Food and the poor

The new face of hunger

From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11049284&CFID=3201667&CFTOKEN=57267138

Global food shortages have taken everyone by surprise. What is to be done?

Reuters

SAMAKE BAKARY sells rice from wooden basins at Abobote market in the northern suburbs of Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire. He points to a bowl of broken Thai rice which, at 400 CFA francs (roughly $1) per kilogram, is the most popular variety. On a good day he used to sell 150 kilos. Now he is lucky to sell half that. “People ask the price and go away without buying anything,” he complains. In early April they went away and rioted: two days of violence persuaded the government to postpone planned elections.

“World agriculture has entered a new, unsustainable and politically risky period,” says Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC. To prove it, food riots have erupted in countries all along the equator. In Haiti, protesters chanting “We're hungry” forced the prime minister to resign; 24 people were killed in riots in Cameroon; Egypt's president ordered the army to start baking bread; the Philippines made hoarding rice punishable by life imprisonment. “It's an explosive situation and threatens political stability,” worries Jean-Louis Billon, president of Côte d'Ivoire's chamber of commerce.

Last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16% (see chart 1). These were some of the sharpest rises in food prices ever. But this year the speed of change has accelerated. Since January, rice prices have soared 141%; the price of one variety of wheat shot up 25% in a day. Some 40km outside Abidjan, Mariam Kone, who grows sweet potatoes, okra and maize but feeds her family on imported rice, laments: “Rice is very expensive, but we don't know why.”

The prices mainly reflect changes in demand—not problems of supply, such as harvest failure. The changes include the gentle upward pressure from people in China and India eating more grain and meat as they grow rich and the sudden, voracious appetites of western biofuels programmes, which convert cereals into fuel. This year the share of the maize (corn) crop going into ethanol in America has risen and the European Union is implementing its own biofuels targets. To make matters worse, more febrile behaviour seems to be influencing markets: export quotas by large grain producers, rumours of panic-buying by grain importers, money from hedge funds looking for new markets.

Such shifts have not been matched by comparable changes on the farm. This is partly because they cannot be: farmers always take a while to respond. It is also because governments have softened the impact of price rises on domestic markets, muffling the signals that would otherwise have encouraged farmers to grow more food. Of 58 countries whose reactions are tracked by the World Bank, 48 have imposed price controls, consumer subsidies, export restrictions or lower tariffs.

But the food scare of 2008, severe as it is, is only a symptom of a broader problem. The surge in food prices has ended 30 years in which food was cheap, farming was subsidised in rich countries and international food markets were wildly distorted. Eventually, no doubt, farmers will respond to higher prices by growing more and a new equilibrium will be established. If all goes well, food will be affordable again without the subsidies, dumping and distortions of the earlier period. But at the moment, agriculture has been caught in limbo. The era of cheap food is over. The transition to a new equilibrium is proving costlier, more prolonged and much more painful than anyone had expected.

“We are the canary in the mine,” says Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN's World Food Programme, the largest distributor of food aid. Usually, a food crisis is clear and localised. The harvest fails, often because of war or strife, and the burden in the affected region falls heavily on the poorest. This crisis is different. It is occurring in many countries simultaneously, the first time that has happened since the early 1970s. And it is affecting people not usually hit by famines. “For the middle classes,” says Ms Sheeran, “it means cutting out medical care. For those on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. And for those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster.” The poorest are selling their animals, tools, the tin roof over their heads—making recovery, when it comes, much harder.

Because the problem is not yet reflected in national statistics, its scale is hard to judge. The effect on the poor will depend on whether they are net buyers of food or net sellers (see article); for some net buyers, the price rises may be enough to turn them into sellers. But by almost any measure, the human suffering is likely to be vast. In El Salvador the poor are eating only half as much food as they were a year ago. Afghans are now spending half their income on food, up from a tenth in 2006.

On a conservative estimate, food-price rises may reduce the spending power of the urban poor and country people who buy their own food by 20% (in some regions, prices are rising by far more). Just over 1 billion people live on $1 a day, the benchmark of absolute poverty; 1.5 billion live on $1 to $2 a day. Bob Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, reckons that food inflation could push at least 100m people into poverty, wiping out all the gains the poorest billion have made during almost a decade of economic growth.

Small is fairly beautiful

In the short run, humanitarian aid, social-protection programmes and trade policies will determine how well the world copes with these problems. But in the medium term the question is different: where does the world get more food from? If the extra supplies come mainly from large farmers in America, Europe and other big producers, then the new equilibrium may end up looking much like the old one, with world food depending on a small number of suppliers and—possibly—trade distortions and food dumping. So far, farmers in rich countries have indeed responded. America's winter wheat plantings are up 4% and the spring-sown area is likely to rise more. The Food and Agriculture Organisation forecasts that the wheat harvest in the European Union will rise 13%.

Ideally, a big part of the supply response would come from the world's 450m smallholders in developing countries, people who farm just a few acres. There are three reasons why this would be desirable. First, it would reduce poverty: three-quarters of those making do on $1 a day live in the countryside and depend on the health of smallholder farming. Next, it might help the environment: those smallholders manage a disproportionate share of the world's water and vegetation cover, so raising their productivity on existing land would be environmentally friendlier than cutting down the rainforest. And it should be efficient: in terms of returns on investment, it would be easier to boost grain yields in Africa from two tonnes per hectare to four than it would be to raise yields in Europe from eight tonnes to ten. The opportunities are greater and the law of diminishing returns has not set in.

Unfortunately, no smallholder bonanza is yet happening. In parts of east Africa, farmers are cutting back on the area planted, mostly because they cannot afford fertilisers (driven by oil, fertiliser prices have soared, too). This reaction is not universal. India is forecasting a record cereal harvest; South African planting is up 8% this year. Still, some anecdotal evidence, plus the general increase in food prices, suggests that smallholders are not responding enough. “In a perfect world,” says a recent IFPRI report, “the response to higher prices is higher output. In the real world, however, this isn't always the case.” Farming in emerging markets is riddled with market failures and does not react to price signals as other businesses do.

This is true to a certain extent of farming in general. If you own a toy factory, or an oilfield, and the price of toys or oil rises, you run the factory night and day, or turn the taps full on. But it always takes a season to grow more food, which is why farm prices everywhere tend to be “sticky”: a 10% increase in prices leads to a 1% increase in output. But the food crisis of 2008 suggests farm prices in developing countries may be stickier than that.

The quickest way to increase your crop is to plant more. But in the short run there is only a limited amount of fallow land easily available. (The substantial unused acreage in Brazil and Russia will take a decade or so to get ready.) For some crops—notably rice in East Asia—the amount of good, productive land is actually falling, buried under the concrete of expanding cities. In other words, food increases now need to come mainly from higher yields.

Yields cannot be switched on and off like a tap. Spreading extra fertiliser or buying new machinery helps. But higher yields also need better irrigation and fancier seeds. The time lag between dreaming up a new seed and growing it commercially in the field is ten to 15 years, says Bob Zeigler of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. Even if a farmer wanted to plant something more productive this year, and could afford to, he could not—unless research work had been going on for years.

It has not. Most agricultural research in developing countries is financed by governments. In the 1980s, governments started to reduce green-revolutionary spending, either out of complacency (believing the problem of food had been licked), or because they preferred to involve the private sector. But many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists. And in the 1980s and 1990s huge farm surpluses from the rich world were being dumped on markets, depressing prices and returns on investment. Spending on farming as a share of total public spending in developing countries fell by half between 1980 and 2004.

This decline has had a slow, inevitable impact. Creating a new seed is a bit like designing a flu vaccine: you need to keep updating it, or pests and disease will negate its effectiveness. When the rice variety IR8 was introduced in 1966, it produced almost ten tonnes per hectare; now it yields barely seven. In developing countries between the 1960s and 1980s, yields of the main cereal crops increased by 3-6% a year. Now annual growth is down to 1-2%, below the increase in demand (see chart 2). “We're paying the price for 15 years of neglect,” says Mr Zeigler.

Alterations in the structure of farming have exacerbated the effects of underinvestment. Farming is just one part of a food chain that stretches from fertiliser and seed companies at one end to supermarkets at the other. In the past, the end of the chain nearest consumers was less important. Food policy meant improving links between farmers and suppliers. The Green Revolution of the 1960s, for example, provided new seeds and subsidised fertilisers. Malawi is doing something similar now. But over the past decade, the other end of the chain has come to matter more. The main reason why Kenyan and Ethiopian farmers planted less this year was not just that fertilisers were expensive, but that farmers could not get credit to finance purchases. Supermarkets are also more important to farmers than they used to be, accounting for half or more of food sales, even in many developing countries.

Success in patches

In theory, the growing importance of traders and supermarkets ought to make farmers more responsive to changes in prices and consumer tastes. In some places, that is the case. But supermarkets need uniform quality, minimum large quantities and high standards of hygiene, which the average smallholder in a poor country is ill equipped to provide. So traders and supermarkets may benefit commercial farmers more than smallholders.

To make matters worse, smallholdings are fragmenting in many countries. Because of population growth and the loss of farmland, the average farm size in China and Bangladesh has fallen from about 1.5 hectares in the 1970s to barely 0.5 hectares now; in Ethiopia and Malawi, it fell from 1.2 hectares to 0.8 in the 1990s. By and large, the smaller the farm, the greater the burden of the cost of doing business with big retailers. Smaller smallholders are also at a disadvantage in getting loans, new seeds and other innovations on which higher yields depend.

ReutersA burden to afford

Such bottlenecks and market failures make it harder for smallholders to respond to higher prices, even without the multiple distortions that governments also introduce into world food markets. They mean the transition to a new equilibrium will be prolonged and painful. But they do not mean it will not happen. Lennart Båge, the head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a UN agency in Rome, argues that if farmers can keep the higher prices, they will overcome the problems that beset them. As he points out, India feeds 17% of the world's people on less than 5% of the world's water and 3% of its farmland—and, along with China, is seeing its cereal crop rise this year. Similar success stories are cropping up, in patches.

Despite East Africa's problems, Ethiopia this week opened its own commodity exchange, a rare thing on the continent, in an attempt to improve the markets that connect farmers and traders. The spread of mobile phones also relays market information more widely. In landlocked Malawi, it costs almost as much to ship maize to and from world markets as it does to grow it locally, so Malawian farmers have found it hard to export their surplus even with prices high. But partly because of the political disaster of Zimbabwe, regional markets are now springing up out of nowhere in southern Africa—and Malawi's farmers are selling there.

Moreover, technological improvements are still pushing through the neglected soil. Mr Zeigler reckons IRRI has enough tinkerings in the pipeline to increase yields by one or two tonnes a hectare. And if European countries relax their hostility to genetically modified organisms, crop scientists could do things—such as redesigning photosynthesis in plants—which could boost yields 50% or more.

Between November 2007 and February 2008, rice exports from Thailand (the world's biggest exporter) were running at 1m tonnes a month—an unprecedented bonanza. But for even for producers and traders, the blessing was mixed. Some farmers sold their crop before prices soared. Millers tried to keep supplies back, waiting for higher prices. The government capped exports below last year's levels. The secretary-general of the Thai rice exporters' association told IRRI that “We don't know where the 2007 harvest is.” Vichai Sriprasert, a big exporter, describes the Thai rice market using language that, elsewhere, is literally true. “This is a crucial time,” he says. “It will tell the story of who will survive and who will not survive.”

The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots

30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?

The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots

By BILL QUIGLEY
Counter Punch
http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley04212008.html

Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people. There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal crops.

Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks” they’ re not getting enough nourishment. Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is 25 cents. With a dollar twenty-five, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”

The St. Claire’s Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port au Prince, serves 1000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children -- five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation. Children from Cite Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The cost of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil, propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller. But hunger is on the rise and more and more children come for the free meal. Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers.

The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.” Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages -- the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers. This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.

Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?

In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.

Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.’ The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,’ flooded the market. There was violence, ‘rice wars,’ and lives were lost.”

“American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.

Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”

Still the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more.

But, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, what reason could the U.S. have in destroying the rice market of this tiny country?

Haiti is definitely poor. The U.S. Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400. The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78. Over 78% of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day.

Yet Haiti has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S. The U.S. Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third largest importer of US rice - at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2200 pounds).

Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the U.S. Rice subsidies in the U.S. totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods Inc of Stuttgart Arkansas, received over $500 million dollars in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006.

The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. -- with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”

In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the U.S., there are also direct tariff barriers of 3 to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute -- the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the U.S. and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.

U.S. protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in the Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice.

And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt.

Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well. “Haiti, once the world's largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar-- from U.S. controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida. It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work. All this sped up the downward spiral that led to this month's food riots.”

After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110 pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month. No one thinks a one month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.

Haiti is far from alone in this crisis. The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day. The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases.

Thirty three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the Wall Street Journal. When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, “there is no margin of survival.”

In the U.S., people are feeling the world-wide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery. Middle class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat. The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating. That leads to hunger riots.

In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti. Venezuela sent 350 tons of food. The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief. The UN is committed to distributing more food.

What can be done in the medium term? The US provides much of the world’s food aid, but does it in such a way that only half of the dollars spent actually reach hungry people. US law requires that food aid be purchased from US farmers, processed and bagged in the US and shipped on US vessels -- which cost 50% of the money allocated. A simple change in US law to allow some local purchase of commodities would feed many more people and support local farm markets.

In the long run, what is to be done? The President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who visited Haiti last week, said “Rich countries need to reduce farms subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports. Either the world solves the unfair trade system, or every time there's unrest like in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger."

Citizens of the USA know very little about the role of their government in helping create the hunger problems in Haiti or other countries. But there is much that individuals can do. People can donate to help feed individual hungry people and participate with advocacy organizations like Bread for the World or Oxfam to help change the U.S. and global rules which favor the rich countries. This advocacy can help countries have a better chance to feed themselves.

Meanwhile, Merisma Jean-Claudel, a young high school graduate in Port-au-Prince told journalist Wadner Pierre "...people can’t buy food. Gasoline prices are going up. It is very hard for us over here. The cost of living is the biggest worry for us, no peace in stomach means no peace in the mind.¦I wonder if others will be able to survive the days ahead because things are very, very hard."

“On the ground, people are very hungry,” reported Fr. Jean-Juste. “Our country must immediately open emergency canteens to feed the hungry until we can get them jobs. For the long run, we need to invest in irrigation, transportation, and other assistance for our farmers and workers.”

In Port au Prince, some rice arrived in the last few days. A school in Fr. Jean-Juste’s parish received several bags of rice. They had raw rice for 1000 children, but the principal still had to come to Father Jean-Juste asking for help. There was no money for charcoal, or oil.

Jervais Rodman, an unemployed carpenter with three children, stood in a long line Saturday in Port au Prince to get UN donated rice and beans. When Rodman got the small bags, he told Ben Fox of the Associated Press, “The beans might last four days. The rice will be gone as soon as I get home.”

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. His essay on the Echo 9 nuclear launch site protests is featured in Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance from the Heartland, published by AK Press. He can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com People interested in donating to feed children in Haiti should go to http://www.whatiffoundation.org/

People who want to help change U.S. policy on agriculture to help combat world-wide hunger should go to:
http://www.oxfamamerica.org/ or http://www.bread.org/

Haiti is in Crisis Because It Can't Feed Itself.

Meanwhile, It is Sending Millions Abraod in Loan Payments

The Black Hole of Debt

By NICK DEARDEN
Counter Punch
http://www.counterpunch.org/dearden04252008.html

In recent weeks, Haiti has been gripped by violent protest yet again. And yet again the inhabitants of this impoverished country are suffering the most brutal consequences of the fallout of the global economic crisis. This time it is the rise in global food prices, which has sparked riots in Port au Prince, Haiti's capital, where UN peacekeepers used rubber bullets and tear gas against protesters attempting to storm the presidential palace. Days later the prime minister was fired.

It is therefore particularly appropriate that on Tuesday this week -the anniversary of the death of Haiti's dictator, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier - hundreds of debt campaigners fasted for Haiti's debt to be cancelled. Haiti's fate has been tied up with the issue of international debt more than any other country. Despite the fact that it's debt is illegitimate by any standards and despite Haiti's sorry position as the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it still owes $1.3bn. Every year debt repayments flow from Haiti to multilateral banks, just as its resources once enriched the French empire.

Haiti became the world's first republic to outlaw slavery, after the slave population led a struggle for independence which they won in 1804. However, in 1825, in return for recognition, the new state promised to pay its former French overlords compensation amounting to $21bn in today's money. It did not finish paying this debt until 1947. Calls for restitution have been consistently rejected by French governments.

Some 40% of Haiti's current debt was run up by the Duvalier dictators - better known as Papa Doc and Baby Doc - who between 1957 and 1986 stole parts of these loans for themselves, and used the rest to repress the population. When the Americans flew Baby Doc out of Haiti in 1986, he is estimated to have taken $90m with him. The Duvaliers were anti-communist and all too happy to follow the economic policies prescribed by the west, so their misdemeanours were overlooked.

In the 1980s and 90s, like all indebted countries, Haiti had to follow structural adjustment policies designed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) - including cuts in government expenditure on health and education, privatisation and the removal of import controls. Indigenous Haitian industries were wiped out as American imports flooded into the country.

In 1995 the IMF forced Haiti to slash its rice tariff from 35% to 3%. According to Oxfam, this resulted in an increase in imports of more than 150% between 1994 and 2003, the vast majority from the US. Certainly this meant lower prices for Haitian consumers, but it also devastated Haitian rice farmers. Traditional rice-farming areas of Haiti now have some of the highest concentrations of malnutrition and a country that was self-sufficient in rice is now dependent on foreign imports, at the mercy of global market prices.

Today, 80% of Haiti's population live in poverty as defined by the World Bank (under $2 a day). Average life expectancy is just 52 years. Half of all Haitian adults cannot read or write. Yet Haiti failed to qualify for debt relief under the heavily indebted poor country initiative (HIPC), established in 1996 to make the debts of the most severely indebted poor countries more sustainable - surely the clearest proof of the arbitrary nature of the HIPC scheme.

Haiti was finally allowed to start the HIPC process in October 2006. It has to jump through numerous hoops before its debt is cancelled - significantly, more of the same economic medicine responsible for Haiti's food dependency. On average it has taken poor countries three years to complete these programmes - by which time the country will have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in debt service. And even then not much more than half of Haiti's debt will be cancelled. While some Haitians are reportedly eating dirt to quell their hunger, their government is forced to send almost $1m each week in debt service to wealthy banks supposedly established to fight poverty.

Haiti is not alone. Throughout April and May, Jubilee Debt Campaign supporters are fasting for 36 countries left behind by the debt cancellation process. Egypt, the Philippines and Pakistan have also experienced disturbances over sharp price rises made more severe by the fact that they are still sending huge sums of money in debt repayments back to the multilateral banks.

Ten years on from the 70,000-strong protest outside the Birmingham G8, which did so much to put debt on the international agenda, it remains a pernicious tool of injustice, taking a real and deadly toll on the lives of millions of the poorest people in the world. We cannot hope to permanently solve the food crisis or the political turbulence which continues to haunt countries like Haiti until debt is wiped out, unconditionally, once and for all.

Nick Dearden is the director of Jubilee Debt Campaign. 18th May marks the 10th anniversary of the Birmingham G8.

Haiti's poor driven to the edge

NICOLE COLSON reports on the devastating consequences of rising food prices in one of the world's poorest countries.

Socialist Worker
April 25, 2008 | Page 1
http://socialistworker.org/2008-1/670/670_01_Haiti.shtml

PLACIDE SIMONE had a horrifying plea to make to the New York Times reporter who visited her home in Haiti's Cité Soleil slum.

"Take one," the desperate 29-year-old mother said, cradling an infant in her arms and pointing to four thin toddlers, all of whom had gone without food that day. "You pick. Just feed them."

Simone is one of a growing number of Haiti's poor who have been pushed beyond endurance by price increases in staple foods.

The crisis isn't relegated to Haiti. It is being felt across the globe. Since 2002, according to the United Nations, global food prices have increased by 65 percent, with grain rising 42 percent and dairy products up 80 percent in 2007 alone. Wheat prices have gone up 130 percent since last year, and rice, a staple for many of the world's poor, has increased in price more than 140 percent since January--jumping 30 percent in a single day in late March.

For Haiti, which imports the majority of its food, including more than 80 percent of its rice, the price increases are particularly disastrous. More than 75 percent of the country's 9 million people live on less than $2 a day, and more than half of the population earns less than $1 a day.

According to the World Health Organization, even before this latest crisis, 2.4 million Haitians were unable to afford enough food to meet its recommended minimum daily intake of calories. In Cité Soleil alone, one in five children is chronically malnourished--a number that is expected to climb as basic staples become priced out of the reach of most residents.

The effects have been immediate and obvious. Reports suggest a growing number of Haitians have begun to rely on cakes made of an edible clay as a main food source, while a recent photo essay by the New York Times followed residents as they picked through a local garbage dump, searching for anything of value that could be sold and any scraps of food that could be salvaged.

Diadonna Pierre, who cares for 18 children in a single cinder block room in Cité Soleil, told the Times that she has had nothing to feed them recently. "Sometimes, someone brings me two cans of rice, because I am not working." The children ate two spoonfuls of rice each as their last meal before going without food entirely the following day.

Pierre's husband, Saint Louis Meriska, said, "They look at me and say, 'Papa, I'm hungry,' and I have to look away. It's humiliating, and it makes you angry."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THAT ANGER recently boiled over onto Haiti's streets in food riots in early April.

The riots began April 3 in Les Cayes, the country's third-largest city, traditionally not known as a center of political unrest. The protests then spread to other cities: Aquin, Cavaillon, Petit-Goave, Gonaïves and, finally, the capital of Port-au-Prince on April 7.

For four days, angry residents took to the streets of Port-au-Prince, targeting banks and businesses, and distributing food wherever it was found.

UN "peacekeepers," who have occupied Haiti since the U.S. government helped engineer the ouster of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, used rubber bullets and tear gas to attack crowds that tried to tear down the gates of the Haitian parliament and the National Palace--with President René Préval, a target of much of the rising anger, still inside. In all, at least five protesters and one UN soldier were killed.

The Haiti Information Project described one action on April 6 in which "over 5,000 protesters set up flaming barricades throughout the main downtown area of Les Cayes and paralyzed traffic for several hours, according to eyewitnesses. Demonstrators stopped two trucks loaded with rice and after the drivers fled the scene, began distributing it to the crowd. They also attacked the fence of the headquarters of United Nations forces in the area."

Préval was forced to make a statement about the crisis, but his initial comments seemed a calculated slap in the face to the Haitian poor--such as his suggestion that if Haitians could afford cell phones, they should be able to afford to feed their families. Préval also chided protesters for tarnishing the image of Haiti among the international business community.

Within days, Préval was forced to shift the blame elsewhere, declaring in an address, "We are now paying the price of a policy applied during the past 20 years"--an apparent reference to neoliberal policies that have forced privatization and "free market" solutions on Haiti.

Préval, who has supported such privatization measures, announced an influx of international aid money, price reductions by importers on sugar and salary reductions for some top officials. Meanwhile, Haitian lawmakers ousted Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis, placing the blame on his shoulders for not having done enough to encourage food production in the country.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THERE IS nothing "natural" about Haiti's food crisis, though natural causes played some role. A six-year-long drought has wiped out 98 percent of Australia's rice crop, for example; global cereal stocks are down to just eight to 12 weeks' supply; and grain supplies are at their lowest since the 1980s.

But overall, the current spike in prices for rice, wheat and other staple crops has man-made causes--for example, increases in commodity prices as investors flee the declining dollar.

Even more important are rising oil prices, caused by the U.S. war on Iraq. The record increase in oil prices has driven up the cost of nearly every aspect of agricultural production, from fertilizer production to transportation.

Then there is the boondoggle of increased production of ethanol, made from corn. The result is that land has been taken away from other crops while simultaneously driving up the price of corn--with the further effect of increasing the price of animal feed, leading to hikes in the price of meat, eggs and dairy products.

Neoliberal policies pushed by the U.S. government and the international institutions it dominates, such as the IMF and World Bank, played no small role in the disaster striking countries like Haiti. Haiti is today a net importer of food, but at one time, it was able to feed itself.

In a recent speech, World Bank President Robert Zoellick, formerly of the Bush administration, warned that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person's income, Zoellick said, "there is no margin for survival."

Yet the policies enforced by Zoellick and others helped plunge countries like Haiti into a quicksand of international debt, while mandating the destruction of social programs and the opening of domestic markets to international plunder.

As Raj Patel, a writer and activist who studies the global food system, commented in Britain's Guardian newspaper, "For anyone who understands the current food crisis, it is hard to listen to the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, without gagging...[P]rices have fluctuated before. The reason we're seeing such misery as a result of this particular spike has everything to do with Zoellick and his friends.

"Before he replaced Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, Zoellick was the U.S. trade representative, their man at the World Trade Organization....His mission was to accelerate two decades of trade liberalization in key strategic commodities for the United States, among them agriculture.

"Practically, this meant the removal of developing countries' ability to stockpile grain (food mountains interfere with the market), to create tariff barriers (ditto), and to support farmers (they ought to be able to compete on their own). This Zoellick did often, and enthusiastically.

"Without agricultural support policies, though, there's no buffer between the price shocks and the bellies of the poorest people on earth. No option to support sustainable smaller-scale farmers, because they've been driven off their land by cheap [European Union] and U.S. imports. No option to dip into grain reserves because they've been sold off to service debt. No way of increasing the income of the poorest, because social programs have been cut to the bone.

"The reason that today's price increases hurt the poor so much is that all protection from price shocks has been flayed away, by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank."

Today, Haiti owes more than $48 million to the IMF and others. Fearing more unrest, Congress voted in April to add Haiti to the list of those poorest countries eligible for debt relief, allowing them to divert resources from loan repayment to health and education programs.

But such relief is only a drop in the bucket. As the Wall Street Journal reported, "The situation in Haiti underscored some of the problems afflicting the world's poorest countries. Haiti has enough food in the marketplace to feed its populace, but prices have increased beyond the means of many of the urban poor to pay for it."

UN official Jean Ziegler was harsher in his description of the growing global food crisis. Ziegler recently told the Austrian newspaper Kurier am Sonntag that the rise in global food prices is a form of "silent mass murder," and that commodities markets have brought "horror" to the world.

The typical assumption that hunger is only a matter of fate is "madness," said Ziegler. "Hunger has not been down to fate for a long time--just as Marx thought. It is rather that a murder is behind every victim. This is silent mass murder."

According to Ziegler, neoliberal policies of globalization are responsible for "monopolizing the riches of the earth"--and multinational corporations are to blame for a type of "structural violence."

"And we have a herd of market traders, speculators and financial bandits who have turned wild and constructed a world of inequality and horror," he said, adding that he believed starving people could rise up against their persecutors.

"It's just as possible as the French Revolution was," he said.

Muqtada and the Mahdi Army. A Cleric, a Pol and a Warrior

By PATRICK COCKBURN

originally published at counterpunch.org

The iraqi government has decided that the moment has come to crush the Mahdi Army and the followers of Muqtada Sadr once and for all. Despite its failure to eliminate his militiamen in Basra at the end of March, the government, with American backing, is determined to try again, according to senior Iraqi officials.

It is a dangerous strategy for both Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and the U.S. Sadr remains one of the most powerful and revered leaders of the Shiite community -- and the Shiites make up 60% of Iraq. What's more, the 34-year-old Sadr is not exactly the mercurial "firebrand" or "renegade" cleric portrayed by journalistic cliche-mongers; rather, he has repeatedly shown himself to be a cautious and experienced political operator.

Ever since he unexpectedly emerged as a central figure in Iraqi politics in the days after the overthrow of the old regime in 2003, Sadr's many enemies have invariably underestimated him and the commitment of his followers. When the U.S. viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, moved against Sadr in April 2004, he was astonished when the Sadrists took over much of southern Iraq in response. Maliki had a similar experience in March: He demanded that the Mahdi Army militiamen hand over their weapons within three days -- only to see pictures on TV of disaffected troops and police surrendering their guns to the militia instead.

Sadr enjoys such great religious and political authority because he is the scion of the most respected Shiite clerical family in Iraq. His father, Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, and two of his brothers were killed, presumably by Saddam Hussein's gunmen, in 1999. His cousin and father-in-law, Mohammed Baqir Sadr, a revered Shiite theologian, was executed by the old regime in 1980.

It was Sadeq Sadr who created the Sadrist movement, whose mixture of puritanical Islam, nationalism and social relief appealed to the millions of Shiite poor, impoverished by war and economic sanctions. Although Hussein initially saw Sadeq Sadr as a potential ally, he realized late in the day that he was fostering a dangerous enemy and ordered Sadeq Sadr's assassination.

Muqtada Sadr became so important so fast after the fall of Hussein because he inherited his father's movement -- and it is still the basis of his influence. He only narrowly avoided being killed at the same time as Sadeq Sadr and was held under house arrest, allowed to live only because Iraqi security believed he was no threat.

Living so close to death for so many years helps explain Muqtada Sadr's secretive character. "Even his closest lieutenants sitting beside him do not know what is going on in his head," one of his aides said. Highly intelligent with a quick, nervous manner, he illustrates his words with rapid hand movements in apparent imitation of his father's manner.

Muqtada Sadr created the Mahdi Army in 2003 and rapidly turned it into the most powerful militia in Iraq. Lightly armed and poorly trained, it suffered terrible losses fighting the U.S. Marines in two battles in Najaf in 2004, but the outgunned militiamen did not surrender. The Sadrists have always seen political and social activism as essential to Islamic practice. They criticized the rival Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and the established Shiite clergy for their "quietism" and their failure to actively oppose Hussein (and later, the American occupation).

What makes Sadr different from other Shiite leaders, and gives him credibility among the Shiite masses, is that he opposed the U.S. occupation from the beginning. When the U.S. invasion overthrew Hussein, Sadr said that "the big snake has succeeded the small snake." He pulled his followers out of the Iraqi government in 2006 because Maliki would not condemn the occupation. He also became increasingly reliant on Iran in the face of U.S. hostility.

The once impressive political unity of the Shiite community is now collapsing. Maliki (who is a Shiite) and his small Dawa Party, along with his main ally, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, believe that they can isolate the Sadrists and, with American help, marginalize them before the October provincial elections in which the Sadrists were expected to do well. The long rivalry of the Sadr family and the Hakim family (the founders of the Supreme Islamic Council in 1982) has once again exploded. The U.S. may come to regret taking sides against the Sadrists in this intra-Shiite feud.

Ever since the battles for Najaf four years ago, Sadr has tried to avoid direct military confrontation with U.S. military forces. He has agreed to truces and cease-fires, and two weeks ago, he even called his militiamen off the streets in Baghdad and Basra when they seemed to be winning.

But for the Iraqi government, those clashes were only the first round in a battle to crush the Sadrists as a political and military force. Going by past experience, Sadr will try to arrange a compromise to avoid the destruction of his movement. But if he is forced to fight, the U.S. will face a whole new front in the war in Iraq.

Abolish the Prisons!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acIZDZ7t_UE

Immigration, NAFTA, and Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King in Mexico

Remarks at the Autonomous University of Mexico City, April 2008

By Gerald Lenoir
Director, Black Alliance for Just Immigration

April 21, 2008

I would like to first thank the Autonomous University of Mexico City, the Mexico City Human Rights Commission, Casa de los Amigos, Mesoamerican Migrant Movement and the other sponsors for inviting me to speak at this first Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Symposium. It is, indeed, an honor to be a part of an event on Mexican soil honoring a leader that has been so important to the struggle for peace and justice in the United States and the world. Hosting this event is a testament to Dr. King’s relevance to peoples and struggles in the Americas, in this hemisphere and all over the world.

It is hard for me to believe that it has been forty years since Dr. King’s untimely assassination. On April 4, 1968, I was a 19 year-old sophomore at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Like most African Americans, I was stunned, saddened and outraged by the murder of a man who stood for justice, love and nonviolence. That night, we marched, we cried and we resolved that Dr. King’s death would not be in vain.

In the aftermath of his death, black students on campus banded together and demanded a Black Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin. The black student demands, supported by many white students, led to campus-wide strikes and for the first time in the history of the university, the National Guard occupied the campus. Students were beaten, arrested and some were expelled from the university. But in the end, we prevailed.

In the fall of 1969, the Department of Afro-American Studies was established as a result of the student actions. We were inspired by Dr. King and honored his memory by continuing his legacy of nonviolent direct action for social equality.

Over the next few days, many people in the United States and throughout the world will honor Dr. King as a great Civil Right leader. And well they should. He fought with every fiber of his corporeal, intellectual, and spiritual self to free his people—black people—from the bondage of Jim Crow segregation and racist exploitation.

But to remember Dr. King as just a Civil Rights leader would do an injustice to his life and his legacy. Dr. King transcended the divisions of race, class and nationality to become, over the course of his life, a champion of social and economic justice for all peoples of the world. By the time of his death in 1968, the Martin Luther King, Jr. that headed the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott in 1955 had been transformed from a nascent U.S. Civil Rights leader to an international champion of human rights. He espoused what I believe is a form of liberation theology adapted to the conditions facing African Americans in the twentieth century. Of his faith, Dr. King said:

“A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions… Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.”

Dr. King combined his religious beliefs with a concrete analysis of conditions and a prescription for change. He often spoke out against what he called the triple threat of racism, militarism and materialism. He called for a “revolution of values” and a new world order. In his speech, “Beyond Vietnam” which he delivered at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, Dr. King said:

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

He went on to say, “A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just.’ It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”

In that same speech, Dr. King called for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, calling the U.S. government, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

At the time, Dr. King’s indictment of the U.S. government was extremely controversial. He knew that his stance against the Vietnam War and his call for economic justice would create a backlash. Some of his advisors warned him not to speak out against the war but he went against this advice. Dr. King saw the issues of racism, militarism and economic exploitation as inextricably linked. He addressed this issue in his speech at the Riverside Church.

He said, “For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear…

“Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. I America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.”

The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that we honor here today was a man of far-reaching vision, deep religious conviction, incisive analysis and decisive action. His understanding of the world and his commitment to nonviolent direct action are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago.

Today we face the same constellation of issues—racism, militarism and materialism—that Dr. King so eloquently denounced and fought against. In the United States, this triple “axis of evil,” if you will, is arrayed against working class people, especially people of color, who are bearing the brunt of economic recession, a resurgence of white supremacist ideology, and the prosecution of an illegal and immoral war in Iraq. And U.S. foreign, military and trade policies are detrimental to the countries of the Global South to the benefit of U.S. social and economic elites.

I came of age in the Vietnam War era when the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a supposed attack on a U.S. ship by the North Vietnamese, led to a sharp escalation in the war. That attack was later exposed as an outright lie that thousand of Vietnamese people and U.S. troops paid for with their lives. Today, we are embroiled in a preemptive war that was started by the U.S. under the pretext that the Iraqi government was complicit in the 9-11 attacks and possessed weapons of mass destruction it intended to use against the U.S. and its allies. Again, the people of Iraq nd U.S. soldiers are paying the ultimate price for the empire-building ambitions of an out-of-control government.

And over the past three decades in the United States, we have experienced an assault on our basic civil, constitutional and human rights, the criminalization and incarceration of our black and brown youth in record numbers, the militarization of our southern border, a sharp deterioration in the health of our environment, a decline in our standard of living, and the scapegoating of immigrants of color for our economic ills.

In my work in the immigrant rights movement, I am often challenged by black folks. What is a black man born in America doing working for immigrant rights? We black people have so many problems that we should attend to.

My response is to say that the racial justice movement and the immigrant rights movement must unite to form a new human rights movement to challenge the misplaced policies and priorities of our country. The Black Alliance for Just Immigration was founded upon this premise.

Dr. King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We say to African Americans that we must come to understand that when immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries are racially and religiously profiled, denigrated as camel jockeys and rag heads, jailed without probable cause and indefinitely detained, that is a threat to our own freedom. When Haitians who have risked their lives in rickety boats to escape political persecution and economic deprivation are jailed and deported; when right wing talk show hosts lament about the “browning of America” and rail against “illegal aliens” from Mexico invading our country; when the Ku Klux Klan morphs into the Minutemen and the White Citizens Council become the Federation of American for Immigration Reform; and when our government pursues a policy of spying on people without warrants, of funneling immigrants across a vast stretch of treacherous, perilous desert, conducting raids on workplaces, homes and schools, and deporting thousands of undocumented immigrants, these are all threats to our own civil, human, and constitutional rights.

African Americans know full well the biting sting of racism. We have fought against it for generations. Our message to black folks is that we cannot stand by while these racist attacks are visited upon our brothers and sisters from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. We have common cause with immigrants of color in fighting against an entrenched system of institutional and structural racism and the ideology of white supremacy.

African Americans have always had allies in our struggle for emancipation, civil rights and social and economic justice. Today, it is in the self-interest of African Americans to align ourselves with immigrants of color who are bearing the brunt of a right wing assault that threatens all of us. We must challenge the media hype and right wing rhetoric and begin to understand the struggle of immigrants in their home countries and as they make their way to the United States.

Of course, that alliance must be a two-way street. We have often challenged immigrant rights activists and immigrant communities to understand and appreciate the contributions and historical significance of the Civil Rights and the Black Power Movements and to understand the current day situation of African Americans. We challenge them to examine the stereotypes about African Americans promoted by the dominant culture and to seek out alliances across a range of issues that affect our communities. The black community in the United States and immigrant communities must enter into an ongoing dialogue and must establish solid relationships built upon mutual respect and political unity for the benefit of all of us. This, I believe is one of the most urgent task of our times.

But the dialogue must also extend beyond borders, as it is today. We must challenge the collusion of elites in our various countries who conspire to violate human rights and who benefit from the exploitation of human labor, land and natural resources.

On April twentieth and twenty-first, President Bush, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will meet in New Orleans to discuss the expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other issues. Activists, trade unionists and scholars from Mexico, the United States and Canada are joining together in a “People’s Summit” to counter the misinformation about the impact of NAFTA.

Recently the U.S. presidential candidates have been debating the worth of NAFTA. At least one candidate, Barak Obama, admitted what we have been saying—that NAFTA has been one of the major contributing factors to the flow of immigration to the United States. Under NAFTA, Mexico opened its markets to subsidized food crops from the United States. The result, is nearly three million farmers could not compete with cheap U.S. commodities and lost their land and their livelihood. Many of them have migrated to the U.S. looking for jobs.

These and other policies of the U.S. government and similar polices by the European Union have led to the distortion of economies throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Economic globalization and corporate greed have been major contributing factors to displacement and migration. Over 200 million people around the world are migrants, according to the United Nation. We cannot turn a blind eye to the actions and impact of our government and corporations.

In our discussions with African Americans, we point out how these forces of economic globalization impacted black communities in the seventies during the first round of globalization. As the Civil Rights Movement opened up jobs for African Americans in manufacturing—in the auto industry, the tire and rubber industry, the steel industry and others—we were faced with the phenomenon of the “runaway shops.” To lower their labor costs and to escape labor and environmental laws, corporations simply picked up and moved their operations to Taiwan or Mexico or somewhere else with a “business-friendly environment.” This meant that the hard fought economic gains of African Americans evaporated. And people of the Global South have benn subjected to inhumane working conditions for little pay. This continues today in the maquiladores of Mexico and the sweatshops of Bangladesh. I say all that to say that African Americans, immigrants of color in the United States, and peoples of the Global South have a basis to fight together against the negative impacts of globalization and for social and economic justice for all of us.

Whether we are motivated by our religious beliefs, our humanitarian convictions, or our political principles, we must come together across the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation and national borders to be a part of a unified movement calling for social and economic justice for all. Using critical analysis, building strategic alliances and engaging in direct action across the globe, we can overcome. This is the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This is the challenge of the 21st Century. Si se puede!

Article about my arrest!

Two tax-day protesters arrested

 
By ROGER SNODGRASS, Monitor Editor
Los Alamos Monitor

Two protesters  were arrested for trespassing on government property
at Los Alamos National Laboratory at about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday.
The two men, Marcus Patrick Blaise Page, 41, of Albuquerque and
Michael A. Butler, 21, were part of a tax-day prayer vigil by Trinity
Nuclear Abolitionists, according to a report by the Los Alamos Police
Department.
Chelsea Collonge, a spokeswoman for the Albuquerque-based-group, said,
"We're a faith-based group that uses non-violent action and prayerful
protest for the goal of nuclear disarmament."
She said the group's goal was to pray for 24 hours at Los Alamos, to
protest tax money spent on designing nuclear weapons.
"At the beginning, they said we couldn't be there at all," she said.
"In the last few weeks, they've said we could be there dawn to dusk."
Two members of the group decided to remain beyond the permitted time.
According to the police report, LANL security officers said they had
asked the two men to leave numerous times over a three-hour period
after the agreed-upon time expired. But the men refused to leave.
The police report said they lifted the two men into  standing position
and placed them into custody. They were searched, transported and
booked in the Los Alamos County Jail.
A statement from the group said that the two men pled "not guilty" in
Magistrate Court Wednesday to a misdemeanor charge of criminal
trespass, which carries a $1,000 fine and/or 364 days in prison.
During a jailhouse interview this morning, the men said they plan to
bond out sometime today. The bond is set at $1,000 each along with a
$40 fee.
"We hope to continue these monthly vigils, though not all night long,
so we won't have this problem," Page said.
"We ask people to come and join us and, in general, we ask them to
shut down the lab," Butler said.
Reporter Carol A. Clark contributed to this story. 

nornc.org

RNC WELCOMING COMMITTEE ORDERS TASERS FOR EVERY PROTESTOR

Mar 14th, 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

March 13, 2008

Press Contact: Diablo Bush, rncwcmedia (a) riseup.net

RNC WELCOMING COMMITTEE ORDERS TASERS FOR EVERY PROTESTOR

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL - The RNC Welcoming Committee (RNC-WC), an anarchist and anti-authoritarian organizing body based in the Twin Cities, announced today that it has ordered tasers for each of its members and friends. The announcement comes on the heels of last month’s St. Paul City Council approval of a St. Paul Police Department (SPPD) request for 234 tasers. Due to a unique corporate-anarchist confidentiality agreement, the exact number of tasers or documentable evidence of this new order will not be disclosed.

Both the SPPD and RNC-WC taser orders are scheduled to arrive before the September 1 so-called Republican National Convention (RNC) in St. Paul. However, “The RNC Welcoming Committee’s order of tasers has absolutely nothing to do with the upcoming Republican convention,” said Ann O’ Nymmity of the RNC-WC. “These deadly, yet humane, weapons are needed simply to protect the safety of members of our community on a day-to-day basis. The timing is purely a coincidence.”

Last month, St. Paul police spokesperson Tom Walsh made similar statements to the Associated Press, saying that in regards to the RNC, his department’s purchase is “in no way related [to the timing of the RNC in St. Paul]. It simply isn’t.”

During scheduled protests of the RNC, local police and federal agents are likely to get violent. In Minneapolis last August, police used tasers and pepper spray to attack a nonviolent Critical Mass bike ride which coincided with the “pReNC”, a weekend of radical organizing in preparation for the RNC.

The RNC-WC does not have state-approved funding revenues. O’ Nymmity explained: “Our plan is to finance the purchase through raids on local WMD manufacturers, such as Alliant Techsystems.” The SPPD is funding their taser purchase through $210,000 from drug raids. O’ Nymmity added:
“Through their website, the RNC Welcoming Committee is also accepting contributions from the public.”

Tasers, manufactured by Taser International, Inc., range from $300 to $1,000 and the fashionable weapons come in a variety of styles, including “black pearl,” “electric blue,” “metallic pink,” “leopard print,” and “forest camo.” O’ Nymmity noted, “We imagine St. Paul police will be visiting us soon, and now we’ll have something to talk about when they do. For instance, I can’t wait to compare my leopard print model to St. Paul police deputy chief Matt Bostrom’s metallic pink one!”

Once the RNC-WC order is finalized, the St. Paul Police Department will no longer have a monopoly on the weapons that have been implicated in hundreds of deaths nationwide, including the killing of a Fridley man by Minnesota State Troopers in January.

The Welcoming Committee has no plans to purchase machine guns, rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, concussion grenades, batons, water cannons or helicopters, all of which will be at the disposal of local police and federal agents in September.

O’ Nymmity concluded, “Convention delegates and attendees should feel free to enjoy their five-star hotels, three-course meals, and “gentleman’s clubs” without fear of protest or disruption. After all, if they follow the law and don’t start any illegal wars or anything, what should they have to worry about?”

###

A History Lesson for those protesting the Presidential Conventions

Brief History Of Chicago's 1968 Democratic Convention

(Sources: "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" by Norman Mailer, Facts on File, CQ's Guide to U.S. Elections)

The 1968 Democratic Convention, held on August 26-29th, stands as an important event in the nation's political and cultural history. The divisive politics of the convention, brought about by the Vietnam war policies of President Johnson, prompted the Democratic party to completely overhaul its rules for selecting presidential delegates -- opening up the political process to millions. The violence between police and anti-Vietnam war protesters in the streets and parks of Chicago gave the city a black-eye from which it has yet to completely recover. The following is a brief history of the events leading up to the convention, the convention itself and the riots surrounding it.

Events Leading up the 1968 Convention Riots

The primary cause of the demonstrations and the subsequent riots during the 1968 Chicago convention was opposition to the Vietnam War. Young peace activists had met at a camp in Lake Villa, Illinois on March 23 to plan a protest march at the convention. Anti-war leaders including David Dellinger (editor of Liberation magazine and chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End War in Vietnam) Rennie Davis, head of the Center for Radical Research and a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Vernon Grizzard, a draft resistance leader, and Tom Hayden (also a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society) coordinated efforts with over 100 anti-war groups.

Groups related to this effort also planned events. Jerry Rubin (a former associate of Dellinger) and Abbie Hoffman (both leaders of the Youth International Party (YIPPIES) planned a Youth Festival with the goal of bringing 100,000 young adults to Chicago. They tried to get a permit from Chicago to hold a YIPPIE convention. The permit was denied, but the YIPPIES still came.

On March 31, President Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. Johnson's favorability ratings were in the mid-30% range and polls showed even less support for his Vietnam War policies (about 23%.) The announcement created uncertainty in the anti-war groups' convention plans. Many anti-war activists also became involved in the presidential campaigns of war opponents such as Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-NY), Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-WI) and Sen. George McGovern (D-SD).

However, by early April there was much talk of Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Vice President, running for the presidency. Humphrey officially entered the race on April 27th. Because of his close identity with the Johnson administration, the plans for demonstrations were not cancelled.

Other events preceding the 1968 Democratic convention contributed to the tense national mood. On April 4, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated and riots broke out throughout the country. (This included Chicago, where Mayor Daley reportedly gave a "shoot to kill" instruction to police.) On June 3, artist and cultural icon Andy Warhol was shot. Finally, on June 5th, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy (President John Kennedy's brother) was shot in the head after winning the California primary. He died the next day. There also were countless protests against the Vietnam war at this time. Student protesters effectively shut down Columbia University in April.

Attempts to Move the Convention from Chicago

Many Democrats were eager to move their national convention from Chicago to Miami, where the Republicans were to hold their nominating event. Democrats were concerned not only about the possibility of unruly protests, an ongoing telephone strike in Chicago threatened to cause logistical nightmares. The television networks also lobbied to move the event to Miami -- TV and phone lines already were installed at the Republican convention site. In addition, because of the phone strike in Chicago, television cameras would be limited to the hotels and the convention center -- new phone lines were needed to cover outside events. Any footage taken outside this area would have to be shot on film, which would require processing before it was broadcast.

Mayor Richard J. Daley would not let the convention leave Chicago. He promised to enforce the peace and allow no outrageous demonstrations. He also threatened to withdraw support for Humphrey, the apparent nominee, if the convention was moved. President Johnson also wanted to keep the convention in Chicago and is rumored to have said "Miami is not an American city."

The Convention

Humphrey came to Chicago with the nomination virtually sewn up -- he had between 100 and 200 more delegates than he needed, as well as the support of blacks, labor groups and Southern Democrats. However, he still felt his nomination was in jeopardy.

Humphrey was clearly seen as Johnson's man. President Johnson still had a grip over the convention, even going as far as to ensure states supportive of him received the best seats at the convention hall. But Johnson did not show up for the event.

Mayor Daley, who wanted Ted Kennedy to run for President, caucused his delegation of 118 the weekend before the convention and decided to remain "uncommitted." Humphrey also was at risk from the growing anti-war wing of the Democratic party. After vascillating between the pro-war policies of the Johnson administration and the anti-war policies of his opponents, Humphrey made it clear on CBS's Face The Nation the weekend before the convention he supported President Johnson's Vietnam policies.

Humphrey faced a major credentials fights. Delegations from 15 states tried to unseat Humphrey's delegates and seat anti-Vietnman delegates. Humphrey's forces won every fight. There also was manuevering behind the scenes at the Conrad Hilton (where the press and the Democratic party were staying) to try and get Sen. Ted Kennedy to run.

Sen. Dan Inouye (D-HI) gave the keynote address, but it was decidedly downbeat, with 10 of 13 pages devoted to what's wrong with the country. (Keynote speeches are usually upbeat affirmations of the party.)

The most contentious issue was Vietnam, and the debate on the minority "peace plank." The convention managers scheduled the debate for late (past prime-time) Tuesday night, but the peace delegates staged a protest and it was rescheduled for the next afternoon.

Debate was limited to one hour for each side and structured to prevent hostile exchanges. Rep. Phil Burton (D-CA) was the featured speaker in support of the peace plank, Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-ME) was the featured speaker in support of the Johnson-Humphrey language. After the Humphrey language was approved, the New York and California delegations began to sing "We Shall Overcome" and more delegations marched around the convention floor in protest. Television made it impossible for the convention planners to hide the protests of delegates favoring the peace plank. Even if planners tried to hide rebel delegations (such as New York and California) by placing them in the back of the convention hall and turning down their microphones, a camera and sound-man covering the floor could easily broadcast their protests across the nation.

During the debate on the peace plank, the worst day of rioting occurred outside the Amphitheater, in the so-called "Battle of Michigan Avenue."

Humphrey was nominated by Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco. (His daughter is now running for Congress in California.) Sen. George McGovern was nominated by Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D-MA), who shocked the convention by saying, "With George McGovern as President of the United States we wouldn't have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago." Mayor Daley erupted in anger and shook his fist at Ribicoff. Most reports of the event also say Daley yelled an off-color epithet beginning with an "F," but accoriding to CNN executive producer Jack Smith, others close to Daley inist he shouted "Faker," meaning Ribicoff was not a man of his word, the lowest name one can be called in Chicago's Irish politics.

Humphrey easily won the nomination by more than a 1,000 votes, with the delegation from Pennsylvania putting him over the top.

On the last day, Thursday, the convention opened with a film tribute to Bobby Kennedy. Also, Mayor Daley printed up hundreds of "We Love You Daley" signs and orchestrated a pro-Daley demonstration in the convention to contrast with the negative image the city had gained during the course of the convention.

Humphrey chose Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-ME) to be his running mate. Julian Bond, the African-American civil rights activist, was nominated for Vice President, but withdrew because he was 28 years old, under the constitutional age (35) to hold the office.

The Riots

Outside the official convention proceedings, anti-war demonstrators clashed with 11,900 Chicago police, 7500 Army troops, 7500 Illinois National Guardsmen and 1000 Secret Service agents over 5 days.

The violence centered on two things: the Chicago police forcing protesters out of areas where they were not permitted to be; and protesters clashing with police, and their reinforcements, as they tried to march to the convention site.

The violence began Sunday August 25th. Anti-war leaders had tried to get permits from the city to sleep in Lincoln park and to demonstrate outside of the convention site. Those permit requests were denied, although the city did offer them a permit to protest miles away from the Amphitheater But the protesters were undeterred. When the park was officially closed, Chicago police bombed protesters with tear gas and moved in with billy-clubs to forcibly remove them from the park. Along with the many injuries to anti-war protesters, 17 reporters were attacked by police (including Hal Bruno, who was then a reporter for Newsweek and is now political director for ABC.) Throughout the convention, police would see the press as the enemy. Subsequent battles between police and protesters occurred nightly in Lincoln Park and Grant Park.

Also present that first night and throughout the convention were the famous Beat artists Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and French poet Jean Genet. Most events and protests featured speeches from Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

The worst day of protesting was Wednesday, and was dubbed the "Battle of Michigan Avenue." Protesters were stopped in their march to the convention site and the media recorded graphic violence on the part of the Chicago police. Many innocent bystanders, reporters and doctors offering medical help were severely beaten by the police. Many hotels where the delegates were staying were affected by the riots. Fumes from the tear gas used by the police and "stink bombs" thrown by the protesters drifted into the buildings. (One of those affected was the Conrad Hilton, the headquarters for the Democratic party and the press.)

Another major clash occurred on the final day of the convention, when protesters tried once again to reach the convention center. They were twice turned away. A barricade was put up around the convention center to prevent anyone without credentials from entering the facility.

When the convention was finally over, the Chicago police reported 589 arrests had been made and 119 police and 100 protesters were injured. The riots, which were widely covered by the media, led to a government funded study to determine the cause of the violence. The study was led by Daniel Walker, a Democratic businessman from Illinois who would ran successfully for governor in Illinois in 1972. The study placed most of the blame on the Chicago police. Mayor Daley disagreed with the report and issued the Chicago police a pay raise.

The Aftermath

On March 20, 1969, a Chicago grand jury indicted eight police officers and eight civilians in connection with the disorders during the Democratic convention. The eight civilians, dubbed the "Chicago 8," were the first persons to be charged under provisions of the 1968 Civil Rights act, which made it a federal crime to cross state lines to incite a riot. David Dellinger was chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden were members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were leaders of the Youth International Party (YIPPIES). Lee Weiner was a research assistant at Northwestern University. John Froines was a professor at the University at the University of Oregon. Bobby Seale was a founder of the Black Panthers.

The trial of the "Chicago 8" opened before Judge Julius Hoffman in Chicago on September 24, 1969. It was a circus. The defendents disrupted the trial and talked back to the judge. The defense attorneys repeatedly accused the judge of bias against them. Because of Seale's repeated courtroom outbursts, Hoffman had ordered him gagged and chained to his chair on October 29. When the restraints were removed on November 3, Seale resumed his outburts, calling Hoffman a "racist," a "facist" and a "pig." Seale's trial was severed from the other seven on November 5, 1969 when Hoffman declared a mistrial on the conspiracy charges and sentenced him to four years in prison for contempt.

The long "Chicago 7" case finally went to the jury on February 14, 1970. The next day Judge Hoffman convicted all 7 defendents, plus defense attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, of contempt of court. (Kunstler had told the judge the trial was a "legal lynching" for which Judge Hoffman was "wholly responsible.") The jury returned its verdicts on February 18, 1970. Froines and Weiner were aquitted. Dellinger, Davis, Hayden, Hoffman and Ruben were convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot and giving inflammatory speeches to further their purpose. They were fined $5,000 each, plus court costs, and given five years in prison.