Conducive Chronicle &#187; Corey Hill

Troubling Travels: Reconciling Safe Skies with Personal Privacy

Supreme Court Helps Make Elections Better

Corey Hill — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:30:22 +0000

We the corporations of the United States of America, in order to create a more favorable investment climate, evade regulation, and increase quarterly earnings, do declare these truths to be self evident…

Thank you, Supreme Court, for staying true to the glorious principles upon which this country was founded. Primarily among them: the untrammeled right of corporations to use money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads. It’s about time someone stood up for the little guys.

Yesterday, in a landmark case that boggles the mind and thoroughly thrashes any remaining notions that we might have a healthy democratic process in this country, the conservative court ruled that a decades long ban against corporate spending in elections was unconstitutional, on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment rights of corporations.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

Those poor, underrepresented ‘associations of citizens.’ The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission overturned decades of precedent, including components of what is commonly referred to as McCain-Feingold.

Conservative judges are supposed to practice judicial restraint, aren’t they? Whoops.

And they did it all on the grounds of protecting ‘free speech.’ It’s debatable whether sluicing money straight into the open wound of our elections is ‘free speech,’ but that’s really a secondary issue. Why should corporations even have these rights to begin with?

The First Amendment was never intended to be applied to corporations. In fact, it’s hard to imagine the founding fathers agitating for the rights of Chevron, Phillip Morris, and Monsanto. Corporations have steadily acquired rights that were never intended for them. They don’t have to march in the streets or endure beatings or dog attacks or fire hoses, either. They just have to hire some lawyers, hire some lobbyists, put a few ads on the teevee, and sit back and enjoy the fruits of their ’struggle.’

Corporate Personhood

It is said that there are only two things that are certain in life: death and taxes. Corporations avoid both. They aren’t people. They are eternal monoliths whose ever growing power threatens the remaining scraps of our battered democracy. In fact, corporations get the best of both worlds. Their right to free speech is protected, but should one of their faulty products happen to kill someone, no one has to go to jail. What a deal!

By extending the rights of free speech to corporations, by granting them the same or even greater rights as people, we guarantee that the people’s rights will wither. Or more appropriately, be trampled.

There is a growing movement to return balance to the law, and to put the rights of people before the power of corporations. Activists and lawyers, in concert with affected communities, use rights based organizing to create laws that empower citizens, whether it be protecting water supplies or preventing pesticide spraying. Now, in the face of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the work of activists like these, and others whose goal is to undo corporate personhood will likely receive increased interest.

It’s time to reduce corporations to the subordinate status they deserve, and reserve personhood for actual people.

Troubling Travels: Reconciling Safe Skies with Personal Privacy

Blame Canada

Corey Hill — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:56:02 +0000

Blame Canada.

December 29, 2009–In response to the humiliation they endured at the hands of anti-corporate pranksters at the Copenhagen conference, officials from Environment Canada convinced an Internet Service Provider to block access to two websites the pranksters created to pull off their elaborate hoax. Claiming that they wished to avoid creating ‘confusion’, and that these sites were ‘directly connected to a hoax,’ Canadian officials successfully urged German ISP Serverloft to block access to two sites: enviro-canada.ca and ec-gc.ca. They went a step further, though, and asked the provider to make the effort to block similar websites from originating from their servers.

Naturally, even in the absence of warrants or legal justification, the ISP complied. In their zeal to execute Environment Canada’s request, Serverloft also cut off access to 4,500 other, unrelated websites.

Certainly, it is understandable that the Canadian government was upset by what happened in Copenhagen. Nobody likes to have their mistakes pointed out to them, especially on the world stage, in a way that makes them look like complete fools.

But demanding an ISP shut down web sites, in the process blocking access to 4,500 completely unrelated sites? All because of what the Canadian Prime Minister himself termed a ‘childish prank?’

Maybe the ‘childish prank’ stirred up more anger among Canadian officials than they originally let on. Two weeks prior to the web site shutdown, at the Copenhagen conference, The Yes Men, in collaboration with activists from Climate Debt Agents, used the previously mentioned domain names to perpetrate an elaborate hoax where by the Canadian government reversed its climate change policy, agreeing to voluntarily cut carbon emissions by 40% over 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% by 2050. Press releases made their way to the press, more false statements were issued, and the story grew. Canadian government officials, naturally, were confused. As was the press.

Finally, the official Canadian response was sought.

The Canadians had to clarify, for the record, that they were not actually making any changes to their atrocious policies.

They were clearly not happy to have to clarify. Despite having created a Rapid Response Team to deal with any emergencies related to climate change bad press, the Canadians still ended up the target of biting satire. They still ended up having to stand before the world and declare that they were not, in fact, changing anything–that they would continue to pollute and renege on their pledges for the foreseeable future.

Oh, Canada.

Canada, you see, signed on to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, voluntarily agreeing to reduce emissions. At the time, the Canadians were enthusiastic supporters of the measure. Environmentalists in the United States pointed to the North as a positive example, a beacon of progressive environmental thinking. A few years later, a new conservative Prime Minister, and they call the whole thing off. They are the only country on the planet to have done so. As there are no mechanisms in the Kyoto Protocol for enforcement, they knew they could do this without any serious repercussions.

Not only did the Canadians cease to curb or reduce emissions, their emissions have risen 30% since 1990, compared to 16% in the United States. Going back on the Kyoto Protocol is not the only instance of Canadians changing their minds about environmental policies. They also dumped their pledge of five million dollars to assist developing countries with emissions reduction. And their pledge to help the Inuit who inhabit Northern Canada.

Oh, and that dirty oil under the sand. The Alberta Tar Sands, a vast reserve of bitumen, are either the world’s largest, or second largest oil reserves, depending on who’s doing the estimating. Extracting oil from the mixture of clay, water, and bitumen that makes up the tar sand is a dirty process, producing significantly greater greenhouse gas than the production of conventional crude oil. Oil production in the tar sands shoots an astonishing 40 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere every year, accounting for the bulk of Canada’s growth in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Alberta Tar Sands are also the world’s single largest industrial source of carbon emissions.

But Surely They Have Seen the Error of Their Ways?

Current Canadian government officials have begun to circulate private plans to not only continue production in Alberta, but to allow a 165% increase in emissions from the Alberta Tar Sands. Documents brought to light during the Copenhagen conference showed Canadian Cabinet officials calling for softer emission reduction targets, and giving wide berth to Canada’s oil and gas industry. For their conduct in Copenhagen, the Climate Action Network, an international organization of climate activists, awarded Canada the “Colossal Fossil” Award, a prize they earned for worst behavior at the conference.

Rather than address the very real challenges of their disastrous climate change policy, the Canadian government instead chose to lash out at the perpetrators of an embarrassing hoax. Aside from shutting down the websites, the Canadian government has issued threats for unspecified legal actions.

“We are sorry to see that the Canadian government will not ‘take certain actions’ that could help stave off catastrophic climate change,” said Mike Bonanno of The Yes Men, “and we are sorry to see that they don’t care so much for free speech.”

Indeed.

The hijinks at the Copenhagen conference and the Canadian response can be cause for alarm, to be sure, but they are also cause for celebration. Yes, the Canadians have not yet changed any of their policies, and they shut down 4,502 websites. The emissions standards will not be changed. The Tar Sands continue polluting prodigiously. Angry Canadian officials continue issuing threats and denials. Nothing changed at all, some might say.

But there is a greater lesson to be learned from the great Blame Game that took place in late December: a few committed activists, with just their imaginations, rented rooms, and a sense of humor, managed to draw the attention of the entire world, shining the spotlight on Canada’s shame, forcing the truth into the open.

Related Posts:

A Car Free Life

How to Go Green at Work

People’s World Conference on Climate Change

The curious math of un-people

Corey Hill — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:25:58 +0000

Napalm exploding in Vietnam

Europeans arriving on the shores of the New World faced a serious dilemma: How to claim this valuable land for themselves when there already millions of people living here?

Columbus was quick to find an answer:

“They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance…they would make fine servants…With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Columbus being a go-getter, subjugation began immediately. He took natives aboard his ship as captives. There were some problems. Some of the natives were run through with swords and bled to death as a result of said problems. The natives not being real people, their deaths did not plague Columbus or the other God-fearing Christians onboard. Good Christians, every one of them, they were able to pray for guidance in these strange new lands. They were able to eat dinner and continue writing in their diaries. They were able to get down to Business. (Business being the primary concern of all important God Fearing Christians).

Being important Businessmen, naturally they dealt with practical concerns first. With all this wonderful Virgin Land to till, who was going to do all the work? And cheaply?

People would not do at all. People complained. People had to be paid.

But Un-People were perfect.

And the price was right.

So the un-people of the New World, its original inhabitants, became the first slaves to the European conquerors. At the point of a sword and barrel of a gun, the natives worked the Virgin Soil for the Europeans. Until around 1730, the native inhabitants of the continent were the preferred slave labor for the colonists. But by 1770 the native population, devastated by disease and purposeful extermination at the hands of the Americans, was unable to keep up with the demands of industry.

In fact, over ninety five percent of the Native population was exterminated within four centuries of Europeans first landing in the New World. This genocide, however, is still referred to in our History books (now with some reservation) as the discovery of the New World. The age of exploration. Etc. Move aside Un-People, we’re here now.

Whatever were the Good Christian Explorers to do?

Thankfully for these would be entrepreneurs, there was an entire continent full of labor available to them, for only the cost of transport, housing, and feeding. The African slave industry replaced the native slave trade completely by 1750. African un-people became the preferred laborers.

This particular set of Un-People, for one thing, had more natural resistance to European diseases.

The African slave population grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent. Tilling the fields, working in the houses—all of the work that the good People did not want to do themselves. Some states had as many Un-People living in them as People. All of these people who weren’t people mingling with the people who really were people began to create difficulties.

Forward to 1787, and the Philadelphia convention. Southern slaveholders wanted to count slaves as entire people so that their own representation would be increased in the House of Representatives. Northerners opposed. In this case, it was actually Northerners opposed to slavery (some who actually considered slaves to be People) who didn’t want to count the slaves as People. So, strangely enough, we arrived at the three fifths compromise, where by each slave would be counted as three fifths of a person.

All the while, though, there were other important mathematical problems as well. What is the value of a strong adult male human? Or a middle aged female? Can she do housework? Can he till the land?

These were the vexing questions that plagued the minds of the potential slave purchaser. What is a reasonable rate to pay for an Un-Person? In the middle of the eighteenth century, the price averaged $125. By the 1820s, it was $380. Women only cost three fourths as much as men. And infants only about a tenth. Boys fifty percent of adult males.

(As a side note, it is possible to purchase a child slave in West Africa now for two dollars.)

It wasn’t until Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in 1862 that these Un-People stopped being counted as three fifths of a person.

That didn’t mean that the funny math stopped, though. The numbers are still a little weird.

In the United States, the African American unemployment rate has been twice that of the white unemployment rate for as long as that statistic has been measured. Nearly forty percent of prisoners are African Americans. African American life expectancy is five years less than that of their white counterparts.

Also, some among us seem to think that the election of one African American president erases all those other numbers. That now Everything is Better. But I digress.

Let’s go back. End of the Civil War, turn of the century, and the United States is feeling rather expansionist. Unified, militarily strong, now it is time to move on to bigger and better. Or, more accurately, capitalized as Bigger and Better. Capitalism requires constant growth.

But there are others who also want Bigger and Better. Or others whose backyard is part of our planned Bigger and Better. So naturally we go to War. (When you are militarily strong, War is a good way to acquire your Bigger and Better)

And then the killing.

And then the dehumanization. That’s the thing about killing People. Killing People is difficult. Man has a natural aversion to killing his fellow man, especially if he has never met his fellow man and has no particular quarrel with this other, fellow man. So how to kill People?

The answer is simple. People must become Un-People. People must become the yellow man.

So when it came time to seize the Philippines, the good soldiers of the United States Army had little difficulty clearing vast swaths of the island through shelling and a scorched earth policy. They had no problems running their bayonets into the guts of the yellow Un-People.

We will probably never know exactly how many people were killed by the United States in the Philippines. The nice thing about Un-People is that they don’t matter. So we didn’t bother to count the corpses. There was no guilt when civilians were rounded up and placed into internment camps.

Maybe one million. Two million? Impossible to say. Sometimes we avoid math altogether.

At the turn of the twentieth century, there were so many Great Powers who all wanted Bigger and Better that another War was probably inevitable. Every imperial power required land from which to draw raw materials and to export finished goods. It was a foregone conclusion that all of these Great powers vying for Bigger and Better would eventually conflict.

And they did.

In the War to End all Wars.

Seems that there was some problem with words, too.

That War to End all Wars did not End All Wars for very long. So we did it again, in World War Two.

The Second World War saw us fighting against the red menace of Japan. Those Jap Bastards sneak attacked us! (Even though we provoked them into it by shutting off their access to Pacific raw materials and we probably knew about Pearl Harbor in advance ).

An ancient civilization became a slant eyed menace. And wouldn’t you know it, but some of those Yellow Bastards were living right here in the United States? Under our very noses.

So we rounded them up and placed them into internment camps. We were all safer that way. Even bona-fide American citizens can become Un-Persons, if the mood strikes someone just so. (See also—Enemy Combatants).

Japs weren’t the only Bastards, though. There were also Krauts. Those Nazi Bastards. German cities, too, were full of them. So naturally, we leveled a good number of the civilian population centers of Germany. Someone wrote a book about Dresden. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

Being yellow, though, and not white, it was easier for our boys to demolish Japanese civilization. The Un-People of the Land of the Rising Sun received our special attention.

Admiral William F. Halsey is said to have remarked, “When we get to Tokyo…we’ll have a little celebration where Tokyo was.”

Never a country to deny a celebration, the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo commenced in February of 1945, when 174 B-29s dropped incendiaries on Tokyo. An incendiary, for point of interest sake, is an explosive device designed to cause damage from the ensuing fire. Not content with the initial damage of this first run, the firebombing of Tokyo was repeated in March of that same year. Over one million residents lost their homes. Over one hundred thousand were killed.

And then fat man and little boy. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear weapons dropped on civilian population centers to end the war. Or to display to the Soviet Union our new weapon so that they would know who would be the Biggest of the Big Players, who would have the most access to Bigger and Better. Just so those Soviet Bastards didn’t get any Big Ideas, we melted two cities full of Un-People.

And there were new enemies, and new Big Players, and a long time Big Enemy and a Cold War and fights between us and our newest enemy over access to raw materials which were usually clandestine operations in countries full of Un-People whose lives were only an ancillary concern.

See, for example, Vietnam. Falling Dominoes took precedence over Un-People. We were worried about the Russians. But we couldn’t find any evidence that the Russians were interested in Vietnam. So then we were worried about the Chinese. We were worried about Japan staying within the Free World Economic Grid.

The only people we weren’t worried about, it seemed, were the Vietnamese. We weren’t worried about them when the French were brutally suppressing a liberation movement. We weren’t worried about them in Geneva in 1954. We weren’t worried when the nationwide elections called for in the Geneva agreements didn’t take place in 1956. We weren’t worried about them when we started sending advisors. We weren’t worried about them when we mercilessly bombed South Vietnam.

We weren’t concerned with what the Vietnamese people wanted. People, who incidentally, overwhelmingly supported the National Liberation Front. Not the government installed and supported by the United States.

Democracy is not important for Un-People. Un-People do not need a voice.

What we want, though, is important. So it was important that we create free fire zones where anything that moved could be destroyed. Drop tons of defoliants. Tons of bombs. So that those Un-People could make the right choice.

It was also important that we find New Un-People to kill in Cambodia. In Laos.

Forced urbanization and modernization—meaning destroying someone’s home, killing their family, and forcing them into a concentration camp. All for their own good. They made it so damn hard for us.

Taylor, analyzing the situation faced by our boys in their quest against the Un-People, said:

“the hostile and the friendly do not label themselves as such, and individuals of the yellow race are hard for our soldiers to identify.”

If only they wore uniforms. Being hard for our soldiers to identify, they were destroyed indiscriminately. Rice paddies were napalmed to deny food. Dams were destroyed. Villages were leveled.

In Vietnam. In Laos, in Cambodia.

Speaking of the Plain of Jars, in Laos, T.D. Allman said this:

“In large areas the original bright green has been destroyed and replaced by an abstract pattern of black and bright metallic colors. Much of the remaining foliage is stunted and dull from the use of defoliants. Black is now the main color of the northern and eastern reaches of the plain. Napalm is dropped regularly to burn off vegetation, and fires burn constantly, creating giant rectangles of black. During the flight, plumes of smoke could be seen rising from freshly bombed areas.”

4.5 million tons of bombs were dropped on Indochina between 1965 and 1969. More than in all of World War Two.

But this war is still said to be a great loss for the United States. Because we lost 58,000 soldiers. And our soldiers are People.

The over 2,000,000 Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian Un-People killed as a result of the war against Indochina?

We do not need to comment on them.

They did not really exist.

We do not mourn figments.

We still don’t count well, really, despite all claims to the contrary.

Each new generation claims that they now view all People as People. Claim that the dark ages of the past are over.

Until a new group of Un-People pop up.

In Rwanda, 800,000 people were massacred in 100 days with machetes, in a systematic extermination program which killed at a rate faster than the Nazi death machine. A world, which vowed ‘never again,’ did nothing when corpses floated down the rivers and were piled in the streets.

Those African savages were always doing this kind of thing.

The eight hundred thousand dead from Rwanda were brown. They were Africans.

There was some funny math going on, again.

Speaking to Lt. General Romoe Dallaire, the commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, an American military officer was quoted as saying that a risk assessment recently completed stated that 80,000 Rwandan lives equaled the life of one U.S. Soldier. Eighty thousand to one.

The math of People is a difficult subject humanity has still not mastered.

And then it came time for the Gulf War.

And after the Gulf War, sanctions.

The Gulf War Sanctions denied food and medicine to the civilians of Iraq and bolstered the power of Saddam Hussein.

In an interview on 60 Minutes, 5/12/1996, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is asked by Lesley Stahl:

“We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

There was no attempt made to dispute the accuracy of these numbers, which were never verified. But to her, the price is worth it. Five hundred thousand children to ‘punish’ a dictator who we supported through his gassing of the Kurds and his war with the Iranians. (We gave him satellite pictures, for one, of Iranian troop positions). The price was worth it. Five hundred thousand dead Un-Children is a small price to pay for one of the leaders of the Free World in their quest for geopolitical supremacy.

The Un-People of Iraq, though, would be blessed by the beneficence of the United States not just once, but twice. We would Liberate them. We would liberate their oil, too, and their markets…First, though, we had to Shock and Awe them. Scheduled exactly for Prime Time Television, coincidentally. So our Shock and Awe began, in the form of two thousand pound bombs dropped into a densely populated urban area.

Our liberation has had some interesting consequences for the Iraqi people.

Four hundred thousand detainees and prisoners. Four million living below the poverty level. Skyrocketing unemployment. The highest rates of infant and newborn mortality in the world. Five million people displaced, both as internal and external refugees.

In fact, the movement of Iraqi refugees has been the largest in human history.

A fact that goes without remark in the United States Press.

Now that we have laser guided munitions, people are not people; they are collateral damage. And maybe they are counted. Or maybe they are not.

“We don’t do body counts.” U.S. General Tommy Franks, concerning the loss of Iraqi civilian lives to the United States.

So we can take that as a firm ‘no.’ We do not count them.

There are some others that do, though. Non-profit organizations drawing from medical surveys and news reports, have compiled some interesting numbers concerning the dead in Iraq.

Estimates run from one hundred thousand to two million.

Two million dead Un-People. That is a large number. Sometimes really big numbers are difficult to process. Sometimes it gets complicated. Sometimes there are other factors at play.

Whether or not the dead are counted or not is a matter of their relationship to the United States Government. Are they enemies? Are they friends? It is a well known fact that our enemies commit massacres. Most of us know about Stalin’s purges and the Holocaust and about the Khmer Rouge.

But what about when the dead happen to be on the wrong side? Like when the dead are victims of a U.S. ally? It is important to ask where the Person is from. Often this is a useful way to determine their humanity.

Are they Cuban?

Are they one of the thousands killed by CIA backed terrorists operating out of Miami?

Or East Timorese?

Indonesia’s brutal military dictatorship brutally suppressed the population of East Timor from the 1970s until 1999. While Suharto was busy massacring civilians in East Timor, successive U.S. administrations praised his improvements in human rights. The two hundred thousand or so people slaughtered over the years?

As a stern warning against any future killing, when Suharto came to the White House, Bill Clinton offered him F-16 fighter jets. Two hundred thousand dead Un-People, of course, cannot get in the way of doing Business. (Business, by the way, being the primary concern of all Important God Fearing Neoliberals). But we do not admit anything concerning the Un-People. Bill Clinton said in 2000, when asked by a reporter about his complicity in the East Timorese genocide:

“You want to look backward. I’m going to stick with the leaders. You want to look backward, have at it, but you’ll have to have help from someone else.”

We must constantly Move Forward. On to Bigger and Better. A globalized world economy requires dynamic thinking, not looking backward, and neoliberalism’s hero has no time to look back at the Un-People.

So let’s Look Forward. Let’s stay in the Present.

The recent Israeli massacre in Gaza is a perfect example of a continued asymmetrical valuation of human life. The offensive began, not as Israel claims with the launching of rockets into Israel by Hamas, but with an Israeli bombing of a tunnel used by Hamas to bring food and weapons into the occupied territory. During the 23 days of fighting in 2008-2009, over 1400 Palestinians were killed, including 900 civilians. These civilians, living in an area completely blockaded, and among the most densely populated areas on earth, were subjected to daily bombardment from a sophisticated Israeli military machine.

Tanks, shelling, aircraft assault, and attacks using incendiary white phosphorous. Palestinian children were buried under rubble or eviscerated by anti-personnel weapons. White phosphorous burned through clothing, skin, burrowing down to the bone. Palestinians were used by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) as human shields.

It might be noted that during this entire assault, 13 Israelis total were killed, of whom three (3!) were the victims of rocket fire.

But Barack Obama said that there was only one president at a time.

He seemed pretty sure about the math on this one.

The key principle running through all of this funny math is one of dehumanization. In general, humans have an antipathy towards causing suffering to other humans. Numerous studies have shown that when placed into combat situations, most first time soldiers will intentionally fire high, or not at all, just to avoid killing. People want to help other People. Not kill them. It is in our nature.

But when people are no longer People, the math changes.

Un-People like African Americans can be given syphilis and left to die untreated. They can be sprayed with fire hoses. Un-People can be placed in cages because of their ancestry, because of their skin color.

Nearly all massacres throughout history have been spurred by a serious effort to reduce the ‘other’ to a status of less than human. Preceding the Rwandan genocide, for example, Hutu organizers referred to the Tutsis as cockroaches, culminating with the exhortation on Hutu Power Radio to “…kill the Tutsi cockroaches.”

Cockroaches are much easier to kill than human beings. So are Japs, gooks, and towelheads.

And Insurgents.

These words are easier than the truth.

Mother. Sister. Husband. Son.

People.

And these people count. Whether they are American or Iraqi or Iranian or Indonesian.

Human beings are human beings.

It is time we learn math a little better. Perhaps we should start with the equals sign, and work from there.

Troubling Travels: Reconciling Safe Skies with Personal Privacy

Not so sweet: Post-Halloween reflections on chocolate’s dark side

Corey Hill — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:47:43 +0000

cocoa beans

Though Halloween has passed, there are likely still at least a few chocolates hiding in the cupboard somewhere, ready to be unwrapped and greedily devoured. Before eating another bite of these treats, readers may want to give consideration to the origins of their trick-or-treating spoils, as the truth behind chocolate production is far from sweet.

Child slavery is rampant in the cocoa industry. There are an estimated 150,000 child slaves in Cote d’Ivoire alone, part of an estimated 285,000 children working on cocoa plantations throughout Africa. Every day, slave traders sell human beings into servitude for as little as two or three dollars.

Giant multinational cocoa purchasers, well aware of the rampant abuses on cocoa plantations, push the price down so low that many farmers resort to child labor. In 2001, Pascal Affi N’ Guessan, Prime Minister of Cote d’Ivoire, the world’s number one producer of cocoa, named a price ten times higher than the (then) current price to ensure quality of life for Cote d’Ivoire’s farmers.

Free-market ideology has failed the cocoa producers of the region, leaving them left to fend for themselves in the chaotic environment of a worldwide commodities market, where fluctuating prices oftentimes dip below the cost of production. For substantial portions of the last decade, for instance, the worldwide commodity price for cocoa has been below the cost of production, almost guaranteeing the perpetuation of abusive labor practices in the region.

Also, as the governments of cocoa producing nations rely heavily on the income generated from cocoa production, when prices dive, social services in health and education are cut. In cocoa producing nations, failure to set a minimum fair price hurts not only the cocoa producers themselves, but all of society.

Chocolate manufacturers have a way of insuring that prices stay low, despite the devastating impact upon the farmers of West Africa.

Hershey’s and M&M’s Mars, two of the world’s largest chocolate companies, have refused to take any steps to insure that child slavery and other abuses are eliminated from cocoa plantations. Multi-million dollar lobbying efforts protect their bottom lines and guarantee that the plantations’ horrendous conditions remain under wraps.

In 2001, threatened with the passage of a measure in the United States House of Representatives that would have called for manufacturers to label their products ‘slave free’ or not, the United States chocolate industry fought back with a fierce lobbying effort, arguing that the ‘slave free’ label requirement would actually end up hurting the cocoa producers of West Africa. Hiring Bob Dole and George Mitchell to lobby on their behalf, the Chocolate Manufacturer’s Association successfully defeated passage of the bill.

Later that year, bowing to intense international pressure, chocolate manufacturers agreed to the ‘Harkin-Engel’ protocol, named for Senator Tom Harkin and Eliot Engel, who facilitated its creation. Major signatories included the Chocolate Manufacturer’s Association, Hershey’s, M&M’s Mars, the government of Cote d’Ivoire, and the child labor office of the International Labor Organization.

Critics of the Harkin-Engel protocol note that the measure, the only major effort to date by manufacturers to reduce suffering in the region, does nothing to prevent the root cause of the problems in the cocoa industry: unfair pricing.

Many activists have rallied around a simple solution put forward by organizations such as Global Exchange and the International Labor Rights Forum: a guaranteed minimum floor price for cocoa. Setting a floor price would remove the destructive fluctuations and undervaluing inherent in the ‘free’ market system and replace them with a standardized fair pricing system, finally addressing the root cause of the abusive labor practices in West African cocoa production.

Cold War Myths and the Endurance of Fiction

Corey Hill — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:40:20 +0000

Berlin Wall circa 1989

Recently, the world celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Angela Merkel and Mikhail Gorbachev walked through a former border crossing on November 9th, 20 years to the day after the wall came down, thronged by adulant crowds. Commentators capitalized on the anniversary as an opportunity to generate endless syrupy combinations of the words ‘tyranny’ ‘liberty’ and ‘reflection,’ saturating the atmosphere with their appropriately reverant and triumphant iterations, ‘looking back’ through the distorted prism of propaganda.

One wall indeed came down, its brick and barbed wire dismantled by bulldozers and bare hands, its fall celebrated in the streets of Berlin and in homes across the world. A wall came down and the world rightly rejoiced the end of decades of oppression. Unfortunately, another remained, a wall stronger than the bricks built by Soviets, one whose guard towers still yet stand. This wall has not eroded or weakened with the passage of time, but rather, grown stronger, a testament to the endurance of propaganda, and to the readiness with which the Western world accepts convenient falsehoods.

This wall is a wall of myths.

Myths were actively cultivated during the Cold War as a barrier to objective analysis of the policies of the West. Soviet citizens, controlled by overt force, required only the crudest of propaganda efforts. Western citizens, though, were freer, and thus required a more sophisticated propaganda campaign. Noam Chomsky refers to the process as the manufacturing of consent. Thought control. Propaganda. Whatever the description given of the process, well developed systems were used to insure that Western minds were properly controlled, and vital topics were only discussed within a limited framework. Though not centrally coordinated like that of the Soviets, the Western propaganda effort effectively maintained the parameters of debate.

Central to the propaganda of the era was the Great Myth of the Cold War.

Within the consensus framework of thought, the Cold War was an ideological struggle between two implacable foes. Western States declared themselves ‘The Free World’ without any apparent sense of irony, placing the Soviet Union, by extension, firmly behind the ‘Iron Curtain.’

Our leaders warned that we were in a death struggle, with no less than our dearest freedoms at stake. Massive amounts of money were spent on weapons, with an ever escalating arms race resulting in the insanity of MIRVs and MAD, a world on hair trigger alert for nuclear annihilation.

The world stood ready to be destroyed, and few even questioned why.

Rather than examine the central claims of the Cold War to test their validity, Westerners, from policy makers to citizens, accepted them, everyone playing a part in the collective delusion of Cold War mythmaking. And though the Cold War never erupted into the world-ending calamity of nuclear confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact powers, flare ups were continual, with very real lives sacrificed to the myth in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

The Western world was free, our leaders declared, and the East was not. So we fought, and died, and killed. For Freedom! We were told it was freedom, a noble end, and most believed.

What thought was given to this claim that our leaders were deeply concerned with freedom, whether it be freedom at home or freedom abroad? What thought was given to democracy and struggles for independence? Was this claim analyzed?

If it was, then what of the tyrannies actively supported by the United States during this time? In Iran, the Congo (Zaire at the time), the Phillipines, and in countless other nations, the United States government supported dictators. We trained their secret police, we hosted their Generals at US State Dinners, and we sent bullets and airplanes to their militaries. Iran’s secret police, the SAVAK, were trained by the CIA and tortured thousands. In Zaire, the CIA played an active role in the assassination of reformer Patrice Lumumba and the rise to power of his successor, the corrupt dictator Mobutu, whose reign was notable for fraud and massacres. Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillipines stole billions and instituted martial law. These were our allies.

It this claim was analyzed, then what of the United States participation in overthrowing the democratically elected governments of Chile, Guatemala, and Iran? What of our role in denying the determination of the Vietnamese to select their own form of their government? If one of the central claims of the anti-Soviet propaganda was that we were fighting to preserve democracy, why did the US government have so few qualms about destroying it?

What of the carpet bombing and defoliants that burned, maimed, and mutilated the men, women and children of hamlets across Southeast Asia? Three million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians were killed. Seven million tons of bombs, more than were used in all of World War Two, fell on the countries of Southeast Asia.

What of support given by the United States to Suharto in Indonesia, the military aid and intelligence sharing with a government that slaughtered over 200,000 in East Timor, a slaughter that lasted from 1975 until the Clinton years without abatement?

The hypocrisy and cynicism of the Cold War myths are boundless.

It is a great testament to the power of these towering falsehoods that one can speak of the Cold War as an ideological struggle without being laughed out of the room. Certainly powerful forces were at play in the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West, but not the ones so readily referenced in mainstream analysis.

From 1939-1945, planners in the US State Department extensively researched geopolitical concerns, resulting in the production of a “Grand Area Plan.” The plan called for US control over significant portions of the world, specifically referencing Middle Eastern oil. The plan, in fact, called for control of most of the world’s resources, if possible. Following the end of World War Two, and the emergence of a dominant American economic system, these aims seemed within grasp to American planners.

Unfortunately, the Soviets were in need of these same materials. Western governments realized that Soviet control over said resources would make them impenetrable to Western development and exploitation, as the Soviet model of development was drastically different from that of capitalist systems. Two massive economies, two different worldviews, finite resources…the resultant conflict was all but inevitable.

The governments of both West and East alike sought to cloak their naked grabs for control of resources in the cloth of ideological propaganda. Had the governments of these nations stated baldly in the language of realpolitik that control over Middle East oil and African minerals were the reasons for their disagreement, citizens may not have been so accepting of the great myths of the era.

Oil is not as appealing an object of defense as Freedom.

The Soviets were the perfect foil for the West, and we the perfect foil for them, a fictionalized enemy whose widely perceived and greatly exaggerated external threat could be referenced to justify oppression at home. By pointing to the East, towards the Great Red Menace, our leaders could claim that their energies were focused on protecting us from the nuclear armed hordes, and any number of domestic priorities could be safely ignored. Soviet leaders could reference Western Imperialism and Capitalist Plots with some basis in reality to justify their curtailment of liberties, their paranoia.

Labor movements could be crushed. Racism could continue. Hungary could be invaded. Soviet and Western leaders alike readily pointed outwards as a handy way to excuse their own crimes. Everyone was happy with the arrangement, excepting, of course, the hundreds of millions who suffered as a result.

But neither side was eager to give up the myth, with Soviet and Western governments alike justifying their actions by pointing to the other. The great ruse continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the United States was left without a credible foe.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, US military spending was exorbititant without explanation. The cries to restructure society along more peaceful lines grew louder, with people demanding the billions previously spent on tanks and fighter jets be reallocated to schools and roads.

But myths as strong as the ones of the Cold War do not die easily. They change, perhaps, but do not die.

Though September 11th was indeed a tragedy, the call to an eternal world war against terrorism was not the only course of action available to US policymakers. Traditional analysis, in fact, favored a concerted criminal investigation rather than bombing and invasion. Police work rather than creating martyrs.

It was not to be. New times require new heroes and villains to fill the pantheon. Now the mortal threat is ‘terrorism.’ Osama Bin Laden the new boogeyman, a totem, a symbol, filling his place in the new mythology.

Terrorism is the new Communism, and we reorient ourselves around new dangers.

There are dangers to the American people from extremists, to be sure, but concern for the lives of the American people has never been of central concern to the powerful men and women who decide policy.

The abuse and criminality of the Iraq war spawned and continues to inspire new recruits to extremist organizations, according to American intelligence agencies. Drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan kill civilians and create massive opposition. The people of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and America declare that they do not want war. Yet war continues. A war the people do not want is fought for democracy building.

So terrorism’s myth is like that of the Soviets, a convenient justification for pre-determined policies, an ideological cover for the ugliness beneath.

Our infrastructure crumbles, homes are foreclosed, and real unemployment reaches sixteen percent. The United States spends as much as the rest of the world combined on weapons, maintaining over seven hundred military bases around the world, on all continents except Antarctica, and this is declared to be all for our ‘defense.’

The myth continues.

Stripped of the cloaks of ideological justifications, the reasons for bloodshed and conflict are the same now as they were then: control over finite resources and the domination of a world economy by force.

The jungles of Vietnam and the Congo have been replaced by the steppes of Central Asia and the bullet riddled buildings of Baghdad. The young men of America are no longer drafted against their will, but pulled into the military with offers of free health insurance, housing, and money for college, an increasingly enticing prospect given the economic devastation wrought by decades of governmental neglect. Our quest for Freedom, Truth, and the American way continues. Now, it is Muslim Terrorists who stand in our way, and not those damned Communists.

There are new myths, and new symbols, new appeals.

Those who make the ultimate sacrifice are perhaps the most potent symbol of all, their deaths held up frequently by myth makers, appealed to, eulogized, but never truly honored. Their deaths are cause for reverence, if they are on our side, cause for slim consideration if they are on the other. Either way, their deaths are not truthfully represented, and we do them a dishonor when we fictionalize their stories. We do them a dishonor because we hide their sacrifices behind a wall of myths.

On the other side of that wall is truth. If these walls are taken down, and realities analyzed, perhaps there will be fewer bombs, fewer bullets, fewer wars, and fewer bodies to bury. In order to reclaim the present we must reclaim history.

I, for one, am ready to tear down that wall.