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Family and community planning for world population

by Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
President
Global Parliament
Federation of Global Governments
(Short Bio)

Family and community planning for world population in PDF format
The following is a zip folder. The folder has a PDF file and other info files concerning colors and text of the images. Adobe Reader 9 is best for reading the PDF file.

PDF file (9 pages, 8 MB)

Moratorium on world population, the fertility rate and immigration applications

The Global Community is declaring a moratorium on immigration all over the world, on all applications for immigration, until applicants from any religious or cultural background have satisfied completely the Global Community standard for a population fertility rate of 1.3 children per family. The problem with world overpopulation is everybody’s problem. We are all responsible. Until tangible progress is made no immigrants should be accepted. That is Global Law.

Population warfare

It is the use of a very high fertility rate to conquer a nation, and that could mean as many as or more than 2.1 children per family. It is a form of cultural and/or religious aggression and invasion by having a much too high number of new born babies. For instance, there has been a rapid increase in population among Muslims to the extent that in fifty years all of Europe and North America are expected to be mostly Islamic. The influx of Latino immigration into the western states of the USA will also have the effect of a population warfare.

The fundamental definition of the Global Community, the Scale of Global Rights and immigration

"The Global Community is defined as being all that exits or occurs at any location at any time between the Ozone layer above and the core of the planet below. It is defined around a given territory, that territory being the planet as a whole, as well as a specific population, which is all life forms on Earth." This definition includes all people, all life on Earth. And life claims its birthright of ownership of Earth, and so does the Soul of all Life. That makes the Global Community the 21st century framework for Earth governance, and the only legitimate body with the power to make the laws of the land and to make the rules for the territory of the Earth.

The Scale of Global Rights contains six (6) sections. Section 1 has more importance than all other sections below, and so on. Concerning Sections 1, 2, and 3, it shall be the Global Community highest priority to guarantee these rights to Member Nations and to have proper legislation and implement and enforce global law as described in Global Parliament Constitution.

Section 1.
Global [ environmental, ecological, protection of life-support systems ] rights

Section 2. Primordial human rights :
safety and security, have shelter, 'clean' energy, a 'clean' and healthy, environment, drink fresh water, breath clean air, eat a balance diet, basic clothing, universal health care and education, and employment for all.
Section 3. Global [ecological, environmental, protection of life-support systems ] rights and the primordial human rights of future generations.
Concerning Sections 4, 5 and 6, it shall be the aim of the Global Community to secure these other rights for all global citizens but without immediate guarantee of universal achievement and enforcement. These rights are defined as Directive Principles, obligating the Global Community to pursue every reasonable means for universal realization and implementation.
Section 4. Community rights, the rights of direct democracy and global voting, the right that the greatest number of people has by virtue of its number (50% plus one) and after voting representatives democratically.
Section 5. Economic rights (business and consumer rights, and their responsibilities and accountabilities) and social rights (civil and political rights).
Section 6. Cultural rights and religious rights.

Now, obviously what immigration does is to infringe into the most important rights on the Scale of Global Rights: Sections 1, 2, and 3. It amounts at creating the world overpopulation problem which is way far more destructive than conducting military warfare. The Global Community condemns all types of warfare we see in the world today: military, economic and population. Surely the rights to protect the existence of all life on our planet are more important than cultural and religious rights.

Earth Environmental Governance can only be achieved successfully within the larger context of Sustainable Development and Earth Management. All aspects are inter-related and affect one another. A healthy environment is essential to long term prosperity and well-being of Global Community citizens. That demands a high level of ecological protection. This is the 'raison d'etre' of the Scale of Global Rights.

Primordial human rights are those human rights that individuals have by virtue of their very existence as human beings: to live, eat, drink fresh water, breath clean air, have shelter, safety and security, 'clean' energy, a 'clean' and healthy environment, universal health care and education, and employment for all.

Ecological and primordial human rights are separate categories than the rights of the greatest number of people, economic rights, social rights, cultural rights and religious rights.

Ecological and primordial human rights are the only rights that have existed unchanged throughout the evolutionary origin of our species. Any major change would have threatened our very existence. All other human rights are rights created by human beings and can be changed depending of new circumstances; they are not stagnant but are rather flexible and adaptive, and they can evolve. Ecological and primordial human rights of this generation and of future generations are therefore much more important than any other human rights existing now and in the future.

In this way the Scale of Global Rights gives us a sense of direction for future planning and managing of the Earth. Earth management is now well defined and becomes a goal to achieve.

Earth management includes problems with immigration in the world. We have shown that all aspects are inter-related and affect one another. Population warfare amounts to increasing demands for more resources but nations are already fighting for what is left of natural resources on the planet. Today, we need five healthy Earths to feed the world population. And population warfare also amounts to a specific cultural or religious group of a population trying to gain control of a nation by increasing its size and affecting the political outcomes of government in power.
All about control!

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UXBRIDGE, Canada - The carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have melted the Arctic sea ice to its lowest volume since before the rise of human civilisation, dangerously upsetting the energy balance of the entire planet, climate scientists are reporting.

"The Arctic sea ice has reached its four lowest summer extents (area covered) in the last four years," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado.

The volume - extent and thickness - of ice left in the Arctic likely reached the lowest ever level this month, Serreze told IPS.

"I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It's not going to recover," he said.

There can be no recovery because tremendous amounts of extra heat are added every summer to the region as more than 2.5 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean have been opened up to the heat of the 24-hour summer sun. A warmer Arctic Ocean not only takes much longer to re-freeze, it emits huge volumes of additional heat energy into the atmosphere, disrupting the weather patterns of the northern hemisphere, scientists have now confirmed.

"The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009-2010 in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic," James Overland of the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States told IPS in Oslo, Norway last June in an exclusive interview. ' Paradoxically, a warmer Arctic means "future cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception" in these regions, Overland told IPS.

There is growing evidence of widespread impacts from a warmer Arctic, agreed Serreze. "Trapping all that additional heat has to have impacts and those will grow in the future," he said.

One local impact underway is a rapid warming of the coastal regions of the Arctic, where average temperatures are now three to five degrees C warmer than they were 30 years ago. If the global average temperature increases from the present 0.8 C to two degrees C, as seems likely, the entire Arctic region will warm at least four to six degrees and possibly eight degrees due to a series of processes and feedbacks called Arctic amplification.

A similar feverish rise in our body temperatures would put us in hospital if it didn't kill us outright.

"I hate to say it but I think we are committed to a four- to six-degree warmer Arctic," Serreze said.

If the Arctic becomes six degrees warmer, then half of the world's permafrost will likely thaw, probably to a depth of a few metres, releasing most of the carbon and methane accumulated there over thousands of years, said Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and a world expert on permafrost.

Methane is a global warming gas approximately 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2).

That would be catastrophic for human civilisation, experts agree. The permafrost region spans 13 million square kilometres of the land in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe and contains at least twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere - 1,672 gigatonnes of carbon, according a paper published in Nature in 2009. That's three times more carbon than all of the worlds' forests contain.

"Permafrost thawing has been observed consistently across the entire region since the 1980s," Romanovsky said in an interview.

A Canadian study in 2009 documented that the southernmost permafrost limit had retreated 130 kilometres over the past 50 years in Quebec's James Bay region. At the northern edge, for the first time in a decade, the heat from the Arctic Ocean pushed far inland this summer, Romanovsky said.

There are no good estimates of how much CO2 and methane is being released by the thawing permafrost or by the undersea permafrost that acts as a cap over unknown quantities of methane hydrates (a type of frozen methane) along the Arctic Ocean shelf, he said.

"Methane is always there anywhere you drill through the permafrost," Romanovsky noted.

Last spring , Romanovsky's colleagues reported that an estimated eight million tonnes of methane emissions are bubbling to the surface from the shallow East Siberian Arctic shelf every year in what were the first-ever measurements taken there. If just one percent of the Arctic undersea methane reaches the atmosphere, it could quadruple the amount of methane currently in the atmosphere.

Abrupt releases of large amounts of CO2 and methane are certainly possible on a scale of decades, he said. The present relatively slow thaw of the permafrost could rapidly accelerate in a few decades, releasing huge amounts of global warming gases.

Another permafrost expert, Ted Schuur of the University of Florida, has come to the same conclusion. "In a matter of decades we could lose much of the permafrost," Shuur told IPS.

Those losses are more likely to come rapidly and upfront, he says. In other words, much of the permafrost thaw would happen at the beginning of a massive 50-year meltdown because of rapid feedbacks.

Emissions of CO2 and methane from thawing permafrost are not yet factored into the global climate models and it will be several years before this can be done reasonably well, Shuur said.

"Current mitigation targets are only based on anthropogenic (human) emissions," he explained.

Present pledges by governments to reduce emissions will still result in a global average temperature increase of 3.5 to 3.9 C by 2100, according to the latest analysis. That would result in an Arctic that's 10 to 16 degrees C warmer, releasing most of the permafrost carbon and methane and unknown quantities of methane hydrates.

This why some climate scientists are calling for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, recommending that fossil fuel emissions peak by 2015 and decline three per cent per year. But even then there's still a 50-percent probability of exceeding two degrees C current studies show. If the emissions peak is delayed until 2025, then global temperatures will rise to three degrees C, the Arctic will be eight to 10 degrees warmer and the world will lose most its permafrost.

Meanwhile, a new generation of low-cost, thin-film solar roof and outside wall coverings being made today has the potential to eliminate burning coal and oil to generate electricity, energy experts believe - if governments have the political will to fully embrace green technologies.

A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.

“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”
CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps—these questions take on new urgency.

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.

The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope’s Edge we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.”

The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.

“For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce.”

Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners—grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.

“I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.

“It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.

No one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows “food with dignity,” say those involved.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

“We’re fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent administrator,” Adriana explained. “We’re showing that the state doesn’t have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels for people to find solutions themselves.”

For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.

The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for school kids’ daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

The result of these and other related innovations?

In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.

The cost of these efforts?

Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food for all is a public good.”

The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.

And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat.

Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world taking this approach—food as a right of membership in the human family. So I asked, “When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?”

Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes—if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.

Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books including Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute, and a YES! contributing editor.

The author thanks Dr. M. Jahi Chappell for his contribution to the article.

Interested?
Walking Through Fear: interview with Frances Moore Lappé.

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This is a chart that should put every Indian into shame. Not only an Indian, but also those who swear in the name of democracy. How can people's representatives remain immune to the growing scourge of hunger? Shouldn't this provoke you to ask the basic: why should hunger exist in a democracy?

The illustration above [released ahead of the Sept 20-22 Summit of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)] reflects the monumental failure of the global leadership to address the worst tragedy that a democracy can inflict. Amartya Sen had said that famine does not happen in a democracy, but let me add: hunger perpetuates in a democracy.

The hunger map above is also a reflection of the dishonesty shown by the international leadership to fight hunger. Hunger is the biggest scandal, a crime against humanity that goes unpunished. At the 1996 World Food Summit, political leaders had pledged to pull out half the world's hungry (at that time the figure was somewhere around 840 million) by the years 2015. This commitment was applauded by one and all, including the academicians, policy makers, development agencies and charities, and you name it.

This commitment alone demonstrated the political indifference to mankind's worst crime. Considering FAO's own projections of the number of people succumbing to hunger and malnutrition at around 24,000 a day, I had then said that by the year 2015, the 20 years time limit they had decided to work on, 172 million people would die of hunger. And when the world meets for the MDG Summit in a few days from now, almost 15 years since the WFS 1996, close to 128 million people have already died from hunger.

And you call this an urgency?

No one across the world stood up to call the bluff.

Hunger has instead grown. By 2010, the world should have removed at least 300 million people from the hunger list. It has however added another 85 million to raise the tally to 925 million. In my understanding, this too is a gross understatement. The horrendous face of hunger is being kept deliberately hidden by lowering the figures. In India, for instance, the map shows 238 million people living in hunger. This is certainly incorrect. A new government estimate points to 37.2 per cent of the population living in poverty, which means the hunger tally in India is officially at 450 million. Even this is an understatement. The poverty line is kept so stringent in India (at Rs 17 per person per day) that in the same amount you cannot even think of feeding a pet dog. I wonder how can the poor manage two-square meals a day under this classification.

Hunger is also growing in major democracies. In the US, it has broken a 14-year record, and one in every ten Americans lives in hunger. In Europe, 40 million people are hungry, almost equivalent to the population of Spain. Interestingly, most of the countries in the hunger chart are following democratic forms of governance. And yet, the only country which has made a sizable difference to global hunger is China, which as we all know is not a democracy.

Is it so difficult to remove hunger? The answer is No.

While there is no political will to fight hunger, the business of hunger is growing at a phenomenal rate. The economic growth paradigm that the world is increasingly following in principle aims at minimising hunger, poverty and inequality. But in reality acerbates hunger and inequality. Economists have programmed the mindset of generations in such a manner that everyone genuinely believes that the roadmap to remove hunger passes through GDP. The more the GDP the more will be the opportunities for the poor to move out of the poverty trap. Nothing could be further away from this faulty economic thinking. This is the biggest economic folly that a flawed education system has inflicted.

And it is primarily for this reason that after the 2008 economic meltdown, the international leadership pumped in more than $ 20 trillion to bail out the rich and crooked. On the other hand, removing hunger and poverty from the face of the Earth would cost the world only $ 1 trillion at the most, for which the resources are unavailable. But there is all the money in the world to fill the pockets of the rich, hoping that it would one day trickle down to the poor. Privatising the profits, and socialising the costs. Isn't this political and economic dishonesty?

Hungry stomach offers tremendous business opportunities. Rich economies are buttressed by speculation and free trade in food and agriculture. Opening up of the developing economies provides them opportunities to sell unwanted technologies/goods in the name of development. Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector sees the poor as a business opportunity to bail out the companies from sluggish growth. Micro-finance steps in to empty the pockets of the poor, again in the name of development. So much so that even Climate Change provides tremendous scope to milk the poor.

All this is happening in a democratic world.

With greater power to build alliances across boundaries, the Davids of the world are having more success throwing off the Goliaths

It was the kind of fight in which the power seems so one-sided that the conclusion is foregone. The indigenous Dongria Kondh of Niyamgiri, India, saw their homeland and their sacred mountains threatened by Vedanta Resources, an international mining company that planned to build an enormous bauxite mine in the heart of their land. The Dongria used themselves as roadblocks to keep Vedanta employees away, but it was hard to imagine that their resistance would have long-term effects.

But as word of their struggle spread, so did the resistance to the mine: Celebrities took up the cause, and shareholders from major firms to the Church of England and the Norwegian government withdrew their investments from Vedanta. The Indian government began to take a closer look at the project.

Last week, the government withdrew its permission from the mining proposal. The Indian environment ministry also accused a Vedanta subsidiary of violating conservation and environmental regulations. In reaction to this news, Vedanta stock plummeted almost 6 percent.

Improbable Victories

The Vedanta decision is just the most recent of many seemingly improbable victories by indigenous and environmental groups around the planet. Collective actions by ordinary people—increasingly aided by sophisticated use of information networks to connect people across distances—have stopped destructive practices by industries around the world.

In Ecuador and Peru, tribes like the Shuar and Achuar provide a powerful example—once enemies, they have now have joined forces with each other, as well as with NGOs like the U.S.-based Pachamama Alliance, to block the destruction of their homelands by foreign oil companies. In addition to organizing the largest environmental lawsuit in history (against Chevron/Texaco) in Ecuador, their actions forced the government of Peru to turn back two of decrees that would have opened large areas of the rainforest to investment and allowed projects to be permitted without an opportunity for indigenous review.

Indeed, throughout the Amazon, tribes have united—to a large degree by employing modern technologies—in order to halt the auctioning off and destruction of large parts of the rainforest. Ambrosio Uwak, an indigenous leader, was cited in a London Times article stating that two-way radios enabled his group to mobilize more than 15,000 people to blockade roads and resist oil drilling.

The triumphs of indigenous and green movements clearly demonstrate the importance of forming alliances, of proactively combining groups and resources in order to send a clear message to the corporatocracy. The recent successes also point out the role that global communications can play in uniting allies around a common cause.

Local Movements Go Global

A few years ago, I was standing beside a glacier high in the Himalayas, listening to the leader of a nomadic clan lamenting the fact that his people would never have telephones because the lines could not reach them. Several months later, I heard a similar complaint from a tribal chief deep in the Amazon. Today, they both have access to satellite cell phones—and they are using them to organize their people in their fight against social injustice and environmental destruction.

For the first time in history, we are all talking to each other. The significance of this cannot be overstated. Just as the invention of the printing press took control of published texts in Europe out of the hands of the Catholic Church, today the Internet and social networking are allowing people to share information and strategies directly with each other, challenging the power of the mainstream media. From the frozen Arctic to the scorching Sahara, we are connecting with each other in ways that could not have been imagined a decade ago.

The threat the bauxite mine posed to the Dongria Kondh tribe was exposed to the wider world when a video of people dressed as Na’vi (from the film Avatar) protesting at Vedanta’s London shareholder meetings was posted on YouTube; it highlighted the struggle against Vedanta Resources by comparing the company’s operations to the devastation portrayed in the movie. Something similar happened after a rally of Ecuador’s indigenous people, organized around the showing of Avatar in Quito, was posted on blogs across the planet. When residents of the Brazilian Amazon marched against the Belo Monte dam, Survival International reported that over 500 indigenous people from 27 tribes converged near the Xingu River to proclaim a message that was flashed around the globe on Twitter: “Defend the Xingu: Stop Belo Monte.”

Success Is Contagious

We’re now able to better share our victories as well as our struggles and strategies for resistance. It is easy to get caught up in all the negativity distributed by the mainstream media, to believe that we the people are powerless. The corporatocracy—the owners of those media—want us to believe just that. But the victories are many, for indigenous peoples as well as for others who seek to sever the shackles of corporate imperialism. Examples of our strength, our ability to force change, are becoming more prevalent every day. To cite just a few more recent victories:

> Kenya passed a referendum that strengthens indigenous peoples and their rights; it also changed its constitution to curb authoritarian presidential powers and place more control in the hands of the people;

> The Karuk of California joined forces with fishermen and environmental groups to win a moratorium on suction dredge mining, thus preventing further damage to salmon runs;
Ecuador ratified a new constitution granting inalienable rights to nature;

> In a resolution ratified by more than 90 percent of its citizens, Iceland refused to pay off debts the IMF and other international banks claim it owes—saying the people had been hoodwinked by economic hit men;

> Greeks took to the streets to protest harsh austerity measures imposed by the European Union and IMF;

> Argentine workers re-opened and successfully ran factories closed by owners who refused to pay fair wages;

> WikiLeaks continued to expose war crimes allegedly committed by the U.S. military, despite pressure brought by the CIA and the U.S. and other governments.

> University students in the U.S. convinced their schools not to renew their contracts with Nike until the company compensated jilted workers in Honduras—which it agreed to do.

The recent and continuing triumphs of indigenous, environmental, and other movements in support of people and nature demonstrate that we the people hold more power than we often believe. In proving that victory is possible, the Dongria Kondh offer each of us the inspiration to work for a world that our children and grandchildren will want to inherit. In the light of their achievements, we see a path we all can follow.

John Perkins wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. John is the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman and, most recently, Hoodwinked: An Economic Hitman Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded—and What We Need to Do to Remake Them.

Research and editorial input provided by Nettie Hartsock.

Interested?

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YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

It would be a silent forest, a killing forest, an alien forest. No wonder Vandana Shiva scoffs at the moniker, biotechnology. ?This is not a life technology. It's a death science.?

Genetically engineered forests are a holocaust on nature. An award-winning documentary, A Silent Forest: The Growing Threat, Genetically Engineered Trees (2005, 46 mins) details the appalling effects. (You can buy the full length film at Amazon. )

Global Justice Ecology Project director, Ann Petermann defines the issue: ?Genetically engineered trees are the greatest threat to the world's remaining forests since the invention of the chainsaw.?

Jim Hightower calls them, ?wildly invasive, explosively flammable, and insatiably thirsty for ground water.?

If planting a sterile, killer forest isn't freaky enough, some GM trees will be viable and can and will contaminate natural species. Tree pollen can travel over 600 miles , according to a model created by Duke University, reported Petermann in 2006. Another study found pine pollen 400 miles from the nearest pines. This year, a scientist was surprised to find viable seeds 25 miles offshore .

?Sterile trees would also be able to spread their transgenes through vegetative propagation,? notes Petermann . Unlike with animals, being sexually sterile does not preclude reproduction when it comes to plants.

GM contamination occurs around the globe, as documented by GM Watch and the GM Contamination Register (among others). The technology cannot be contained. Genetically modified organisms are dominant over natural species and will forever alter Earth's natural plants.

By the way, the latest batch of approved GM trees ? 200,000 eucalyptus for seven southern states (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina) ? are engineered to be cold tolerant. A lawsuit has been filed to overturn their approval.

Chemically altering the atmosphere to be cooler

Not only are the powers-that-be genetically altering trees, food crops and animals, they're also chemically altering the atmosphere. In 1976, the United Nations banned hostile environmental modification , after investigative reporter Jack Anderson uncovered its use in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Next month, October 2010, the UN will vote on a resolution to stop all EnMod activities.

While the thought police label chemtrails a ?conspiracy theory,? it's unlikely that the UN scientific body calling for their termination would base such a recommendation on fiction. Those interested in scientific and legal proof can review the sources in my piece on atmospheric geoengineering .

Climate change is still being debated, especially after the University of East Anglia was caught publishing false data showing temperature increases. Significant errors in a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where it also falsely asserted as fact that Himilaya glaciers would melt by 2035, also fuel the debate.

Recently, an independent investigative body told the IPCC to stop lobbying on behalf of global warming programs. Members of the IPCC were also ordered to reveal their financial connections to such programs.

The temperature of the planet is characterized as too warm, and so the wealthy and powerful want to cool down the planet. If they do, those cold-tolerant GM trees will survive.

Altering the chemistry of the hydrosphere

Governments also support altering the chemistry of the hydrosphere. There is still much debate as to whether iron-seeding the oceans can remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to actually cool the planet. But, like the Cap and Trade scam, profit can be made so policy makers still support the idea.

Beyond deliberate attempts at geoengineering, we also have industry to blame for doing so. For over a century, humanity has been conned into poisoning the environment with toxic chemicals that end up in our streams, lakes and oceans. ?Conventional? agriculture and industrial pollution is killing us .

Corporations profit by this, of course, enabled and protected by governments. The most recent example, allowing BP to spray at least two million gallons of toxic oil dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico, is a case in point. This is after the Earth Day Blowout that released up to 350 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. Those dispersants enable oil to more readily penetrate the bodies of sea life, and they interfere with oil-eating microbes .

They're destroying an ocean and the US Senate is giving BP a pass. It refuses to grant subpoena power to investigate, let alone criminally prosecute. Forget partisanship, says Dateline Zero , ?they are the same party, and they get their money from the same people, they get their orders from the same people ? and that includes big oil.?

The actions of the corporations involved and the governmental agencies charged with regulating them have caused an ongoing Extinction Level Event.

This is happening all over the world. Corporations are destroying the planet under the guise of seeking profit. But their ecocidal activities are so horrendous and so ubiquitous that profits seem hardly plausible as authentic motive.

When taken together ? chemically altered skies and waters and genetically altered plants and animals ? reasonable minds cannot but wonder at the alien transformation of Planet Earth that we are witnessing.

The violence in Maputo is just the latest manifestation of the crippling shortcomings of the global economy

It has been a summer of record temperatures – Japan had its hottest summer on record, as did South Florida and New York. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded and the eastern US is mopping up after hurricane Earl. None of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming. But to see how climate change will play out in the 21st century, you needn't look to the Met Office. Look, instead, to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique's "food riots" to see what happens when extreme natural phenomena interact with our unjust economic systems.

The immediate causes of the protests in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, and Chimoio about 500 miles north, are a 30% price increase for bread, compounding a recent double-digit increase for water and energy. When nearly three-quarters of the household budget is spent on food, that's a hike few Mozambicans can afford.

Deeper reasons for Mozambique's price hike can be found a continent away. Wheat prices have soared on global markets over the summer in large part because Russia, the world's third largest exporter, has suffered catastrophic fires in its main production areas. These blazes, in turn, find their origin both in poor firefighting infrastructure and Russia's worst heatwave in over a century. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin extended an export ban in response to a new wave of wildfires in its grain belt, sending further signals to the markets that Russian wheat wouldn't be available outside the country. With Mozambique importing over 60% of the wheat its people needs, the country has been held hostage by international markets.

This may sound familiar. In 2008, the prices of oil, wheat, corn and rice peaked on international markets – corn prices almost tripled between 2005-2008. In the process, dozens of food-importing countries experienced food riots.

Behind the 2008 protests were, first, natural events that looked like an excerpt from the meteorological section of the Book of Revelation – drought in Australia, crop disease in central Asia, floods in south-east Asia. These were compounded by the social systems through which their effects were felt. Oil prices were sky-high, which meant higher transport costs and fossil fuel-based fertiliser prices. Biofuel policy, particularly in the US, shifted land and crops from food into ethanol production, diverting food from stomachs to fuel tanks. Longer term trends in population growth and meat consumption in developing countries also added to the stress. Financial speculators piled into food commodities, driving prices yet further beyond the reach of the poor. Finally, some retailers used the opportunity to raise prices still further, and while commodity prices have fallen back to pre-crisis levels, most of us have yet to see the savings.

Is this 2008 all over again? The weather has gone wild, meat prices have hit a 20-year high, groceries are being looted and heads of state are urging calm. The view from commodities desks, however, is that we're not in quite as dire straits as two years ago. Fuel is relatively cheap and grain stores well stocked. We're on track for the third-highest wheat crop ever, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). While all this is true, it misses the point: for most hungry people, 2008 isn't over. The events of 2007-2008 tipped more than 100 million into hunger and the global recession has meant that they have stayed there. In 2006, the number of undernourished people was 854 million. In 2009, it was 1.02 billion – the highest level since records began. The hardest hit by these price rises, in the US and around the world, were female-headed households.

Not only are the hungry still around, but food riots have continued. In India, double-digit food price inflation was met by violent street protests at the end of 2009. The price rises were, again, the result of both extreme and unpredictable monsoons in 2009 and an increasingly faulty social safety net to prevent hunger. There have been frequent public protests about the price of wheat in Egypt this year, and Serbia and Pakistan have seen protests too.

Although commodity prices fell after 2008, the food system's architecture has remained largely the same over the past two decades. Bill Clinton has offered several mea culpas for the international trade and development policies that spawned the food crisis. Earlier this year, he blamed himself for Haiti's vulnerability to price fluctuations. "I did that," he said in testimony to the US Senate. "I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else." More generally, Clinton suggested in 2008 that "food is not a commodity like others… it is crazy for us to think we can develop a lot of these countries [by] treating food like it was a colour television set."

Yet global commodity speculators continue to treat food as if it were the same as television sets, with little end in sight to what the World Development Movement has called "gambling on hunger in financial markets". The recent US Wall Street Reform Act contained some measures that might curb these speculative activities, but their full scope has yet to be clarified. Europe doesn't have a mechanism to regulate these kinds of speculative trades at all. Agriculture in the global south is still subject to the "Washington consensus" model, driven by markets and with governments taking a back seat to the private sector. And the only reason biofuels aren't more prominent is that the oil they're designed to replace is currently cheap.

Clearly, neither grain speculation, nor forcing countries to rely on international markets for food, nor encouraging the use of agricultural resources for fuel instead of nourishment are natural phenomena. These are political decisions, taken and enforced not only by Bill Clinton, but legions of largely unaccountable international development professionals. The consequences of these decisions are ones with which people in the global south live everyday. Which brings us back to Mozambique.

Recall that Mozambique's street protests coincided not only with a rise in the price of bread, but with electricity and water price hikes too. In an interview with Portugal's Lusa news agency, Alice Mabota of the Mozambican League of Human Rights didn't use the term "food riots". In her words: "The government… can't understand or doesn't want to understand that this is a protest against the higher cost of living." The action on the streets isn't simply a protest about food, but a wider act of rebellion. Half of Mozambique's poor already suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the FAO. The extreme weather behind the grain fires in Russia transformed a political context in which citizens were increasingly angry and frustrated with their own governments.

Yesterday, I reached Diamantino Nhampossa, the co-ordinator of Mozambique's União Nacional de Camponeses (National Peasants Union of Mozambique). "These protests are going to end," he told me. "But they will always come back. This is the gift that the development model we are following has to offer." Like many Mozambicans, he knows full well which way the wind blows.

In 2009, the mainstream U.S. media reported with satisfaction that the Pakistani government had finally responded positively to the United States and NATO's demands[1] for an aggressive military policy aimed at depriving the resurgent Taliban of ?safe havens? in Pakistan.[2] The subsequent offensive, featuring a Pakistani invasion of these areas and aerial assaults by the U.S. and its NATO allies, and has become just another unexceptional element of the open-ended military campaign formerly known as GWOT (the ?Global War on Terror?), but which, under the Obama administration has continued without a name. It receives little attention from the mainstream media, which is focusing its limited attention on Afghanistan, to the exclusion of the other ?hot wars? the U.S. is currently conducting in Iraq and Pakistan.

In neglecting to cover the process and impact of the Pakistan war, the U.S. media has ignored or recorded in a perfunctory manner (often as add-ons to Afghanistan coverage) major developments in this war, particularly the humanitarian crisis it has created.

One vivid, pregnant, and immensely significant instance of this casual treatment of events that alter the history of the host country was the coverage of a recent United Nations report focused on a single campaign in the Pakistan war. The Associated Press[3] reported it thusly: ?More than 200,000 people have fled Pakistan's latest offensive against Taliban militants in the northwest, the United Nations said Monday, as fresh clashes in the remote region killed 41 insurgents and six soldiers.? Later in the article, it emerged that this major displacement in a single region?running at about 50,000 displaced per month?was matched by other campaigns in nearby areas, with a total, according to the United Nations, of 1.3 million refugees ?driven from their home by fighting in the northwest and unable to return.?

But even this 1.3 million refugee figure was still a partial number, because it did not include the impact of the various earlier and parallel campaigns carried out by Pakistan, NATO special forces, and the increasingly infamous drone attacks piloted by remote control from thousands of miles away. These offensives had produced, by June of this year, about 3.5 million displaced persons, including several hundred thousand rendered homeless for more than a year.[4] This humanitarian disaster was therefore one magnitude greater than the agony of Darfur, which in mid-2010 was estimated to have displaced 2.7 million people,[5] though Pakistan's disaster still lagged behind the Iraqi total, which had reached or exceeded five million.[6]

What never appears in the U.S. media is the process by which these military offensives translate into massive displacement. Unlike our unformed image of these wars, which pictures people fleeing the fighting and then returning when (and if) peace and/or security returns, these military campaigns leave permanent damage behind that usually?at least given the current goals and policies of the United States?have little chance of being repaired. Therefore, the displacement is likely to be long term for a substantial proportion of its victims, with all the misery that refugee status implies.

Take the casually reported offensive in the tribal regions of Afghanistan. Kathy Kelly, an independent reporter and human rights activist with years of experience in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region[7] described to Democracy Now one facet of the degradation process[8] that she witnessed in her last trip to the tribal areas of Pakistan The linchpin of this particular disaster was the systematic targeting of electrical facilities by the NATO and Pakistani military, considered necessary to disabling the resistance. Soon after the beginning of the offensive, the affected cities were delivering electricity for only part of the day, creating a chain reaction:

The textile industry can't function if their factories are closed down with eight hours' loss of electricity every day. And so the numbers of people that are jobless, homeless, and out on the streets and willing to demonstrate, which is very risky to do in a country with so much military control. But we spent a long time sitting with the Pakistani Clerks Association, who were out demonstrating. They were in their third month. Students were in their tenth day of demonstrating, saying that they had all been summarily dismissed from their jobs, and what would they do?

Situations like those created in Pakistan therefore generate both protests?which becomes more and more insistent as the immiseration deepens?and displacement?in which people search for a location with better prospects. Some do both. Others will seek to wait out the crisis and hope for a better day. But since these kinds of disasters do not go away, people's patience is soon exhausted. They will not sit still when their children are starving or without shelter at night, or without sufficient clothes.

The displaced people come to constitute the visible humanitarian crisis that the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees investigates and seeks to ameliorate. In the meantime, the collateral protests are regularly interpreted (often correctly) as anger against the military, the local government, and the foreign occupation. Whatever form the protests take (ranging from petitions to demonstrations to angry mobs to systematic insurgency to terrorist attacks) they become justification for renewed military onslaughts, thus bringing the process full circle.

This cycle of military aggression, immiseration, displacement and protest, leading to new military offensives aimed at definitive pacification, characterizes the visible (Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan) and less visible (Somalia, Yemen) interventions undertaken by the United States as part of the military strategy formerly known as GWOT.

But why doesn't the U.S. and its client governments move quickly to repair the damage caused by the attack, thus damping the protest and ending mass displacement? In Pakistan, then, one might look for a rapid restoration of electrical service in affected cities, followed as quickly as possible by revival of the textile industry, leading to revival of the local economy and, in the middle term perhaps, improvement over the pre-war conditions. This strategy, currently labeled as Counterinsurgency Warfare, is the official goal of all current U.S. campaigns.

But what actually happens is quite the reverse: a further erosion of local living conditions that it an inevitable part of the strategy formerly knows as GWOT. In pacified areas, where resistance is quiescent or absent, the process of U.S. sponsored reconstruction has a kind of reverse Midas touch, contributing to the immiseration of the local community. Take the example of the Iraqi electrical system, which was also a major military target, both in the earlier Gulf War (in 1990) and in the 2003 invasion. By the time the Hussein regime was overthrown in spring of 2003,[9] electrical generating capacity had been reduced by almost 50% from a 1990 high of 9000 megawatts to less than 5000 megawatts, leading to daily outages everywhere in the country. In the six subsequent years the U.S. invested over five billion dollars in the electrical system aimed at restoring and expanding the system to cover the dramatically increased demand from newly introduced electrical appliances and newly built U.S. facilities. Nevertheless, capacity stagnated at 5000 megawatts, barely above the prewar total, and far less than half the needed output (estimate in 2010 at 14,000 megawatts). All over Iraq, cities suffered with as little as two hours of electricity per day, far less than was available even after the destruction wrought by the 2003 overthrow of the Ba'athist regime.

This failure was not a result of ongoing fighting that prevented reconstruction; in fact, most of the five billion dollar U.S. effort had been invested in areas where there had been very little fighting, though many of these areas became insurgent centers as the electrical and associated crises continued.

The failure to rebuild the electrical system was, instead, a consequence of the ambitious goals that the Bush Administration had for its occupation of Iraq, goals that have become central to the policies of the Obama administration as well. They were summarized succinctly in the 2006 National Security Strategy of the United States, the official statement of U.S. military goals: ?We seek a Middle East of independent states, at peace with each other, and fully participating in an open global market of goods, services, and ideas,? which would ?ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade?[10] The goals were summarized by retired army colonel Douglas Macgregor?a West Point class mate of ousted Afghanistan commander David McChrystal?as an attempt to ?reshape the culture of the Islamic world.?[11]

And they were embraced by President Obama in his major policy statement about Afghanistan when he promised a ?dramatic increase in our civilian effort? designed to ?To advance security, opportunity, and justice -- not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces -- we need agricultural specialists and educators; engineers and lawyers. That is how we can help the Afghan government? develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs.?[12]

In short, a fundamental goal of the full scale U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan?and the aerial and Special Forces invasion of the tribal regions of Pakistan?is political, social, and economic transformation.

In Iraq, the electrical system reconstruction was part of this larger goal of transforming Iraqi society. In this instance a major feature of the campaign involved destroying the Ba'athist government and replacing its state controlled economic and physical infrastructure with a privatized system integrated into the globalized economy. This meant dismantling state-owned electrical and construction companies and contracting with international businesses to replace the existing facilities with proprietary technology, replace Iraqi professionals with their own technicians, and replace Iraqi workers with their own imported labor force. In implementing this transformation with no-bid cost-plus contracts and no oversight by either the U.S. government or the Iraqis, the politically connected?aptly called ?beltway bandits?[13] by journalist Ann Jones? contractors were rewarded for maximizing profit on every element of the operation, creating vast cost overruns, and leaving the work incomplete if and when supplementary funds were not made available.

One incredible example in the reconstruction of the Iraqi electrical grid involved the U.S. based construction company Bechtel, which removed 26 functioning Iraqi oil driven generators and replaced them with new proprietary gas driven turbines rated at twice the megawatt output.[14] However, since Iraq does not capture its natural gas, all but seven of the turbines could not be activated. With no new contracts to remedy the problem Bechtel walked away, taking its profits back to the United States. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers then gerryrigged the turbines so that they could use fuel oil, though this fix-up reduced output by 50%, making the new turbines no more productive than the one that had been ripped out. Iraqi technicians, excluded from the construction process and untrained in operating and repairing Bechtel's proprietary turbines, struggled to maintain the half-capacity output, but the fuel oil clogged the system and?over a two year period?one after another went off line, temporarily or permanently. Ultimately the newly installed system produced far less output than the one it replaced.

What the Iraqi electrical system debacle exemplified is how the effort to rebuild Iraq (and/or Afghanistan or Pakistan) ?through free markets and free trade? produced the opposite of reconstruction and revival. The areas served by the Bechtel turbines experienced a further degradation of their living conditions, as the absence or shortage of electricity undermined the viability of local industry and commerce, made household living difficult and sometimes impossible, and led to all manner of social pathologies as desperate people turned to desperate measures. The five billion dollar investment by the United States in the Iraqi electrical system produced ample profits for international businesses and continued immiseration for Iraqis.

The impact of U.S. sponsored reconstruction thus produces a second vicious cycle intermingled and complementary to the military-impelled cycle of pacification, destruction, immiseration, resistance, and re-pacification experienced by the NATO/Pakistani offensive in Orakzai region. In this pattern, pacification?violently accomplished or unresisted?is succeeded by an effort to deconstruct the old system and replace it with service from globalized enterprises. Instead of vivifying local life, this effort produces deconstruction and immiseration, followed by displacement and resistance, leading to new efforts at pacification.

Throughout the six years, the reverse Midas touch applied to the Iraqi electrical system?and to other key targets of U.S. reconstruction, including the provision of potable water, the westernization of education, and the privatization of medical care? has been the focus of discontent and resistance, ranging from peaceful demands for service, siphoning off electricity for private purposes, sabotage when facilities were seen as being misused, and various forms of violent protest. In one dramatic moment, the heat of the summer in 2010 triggered nationwide protests against electrical shortages and prices. In Baghdad, where prices were doubled at the start of the summer, families complained about being charged 100 dollars per month (about a third of average monthly income) for two hours of electricity per day.[15] Protests, especially in the hard hit poorer neighborhoods became a daily event. In Basra, the second largest city in Iraq, police ?opened fire on a mob enraged by power cuts that reduced electricity availability to below two hours per day,? killing two and wounded many others. In Nasiriyah, a town with little history of violent resistance to the occupation, police used water cannon to repel demonstrators after they injured 17 police while ?trying to storm provincial headquarters.?

The protests produced small but significant concessions from the Iraqi government, including the resignation of the Electricity Minister, price cuts in some areas, and promises of increased output in specific localities where protests had been particularly ferocious The larger structural issue remained unaddressed, with the Iraqi government announcing contracts with multinational electrical companies (General Electric and Siemens) to increase capacity to approximately 70% of demand in the next few years. The new contracts, like that signed by Bechtel, contained all the same incentives that led to the Bechtel debacle six years earlier.

The two concentric cycles?pacification-immiseration-resistance-pacification and deconstruction-immiseration-protest-deconstruction?work together to create a cycle of misery. With or without violent confrontations between indigenous groups and occupation forces, each cycle creates larger masses of destitution, as the social, physical, and economic infrastructure continues to decline?under the weight of military occupation and/or the impact of globalized deconstruction. The double weight of military campaigns and contracts with multinational companies, aimed at reshaping the ?culture of the Islamic world?[16] and vivifying the host economies ?through free markets and free trade?[17] works only to further the immiseration of the targeted communities, and to guarantee wave after wave of protest. And, in embedded in these cycles of misery are the ever-enlarging humanitarian crises, made visible by growing armies of the displaced, deprived of the basic necessities of human life.

[1] AssociatedPress 100217 ? Pakistan Blasted for creating Taliban Safe Haven http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,494446,00.html Pakistan Blasted for Creating Taliban Safe Haven With Islamic Law Deal, Tuesday , February 17, 2009

[2]AssociatedPress 091018 ? Taliban vow to defeat Pakistan offensivehttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33367064/

[3] AssociatedPress 100412 ? Abbot ? Pakistan Taliban offensive causes over 200,000 to felle.

Pakistan Taliban Offensive Causes Over 200,000 To Flee

SEBASTIAN ABBOT | 04/12/10 08:06 PM |

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/12/pakistan-taliban-offensiv_n_533 ... - #

[4] DemocracyNow 100610 ? Kelly ? US secret war in Pakistan

June 10, 2010 Peace Activist Kathy Kelly on the Secret US War in Pakistan http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/10/peace_activist_kathy_kelly_on_the

[5] http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/Resettling-Darfurs-Displaced-Raises ...

[6] Citation for Iraq.

[7] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=kathy-kelly

[8] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/10/peace_activist_kathy_kelly_on_the

[9] NYT 100801 ? Myers ? a benchmark of progress

August 1, 2010 A Benchmark of Progress, Electrical Grid Fails Iraqis By STEVEN LEE MYERS

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/world/middleeast/02electricity.html?_r=1

[10] National Security Council, 2006, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March, 2006 (DC, White House, U.S. Government) found at
http://www.intelros.org/lib/doklady/usa_nss_2006.html and at

http://books.google.com/books?id=ke0FKjVsvIUC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=%22we+ ... (download June, 21, 2010)

[11] Michael Hastings, 2010, ?The Runaway General,? Rolling Stone"(June 22), found at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25796.htm (July 7, 2010). Macgregor saw this effort as hopeless: "The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people?. The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.?

[12] ?A New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan? (Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama Friday 27 March 2009); Transcript ; White House Press Office , Washington, DC http://www.truthout.org:80/032709R

[13] Ann Jones, 2009, ?The Afghan Reconstruction Boondoggle,? Tom Dispatch (January 11), found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175019/ann_jones_the_afghan_reconstructi ...

[14] This discussion is taken from Schwartz, 2008, pp. 155-159.

[15] AsiaTimes 100626 = McDermid and Waleed

Jun 26, 2010

Dark days for Iraq as power crisis bites By Charles McDermid and Khalid Waleed

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LF26Ak01.html

[16] Michael Hastings, 2010, ?The Runaway General,? Rolling Stone"(June 22), found at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25796.htm (July 7, 2010). Macgregor saw this effort as hopeless: "The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people?. The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.?

[17] National Security Council, 2006, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March, 2006 (DC, White House, U.S. Government) found at
http://www.intelros.org/lib/doklady/usa_nss_2006.html and at

http://books.google.com/books?id=ke0FKjVsvIUC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=%22we+ ... (download June, 21, 2010)

The sluggish international response to the Pakistan floods emergency is actually not all that sluggish, at least compared to these humanitarian crises. Introducing the five most under-funded and ignored humanitarian crises:

1) Iraqi Refugees

The invasion, occupation and subsequent civil war in Iraq war caused one of the biggest refugees crises in recent history. According to the UN Refugee Agency, there are 1.7 million Iraqi refugees living in Syria and Jordan. There are another 1.5 million Iraqi IDPs. The UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released its regional response plan for Iraqi refugees in January. The appeal called for $367 million to support the refugees. So far, though, only 17.9% or $65 million is funded. The United States has contributed $17 million to the fund.

2) Guatemala -- Tropical Storm Agatha

Remember Tropical Storm Agatha? Not many people outside of Central America do either. Nearly 200 people were killed when the first storm of the hurricane season made landfall in Guatemala on May 31. The storm caused extensive damage--most dramatically, it opened up a 200 foot deep sinkhole in the middle of Guatemala's capital. To make matters worse, the storm hit just a day after a major volcanic eruption.Thousands were displaced. An international appeal was launched. The international appeal was ignored. Today, only $5 million of the $15 million has been donated.

3) Uganda

A 20 year civil war in Northern Uganda largely ended in 2006. Still, 400,000 2 million people remain displaced and [nearly 2 million] reliant on humanitarian aid. The so-called "consolidated appeal" for Uganda warned that the humanitarian gains achieved since the cessation of hostilities is in danger of unraveling "due to diminishing humanitarian programming that is unmatched by a significant increase in recovery programs." Only $64 million of the $184 million appeal has been received.

4) Central African Republic

The civil war may have ended in Northern Uganda, but the same group responsible for the destruction in Uganda has reconstituted itself, this time in Central African Republic. Attacks on border villages by the Lord's Resistance Army has left at least 50 villages burned or emptied, according to the UN. But they make up only a relatively small portion of the nearly 200,000 IDPs in CAR. The country also suffers from being in a terrible neighborhood and has suffered from the spill over effects of both the Darfur conflict and conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In fact, over 18,000 refugees from the DRC fled to the Central African Republic last year alone. But despite all these needs, funding for humanitarian operations in CAR remains critically low. It is the fourth most under-funded crisis in the world at $53 million received out of a requested $144 million.

5) Civil Unrest in Kyrgyzstan

In June, the UN launched a $96 million emergency appeal following an anti-Uzbek pogrom in Kyrgyzstan. 100,000 people were displaced in a very short period of time, most across the border to Uzbekistan. Now, they are returning and in need of assistance. Many homes were destroyed livelihoods lost. To date, the UN has received 35 million, or 36% of the total funding needed to care for the humanitarian needs of the displaced.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing,” which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Information about the film, distributed by the Media Education Foundation, and an extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff are online at http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html.

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html.