The Rag Blog

The recent sharp rise in US gasoline prices and the accompanying hardship for millions of people underscore once again the consequences of an energy market dominated by a few giant corporations. The price increase has been attributed to limited refining capacity, which has generated a sharp rise in refinery profits while facilitating market manipulation.

Gas prices in the US rose to record highs just in time for the Memorial Day weekend at the end of May, traditionally a time when many families drive long distances. Average gasoline prices reached $3.22 last week, approaching the record inflation-adjusted high of $3.29, set in 1981. In some parts of the country, prices rose considerably above that, with gasoline reaching as high as $3.69 a gallon in California.

The main beneficiaries of the surge in prices have been American refiners, which import crude oil and process it into gasoline and other products. Some of the major oil corporations, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, are vertically integrated, combining oil extraction and refining operations. These companies have seen profitability of the refining portion of their business soar.

A Wall Street Journal article May 18 noted that refiners are pulling in more than $30 in profit before taxes and other expenses for every barrel of oil that they process, the most per barrel since the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. On the West Coast, where gasoline prices are higher than the national average, refinery profits are at $39 a barrel, more than double the average of $17 over the past five years, according to a March 9 report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The large differential between the oil refinery revenues from the sale of gasoline and costs from the purchase of crude has been explained by shortages in refining capacity, which has reduced gasoline reserves as demand increases—leading to a rise in gas prices. All of the extra profit to the major refineries is coming directly out of the pockets of American consumers.

Bloomberg news service quoted Tom Betz, an oil broker with BNP Paribos Inc., as noting, “Probably stocks, based on demand, have never been lower in our history.” Demand is “very strong and is still rising as we head into driving season,” meaning that gasoline prices will stay high throughout the summer.

The rise in prices is hurting working class and lower-income families the most, as they have less disposable income to shift to transportation costs. This means that the high prices are cutting into other necessary spending, including food, prices for which are also rising throughout the country. An AP poll released May 25 found that 46 percent of the population said that high gasoline prices are causing severe financial problems.

The shortage of refining capacity is generally attributed in the media to a number of planned and unplanned refinery outages. However, refinery capacity has been deliberately decreased over the course of the past two decades, for the explicit purpose of boosting profit margins.

On the first anniversary of the beginning of last summer’s feverish uprising here, the city’s jewel-box plaza which had been occupied for seven months by striking teachers and their allies in the Oaxaca Peoples’ Popular Assembly (APPO) from May until October when federal police forced them into retreat, shimmered in the intense spring sunbeams. The only massive police presence on view was the city police department’s orchestra tootling strident martial airs to a shirt-sleeved crowd of gaffers. Here and there, handfuls of burley state cops, sweltering in bulletproof vests and helmets in hand, huddled in the shade quaffing “aguas frescas” (fruit water) and flirting with the senoritas.

Evidence of last summer’s occupation has been obliterated. Surrounding government buildings have been scrubbed clean of revolutionary slogans and no marches were scheduled to commemorate last May 22nd when the teachers first established their camp in the plaza. Indeed, militant members of Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) were not encamped in the stately old square for the first time since the section’s founding 27 years ago. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), the object of their fury, was still the despotic governor of Oaxaca.

Despite the relaxation of U.S. State Department travel advisories and the apparent calm, few tourists were strolling the cobblestone streets of Oaxaca’s “Historic Center”. long ago designated the patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO, and the cavernous colonial hotels around the plaza were virtually deserted. The 2006 uprising has put a serious kibosh on the international tourist trade, the backbone of the local economy. If the experience of San Cristobal de las Casas after the 1994 Zapatista uprising is any lesson, the tourist moguls will take years to recoup.

“Apparent calm” is a euphemism oft utilized to describe the uneasy lulls that mark social upheaval in Mexico. True to the nation’s volcanic political metabolism with its fiery spurts of molten fightback and sullen, brooding silences, the Oaxaca struggle seems to have entered into a period of internal contemplation.

Government repression, which featured death squad killings and the jailing of hundreds of activists, slammed the lid down on the social stew but did not extinguish it. Discontent continues to brew and fester, the bad gas building down below. The structures of the Popular Assembly and the teachers union, which served to catalyze this discontent throughout 2006, remain in tact.

To be sure, the rainbow of social movements that lit up red bulbs as far away as Washington last year, are not enjoying their best moments. Section 22, which itself is a loose amalgam of left factions, is wracked with division and dissonance and its titular leader Enrique Rueda Pacheco is held in profound contempt for having forced the strikers back into the classroom last October and abandoning the APPO to savage government repression.

Moreover, in response to the 70,000-strong Section 22’s rebellion against the leadership of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), union czarina Elba Esther Gordillo, a close confidante of President Felipe Calderon, chartered a new Oaxaca local, Section 59, to diminish the control that the militants exert over the state’s classrooms.

The division has put a dent in the teachers’ usual aggressive stance and instead of walking out this past May 15th, National Teachers Day, when new contracts are negotiated, Section 22 tentatively accepted a 4.8$ base wage increase (above the 3.7% Calderon had conceded to other sectors) and 122 million bonus pesos to “re-zone” Oaxaca for cost of living increases in this tourism-driven state.

Caracas, May 31, 2007 (venezuelanalysis.com)— Organizations, journalists, students, activists and intellectuals in Venezuela accused the national and international media of waging a campaign against Venezuela and of supporting destabilization plans that have been carried out in the country in the past few days. According to declarations made by various groups and individuals, the RCTV protests and media coverage of them have a hidden agenda directed by the United States and their Venezuelan allies to destabilize the country.

At a press conference yesterday in Caracas, more than six hundred different social organizations, including communal councils, political movements, collectives, community media, and cooperatives signed a document in rejecting the “imperial interference to destabilize and overthrow the Bolivarian government.” The organizations support the Venezuelan government’s decision not to renew the broadcast license of the private TV network RCTV and insist that the protests in the country are a part of an imperial strategy.

“The Venezuelan people forcefully reject the interference of the United States government in the internal affairs of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Once again the CIA has put a destabilization plan in place with the objective of overthrowing the Bolivarian government and of assassinating President Hugo Chavez,” said the opening paragraph of the document.

Later in the document the text makes reference to recent revelations of “documents that show the payment in dollars of journalists” from RCTV and Globovision “by the government of the United States, through the National Endowment for Democracy, connected with the US State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency through Freedom House.”

The document assures that the plan seeks to create violence and deaths in the street with the intention of discrediting and weakening the government of Hugo Chavez.

In contradiction to the claims made by the media regarding freedom of expression in the country, the social organizations claim that RCTV and Globovision have systematically “called for subversion, chaos, fascism, terrorism, and assassination.”

“These television channels have been spokespersons of foreign interests, specifically those of the Bush government, whose final objective is to overthrow and assassinate President Hugo Chavez,” they said.

Eva Golinger, Venezuelan-American attorney and author of the recent book Bush vs. Chavez, affirmed these declarations yesterday, calling on all Venezuelans to be aware of the media offensive on the part of national and international media with the intention of destabilizing the country.

“We have to be very aware that there are actors that are looking to create a scenario that later is going to justify what they want, which is an international intervention, above all from the United States,” said Golinger.

Journalists and students in Venezuela have also denounced the media campaign in recent days. Journalist Ernesto Villegas assured that part of the destabilization plan surrounding the case of RCTV includes an immense media operation to create a situation similar to the 2002 coup attempt.

“Here what they are looking for is a death,” said Villegas on the state television channel VTV yesterday. “The opposition media insists on stressing the peaceful nature of the protests, but, in reality, we have been able to observe that they aren’t of that nature. We can see a clear intention to destabilize through the use of violence and provocation,” he said.

Students who support the government from various universities across the country also came out against the media campaign. In a statement released yesterday the students rejected the destabilization plan and warned the Venezuelan people to not be deceived.

“We, the university students, denounce before the country and the world the destabilization plan that is being promoted by the private media that respond to the interests of the national and transnational elite,” said the statement. “With this behavior they are trying again to break the constitutional order.”

“We reject and condemn the manipulation of the private media who use the freedom of expression guaranteed by law, to “denounce” a supposed abuse of that right on the part of the government,” they said.

“Likewise, we repudiate the use of that lie to alter the public order and peace, with the intention of creating situations similar to the events of April 11th 2002, and during the oil strike of 2002 and 2003.”

Some Argentinean intellectuals also came out against what they called a “disturbing” campaign in the international press earlier this week. Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, filmmaker Fernando Pino Solanas, and sociologists Atilio Boron and Alcira Argumedo all condemned the campaign for trying to “convince the world” of the supposed “closure” of RCTV. According to the intellectuals, the media campaign is a “dangerous escalation of disinformation that could serve as a platform for other plans by Washington.”

Her rise to power sent shock waves through Chile’s political elites, who still, after a year of her government, remain implacable. Between the lines, their message could be read as this: “She is a woman, she acts like a woman, and women don’t know how to exert authority.”

A close look at the private lives of ordinary Chileans reveals changes that were quietly laying the groundwork that made it possible for a woman to become president in spite of the conservative influence of the Catholic Church and the political elites.

But after Bachelet’s first year in the government, many of her critics maintain they were right, since the center-left coalition is experiencing its worst period and showing obvious signs of wear.

If Michelle Bachelet can be criticized for anything it’s her inefficiency in constructing a story, an epic of this new form of governing—that of a woman who wants to govern as a woman, with geniality and greater participation of ordinary citizens.

Women Take Power

As is true of almost all Latin American countries, Chilean society has always been patriarchal. Ever since the Spanish conquest, the figure of the “señor” or “lord” reigned supreme in the large, landed estates and later in the cities. Until the 1960s, women were largely excluded from government, work, and business; their lives centered on matters of the home and child raising.

Military dictator Augusto Pinochet embodied the most stereotypical characteristics of this machismo: those of the omnipotent and authoritarian man. He promised order and security in exchange for liberty and human rights. Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, wife of the dictator, told women to take a secondary role in support of their husbands.

With the end of the dictatorship in 1990, the democratic coalition installed a more benign patriarch: President Patricio Aylwin. Ricardo Lagos, the third president after the dictatorship, also represented a patriarchal figure who, in moments of conflict, would bang on the table to get the last word—a practice that increased his popularity.

Michelle Bachelet does not fit any of these characteristics. She is a socialist, agnostic, and daughter of a general assassinated by the dictatorship. She is separated, with children from different fathers; her youngest was born when she was single. She is seen as unpredictable in her friendly, feminine, maternal ways.

As Lagos’ minister of health and later of defense, she was well-liked. It was citizens, not the political class, who invested in her candidacy and later in her presidency.

It is no surprise that Al Gore is attacking Bush in his new book, of course. Nor is it a surprise that Gore accuses Bush of ignoring all reasonable evidence in both making the decision to invade Iraq and in deciding to do nothing about global warming.

What is important about what Gore is saying is his focus on how the pollution of America’s information environment by 1) corporate media consolidation (all television news is brought to Americans by five private corporations, the CEOs of which all vote Republican) and 2) government propaganda (i.e. lies purveyed to Americans using the money and resources of Americans).

Polling shows that the percentage of Americans who view Iran as the number one threat to the United States has risen to 27 percent now. I think it was only 20 percent in December 2006. First of all, how in the world can a developing country with about a fourth of the population of the US, about a $2000 per capita income (in real terms, not local purchasing power), with no intercontinental ballistic missiles, with no weapons of mass destruction (and no proof positive it is trying to get them), with a small army and a small military budget– how is such a country a “threat” to the United States of America? Iranian leaders don’t like the US, and they talk dirty about the US, and they do attempt to thwart US interests. The same is true of Venezuela under Chavez. But Tehran is a minor player on the world stage, and trying to build it up to replace the Soviet Union is just the worst sort of fear-mongering, and it is being done on behalf of the US military industrial complex, which wants to do to Iran what it did to Iraq. It is propaganda, and significant numbers of Americans (a 7 percent increase would be like 21 million people!) are buying it.

Why have those poll numbers gone up? Because the Bush administration is trying to hang the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq on Iran (and even trying to hang the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan on Iran). The message of administration and military spokesmen is that Iran is deliberately killing US troops and is a major source of insurgency in Iraq. No convincing evidence has ever been presented for either allegation, nor is it reasonable to assume that Iran plays a significant role in funding hyper-Sunni, Shiite-killing death squads to deliberately destabilize its client governments in Baghdad (al-Maliki) and Kabul (Karzai). Yet the New York Times and even the Guardian put this b.s. on the front page, and of course it is all over CNN, Fox Cable News, MSNBC, etc. Are US journalists trapped in the dictates of the military-industrial complex by virtue of working for these mega corporations? We know that Roger Ailes at Fox Cable News orders his employees how to spin the day’s news (he is a former high Republican Party official). Has any of the journalists counted up how many of the 127 US troops killed in Iraq in May was killed in Sunni Arab areas and how many in Shiite neighborhoods? Has any of them actually read the translated communiques on World News Connection of the Sunni Arab guerrillas and what they say about Iran and Shiites? Has any demanded air tight proof and non-anonymous sources before printing this garbage?

No.

Alternating between “with us or against us”, “bring ’em on” snarling or “why do they hate us?” whining, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney characterize Americanism at its most crass and banal. The suave barbarism of Condoleezza Rice, John Negroponte or Robert Zoellick offers a more insidious version, but one no less repugnant. Based on crude US chauvinism, a facilitating medium for empire, Americanism is inherently anti-humanitarian and anti-democratic. The Bush regime’s trashing of domestic and international legal and human rights norms is Americanism rampant. Americanism deliberately confounds the undeniable contributions of the United States’ peoples to human development with itself. Individuals like John Negroponte and Robert Zoellick exploit that confusion to camouflage their corporate imperialist assault on the interests of the majority of people in the United States.

Americanism affirms that the United States is all that really counts of the Americas, North, Central or South. It regards everything about and in Latin America as inferior, as it does all the Americas’ indigenous peoples. Americanism presumes that the lives of United States citizens – except for the impoverished and the non-white – are worth more than the lives of people in other countries. Americanism skims glibly over multiple mass-murder on the basis that the United States is accountable to no one. It glosses over its historical crimes – slavery, the genocide of North American indigenous peoples and the invasion and/or occupation of many other peoples and their lands. Those crimes are treated at most as regrettable blemishes, past and, bar Iraq and Afghanistan, no longer relevant.

Applying even rudimentary notions of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism helps render more clearly not just the obnoxious folly Americanism engenders but also its well-calculated political and economic consequences. Americanism still encourages people to view Latin America as a conquered physical and conceptual space – a ready victim for demeaning US and European superimposed caricatures of impotence, cruelty, stupidity, inefficiency. Europe’s intimidating illusions of presumptuous superiority reinforce Americanism’s racist patrimony. As the US comes to terms with its incipient imperial decline, Americanism may be mutating. But it remains the basis for the never-ending attacks on alternatives that reject US domination.

Resistance leaders from Jose Marti and Augusto Sandino to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez have consistently turned the caricatures on their heads. Ever diminishing differences between competing United States, European and Pacific imperialisms have acted upon corresponding divergences among the varieties of resistance they have provoked. ALBA – the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas – is the most recent self-definition of Latin American resistance and necessarily entails an emphasis on integration. Peoples united are much harder to defeat. Since current conditions demand different strategies, Americanism’s proponents develop often shifting but singularly purposeful policies – consolidating alliances with existing elites, most obviously in Mexico and Colombia, and co-opting emergent political and economic actors wherever possible, as in Brazil and Uruguay.

A large part of the superiority Americanism assigns itself resides in what Said wrote about the Orient “The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader or the soldier was in or thought about the Orient because he could be there or could think about it with very little resistance on the Orient’s part.” (1) Corporate globalization – dominated by US, European and Pacific multinationals and the politicians who front for them – is an effort to make permanent that ability to be wherever Americanism deems necessary with relatively little resistance. Americanism insists the United States and its allies must be able to be in target victim-countries as they please, while migration from those countries must be policed ever more rigidly. The proposed anti-migrant border wall between Mexico and the United States is Americanism’s concrete and razor wire apotheosis.

Cutting at the apparently seamless texture presented by would-be dominant versions of reality, like Americanism, exposes their discontinuities, their constructedness, and the fluidity of their production processes. Up against it, the understandable tendency, a kind of intellectual and moral fight-or-flight, is to veer between critical incisiveness and iconoclastic clearance towards a way out into open ground. The impulse tends both to challenge and to escape illegitimate authority’s insincere or downright mendacious workings, the sadistic criminality of its military invasions and occupations and its persistently destructive hypocritical economic interventions.

A crucial contest with the delinquent authority appropriated by suffocating orthodoxies like Americanism is over the construction of events and memories and their representations. However diffuse the spoken, textual or visual record of events, these still seep across time and memory. Their presences and absences stain, color and mark what we are able to think and what we do in fact think, what we say or write, what images we produce, what music we make. In Christian scriptural studies, the 19th century theologian Franz Overbeck argued the historical role of apocryphal texts was to define the canon – marginality and heresy defining order.

Control of the various sieves and filters of information has always been as essential as military force in imposing political and economic control. Authorized versions and imprimaturs have never gone away. They include current attempts to harass dissenting academics include cases like those of Ward Churchill or Norman Finkelstein. Fierce distortion of the recovery from the local big business oligarchy by the Venezuelan State of RCTV for use as a public service channel is another. Yet another is the suppression of information about the five Cuban anti-terrorists unjustly imprisoned in high security jails while super-terrorist Luis Posada Carriles walks free.

Just as egregious is the mass censorship by the corporate media of events in Mexico and Haiti over the last couple of years. In Mexico the routine use of torture by the police, mass rape and assault in Atenco, lawless repression in Oaxaca, the electoral fraud of July 2006 all have been handled with kid gloves, if at all, by international corporate news outlets. In Haiti the massacres of civilians by UN mercenaries have gone deliberately under-reported by the world’s corporate media. They slavishly perpetuate Americanism’s perception-management chokehold on what constitutes, or not, international news.

The various elites obsessed with power, control, status and prestige that promote Americanism use these means and many more to transmit, protect and promote their excuses, rationalizations, self-justifications and prejudices. Corporate European and US media coverage of events in Iraq, Palestine, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Somalia, Haiti or Afghanistan shows clearly how in an unequal relation, the interpretations and versions of the less powerful are restricted, their expression intimidated, crushed. The constantly accumulating hoard of dominant interpretations of the historical record and their management create a vast, dense archive of intimidation deployed by powerful elites to face down critical questioning and skepticism.

With regard to Americanism, the latest battleground for Latin American autonomy is the resurgence of the role of the State following the failure of the neo-liberal model on its ostensibly argued terms, if not its encrypted purpose – the consolidation of power and concentration of wealth. Ideas about or discussion and analysis of Latin America are certainly greatly determined by the fact of its colonial and neo-colonial subordination to the US and Europe. But that fact is diffused through a plethora of activities and divisions of labor which demand a persistent state of alert and resistance to the ways Americanism transmits and reproduces itself.

John Negroponte’s recent visit to Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador confirmed that the US State Department is rigging its diplomatic machinery to the hum of a less crudely debilitating white noise. The effort is to see if changing the tone and dynamic of the psychological stress might not still be effective in reducing Latin American subjects to putty in US hands. For his part, Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs uses a mellow style that superficially supplants traditional “do what we want or else…” US diplomatic argot.

But one has only to remember the “ham-and-eggs” diplomacy of Ambassador Dwight D. Morrow dealing with President Calles during the Cristero War in Mexico to realize that talking softly regularly accompanies the traditional big stick. Modernizing the workings of Americanism will remain central to US government and allied efforts to recoup lost ground for corporate imperialism in Latin America. Current continuing US efforts with local allies to destabilize Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua demonstrate that challenging and exposing Americanism will be a constant and crucial task to defend and preserve fundamental rights of the majority in Latin America.

toni solo is an activist based in Central America – toni.tortillaconsal.com

NEW YORK (June 2) – Federal authorities announced Saturday they had broken up a suspected Muslim terrorist cell planning a “chilling” attack to destroy New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, kill thousands of people and trigger an economic catastrophe by blowing up a jet fuel artery that runs through residential neighborhoods.

Three men, one of them a former member of Guyana’s parliament, were arrested and one was being sought in Trinidad as part of a plot that authorities said they had been tracked for more than a year and was foiled in the planning stages.

“The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable,” U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf said at a news conference, calling it “one of the most chilling plots imaginable.”

In an indictment charging the four men, one of them is quoted as saying the foiled plot would “cause greater destruction than in the Sept. 11 attacks,” destroying the airport, killing several thousand people and destroying parts of New York’s borough of Queens, where the line runs underground.

One of the suspects, Russell Defreitas, a U.S. citizen native to Guyana and retired JFK air cargo employee, said the airport named for the slain president was targeted because it is a symbol that would put “the whole country in mourning.”

“It’s like you can kill the man twice,” said Defreitas, 63, who first hatched his plan more than a decade ago when he worked as a cargo handler for a service company, according to the indictment.

Authorities said the men were motivated by hatred toward the U.S., Israel and the West. Defreitas was recorded saying he “wanted to do something to get those bastards.”

Despite their efforts, the men never obtained any explosives, authorities said.

To end poverty, put poor people in charge of their livelihood. A co-op boom turns the jobless into worker/owners.

When Estrella Ramirez’s 14-year-old son signed her up to participate in the government’s free literacy program, Mission Robinson, she reluctantly agreed. Ramirez, who lives in the poor western Caracas neighborhood of Catia, lost her right arm in 1991 from an arterial thrombosis. Six years later, her husband left her, leaving her to raise her young children alone. She looked for work but couldn’t find a job. “I lived locked in my house with my children, and I maintained my children sometimes selling coffee at the hospital, making lunches,” she says.

Three months after ramirez started the literacy program, her teacher enrolled her in the government’s new cooperative job-training program, Vuelvan Caras (About Face).

“I thought they wouldn’t accept me or put up with me,” Ramirez says. “There’s discrimination. You’re treated as if you are useless, a cripple.”

Ramirez began the year-long Vuelvan Caras industrial sewing course in spring 2004 with a group of other unemployed women from her community. Some, like Ramirez, were also offered scholarships so they could study and still care for their children.

Three years later, Ramirez is a co-founder and associate of the textile cooperative, Manos Amigas (Friendly Hands). She is also, according to former cooperative president, Maria Ortiz, “one of the hardest workers” of the 15-person outfit.

Ramirez formed Manos Amigas with her fellow Vuelvan Caras graduates shortly after finishing the program. They received an $80,000 zero-interest loan from the Venezuelan National Institute for Small and Medium Industry to buy 20 sewing machines and purchase their first materials. The government provided a prime location—free of charge—from which to run their cooperative, in a rundown building in downtown Caracas. They invested part of their loan in fixing up their space on the fourth floor.

At Manos Amigas, members voted to work eight hours a day, five days a week, and to pay themselves minimum wage, or around $200 a month. They also receive a bonus at the end of the year, depending on the cooperative’s yearly profits. As is the norm under the 2001 Venezuelan Cooperative Law, a president, secretary, and treasurer are elected yearly. The co-op holds a general assembly once a month, and decisions are made by consensus or by majority. “No one is boss, everyone is part of the team,” said one member.

Manos Amigas is just one of the 8,000 cooperatives, or worker-collectives, formed by the nearly 300,000 graduates of the Vuelvan Caras cooperative job-training program since it began in 2004. It is also just one of the 181,000 cooperatives officially registered in Venezuela as of the end of last year—an astonishing figure that puts the South American nation at the top of the list of countries in the world with the most cooperatives.

Over 99 percent of Venezuela’s cooperatives have registered since President Hugo Chávez Frias took office in 1999. The cooperative boom is key to the shift by the Venezuelan government towards an economy based on the inclusion of traditionally excluded sectors of society and the promotion of alternative business models as part of its drive towards what Chávez calls “socialism of the 21st century.”

Seeds of Venezuela’s Co-op Boom

At the time that President Chávez was elected in 1998, poverty had been on a slow but constant rise since the middle half of the century. The consolidation of lands into a few hands had displaced farmers who migrated in large numbers to the cities in search of work. As a result, Venezuela became the most urbanized country in Latin America; its capital, Caracas, is surrounded by poor barrios that house almost half of its population of nearly 5 million in substandard conditions. The implantation of neoliberal policies during the 1990s only aggravated the situation by privatizing state-owned businesses, and cutting subsidies and social spending. Inflation skyrocketed and zeros piled on to the end of the national currency, the Bolivar.

Venezuela’s poor were left with few options in a society that former vice-minister of popular economy (MINEP) Juan Carlos Loyo, described last year as “profoundly individualistic … profoundly unequal, and discriminatory.”

In 1998, however, things began to change. Chávez was elected president with the promise to rewrite the Constitution. As he built on the vision of South America’s liberator, Simón Bolívar, his popularity grew among the poor. His “Bolivarian Revolution,” Loyo says, includes building an economic system “based on solidarity and not exploitation.”

Chávez decreed the Special Law of Cooperative Associations in 2001, which made it easier to form cooperatives, and, in the words of former Cooperative Superintendent (SUNACOOP) Carlos Molina, “transformed cooperatives into a fundamental tool of social inclusion.”

Why cooperativism? “Because cooperativism goes further than purely economic activity, and is based on productive relations which are collective, in solidarity, and above all else inclusive,” says Molina.

The Venezuelan government began promoting the creation of co-ops by prioritizing them for government contracts, offering grants and loans with little or no interest, and eliminating income tax requirements for co-ops. Cooperative numbers immediately began to grow.

Venezuela kicked off Vuelvan Caras in spring 2004 as it began to reinvest its oil wealth in educational, social, and health “missions” in an attempt to incorporate Venezuela’s marginalized poor back into society.

The same year, the Venezuelan government began to promote what it called “Endogenous Development” (economic development from within), directly in contrast to the neoliberal model imposed during the 1990s, which promoted privatization and corporate ownership.

Endogenous Development puts the development of the community in the hands of the residents and builds on the local resources and capacities for the benefit of the region and its inhabitants. The model is based in 130 Nuclei of Endogenous Development (NUDEs) located across the country as centers of local development.

At the pilot Venezuelan NUDE in western Caracas, Fabricio Ojeda, more than 40 worker-collectives intermingle with the government health mission, Barrio Adentro, and the low-priced government-sponsored food store, Mercal.

Unfortunately, the reality of the cooperative boom is not without its problems. According to last fall’s first Venezuelan Cooperative Census, less than 40 percent of the cooperatives registered at the time were actually functioning.

Many of the discrepancies come from businesses that registered and either never got off the ground or failed to comply with the cooperative law. In rare cases, so-called “ghost cooperatives” registered and received loans from the government before disappearing with the cash.

Venezuelan cooperative totals are growing at hundreds per week, and former SUNACOOP director Molina verified last year that they have no hope of being able to audit them all.

The invasion of Iraq has set off what could be the largest oil boom in history. All the signs are there: multinationals free to gobble up national firms at will, ship unlimited profits home, enjoy leisurely “tax holidays” and pay a laughable 1 percent in royalties to the government.

This isn’t the boom in Iraq sparked by the proposed new oil law–that will come later. This boom is already in full swing, and it is happening about as far away from the carnage in Baghdad as you can get, in the wilds of northern Alberta. For four years now, Alberta and Iraq have been connected to each other through a kind of invisible seesaw: As Baghdad burns, destabilizing the entire region and sending oil prices soaring, Calgary booms.

Here is how chaos in Iraq unleashed what the Financial Times recently called “north America’s biggest resources boom since the Klondike gold rush.” Albertans have always known that in the northern part of their province, there are vast deposits of bitumen–black, tarlike goo that is mixed with sand, clay, water and oil. There are approximately 2.5 trillion barrels of the stuff, the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the world.

It is possible to turn Alberta’s crud into crude, but it’s awfully hard. One method is to mine it in vast open pits: First forests are clear-cut, then topsoil scraped away. Next, huge machines dig out the black goop and load it into the largest dump trucks in the world (two stories high, a single wheel costs $100,000). The tar is diluted with water and solvents in giant vats, which spin it around until the oil rises to the top, while the massive tailings are dumped in ponds larger than the region’s natural lakes. Another method is to separate the oil where it is: Large drill-pipes push steam deep underground, which melts the tar, while another pipe sucks it out and transports it through several more stages of refining, much of it powered by natural gas.

Both techniques are costly: between $18 and $23 per barrel, just in expenses. Until quite recently, that made no economic sense. In the mid-1980s, oil sold for $20 a barrel; in 1998-99, it was down to $12 a barrel. The major international players had no intention of paying more to get the oil than they could sell it for, which is why, when global oil reserves were calculated, the tar sands weren’t even factored in. Everyone but a few heavily subsidized Canadian companies knew that the tar was staying put.

Then came the US invasion of Iraq. In March 2003, the price of oil reached $35 a barrel, raising the prospect of making a profit from the tar sands (the industry calls them “oil sands”). That year, the United States Energy Information Administration “discovered” oil in the tar sands. It announced that Alberta–previously thought to have only 5 billion barrels of oil–was actually sitting on at least 174 billion “economically recoverable” barrels. The next year, Canada overtook Saudi Arabia as the leading provider of foreign oil to the United States.

All this has meant that Iraq’s oil boom has not been delayed; it has been relocated. All the majors, save BP, have rushed to northern Alberta: ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total, which alone plans to spend $9-$14 billion. In April, Shell paid $8 billion to take full control of its Canadian subsidiary. The town of Fort McMurray, ground zero of the boom, has nowhere to house the tens of thousands of new workers, and one company has built its own airstrip so it can fly in the people it needs.

Seventy-five percent of the oil from the tar sands flows directly to the United States, prompting Brian Hall, an energy consultant with Colorado-based IHS, to call the tar sands “America’s energy security blanket.” There is a certain irony there: The United States invaded Iraq at least in part to secure access to its oil. Now, thanks partly to economic blowback from that disastrous decision, it has found the “security” it was looking for right next door.

It has become fashionable to predict that high oil prices will spark a free-market response to climate change, setting off an “explosion of innovation in alternatives,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently. Alberta puts the lie to that claim. High prices have indeed led to an R&D extravaganza, but it is squarely focused on figuring out how to get the dirtiest possible oil out of the hardest-to-reach places. Shell, for instance, is working on a “novel thermal recovery process” — embedding large electric heaters in the deposits and literally cooking the earth.

And that’s the Alberta tar sands for you: The industry already contributing to climate change more than any other is frantically turning up the heat. The process of refining bitumen emits three to four times the greenhouse gases produced by extracting oil from traditional wells, making the tar sands the largest single contributor to Canada’s growth in greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, the industry plans to more than triple production by 2020, with no end in sight. If prices stay high, it will soon become profitable to extract an additional 141 billion barrels from the tar sand, which would place the largest oil reserves in the world in Alberta.

Developing the sands is devouring trees and wildlife — the Pembina Institute, the leading authority on the tar sands’ environmental impact, warns that boreal forests covering “an area as large as the State of Florida” risk being leveled. Now it turns out that the main river feeding the industry the massive quantities of water it needs is in jeopardy. Climate scientists say that dropping water levels are the result — fittingly enough — of climate warming.

It started in 1979 when the US wanted to undermine the Soviet Union — its enemy back then. Luring and funding tens of thousands of Muslims from across the Arab world to fight the “atheist” enemy — the USSR — that occupied Afghanistan, the US created its own and real enemy, Al-Qaeda.

One would have thought that following the 11 September attacks the current US administration would have made some revisions to destructive and self-destructive US policy. Even if the message hadn’t yet reached Washington’s decision-makers back in 2001, the disaster they created in Iraq — which only fuelled and expanded Al-Qaeda — should have been an obvious warning sign for the Americans, but it wasn’t.

Ten days into the Nahr Al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp showdown with the Lebanese army the situation remains as volatile and dangerous as it was when fighting erupted 20 May. Meanwhile, we are confronted with a deluge of revealing information on what Fatah Al-Islam — the guerrilla group based in the Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp — is and who created it.

If we are to believe the facts presented by leading investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, this extremist Sunni group seems to be the making of the Lebanese government, specifically the Sunni political movement of Saad Al-Hariri and the United States, with the help of Saudi Arabia. The objective? Countering the powerful Shia Hizbullah resistance group. Result? Fatah Al-Islam got out of hand and will not now submit to be controlled by anyone. In fact, its leaders are now saying they will lead the war on America.

Washington’s policymakers do not seem to understand that this strategy is not working, hasn’t worked, and never will. That they are spicing up this decades-old approach by playing on the sensitive issue of sectarianism in a desperate bid to win their battle with Shia Iran is only an indication of their short-sightedness and ignorance of the dynamics of the region.

Dividing the Arab world into “moderate” and “extremist” countries, “Shia crescents” or “Sunni blocs”, is playing with fire and underestimating the impact of such harmful policies on our peoples.

Before arming an extremist Sunni group in a Palestinian refugee camp, the US and its allies who assisted in the making of this problem should have examined its dangerous consequences first.

Hizbullah was created following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It has remained since then and expanded into a very powerful army enjoying popular support because Israel continued to occupy parts of Lebanon. It will not cease to be a resistance group until the reasons that led to its creation — Israeli occupation and belligerency — cease to exist. Creating and arming a Salafi extremist “Sunni” group like Fatah Al-Islam does not counter Hizbullah because Fatah Al-Islam was not founded on legitimate reasons.

WASHINGTON (June 2) – America may spew more greenhouse gases than any other country, but some states are astonishingly more prolific polluters than others – and it’s not always the ones you might expect.

The Associated Press analyzed state-by-state emissions of carbon dioxide from 2003, the latest U.S. Energy Department numbers available. The review shows startling differences in states’ contribution to climate change.

The biggest reason? The burning of high-carbon coal to produce cheap electricity.

Wyoming’s coal-fired power plants produce more carbon dioxide in just eight hours than the power generators of more populous Vermont do in a year.

Texas, the leader in emitting this greenhouse gas, cranks out more than the next two biggest producers combined, California and Pennsylvania, which together have twice Texas’ population.

In sparsely populated Alaska, the carbon dioxide produced per person by all the flying and driving is six times the per capita amount generated by travelers in New York state.

Enterprising tribesmen, fed up with officials’ failure to address their education needs, build their own makeshift schools.

The village of Ghadhari, in the province of Muthanna, has never had a school. “We hoped [after Saddam’s fall] that any new government would listen to our desire for [one],” said Sheikh Dhager al-Hashim from the al-Ziyad tribe, the largest in this long neglected part of southwest Iraq.

A month, a year went by, a few American and other coalition troops passed through, new governors took office in Samawa, the capital of the predominantly Shia province. But nothing happened in Ghadhari.

Until Sheikh Dha ger al-Hashim and his tribesmen did something unusual for Iraq, where there is a tradition of waiting for the government to solve any given problem. Locals – who scrape a living breeding sheep and camels, growing a few crops, making bricks and occasional smuggling – took matters into their own hands and built a school of mud and wood, the al-Hudaibiya primary school.

It has just a handful of classrooms, the windows have no panes and there’s little in the way of furniture, but it represents progress in impoverished Ghadhari where most people are illiterate. “I paid for the school, and [villagers] helped with the construction,” said a proud al-Hashim.

The whole village contributes to the running of the new school. Local families provide teachers – who are in short supply – with food and sometimes accommodation; and the sheikh pays the taxi fares for staff who commute from Samawa, 35 kilometres away.

Such self-reliance appears to stem from years of being ignored by the central authorities. This is a forgotten land, with no oil reserves, holy site, nor important road that has ever attracted the attentions of the ruling elite.

In Saddam’s time, thousands of Kurds and Shia critical of the Sunni dictatorship were held in prison camps in the region.

Like his predecessors, the former dictator had little time for Muthanna. One of the few things that Saddam was praised for by the international community was raising education standards across the country, but he allocated little money to schools here.

What Ghadhari locals can’t afford to provide themselves they seek from other sources and vainly hope that officials in Samawa will help them.

School furniture, such as desks and blackboards, are borrowed from other schools. And the school manager, Mohammed Chaffat, says he’s asked the education authorities in Samawa to pay for the repair of the ceiling, which recently collapsed because of heavy rains and stormy winds – but has had no response.

Hulayel Jabbar, 16, a fourth grade student, says that despite there being a lot of problems, local kids are keen to go to school.

“Some of the [students] have to stand because there are not enough desks. When the weather is bad, [because the ceiling collapsed] we don’t go to school since the teachers don’t turn up either. Also the classrooms are very close together, so the teacher of the first grade annoys the teacher of the fourth grade. But even with all the difficulties, the students are enthusiastic,” said Hulayel.

Conditions are no better at the several dozen other “mud schools” in the area, which have been built by local communities who, like the Ghadhari villagers, have lost patience with the authorities’ seeming reluctance to address their education needs.

“[Some schools] are just tents, covered by woven camel-wool! One hundred and twenty are in need of reconstruction – 16 are close to total collapse,” said Abdul Hussein Jawad, planning manager at the Muthanna education office.

The post-Saddam Iraqi government pledged to overhaul the school system in the country, by providing free education for all and building new schools and educational institutes.

But the new authorities have made little progress, with much of the work in the educational development field being done by international organisations.

The situation in rural areas is particularly bad. The ministry of education promised to pay teachers extra for travel costs, but according to Jawad, “These amounts do not cover half of what the teachers pay for transportation and other expenses!”

There’s an urgent need for a school building programme in the countryside because ever since Ottoman times, the geographic distribution of schools has been unfair, said Furkan Faisal, a professor at the College of Education at Muthanna University. For instance, he said, there are 63 primary schools in Mosul but only four in Diwaniya province.

But everywhere schools are in bad shape, with most lacking drinking water and toilets – conditions in Samawa being he worst among the country’s 18 provinces, according to ministry of education statistics.

Apart from the distribution of schools and their general state of disrepair, another big problem is the unwillingness of parents, especially in rural areas, to send their daughters to school – which has contribiuted to high levels of illiteracy among women.

Mohammed Hasson, 45, a teacher at Dar al-Salam school in Samawa, says narrow-minded and backward attitudes are gaining ground in many areas, which dictate that once a “girl gets married, she has no need of education because she should take care of her husband and her house”.

However, there are grounds for some optimism in this forgotten corner of southwest Iraq.

Hasan Fadhlalah Ma’ala, director general of school buildings at the ministry of education in Baghdad, says the ministry has commissioned a plan to replace the region’s mud schools with modern buildings – although he says there are still a number of security and financial problems to overcome. He estimated the cost would come to one billion US dollars, and that it would take a year to replace all the local schools.