limitless life

Dying Honeybees: It Was the Insecticides All Along

limitlesslife — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:29:07 +0000

Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder may have a simple cause, after all. (photo: redorbit.com)

Dying Honeybees: It Was the Insecticides All Along

By Jeanne Roberts, Celsias

28 January 12

ith news that the U.S. honeybee population has been so devastated that some beekeepers will qualify for disaster relief dollars, comes a report from Purdue University that one of the causes of honeybee deaths is – as long suspected - neonicotinoids.

I say one of the causes, because the article does. In fact, the levels of neonicotinoid contamination of the powder used to spread seeds – up to 700,000 times the lethal dose – suggest that this pesticide may be the major, or precipitating, cause, with Varroa mites and other problems simply the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

And this, a myriad of causes, none of them dominant, is what agencies like the U.S.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture would have us believe, either because (as some suggest) they are understaffed to adequately investigate Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or because some of their former (or present) members are in bed with major chemical and genetically modified (GM) seed manufacturers.

The study, by Christian Krupke (professor of entomology) and Greg Hunt (professor of genetics and honeybee specialist), explains that the contaminated powder is residue from the seed treatment. What happens is, corn and soybean seeds are treated with neonicotinoids in a talc base to keep them moving through today’s high-tech vacuum seed spreaders when it comes time to plant.

But not all the talc stays attached to the seeds. Some is released as residue due to excessive application or machinery vibrations, or when cleaning the seeders after use, and settles on nearby flowering plants or in the soil. Some even manages to survive the growing year intact on corn pollen.

One of the neonicotinoids, clothianidin (and its precursor, thiamethoxam), was also found regularly, albeit at low levels, in U.S. soils up to 24 months after treated seed was planted. This is the same insecticide, or pesticide already banned across much of Europe, including France, Italy, Germany, the UK and Slovenia.

Several countries, like Germany, have also sued clothianidin maker Bayer CropScience for its role in the manufacture and distribution of the highly toxic pesticide, which is aimed at replacing imidacloprid (whose patent ran out, so it doesn’t bring as much sales revenue to chemical corporations like Bayer CropScience!).

This is the same Bayer that came under the gun in 2010 for its GM rice, which contaminated three fields of genetically pure rice in Germany. The cost, to Bayer, was $1.5 million, but the truth is that the Big Five Frankenfood creators (Bayer, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow and DuPont) rarely get tagged for their perversion of the natural world, making their takeover of the global seed market and their promotion of monocropping spectacularly successful (and almost complete, thanks to help from Codex Alimentarius).

Should you doubt this is true, consider the case of Monsanto in India, where the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, and the World Bank, both pushed regulators, who in turn pushed farmers to buy and sow expensive Monsanto cotton seed, which (because it carries a “terminator” gene) needs to be bought again every year, where once farmers either bought cheap, native cotton seed or saved seed for replanting.

When cotton fields from this GM seed failed to materialize – largely because farmers had been growing native cotton that required less water to survive – farmers lost everything. Many committed suicide by drinking the very (and also expensive) pesticides and weed killers tailor-made to work alongside their GM fields. The final death toll was 125,000.

Surprisingly, Europe – which seems to be dominated by a policy of central control (in everything from finances to law to farming), at least when compared to the U.S. – has been the staunchest opponent of Frankenfoods, from crop chemical to seed.

Not so the U.S., where beekeepers are losing about one-third of hives each and every year. But now the state of California, ever at the forefront of earth-friendly policies, has put forward a right-to-know referendum which will enable residents to find out about genetically engineered foods (i.e., who makes them, what they are, where they are sold) – something the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, has stubbornly refused to demand in food labeling.

Nor has the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stepped up to the plate. In fact, it failed to pay attention to reports from its own scientists, and was completely taken in by the deeply flawed Bayer study about clothianidin-treated canola crops.

The situation in the U.S. has now reached what beekeepers and their advocates, like Steve Ellis of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board, are calling a ‘critical tipping point’ beyond which honeybee colonies may not survive to replenish themselves.

Thanks, Bayer et al; we needed that!

Give Okinawa Back to the Okinawans

limitlesslife — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:19:01 +0000

Anti-base protesters at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma hold hands in front of the base sign during a demonstration May 18, 2010, symbolically closing the controversial base. (photo: Matt Orr/Stars and Stripes)

Give Okinawa Back to the Okinawans

By Doug Bandow, Forbes

28 January 12

he U.S. is overextended and overburdened, but Washington policymakers are determined to preserve America’s dominant military presence around the globe. Financial pressure is forcing the administration to finally slow a massive, decade-long increase in military spending, but American garrisons overseas remain inviolate. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared: “The U.S. remains committed to maintaining a robust forward presence in East Asia.”

That means preserving multiple bases in Okinawa, which have burdened island residents since the U.S. defeated imperial Japanese forces there in mid-1945. Nearly seven decades later Washington refuses to take any meaningful steps to lighten the load. Indeed, Administration pressure in 2010 helped force the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama over the issue.

The American government insists that it is and always will be the senior partner in any alliance. Washington will protect you, but only on its terms. In this case, the U.S. wants bases in Okinawa, and wants them forever. Nearly 30 Okinawans, ranging from elected officials to students, are visiting Washington, D.C. this week to tell Americans about the resulting burden on the people of Okinawa.

Okinawa’s travails have a long history. The Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa is the largest, were independent throughout most of their history. Only late was the territory conquered by imperial Japan. Okinawans were never fully trusted by Tokyo and suffered horribly in the closing stages of World War II.

The so-called “Typhoon of Steel,” as the American invasion campaign was called, ran from April through June in 1945. Combat was brutal. Estimated civilian casualties ran up to 150,000. The U.S. occupied Japan after the war and turned Okinawa into a veritable colony. Only in 1972, 27 years after the conclusion of the war, was the island turned back to Japan.

However, the U.S. military continues to control much of the island, roughly 20 percent of the land mass. Long fences separate residents from property owned by their ancestors. Air bases crowd civilian neighborhoods. Prime beaches remain under U.S. military control. Thousands of young, aggressive foreign men transform local life-and often not for the good.

Frustrated Okinawans have been asking for relief for years. Anger exploded in 1995 after the rape of a teenage girl and insensitive comments of the U.S. military commander. But nothing changed, despite large demonstrations. Okinawans faced a hostile partnership between the American and Japanese governments.

The U.S. military likes Okinawa because of its central location. Nor does the Pentagon want to pay to relocate the Marine Expeditionary Force. Inconvenience for Okinawans is not a concern in Washington, other than the extent to which it complicates the U.S.-Japan relationship. Gen. Burton Field, commander of U.S. forces in Japan, dismissed the “resistance in Okinawa” with the observation that “the sooner we are able to build a better place for the Marines to operate, the sooner we will put some of this animosity behind us.”

However, the real author of the Okinawans’ distress is Tokyo. The U.S. government negotiates with the national Japanese authorities, not the Okinawan prefectural government. From Washington’s perspective, responsibility to accommodate local preferences lies with Tokyo, not the U.S.

But the Japanese government also favors concentrating bases in Okinawa because of its location-its distance from the rest of Japan. Roughly three-fourths (by area) of U.S. military facilities, with half of American military personnel are located in Japan’s most distant and poorest prefecture, making up just .6 percent of the nation’s territory. Although nearly six of ten Japanese is critical of the resulting burden on Okinawa, none of them wants another U.S. base near their neighborhood.

Proposals abound for tinkering with the American presence. In 2006 after a decade of negotiation the Japanese government agreed to pay to help move some Marines to Guam and relocate Futenma airbase to less populous Henoko elsewhere on the island. The initiative was designed to satisfy no one: inconvenient to the U.S., expensive to Japan, and unhelpful to Okinawa. In Japan’s 2009 election the opposition Democratic Party of Japan opposed the proposal. After taking office, DPJ Prime Minister Hatoyama declared: “It must never happen that we accept the existing plan.”

The new government’s intentions were good, but it did not expect the Obama administration’s unyielding refusal to reset Washington’s military relationship with one of its closest allies. The DPJ had spoken of creating a more equal partnership, but that is not how America conducts alliances. Nor were Japanese policymakers-and people-ready to challenge the relationship. The first DPJ government collapsed under U.S. pressure.

Yet the Futenma plan appears to be no more viable than the Hatoyama premiership. The Government Accountability Office figures that relocating the Marines to Guam likely will cost more than $29 billion, nearly triple the initial estimate. Congress cut all money for the project this year. Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Jim Webb (D-Va.) called the proposal “unrealistic, unworkable and unaffordable.”

Japan also slashed 2012 financial support for the move. Tokyo is inclined to simply kick the can down the road, so to speak. Doing so “worked” after the 1995 rape; protests eventually died down. Large demonstrations erupted again in 2010 but then ebbed.

Japanese leaders hope that doing nothing will work again, at least in the short-term, since Okinawans still have little clout in Tokyo. Prime Minister Naoto Kan last year told island residents that “We have reviewed [moving operations out of Okinawa] from every angle, however, and the current situation would not allow it.” For years Tokyo has attempted to simultaneously bribe and browbeat local residents into submission.

Civil disobedience is a potential game-changer. In May 2010 17,000 Okinawans created a human chain surrounding Futenma. More recently roughly 200 demonstrators delayed delivery of an environmental impact report on a new runway from the defense ministry to the prefectural government. Using force against protestors would threaten a future Japanese government’s survival and embarrass Washington.

Rather than resist Okinawan demands, the U.S. should voluntarily reduce its military presence on the island. Jeffrey Hornung of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies observed: “Given how much problems this is causing in Okinawa, it’s finally time to rethink things.”

But American military facilities are a symptom, not a cause. The bases exist to support the defense of Japan. The MEF also is available for deployment elsewhere, most obviously in a war on the Korean Peninsula.

It is unreasonable to expect Washington to defend Japan without bases in Japan. But the U.S. should end its security guarantee and then remove, rather than relocate, its military facilities in Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan. Indeed, instead of augmenting its forces elsewhere in East Asia, such as in Australia, Washington should withdraw and demobilize troops and close bases throughout the region. World War II ended 67 years ago. America no longer need guarantee the security of its many prosperous and capable allies.

Japan should endorse this step as the only way to escape its status as an American protectorate. Tokyo has essentially relinquished control over its own territory to comply with U.S. demands. Although the Obama administration frustrated the 2009 DPJ campaign pledge to create a more equal security partnership, Japanese citizens will inevitably raise more questions about the bilateral relationship as they debate security issues.

Prof. Kenneth B. Pyle of the University of Washington argued that “the degree of U.S. domination in the relationship has been so extreme that a recalibration of the alliance was bound to happen, but also because autonomy and self-mastery have always been fundamental goals of modern Japan.” Even as Prime Minister Hatoyama was beaten by Washington he looked to the future, observing: “Someday, the time will come when Japan’s peace will have to be ensured by the Japanese people themselves.”

That many Japanese still look to America for their defense is hardly surprising. Relying on a friendly superpower for protection frees domestic resources for other purposes. The alliance also eases Tokyo’s diplomatic burden, which otherwise would include reassuring neighbors still obsessed with Imperial Japan’s military depredations.

More curious is Washington’s determination to keep paying for Japan’s defense. The U.S. government is broke, having run deficits exceeding $1 trillion three years running. Unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare alone exceed $100 trillion. A potpourri of other financial obligations account for another $100 trillion. Yet most U.S. policymakers presume the necessity for a permanent, even enhanced American military presence in East Asia.

There are two different rationales for Washington’s paternalistic role. The first is to contain China. Pointing to the People’s Republic of China, Gen. Field declared: “Most of the countries in this region want to see this remain a secure and stable region.”

Exactly how the Marines help contain Beijing is not clear. As Robert Gates observed, U.S. policymakers would have to have their heads examined to participate in another land war in Asia. If a conflict with China improbably developed, Washington would rely on air and naval units.

Moreover, despite persistent fear-mongering about Beijing, the PRC is in no position, and for many years will not be in position, to harm the U.S. Chinese military spending remains far behind that of America. Beijing is working mightily to deter the U.S. from attacking China, not to attack America.

Japan and its neighbors have greater reason to worry, being closer to and weaker than the PRC. However, it is up to them, not Washington, to assess the risk and respond accordingly. They should take whatever steps they deem necessary to ensure that their region remains “secure and stable,” as Gen. Field put it. Just as China is seeking to deter the U.S., they should seek to deter Beijing.

Japan already has constructed a capable military, called a “Self-Defense Force” to get around a constitutional prohibition originally enacted at the insistence of Washington during the American occupation. But Tokyo has never invested resources commensurate with its capabilities; in fact, the government recently announced that it was reducing SDF outlays. If Japan believes itself to be threatened by China, as well as ever-unpredictable North Korea, then Tokyo should do more.

There also is good reason for Japan to work more closely with like-minded states such as the Republic of Korea. This bilateral relationship, like others involving Tokyo, remains tainted by history. But so long as Washington essentially smothers the region with its security blanket, allied states have little incentive to eschew taking domestic political advantage of nationalistic sentiments and work through historic difficulties. Take away the American guarantee, and other states have a much greater incentive to cooperate.

Indeed, in recent years Beijing has exhibited sharp elbows in its relationship with other states over territorial claims. The response has been to exacerbate regional concerns over Chinese behavior and spark increased military spending, and in particular naval procurement programs. That is far better than expecting Washington to build more ships to deploy to the region.

Some policymakers talk more broadly about promoting regional stability, but it’s hard to imagine a contingency requiring deployment of the Okinawa-based MEF. Manpower-rich South Korea doesn’t need a few thousand Marines if the North invades. Even if “something,” whatever that might be, happened in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, Burma, or Cambodia-among the least stable states in the region-it is hard to imagine why the U.S. would consider intervening with ground troops. Not every geopolitical problem warrants an automatic American military response. Then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald Fogelman admitted that the Marines “serve no military function. They don’t need to be in Okinawa to meet any time line in any war plan.”

The second purpose of the U.S.-Japan alliance is to contain Tokyo-or as Maj. Gen. Henry Stackpole famously but inelegantly put it, to maintain “the cap in the bottle” preventing “a rearmed, resurgent Japan.” It is a claim that even Japanese officials have used on occasion: protect us, since surely you don’t want the Imperial Japanese navy wandering the Pacific again.

But the “stop us before we aggress again” argument has grown thin after decades of peace and democracy. While there are no certainties in life, there is no evidence of resurgent militarism among more than a fanatic few. Deploying even a few peace-keeping troops has proved to be highly controversial for Tokyo. The Japanese should not be treated as if they possess a double dose of original sin.

Moreover, Washington could help ease regional concerns by promoting military transparency and multilateralism. Tokyo should adapt its forces and relationships to defense and deterrence against a superior power. Without a large army, Japan could not occupy anyone even if it wanted to.

But whether Tokyo does more and, if so, precisely what it does, and with whom, should be up to the Japanese people. It is not America’s place to dictate.

Dropping the U.S.-Japan military alliance would not mean abandoning the U.S.-Japan relationship. Economic, family, and cultural ties would remain strong. Moreover, the two countries should cooperate militarily. Shared intelligence, emergency base access, training maneuvers, pre-positioned materiel, and other forms of cooperation would remain appropriate. The U.S. could act as an “off-shore balancer,” ready to aid allied states such as Japan if threatened by a potential hegemon. But Washington no longer would attempt to micro-manage regional disputes of lesser consequence.

Adopting such a stance would be in the interests of the American and Japanese people. And especially in the interest of the Okinawan people. The U.S. should begin transforming its alliance relationships. Now is a good time to do so with Japan.

Nuclear Energy Governance after Fukushima

limitlesslife — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:42:46 +0000

Speech at Hosei University, on October 5, 2011

“Nuclear　Energy Governance after Fukushima”

Mitsuhei Murata

Former Japanese Ambassador to Switzerland

Executive Director, the Japan Society for Global System and Ethics

1.Historic role to be played by Japan

As an inhabitant in Japan and in Tokyo, being increasingly menaced by the spreading radioactive contamination resulting from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, I feel qualified to voice the strongest condemnation against the use of nuclear energy, be it civil or military. It has been definitely confirmed that nuclear energy is beyond human control. The air, the land and the sea continue to be polluted. Even food such as fish, beef, mushrooms and others have been found contaminated, which has shocked all Japan. Slow death, alas , awaits so many innocent children and citizens like in Chernobyl.

It is now the responsibility and the duty of Japan to contribute

to the realization of denuclearization, both military and civil ,as the only country to have grasped the whole picture of nuclear energy that can be defined as the most immoral, being the　seeds of unbearable disasters and catastrophe beyond imagination.

The 4 nuclear reactors out of control are teaching us the lesson that the usage of nuclear energy with its fatal effects due to its invisible radioactivity and radiation is totally incompatible with ethics.

The innocent population is suddenly placed in a situation out of human control by an accident and is obliged to accept all sorts of consequences. Hundreds of thousands of residents in Fukushima forced to seek refuge far away from home are placed on the brink of despair.

The Japanese population,　the first victim of the military use of

atomic energy is now going through a huge ordeal resulting from its civil use. It is the will of good willing Japanese people to see to it that Japan will help the world to change course in the nuclear field to avoid further tragedies. It is a historic role to be played by Japan.

2.The　“nuclear village” or nuclear dictatorship

From this point of view, I am deeply disappointed by the persistence of the“nuclear dictatorship” in spite of the overwhelming support of the public for ceasing the dependence on nuclear energy. This is made possible by minimizing the gravity of the consequences of the accident, in particular, the underground situation of the nuclear plant, where melt through fuel rods are surmised to be wriggling.

The possibility of hydrogen or steam explosions that could make even Tokyo inhabitable cannot be excluded. It can be said that the world faces the greatest danger never experienced by humanity. It could become the first step toward the ultimate catastrophe of the whole world. Suffice it to say that radioactive waste equivalent to one million Hiroshima atomic bombs are to be accumulated in the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant. We cannot deny that the existing 54 nuclear reactors in Japan are all seeds of catastrophes

After the Fukushima accident, promoting nuclear energy has undeniably lost the status of national policy. It is required consequently to reform the existing system, including the establishment of the independent nuclear security agency and the strengthened surveillance of the expenditures of the electric companies that have manipulated leaders in all fields, including government officials, politicians, businessmen, scholars,

judges , and the mass media. The nuclear dictatorship in Japan was thus created.

Seven years ago, I sent out a message in all directions ,

including top political leaders, warning that electric companies

would be deciding the fate of Japan. It enumerated concrete cases

reflecting the lack of ethics and responsibility like careless management and supervision, false reports, arbitrary decisions

like extending by 20 years the life of a reactor.

If the nuclear dictatorship is allowed to survive, as is at present, electric companies will be deciding the fate of the world.

3.Proposals for true denuclearization

In 2005, I submitted to the InterAction Council Meeting held

in the United States a paper entitled “A plea for a total ban on the use, be it military or civilian, of nuclear energy” The Fukushima accident has strengthened my conviction expressed in the paper.

In the paper,I made the following proposals.

1.The I.A.E.A .that is given an incompatible mission of preventing nuclear proliferation and promoting nuclear power generation should be reformed.

2.National nuclear commissions mandated to promote nuclear plants should also be reformed.

3.Many organizations and groups campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons,including the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be advised to revitalize the movement by encompassing the abolition of the civilian use of nuclear energy.

4.Those involved in the peaceful use of nuclear energy are often criticized that they have not sufficiently disclosed the dangers of nuclear energy such as lasting damages of radioactivity and radiation leakage.They are requested to respond and fulfil their accountability

.5. International control over the safety of existing nuclear plants must be strengthened. Sovereignty can no longer serve as a pretext for rejecting interventions by other countries, since a fatal accident in one country could have unimaginable consequences for many others.

The problem of nuclear energy boils down to the question of ethics and responsibility.

I concluded the paper by the following remarks.

“Is it ethical to export nuclear installations to other countries fully aware that they are dangerous?

Is it ethical for decision makers to import such installations, fully aware of the dangers?

Is it not a lack of the sense of responsibility to allow the continued functioning of more than 430 nuclear reactors without knowing how to dispose of accumulating nuclear waste or how to suppress an eventual accident that requires the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people?

To do nothing to eliminate the seeds of such catastrophes, doesn’t it reflect a lack of the sense of justice?

The foregoing statement seems to justify the need for the denuclearisation of the globe, both military and civilian, which I have long been advocating.

We are faced with two choices. The first is to start the denuclearisation of the globe as a preventive measure. The second is to be eventually forced to do so by a catastrophic disaster.”

Regrettably, this is what has happened

4. The lessons of Fukushima

(1) The dawning of a new civilization

The Japan Society for Global System and Ethics, of which I am executive director, issued an urgent appeal based on the following position last April.

The recent earthquakes and tsunami that led to the tragedy of Fukushima nuclear desaster, are nothing but warnings of Mother Earth that mankind faces a change of way of life not only in Japan, but the entire world.

The present civilization of power based on paternal culture needs to be replaced by a civilization of harmony based maternal culture. Paternal culture whose characteristics are competition and confrontation needs to be balanced with maternal culture whose characteristics are harmony and cooperation.

The deeply-rooted cause of the crisis confronting mankind is the universally prevalent lack of ethics. It is against fundamental ethics to abuse and exhaust natural resources that belong to future generations and leave behind permanently poisonous waste and enormous financial debts.

Prompted by such circumstances, this Society proposes to the International Community to hold a United Nations Ethics Summit as early as possible and to create an “International Day for Global Ethics” that will enable all nations, year by year, to reflect on the importance of ethics.

This appeal has been translated into 9 languages. The support for it is fortunately rapidly expanding.

(2)Impact on neighboring regions and countries

The Fukushima nuclear accident has shown that an accident of one nuclear accident can affect the whole world.

The Town Council of Makinohara Town,10 kilometers away from

the Hamaoka Nuclear plant has passed a resolution demanding the permanent ceasing of the operations of the Hamaoka reactors.

This “Makinohara phenomenon” is of great significance and it is expected to be followed suit not only in Japan, but world wide.

The day before yesterday, the city of Yaezu followed suit.

It makes it possible to conceive a new global movement for true denuclearization in which the countries that have opted for phasing out nuclear energy are expected to play a leading role.

Even countries not possessing nuclear reactors will participate

in this lofty endeavour.

(3)Increased dangers of nuclear terrorism

I read with great interest Professor Tilman Ruff’s article (Japan Times,Sep.21,2011.http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20110921a2.html) which has made the vulnerability of nuclear powers stand out in relief in relation to nuclear terrorism. The Fukushima disaster has shown that power failure , water failure, in a nuclear plant can cause catastrophes. It has brought into focus the dangers of spent fuel pools which are not well protected.

Motivations for real denuclearization are gaining weight. The consequences of China constructing hundreds of nuclear reactors can easily be imagined. Yellow sands flying from China could be lethal in the worst case.

(Conclusion)

The will of heavens and the earth (my translation of Providence)

that protects humanity and the planet earth, although often resorting to cruel warnings, will support the vision of true denuclearization.

A maternal civilization based on ethics and solidarity is indispensable for denuclearization. A UN Ethics Summit is the first concrete step toward this civilization, hence toward denuclearization. It is therefore indispensable for World Peace.

Japan has the duty and the responsibility to let the entire world know the whole picture of the impending danger mankind has never known. The ultimate catastrophe must be averted at all costs.

Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War Machine

limitlesslife — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 04:54:53 +0000

AlterNet / By Robert Greenwald

78 COMMENTS

Robert Greenwald and Reporter Michael Hastings Take on the Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War Machine

Hastings, in his hard-hitting new book, discusses “politically correct imperialism,” why the military is obsessed with its legacy, and why we’re stuck in post-9/11 thinking.

January 25, 2012 |

Photo Credit: The Daily Beast

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Not many journalists can say they had a hand in getting a commanding general relieved of duty in the middle of a war. But Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings did just that when his 2010 story on Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, sent shockwaves through Washington and resulted in McChrystal being recalled to DC and uneremoniously fired by Barack Obama.

Hastings’ report, “The Runaway General,” detailed how McChrystal and his top officers spoke of their civilian superiors with sneering condescension, and revealed that they didn’t genuinely embrace the counterinsurgency strategy being sold to the public at home. The piece was a result of fortuitous circumstances. Hastings had at first been allowed only controlled access to McCrystal, but when European air-traffic was grounded following the eruption of the Eyjafjöll volcano in Iceland, Hastings ended up catching a bus to Berlin with McChrystal and his staff, who let down their guard during the extended ride.

The young journo is a veteran war correspondent who covered Iraq as well as Afghanistan. The McChrystal story wasn’t Hastings’ first significant report, and it wouldn’t be his last — in 2011, he broke a story about how David Petraeus, McChrystal’s replacement in Afghanistan, was using military psy-ops units to influence visiting United States senators’ views of the conflict.

Hastings’ new book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan, draws on his extensive grounds-eye-view reporting from the decade-long conflict. Filmmaker Robert Greenwald, director of Rethink Afghanistan, caught up with Hastings to discuss his book and the ongoing war.

Robert Greenwald: Let me congratulate you on this book, it’s an absolutely wonderful read. I felt like I was reading some combination of a detective story, a movie screenplay and Orson Welles all at the same time.

Michael Hastings: Thank you so much.

RG: One of the ideas that you talk about is that the “terrorist safe haven” is the “weapons of mass destruction” of the Afghanistan war. Why don’t you explain how you came to that realization and why it’s important.

MH: Well, I call it the “safe haven myth.” And what that means is that this idea that the best way to protect ourselves from getting attacked in the United States by terrorists is to invade and occupy other countries – that’s essentially what they mean when they say we can’t accept terrorist safe havens. And the response to the safe havens has been to expend billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American troops to try to prevent something that is quite nebulous.

I mean, it’s very clear a terrorist safe haven can be anywhere, and they are everywhere. So the notion that the best way to defeat them or to make yourself safer from a terrorist is by occupying countries always struck me as funny. How are 150,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan going to protect us from another terrorist attack? And the answer is they’re not. That hasn’t happened because all the other terrorist attacks we’ve seen, and attempted terrorist attacks, they’re not coming from Afghanistan. The terrorists have moved.

Whether they’re coming from Nigeria and Yemen or different parts of Pakistan or Connecticut, you know? The Times Square bomber, the foiled plot there, was hatched in Connecticut – is it a terrorist safe haven as well? No. And it gets to the larger point, which is that if you considered terrorism a law enforcement problem you were considered to be some sort of appeasing Neville Chamberlain type. But in fact, that’s the way to defeat terrorists.

I mean, every study shows that the way to defeat terrorist networks is through law enforcement and intelligence gathering, it’s not through invading and occupying.

RG: Yeah, I’ve read a lot of those studies and it couldn’t be clearer that there are ways to get terrorists, and the way that’s guaranteed to fail is to invade, occupy, kill lots of innocent people. So do you have a sense of how and why this theory came into being? I mean, is it completely driven by the politics of the Bush administration? The think tanks in DC? Some combination thereof? Because it’s so far off the mark in terms of any rational notion about keeping us safer.

MH: I think it has to do with the original reaction to September 11. By going into Afghanistan where, at the time, Osama bin Laden was being given safe haven by the Taliban. It was a legitimate rationale — “Okay, the Taliban government is protecting this terrorist and as a response to that we are going to punish this government for their actions.”

And at that time, remember, there were warnings. In 2001 people were warning, oh, this could be a quagmire … and again, they were laughed off the stage. So then, 10 years later when we were clearly in a quagmire, the military having kind of sunk their claws into the war find themselves in a situation where they need to justify all the tremendous outlay of resources.

And so the way they came up to justify what they were doing was to adopt these counterinsurgency tactics. Now, this is where counterinsurgency relates to the terrorist safe havens because General David Petraeus said, and I found this during the research, he said counterinsurgency is the framework we should view counterterrorism through. And that’s not true, and everyone knows that’s not true. But they had to come up with a justification to continue to pursue the policies that they wanted to pursue.

A general told me recently that the military is risk-averse and legacy obsessed. And I think that’s interesting. Especially the legacy-obsessed part. Because once they started in Iraq, and once they sort of started on this project in Afghanistan, it’s much less risky to keep doing what you’re doing. Leaving is a risk. Staying and doing what you’re doing, you know what the outcome is going to be because you’ve been doing it for 10 years.

And legacy-obsessed means they don’t want to have a repeat of Vietnam. They want to be able to say — the Pentagon wants to be able to say, General Petraeus and General McChrystal want to be able to say that they won. And so that’s why they’re going to keep doing what they’re doing until they can convince everyone that they won.

RG: Now, I underlined so many things in your book that it would take a day to just quote them all. But one quote that stuck with me summed up the essential flaws in the thinking, the safe haven flaw, if you will: “Marja must be controlled in order to eventually control Kandahar. Kandahar must be controlled to control Afghanistan. Afghanistan must be controlled to control Pakistan. Pakistan must be controlled to prevent Saudi Arabia terrorists from getting on a flight at J.F.K. Airport in Jamaica, Queens.”

Did that revelation all come to you at the same time? Or how were you able to put that together and make it so crystal clear?

MH: Well, to me this was apparent in Iraq, but it’s also apparent in Afghanistan: that nothing that we’re doing on a daily basis — by “we” I mean NATO and U.S. forces — has anything to do with preventing another September 11. I mean, 99 percent of the people we killed over these past 10 years would never have posed a threat to the United States. I mean, that’s a devastating indictment of our endeavors — it’s devastating.

RG: Well, when we began our work on Afghanistan, we did it at a time when the war was incredibly popular — it was the right war – but a cursory look made it clear that the fundamentals made no sense. Iraq, you could argue — obviously we were opposed to it – but you could argue they had weapons of mass destruction and therefore you should do something. It was a wrong but rational argument. In Afghanistan, I cannot find rational, logical arguments for doing what we’re doing.

MH: In 2008, after my first trip to Afghanistan, I came back and did a story for GQ, and my editor said something — and it’s a line I’ve stolen from him – he said we’re stuck in post-9/11 thinking. There was this whole period of time where you could be accused of pre-9/11 thinking, but what’s happened is we’re stuck in post-9/11 thinking. And these misconceptions that I think took hold quite early have become institutionalized. And institutionalized in a way that is meant to shut down debate.

Because you may say, well, we should get out of Afghanistan, and then the answer is, well, what about the terrorist safe havens? Grover Norquist actually made the argument that there’s a reason why there’s not a robust debate from the other side about Afghanistan – it’s because they know how flimsy their argument is.

And we haven’t even gotten to the fact that by being in these places – and with the trauma that we’re inflicting on these societies while we’re there – that’s the way you create terrorists, it’s not the way you defeat terrorists.

RG: Yes, well, with the exception of you and a few others we have allowed some of these folks to get away with outrageousness under the pretense that it’s serious thinking. And I think the so-called liberal hawks have also done us an extraordinary disservice for which they have paid no public price. And you had a really good name for it — “politically correct imperialism.” And I just love that.

MH: It’s really amazing to see. And the sort of liberal human-rights pro-war community, they only use these sort of human rights issues when it’s to their advantage. The great argument is we can’t leave Afghanistan because what about the Afghan women?

And the problem with that line of thinking is not that, oh, you know, I’m not concerned with the fate of Afghan women, it’s that the U.S. government and the Pentagon is never going to be concerned with the fate of Afghan women. And the only reason these arguments are used is to put forth these sort of plans for constant war.

But I should rephrase that. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just not a priority. And all these human rights issues that get put out there as reasons to stay, are just, in my mind, again, it becomes a strange form of this politically correct imperialism. If the U.S. government were actually concerned about the fate of these native populations, then you clearly wouldn’t want to invade them and raid their houses and detain tens of thousands of their citizens. Does anyone really think that we have any concern at all for the fate of Afghan women?

But again, that’s taken as a serious argument. You know, people at the Council on Foreign Relations will argue strenuously that’s why we have to be in Afghanistan.

RG: I want to move to a Colbert quote and talk about the Pentagon and the media. There’s a great quote of his from the White House Correspondents dinner, whenever that was, 2006: “Let’s review the rules, here’s how it works. The President makes decisions, he’s the decider. The press secretary announces the decisions, and you people of the press type these decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put them through a spell check and go home.”

It’s common knowledge about Iraq, but I think the price that we’ve paid for the press being stenographers, or as you call it, the “media military industrial complex,” is significant. And I do not think it’s a question of just sort of attacking some bad journalists, although that can be done, but I’d like you to talk about the institutional way that Pentagon approaches this.

MH: Well, one point on Stephen Colbert’s speech: it’s now considered sort of this amazing speech because it was, but at the time a lot of journalists panned it. Oh, they hated it because it hit too close.

I mean, look, there are a lot of excellent journalists doing great, great work. But the reason I called it the “media military industrial complex,” and one of the sort of insights that I have had is that they call it the Pentagon Press Corps, right? And you sort of think, oh, well it means the people who kind of watch over the Pentagon and perform the media’s watchdog function, but no, it’s an extension of the Pentagon. For the most part.

I mean, when was the last time anyone at the Pentagon broke a story that wasn’t pre-approved? It’s very, very rare. And the reason why it’s so difficult — and this gets to the information operations and the public affairs — it’s a very difficult story to tell because you’re lifting up the curtain on what have become very common practices for journalists to do.

And I noticed this first in Iraq when things were going horribly — this is in 2005, 2006, 2007 when I was there. And the spokespeople in the military public relations apparatus would just lie to your face. Every day they would lie. It was general Caldwell who was one of the spokes people there who I would sit next to at these briefings and he would say everything’s fine, you know? And there might have been four car bombs that morning.

And what’s been scary is that these sort of information operations tactics … most journalists consider them no big deal. And when you try to point out, ‘hey, this isn’t right.’ you get your head chopped off.

I did a story about this information operations team trained in psychological operations that was being asked to spin and influence visiting senators. Did the media respond by saying, ‘let’s launch an investigation, let’s make sure we don’t do this?’ No, they responded by attacking the whistle blower and then at the same time saying, ‘oh, it’s no big deal, this is fine. Of course generals use their information operations psy-ops guys to put together material, it’s not a big deal, it’s just normal public relations.’

But wait a second here. This is not just normal public relations — there are entire operations in the Pentagon whose goal is not just to influence the enemy’s population but in fact the more important goal is to influence the U.S. population. And the line that used to be, or was supposed to have been the red line between public relations and information operations, meaning one you use on Americans and one you use on the enemy, they are tearing that firewall down. So you have generals with public media handlers and they have these contracting companies that are collecting data on who’s tweeting what and they have different Twitter “sock-puppets” that they’ve put up to try to manipulate all these different social media.

And at some point they’re essentially waging this global information war against their own citizens. So that, to me, is the most disturbing trend of it all. And General Petraeus at one point said the most important thing about Iraq was information operations, information operations, information operations. And in the context he was saying it, he meant in terms of convincing the Iraqi people that things were going well. But the real people he was convincing were back in Washington. That’s who the target of all the spin really is.

RG: And when you said the people of Washington … so you are talking about the decision-makers who get impacted by this, right?

MH: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of really good reporting that’s come out on the ground while you’re over there. But you look at the reporting that comes out of Washington on some of this stuff and it’s bonkers, it’s just so far off base.

I haven’t ever really looked at the numbers, but you count up the budget of every major news organization in Afghanistan, and I would guess American news organizations spend maybe 10 million a year, maybe 20 million to cover Afghanistan. The Pentagon itself is spending 5 million just to have one information operations unit there, and they have hundreds of them. So the actual military in Afghanistan is putting hundreds of millions of dollars of resources into manipulating the media. And the media is spending $10 -20million to try to find, in theory, the truth. So it’s this huge power imbalance that you’re always fighting against.

And God forbid you step outside the packet, as some journalists have done, and point this out. Yeah, we all know they’re lying but you’re not supposed to say it, you know? We know we’re getting bullshit every day, but come on, man, don’t point it out — that’s not classy.

RG: Right. So I know that it’s systemic, but are there individual reporters whom you want to call out publicly for their sort of following the Pentagon line and not doing their job?

MH: Yeah. I saw a pretty egregious example with the New York TimesPentagon correspondent who literally just published the Pentagon spokesperson’s anonymous quotes when he was reporting on my stories. And he didn’t bother to call Rolling Stone for a comment, of course, because, well, he’s got the official line from the Pentagon.

But I would also call out a group of very influential national security reporters who work at most of the major media outlets. And if you look closely at their resumes, they all belong or have been paid by, or have worked for very influential think tanks. Now again, what’s the big deal? These think tanks — Center for New American Security is sort of the most egregious example — are funded by defense contractors. These think-tanks also employ a lot of retired generals. And,, more importantly, they are promoting very specific pro-war policies.

And so they put the guys on their payroll whose job it is to cover the policies they’re promoting. And you go through the list, all of them – theNew York Times, the Washington Post – have had their guys on the payroll of these major influential think attention, again, funded by defense contractors, and then we expect them to cover their friends and colleagues very critically? They haven’t.

One guy said to me, “I don’t think that just the fact that they had a job or had a stipend or had an office space at these places impacts their coverage.” I said, “I don’t know about that. They’re all on the same team, you know, in this atmosphere.” And CNAS, amazingly enough, brags about the influence it peddles. They brag about all the big time journalists they have on their payroll and the influence that that brings.

And you can call it soft influence peddling, but I think it’s more than that. Look, if you’re a police reporter but you’re working for a police officer association’s policy network which is funded by the police groups, you would be called out for it. If you were a golf reporter and you’re being paid by the PGA but writing for a national publication, you would be called out for it.

So the fact that they haven’t … well, they have been but it just doesn’t stick because they’re all complicit. I mean, that’s the rub. And I understand that it’s tough to make a living as a writer, and these institutions give you an office space, they give you time, they give you money to do more interesting projects, but what’s the price of that? The price is that you have to pull a lot of punches. And you may not even be realizing you’re doing it. But I think they do, I think they’re just playing the game.

RG: Right, the club. Moving from that to the final question I wanted to ask you about. When you exposed what was going on with McChrystal and his team over there, you said you learned by going out in the field not at the K Street cocktail parties …

MH: Yeah, and that was a comment that endeared me to many of my friends in Washington, I’m sure.

RG: I’m sure it did. But an important one because it’s a very clear dividing line, and a very clear perspective. You got quite viciously attacked. Was it organized? Was it the club? And how did you respond to those attacks? And have they had any lasting effect?

MH: Well, look, at first I was perplexed and thought, ‘oh, these guys just don’t get what I’m doing or they’re confused.’ But then I realized it was a little more pernicious than that. I’m trying to think of exactly how I should put this. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by it.But I was. I got a horrible review in the Wall Street Journal which was comical in many ways because it was written by a defense contractor, it was written by a guy who worked for General Petreaus and general Caldwell, and they didn’t disclose that.

But this reviewer says, you know, ‘Hastings is a fuck up because he follows in the tradition of Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, and not reporters who work for the New Yorker or The New York Times.’ And why that was interesting to me was because, I agree, I totally agree with that analysis, but it’s because Neil Sheehan and Dave Halberstam, their experiences were forged while they were in their 20s in Vietnam, you know? They were young reporters covering this stuff. So they saw the war not working first-hand. And that had a very profound impact on how they viewed everything.

And there’s a number of journalists, of my contemporaries, who I would name but I don’t want to get them in trouble, who also have seen these sort of same sort of things unravel in our 20s. And that’s the most formative kind of experience for us. Now on the other hand, you have these kind of liberal hawks guys who their first big war was Iraq, and they were dead wrong about it, you know? They’re these foreign policy experts who were just dead wrong.

And so how do you deal with that? How do you come to terms with that? And my answer to that would be I don’t think they came to terms with it well. As you see when they lash out.

And you can’t ever forget the impact of the complete failure of many of the top names in the media when it comes to the Iraq war. And we’ve never come to terms with it. They just can’t. The guys who were the worst offenders cannot come to terms with their moral responsibility in terms of waging the war in Iraq. And in fact, again, you see them making statements today like, ‘oh, well I didn’t really support that,’ or ‘I was ambivalent,’ or ‘well, I didn’t publicly support it.’ And you think they would have learned with Afghanistan to question more and to not just cheerlead the whole thing.

The fact that every journalist in the Pentagon Press Corps wasn’t standing up when they were going to escalate in Afghanistan and saying, ‘are you guys fucking kidding me? We’re going to escalate in Afghanistan? Are you guys nuts? Have you all gone mad?’ But the majority just reported that some unnamed military official says McCrystal wants more troops, and Obama better give them to him. You know? It was pathetic. It was really, really pathetic.

RG: Which was worse: the reporting on Iraq or the reporting on Afghanistan?

MH: I don’t know. I trash the media but in many ways you can actually be quite well informed if you read The New York Times and theWashington Post and all these places – again, I want to make the distinction between the reporting out in the field and the reporting that happens in Washington … you can get a pretty good sense of what’s going on, you know, from reporters in the field.

But unfortunately, in this warped Beltway view of the world, what happens on the ground matters much less than what happens in Washington. I mean, the great catalyst — and this I write about extensively in the book – the great catalyst for the Afghanistan debate was not what was happening in Afghanistan, it was the fact that Bob Woodward published a report in Washington. It was the leak. That was the great catalyst of the Afghanistan debate in the first year of President Obama’s administration.

Which is really incredible because it’s not like Afghanistan was that much worse than it was six months or a year or two years earlier. I mean, it was a little bit worse but not, you know, not entirely noticeably worse. But it was the fact that it became a political issue in Washington that actually impacted the debate.

RG: Yes. Well, I think that’s an important, and a good distinction. And we found that in our work also — that talking to the reporters who were there in the war zones on the ground is like speaking a totally different language than those who were only at the cocktail parties.

I want to thank you for the book, and the work you’ve done, Michael, and encourage anybody reading this to get a copy. It’s an important book, and it’s a great read. And I keep pretty well informed, but there’s all kinds of stuff that I didn’t know about until I read your book.

Robert Greenwald is the director/producer of “Rethink Afghanistan,” “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” and many other films. He is a board member of the Independent Media Institute, AlterNet’s parent organization. Follow him on Twitter andFacebook.

Gobal Nuke Catastrophe Warning: Ex-ambassador to UNSec. Ban, Obama, Goa, et al

limitlesslife — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:27:18 +0000

The Honorable Ban Ki-Moon

Secretary–General of the United Nations Organization

New York City, NY.

___________________________________________

Tokyo, January 17, 2012

Dear Secretary-General,

Honorable Ban Ki-moon,

I hope everything goes alright for you.

The nuclear accident in Fukushima still remains a real threat, menacing Japan and the whole world.

Please allow me to send the text of my speech in which I referred to the possibility of the Fukushima nuclear accident becoming the first step toward the ultimate catastrophe of the world.

Suffice it to say that, on March 14 three days after

the Earthquake and the Tsunami, the electric company TEPCO wanted to withdraw the whole team from the site of the accident in the face of approaching explosions. The government, thanks to the strong leadership of the then Prime Minister Kan, managed to persuade the Tepco to remain. If the withdrawal had taken place, it would have triggered the end of Japan and the beginning of a global catastrophe. It is a historic fact that should be known by the whole world.

An eminent professor of Harvard University who finds my speech “fascinating and impassioned” recently informed me that

he had heard a lot of disturbing things about Japan’s vulnerability to reactor failure, including the possibility that an accident could force the evacuation of Tokyo. My response to this is “Japan‘s vulnerability to reactor failure is universally shared and it is by good luck that Japan has survived so far. Good luck is not assured for the next fatal accident anywhere in the world.”

The Japanese people no longer believe the assurance of security by the authorities that are responsible for the Fukushima accident because of their revealed total dependence on electric companies.

49 nuclear reactors have ceased functioning and 5 others will stop their operations by next May for inspection. The competent authorities helped by electric companies are endeavoring to reopen their operations, but the governors and inhabitants concerned are increasingly opposed to it, supported by the mounting public opinion. The nuclear policy of Japan thus finds itself in a crucial stage.

　Seven years ago, I sent out a message of warning in all directions that electric companies would decide the fate of Japan.

I am now warning that the reopening of operations of nuclear reactors will decide the fate of Japan and, possibly, the whole world.

　　I am convinced that Japan, experiencing the fatal Fukushima disaster, now should call upon the world to seek true denuclearization, both civil and military. I have long been asserting that the present civilization of power based on paternal culture must be replaced by a civilization of harmony based on maternal culture, that is to say, a maternal civilization.

The first concrete step toward it is the UN Ethics Summit which opens the way to a maternal civilization and the maternal civilization is indispensable to true denuclearization. It is thus the bond of ‘trinity’ that connects the UN Ethics Summit, a maternal civilization and true denuclearization.

The Ethics Summit is expected to create an International Day of Global Ethics （cf. annex）. As to its concrete date,　we could choose April 5 (President Obama’s Prague speech) or March 11 (the initiation of a new paradigm).

It is with all this in mind that I have written to the American Ambassador in Japan,　Mr.John V. Roos,　asking him to suggest to President Obama to take the initiative of holding a United Nations Ethics Summit on the occasion of the next General Assembly in September 2012. President Obama from whom the world awaits the next concrete step toward his vision of the “World without nuclear weapons” may find it helpful to respond to this expectation.

I am trying my best to convey this idea to Prime Minister Noda　so that he could discuss it with President Obama during his next visit to the United States.

Please allow me to have frankly expressed my recent thinking

based on my serious preoccupations as to the future development

of the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Please allow me to count on your invaluable moral support.

I wish you the best of luck in your noble mission.

With highest regards,

Mitsuhei Murata

Former Japanese Ambassador to Switzerland and Senegal;

Executive Director, the Japan Society for Global System and Ethics

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’

limitlesslife — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:03:35 +0000

Published on Thursday, January 26, 2012 by Waging Nonviolence

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’

by George Lakey

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbro will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.

In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent.

When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.

In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.

The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!

The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928.

The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations.

Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt.

By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.

This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)

Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.

Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

George Lakey is Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College and a Quaker. He has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining. E-mail: glakey1@swarthmore.edu

Wars: Illegal (Kellogg–Briand Pact: General Treaty for the Renunciation of War: World Peace Act)

limitlesslife — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:35:48 +0000

War Was Over Because Our Grandparents Wanted It

By David Swanson (about the author)

This is an exclusive for OpEd News. Rob Kall also just interviewed me about it for his radio show. This is an excerpt from a new book called “When the World Outlawed War.”

There are actions we widely believe are and should be illegal: slavery, rape, genocide. War is no longer on the list. It has become a well-kept secret that war is illegal, and a minority view that it should be illegal. I believe we have something to learn from an earlier period in our history, a period in which a law was created that made war illegal for the first time, a law that has been forgotten but is still on the books.

In 1927-1928 a hot-tempered Republican from Minnesota named Frank who privately cursed pacifists managed to persuade nearly every country on earth to ban war. He had been moved to do so, against his will, by a global demand for peace and a U.S. partnership with France created through illegal diplomacy by peace activists. The driving force in achieving this historic breakthrough was a remarkably unified, strategic, and relentless U.S. peace movement with its strongest support in the Midwest; its strongest leaders professors, lawyers, and university presidents; its voices in Washington, D.C., those of Republican senators from Idaho and Kansas; its views welcomed and promoted by newspapers, churches, and women’s groups all over the country; and its determination unaltered by a decade of defeats and divisions.

The movement depended in large part on the new political power of female voters. The effort might have failed had Charles Lindbergh not flown an airplane across an ocean, or Henry Cabot Lodge not died, or had other efforts toward peace and disarmament not been dismal failures. But public pressure made this step, or something like it, almost inevitable. And when it succeeded — although the outlawing of war was never fully implemented in accordance with the plans of its visionaries — much of the world believed war had been made illegal. Wars were, in fact, halted and prevented. And when, nonetheless, wars continued and a second world war engulfed the globe, that catastrophe was followed by the trials of men accused of the brand new crime of making war, as well as by global adoption of the United Nations Charter, a document owing much to its prewar predecessor while still falling short of the ideals of what in the 1920s was called the Outlawry movement.

“Last night I had the strangest dream I’d ever dreamed before,” wrote Ed McCurdy in 1950 in what became a popular folk song. “I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room, and the room was filled with men. And the paper they were signing said they’d never fight again.” But that scene had already happened in reality on August 27, 1928, in Paris, France. The treaty that was signed that day, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, was subsequently ratified by the United States Senate in a vote of 85 to 1 and remains on the books (and on the U.S. State Department’s website) to this day as part of what Article VI of the U.S. Constitution calls “the supreme Law of the Land.”

Frank Kellogg, the U.S. Secretary of State who made this treaty happen, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and saw his public reputation soar — so much so that the United States named a ship after him, one of the “Liberty ships” that carried war supplies to Europe during World War II. Kellogg was dead at the time. So, many believed, were prospects for world peace. But the Kellogg-Briand Pact and its renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy is something we might want to revive. This treaty gathered the adherence of the world’s nations swiftly and publicly, driven by fervent public demand. We might think about how public opinion of that sort might be created anew, what insights it possessed that have yet to be realized, and what systems of communication, education, and elections would allow the public again to influence government policy, as the ongoing campaign to eliminate war — understood by its originators to be an undertaking of generations — continues to develop.

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We might begin by remembering what the Kellogg-Briand Pact is and where it came from. Perhaps, in between celebrating Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Yellow Ribbon Day, Patriots Day, Independence Day, Flag Day, Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, and the Iraq-Afghanistan Wars Day legislated by Congress in 2011, not to mention the militaristic festival that bombards us every September 11th, we could squeeze in a day marking a step toward peace. I propose we do so every August 27^th. Perhaps a national focus for Kellogg-Briand Day might be on an event in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., (if it safely reopens following the recent earthquake) where the inscription below the Kellogg Window gives Kellogg, who is buried there, credit for having “sought equity and peace among the nations of the world.” Other days could be developed into peace celebrations as well, including the International Day of Peace on September 21^st, Martin Luther King Jr. Day every third Monday in January, and Mothers Day on the second Sunday in May.

We would be celebrating a step toward peace, not its achievement. We celebrate steps taken toward establishing civil rights, despite that remaining a work in progress. By marking partial achievements we help build the momentum that will achieve more. We also, of course, respect and celebrate the ancient establishment of laws banning murder and theft, although murder and theft are still with us. The earliest laws making war into a crime, something it had not been before, are just as significant and will long be remembered if the movement for the Outlawry of war succeeds. If it does not, and if the nuclear proliferation, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation that come with our wars continue, then before long there may be nobody remembering anything at all.

Another way to revive a treaty that in fact remains law would, of course, be to begin complying with it. When lawyers, politicians, and judges want to bestow human rights on corporations, they do so largely on the basis of a court reporter’s note added to, but not actually part of, a Supreme Court ruling from over a century back. When the Department of Justice wants to “legalize” torture or, for that matter, war, it reaches back to a twisted reading of one of the Federalist Papers or a court decision from some long forgotten era. If anyone in power today favored peace, there would be every justification for recalling and making use of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It is actually law. And it is far more recent law than the U.S. Constitution itself, which our elected officials still claim, mostly unconvincingly, to support. The Pact, excluding formalities and procedural matters, reads in full,

The High Contracting Parties solemly [sic] declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.

The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.

The French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, whose initiative had led to the Pact and whose previous work for peace had already earned him a Nobel Peace Prize, remarked at the signing ceremony,

For the first time, on a scale as absolute as it is vast, a treaty has been truly devoted to the very establishment of peace, and has laid down laws that are new and free from all political considerations. Such a treaty means a beginning and not an end. . . . [S]elfish and willful war which has been regarded from of old as springing from divine right, and has remained in international ethics as an attribute of sovereignty, has been at last deprived by law of what constituted its most serious danger, its legitimacy. For the future, branded with illegality, it is by mutual accord truly and regularly outlawed so that a culprit must incur the unconditional condemnation and probably the hostility of all his co-signatories.

http://davidswanson.org

David Swanson is the author of “When the World Outlawed War,” “War Is A Lie” and “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org

Radical Revolution

limitlesslife — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:24:47 +0000

Radical Revolution

ABOUT BILL QUIGLEY, Nation of Change/op-ed.

Published: Wednesday 25 January 2012

“Amend the US Constitution so it is clear corporations do not have constitutional or human rights.”

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967

One. Human rights must be taken absolutely seriously. Every single person is entitled to dignity and human rights. No application needed. No exclusions at all. This is our highest priority.

Two. We must radically reinvent contemporary democracy. Current systems are deeply corrupt and not responsive to the needs of people. Representatives chosen by money and influence govern by money and influence. This is unacceptable. Direct democracy by the people is now technologically possible and should be the rule. Communities must be protected whenever they advocate for self-determination, self-development and human rights. Dissent is essential to democracy; we pledge to help it flourish.

Three. Corporations are not people and are not entitled to human rights. Amend the US Constitution so it is clear corporations do not have constitutional or human rights. We the people must cut them down to size and so democracy can regulate their size, scope and actions.

Four. Leave the rest of the world alone. Cut US military spending by 75 percent and bring all troops outside the US home now. Defense of the US is a human right. Global offense and global police force by US military are not. Eliminate all nuclear and chemical and biological weapons. Stop allowing scare tactics to build up the national security forces at home. Stop the myth that the US is somehow special or exceptional and is entitled to act differently than all other nations. The US must re-join the global family of nations as a respectful partner. USA is one of many nations in the world. We must start acting like it.

Photo: Glenn Halog

Five. Property rights, privilege, and money-making are not as important as human rights. When current property and privilege arrangements are not just they must yield to the demands of human rights. Money-making can only be allowed when human rights are respected. Exploitation is unacceptable. There are national and global poverty lines. We must establish national and global excess lines so that people and businesses with extra houses, cars, luxuries, and incomes share much more to help everyone else be able to exercise their basic human rights to shelter, food, education and healthcare. If that disrupts current property, privilege and money-making, so be it.

Six. Defend our earth. Stop pollution, stop pipelines, stop new interstates, and stop destroying the land, sea, and air by extracting resources from them. Rebuild what we have destroyed. If corporations will not stop voluntarily, people must stop them. The very existence of life is at stake.

Seven. Dramatically expand public spaces and reverse the privatization of public services. Quality public education, health and safety for all must be provided by transparent accountable public systems. Starving the state is a recipe for destroying social and economic human rights for everyone but the rich.

Eight. Pull the criminal legal prison system up and out by its roots and start over. Cease the criminalization of drugs, immigrants, poor people and people of color. We are all entitled to be safe but the current system makes us less so and ruins millions of lives. Start over.

Nine. The US was created based on two original crimes that must be confessed and made right. Reparations are owed to Native Americans because their land was stolen and they were uprooted and slaughtered. Reparations are owed to African Americans because they were kidnapped, enslaved and abused. The US has profited widely from these injustices and must make amends.

Ten. Everyone who wants to work should have the right to work and earn a living wage. Any workers who want to organize and advocate for change in solidarity with others must be absolutely protected from recriminations from their employer and from their government.

Finally, if those in government and those in power do not help the people do what is right, people seeking change must together exercise our human rights and bring about these changes directly. Dr. King and millions of others lived and worked for a radical revolution of values. We will as well. We respect the human rights and human dignity of others and work for a world where love and wisdom and solidarity and respect prevail. We expect those for whom the current unjust system works just fine will object and oppose and accuse people seeking dramatic change of being divisive and worse. That is to be expected because that is what happens to all groups which work for serious social change. Despite that, people will continue to go forward with determination and purpose to bring about a radical revolution of values in the USA.

ABOUT BILL QUIGLEY

Bill is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach him at Quigley77@gmail.com

No Telling of Next Moment!

limitlesslife — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:58:34 +0000

Big quake could hit Tokyo within 4 years, researchers warn

NATIONAL JAN. 24, 2012 – 10:55AM JST ( 59 )

Searching for the missing after the northern Japan earthquake of 2011AFP

TOKYO —

Japanese researchers have warned of a 70% chance that a magnitude-seven earthquake will strike Tokyo within four years, a report said Monday—much higher than previous estimates.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s earthquake research institute based the figure on data from the growing number of tremors in the capital since last year’s March 11 earthquake off northeast Japan, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

According to the meteorological agency, an average of 1.48 earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from three to six have occurred per day in and near Tokyo since March.

That is around five times as many as before the disaster, the researchers said, according to the Yomiuri.

The Japanese government has forecast that the chance of a major quake of magnitude seven or more in the Tokyo region is 70% over the next 30 years.

Naoshi Hirata, one of the University of Tokyo researchers, said the results showed that seismic activity had increased in the area around the capital, which was expected to lead to a higher probability of a major quake.

The 9.0-magnitude earthquake last year and the resulting tsunami left more than 19,000 people dead or missing and crippled the cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear power station, causing meltdowns in some of its reactors.

The last time a “big one” struck Tokyo was in 1923, when the magnitude-7.9 Great Kanto Earthquake claimed more than 100,000 lives, many of them in fires. Previously, in 1855, the Ansei Edo quake also devastated the city.

Japan, located on the tectonic crossroads known as the Pacific Ring of Fire and dotted with volcanoes, is one of the world’s most quake-prone countries, with Tokyo lying in one of its most dangerous areas.

The megacity sits on the intersection of three continental plates—the Eurasian, Pacific and Philippine Sea plates—which are slowly grinding against each other, building up enormous seismic pressure.

Catastrophe, anywhere any time

limitlesslife — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:55:11 +0000