The Rag Blog

Following a grand photo opportunity in March 2005 for the presidents of Mexico and the United States, and the prime minister of Canada, observers were regaled, almost to the point of nausea, by references to these men as ‘the three amigos’. Their alleged camaraderie was deemed by a compliant media to be of far greater interest and import than the substance of what might have been discussed or accomplished. Unfortunately, the major issue under review by the three men will, if not aborted, cause immense harm to North America and, ultimately, the world.

Canadian prime minister Paul Martin and Mexican president Vicente Fox are now gone from the world stage; neither will be missed. Unfortunately, the most simple-minded of the three remains. In the context of this article, however, United States president George Bush is not the villain; he is merely a symptom of a virulent disease that is infecting North America and which may be unstoppable unless the brakes are applied very soon.

Completely outside the public forum, behind closed doors and in first class comfort, planners have been meeting to create a North American Union (NAU). Mostly, these planners are not government officials; they are not the representatives of the people. Those government minions who have been admitted to these hallowed meetings are there solely for the functionary benefit of greasing the skids for the conductors of what might soon become a runaway train.

What is occurring is the auctioning of North America. You can find some of the details if you really search; but there is no way to know how much information is still hidden.

A small, but influential, group of wealthy business people is proceeding with plans to create a North American union that will combine Canada, Mexico, and the United States. There is no political or economic mandate for these plans and various polls, mostly unofficial, indicate that citizens of all three countries would oppose such a union. Although George Bush is not the prime mover behind this effort, it does have its genesis in the Executive Branch of the US government – more than 30 years ago – and both Presidents Bush have their fingers all over it.

What is being created can be best thought of as NASSR — North America’s Sinking Ship Republic. It has most of the bad points of the USSR, and none of the good. Most important, it is doomed to fail.

Triumphant Trilateralism

In 1973, a group known as the Trilateral Commission was founded. It’s a private organization created on the initiative of David Rockefeller, of the family who bears that famous surname. He solicited a cadre of influential people and, after a series of preliminary and exploratory meetings, the first executive meeting of the Commission took place in October 1973. Today, the membership is between 300–350 private individuals from North America, Europe, and Asia; it claims to exist for the purpose of promoting closer economic and political cooperation between these areas. In fact, the group has asserted throughout the years that its only goal was to foster a ‘New International Economic Order’.

The membership list during its history contains a lot of familiar names: George Bush the First, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney – and a host of influential politicians, diplomats, and business executives from several continents.

It presents itself as non-political; but nothing could be further from the truth.

The Trilateral Commission has maintained a lock on the Executive Branch of the US government since the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Trilateral Commission is believed to have hand-picked Carter to be a candidate for the presidency; his training in globalist philosophy and foreign policy appears to have been provided by Brzezinski personally. As president, Carter appointed a third of the US members of the Commission to his cabinet and other high-level administration posts.

White House influence continued with the election of Ronald Reagan and his vice-president, George H.W. Bush, who influenced Reagan to appoint Commission members to key areas in his government. Following Reagan, the presidency itself was held by members of the Trilateral Commission for twelve consecutive years. And although the current President Bush is not a member of the Commission, his vice-president is.

This group is, despite all protestations to the contrary, established solely to provide a forum for the elite to plan the management of the world. Because the people of the world are not, in the view of the Commission members, entitled to any kind of input into how the world should be ordered – only this elite group should have that right. Naturally, the order of the world shall be whatever enriches them most.

The North American members of the group now have their sites set on a new prize.

Circumventing the Ballot Box

Membership in the Trilateral Commission includes corporate CEOs, politicians, academics, labor leaders, and individuals involved in overseas philanthropy. Members who gain a position in their respective country’s government must resign from the Commission. That criteria has nothing to do with maintaining integrity or averting inappropriate influence; it is to deflect criticism that the Commission is running the world’s governments – but it does run them nonetheless, or at least many of them.

The time for democratic choice by citizens has long since passed. No government of a major country can make any real claim to democracy any longer. Governments do not represent the citizenry; they represent business. And business is the domain of the Trilateral Commission and other similar groups whose prime purpose is to ensure that the elites continue to be in charge, and that the great mass of humanity functions as their feudal peasants.

In North America, there is a general belief among the citizenry that we have largely fair and clean elections. There is at least some belief that the people we elect to represent us intend to do just that. But such beliefs are wishful thinking. If the citizens of the three North American countries ever truly did have democratic choice and honest representatives, it is in some semi-mythical past far beyond the reach of remembrance.

Speaking to an audience at Columbia Business School in February, Rodrigo de Rato, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, sketched out his vision for Latin America. Optimistically titled “The Way Forward,” Mr. de Rato called on the countries of the region to stay the course laid out by the IMF – structural adjustments, trade liberalization and privatization.

He dismissed the shift to the left in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia as an “apparent inconsistency of economic and political developments,” suggesting that voter dissatisfaction has more to do with a lack of recognition of economic progress to date. When he did admit to high poverty levels, he advised that “the problem is often that reforms have not gone far enough.”

But even as Mr. de Rato spoke, the IMF’s influence in the region is on the decline. In 2005, the Fund placed 80 per cent of its loans in Latin America but this year that amount is down to a mere one per cent, or $50 million. While there has been no economic miracle, enabling countries like Bolivia and Ecuador, which owe $5.9 billion and $10 billion respectively, to pay off their foreign debts, a new lender has entered the picture – Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan petro-economy.

So far, Chavez has loaned $2.5 billion to Argentina and is close to providing $500 million to ease the Ecuadorian debt crunch and $1.5 billion to help Evo Morales stabilize the situation in Bolivia. Venezuela is also floating a bond offering jointly with Argentina, following last November’s successful $1 billion issue. Chavez has proposed institutionalizing this lending with a regional organization he calls the Banco del Sur.

This is bad news for the IMF, which has been forced to consider selling off part of its gold reserves to cover losses from its lending operations. More fundamentally, it is bad news for the United States, whose Treasury is the largest shareholder in the IMF. Historically, the IMF and the World Bank have been effective in promoting the ‘Washington Consensus’ – a sort of economic shock treatment intended to put countries like Argentina on the path to economic growth. Typically, countries would have to submit to structural adjustments, privatization and austerity measures to obtain a loan from the IMF.

Chavez’ disdain for the IMF was clear in remarks he made at the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana last year, arguing “we don’t accept the kind of development the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund want to push on us.” The IMF after all, oversaw the wholesale privatizations and adjustments made in the early 1990’s in Venezuela that prompted Chavez’ first rebellion in 1992.

Pundits argue whether Venezuela has enough oil revenue to fuel socialist alternative lending in Latin America in the long-term and whether Venezuela and its partners will be able to challenge the US even when, as Chavez remarked in Havana last year, it is a “US empire experiencing decline.” But the bigger question is what the US will do now that it has lost a lever of influence in the region. As Bill Blum (author of ‘Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II’) argues, “the simple numbers don’t begin to tell the full story because the US can and probably will undermine Venezuela in various ways which have more to do with covert operations and psychology.”

I’m not going to church this Easter, as well as not joining with family, because I don’t silently condone torture nor can I shut up about it. I’m supposed to zip my lip and not offend the morality of other family members who “love my country”. Excuse me. My morality is offended, much more deeply than those offended by my protests could ever fathom because of their shallowness. Abu Grahib was the 9-11 event to our morality. Where is the outrage?

This president is not ashamed or embarrassed to use tortured confessions. This country is not ashamed or embarrassed to use tortured confessions. Need I say more? I don’t suspect there is any questioning of this in the churches of this country. Rather, there is pray for our troops. And just what are our troops doing?

Laila al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls – monitored, of course – and he was growing steadily weaker.

Sami al-Arian is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days to protest the government outrage committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

All praise, then, to the journalist John Sugg from Tampa, Florida, who has been cataloging al-Arian’s little Golgotha for months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch.

The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a respected computer professor at the University of South Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according to Sugg, Israel’s lobbyists were enraged by his lessons – al-Arian’s family was driven from Palestine in 1948 – and in 2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was arrested and charged with conspiring “to murder and maim” outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic Jihad in “Palestine”. He was held for two and a half years in solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.

Al-Arian’s $50m (£25m) Tampa trial lasted six months; the government called 80 witnesses (21 from Israel) and used 400 intercepted phone calls along with evidence of a conversation that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in – wait for it – a dream. The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any remarks about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security Council Resolution 242, on the grounds that they would endanger the impartiality of the jurors.

After repeatedly topping the Arab health index, Iraq’s health record is now worse than ever because of the US-led occupation. The general effect on the Iraqi population amounts to a massive war crime, writes Bert De Belder*

In March, the deadliest month witnessed by Iraqis recently, some 67 lives on the average were lost daily, as a result of bombings and acts of violence. An elderly man mourns his relative at the entrance of a local hospital in Baghdad’s impoverished district of Sadr City. Political violence has conspired with the occupation to wreak havoc not only with lives, but, as well, the infrastructure needed to safeguard the health of millions of Iraqis

Health standards in Iraq plummet because of the United States occupation of the country: Iraqi medics treat a wounded child at a hospital in the oil rich city of Kirkuk (left); and Iraqi women rush to the site where a car bomb exploded in Baghdad’s impoverished district of Sadr City

Iraq’s health status, four years into the occupation, is nothing short of disastrous. Iraq’s health index has deteriorated to a level not seen since the 1950s, says Joseph Chamie, former director of the United Nations Population Division and an Iraq specialist. People’s health status is determined by social, economic and environmental factors much more than by the availability of healthcare. Not surprisingly, all these factors have deteriorated in the course of the occupation.

A recent UNDP-backed study reveals that one-third of Iraqis live in poverty, with more than five per cent living in abject poverty. The UN agency observes that this contrasts starkly with the country’s thriving middle- income economy of the 1970s and 1980s. But these figures may well be a grave underestimation, as other reports speak of eight million out of 28 million Iraqis living in extreme poverty on incomes of less than $1 per day. More than 500,000 Baghdad residents get water for only a few hours a day. And the majority of Iraqis get three hours of electricity a day, in contrast to pre-war levels of about 20 hours.

THE DEVASTATED HEALTH OF IRAQI CHILDREN: The combination of sanctions, war and occupation has resulted in Iraq showing the world’s worst evolution in child mortality: from an under-five mortality rate of 50 per 1000 live births in 1990, to 125 in 2005. That means an annual deterioration of 6.1 per cent — a world record, well behind very poor and AIDS- affected Botswana. At the outset of the 2003 war, the US administration pledged to cut Iraq’s child mortality rate in half by 2005. But the rate has continued to worsen, to 130 in 2006, according to Iraqi Health Ministry figures.

Nutrition is, of course, vital to health. According to the United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF), about one in 10 Iraqi children under five are underweight (acutely malnourished) and one in five are short for their age (chronically malnourished). But this is only the tip of the iceberg, according to Claire Hajaj, communications officer at the UNICEF Iraq Support Centre in Amman. “Many Iraqi children may also be suffering from ‘hidden hunger’ — deficiencies in critical vitamins and minerals that are the building blocks for children’s physical and intellectual development,” Hajaj says. “These deficiencies are hard to measure, but they make children much more vulnerable to illness and less likely to thrive at school.” Hayder Hussainy, a senior official at the Iraqi Ministry of Health, states that approximately 50 per cent of Iraqi children suffer from some form of malnourishment.

The Camp David meeting has just come to an end. All of us followed the press conference offered by the presidents of the United States and Brazil attentively, as we did the news surrounding the meeting and the opinions voiced in this connection.

Faced with demands related to customs duties and subsidies which protect and support US ethanol production, Bush did not make the slightest concession to his Brazilian guest at Camp David.

President Lula attributed to this the rise in corn prices, which, according to his own statements, had gone up more than 85 percent.

Before these statements were made, the Washington Post had published an article by the Brazilian leader which expounded on the idea of transforming food into fuel.

It is not my intention to hurt Brazil or to meddle in the internal affairs of this great country. It was in effect in Rio de Janeiro, host of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, exactly 15 years ago, where I delivered a 7-minute speech vehemently denouncing the environmental dangers that menaced our species’ survival. Bush Sr., then President of the United States, was present at that meeting and applauded my words out of courtesy; all other presidents there applauded, too.

No one at Camp David answered the fundamental question. Where are the more than 500 million tons of corn and other cereals which the United States, Europe and wealthy nations require to produce the gallons of ethanol that big companies in the United States and other countries demand in exchange for their voluminous investments going to be produced and who is going to supply them? Where are the soy, sunflower and rape seeds, whose essential oils these same, wealthy nations are to turn into fuel, going to be produced and who will produce them?

Some countries are food producers which export their surpluses. The balance of exporters and consumers had already become precarious before this and food prices had skyrocketed. In the interests of brevity, I shall limit myself to pointing out the following:

According to recent data, the five chief producers of corn, barley, sorghum, rye, millet and oats which Bush wants to transform into the raw material of ethanol production, supply the world market with 679 million tons of these products. Similarly, the five chief consumers, some of which also produce these grains, currently require 604 million annual tons of these products. The available surplus is less than 80 million tons of grain.

This colossal squandering of cereals destined to fuel production -and these estimates do not include data on oily seeds-shall serve to save rich countries less than 15 percent of the total annual consumption of their voracious automobiles.

At Camp David, Bush declared his intention of applying this formula around the world. This spells nothing other than the internationalization of genocide.

In his statements, published by the Washington Post on the eve of the Camp David meeting, the Brazilian president affirmed that less than one percent of Brazil’s arable land was used to grow cane destined to ethanol production. This is nearly three times the land surface Cuba used when it produced nearly 10 million tons of sugar a year, before the crisis that befell the Soviet Union and the advent of climate changes.

Our country has been producing and exporting sugar for a longer time. First, on the basis of the work of slaves, whose numbers swelled to over 300 thousand in the first years of the 19th century and who turned the Spanish colony into the world’s number one exporter. Nearly one hundred years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, when Cuba was a pseudo-republic which had been denied full independence by US interventionism, it was immigrants from the West Indies and illiterate Cubans alone who bore the burden of growing and harvesting sugarcane on the island. The scourge of our people was the off-season, inherent to the cyclical nature of the harvest. Sugarcane plantations were the property of US companies or powerful Cuban-born landowners. Cuba, thus, has more experience than anyone as regards the social impact of this crop.

This past Sunday, April 1, CNN televised the opinions of Brazilian experts who affirm that many lands destined to sugarcane have been purchased by wealthy Americans and Europeans.

As part of my reflections on the subject, published on March 29, I expounded on the impact climate change has had on Cuba and on other basic characteristics of our country’s climate which contribute to this.

Christopher Phelps has written a timely but ultimately disappointing article in The Nation about the vibrant and growing student movement. [The New SDS (April 16, 2007)] He transforms the tough challenges of movement-building into a set of tepid formulas about what not to do. The new wave of student activism in America and around the world is a hopeful development worthy of our active participation and respect.

Yet Phelps focuses on the sectarian divides of the MDS generation rehearsing old political grudges or offering simplistic “lessons” from the New Left, rather than highlighting the steps forward and the common ground between radical organizers.

Our points of convergence (young and old, organizers and activists) are numerous, including the need to strive for participatory democracy and non-exclusion, resist the savage US wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, fight brutal poverty and gluttonous wealth here and globally, act to end catastrophic climate change, racial injustice and patriarchal power, and reject the permanent so-called war on “terror” in toto.

Phelps would have benefited from more attention to what led to coordinated anti-war actions on 60 campuses last month, and to the new SDS diverse political campaigns ranging from getting military recruiters out of high schools and off campuses to anti-sweatshop coordination, from opposition to police violence against the community to protest when war criminals speak, from support for Assata Shakur and the new Panther 8 defendants to fights for universal health care–radical youth organizing is broad and deep. This is the power and the inspiration of a vast, left umbrella network with variety and vigor.

Phelps stereotypically characterizes me as a “celebrity” while the male ideologues are described by what they say about politics. I object. Who knows why any speech or article is well received?