The Rag Blog

Mexico was ablaze in late January. Just two months after the election of Felipe Calderon as Mexico’s President, protests had broken out across the country.

Thousands of people were marching on the main cities calling on their pro-free trade businessman President to halt a phenomenon threatening the lives of millions of Mexicans.

In their hands the protesters clutched cobs of corn, the staple crop that makes tortillas and for many of Mexico’s poor the main source of calorific sustenance in an otherwise nutritionally sparse diet.

Over the past three months the price of corn flour had risen by 400 per cent. Despite being the world’s fourth largest corn producer and a major importer of supposedly cheap American corn, millions of Mexicans found the one source of cheap nutrition available to them was suddenly out of reach.

Poor Mexicans, who normally expect to set aside a third of their wages for corn flour, had always been particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations in the corn market, but a four-fold increase was both unheard of and potentially catastrophic.

The reason for such a substantial increase in the price lay north of the border. In order to wean itself off its addiction to oil, the US was turning to biofuels made from industrial corn like never before. Farmers in Mexico and America had been replacing edible corn crops with industrial corn that could then be processed into biofuels, leading to a decrease in the amount corn available on the open market.

As corn imports and domestic production dropped, greedy wholesalers in Mexico began hoarding what supplies they could get their hands on, forcing the price of corn to rise astronomically. Eventually tortillas became unaffordable, so people took to the streets.

President Calderon found himself caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand were the corn importers and major multinationals who would not look kindly on any government intervention on the free market. On the other side were Mexico’s teeming poor, the vast majority of the population who already viewed Mr Calderon as a discredited pro-business leader that ignored the needy.

In the end, Mr Calderon compromised. He capped the price of flour at 78 cents per kilogram but made the scheme voluntary for businesses. So far the price has largely stabilised but many are becoming increasingly concerned that Mexico’s tortilla wars were simply the sign of things to come. “Recently there’s been a huge increase in the demand for industrial corn for the production of ethanol which inevitably pushes up the price of food stuffs,” says Dawn McLaren, a research economist at the W P Carey School of Business in Phoenix, Arizona. “But if we get a particularly bad harvest or if a weather system like El Niño strikes we could be really stuck.”

A familiar face. Could it be?? YES!!

My cousin …………!! I haven’t seen her for so long.

She leaves her car and hurries towards me.

“Hello Habibti! How are you doing??” We sit in my car and catch up on family gossip.

Suddenly she jumps out of the car, “I’ll be back!” With that promise she runs to move her car some ten meters forward, and returns before I have a chance to move my car the same distance.

We are, of course, standing in the petrol line.

“What will you have?”

I motion to the roaming “drinks man” to give us two sodas, “All very cold, Khala (aunty, honorary title given to family ladies)!! Take your pick.”

We drink and chat, our conversation interrupted by jumps to move her car forward every fifteen minutes or so.

So hot, so thirsty and so hungry. So tired and so angry.

I can hardly keep my eyes open.

Hundreds of cars, waiting in line like beggars in front of the King’s gate; waiting for his bounty.

One line (hundreds of cars) for men.

One line (tens) for women.

One line (tens) for holders of “badges”.

One line (tens) for friends and acquaintances.

Which two do you think move forward more swiftly??

I fuel up twice a week, once for the generator and once for the car. And I’m one of the lucky ones – a lady – able to fuel up after only three hours wait, many of the men take a turn today… and reach the filling machine tomorrow.

It is already seven thirty and danger awaits on the path of those who heed not the call of prudence, and get home before this time.

We chat on, as do groups of women and men, who leave their cars in search of a shady spot.

Here comes the ice-cream man; OH! And there goes the sandwich man!! COME!!

We buy sandwiches – tiny falafel sandwiches and more soda to assuage our insatiable thirst.

So hot.

So infuriating.

Some cars fuelled up and have come back to fuel up again – they smile at us smugly.

At half past eight, just about to cross the bridge on my way home, my phone rings, “Where are you, Sahar??”

“Yes, Baba (father), I’m only just crossing the bridge.”

“So late!! And I thought you had forgotten me!”, “No, I’m on my way.”

It’s hard to listen to the hard-line rhetoric that has killed immigration reform and not undergo a sense of deja vu. Despite the nostalgia around places like Ellis Island, America’s love/hate relationship with immigration is longstanding. Sometimes hailed as embodiments of faith, family and hard work, other times denounced as a threat to the country’s moral, physical and economic well-being, immigrants have passed in and out of favor.

The debate has waxed and waned over the last two centuries. What hasn’t changed is the temptation to substitute shrillness for commonsense and depict the most recent newcomers as lepers, terrorists and parasites whose very presence subverts our economy and threatens our democracy.

In the beginning, anyone with the stamina to get here was welcome to stay. For the most part, foreigners were courted and encouraged to come. The young nation counted on their skills, ambition and numbers to sustain westward expansion and help fuel the growth of industry. The shrill notes, however, weren’t long in coming. By the 1830s, a growing influx of German and Irish Catholics led prominent Americans like Lyman Beecher and Samuel F.B. Morse to warn of a plot to bring the United States under the sway of the pope.

Soon afterwards, the arrival of a massive wave of Irish Catholics in flight from a devastating famine in their homeland put immigration at the center of American politics. In the single decade from 1845 to 1855, Irish-Catholic immigration approached that of all groups over the previous seventy years. Native Americans — a term the descendants of previous arrivees from the British Isles expropriated to themselves –maintained that Irish poverty was a function of Irish character. The immigrants were painted as disease-bearing, superstition-ridden and violence-prone, and the demand was made for imposing severe restrictions on the granting of citizenship.

In an 1855 address to the Massachusetts legislature, Gov. Henry J. Gardner went back to classical history to find a comparison. The scale of Irish immigration resembled, the governor said, the “horde of foreign barbarians” that had overthrown the Roman Empire. Gardner was far from alone in his fear. In that same year, the American party, which was founded to curtail the incursion of Catholics in general and the Irish in particular, controlled the legislatures of most New England states as well as those of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California. For a time its success made it the largest third-party movement in American history.

Amid the hysteria, there were voices or reason such as Abraham Lincoln and New York Governor William Seward who believed the best course was not to stop or discourage immigration but to find ways to channel it to the greatest advantage. Eventually, the larger crisis of slavery and civil war overshadowed the issue. If neither welcomed nor embraced, the Irish found their brawn and bravado needed, sometimes even valued.

By the turn of the 20th century, however, a flood of Italians, Slavs and Ashkenazi Jews had once again revivified nativist fears and set in motion a virulent anti-immigrant reaction. An elite cadre of eugenicists, supported by wealthy philanthropists, argued that the racial “germ plasm” of these groups was riddled with hereditary tendencies to feeblemindedness, criminality and pauperism. The subsequent revival of the Klu Klux Klan as a mass movement whose influence extended outside the South testified to the depth and breadth of anti-immigrant sentiment.

In the wake of World War I, the passage of the 18th Amendment, a constitutional change that prohibited the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages, had as a prime target the cultural and social habits of wine/whisky/beer-drinking immigrants. A few years later, in 1924, with the support of eugenicists and Klansmen alike, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively cut arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe by 80 percent, a limitation that stayed in place through World War II and the Holocaust.

It remains to be seen whether we will learn from the past or repeat it. The complex issues involved in immigration can’t be resolved in just and sensible ways if we succumb to panic-driven paranoia about foreign hordes threatening our survival. We need to remind ourselves that however they arrive, immigrants are human beings entitled to a modicum of respect and fair treatment, and that if the past is any guide, their long-term potential to enrich and enliven our society is far greater than the short-term difficulties their presence can create.

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed on Sunday that British foreign policy had nothing to do with the latest attempted terror attacks.

Two car bombs failed to detonate in London on Friday and two men crashed a car into the main terminal building at Glasgow airport before dousing it and themselves with petrol and igniting the fuel.

The men’s clothes were extinguished and they were taken into custody. Three other men have also been arrested over the attempted bombings.

In an echo of his predecessor Tony Blair, Mr Brown claimed that this weekend’s shambolic bomb plots were the work of phantom menace terror group al-Qaida.

He claimed that the would-be bombers were not motivated by the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan but had “a grievance against society, particularly against the values that we represent and the values decent people of all religions represent.

“Irrespective of Iraq, irrespective of Afghanistan, irrespective of what is happening in different parts of the world, we have an international organisation trying to inflict the maximum damage on civilian life in pursuit of a terrorist cause that is totally unacceptable to most people,” he declared.

Identifying the bomb plot with Islam and British Muslims, Mr Brown said: “We have got to fight a battle for hearts and minds.

“We have got to separate those moderate members of our community from a few extremists who wish to practise violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion.”

But Stop the War Coalition convener Lindsey German said: “The government is in denial on this question.

“Even a government inquiry last year found that the growth of terrorism in Britain was due to the war in Iraq.

“There is one simple fact – before the Iraq war, Britain was not under threat from terrorism and now it is. What Britain needs is not more terror laws but a change in foreign policy.”

Britain’s security level was raised from severe to critical after the Glasgow airport attack.

On the permanently heightened state of alert, Mr Brown boasted: “We have never let the security warning drift downwards.”

Increased security at airports and in crowded public places was announced.

Shadow foreign secretary William Hague said that the Tories may be willing to consider extending police powers of detention without charge beyond the current 28 days.

Ms German warned: “All this will achieve is that more people will be detained and more of them will make false confessions. That was the experience of internment in Ireland. It would be totally counterproductive.”

New Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will make a statement on the attacks to the House of Commons on Monday.

Mérida, June 30, 2007 (venezuelanalysis.com)— Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez arrived in Moscow Thursday and in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Friday as part of his three-nation tour of Russia, Belarus, and Iran that began on Wednesday. Meetings in Moscow and Minsk have the intention of strengthening economic and military cooperation with Venezuela as well as the construction of strategic political alliances.

Beginning his activities in Russia on Thursday, where he discussed increasing Russian investment in Venezuela as well as the purchase of several Russian submarines, the Venezuelan President first praised the role, in his opinion, that Russia plays in counterbalancing U.S. power.

“The Soviet Union, we say with a lot of respect, unfortunately fell. But Russia did not disappear, nor did the people that make it up,” said Chavez in a speech yesterday at the inauguration of a Latin American Cultural Center in Moscow. “There is a rebirth in Russia that has lifted her up again as a new center of power. And we, the people of the world, need Russia, and China, to get stronger and stronger,” he assured.

Chavez warned that the greatest threat to the world is “North American imperialism” and assured that the economic and military agreements with Russia were not his only priorities. The Venezuela leader also considers Russia important for curtailing U.S. influence and constructing a multi-polar world.

“We either break North American imperialism or North American imperialism will destroy the world,” Chavez said. “The empire must understand that it cannot dominate the world,” he declared congratulating Putin’s efforts to resist the U.S. in its plans to install a missile shield in Eastern Europe.

Both presidents met later Thursday evening in Putin’s Presidential Residence in Novo-Ogariovo in the outskirts of Moscow to discuss economic and military matters. Chavez said he hopes to boost Russian-Venezuelan business ties, especially in the energy sector, including the construction of oil refineries and a natural gas pipeline.

The two leaders discussed the creation of a bilateral fund to finance new projects of economic alliance. For the creation of said fund the two leaders plan two future meetings, one in Moscow in September and the second in October in Caracas.

“The fund,” said Chavez, “will study the viability of concrete projects for processing raw materials, constructing oil refineries, petrochemicals, the food industry, transport, fishing and construction.”

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Amid the media and military focus on Baghdad, another major Iraqi city – Basra – is being overlooked. Yet Basra’s experience carries important lessons for the capital and nation as a whole. Coalition forces have already implemented a security plan there, Operation Sinbad, which was in many ways similar to Baghdad’s current military surge. What U.S. commanders call “clear, hold and build”, their British counterparts earlier had dubbed “clear, hold and civil reconstruction”. And, as in the capital, the putative goal was to pave the way for a takeover by Iraqi forces. Far from being a model to be replicated, however, Basra is an example of what to avoid. With renewed violence and instability, Basra illustrates the pitfalls of a transitional process that has led to collapse of the state apparatus and failed to build legitimate institutions. Fierce intra-Shiite fighting also disproves the simplistic view of Iraq neatly divided between three homogenous communities.

Lack of attention to Basra is understandable. Iraq’s future is often believed to depend on Baghdad, and most of the spectacular bombings have taken place in the centre of the country, far from the southern city. Observers, by now accustomed to the capital’s dynamics, have had difficulty making sense of Basra’s and so have tended to downplay them. Finally, because U.S. forces have not been directly involved, news coverage has been both limited to Arabic and British media and forced to compete with the gruesome violence that is tearing the centre apart.

But to neglect Basra is a mistake. The nation’s second largest city, it is located in its most oil-rich region. Basra governorate also is the only region enjoying maritime access, making it the country’s de facto economic capital and a significant prize for local political actors. Sandwiched between Iran and the Gulf monarchies, at the intersection of the Arab and Persian worlds, the region is strategically important. Sociologically, Basra’s identity essentially has been forged in opposition not only to the capital but also to other major southern cities such as Najaf and Karbala. For these reasons, it is wrong either to ignore it or lump it together with an imaginary, undifferentiated Shiite south.

On its face, Basra’s security plan ranked as a qualified success. Between September 2006 and March 2007, Operation Sinbad sought to rout out militias and hand security over to newly vetted and stronger Iraqi security forces while kick-starting economic reconstruction. Criminality, political assassinations and sectarian killings, all of which were rampant in 2006, receded somewhat and – certainly as compared to elsewhere in the country – a relative calm prevailed. Yet this reality was both superficial and fleeting. By March–April 2007, renewed political tensions once more threatened to destabilise the city, and relentless attacks against British forces in effect had driven them off the streets into increasingly secluded compounds. Basra’s residents and militiamen view this not as an orderly withdrawal but rather as an ignominious defeat. Today, the city is controlled by militias, seemingly more powerful and unconstrained than before.

What progress has occurred cannot conceal the most glaring failing of all: the inability to establish a legitimate and functioning provincial apparatus capable of redistributing resources, imposing respect for the rule of law and ensuring a peaceful transition at the local level. Basra’s political arena remains in the hands of actors engaged in bloody competition for resources, undermining what is left of governorate institutions and coercively enforcing their rule. The local population has no choice but to seek protection from one of the dominant camps. Periods of stability do not reflect greater governing authority so much as they do a momentary – and fragile – balance of interests or of terror between rival militias. Inevitably, conflicts re-emerge and even apparently minor incidents can set off a cycle of retaliatory violence. A political process designed to pacify competition and ensure the non-violent allocation of goods and power has become a source of intense and often brutal struggle.

Basra is a case study of Iraq’s multiple and multiplying forms of violence. These often have little to do with sectarianism or anti-occupation resistance. Instead, they involve the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighbourhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors. Should other causes of strife – sectarian violence and the fight against coalition forces – recede, the concern must still be that Basra’s fate will be replicated throughout the country on a larger, more chaotic and more dangerous scale. The lessons are clear. Iraq’s violence is multifaceted, and sectarianism is only one of its sources. It follows that the country’s division along supposedly inherent and homogenous confessional and ethnic lines is not an answer. It follows, too, that rebuilding the state, tackling militias and imposing the rule of law cannot be done without confronting the parties that currently dominate the political process and forging a new and far more inclusive political compact.

Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. But before and beyond that, Iraq has become a failed state – a country whose institutions and, with them, any semblance of national cohesion, have been obliterated. That is what has made the violence – all the violence: sectarian, anti-coalition, political, criminal and otherwise – both possible and, for many, necessary. Resolving the confrontation between Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds is one priority. But rebuilding a functioning and legitimate state is another – no less urgent, no less important and no less daunting.

BAGHDAD — On the first floor of a tan building inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, the full scope of Iraq’s daily carnage is condensed into a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation.

Displayed on a 15-foot-wide screen, the report is the most current intelligence on significant enemy activity. Two men in khakis and tan polo shirts narrate from the back of the room. One morning recently, their report covered 168 incidents: rocket attacks in Tikrit, a cow-detonated bomb in Habbaniyah, seven bodies discovered floating in the Diyala River.

A quotation from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, concluded the briefing: “Hard is not hopeless.”

The intelligence was compiled not by the U.S. military, as might be expected, but by a British security firm, Aegis Defence Services Ltd. The Reconstruction Operations Center is the hub of Aegis’s sprawling presence in Iraq and the most visible example of how intelligence collection is now among the responsibilities handled by a network of private security companies that work in the shadows of the U.S. military.

Aegis won its three-year, $293 million U.S. Army contract in 2004. The company is led by Tim Spicer, a retired British lieutenant colonel who, before he founded Aegis, was hired in the 1990s to help put down a rebellion in Papua New Guinea and reinstall an elected government in Sierra Leone. Several British and American firms have bid on the contract’s renewal, which is worth up to $475 million and would create a force of about 1,000 men to protect the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on reconstruction projects. Protests have held up the award, which is expected soon.

The contract is the largest for private security work in Iraq. Tucked into the 774-page description is a little-known provision to outsource intelligence operations that, in an earlier time, might have been tightly controlled by the military or government agencies such as the CIA. The government continues to gather its own intelligence, but it also increasingly relies on private companies to collect sensitive information.

The deepening and largely hidden involvement of security companies in the war has drawn the attention of Congress, which is seeking to regulate the industry. The House intelligence committee stated in a recent report that it is “concerned that the Intelligence Community does not have a clear definition of what functions are ‘inherently governmental’ and, as a result, whether there are contractors performing inherently governmental functions.”

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian Prime Minister John Howard is secretly planning to begin withdrawing Australian troops from Iraq by February 2008, Australian media reported on Sunday.

The Sunday Telegraph, quoting an unnamed senior military source, described Howard’s withdrawal plan as “one of the most closely guarded secrets in top levels of the bureaucracy.”

The Sunday Telegraph said the drawdown of troops would focus on soldiers based in southern Iraq on security duty with Iraqi soldiers.

Australia has about 1,500 soldiers, sailors and airmen in and around Iraq.

Howard, a close ally of President George W. Bush, has been a mainstay of support for the controversial United States military presence in Iraq.

As recently as last week Prime Minister Howard said there were no plans to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq, and has consistently said that Australian troops would remain in Iraq for as long as needed.

A spokesman for Howard on Sunday referred to Howard’s statement last week and told Reuters that he did not want to give credence to the Sunday Telegraph report.

Howard said last week that his government was not committed to a timetable over Australian troops in Iraq but was committed to an outcome driven by circumstances and events.

“Americans don’t only disapprove of the president; they overwhelmingly see the country as on the wrong track.” Kathy Frankovic, CBS News director of surveys

(CBS) A CBS News poll shows Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with the Iraq war, President Bush and the Congress, as well as the overall direction of the country.

More Americans than ever before, 77 percent, say the war is going badly, up from 66 percent just two months ago. Nearly half, 47 percent, say it’s going very badly.