Cindy Sheehan

Since I haven’t really followed her work over the past few years, I was a bit annoyed when I heard she had “quit”. Who is she to “quit”, and to do so so publicly, I wondered? War, empire, are filthy, despicable, genocidal affairs. Opposing them is not like a job that one can “quit”, is it? Opposing them, in my view, doesn’t even mean one is deserving of special praise. But then I read her exit note, and found it some of the best and most refreshing reading I have seen in some time.

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Pet Panacea of India’s Ruling Classes

by Badri Raina
first published May 22, 2007

India’s ruling think gurus are forever on the lookout for a smart panacea for what they perceive the country’s ills. In arguing for a two-party political system, the idea seems to be to subdue the proliferation of organic discontent among the lower orders of the polity by imposing a mechanical structural arrangement from the top.

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Pakistan in the region

http://www.zcommunications.org/pakistan-in-the-region-by-zia-mian

Zia Mian directs the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, Princeton University. He is a writer and filmmaker on South Asia and nuclear issues. Previous interviews are here:

February 2004
February 2003

I caught up with him by phone on April 27, 2007 – just as the current crisis was beginning.

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Irreversible Damage: conservatives in power

People think of bloggers as astute observers of the press. I think if you read this blog carefully you realize that I, unfortunately, am not. I read a few foreign papers and get a fair amount of material from email, because of my work at ZNet. And on the other side, I don’t have the stomach to pay constant attention to the North American mainstream media. When I do try to read it in detail, it is often a very painful experience (the most recent and painful experience being the foray into Mitch Potter’s writing).

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A political error, logged for the record

Unsure of what the appropriate forum is for what was essentially a personal political error, I thought I should put it here in my blog, as sort of a public apology. The error I made has to do with this petition:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/no_way_us-colombia_fta/

A very good group of activists from Colombia and the US put this together to try to build support against the terrible Colombia-US-FTA. As a member of Pueblos en Camino, I sometimes send bulletins of information about Colombia or what we’re doing or our counterparts in Colombia. In this case, my co-collective member Manuel had already circulated the petition and wanted me to circulate it again along with various other pieces of info about Colombian President Uribe’s visit to the US.

The error comes here. There were a couple of paragraphs in the petition that one of our readers pointed out to me the first time we circulated it, and when I read them I also didn’t like them:

The FTA would result, like other treaties with Mexico and Central America, in increased unauthorized migration to the United States. NAFTA has been a disaster for Mexican farmers. It has driven many of them off the land, into the cities and northward to the United States in search of employment and income. If the Colombia FTA passes, we can expect more undocumented migrants.

The FTA would result in more unemployment among U.S. workers and pressure to lower wages in this country. Our workers would be exposed to competition with a labor market that is notorious for its extensive labor and human rights violations. U.S. workers are struggling for a living wage, and this would be a setback in that struggle.

What I should have done was sent the petition around, and afterwards, made some comment or reaction available to its authors. Instead, when I sent the petition, I added the following text before it:

“The petition for the US Congress – a flawed petition, as some of our readers have noted, making various concessions to US politics
– but one that makes some good points and had participation from Colombian activists in its preparation.”

I should not have done this. Manuel’s summary of this error was as follows, and I think he was completely right.

“What I think is a mistake is to qualify the petition-letter as flawed without presenting the reasons for this qualification as an opinion of two people, particularly when this letter is the product of a long and participatory process by many people who are part of the Mingas effort. From my perspective, the letter should have been circulated and included without comments, quoting the source, and the opinions and reactions to it signed and circulated as reactions to the letter. I am afraid that the comment “flawed” qualifies the letter from the editorial perspective of En Camino, which is, in fact not real and unfair to it.”

What were my reasons? Here is what I wrote when asked:

“[The other reader] pointed out that describing “unauthorized migration to the US” as a problem is a kind of concession to anti-immigrant sentiment that views migrants as a “problem” rather than a part of the US economy that serves elite interests. Similarly the argument that FTA would result in a setback for labor rights in the US could be viewed as a concession to privileging US workers, and to the notion that Colombian workers and US workers are intrinsically in competition (I’m not actually sure they are, if you did a sector-based economic analysis).”

But those reasons should have been offered to the authors first, without publicly calling the petition “flawed”. That was unfair and it did allow me to trump the views of all of the activists who worked hard to put this petition together. To them, I apologize.

Another round of climate denial

Two blogs ago I was expressing incredulity that the Dominion would provide a forum for climate denial in the form of Denis Rancourt, who has a good reputation as an activist but whose essays on the climate are preposterous. According to Rancourt’s blog, Rancourt has recently inspired sociologist and activist David Noble to tackle the climate issue in an essay that basically calls George Monbiot a dupe for his deference to politicized science. I find this all rather depressing. Rancourt and Noble’s anti-science arguments seem to me to leave people without any standard for evaluating arguments. I like science because the idea of science is that there is much about the world that can be understood, and that anyone can figure out how something works, it is a matter of time and effort. If it’s all politicized, then perhaps we can just cherry pick those scientific (or pseudoscientific) arguments that suit us and leave the rest. Certainly that is what Rancourt’s essay does, and that is also what Alexander Cockburn’s recent piece on the topic does – indeed, it relies on the same claims. Cockburn’s piece, like Rancourt’s, didn’t pass peer review at any (politicized) scientific journal, but it did get past the editors of ZNet, where I work. I did not think it should have, but I only saw it after the fact. In any case we asked George Monbiot to reply, which he did very effectively. So did some climate scientists, at the excellent site realclimate.org . It’s a bit of an embarrassment that long-discredited arguments are being trotted out by really respected leftists. I suppose it’s because it was Gore, rather than someone with a more decent record, who raised the profile of the issue. But this is one aspect of left behaviour I don’t agree with. It’s as if because the dems or the establishment say something, it’s automatically false. But I guess that’s a corollary of there being no factual matters and everything being political – no need to evaluate claims, if they’re coming from people with bad politics…

The recently-breaking (5-year old) Harper Afghan detainee abuse scandal

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have been reporting on the torture of detainees of the “war on terror” since about 2002. There are plenty of specific reports of people dying in detention, people being tortured to death, and so on. Some of that is documented in “Bleeding Afghanistan”, the book written by my friends Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls.

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