Baltimore Activist Alert July 27 – Aug. 2, 2012
"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours.
The initiative to stop it must be ours." -Martin Luther King Jr.
Friends, this list and other email documents which I send out are done under the auspices of the Baltimore Nonviolence Center. Go to www.baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com. If you appreciate this information and would like to make a donation, send contributions to BNC, 325 East 25th Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. Max Obuszewski can be reached at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski [at] verizon.net.
Tune into the Maryland Progressive Blog at http://mdprogblog.org.
1] Books, buttons and stickers
2] Web site for info on federal legislation
3] Join Nonviolent Resistance lists
4] Buy coffee through HoCoFoLA
5] Help out the Green Party
6] White House vigil – July 27
7] WIB Inner Harbor vigil – July 27
8] WIB Roland Park vigil – July 27
9] Justice for Palestine/Israel vigil – July 27
10] AFL-CIO book discussion – July 27
11] Silent peace vigil – July 27
12] Green Friday – July 27
13] Palestinian Photo Exhibit – July 27
14] Play LETHAL INJECTION – July 27 through Aug. 5
15] Ballroom dancing – July 27
16] Tent of Dreams: An Occuplay – July 27
17] Olney peace vigil – July 28
18] Canvass for Marriage Equality -- July 28
19] West Chester, PA demo – July 28
20] Silent vigil at Capitol – July 28
21] Protest fracking – July 28
22] Film A PROPHET – July 28
23] Reflections of a Family Practitioner – July 29
24] Bridges for Peace – July 29
25] Seek truth at Trader Joe’s – July 29
26] Canvass for Marriage Equality -- July 29
27] Media Center fundraiser – July 29
28] Philadelphia Peace Vigil – July 29
29] Book THE UNCONQUERED -- July 29
30] Tent of Dreams: An Occuplay – July 29
31] Liberia 2.0 – July 29
32] Red Emma’s meeting – July 29
33] Pentagon Vigil – July 30
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1] – Buttons, bumperstickers and books are available. “God Bless the Whole World, No Exceptions” stickers are in stock. Donate your books to Max. Call him at 410-366-1637.
2] – To obtain information how your federal legislators voted on particular bills, go to http://thomas.loc.gov/. Congressional toll-free numbers are 888-818-6641, 888-355-3588 or 800-426-8073. The White House Comment Email is accessible at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.
3] – THE ORGANIZING LIST will be the primary decision-making mechanism of the National Campaign of Nonviolent Resistance [NCNR]. It will be augmented by conference calls and possibly in-person meetings as needed. It will consist of 1 or 2 representatives from each local, regional, or national organization (not coalitions) that wishes to actively work to carry out the NCNR campaign of facilitating and organizing nonviolent resistance to the war in Iraq.
To join the ORGANIZING List, please send your name, group affiliation, city and email address to donmuller@msn.com. Different local chapters of a national organization are encouraged to subscribe.
THE NOTICES LIST will include only notices of NCNR actions and related information and is open to any interested person to subscribe. It will be moderated to maintain focus & will include periodic notices about getting involved in NCNR national organizing. To join the NOTICES List, send an email message to ncnrnotices-subscribe@lists.riseup.net. You will get a confirmation message once subscribed. If you have problems, please write to the list manager at ncnrnotices-admin@lists.riseup.net.
4] – You can help safeguard human rights and fragile ecosystems through your purchase of HOCOFOLA Café Quetzal. Bags of ground coffee or whole beans can be ordered by mailing in an order form. Also note organic cocoa and sugar are for sale. For more details and to download the order form, go to http://friendsoflatinamerica.typepad.com/hocofola/2010/02/hocofola-cafe-quetzal-order-form-2010.html. The coffee comes in one-pound bags.
Fill out the form and mail it with a check made out to HOCOFOLA on or before the second week of the month. Be sure you indicate ground or beans for each type of coffee ordered. Send it to Adela Hirsch, 5358 Eliots Oak Rd., Columbia, MD 21044. Be sure you indicate ground (G) or bean (B) for each type of coffee ordered. The coffee will arrive some time the following week and you will be notified where to pick it up. Contact Adela at 410-997-5662 or via e-mail at adela4peace@verizon.net.
5] – Bill Barry [wbarrymd@hotmail.com] is asking for your help in keeping the Maryland Green Party on the ballot line. The Maryland Green Party still needs another 1,500 signatures on petitions. Can you help out? He has the petitions, and would like to know if you can get ten signatures from registered voters. He will get you the petitions.
6] – A peace vigil takes place every Friday from noon to 1 PM at Lafayette Park facing the White House. Join the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker and friends. Contact Art Laffin: artlaffin@hotmail.com.
7] – Every Friday from noon to 1 PM, Women in Black, Baltimore, host a vigil at Pratt and Light Sts. in the Inner Harbor. Peace signs will be available. See http://www.peacepath911.com/ or write wibbaltimore@hotmail.com or call 410-467-9114.
8] – There is also a noon vigil on July 27 at Roland Park Place at 830 W. 40th St. Call 410-467-9114.
9] – A vigil for Justice in Palestine/Israel (now in its 8th year) takes place every Friday from noon to 1 PM at 19th & JFK Blvd., Philadelphia (across from Israeli Consulate. It is sponsored by Bubbies & Zaydes (Grandparents) for Peace in the Middle East. Email cswartz@pil.net. Go to http://phillyjewishpeace.org/.
10] – The AFL-CIO Summer Book Group will discuss "From Financial Crisis to Stagnation: The Destruction of Shared Prosperity and the Role of Economics," by Tom Palley. on Fri., July 27 from noon to 2 PM at AFL-CIO, 815 16th St. NW. Bring your lunch and come join in a lively discussion. Drinks will be provided, and books will be available for purchase and author signing. Why is our economy stagnating, rather than recovering? Economist Tom Palley argues the same conventional economic thinking that led to the Great Recession could lead to a Great Stagnation. Visit http://www.dclabor.org/ht/display/EventDetails/i/102693/pid/538.
11] – There is a silent vigil on Fri., July 27 from 5 to 6 PM outside of Homewood Friends Meeting, 3107 N. Charles St., in opposition to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Placards say: "War Is Not the Answer." The silent vigil is sponsored by AFSC, Homewood Friends and Stony Run Meetings.
12] – Bill Barry [mailto:wbarrymd@hotmail.com] invites you to GREEN FRIDAY, July 27 from 5 to 7 PM to think globally and drink locally outside The Chameleon Cafe, 4341 Harford Road. Stop by, have a drink, bring your Green Party petitions if you have them, and plot and conspire.
13] – Jerusalem Fund Gallery Photography Exhibit opens on Fri., July 27 from 6 to 8 PM and continues through Sun., Aug. 19 at 6 PM at 2425 Virginia Ave. NW. More than a romantic idea, Palestinians' cultivation of their land contains the seeds of resistance. Walk the fields through Vivien Sansour's photographs, experience the relationship of farmer to land, see how old ways of planting and harvesting, of cooking old recipes, form a historical continuum, the fruits of their labors feeding the body and the soul of Palestine today.
Vivien will combine stunning large format images of Palestinian farmland with portraits of individual farmers. In addition, she will debut a film on the traditional method of making apricot jam, and include photographic recipe cards. During the opening, end-use products from the farmers harvests, such as tapenade, sun dried tomatoes, maftoul and za'atar, along with flavored olive oils, will be available for tasting and purchase. Call 202-338-1958 or email info@thejerusalemfund.org
14] – In Michael Reimann's new play, LETHAL INJECTION, the audience plays the role of the jury in a case of two brothers accused of murdering an intruder in their Texas home. A conviction means death by lethal injection.
The play, part of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, can be seen on weekends from Fri., July 27 through Sun., Aug. 5. On Fridays and Saturdays, the performance begins at 8 PM. On Sunday, it starts at 2 PM at the Vagabond Players, 806 S. Broadway. Call 410-563-9135. Or go to http://vagabondplayers.org. Tickets are priced from $10-$12.
15] – There is an opportunity to participate in ballroom dancing, usually every Friday of the month, in the JHU ROTC Bldg. at 8 PM. Turn south on San Martin Dr. from the intersection of Univ. Parkway and 39th St. Drive on campus by taking the third left turn. The next dance will be July 27. Call Dave Greene at 410-599-3725.
16] – Tent of Dreams: An Occuplay will be performed on Fri., July 27 at 8 PM at: the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent Bar, Fort Fringe, 607 New York Ave., NW. Nu Sass is back. They are presenting the play at the 2012 Capital Fringe Festival. See https://www.facebook.com/events/247863098649134/.
17] – Friends House, 17715 Meeting House Rd., Sandy Spring, MD 20860, hosts a peace vigil every Saturday, 10:30 to 11:30 AM, on the corner of Rt. 108 and Georgia Ave. in Olney, MD. The next vigil is July 28. Call Chuck Harker at 301-570-7167.
18] – Join the Frederick Canvass for Marriage Equality on Saturdays, 11 AM to 1 PM, corner of E. Patrick St. & N Market St., Frederick, MD 21701. RSVP at manley@mdfme.org.
19] – Each Saturday, 11 AM – 1 PM, Chester County Peace Movement holds a peace vigil in West Chester in front of the Chester County Courthouse, High & Market Sts. Go to www.ccpeace.org. Email ccpeacemovement@aol.com.
20] – There will be a peace vigil on the West Lawn of the Capitol at noon on Sat., July 28. Look for the blue banner with the message, "Seek Peace and Pursue It.--Psalms 34:14." The vigil lasts one hour and is silent except when one responds to the occasional questions. Go to http://www.quaker.org/langleyhill/seekpeace.htm or email seekpeacevigil@yahoo.com.
21] – Join PSR’s executive director, Catherine Thomasson MD, in calling for a halt to health-endangering hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) used in drilling for oil and natural gas. Dr. Thomasson will address the first nationwide demonstration protesting unsafe fracking. Join Dr. Thomasson on the Mall in Washington, DC.
22] – See the film A Prophet on Sat., July 28 at 7 PM at the Peace House, 1233 12th St. NW. The film (French: Un prophète) is a 2009 French prison film directed by Jacques Audiard, who claims the film aims at "creating icons, images for people who don't have images in movies, like the Arabs in France." Go to https://www.facebook.com/events/340259412722281/.
23] – Usually, the Baltimore Ethical Society, 306 W. Franklin St., Suite 102, Baltimore, MD 21201-4661, meets on Sundays, and generally there is a speaker and discussion from 10:30 to 11:30 AM. On Sun., July 29, the topic is “Reflections of a Family Practitioner,” and the presentation will be by Susan Henley, MD. The long-time BES member will reflect on what she has learned in her professional life, how it fulfills her, and how it translates into other areas of her life, including her family. Call 410-581-2322 or visit www.baltimoreethicalsociety.org.
24] – Maryland Bridges for Peace welcomes you to stand for peace Sundays from noon (or thereabouts) to 1 PM on the Spa Creek Bridge in Annapolis. Contact Lucy at 410-263-7271 or mdbridgesforpeace@toadmail.com. Signs are not allowed to be on a stick or pole. If there is interest, people will be standing on the Stoney Creek Bridge on Fort Smallwood Road in Pasadena [410-437-5379 or magicalgodmom@aol.com]. Go to http://BridgePeace.blogspot.com/.
25] – Shopping for Truth at Trader Joe's, 1101 25th St. NW, on Sun., July 29 from noon until 2 PM. The DC Occupy Monsanto Genetic Crimes Unit will investigate the extent of Monsanto's genetic contamination in the Trader Joe's private-label products. Samples will be collected from various processed foods and will be analyzed for the existence of mutilated genes & toxic pesticide residue. Join the shop for the truth. Visit https://www.facebook.com/events/395141327213264/.
26] – Join an Annapolis canvass for marriage equality on Sundays from 2 to 4 PM at the UUCA Parking Lot, 333 Dubois Road, Annapolis, MD 21401. RSVP at manley@mdfme.org.
27] – The People's Media Center Fundraiser is happening on Sun., July 29 from 4 to 8 PM at Haydee's Restaurant, 3102 Mount Pleasant St. NW, WDC 20010-2710. The event is for an artist's showcase to uplift and inspire people of all ages. Support the Peoples Media Center to enhance communications and empowerment programs, to train a media crew in radio and TV production, open websites and blogs and more. Go to https://www.facebook.com/events/335486079866872/.
28] – Every Sunday, 4 to 5 PM, there is a Quaker Peace Vigil at Independence Mall, N. side of Market between 5th and 6th Sts., Philadelphia. Call 215-421-5811.
29] – On Sun., July 29 at 5 PM at Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, there is an author event with Scott Wallace, author of “The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes.” This is the Washington, D.C. launch of the paperback edition.
Email Amazon Watch at andrew=amazonwatch.org@mail22.us2.mcsv.net.
Scott will discuss the latest information on the Amazon's uncontacted tribes and read from the book. Fresh from the deep jungles of Peru and Ecuador where uncontacted indigenous communities continue to hold forth in isolation from the outside world, Scott will bring his unique insights to bear on the discussion.
30] – Tent of Dreams: An Occuplay will be performed on Sun., July 29 at 5:30 PM at: the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent Bar, Fort Fringe, 607 New York Ave., NW. Nu Sass is back. They are presenting the play at the 2012 Capital Fringe Festival. See https://www.facebook.com/events/247863098649134/.
31] – Liberia 2.0: A Celebration of Arts and Culture is on for Sun., July 29 from 6 to 9 PM at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre, Rockville, MD 20851. The evening will begin with a reception and exhibition of contemporary visual art, followed by an exhilarating evening of entertainment. Buy tickets at http://liberia20.ticketleap.com/liberia-2point0/.
32] – Red Emma’s needs volunteers. Stop in to the weekly Sunday meeting at 7 PM at 800 St. Paul St. or email info@redemmas.org. The next meeting is July 29. There is no meeting on the first Sunday of the month. Call 410-230-0450. If you would be interested in volunteering or becoming a collective member of 2640, send an email to 2640@redemmas.org.
33] – There is a weekly Pentagon Peace Vigil from 7 to 8 AM on Mondays, since 1987, outside the Pentagon Metro stop. The next vigil is Mon., July 30, and it is sponsored by the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker. Call 202-882-9649.
To be continued.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Friday, July 27, 2012
Eve Tetaz released/The Power of Training for Direct Action
Eve Tetaz, a retired eighty year young former DC public school teacher, was given a 60 day jail sentence for her involvement in the January 17th nonviolent witness at the U.S. Supreme Court to end the death penalty. At her June 27th sentencing before Judge McKenna she said she could not in good conscience cooperate with fines or probation or a stay away order from the court grounds. Consequently, she was sent to D.C. jail to serve her sentence. Thankfully, she was released yesterday on medical grounds. It was reported she was not looking well upon release. It is hoped fresh air and contact with friends will revive her.
The Power of Training for Direct Action
By George Lakey
Usually, direct action training is what it sounds like: training in preparation for a direct action. Sometimes, however, the training itself is the action.
Consider this story. The members of a hospital workers union were frustrated because their strike was being disregarded by the employer. The formerly locally owned Pennsylvania nursing home where they worked had been taken over in the 1980s by a Canadian corporation that wanted to break the union. The workers had never had to go on strike before and felt uneasy about picketing on the streets of their small city; they saw themselves as the “solid citizens” of the working class who didn’t make trouble.
Still, the corporation wasn’t willing to negotiate seriously, and they felt forced to do what they thought of as an undignified thing by going on strike. But even then, the strike wasn’t working; the employer stonewalled.
The union’s organizer called me and asked for a civil disobedience training. “The members don’t want this,” he said, “but they are willing to explore the C.D. option because they are running out of patience. They want a full evening of training.”
Barbara Smith of the Jobs With Peace Campaign agreed to co-facilitate. We found over 60 workers in the union hall when we arrived — virtually the whole staff who were free to come. The main part of the workshop was role-playing a sit-in in the offices of the nursing home management, with some members playing police who came in to arrest the workers. I marveled at the courage of these longtime residents of the town, blue-collar people who prided themselves on never having been in trouble with the law, pretending to be handcuffed and led off to police vans. Some were visibly shaking, but they did it.
At the end of the evening, we did a closing circle. Barbara initiated it and asked each person to say why they cared so much about this struggle that they were willing to take the risk. I was moved by the depth with which they spoke. The youngest said that she was taking the risk “because Mildred” — nodding to an elderly woman across the circle from her — “is close to retirement and deserves for her last year to be treated with respect.”
I saw the tears in Mildred’s eyes, and when it came to her turn in the circle, she said, “It’s amazing that Karen said what she did, because I was going to say that I’m taking this risk because she’s just started her life as a worker, and I want her to know the dignity of being in a union.”
The next day I got a phone call from the union organizer. “The boss called me,” he said. “He wants to restart negotiations on a serious basis.”
The organizer laughed. “Of course we assumed there was a company spy in our training last night, so the boss would find out what we were planning. But I didn’t expect a turnaround right away. Looks like they don’t even want to face the civil disobedience—they just want to settle!”
“What do you think was involved in that?” I asked.
“A lot of things,” he said, “but I’ll bet one of the most important ones was that closing circle. The spy could see the members’ determination. I’m sure they don’t want to deal with that!”
This incident reminded me of something much larger, a decade before in New Zealand. Many New Zealanders opposed the South African rugby team coming to play New Zealand’s national rugby team, planned for 1973. Their slogan was, “Don’t import apartheid sport!” The New Zealand protest was part of a series of sports campaigns in the British Commonwealth putting pressure on South Africa to abandon apartheid.
The New Zealand campaign invited me to facilitate a series of training camps in preparation for their direct action. The training was to serve three purposes: to bring together organizers from a variety of movements (including environmental, Maori, and women’s) to learn popular education methods of training, to train trainers for the anti-apartheid campaign itself, and to create a context for the main leaders of the anti-apartheid campaign to gain more unity and strategic cohesion.
New Zealand’s right wing got wind of my being invited and launched a national petition drive to ban me from the country, on the grounds that I was a known foreign agitator whose work threatened the public order. But the government allowed me in, and the petition drive ensured that our three weeks of trainings were done in the glare of media attention—a positive thing in itself.
The last of the three trainings focused on the anti-apartheid activists and leaders. I knew ahead of time about the differences that divided them and their competitiveness with one another. I led an intense simulation that lasted over 12 hours and brought the entire camp to the point of exhaustion and fresh insights. At that point, the training turned into a planning session that brought the movement into strategic unity for the first time.
At the end of that training, the head of New Zealand’s national police force asked to see me, “off the record.” He said that after all the media attention and national controversy I’d gotten, he needed to meet me personally. We had a vigorous interchange, and when the conversation turned to the South African rugby team, he said he would recommend to the government that it prevent the team’s visit. “You’ve won,” he said.
“How?” I asked.
“The leadership at the camp created a strategy we can’t beat,” he said, “and the nonviolent training program reinforces the strategy. If the rugby tour happened, it would be a disaster for the government.”
I tested his conclusion, asking about various repressive options the government might have at its disposal, like calling out the troops to back up the police. He explained why each option would end poorly for the government and probably cost it the next election.
From back home in Philly, I followed subsequent events and, indeed, without the grassroots movement having to implement its direct action campaign—and to the fury of hard-core rugby fans—the government canceled the South African rugby team’s tour.
It may be time to experiment more with using training as a form of action. In April, the Earth Quaker Action Team climaxed its 200-mile Green Walk for Jobs and Justice with a training in Pittsburgh, on the sidewalk in front of the national headquarters of PNC Bank.
First, there were attempts to deliver an invitation to PNC’s CEO to meet with us. Then, people from Appalachian coal country talked about the suffering they experience from mountaintop removal coal mining and called on PNC Bank to stop funding extreme extraction, including fracking.
Finally, the walkers staged a practice action, complete with role-playing police “arresting” demonstrators in a sit-down on the sidewalk.
The excitement of the training slowed traffic on the busy downtown street. EQAT staff organizer Zach Hershman, who facilitated the training, said through the bullhorn, “We need to practice so we’re ready to return to Pittsburgh and stage a sit-in in the bank.”
After the role-play was over, Zach asked for a show of hands on how many had previously done direct action. Many had not. After the event was over I turned to a gray-haired woman next to me who had not raised her hand and asked her about that. Her face turned thoughtful.
“When I was young in the civil rights days, I knew racism was wrong but I didn’t join the sit-ins. I was scared. Then the anti-Vietnam war protests started and I agreed with them, but I was too scared to join.”
She paused, and looked right at me. “But now,” she said, “I’m not scared any more.”
George Lakey is the director of Training for Change. He has led 1,500 workshops and activist projects on the local, national and international levels. He has written severalarticles and books on strategizing for activism, including "Grassroots and Nonprofit Leadership: A Guide for Organizations in Changing Times." Currently, Lakey is a Lang Research Fellow and Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/power-training-direct-action-1343395651. All rights are reserved.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
The Power of Training for Direct Action
By George Lakey
Usually, direct action training is what it sounds like: training in preparation for a direct action. Sometimes, however, the training itself is the action.
Consider this story. The members of a hospital workers union were frustrated because their strike was being disregarded by the employer. The formerly locally owned Pennsylvania nursing home where they worked had been taken over in the 1980s by a Canadian corporation that wanted to break the union. The workers had never had to go on strike before and felt uneasy about picketing on the streets of their small city; they saw themselves as the “solid citizens” of the working class who didn’t make trouble.
Still, the corporation wasn’t willing to negotiate seriously, and they felt forced to do what they thought of as an undignified thing by going on strike. But even then, the strike wasn’t working; the employer stonewalled.
The union’s organizer called me and asked for a civil disobedience training. “The members don’t want this,” he said, “but they are willing to explore the C.D. option because they are running out of patience. They want a full evening of training.”
Barbara Smith of the Jobs With Peace Campaign agreed to co-facilitate. We found over 60 workers in the union hall when we arrived — virtually the whole staff who were free to come. The main part of the workshop was role-playing a sit-in in the offices of the nursing home management, with some members playing police who came in to arrest the workers. I marveled at the courage of these longtime residents of the town, blue-collar people who prided themselves on never having been in trouble with the law, pretending to be handcuffed and led off to police vans. Some were visibly shaking, but they did it.
At the end of the evening, we did a closing circle. Barbara initiated it and asked each person to say why they cared so much about this struggle that they were willing to take the risk. I was moved by the depth with which they spoke. The youngest said that she was taking the risk “because Mildred” — nodding to an elderly woman across the circle from her — “is close to retirement and deserves for her last year to be treated with respect.”
I saw the tears in Mildred’s eyes, and when it came to her turn in the circle, she said, “It’s amazing that Karen said what she did, because I was going to say that I’m taking this risk because she’s just started her life as a worker, and I want her to know the dignity of being in a union.”
The next day I got a phone call from the union organizer. “The boss called me,” he said. “He wants to restart negotiations on a serious basis.”
The organizer laughed. “Of course we assumed there was a company spy in our training last night, so the boss would find out what we were planning. But I didn’t expect a turnaround right away. Looks like they don’t even want to face the civil disobedience—they just want to settle!”
“What do you think was involved in that?” I asked.
“A lot of things,” he said, “but I’ll bet one of the most important ones was that closing circle. The spy could see the members’ determination. I’m sure they don’t want to deal with that!”
This incident reminded me of something much larger, a decade before in New Zealand. Many New Zealanders opposed the South African rugby team coming to play New Zealand’s national rugby team, planned for 1973. Their slogan was, “Don’t import apartheid sport!” The New Zealand protest was part of a series of sports campaigns in the British Commonwealth putting pressure on South Africa to abandon apartheid.
The New Zealand campaign invited me to facilitate a series of training camps in preparation for their direct action. The training was to serve three purposes: to bring together organizers from a variety of movements (including environmental, Maori, and women’s) to learn popular education methods of training, to train trainers for the anti-apartheid campaign itself, and to create a context for the main leaders of the anti-apartheid campaign to gain more unity and strategic cohesion.
New Zealand’s right wing got wind of my being invited and launched a national petition drive to ban me from the country, on the grounds that I was a known foreign agitator whose work threatened the public order. But the government allowed me in, and the petition drive ensured that our three weeks of trainings were done in the glare of media attention—a positive thing in itself.
The last of the three trainings focused on the anti-apartheid activists and leaders. I knew ahead of time about the differences that divided them and their competitiveness with one another. I led an intense simulation that lasted over 12 hours and brought the entire camp to the point of exhaustion and fresh insights. At that point, the training turned into a planning session that brought the movement into strategic unity for the first time.
At the end of that training, the head of New Zealand’s national police force asked to see me, “off the record.” He said that after all the media attention and national controversy I’d gotten, he needed to meet me personally. We had a vigorous interchange, and when the conversation turned to the South African rugby team, he said he would recommend to the government that it prevent the team’s visit. “You’ve won,” he said.
“How?” I asked.
“The leadership at the camp created a strategy we can’t beat,” he said, “and the nonviolent training program reinforces the strategy. If the rugby tour happened, it would be a disaster for the government.”
I tested his conclusion, asking about various repressive options the government might have at its disposal, like calling out the troops to back up the police. He explained why each option would end poorly for the government and probably cost it the next election.
From back home in Philly, I followed subsequent events and, indeed, without the grassroots movement having to implement its direct action campaign—and to the fury of hard-core rugby fans—the government canceled the South African rugby team’s tour.
It may be time to experiment more with using training as a form of action. In April, the Earth Quaker Action Team climaxed its 200-mile Green Walk for Jobs and Justice with a training in Pittsburgh, on the sidewalk in front of the national headquarters of PNC Bank.
First, there were attempts to deliver an invitation to PNC’s CEO to meet with us. Then, people from Appalachian coal country talked about the suffering they experience from mountaintop removal coal mining and called on PNC Bank to stop funding extreme extraction, including fracking.
Finally, the walkers staged a practice action, complete with role-playing police “arresting” demonstrators in a sit-down on the sidewalk.
The excitement of the training slowed traffic on the busy downtown street. EQAT staff organizer Zach Hershman, who facilitated the training, said through the bullhorn, “We need to practice so we’re ready to return to Pittsburgh and stage a sit-in in the bank.”
After the role-play was over, Zach asked for a show of hands on how many had previously done direct action. Many had not. After the event was over I turned to a gray-haired woman next to me who had not raised her hand and asked her about that. Her face turned thoughtful.
“When I was young in the civil rights days, I knew racism was wrong but I didn’t join the sit-ins. I was scared. Then the anti-Vietnam war protests started and I agreed with them, but I was too scared to join.”
She paused, and looked right at me. “But now,” she said, “I’m not scared any more.”
George Lakey is the director of Training for Change. He has led 1,500 workshops and activist projects on the local, national and international levels. He has written severalarticles and books on strategizing for activism, including "Grassroots and Nonprofit Leadership: A Guide for Organizations in Changing Times." Currently, Lakey is a Lang Research Fellow and Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/power-training-direct-action-1343395651. All rights are reserved.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Safe From Fire, but Not Guns
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/kristof-safe-from-fire-but-not-gone.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120726
July 25, 2012
Safe From Fire, but Not Guns
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Cinemas like the one in Colorado where the shooting took place last week are closely regulated in virtually every respect but one.
Federal law requires large theaters to have wheelchair seating, ramps as well as stairs, and bathrooms that are accessible to the disabled. Fire codes limit audience size. Emergency fire exits must be illuminated.
We have a ratings system to protect children from nudity or offensive language. Indeed, on that horrific night in the theater last week, only one major element wasn’t regulated: the guns and ammunition used to massacre viewers.
As a nation, we regulate fire exits, but not 100-round magazines. We shield youngsters in cinemas from violence — but only if it’s on the screen.
Almost a week after the cinema shooting, we can also be sure what won’t happen: serious gun control. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have supported a ban on assault weapons in the past, but both seem to have backed off for an obvious reason: the public has become pro-gun.
Since 1959, Gallup has asked Americans if they favor banning handguns. When the polling started, 60 percent said yes; the latest poll showed support from a new low of 26 percent.
The latest poll also found that, for the first time, a majority of Americans, 53 percent, opposed a ban on assault rifles.
Indeed, the immediate reaction to the Colorado shooting was a scramble to buy guns. The Denver Post reported a roughly 40 percent jump in background checks to purchase firearms.
“It’s been insane,” a gun store employee told the paper.
Quite.
Yet if traditional efforts at gun control are at a political dead end, there should still be room for a public health effort to mitigate their harm.
Take auto safety, one of the great successes of public health. Many car accidents involve unlawful behavior such as speeding or driving while intoxicated. We prosecute those offenders, but, for decades, we’ve also taken a broader public health approach. We’ve required seat belts and air bags, we’ve created graduated licenses for young drivers, and we have engineered roads and intersections so that accidents are less lethal.
The upshot is that the traffic fatality rate in the United States has fallen to a record low. Seat belts alone save more than 12,000 lives a year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
So if we can make cars safer, without banning them, then why not try to do the same with guns?
Look, I know this isn’t sexy. It certainly isn’t as satisfying to gun opponents as a ban on some kinds of firearms. But this approach might actually save thousands of lives.
Yes, the National Rifle Association will rant. But N.R.A. members are much more reasonable than their organization. There’s room for progress if politicians will show leadership. Hello, President Obama?
A recent survey found that more than 70 percent of N.R.A. members approve of criminal background checks for would-be gun owners. That suggests broad backing for one of the most crucial steps: a universal background check for all gun buyers, even when buying from private citizens. I’d also like to see us adopt Canada’s requirement that gun buyers have the support of two people vouching for them.
Other obvious steps include restricting high capacity magazines and limiting gun purchases to one a month. Making serial numbers more difficult to erase would help. And bravo to California for trying to require that new handguns imprint a microstamp on each bullet so that it can be traced back to the gun that fired it.
We should also finance research to design safer firearms. Many accidents would be averted if a gun always indicated if a round were in the chamber. And there should be ways to employ biometrics or a PIN so that a stolen gun would be unusable.
David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health has written an excellent book about public health approaches to firearms. But he argues that we need changes not just in laws but also in social mores — just as we’ve stigmatized drunken driving. Not to mention other kinds of irresponsibility.
“Where I see social norms changing is dog poop,” Hemenway said in an interview. “You’re not allowed to let your city dog run loose now, and you have to pick up your dog poop.” He muses: What if people felt as responsible for their guns as for their dogs? For starters, one result might be more people buying gun safes or trigger locks.
The bottom line is that to promote public health and safety, we regulate everything from theater fire exits to toy guns (that’s why they have orange tips). And if we impose rules on toy guns to make them safer, shouldn’t we do the same with real ones?
© 2011 The New York Times Company
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
July 25, 2012
Safe From Fire, but Not Guns
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Cinemas like the one in Colorado where the shooting took place last week are closely regulated in virtually every respect but one.
Federal law requires large theaters to have wheelchair seating, ramps as well as stairs, and bathrooms that are accessible to the disabled. Fire codes limit audience size. Emergency fire exits must be illuminated.
We have a ratings system to protect children from nudity or offensive language. Indeed, on that horrific night in the theater last week, only one major element wasn’t regulated: the guns and ammunition used to massacre viewers.
As a nation, we regulate fire exits, but not 100-round magazines. We shield youngsters in cinemas from violence — but only if it’s on the screen.
Almost a week after the cinema shooting, we can also be sure what won’t happen: serious gun control. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have supported a ban on assault weapons in the past, but both seem to have backed off for an obvious reason: the public has become pro-gun.
Since 1959, Gallup has asked Americans if they favor banning handguns. When the polling started, 60 percent said yes; the latest poll showed support from a new low of 26 percent.
The latest poll also found that, for the first time, a majority of Americans, 53 percent, opposed a ban on assault rifles.
Indeed, the immediate reaction to the Colorado shooting was a scramble to buy guns. The Denver Post reported a roughly 40 percent jump in background checks to purchase firearms.
“It’s been insane,” a gun store employee told the paper.
Quite.
Yet if traditional efforts at gun control are at a political dead end, there should still be room for a public health effort to mitigate their harm.
Take auto safety, one of the great successes of public health. Many car accidents involve unlawful behavior such as speeding or driving while intoxicated. We prosecute those offenders, but, for decades, we’ve also taken a broader public health approach. We’ve required seat belts and air bags, we’ve created graduated licenses for young drivers, and we have engineered roads and intersections so that accidents are less lethal.
The upshot is that the traffic fatality rate in the United States has fallen to a record low. Seat belts alone save more than 12,000 lives a year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
So if we can make cars safer, without banning them, then why not try to do the same with guns?
Look, I know this isn’t sexy. It certainly isn’t as satisfying to gun opponents as a ban on some kinds of firearms. But this approach might actually save thousands of lives.
Yes, the National Rifle Association will rant. But N.R.A. members are much more reasonable than their organization. There’s room for progress if politicians will show leadership. Hello, President Obama?
A recent survey found that more than 70 percent of N.R.A. members approve of criminal background checks for would-be gun owners. That suggests broad backing for one of the most crucial steps: a universal background check for all gun buyers, even when buying from private citizens. I’d also like to see us adopt Canada’s requirement that gun buyers have the support of two people vouching for them.
Other obvious steps include restricting high capacity magazines and limiting gun purchases to one a month. Making serial numbers more difficult to erase would help. And bravo to California for trying to require that new handguns imprint a microstamp on each bullet so that it can be traced back to the gun that fired it.
We should also finance research to design safer firearms. Many accidents would be averted if a gun always indicated if a round were in the chamber. And there should be ways to employ biometrics or a PIN so that a stolen gun would be unusable.
David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health has written an excellent book about public health approaches to firearms. But he argues that we need changes not just in laws but also in social mores — just as we’ve stigmatized drunken driving. Not to mention other kinds of irresponsibility.
“Where I see social norms changing is dog poop,” Hemenway said in an interview. “You’re not allowed to let your city dog run loose now, and you have to pick up your dog poop.” He muses: What if people felt as responsible for their guns as for their dogs? For starters, one result might be more people buying gun safes or trigger locks.
The bottom line is that to promote public health and safety, we regulate everything from theater fire exits to toy guns (that’s why they have orange tips). And if we impose rules on toy guns to make them safer, shouldn’t we do the same with real ones?
© 2011 The New York Times Company
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Fracking is polluting and endangering the planet.
Fracking is polluting and endangering the planet.
In hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), a chemical-water mixture is injected deep underground to break apart geological formations and extract natural gas or oil. It is already resulting in water pollution, air pollution, and releases of methane, a climate change-inducing gas far more potent that carbon dioxide.
Take Action!
Join Physicians for Social Responsibility executive director Catherine Thomasson, MD at a rally in Washington, DC this Saturday to call for a moratorium on fracking until its health threats can be brought under control.
PSR has found that fracking's threats to health include industrial-scale water consumption and contamination; air pollution, particularly by volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and methane; seismic effects (i.e. earthquakes), and the generation and management of large quantities of toxic liquid waste.
Hydraulic fracturing should be halted until enforceable rules are in place that provide adequate protection for human health and the environment.
Come raise your voice for a halt to fracking. Join PSR in Washington this Saturday. We'll be on the Mall at the West side of the Capitol Building at 2 pm.
Yours for a livable planet,
Barbara Gottlieb
Director, Environment & Health
Published on Thursday, July 26, 2012 by The Switchboard / NRDC Blog
Stop the Frack Attack
by Frances Beinecke
All around the country, people are telling the story of what it’s like to live next door to fracking. Many of them never imagined that polluting drill pads or massive water trucks would come to dominate their small towns or suburban subdivisions. Yet over the last few years, tens of thousands of natural gas wells have been drilled in America.
Energy companies are so hungry for profits they are chasing oil and natural gas wherever they find it—even right near our homes.
People are fighting back by telling the truth about life in the fracking fields. One woman from Butler County, Pennsylvania, for instance, says her sleepy town has been upended. “I am living in an industrial wasteland now. I get to deal with explosions, high traffic, stinky air, and having no water. So yeah, my nice rural community is now an industrial wasteland.”
Residents of Firestone, Colorado north of Denver wonder about the dangers of having drill pads less than 400 feet from a local school playground, especially since scientists have found that people living within a half-mile of fracking operations face greater health risks.
And a woman who lives next to natural gas wells and a compressor station in Bartonville, Texas, has struggled to help her children cope with severe asthma attacks. “I am not an activist, an alarmist, a Democrat, environmentalist or anything like that. I’m just a person who isn’t able to manage the health of my family because of all this drilling.”
These are the stories we need to tell lawmakers and administration officials. They need to hear why it’s so important to create stronger standards for fracking operations. Right now, fracking remains grossly under-regulated because oil and gas companies have managed to block or weaken most attempts to make them clean up their act.
It’s time to change that. Energy companies exert extraordinary influence in state capitols and Congress, but if enough Americans start raising our voices about the dangers of fracking, companies won’t be able to drown us out.
This Saturday we have a great opportunity to amplify our voices. NRDC and our partners are supporting the Stop the Frack Attack rally in Washington on July 28. People will gather from as far away as Texas and Ohio, Idaho and Arkansas to tell Congress, the White House, and the Bureau of Land Management, and the Environmental Protection Agency to put communities first and start issuing stronger safeguards.
In the days before the rally, people from around the country will by meeting with lawmakers and urging them to close the fracking loopholes in environmental laws.
Only by speaking up, describing life in the fracking fields, and demanding action from our representatives we will succeed in protecting our communities. You can start by clicking here and telling the Obama Administration you support new standards for fracking on public lands.
© 2012 NRDC
Frances Beinecke is the President of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/26-9
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
In hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), a chemical-water mixture is injected deep underground to break apart geological formations and extract natural gas or oil. It is already resulting in water pollution, air pollution, and releases of methane, a climate change-inducing gas far more potent that carbon dioxide.
Take Action!
Join Physicians for Social Responsibility executive director Catherine Thomasson, MD at a rally in Washington, DC this Saturday to call for a moratorium on fracking until its health threats can be brought under control.
PSR has found that fracking's threats to health include industrial-scale water consumption and contamination; air pollution, particularly by volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and methane; seismic effects (i.e. earthquakes), and the generation and management of large quantities of toxic liquid waste.
Hydraulic fracturing should be halted until enforceable rules are in place that provide adequate protection for human health and the environment.
Come raise your voice for a halt to fracking. Join PSR in Washington this Saturday. We'll be on the Mall at the West side of the Capitol Building at 2 pm.
Yours for a livable planet,
Barbara Gottlieb
Director, Environment & Health
Published on Thursday, July 26, 2012 by The Switchboard / NRDC Blog
Stop the Frack Attack
by Frances Beinecke
All around the country, people are telling the story of what it’s like to live next door to fracking. Many of them never imagined that polluting drill pads or massive water trucks would come to dominate their small towns or suburban subdivisions. Yet over the last few years, tens of thousands of natural gas wells have been drilled in America.
Energy companies are so hungry for profits they are chasing oil and natural gas wherever they find it—even right near our homes.
People are fighting back by telling the truth about life in the fracking fields. One woman from Butler County, Pennsylvania, for instance, says her sleepy town has been upended. “I am living in an industrial wasteland now. I get to deal with explosions, high traffic, stinky air, and having no water. So yeah, my nice rural community is now an industrial wasteland.”
Residents of Firestone, Colorado north of Denver wonder about the dangers of having drill pads less than 400 feet from a local school playground, especially since scientists have found that people living within a half-mile of fracking operations face greater health risks.
And a woman who lives next to natural gas wells and a compressor station in Bartonville, Texas, has struggled to help her children cope with severe asthma attacks. “I am not an activist, an alarmist, a Democrat, environmentalist or anything like that. I’m just a person who isn’t able to manage the health of my family because of all this drilling.”
These are the stories we need to tell lawmakers and administration officials. They need to hear why it’s so important to create stronger standards for fracking operations. Right now, fracking remains grossly under-regulated because oil and gas companies have managed to block or weaken most attempts to make them clean up their act.
It’s time to change that. Energy companies exert extraordinary influence in state capitols and Congress, but if enough Americans start raising our voices about the dangers of fracking, companies won’t be able to drown us out.
This Saturday we have a great opportunity to amplify our voices. NRDC and our partners are supporting the Stop the Frack Attack rally in Washington on July 28. People will gather from as far away as Texas and Ohio, Idaho and Arkansas to tell Congress, the White House, and the Bureau of Land Management, and the Environmental Protection Agency to put communities first and start issuing stronger safeguards.
In the days before the rally, people from around the country will by meeting with lawmakers and urging them to close the fracking loopholes in environmental laws.
Only by speaking up, describing life in the fracking fields, and demanding action from our representatives we will succeed in protecting our communities. You can start by clicking here and telling the Obama Administration you support new standards for fracking on public lands.
© 2012 NRDC
Frances Beinecke is the President of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/26-9
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Thursday, July 26, 2012
NRA's Wayne LaPierre Has Blood on His Hands for Aurora Shooting and Many Others
http://www.alternet.org/story/156450/nra%27s_wayne_lapierre_has_blood_on_his_hands_for_aurora_shooting_and_many_others?paging=off
civil liberties
AlterNet / By Peter Dreier
NRA's Wayne LaPierre Has Blood on His Hands for Aurora Shooting and Many Others
LaPierre didn't pull the trigger, but he's the NRA's hit man when it comes to intimidating elected officials to oppose any kind of gun control.
July 24, 2012
The Brady Campaign has a 62-page list of mass shootings in America since 2005. It is Wayne LaPierre's resume.
For 21 years, LaPierre has been the executive VP and chief political strategist of the National Rifle Association. The blood of the victims of the Aurora, Colorado shooting is on his hands.
Of course, LaPierre didn't pull the trigger, but he's the NRA's hit man when it comes to intimidating elected officials to oppose any kind of gun control and the nation's most vocal advocate of gun owner rights.
The NRA not only lobbies on behalf of "stand your ground" laws, but also offers insurance to members to pay for the legal costs of shooting people in "self-defense." The NRA also defends the right of Americans to carry concealed weapons, including handguns.
James Holmes, the man who walked into the Aurora movie theater, killed 12 people and wounded 58 others, is no doubt deranged. He's not alone. There are lots of crazy people around. But if we make it easy for them to obtain guns, they are more likely to translate their psychological problems into dangerous and deadly anti-social behavior. The three guns Holmes used in the killings were all purchased legally.
LaPierre's job (which he's held for 21 years) is to make it easier for people to buy and use guns. And so far he's been very successful.
It is no accident that the United States ranks first in the world -- by a wide margin -- in gun-related civilian deaths and injuries. Compared with every other democracy, we have the most guns and the weakest gun laws. The shooting at the Aurora movie theater was not an isolated incident. We've almost become used to a regular diet of gun-toting rampages. The most visible of them -- like Columbine, the Virginia Tech killings and the Arizona shooting that nearly claimed the life of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and left six others dead -- stick in our minds, but there are many others. Even more Americans are killed each year in one-on-one shootings.
The NRA has two knee-jerk responses to this. The first is that the Second Amendment gives all Americans the right to possess guns of all kinds -- not just hunting rifles but machine guns and semi-automatics. Efforts to restrict gun sales and ownership is, according to the NRA, an assault on our constitutional freedoms. The second is the cliché that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." To the NRA, gun laws have nothing to do with the epidemic of gun-related killings.
Both of these arguments are bogus, but the NRA has the money and membership (4 million) to translate these idiot ideas into political clout to thwart even reasonable gun-control laws.
Even in countries with strong gun-control laws, some people will get their hands on a weapon and destroy others' lives. The tragic killing in Norway one year ago is testament to this reality. (Although let's recall that Anders Breivik bought $550 worth of 30-round ammunition clips from an American gun supplier for the rifle he used to kill 69 Norwegian kids at a summer camp. Thanks to American laws, it was a legal online purchase.) But the shooting in Norway was an infrequent occurrence; it is, in fact, one of the safest countries in the world. In contrast, the U.S. is off the charts in terms of murder rates. In other well-off democratic countries, gun violence is rare and shocking.
According to the most recent comparative figures, the U.S. had five murders for every 100,000 inhabitants. Finland was next with only 2.3 murders per 100,000 residents, followed by Canada (1.8), Belgium (1.7), France (1.3), England and Australia (both 1.2), Netherlands (1.1), Sweden (1.0), Germany (0.8), Norway (0.6) and Japan and Austria (both 0.5). In other words, America's murder rate is more than eight times greater than Norway's.
These statistics translate into real-life tragedies. In 2010, there were 12,996 murders in the United States and 8,775 (24 a day) were caused by firearms. Suicides and unintentional shootings account for another 20,000 deaths by guns each year. Of course, many more people are injured -- some seriously, and permanently -- by gun violence.
Many gun-related deaths are committed by people who purchase their weapons legally. Others purchase or steal them illegally, but their ability to get access to guns is due to our lax laws on gun ownership.
The news media will spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to figure out what was in Holmes' head before he put on his protective gear, carried three guns into the theater, and began his attack. On Sunday, when Meet the Press host David Gregory asked Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper whether this Aurora incident should lead to a discussion of gun control, he avoided the question entirely and instead focused on the killer's state of mind, calling him "demonic," "twisted," and "deeply, deeply disturbed." Although the psychology of the murderer may be fascinating, it should not be the major focus. There are plenty of deranged people in the world, but in most well-off countries they can't easily get their hands on a firearm.
The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other well-off democratic country. But the danger isn't simply the number of guns; it is the type of guns we allow people to legally purchase. Other countries permit hunting rifles. But many Americans believe it is their right to own an assault weapon.
Here's where the NRA comes in. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, since 1990, the gun rights lobby has contributed $27.7 million to candidates for Congress and the White House, 86% of it to Republicans.
In contrast, the gun control lobby has donated only $1.9 million to politicians, 94% to Democrats.
Of course, Democrats are not immune from the NRA's influence. Seventeen House Democrats recently voted in favor of criminal contempt for Attorney General Eric Holder for his oversight of Operation Fast and Furious. Not surprisingly, each of them received campaign contributions from the NRA in the last two election cycles. And each of them is on the hit list of vulnerable Democrats whose districts have a Republican or conservative majority of voters, and thus targets of NRA efforts to unseat them.
At the top of the gun rights food-chain is the NRA's Wayne LaPierre. Its hard to know if he's mentally unstable but he's certainly crazy like a fox (and Fox News). For example, he recently gave a well-received speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in which he said that President Obama was part of a "conspiracy to ensure re-election by lulling gun owners to sleep." LaPierre added: "All that first term, lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term." He also warned that "gun owners across America have fought to achieve over the past three decades could be lost" if Obama wins a second term.
Every American grieves for the families and friends of the people killed and injured in the Aurora shooting. So far LaPierre has been silent on the Aurora gun massacre. But until we tame the power of the NRA, we can expect more killings like this, as well as the deadly daily diet of murders throughout America committed by angry and in some cases crazy gun-toting people whose "freedom" to own weapons of mass destruction LaPierre defends.
Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His book,The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, was just published by Nation Books.
###
civil liberties
AlterNet / By Peter Dreier
NRA's Wayne LaPierre Has Blood on His Hands for Aurora Shooting and Many Others
LaPierre didn't pull the trigger, but he's the NRA's hit man when it comes to intimidating elected officials to oppose any kind of gun control.
July 24, 2012
The Brady Campaign has a 62-page list of mass shootings in America since 2005. It is Wayne LaPierre's resume.
For 21 years, LaPierre has been the executive VP and chief political strategist of the National Rifle Association. The blood of the victims of the Aurora, Colorado shooting is on his hands.
Of course, LaPierre didn't pull the trigger, but he's the NRA's hit man when it comes to intimidating elected officials to oppose any kind of gun control and the nation's most vocal advocate of gun owner rights.
The NRA not only lobbies on behalf of "stand your ground" laws, but also offers insurance to members to pay for the legal costs of shooting people in "self-defense." The NRA also defends the right of Americans to carry concealed weapons, including handguns.
James Holmes, the man who walked into the Aurora movie theater, killed 12 people and wounded 58 others, is no doubt deranged. He's not alone. There are lots of crazy people around. But if we make it easy for them to obtain guns, they are more likely to translate their psychological problems into dangerous and deadly anti-social behavior. The three guns Holmes used in the killings were all purchased legally.
LaPierre's job (which he's held for 21 years) is to make it easier for people to buy and use guns. And so far he's been very successful.
It is no accident that the United States ranks first in the world -- by a wide margin -- in gun-related civilian deaths and injuries. Compared with every other democracy, we have the most guns and the weakest gun laws. The shooting at the Aurora movie theater was not an isolated incident. We've almost become used to a regular diet of gun-toting rampages. The most visible of them -- like Columbine, the Virginia Tech killings and the Arizona shooting that nearly claimed the life of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and left six others dead -- stick in our minds, but there are many others. Even more Americans are killed each year in one-on-one shootings.
The NRA has two knee-jerk responses to this. The first is that the Second Amendment gives all Americans the right to possess guns of all kinds -- not just hunting rifles but machine guns and semi-automatics. Efforts to restrict gun sales and ownership is, according to the NRA, an assault on our constitutional freedoms. The second is the cliché that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." To the NRA, gun laws have nothing to do with the epidemic of gun-related killings.
Both of these arguments are bogus, but the NRA has the money and membership (4 million) to translate these idiot ideas into political clout to thwart even reasonable gun-control laws.
Even in countries with strong gun-control laws, some people will get their hands on a weapon and destroy others' lives. The tragic killing in Norway one year ago is testament to this reality. (Although let's recall that Anders Breivik bought $550 worth of 30-round ammunition clips from an American gun supplier for the rifle he used to kill 69 Norwegian kids at a summer camp. Thanks to American laws, it was a legal online purchase.) But the shooting in Norway was an infrequent occurrence; it is, in fact, one of the safest countries in the world. In contrast, the U.S. is off the charts in terms of murder rates. In other well-off democratic countries, gun violence is rare and shocking.
According to the most recent comparative figures, the U.S. had five murders for every 100,000 inhabitants. Finland was next with only 2.3 murders per 100,000 residents, followed by Canada (1.8), Belgium (1.7), France (1.3), England and Australia (both 1.2), Netherlands (1.1), Sweden (1.0), Germany (0.8), Norway (0.6) and Japan and Austria (both 0.5). In other words, America's murder rate is more than eight times greater than Norway's.
These statistics translate into real-life tragedies. In 2010, there were 12,996 murders in the United States and 8,775 (24 a day) were caused by firearms. Suicides and unintentional shootings account for another 20,000 deaths by guns each year. Of course, many more people are injured -- some seriously, and permanently -- by gun violence.
Many gun-related deaths are committed by people who purchase their weapons legally. Others purchase or steal them illegally, but their ability to get access to guns is due to our lax laws on gun ownership.
The news media will spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to figure out what was in Holmes' head before he put on his protective gear, carried three guns into the theater, and began his attack. On Sunday, when Meet the Press host David Gregory asked Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper whether this Aurora incident should lead to a discussion of gun control, he avoided the question entirely and instead focused on the killer's state of mind, calling him "demonic," "twisted," and "deeply, deeply disturbed." Although the psychology of the murderer may be fascinating, it should not be the major focus. There are plenty of deranged people in the world, but in most well-off countries they can't easily get their hands on a firearm.
The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other well-off democratic country. But the danger isn't simply the number of guns; it is the type of guns we allow people to legally purchase. Other countries permit hunting rifles. But many Americans believe it is their right to own an assault weapon.
Here's where the NRA comes in. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, since 1990, the gun rights lobby has contributed $27.7 million to candidates for Congress and the White House, 86% of it to Republicans.
In contrast, the gun control lobby has donated only $1.9 million to politicians, 94% to Democrats.
Of course, Democrats are not immune from the NRA's influence. Seventeen House Democrats recently voted in favor of criminal contempt for Attorney General Eric Holder for his oversight of Operation Fast and Furious. Not surprisingly, each of them received campaign contributions from the NRA in the last two election cycles. And each of them is on the hit list of vulnerable Democrats whose districts have a Republican or conservative majority of voters, and thus targets of NRA efforts to unseat them.
At the top of the gun rights food-chain is the NRA's Wayne LaPierre. Its hard to know if he's mentally unstable but he's certainly crazy like a fox (and Fox News). For example, he recently gave a well-received speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in which he said that President Obama was part of a "conspiracy to ensure re-election by lulling gun owners to sleep." LaPierre added: "All that first term, lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term." He also warned that "gun owners across America have fought to achieve over the past three decades could be lost" if Obama wins a second term.
Every American grieves for the families and friends of the people killed and injured in the Aurora shooting. So far LaPierre has been silent on the Aurora gun massacre. But until we tame the power of the NRA, we can expect more killings like this, as well as the deadly daily diet of murders throughout America committed by angry and in some cases crazy gun-toting people whose "freedom" to own weapons of mass destruction LaPierre defends.
Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His book,The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, was just published by Nation Books.
###
“Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” — Bill McKibben’s Call to Action on Carbon Emissions Makes Waves
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Eco Equity [1] / By Tom Athanasiou [2]
“Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” — Bill McKibben’s Call to Action on Carbon Emissions Makes Waves
July 26, 2012
The new issue of Rolling Stone has a major essay by Bill McKibben, called Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math [3]. It’s a must read, for a number of reasons. The big one is that McKibben’s call for a “carbon disinvestment” movement – aimed at breaking the hammerlock that the fossil cartel has on our civilization – is a big step forward. It’s not the only step we need to take (more on this below) but it would make a huge difference.
First up, Terrifying New Math is a fine science-for-civilians essay on the recent “extreme weather,” which has been monumental. In fact, the summer of 2012 may well turn out to be a decisive turning point in the climate war. Not to put too fine a point on this, but the deniers have obviously peaked, at least in the US, at least for now. Not that they’ve given up – or run out of funding – but at least they’re now in the rear view. I for one doubt that they’ll be taking control of the debate again.
Anyway, there’s a lot of extreme-weather color in this essay. Who knew that this spring, when it rained in Mecca at a temperature of 109 degrees, it was the hottest recorded downpour on the books? And McKibben does a great job of quickly moving on to key numbers, and then drawing some substantive conclusions.
The numbers are key to the story. McKibben chose three:
The First Number: 2° Celsius
2°C of warming, maximum. This is the semi-official inter-governmental global temperature target (“the bottomist of bottom lines”). And it’s extremely, dangerously high. McKibben makes the case here well and briefly, and correctly notes that the ubiquity of support for the 2°C target is a sign of our desperation. 2°C of warming would very likely be a catastrophe. And the way things are going, we’re not going to come anywhere close to holding the 2°C line.
“The new data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist. In fact, he continued, “When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees.” That’s almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.
The Second Number: 565 Gigatons
The real action begins, though, with McKibben’s introduction of the global carbon budget. And I’d bet that this is the first time it’s shown its face in Rolling Stone. The discussion, again, is miraculously short, and the point is clear.
Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. (“Reasonable,” in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.) . . .
The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all,” says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “There’s maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We’re just fine-tuning things. I don’t think much has changed over the last decade.”
In other words, we’re running out of “atmospheric space.” And, yes, we’re sure.
The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons
This larger number is the point of the story. To see this, note that it’s five times as large as the 565-gigaton carbon budget we met just above.
This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative. . . The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher. . .
Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically above ground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.
If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. [My emphasis] The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but the carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won’t necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That’s how the story ends.
If you haven’t read the whole of McKibben’s Terrifying New Math, read it now. Here’s the link [3] again. When you’re ready to loop back and think more about the carbon bubble in particular, see From “peak oil” to “unburnable carbon” [4], which I wrote last year when Carbon Tracker’s Carbon Bubble [5]report was released. And by the way, it too is mercifully short.
***
The politics are a longer story. McKibben, a consummate literary journalist turned consummate organizer, is working hard, here, to focus attention on what I call the fossil cartel. This makes terrific sense, for all sorts of reasons. Back up far enough, though, and they come to this – while the extremely rapid reduction of global emissions is technologically and economically possible, the decisive action that we need would not be free (think about that $20 trillion in “stranded assets”). There would be powerful losers.
These losers can usefully be seen as a “carbon cartel” that consists of the fossil-energy companies, the fossil-energy exporting nations, and their innumerable satellites, agents, and camp followers. And that cartel is exactly where McKibben, and our friends at 350.org [6], and the folks at Oil Change International [7], and lots of others, are setting their sights. It’s an excellent focus. Hell, from the point of view of place-based and national activism, it’s probably the best we could hope for. It opens doors to real and useful insights. Like this one:
If Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and four percent. Taken together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the Carbon Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the remaining two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the list of coal companies, followed by firms like BHP Billiton and Peabody. The numbers are simply staggering – this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they’re planning to use it.
So far so good. Clear as a bell. But what are the implications? Here we need a bit more thought, which can usefully begin by focusing on that $20 trillion in assets – which we fully intend to “strand,” and as quickly as possible.
McKibben’s essay paves the way, by framing the goal as “divestment.” This is a major step forward from the argument made in the Carbon Bubble [5] report itself, which basically presents itself as a call for rational and prudential management of the investment economy, rather than, say, human civilization.
Now is the time to move into the second generation of investor action on climate change, which tackles the system that is locked into financing fossil fuels. Climate change poses a great threat to the global economy and it is not unrealistic to expect regulators responsible for assessing new systemic risks to address the carbon bubble.
The goal now is for regulators to send clear signals to the market that cause a shift away from the huge carbon stockpiles which pose a systemic risk to investors. This is the duty of the regulator – to rise to this challenge and prevent the bubble bursting.
In any case, the alternative to rational management, or divestment, or whatever you want to call it, is just more delay and fossil lock-in. It’s a future in which the cartel remains firmly in control of energy system investment and deployment. One in which after, say, another decade, when the danger can no longer be denied, “the markets” suddenly “decide” (as they say) that most known “economic reserves” of fossil fuels simply will not be burned. That they are obsolete. Which would presumably mean a sudden and catastrophic “repricing” of coal and oil stocks. And, as Paul Gilding put it in his 2011 book The Great Disruption [8], “if you lose your shirt on your coal and oil investments, don’t say you weren’t warned.”
McKibben is as prudential as they come. But he’s not pretending that divestment is a matter of rational investing. Rather, his goal is a movement that’s powerful enough to isolate and then sunset the fossil cartel, or at least force them to “become true energy companies, this time for real.” Nor does he pretend that this would be easy. And while he puts a certain faith in capitalism’s famous capacity for “creative destruction,” he’s not waiting for the cartel to fall. He’s pushing.
Of course the cartel is very, very strong. All else being equal, it’s going to take us all down with it. This means we have to fight, and it also means that we could win. Though if you compare the carbon divestment challenge to the one faced by the divestment campaign that helped bring down South Africa’s Apartheid. . .
The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of particular companies, you’d still have to figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies. The link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree. (The same logic applies to the world’s largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in the future – that’s when their members will “enjoy their retirement.”) “Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective,” says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the Investor Network on Climate Risk. “The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change – now.”
***
There’s just one wee problem, which becomes visible only when you imagine success, which is to say, when you imagine an accelerated fossil phase-out that is driven, in part, by increased fossil-fuel prices. Here, McKibben chooses to be upbeat:
If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise. Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel – every time they stopped at the pump, they’d be reminded that you don’t need a semi-military vehicle to go to the grocery store. The economic playing field would now be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do it all without bankrupting citizens – a so-called “fee-and-dividend” scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon. By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead.
The problem is the “most people would actually come out ahead,” part, wherein McKibben signals the importance of fee and dividend [9], which seems to be the current name of cap and dividend [10], a proposal I very much support. Still, what McKibben should really say is that “most people in rich countrieswould actually come out ahead.” Because if fee and dividend was the only equity framework on offer, and if energy prices increased as a result of the sunsetting of the fossil industry – which would be a very real danger, given this crazy world and its crazy economy – this wouldn’t be very good news for most people in the developing world. Not, at least, during the next few critical decades, wherein we hope to see a great transition. Which would probably fail for just this reason.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I love most all of the argument here, and I hesitate to write these words. The situation in the US is now so serious, so certifiably insane, that we Americans can be forgiven a bit of strategic self-involvement. We have to do whatever it takes to turn the American supertanker, and if that means temporarily putting the really big problem of – oh, let’s call it international solidarity – aside, so be it. The movement is an ecosystem, and we don’t all have to do the same thing. But do note that we never quite get around to the “acting globally” part of the equation. And that, despite all, despite even mad dogs and Republicans, climate remains a global commons problem. And that the “cooperative management” that’s needed to solve such a problem, as Elinor Ostrom explained in her 2009 Nobel lecture (delivered to commemorate her receipt of the economics prize) is only possible in the presence of “institutions that bring out the best in humans” by supporting “free communication,” “trust,” and “equitable outcomes.”[1] [11]And this means taking a very serious whack at not just the problem of domestic transitional justice (what fee-and-dividend is all about) but global transitional justice as well.
It’s too easy to say, as McKibben does, that …
Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day.
But it’s not at all clear what concessions the Chinese could have offered, given the small potatoes that the rich-world negotiators had put on the table. In fact, China’s tactics in Copenhagen, clumsy and unimaginative though they may have been, made a terrible and even tragic kind of sense. And it was hardly the Chinese alone that resisted the deal. The whole developing-country block was torn between the desire for great ambition and the fear that, all else being equal, greater ambition would close off their development pathways.
And it still is. Torn, I mean. Which is why the climate negotiators, and the Rio negotiators for that matter, are lucky if they can even crawl forward. And why the key to a breakthrough is, in the latest jargon, Equitable Access to Sustainable Development [12].[2] This is a long story, but it begins with a simple truth. Which brings me to …
The Fourth Number: ‘X’
The climate problem, in a nutshell, is that we’ve already exhausted the global carbon budget – the atmospheric space – but that many of us are still far too poor to live minimally dignified, let alone prosperous lives. Given this, and given that global emissions must peak as soon as humanly possible, how shall we understand the predicament of the developing world? Will emerging powers like China and Brazil – where most all people are still far poorer than the average American, or European, or Japanese – have to force themselves to an emissions peak at the same time as these wealthier countries? Clearly, that’s not on the table. But how wealthy would a country have to be — take “X”‘ as its per-capita income, in international dollars — before it could reasonably be expected to peak its emissions? And with what guarantees of international support would it do so? And what about the truly poor nations, India and most of Africa for starters? And those nations that are particularly vulnerable to the coming “impacts,” as they are called? What considerations can they reasonably expect? Keep in mind that, at a certain point, it hardly matters if these are judged in terms of “climate justice” or “climate realism.” What finally matters is that the transition be fair enough to actually work.
The core problem here is that, absent real leapfrogging, the developing countries will be hard put to take any paths apart from those that have already been pioneered in the wealthy world. The awful truth is that the only proven routes to the promised land of “development” – to water and food security, improved health care and education, and in general dignified ways of life that offer substantive choices and freedoms – involve expanding access to energy services, and thus corresponding increases in fossil fuel use and thus carbon emissions. Given this, what to do? This is the South’s dilemma, and if all we have to say about it is that fossil price increases will have virtuous effects (which of course they will), then we are going to lose.
The bottom line: Only a grand and global coalition – one that includes activists, scientists, politicians, negotiators, various elites and lots of citizens, one that brings nations in both the North and the South together to redesign and rebuild the global energy system, and fast – can possibly be powerful enough to defeat the fossil cartel. Without such a grand coalition, we can fight, but we probably can’t win.
We’re kind of trapped here. There’s no choice but to move forward as we can. But, still, there has to be something more for the world’s poor, and for its strivers. If ever it seemed that the world’s elites were getting serious about the “sustainable development goals” that Rio+20 put on the agenda, then climate deadlock would begin to crumble and, not at all incidentally, the fossil cartel would find itself under real pressure. But leapfrogging costs money, and takes technology, and right now neither money nor technology is on the table. From the South’s perspective, this quite implacably means that development is still pitted hard again climate protection, and it will continue to mean this until low-carbon energy is no longer an expensive gamble that the poor are expected to make on their own.
A carbon disinvestment campaign is a great idea. But to line up the ducks that we’ll need to win that campaign, we also need a plan for “lifting up the poor,” globally and as an integral part of the abandonment of fossil energy. Fee-and-dividend approaches could indeed help within rich countries. But they won’t work internationally, and we need something that will. Because, as the protest signs outside the recent Bonn talks said, “Equity is the gateway to ambition.”
[1] Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel in Economics in 2009 for her research on the cooperative management of commons resources. Or, more formally, the polycentric management of common pool resources. Her wonderful, brief Nobel lecture is here [13]. See the very end (25:30) for an enumeration of the attributes of a successful commons regime. Her Nobel paper (Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems”) is here [14].
[2] See Sivan Kartha’s presentation [15], earlier this year in Bonn, at the UNFCCC’s workshop on EASD. Kartha, whose goal was to clearly and briefly lay out the stark logic of the equity-to-ambition link, showed that, if we’re to avoid climate catastrophe, developing-country emissions will have to peak while their per-capita incomes are still extremely low. This, in a way, is the whole problem, or at least the part that’s visible above the surface.
(Kartha, for the record, is a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, an author of the Greenhouse Development Rights framework (full disclosure, I’m another), and a coordinating lead author of the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report : Working Group III, Chapter 4, Sustainable Development and Equity).
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/environment/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-bill-mckibbens-call-action-carbon-emissions-makes
Links:
[1] http://www.ecoequity.org/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/tom-athanasiou
[3] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719?print=true
[4] http://www.ecoequity.org/2011/07/from-peak-oil-to-unburnable-carbon/
[5] http://www.carbontracker.org/carbonbubble
[6] http://www.350.org/
[7] http://priceofoil.org/
[8] http://www.amazon.com/Great-Disruption-Climate-Crisis-Shopping/dp/1608192237
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_and_dividend
[10] http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_101-150/WP150.pdf
[11] http://www.ecoequity.org/2012/07/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-bill-mckibbens-call-for-a-carbon-divestment-movement/#_edn1
[12] http://www.ecoequity.org/2012/06/global-climate-justice-gets-its-15-minutes/
[13] http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1223
[14] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/ostrom-lecture.html
[15] http://unfccc4.meta-fusion.com/kongresse/sb36/templ/play.php?id_kongresssession=5072&theme=unfccc
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class
I Carried a Gun, and It Was Heavy
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/armed-but-not-so-safe.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120726
July 25, 2012
I Carried a Gun, and It Was Heavy
By MICHAEL A. BLACK
Chicago
AS the families of James E. Holmes’s victims continue to deal with this senseless tragedy, anti- and pro-gun groups are exchanging their standard barbs on gun control in America. Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, recently suggested that if this incident had occurred in his state, where many citizens carry concealed weapons, the crazed shooter could have been quickly terminated. I wonder if the congressman considered the confusion and terror that occurs in a real-life firefight?
I spent over 30 years as a police officer in the Chicago area, and I was required to carry a weapon both on and off duty. A few years after 9/11, laws were extended to allow officers to carry their weapons across state lines and retired officers to continue to be armed, the logic being that those men and women had been screened and trained and knew when and how to use their weapons in emergencies. Excluding our brave military personnel, police officers are probably the only individuals who rush toward the sound of gunfire.
I’ve faced people with guns many times and arrested violent, armed offenders for such crimes as robbery and homicide. Although my gun often left its holster on those occasions, I am grateful that I never had to shoot anyone. I never lost sight of the responsibility of carrying a weapon. Despite what many people think, it’s not something to be taken lightly.
Illinois is the only state that does not allow ordinary citizens to carry concealed firearms. A few years back, I was visiting my father at the laundromat where he worked, when one of the regulars, who knew I was a cop, asked if I was “strapped.” When I said yes, he complained that he should have the right to carry a gun, too, since he was “a law-abiding citizen.” I’d heard this knucklehead spout off about minorities on numerous occasions and didn’t think he was a good candidate to be packing a weapon in public, though in many states, he could have been. The Trayvon Martin case shows the consequences of an untrained person with a gun. Police officers must go through psychological screening and a lot of training before they’re allowed to carry a weapon, and even then problems sometimes arise.
I once told a rookie that you never forget the first gun you take off the street. Mine was taken from a guy named Homer in 1978. It was close to midnight, and we got a call reporting two men trying to break into an apartment building. I pulled up and caught the guys — Homer and a friend — at the doors. It turned out that the caller was an ex-girlfriend of Homer’s who lived in the building and had made it clear that he was not welcome. Homer had a record — and a .22-caliber handgun in his pocket.
A month later, he saw me outside the courtroom and cordially waved. “It ain’t nothing but a misdemeanor,” he said, which at that time was true. “I’m just gonna plead it out and get rid of it.” And that’s what he did.
The last shooting incident I was involved in happened at 3 in the morning on Dec. 26, 2010, my last Christmas before I retired. We responded to a report of two men arguing, one threatening to shoot the other. My radio blared, “Shots fired! Man with a gun.” When I reached one man, running in the darkness between two houses, he had already been shot by another officer. When the officer had ordered the man to stop and identify himself, the man had pointed a pistol at him. The officer ducked behind his car door and fired half the bullets in his Glock 21 before finally hitting the offender once in the left buttock. We eventually found the shooter’s silver semiautomatic deep in a snowdrift.
The suddenness and confusion of that moment points out the folly of the politician’s belief that an armed civilian could have easily taken out James Holmes. Imagine the scene: speakers blasting, larger-than-life heroes and villains on the screen, and suddenly real gunshots, a man in a gas mask firing one of three weapons — a shotgun, handgun and rifle, with extended magazines for extra ammo capacity — into the panicking crowd. Even a highly trained, armed police officer would have been caught off guard. Try adding a bunch of untrained, armed civilians into the mix — this type of intervention could have made things much worse.
Illinois is routinely called the “most repressive state” by gun rights groups. It requires everyone to obtain a firearm owner’s identification card before purchasing firearms and ammunition. This gives the police another tool to work with if an armed crook is caught without a card. It also creates a paper trail for repeated, in-state purchases. Perhaps if some kind of effective tracking safeguard had existed in Colorado, James Holmes’s purchases — all of which were legal — might have been flagged.
The pro- and anti-gun groups need to sit down and let common sense rule. We register automobiles and require proof of driving proficiency before granting driving licenses. Is it so unreasonable to consider a national or state-by-state registry for firearms? While I’m not totally opposed to concealed carry laws, why not require comprehensive background checks, psychological screening and training? And while it might be considered un-American to prevent an ordinary citizen from owning an assault rifle, would it be too much to ask why he needs to have a specially modified 100-round magazine?
As a former policeman, I know that such measures would help law enforcement do its job. As an American, I hope that they could help us head off the next tragedy of this type.
Michael A. Black, a retired police officer, is the author of “I Am Not a Cop,” with Richard Belzer, and the forthcoming book “Sacrificial Offerings.”
© 2011 The New York Times Company
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
July 25, 2012
I Carried a Gun, and It Was Heavy
By MICHAEL A. BLACK
Chicago
AS the families of James E. Holmes’s victims continue to deal with this senseless tragedy, anti- and pro-gun groups are exchanging their standard barbs on gun control in America. Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, recently suggested that if this incident had occurred in his state, where many citizens carry concealed weapons, the crazed shooter could have been quickly terminated. I wonder if the congressman considered the confusion and terror that occurs in a real-life firefight?
I spent over 30 years as a police officer in the Chicago area, and I was required to carry a weapon both on and off duty. A few years after 9/11, laws were extended to allow officers to carry their weapons across state lines and retired officers to continue to be armed, the logic being that those men and women had been screened and trained and knew when and how to use their weapons in emergencies. Excluding our brave military personnel, police officers are probably the only individuals who rush toward the sound of gunfire.
I’ve faced people with guns many times and arrested violent, armed offenders for such crimes as robbery and homicide. Although my gun often left its holster on those occasions, I am grateful that I never had to shoot anyone. I never lost sight of the responsibility of carrying a weapon. Despite what many people think, it’s not something to be taken lightly.
Illinois is the only state that does not allow ordinary citizens to carry concealed firearms. A few years back, I was visiting my father at the laundromat where he worked, when one of the regulars, who knew I was a cop, asked if I was “strapped.” When I said yes, he complained that he should have the right to carry a gun, too, since he was “a law-abiding citizen.” I’d heard this knucklehead spout off about minorities on numerous occasions and didn’t think he was a good candidate to be packing a weapon in public, though in many states, he could have been. The Trayvon Martin case shows the consequences of an untrained person with a gun. Police officers must go through psychological screening and a lot of training before they’re allowed to carry a weapon, and even then problems sometimes arise.
I once told a rookie that you never forget the first gun you take off the street. Mine was taken from a guy named Homer in 1978. It was close to midnight, and we got a call reporting two men trying to break into an apartment building. I pulled up and caught the guys — Homer and a friend — at the doors. It turned out that the caller was an ex-girlfriend of Homer’s who lived in the building and had made it clear that he was not welcome. Homer had a record — and a .22-caliber handgun in his pocket.
A month later, he saw me outside the courtroom and cordially waved. “It ain’t nothing but a misdemeanor,” he said, which at that time was true. “I’m just gonna plead it out and get rid of it.” And that’s what he did.
The last shooting incident I was involved in happened at 3 in the morning on Dec. 26, 2010, my last Christmas before I retired. We responded to a report of two men arguing, one threatening to shoot the other. My radio blared, “Shots fired! Man with a gun.” When I reached one man, running in the darkness between two houses, he had already been shot by another officer. When the officer had ordered the man to stop and identify himself, the man had pointed a pistol at him. The officer ducked behind his car door and fired half the bullets in his Glock 21 before finally hitting the offender once in the left buttock. We eventually found the shooter’s silver semiautomatic deep in a snowdrift.
The suddenness and confusion of that moment points out the folly of the politician’s belief that an armed civilian could have easily taken out James Holmes. Imagine the scene: speakers blasting, larger-than-life heroes and villains on the screen, and suddenly real gunshots, a man in a gas mask firing one of three weapons — a shotgun, handgun and rifle, with extended magazines for extra ammo capacity — into the panicking crowd. Even a highly trained, armed police officer would have been caught off guard. Try adding a bunch of untrained, armed civilians into the mix — this type of intervention could have made things much worse.
Illinois is routinely called the “most repressive state” by gun rights groups. It requires everyone to obtain a firearm owner’s identification card before purchasing firearms and ammunition. This gives the police another tool to work with if an armed crook is caught without a card. It also creates a paper trail for repeated, in-state purchases. Perhaps if some kind of effective tracking safeguard had existed in Colorado, James Holmes’s purchases — all of which were legal — might have been flagged.
The pro- and anti-gun groups need to sit down and let common sense rule. We register automobiles and require proof of driving proficiency before granting driving licenses. Is it so unreasonable to consider a national or state-by-state registry for firearms? While I’m not totally opposed to concealed carry laws, why not require comprehensive background checks, psychological screening and training? And while it might be considered un-American to prevent an ordinary citizen from owning an assault rifle, would it be too much to ask why he needs to have a specially modified 100-round magazine?
As a former policeman, I know that such measures would help law enforcement do its job. As an American, I hope that they could help us head off the next tragedy of this type.
Michael A. Black, a retired police officer, is the author of “I Am Not a Cop,” with Richard Belzer, and the forthcoming book “Sacrificial Offerings.”
© 2011 The New York Times Company
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
If Alawites are turning against Assad then his fate is sealed
If Alawites are turning against Assad then his fate is sealed
There seems to be a Baathist pattern of destroying Sunni
villages on the edge of the Alawite heartland
ROBERT FISK
MONDAY 23 JULY 2012
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-if-alawites-are-turning-against-assad-then-his-fate-is-sealed-7965154.html
'Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' th' Tiger,"
Macbeth's First Witch announces, but Shakespeare got his
geography a bit wrong. Aleppo is 70 miles from the
Mediterranean. It's certainly ancient; Aleppo was
mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Ebla in the third
millennium BC and belonged to the Hittites and the Emperor
Justinian, its 14th-century citadel walls still lowering
today over the revolutionary capital of northern Syria.
And that's the point. While the drama of last week's
assault on Bashar al-Assad's regime in Damascus stunned
the Arab world, the sudden outbreak of violence in Aleppo
this weekend was in one way far more important. For Aleppo
is the richest city in Syria - infinitely more so than
Damascus - and if the revolution has now touched this
centre of wealth, then the tacit agreement between the
Alawite-controlled government and the Sunni middle classes
must truly be cracking.
As the birthplace of agriculture - the Euphrates is only
70 miles to the east - Aleppo is also the headquarters of
the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry
Areas (Icarda), one of the finest institutions of its kind
in the world. It increases food production in Asia and
Africa in an area containing a billion people, 50 per cent
of whom earn their living from agriculture. Donors include
Britain, Canada, the US, Germany, Holland, the World Bank
- you name it. And its 500 employees are still operating
in Aleppo.
Alas, its principal research station at Tel Hadya, 20
miles from Aleppo, was raided by gunmen who stole vehicles
- to use them as "technicals" mounted with machine guns -
along with farm machinery and computers. Mercifully,
Icarda's gene bank is safe and has been duplicated outside
Syria. The Syrian government moved a military checkpoint
closer to Icarda's property at Tel Hadya - the Syrian
ministry of agriculture was always one of the more
progressive offices in Damascus - but what use this will
be in the coming days, we shall see.
Across all of Syria, the revolution has spread.
Tragically, there now seems to be a Baathist pattern of
destroying Sunni villages on the edge of the Alawite
heartland, the "frontier" of Alawi-stan in the great
agricultural plain of Hama province, below the mountains
where the Assad home town of Qardaha stands.
Last Wednesday, for example, two Syrian helicopters
attacked the small Sunni town of Haouch, forcing its 7,000
population to run for their lives. For two weeks, Haouch
and other small Sunni towns have been shelled; they do
indeed contain rebels but there is a growing suspicion -
no evidence, mark you - that this is a deliberate policy
of the Baath to prepare Syria for partition if Damascus
falls. Ominously, this "frontier" of fire matches almost
precisely the "State of the Alawites" temporarily created
by the post-First World War French mandate which chopped
Syria up into mini-nations partly on sectarian lines.
There are equal suspicions, I should add, that the first
great Syrian massacre of throat-cutting and executions in
the Sunni village of Houla on 25 May might have been a
reprisal for the attempted poisoning of Bashar al-Assad's
brother-in-law Asef Shawkat, whom the rebels at last cut
down in the bombing in Damascus last Wednesday. Others say
the attempted poisoning was more recent; but everything
that happened - and happens - in Syria is connected.
Take the faint outline of the old French mini-state of the
Hauran where Syria's Druze communities now live in growing
disharmony with the Assad regime. This month, there was a
dangerous outbreak of kidnapping in the region - resolved
only after Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, made
a series of phone calls to prominent Druze in Syria.
Jumblatt himself has had a
friendly-hostile-friendly-hostile-relationship with the
Assad family - I may have left out a couple of 'friendlys'
and 'hostiles' there - but there is no doubt where he now
stands.
Last week, he urged the Druze as well as the Alawites in
Syria to join the revolt against the Assad regime. He has
even attacked his allies in Moscow, calling Russia's
support for Assad "no longer acceptable, morally or
politically."
And not without reason does he speak thus. Three Syrian
Druze have died in the revolution this month. Majd Zein, a
Druze Free Syrian Army member, was killed during an attack
on Rastan. Shafiq Shuqayr and Yasser Awwad were executed
by the Syrian army when they were discovered to be helping
government soldiers to defect in the area of Lajat. Now
Jumblatt is calling upon all Alawites to join the
rebellion instead of allowing themselves to remain a
minority dependent on Assad for their survival. "I say to
them that they must say they are Syrians before they are
Alawites."
And a final statistic to explain the revolution outside
Damascus. Latest figures show that 58 per cent of Syrian's
population under 24 years old are unemployed (higher,
even, than Egypt), while 48 per cent of the 18-29 year-old
age range - a statistic only beaten by Yemen - have no
jobs. They do now, of course. Most have joined the Syrian
revolt.
There seems to be a Baathist pattern of destroying Sunni
villages on the edge of the Alawite heartland
ROBERT FISK
MONDAY 23 JULY 2012
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-if-alawites-are-turning-against-assad-then-his-fate-is-sealed-7965154.html
'Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' th' Tiger,"
Macbeth's First Witch announces, but Shakespeare got his
geography a bit wrong. Aleppo is 70 miles from the
Mediterranean. It's certainly ancient; Aleppo was
mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Ebla in the third
millennium BC and belonged to the Hittites and the Emperor
Justinian, its 14th-century citadel walls still lowering
today over the revolutionary capital of northern Syria.
And that's the point. While the drama of last week's
assault on Bashar al-Assad's regime in Damascus stunned
the Arab world, the sudden outbreak of violence in Aleppo
this weekend was in one way far more important. For Aleppo
is the richest city in Syria - infinitely more so than
Damascus - and if the revolution has now touched this
centre of wealth, then the tacit agreement between the
Alawite-controlled government and the Sunni middle classes
must truly be cracking.
As the birthplace of agriculture - the Euphrates is only
70 miles to the east - Aleppo is also the headquarters of
the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry
Areas (Icarda), one of the finest institutions of its kind
in the world. It increases food production in Asia and
Africa in an area containing a billion people, 50 per cent
of whom earn their living from agriculture. Donors include
Britain, Canada, the US, Germany, Holland, the World Bank
- you name it. And its 500 employees are still operating
in Aleppo.
Alas, its principal research station at Tel Hadya, 20
miles from Aleppo, was raided by gunmen who stole vehicles
- to use them as "technicals" mounted with machine guns -
along with farm machinery and computers. Mercifully,
Icarda's gene bank is safe and has been duplicated outside
Syria. The Syrian government moved a military checkpoint
closer to Icarda's property at Tel Hadya - the Syrian
ministry of agriculture was always one of the more
progressive offices in Damascus - but what use this will
be in the coming days, we shall see.
Across all of Syria, the revolution has spread.
Tragically, there now seems to be a Baathist pattern of
destroying Sunni villages on the edge of the Alawite
heartland, the "frontier" of Alawi-stan in the great
agricultural plain of Hama province, below the mountains
where the Assad home town of Qardaha stands.
Last Wednesday, for example, two Syrian helicopters
attacked the small Sunni town of Haouch, forcing its 7,000
population to run for their lives. For two weeks, Haouch
and other small Sunni towns have been shelled; they do
indeed contain rebels but there is a growing suspicion -
no evidence, mark you - that this is a deliberate policy
of the Baath to prepare Syria for partition if Damascus
falls. Ominously, this "frontier" of fire matches almost
precisely the "State of the Alawites" temporarily created
by the post-First World War French mandate which chopped
Syria up into mini-nations partly on sectarian lines.
There are equal suspicions, I should add, that the first
great Syrian massacre of throat-cutting and executions in
the Sunni village of Houla on 25 May might have been a
reprisal for the attempted poisoning of Bashar al-Assad's
brother-in-law Asef Shawkat, whom the rebels at last cut
down in the bombing in Damascus last Wednesday. Others say
the attempted poisoning was more recent; but everything
that happened - and happens - in Syria is connected.
Take the faint outline of the old French mini-state of the
Hauran where Syria's Druze communities now live in growing
disharmony with the Assad regime. This month, there was a
dangerous outbreak of kidnapping in the region - resolved
only after Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, made
a series of phone calls to prominent Druze in Syria.
Jumblatt himself has had a
friendly-hostile-friendly-hostile-relationship with the
Assad family - I may have left out a couple of 'friendlys'
and 'hostiles' there - but there is no doubt where he now
stands.
Last week, he urged the Druze as well as the Alawites in
Syria to join the revolt against the Assad regime. He has
even attacked his allies in Moscow, calling Russia's
support for Assad "no longer acceptable, morally or
politically."
And not without reason does he speak thus. Three Syrian
Druze have died in the revolution this month. Majd Zein, a
Druze Free Syrian Army member, was killed during an attack
on Rastan. Shafiq Shuqayr and Yasser Awwad were executed
by the Syrian army when they were discovered to be helping
government soldiers to defect in the area of Lajat. Now
Jumblatt is calling upon all Alawites to join the
rebellion instead of allowing themselves to remain a
minority dependent on Assad for their survival. "I say to
them that they must say they are Syrians before they are
Alawites."
And a final statistic to explain the revolution outside
Damascus. Latest figures show that 58 per cent of Syrian's
population under 24 years old are unemployed (higher,
even, than Egypt), while 48 per cent of the 18-29 year-old
age range - a statistic only beaten by Yemen - have no
jobs. They do now, of course. Most have joined the Syrian
revolt.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Washington's Newest Tool for Global Domination
Washington's Newest Tool for Global Domination
By David Vine, TomDispatch.com
Posted on July 23, 2012, Printed on July 24, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/156343/washington%27s_newest_tool_for_global_domination
The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plane was a void -- something missing. A missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily patched and held together. Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and medical monitors.
That man and two other critically wounded soldiers -- one with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the thigh -- were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A tattoo on the soldier’s remaining arm read, “DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.”
I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. “A lot from the Horn of Africa,” he added. “You don’t really hear about that in the media.”
“Where in Africa?” I asked. He said he didn’t know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. “A lot out of Djibouti,” he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main U.S. military base in Africa, but from “elsewhere” in the region, too.
Since the “Black Hawk Down” deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we’ve heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by U.S. military sources as “Moroccan prostitutes,” in a mysterious car accident in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in twenty-first-century U.S. military strategy.
These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq. They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future U.S. bases “scattered,” as one academic explains, “across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence.”
Disappearing are the days when Ramstein was the signature U.S. base, an American-town-sized behemoth filled with thousands or tens of thousands of Americans, PXs, Pizza Huts, and other amenities of home. But don’t for a second think that the Pentagon is packing up, downsizing its global mission, and heading home. In fact, based on developments in recent years, the opposite may be true. While the collection of Cold War-era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope.
Unknown to most Americans, Washington’s garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls “lily pads” (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.
Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia’s tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.
As Mark Gillem, author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, explains, “avoidance” of local populations, publicity, and potential opposition is the new aim. “To project its power,” he says, the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world. According to some of the strategy’s strongest proponents at the American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts,” with the U.S. military “the ‘global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century.”
Such lily-pad bases have become a critical part of an evolving Washington military strategy aimed at maintaining U.S. global dominance by doing far more with less in an increasingly competitive, ever more multi-polar world. Central as it’s becoming to the long-term U.S. stance, this global-basing reset policy has, remarkably enough, received almost no public attention, nor significant Congressional oversight. Meanwhile, as the arrival of the first casualties from Africa shows, the U.S. military is getting involved in new areas of the world and new conflicts, with potentially disastrous consequences.
Transforming the Base Empire
You might think that the U.S. military is in the process of shrinking, rather than expanding, its little noticed but enormous collection of bases abroad. After all, it was forced to close the full panoply of 505 bases, mega to micro, that it built in Iraq, and it's now beginning the process of drawing down forces in Afghanistan. In Europe, the Pentagon is continuing to close its massive bases in Germany and will soon remove two combat brigades from that country. Global troop numbers are set to shrink by around 100,000.
Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.
In Afghanistan, the U.S.-led international force still occupies more than 450 bases. In total, the U.S. military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces -- essentially floating bases -- and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated $250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.
Some bases, like Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, date to the late nineteenth century. Most were built or occupied during or just after World War II on every continent, including Antarctica. Although the U.S. military vacated around 60% of its foreign bases following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Cold War base infrastructure remained relatively intact, with 60,000 American troops remaining in Germany alone, despite the absence of a superpower adversary.
However, in the early months of 2001, even before the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a major global realignment of bases and troops that’s continuing today with Obama’s “Asia pivot.” Bush’s original plan was to close more than one-third of the nation’s overseas bases and shift troops east and south, closer to predicted conflict zones in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Pentagon began to focus on creating smaller and more flexible “forward operating bases” and even smaller “cooperative security locations” or “lily pads.” Major troop concentrations were to be restricted to a reduced number of “main operating bases” (MOBs) -- like Ramstein, Guam in the Pacific, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean -- which were to be expanded.
Despite the rhetoric of consolidation and closure that went with this plan, in the post-9/11 era the Pentagon has actually been expanding its base infrastructure dramatically, including dozens of major bases in every Persian Gulf country save Iran, and in several Central Asian countries critical to the war in Afghanistan.
Hitting the Base Reset Button
Obama’s recently announced “Asia pivot” signals that East Asia will be at the center of the explosion of lily-pad bases and related developments. Already in Australia, U.S. marines are settling into a shared base in Darwin. Elsewhere, the Pentagon is pursuing plans for a drone and surveillance base in Australia’s Cocos Islands and deployments to Brisbane and Perth. In Thailand, the Pentagon has negotiated rights for new Navy port visits and a “disaster-relief hub” at U-Tapao.
In the Philippines, whose government evicted the U.S. from the massive Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base in the early 1990s, as many as 600 special forces troops have quietly been operating in the country’s south since January 2002. Last month, the two governments reached an agreement on the future U.S. use of Clark and Subic, as well as other repair and supply hubs from the Vietnam War era. In a sign of changing times, U.S. officials even signed a 2011 defense agreement with former enemy Vietnam and have begun negotiations over the Navy’s increased use of Vietnamese ports.
Elsewhere in Asia, the Pentagon has rebuilt a runway on tiny Tinian island near Guam, and it’s considering future bases in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, while pushing stronger military ties with India. Every year in the region, the military conducts around 170 military exercises and 250 port visits. On South Korea’s Jeju island, the Korean military is building a base that will be part of the U.S. missile defense system and to which U.S. forces will have regular access.
“We just can’t be in one place to do what we’ve got to do,” Pacific Command commander Admiral Samuel Locklear III has said. For military planners, “what we’ve got to do” is clearly defined as isolating and (in the terminology of the Cold War) “containing” the new power in the region, China. This evidently means “peppering” new bases throughout the region, adding to the more than 200 U.S. bases that have encircled China for decades in Japan, South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.
And Asia is just the beginning. In Africa, the Pentagon has quietly created “about a dozen air bases” for drones and surveillance since 2007. In addition to Camp Lemonnier, we know that the military has created or will soon create installations in Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mauritania, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, South Sudan, and Uganda. The Pentagon has also investigated building bases in Algeria, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria, among other places.
Next year, a brigade-sized force of 3,000 troops, and “likely more,” will arrive for exercises and training missions across the continent. In the nearby Persian Gulf, the Navy is developing an “afloat forward-staging base,” or “mothership,” to serve as a sea-borne “lily pad” for helicopters and patrol craft, and has been involved in a massive build-up of forces in the region.
In Latin America, following the military's eviction from Panama in 1999 and Ecuador in 2009, the Pentagon has created or upgraded new bases in Aruba and Curaçao, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru. Elsewhere, the Pentagon has funded the creation of military and police bases capable of hosting U.S. forces in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and even Ecuador. In 2008, the Navy reactivated its Fourth Fleet, inactive since 1950, to patrol the region. The military may want a base in Brazil and unsuccessfully tried to create bases, ostensibly for humanitarian and emergency relief, in Paraguay and Argentina.
Finally, in Europe, after arriving in the Balkans during 1990’s interventions, U.S. bases have moved eastward into some of the former Eastern Bloc states of the Soviet empire. The Pentagon is now developing installations capable of supporting rotating, brigade-sized deployments in Romania and Bulgaria, and a missile defense base and aviation facilities in Poland. Previously, the Bush administration maintained two CIA black sites (secret prisons) in Lithuania and another in Poland. Citizens of the Czech Republic rejected a planned radar base for the Pentagon’s still unproven missile defense system, and now Romania will host ground-based missiles.
A New American Way of War
A lily pad on one of the Gulf of Guinea islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the oil-rich west coast of Africa, helps explain what’s going on. A U.S. official has described the base as “another Diego Garcia,” referring to the Indian Ocean base that’s helped ensure decades of U.S. domination over Middle Eastern energy supplies. Without the freedom to create new large bases in Africa, the Pentagon is using São Tomé and a growing collection of other lily pads on the continent in an attempt to control another crucial oil-rich region.
Far beyond West Africa, the nineteenth century “Great Game” competition for Central Asia has returned with a passion -- and this time gone global. It’s spreading to resource-rich lands in Africa, Asia, and South America, as the United States, China, Russia, and members of the European Union find themselves locked in an increasingly intense competition for economic and geopolitical supremacy.
While Beijing, in particular, has pursued this competition in a largely economic fashion, dotting the globe with strategic investments, Washington has focused relentlessly on military might as its global trump card, dotting the planet with new bases and other forms of military power. “Forget full-scale invasions and large-footprint occupations on the Eurasian mainland,” Nick Turse has written of this new twenty-first century military strategy. “Instead, think: special operations forces... proxy armies... the militarization of spying and intelligence... drone aircraft... cyber-attacks, and joint Pentagon operations with increasingly militarized ‘civilian’ government agencies.”
Add to this unparalleled long-range air and naval power; arms sales besting any nation on Earth; humanitarian and disaster relief missions that clearly serve military intelligence, patrol, and “hearts and minds” functions; the rotational deployment of regular U.S. forces globally; port visits and an expanding array of joint military exercises and training missions that give the U.S. military de facto “presence” worldwide and help turn foreign militaries into proxy forces.
And lots and lots of lily-pad bases.
Military planners see a future of endless small-scale interventions in which a large, geographically dispersed collection of bases will always be primed for instant operational access. With bases in as many places as possible, military planners want to be able to turn to another conveniently close country if the United States is ever prevented from using a base, as it was by Turkey prior to the invasion of Iraq. In other words, Pentagon officials dream of nearly limitless flexibility, the ability to react with remarkable rapidity to developments anywhere on Earth, and thus, something approaching total military control over the planet.
Beyond their military utility, the lily pads and other forms of power projection are also political and economic tools used to build and maintain alliances and provide privileged U.S. access to overseas markets, resources, and investment opportunities. Washington is planning to use lily-pad bases and other military projects to bind countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America as closely as possible to the U.S. military -- and so to continued U.S. political-economic hegemony. In short, American officials are hoping military might will entrench their influence and keep as many countries as possible within an American orbit at a time when some are asserting their independence ever more forcefully or gravitating toward China and other rising powers.
Those Dangerous Lily Pads
While relying on smaller bases may sound smarter and more cost effective than maintaining huge bases that have often caused anger in places like Okinawa and South Korea, lily pads threaten U.S. and global security in several ways:
First, the “lily pad” language can be misleading, since by design or otherwise, such installations are capable of quickly growing into bloated behemoths.
Second, despite the rhetoric about spreading democracy that still lingers in Washington, building more lily pads actually guarantees collaboration with an increasing number of despotic, corrupt, and murderous regimes.
Third, there is a well-documented pattern of damage that military facilities of various sizes inflict on local communities. Although lily pads seem to promise insulation from local opposition, over time even small bases have often led to anger and protest movements.
Finally, a proliferation of lily pads means the creeping militarization of large swaths of the globe. Like real lily pads -- which are actually aquatic weeds -- bases have a way of growing and reproducing uncontrollably. Indeed, bases tend to beget bases, creating “base races” with other nations, heightening military tensions, and discouraging diplomatic solutions to conflicts. After all, how would the United States respond if China, Russia, or Iran were to build even a single lily-pad base of its own in Mexico or the Caribbean?
For China and Russia in particular, ever more U.S. bases near their borders threaten to set off new cold wars. Most troublingly, the creation of new bases to protect against an alleged future Chinese military threat may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: such bases in Asia are likely to create the threat they are supposedly designed to protect against, making a catastrophic war with China more, not less, likely.
Encouragingly, however, overseas bases have recently begun to generate critical scrutiny across the political spectrum from Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to Democratic Senator Jon Tester and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. With everyone looking for ways to trim the deficit, closing overseas bases offers easy savings. Indeed, increasingly influential types are recognizing that the country simply can’t afford more than 1,000 bases abroad.
Great Britain, like empires before it, had to close most of its remaining foreign bases in the midst of an economic crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. The United States is undoubtedly headed in that direction sooner or later. The only question is whether the country will give up its bases and downsize its global mission by choice, or if it will follow Britain’s path as a fading power forced to give up its bases from a position of weakness.
Of course, the consequences of not choosing another path extend beyond economics. If the proliferation of lily pads, special operations forces, and drone wars continues, the United States is likely to be drawn into new conflicts and new wars, generating unknown forms of blowback, and untold death and destruction. In that case, we’d better prepare for a lot more incoming flights -- from the Horn of Africa to Honduras -- carrying not just amputees but caskets.
David Vine is assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other places. He is currently completing a book about the more than 1,000 U.S. military bases located outside the United States.
© 2012 TomDispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/156343/
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
By David Vine, TomDispatch.com
Posted on July 23, 2012, Printed on July 24, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/156343/washington%27s_newest_tool_for_global_domination
The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plane was a void -- something missing. A missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily patched and held together. Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and medical monitors.
That man and two other critically wounded soldiers -- one with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the thigh -- were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A tattoo on the soldier’s remaining arm read, “DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.”
I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. “A lot from the Horn of Africa,” he added. “You don’t really hear about that in the media.”
“Where in Africa?” I asked. He said he didn’t know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. “A lot out of Djibouti,” he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main U.S. military base in Africa, but from “elsewhere” in the region, too.
Since the “Black Hawk Down” deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we’ve heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by U.S. military sources as “Moroccan prostitutes,” in a mysterious car accident in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in twenty-first-century U.S. military strategy.
These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq. They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future U.S. bases “scattered,” as one academic explains, “across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence.”
Disappearing are the days when Ramstein was the signature U.S. base, an American-town-sized behemoth filled with thousands or tens of thousands of Americans, PXs, Pizza Huts, and other amenities of home. But don’t for a second think that the Pentagon is packing up, downsizing its global mission, and heading home. In fact, based on developments in recent years, the opposite may be true. While the collection of Cold War-era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope.
Unknown to most Americans, Washington’s garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls “lily pads” (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.
Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia’s tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.
As Mark Gillem, author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, explains, “avoidance” of local populations, publicity, and potential opposition is the new aim. “To project its power,” he says, the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world. According to some of the strategy’s strongest proponents at the American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts,” with the U.S. military “the ‘global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century.”
Such lily-pad bases have become a critical part of an evolving Washington military strategy aimed at maintaining U.S. global dominance by doing far more with less in an increasingly competitive, ever more multi-polar world. Central as it’s becoming to the long-term U.S. stance, this global-basing reset policy has, remarkably enough, received almost no public attention, nor significant Congressional oversight. Meanwhile, as the arrival of the first casualties from Africa shows, the U.S. military is getting involved in new areas of the world and new conflicts, with potentially disastrous consequences.
Transforming the Base Empire
You might think that the U.S. military is in the process of shrinking, rather than expanding, its little noticed but enormous collection of bases abroad. After all, it was forced to close the full panoply of 505 bases, mega to micro, that it built in Iraq, and it's now beginning the process of drawing down forces in Afghanistan. In Europe, the Pentagon is continuing to close its massive bases in Germany and will soon remove two combat brigades from that country. Global troop numbers are set to shrink by around 100,000.
Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.
In Afghanistan, the U.S.-led international force still occupies more than 450 bases. In total, the U.S. military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces -- essentially floating bases -- and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated $250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.
Some bases, like Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, date to the late nineteenth century. Most were built or occupied during or just after World War II on every continent, including Antarctica. Although the U.S. military vacated around 60% of its foreign bases following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Cold War base infrastructure remained relatively intact, with 60,000 American troops remaining in Germany alone, despite the absence of a superpower adversary.
However, in the early months of 2001, even before the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a major global realignment of bases and troops that’s continuing today with Obama’s “Asia pivot.” Bush’s original plan was to close more than one-third of the nation’s overseas bases and shift troops east and south, closer to predicted conflict zones in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Pentagon began to focus on creating smaller and more flexible “forward operating bases” and even smaller “cooperative security locations” or “lily pads.” Major troop concentrations were to be restricted to a reduced number of “main operating bases” (MOBs) -- like Ramstein, Guam in the Pacific, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean -- which were to be expanded.
Despite the rhetoric of consolidation and closure that went with this plan, in the post-9/11 era the Pentagon has actually been expanding its base infrastructure dramatically, including dozens of major bases in every Persian Gulf country save Iran, and in several Central Asian countries critical to the war in Afghanistan.
Hitting the Base Reset Button
Obama’s recently announced “Asia pivot” signals that East Asia will be at the center of the explosion of lily-pad bases and related developments. Already in Australia, U.S. marines are settling into a shared base in Darwin. Elsewhere, the Pentagon is pursuing plans for a drone and surveillance base in Australia’s Cocos Islands and deployments to Brisbane and Perth. In Thailand, the Pentagon has negotiated rights for new Navy port visits and a “disaster-relief hub” at U-Tapao.
In the Philippines, whose government evicted the U.S. from the massive Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base in the early 1990s, as many as 600 special forces troops have quietly been operating in the country’s south since January 2002. Last month, the two governments reached an agreement on the future U.S. use of Clark and Subic, as well as other repair and supply hubs from the Vietnam War era. In a sign of changing times, U.S. officials even signed a 2011 defense agreement with former enemy Vietnam and have begun negotiations over the Navy’s increased use of Vietnamese ports.
Elsewhere in Asia, the Pentagon has rebuilt a runway on tiny Tinian island near Guam, and it’s considering future bases in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, while pushing stronger military ties with India. Every year in the region, the military conducts around 170 military exercises and 250 port visits. On South Korea’s Jeju island, the Korean military is building a base that will be part of the U.S. missile defense system and to which U.S. forces will have regular access.
“We just can’t be in one place to do what we’ve got to do,” Pacific Command commander Admiral Samuel Locklear III has said. For military planners, “what we’ve got to do” is clearly defined as isolating and (in the terminology of the Cold War) “containing” the new power in the region, China. This evidently means “peppering” new bases throughout the region, adding to the more than 200 U.S. bases that have encircled China for decades in Japan, South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.
And Asia is just the beginning. In Africa, the Pentagon has quietly created “about a dozen air bases” for drones and surveillance since 2007. In addition to Camp Lemonnier, we know that the military has created or will soon create installations in Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mauritania, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, South Sudan, and Uganda. The Pentagon has also investigated building bases in Algeria, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria, among other places.
Next year, a brigade-sized force of 3,000 troops, and “likely more,” will arrive for exercises and training missions across the continent. In the nearby Persian Gulf, the Navy is developing an “afloat forward-staging base,” or “mothership,” to serve as a sea-borne “lily pad” for helicopters and patrol craft, and has been involved in a massive build-up of forces in the region.
In Latin America, following the military's eviction from Panama in 1999 and Ecuador in 2009, the Pentagon has created or upgraded new bases in Aruba and Curaçao, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru. Elsewhere, the Pentagon has funded the creation of military and police bases capable of hosting U.S. forces in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and even Ecuador. In 2008, the Navy reactivated its Fourth Fleet, inactive since 1950, to patrol the region. The military may want a base in Brazil and unsuccessfully tried to create bases, ostensibly for humanitarian and emergency relief, in Paraguay and Argentina.
Finally, in Europe, after arriving in the Balkans during 1990’s interventions, U.S. bases have moved eastward into some of the former Eastern Bloc states of the Soviet empire. The Pentagon is now developing installations capable of supporting rotating, brigade-sized deployments in Romania and Bulgaria, and a missile defense base and aviation facilities in Poland. Previously, the Bush administration maintained two CIA black sites (secret prisons) in Lithuania and another in Poland. Citizens of the Czech Republic rejected a planned radar base for the Pentagon’s still unproven missile defense system, and now Romania will host ground-based missiles.
A New American Way of War
A lily pad on one of the Gulf of Guinea islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the oil-rich west coast of Africa, helps explain what’s going on. A U.S. official has described the base as “another Diego Garcia,” referring to the Indian Ocean base that’s helped ensure decades of U.S. domination over Middle Eastern energy supplies. Without the freedom to create new large bases in Africa, the Pentagon is using São Tomé and a growing collection of other lily pads on the continent in an attempt to control another crucial oil-rich region.
Far beyond West Africa, the nineteenth century “Great Game” competition for Central Asia has returned with a passion -- and this time gone global. It’s spreading to resource-rich lands in Africa, Asia, and South America, as the United States, China, Russia, and members of the European Union find themselves locked in an increasingly intense competition for economic and geopolitical supremacy.
While Beijing, in particular, has pursued this competition in a largely economic fashion, dotting the globe with strategic investments, Washington has focused relentlessly on military might as its global trump card, dotting the planet with new bases and other forms of military power. “Forget full-scale invasions and large-footprint occupations on the Eurasian mainland,” Nick Turse has written of this new twenty-first century military strategy. “Instead, think: special operations forces... proxy armies... the militarization of spying and intelligence... drone aircraft... cyber-attacks, and joint Pentagon operations with increasingly militarized ‘civilian’ government agencies.”
Add to this unparalleled long-range air and naval power; arms sales besting any nation on Earth; humanitarian and disaster relief missions that clearly serve military intelligence, patrol, and “hearts and minds” functions; the rotational deployment of regular U.S. forces globally; port visits and an expanding array of joint military exercises and training missions that give the U.S. military de facto “presence” worldwide and help turn foreign militaries into proxy forces.
And lots and lots of lily-pad bases.
Military planners see a future of endless small-scale interventions in which a large, geographically dispersed collection of bases will always be primed for instant operational access. With bases in as many places as possible, military planners want to be able to turn to another conveniently close country if the United States is ever prevented from using a base, as it was by Turkey prior to the invasion of Iraq. In other words, Pentagon officials dream of nearly limitless flexibility, the ability to react with remarkable rapidity to developments anywhere on Earth, and thus, something approaching total military control over the planet.
Beyond their military utility, the lily pads and other forms of power projection are also political and economic tools used to build and maintain alliances and provide privileged U.S. access to overseas markets, resources, and investment opportunities. Washington is planning to use lily-pad bases and other military projects to bind countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America as closely as possible to the U.S. military -- and so to continued U.S. political-economic hegemony. In short, American officials are hoping military might will entrench their influence and keep as many countries as possible within an American orbit at a time when some are asserting their independence ever more forcefully or gravitating toward China and other rising powers.
Those Dangerous Lily Pads
While relying on smaller bases may sound smarter and more cost effective than maintaining huge bases that have often caused anger in places like Okinawa and South Korea, lily pads threaten U.S. and global security in several ways:
First, the “lily pad” language can be misleading, since by design or otherwise, such installations are capable of quickly growing into bloated behemoths.
Second, despite the rhetoric about spreading democracy that still lingers in Washington, building more lily pads actually guarantees collaboration with an increasing number of despotic, corrupt, and murderous regimes.
Third, there is a well-documented pattern of damage that military facilities of various sizes inflict on local communities. Although lily pads seem to promise insulation from local opposition, over time even small bases have often led to anger and protest movements.
Finally, a proliferation of lily pads means the creeping militarization of large swaths of the globe. Like real lily pads -- which are actually aquatic weeds -- bases have a way of growing and reproducing uncontrollably. Indeed, bases tend to beget bases, creating “base races” with other nations, heightening military tensions, and discouraging diplomatic solutions to conflicts. After all, how would the United States respond if China, Russia, or Iran were to build even a single lily-pad base of its own in Mexico or the Caribbean?
For China and Russia in particular, ever more U.S. bases near their borders threaten to set off new cold wars. Most troublingly, the creation of new bases to protect against an alleged future Chinese military threat may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: such bases in Asia are likely to create the threat they are supposedly designed to protect against, making a catastrophic war with China more, not less, likely.
Encouragingly, however, overseas bases have recently begun to generate critical scrutiny across the political spectrum from Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to Democratic Senator Jon Tester and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. With everyone looking for ways to trim the deficit, closing overseas bases offers easy savings. Indeed, increasingly influential types are recognizing that the country simply can’t afford more than 1,000 bases abroad.
Great Britain, like empires before it, had to close most of its remaining foreign bases in the midst of an economic crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. The United States is undoubtedly headed in that direction sooner or later. The only question is whether the country will give up its bases and downsize its global mission by choice, or if it will follow Britain’s path as a fading power forced to give up its bases from a position of weakness.
Of course, the consequences of not choosing another path extend beyond economics. If the proliferation of lily pads, special operations forces, and drone wars continues, the United States is likely to be drawn into new conflicts and new wars, generating unknown forms of blowback, and untold death and destruction. In that case, we’d better prepare for a lot more incoming flights -- from the Horn of Africa to Honduras -- carrying not just amputees but caskets.
David Vine is assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other places. He is currently completing a book about the more than 1,000 U.S. military bases located outside the United States.
© 2012 TomDispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/156343/
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