing, if you have freedom to express yourself exactly as you want, then I think it’s justifiable to play a kind of guerilla warfare. That is, to use the weapons of the enemy, use the clout that they have, use their profit motive, and take advantage of the fact that they want a profit and you want to reach a lot of people. I’ve published with many publishers, small and large, from South End Press to Harper Collins. Harper Collins published my People’s History of the United States. I think it was a reasonable choice to make. Harper Collins was able to distribute my book in a way that a smaller publisher wouldn’t have been able to do. So, that’s one part of the answer, but there’s another part, and that is that while there are times when you might do that, I think there are other times when you must give your business– your art, song, or book– to an independent publisher or record company in order to help them out. So, I think, maybe a strategy should be to utilize both.

2006-08-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

About Peace Not War

Created in 2002 to produce a fundraising anti-war CD for grass-root peace groups, Peace Not War has expanded to become a non-profit collective of autonomous artists, creatives, activists, promoters and techies.

Free from commercial and institutional expectations, Peace Not War creates, collects and disseminates the best anti-war music, art and information from around the world and offers it at live events, on CD and DVD, as well as here on our website.

We are currently in the process of developing this website to include more detail on Peace Not War and to create an online resource for the peace movement. In the meantime, if you would like more information about Peace Not War or would like to volunteer or submit material, please email us at office@peace.fm.

Don't forget to visit our profile on MySpace : http://www.myspace.com/peacefm and also check out our new promo video (2.47Mb), created for Peace Not War by Oscar Beard.

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