The Rag Blog

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.

[Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]

When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a bad joke. There is a sense, I’m afraid, that being invited to deliver The Speech to students of Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star: Whatever prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by performance anxiety — the suspicion that your efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional standards. A daunting prospect.

The only course, in both cases, is surely to plunge boldly ahead. And that means, first of all, saluting the family members gathered here, and in particular you, the parents.

Dear parents, I welcome you today to your moment of triumph. For if a higher education is about acquiring the skills and knowledge that allow one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world — and I use “get on in the world” in the very broadest sense — well then, oh esteemed parents, it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with unerring grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them in this very strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen, is truly the Age of Rhetoric.

Now I turn to you, my proper audience, the graduating students of the Department of Rhetoric of 2007, and I salute you most heartily. In making the choice you have, you confirmed that you understand something intrinsic, something indeed…. intimate about this age we live in. Perhaps that should not surprise us. After all, you have spent your entire undergraduate years during time of war — and what a very strange wartime it has been.

When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the rhetorical construction known as the War on Terror was already two years old and that very real war to which it gave painful birth, the war in Iraq, was just hitting its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq War had already ended once, in that great victory scene on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the President, clad jauntily in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck and, beneath a banner famously marked “Mission Accomplished,” had declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme today — “Words in a Time of War” — surely those words of George W. Bush must stand as among the era’s most famous, and most rhetorically unstable. For whatever they may have meant when the President uttered them on that sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003, they mean something quite different today, almost exactly four years later. The President has lost control of those words, as of so much else.

At first glance, the grand spectacle of May 1, 2003 fits handily into the history of the pageantries of power. Indeed, with its banners and ranks of cheering, uniformed extras gathered on the stage of that vast aircraft carrier — a stage, by the way, that had to be turned in a complicated maneuver so that the skyline of San Diego, a few miles off, would not be glimpsed by the television audience — the event and its staging would have been quite familiar to, and no doubt envied by, the late Leni Riefenstahl (who, as filmmaker to the Nazis, had no giant aircraft carriers to play with). Though vast and impressive, the May 1 extravaganza was a propaganda event of a traditional sort, intended to bind the country together in a second precise image of victory — the first being the pulling down of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, also staged — an image that would fit neatly into campaign ads for the 2004 election. The President was the star, the sailors and airmen and their enormous dreadnought props in his extravaganza.

However ambitiously conceived, these were all very traditional techniques, familiar to any fan of Riefenstahl’s famous film spectacular of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. As trained rhetoricians, however, you may well have noticed something different here, a slightly familiar flavor just beneath the surface. If ever there was a need for a “disciplined grasp” of the “symbolic and institutional dimensions of discourse” — as your Rhetoric Department’s website puts it — surely it is now. For we have today an administration that not only is radical — unprecedentedly so — in its attitudes toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.

I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put forward by the proverbial “unnamed Administration official” and published in the New York Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind’s recounting, is what that “unnamed Administration official” told him:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante’s welcome above the gates of Hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Both admonitions have an admirable bluntness. These words from “Bush’s Brain” — for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove, who bears that pungent nickname — these words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the “reality-based community” — those such as we — are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.

Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for truth; or perhaps it should be “truth” — in quotation marks — for, when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in describing it? What faith, after all, is owed to the bitch that is wholly in your power, a creature of your own creation?

Of course I should not say “those such as we” here, for you, dear graduates of the Rhetoric Department of 2007, you are somewhere else altogether. This is, after all, old hat to you; the line of thinking you imbibe with your daily study, for it is present in striking fashion in Foucault and many other intellectual titans of these last decades — though even they might have been nonplussed to find it so crisply expressed by a finely tailored man sitting in the White House. Though we in the “reality-based community” may just now be discovering it, you have known for years the presiding truth of our age, which is that the object has become subject and we have a fanatical follower of Foucault in the Oval Office. Graduates, let me say it plainly and incontrovertibly: George W. Bush is the first Rhetoric-Major President.

The Dirtied Face of Power

I overstate perhaps, but only for a bit of — I hope — permitted rhetorical pleasure. Let us gaze a moment at the signposts of the history of the present age. In January 2001, the Rhetoric Major President came to power after a savage and unprecedented electoral battle that was decided not by the ballots of American voters — for of these he had 540,000 fewer than his Democrat rival — but by the votes of Supreme Court Justices, where Republicans prevailed 5 to 4, making George W. Bush the first president in more than a century to come to the White House with fewer votes than those of his opponent.

In this singular condition, and with a Senate precisely divided between parties, President Bush proceeded to behave as if he had won an overwhelming electoral victory, demanding tax cuts greater and more regressive than those he had outlined in the campaign. And despite what would seem to have been debilitating political weakness, the President shortly achieved this first success in “creating his own reality.” To act as if he had overwhelming political power would mean he had overwhelming political power.

This, however, was only the overture of the vast symphonic work to come, a work heralded by the huge, clanging, echoing cacophony of 9/11. We are so embedded in its age that it is easy to forget the stark, overwhelming shock of it: Nineteen young men with box cutters seized enormous transcontinental airliners and brought those towers down. In an age in which we have become accustomed to two, three, four, five suicide attacks in a single day — often these multiple attacks from Baghdad don’t even make the front pages of our papers — it is easy to forget the blunt, scathing shock of it, the impossible image of the second airliner disappearing into the great office tower, almost weirdly absorbed by it, and emerging, transformed into a great yellow and red blossom of flame, on the other side; and then, half an hour later, the astonishing flowering collapse of the hundred-story structure, transforming itself, in a dozen seconds, from mighty tower to great plume of heaven-reaching white smoke.

The image remains, will always remain, with us; for truly the weapon that day was not box cutters in the hands of nineteen young men, nor airliners at their command. The weapon that day was the television set. It was the television set that made the image possible, and inextinguishable. If terror is first of all a way of talking — the propaganda of the deed, indeed — then that day the television was the indispensable conveyer of the conversation: the recruitment poster for fundamentalism, the only symbolic arena in which America’s weakness and vulnerability could be dramatized on an adequate scale. Terror — as Menachem Begin, the late Israeli prime minister and the successful terrorist who drove the British from Mandate Palestine, remarked in his memoirs — terror is about destroying the prestige of the imperial regime; terror is about “dirtying the face of power.”

President Bush and his lieutenants surely realized this and it is in that knowledge, I believe, that we can find the beginning of the answer to one of the more intriguing puzzles of these last few years: What exactly lay at the root of the almost fanatical determination of administration officials to attack and occupy Iraq? It was, obviously, the classic “over-determined” decision, a tangle of fear, in the form of those infamous weapons of mass destruction; of imperial ambition, in the form of the neoconservative project to “remake the Middle East”; and of realpolitik, in the form of the “vital interest” of securing the industrial world’s oil supplies.

In the beginning, though, was the felt need on the part of our nation’s leaders, men and women so worshipful of the idea of power and its ability to remake reality itself, to restore the nation’s prestige, to wipe clean that dirtied face. Henry Kissinger, a confidant of the President, when asked by Bush’s speechwriter why he had supported the Iraq War, responded: “Because Afghanistan was not enough.” The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” In other words, the presiding image of The War on Terror — the burning towers collapsing on the television screen — had to be supplanted by another, the image of American tanks rumbling proudly through a vanquished Arab capital. It is no accident that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at the first “war cabinet” meeting at Camp David the Saturday after the 9/11 attacks, fretted over the “lack of targets” in Afghanistan and wondered whether we “shouldn’t do Iraq first.” He wanted to see those advancing tanks marching across our television screens, and soon.

In the end, of course, the enemy preferred not to fight with tanks, though they were perfectly happy to have us do so, the better to destroy these multi-million dollar anachronisms with so-called IEDs, improvised explosive devices, worth a few hundred bucks apiece. This is called asymmetrical warfare and one should note here with some astonishment how successful it has been these last half dozen years. In the post-Cold War world, after all, as one neo-conservative theorist explained shortly after 9/11, the United States was enjoying a rare “uni-polar moment.” It deployed the greatest military and economic power the world has ever seen. It spent more on its weapons, its Army, Navy, and Air Force, than the rest of the world combined.

The U.S. Marine Corps is investigating three inactive reservists for wearing their uniforms at protests and for critical statements they made. They face the stain of an “other than honorable” discharge. Whether it affects their veterans benefits would be up to the VA. WASHINGTON — Going on a mock patrol can get you in real trouble with the U.S. Marine Corps.

In a case that raises questions about free speech, the Marines have launched investigations of three inactive reservists for wearing their uniforms during antiwar protests and allegedly making statements characterized as “disrespectful” or “disloyal.”

Two of them were part of the guerrilla theater squad of 13 Iraq Veterans Against the War who roamed Capitol Hill and downtown Washington in March, clad in camouflage and carrying imaginary weapons, to mark the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war.

Adam Kokesh, 25, a graduate student at George Washington University, faces a hearing Monday in Kansas City, where the Marines will recommend an “other than honorable” discharge from the Individual Ready Reserve. He was previously honorably discharged from active duty after fighting in Fallujah and receiving the Combat Action Ribbon and the Navy Commendation Medal.

Upon learning he was being investigated for wearing his uniform during the mock patrol, Kokesh wrote an e-mail to the investigating officer, Maj. John Whyte. The combat veteran discussed his service and his critique of the war, and asked the officer, “We’re at war. Are you doing all you can?” He concluded with an obscene recommendation about what Whyte should go do.

This earned him the count for a “disrespectful statement.”

Appeal to Congress

Liam Madden, 22, who spent seven months on the ground in Iraq, last fall helped launch the Appeal for Redress, a Web site where military personnel can directly appeal to Congress to support withdrawal of troops. Madden, of Boston, is accused of wearing his camouflage shirt at an antiwar march in January.

He also is accused of making disloyal statements during a speech in February in New York, when he says he wasn’t wearing his uniform.

These statements, as summarized by the Marines in legal documents: “Sgt. Madden spends several minutes explaining the ‘war crimes’ of the Bush administration. Sgt. Madden claims that the war in Iraq is a war ‘of aggression’ and one of ’empire building.’ Sgt. Madden explains that the president of the United States has ‘betrayed U.S. military personnel’ engaged in the Iraq conflict.”

The identity of the third Marine under investigation could not be immediately verified.

Papers drawn up by Marine lawyers indicate the corps sees it as a matter of enforcing clear regulations.

The case also raises a fundamental question of interest to the roughly 158,000 men and women in the Marines’ and Army’s Individual Ready Reserve: Are they civilians — free to speak their minds — or not?

In legal documents sent to the reservists, the Marines cite well-known military regulations against wearing uniforms for political activity. Against Kokesh they say a Marine may not insult an officer. Against Madden they cite a military law that covers disloyal statements.

GALESBURG, Illinois (June 2) – Caisha Gayles graduated with honors last month, but she is still waiting for her diploma. The reason: the whoops of joy from the audience as she crossed the stage.

The school said the five students can still get their diplomas by completing eight hours of public service work, answering phones, sorting books or doing other chores for the district.

Gayles was one of five students denied diplomas from the lone public high school in Galesburg after enthusiastic friends or family members cheered for them during commencement.

About a month before the May 27 ceremony, Galesburg High students and their parents had to sign a contract promising to act in dignified way. Violators were warned they could be denied their diplomas and barred from the after-graduation party.

Many schools across the country ask spectators to hold applause and cheers until the end of graduation. But few of them enforce the policy with what some in Galesburg say are strong-arm tactics.

In Galesburg, the issue has taken on added controversy with accusations that the students were targeted because of their race: four are black and one is Hispanic. Parents say cheers also erupted for white students, and none of them was denied a diploma.

Earlier this week, the American Friends Service Committee asked me to speak about finding hope in hard times as part of an interfaith service to conclude their “Eyes Wide Open” display in Chicago’s Grant Park. The display arranged 3,438 soldiers’ boots to commemorate U.S. military people killed in Iraq, along with life sized pictures of Iraqi civilians and a collection of numerous civilian shoes to remember hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed in Iraq since 2003. I asked the audience to join me in recalling experiences I had while imprisoned at the Pekin Federal prison for “crossing the line” at Fort Benning, Georgia.

May 1, 2004, marked the first anniversary of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier. I was in a prison library trying to write an article about that boastful declaration when several women prisoners urged me to hurry over to a TV room for the breaking news on CNN. “Kathy, you gotta come and see this,” they said, their eyes widened with alarm. “It’s awful, what’s going on over there in Iraq.” CNN was showing the first pictures that emerged from Abu Ghraib, images now indelibly embedded in peoples’ memories all over the world: the hooded man; the pyramid; the man on a leash; the man and the dog.

The women I knew in prison could readily identify with shame and fear felt by prisoners in Abu Ghraib. They understood all too well what it meant to feel humiliated, isolated and out of control. But the tears they shed that morning were fueled by their fundamental patriotism. “What’s happening to our country?” they asked.

In response, several women told the warden that they wanted to gather together on the oval track, each day, at sunrise and at sunset, for a special time of prayer. The warden agreed to this, and so began an extraordinary prayer circle.

Here are some of the prayers I recall: “I want to pray for my kids. I ask God to please look after them. And I just want to hold up the children in Iraq, because I know they’re suffering a lot.”

“I want to pray for my children and also for the children of the guards working in this prison.”

“Lord, I pray for all of the children of all of us here, and I pray for all of the U.S. military people in Iraq who are separated from their children.

“It’s so hard for parents and children to be far apart. I just want to pray for every family separated by this war and especially for the kids whose parents won’t ever come home.”

“I pray for parents who’ve lost their kids.”

Over the days and weeks, the prayer circle steadily grew. By the time I left the prison, close to one hundred women were regularly gathering to pray for peace, for freedom, and for an end to war.

I’ve done time in maximum security and minimum security prisons in the United States, and I still don’t know where they keep “the bad sisters,” but I surely know something about criminality. The most dangerous criminals in the United States today are those who profit from and prolong the war in Iraq.

Nobel economist Dr. Joseph Stiglitz calculates that the war in Iraq, if it continues another eight years, will ultimately cost the U.S. economy 2.2 trillion dollars. It’s shocking to think of what we’ve lost in dedicating this expenditure to war, rather than to domestic and foreign aid which could save millions of lives lost to hunger and illness, or, say, to renewable energy development which might save hundreds of millions from economic and environmental disasters now clearly on the horizon. Who are the criminals?

Many people argue that the troops are stabilizing conditions in Iraq. When I hear earnest concerns for Iraqi civilians, I can’t help but wonder why these concerns were so absent when economic sanctions against Iraq directly contributed towards the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children under age five. Have we now a new slogan? “No Iraqi child left behind!”

A May 8th, 2007 “Save the Children” report stated that in 2005, in Iraq, 122,000 children didn’t reach their fifth birthdays. Conditions can’t have improved in 2007 as we learn from the World Health Organization that 80 percent of Iraqi families have home sewage facilities that contaminate their water sources, and 70 percent of families don’t have regular access to clean water; as a result diarrhea and respiratory infections now account for two thirds of the deaths of children under age five. Twenty one percent of Iraqi children are now chronically malnourished. (New York Times, April 18, 2007). The report also notes that 70 percent of Iraqis who die in hospitals after violent injuries would have survived if the hospitals were adequately equipped.

From 1996 through 2003, Voices in the Wilderness delegations delivered duffel bags filled with medicines and medical supplies to Iraqi hospitals during the years when the US and the UK insisted on maintaining brutal economic sanctions against Iraq. The U.S. Treasury Department accused us of acting criminally. Recently, the New York Times noted that Chevron, the second largest U.S. oil company, paid $20 million dollars “under the table” to Saddam Hussein’s government in return for obtaining lucrative contracts, all in violation of the economic sanctions. (May 8, 2007) Condoleeza Rice, then a member of Chevron’s Board of Directors, chaired the corporation’s Public Policy committee when Chevron initially began paying the illegal surcharges. This was the committee charged with oversight of international contracts.

During a period when the Treasury Department hauled Voices in the Wilderness into court several times and ultimately fined us $20,000 dollars, (a sum we have refused to pay), they never went after Chevron.

We don’t want to see a single executive that has profited from economic and military war against Iraq go to jail. But we do want to see them rehabilitated.

The women in prison did what they could in response to feeling overwhelmed by the war in Iraq. They prayed for a kinder and saner world and in the very act of uttering prayers they helped build a more sane perspective on the horrific harms and risks incurred by ongoing war in Iraq.

When I left the Pekin prison, Sherrie, a prisoner trusted and esteemed by prisoners and guards alike, drove me to the bus station. As we passed the high security prison for men, where the median sentence length is 27 years, she placed her hand on mine. “I know you care a lot about those people over there in Iraq. At least our boys aren’t over there,” said Sherrie, an African American woman. “Our boys are all in there.” I don’t know if Sherrie’s words can be backed up demographically. But over the past few years I’ve puzzled over her words and I think I finally understand what she meant. I think she meant that even the darkness of spending decades in a prison is preferable to the risk of killing or being killed in a foreign war to protect criminal interests of an empire.

This summer, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate will be asked to appropriate another $145 billion dollars to pay for ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Analysis of the Department of Defense Budget Materials shows that tens of billions of dollars will be spent on Humvees, Armored Security Vehicles, Bradley vehicles, Stryker vehicles, and Abrams tanks. The earliest expected date for delivery of these items is in 2009, by which time the U.S. people are becoming quite determined that U.S. troops should be home. (see www.vcnv.org for analysis of Iraq and Afghanistan Supplemental Spending, Fiscal year 2008).

I have in front of me two documents of despair, of disillusionment with the American political system that allows this criminal war to continue. Andrew J. Bacevich in his Washington Post op-ed column and Cindy Sheehan in her statement on her blog express despair over the failure of the Democrats placed in power by an antiwar electorate to take firm measures to end the war in Iraq. Sheehan declares, as she announces her departure from the spotlight that “hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike,” adding, “It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years”

Professor Bacevich, now sharing Sheehan’s personal grief, calls his earlier hopes that he and others might force the country to change course “an illusion,” noting that “responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party.” “Money,” he notes bitterly, “maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent. This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.”

If there is a positive aspect to this despair, it is this very realization: the system is the problem. It has not so much “failed” us as we have failed to understand what Sheehan and Bacevich are concluding: it isn’t designed to work for us but for but for them.

For those who can’t bring themselves to say that the war is not a “mistake” but a crime. For those who can’t call for immediate withdrawal in accordance with the wishes of the American and Iraqi people but talk about “benchmarks” for a gradual withdrawal. For those who want to shift the onus of the U.S. failure in Iraq to Iraqi politicians for their delays and bickering, and the Iraqi people for their bewildering Islamic sectarianism.

It serves those who vote in bipartisan fashion to further vilify and isolate Syria and Iran—the fools who do not know the first thing about Islamic history and the divisions between Shiites and Sunnis, secularists and Islamists. It serves those lining up to embrace the fear-mongering Islamophobic neocon agenda for more confrontation with the Muslim world. It serves those who fear AIPAC more than the consequences of a strike on Iran. It serves the Democrats who want to keep an attack on Iran on the table, but assure President Bush that his impeachment is off the table because it’s just too radical a prospect for them to consider.

This is indeed the way the system works.

“I am deemed a radical,” writes Sheehan, “because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside” Having seen Sheehan speak on several occasions, I think rather she’s been deemed radical because her understanding of the war is too honest for the system’s hacks and political opportunists (including some who affect a liberal antiwar posture) to endorse. They cannot.

Nancy Pelosi cannot say, “This is an imperialist war to reconfigure the Middle East, allow the U.S. to control the flow of oil from the region, dot it with huge permanent U.S. military bases, advance Israeli aims in the region, and intimidate all potential rivals for decades. It is wrong, a clear violation of international law.” Harry Reid can’t say, “The lies of these war planners are so obvious. We need hearings now about the Office of Special Plans. We need to find out who forged the Niger uranium documents and who undercut our intelligence professionals in pushing that completely false case presented by Colin Powell to the U.N. We need to move on impeachment of both Bush and Cheney.”

That sort of honest talk is not normally allowed by the system to the “loyal opposition.” Only under circumstances of extraordinary duress, when it feels its very existence threatened, does the system make some concessions to the people it doesn’t work for. In the early ’70s our outrage over the war in Vietnam, compounded by disgust about the evolving Watergate Affair, forced Congress to cut off war funding (through the Case-Church Amendment passed on June 19, 1973), produced a wave of investigations that exposed the vicious Cointelpro Program, and produced the Freedom of Information Act. We’re not yet back to that level of outrage, but the number of people questioning the system itself — the money-driven “Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics” — is growing. As the Democrats drag their feet, ignore their mandate to end the war, and collude with moves against Iran and Syria bound to produce disastrous repercussions, disillusionment will no doubt mount, as it should.

“To be radical,” wrote Marx, “is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man, the root is man himself.” In other words, radicalism means thinking clearly about how and why people in general are oppressed by the “money” to which Bacevich alludes. By those who use their unconscionable wealth (= political power) to pursue their boundless “interests”—sacrificing other people’s children to do so. But Marx in the same work notes how people oppress themselves with delusional thinking. He refers to religion but might as well be speaking of delusions about contemporary American “democracy” when he writes, “The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.”

Corporate media—and even some alternative websites, are blaring with headlines about Cindy Sheehan “quitting” the anti-war movement. It is true that Sheehan has stepped down as the consummate symbol of the ordinary, salt-of-the-earth American mother crusading against the empire for the end of the war that brought about her son’s meaningless death. But it is not true that Cindy is “quitting.” After years of sacrifice, incomprehensible losses, and several hundred stages of burnout, she has walked away from a role and the symbolism inherent within it, but even more significantly in my opinion, and reverberating through her article “Letter To The Democratic Congress,” she has rejected the Democratic Party and its pretense of offering an alternative to the politics of empire.

Last night I watched Keith Olbermann begin his “Countdown” show with the story of Sheehan’s “quitting” the anti-war movement, even including some quotes from her, but mentioning nothing about her leaving the Democratic Party. How could he do otherwise when he devoted the next twenty minutes of the program to interviewing Al Gore and communicating unmistakably to the viewers that the former Vice-President is unequivocally our “savior”? What else could we expect from corporate media?

Yesterday, I received emails which described Sheehan’s departure as “sad” and “unfortunate”, suggesting that she had been “worn” down. I understand the intent of these comments, but I emphatically disagree. Could we all please look more deeply into Sheehan’s decision?

What is it exactly that Cindy Sheehan walked away from? What did she “quit”? Certainly, it was not her feelings and opinions about the empire and its endless wars. What she resoundingly rejected was “hope”—that cousin to denial that so many “progressives” want to hang onto above and beyond all manifestations of reality to the contrary. One reason we treasure her and the one quality that has endeared her to us is her unmitigated courage and fortitude in standing toe-to-toe with the empire. Yet, many of us fail to see the courage in her decision to walk away from her most recent expressions of that courage and demonstrate courage on a deeper level. It is one thing to confront the empire with the Democratic Party and a throng of progressives invested in the Party and the rigged electoral process standing behind oneself in “support”, and it is quite another to turn around and face those so-called supporters and insist they are part of the problem.

What Cindy is saying is simply, “I no longer choose to embrace the teddy-bear illusion that I live in a democratic republic in which the rule of law and the Constitution prevail. I am no longer willing to believe that a two-party system exists in this empire, and I refuse to continue to ‘hope’ that one wing of the one-party system will ever significantly challenge or extricate itself from the other wing. I will not live in denial, even if it brings me adulation, inspires others to resist the empire, or nurtures within me a feeling of doing the right thing. I will open my eyes, and my mouth, and I will buy OUT of the current paradigm.”

Many of you reading these words have made the same decision Cindy has made, and many of you have also been called “quitters” or “purveyors of doom and gloom.” Others of you have not bought out of the illusion that the federal government, the Democratic Party, or some political, environmental, or spiritual movement can save the earth and its inhabitants, and you are still “hoping.” And of course, from the earliest origins of the Judeo-Christian tradition to Barack Obama’s “The Audacity Of Hope”, the culture is replete with moralizing aphorisms that instruct us not to give up hope. Yet, as any recovering addict will testify, it is only when we give up all hope that we can awaken with clarity and a deeper consciousness to the reality of our situation.

I do not mean to minimize the brutal losses beyond the pale that Cindy Sheehan has incurred. No other word than “tragic” can be applied to the loss of her son, the loss of her marriage, the enormous debt she is now facing—including her own personal hospital bills for a heat stroke, and the countless sacrifices she has made in order to speak truth to power and awaken the entranced citizens and politicians of empire. Has she been “worn down”? Unquestionably, and so have many of us who would not have otherwise walked away from empire and its delusional political process. American capitalist/consumerist/corporatist culture is so toxic, so seductive, so addictive, so soporific that few of us are capable of seeing through it without terrible, sometimes traumatic, loss and persecution.