The Guardian, August 13, 2008
Title: “Amazon rainforest threatened by new wave of oil and gas exploration”
Author: Ian Sample

Student Researcher: Rob Hunter
Faculty Evaluator: Sasha Von Meier, PhD
Sonoma State University

The western Amazon, home to the most biodiverse and intact rainforest on Earth, may soon be covered with oilrigs and pipelines. Vast swaths of the region are to be opened for oil and gas exploration, putting some of the planet’s most pristine and biodiverse forests at risk, conservationists have warned.

A new study has found that at least thirty-five multinational oil and gas companies operate over 180 oil and gas “blocks”—areas zoned for exploration and development—which now cover the Amazon in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and western Brazil.

The western Amazon is also home to many indigenous ethnic groups, including some of the world’s last uncontacted peoples living in voluntary isolation. Underlying this landscape of extraordinary biological and cultural diversity, which environmental scientists refer to as the lungs of the planet, are large reserves of oil and gas. Growing global demand is stimulating unprecedented levels of new oil and gas exploration and extraction—and the threat of environmental and cultural devastation.

Researchers tracked hydrocarbon activities across the region over a four-year period and generated a comprehensive map of oil and gas activities. The maps showed that in Peru and Ecuador, regions designated for oil and gas projects already cover more than two thirds of the Amazon. Of sixty-four oil and gas blocks that cover 72 percent of the Peruvian Amazon, all but eight were approved since 2003, and at least sixteen were signed in 2008. Major increases in activity are also expected in Bolivia and western Brazil.

“We’ve been following oil and gas development in the Amazon since 2004 and the picture has changed before our eyes,” said Matt Finer of Save America’s Forests, a US-based environment group. “When you look at where the oil and gas blocks are, they overlap perfectly on top of the peak biodiversity spots, almost as if by design, and this is in one of the most, if not the most, biodiverse places on Earth.”
Some regions have established oil and gas reserves, but in others companies will need to cut into the forest to conduct speculative tests, including explosive seismic investigations and test drilling. Typically, companies have seven years to explore a region before deciding whether to go into full production.

“The real concern is when exploration is successful and a zone moves into the development phase, because that’s when the roads, drilling and pipelines come in,” said Finer.
Writing in the journal PLoS One, Finer and others from Duke University and Land is Life, a Massachusetts-based environment group, call for governments to rethink how energy reserves in the Amazon are exploited.

One issue, the authors argue, is that while companies must submit an environmental impact assessment for their project, these are often considered individually instead of collectively. “They’re not looking at the bigger picture of what happens if there are lots of projects going on at the same time. You could have each individual company thinking they’re being relatively responsible and keeping their own road networks under control and so on, but what happens when you have fifteen other projects around you? All of a sudden, when you look at the bigger picture, you have a sprawling road network,” said Finer. The creation of widespread road networks will put previously inaccessible forest at risk of deforestation, illegal hunting and logging, the authors argue.

Further research by the team found that many of the planned exploration and extraction projects were on land that is home to indigenous people, who whilst being consulted, have no say in whether a project goes ahead or not. At least fifty-eight of the sixty-four blocks in Peru are on land where isolated communities live, with a further seventeen infringing on areas that have existing or proposed reserves for indigenous groups.

“The way that oil development is being pursued in the western Amazon is a gross violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the region,” said Brain Keane of Land is Life. “International agreements and inter-American human rights law recognize indigenous peoples’ rights to their lands, and explicitly prohibit the granting of concessions to exploit natural resources in their territories without their free, prior and informed consent,” he added.

Indigenous resistance is increasingly organized, politicized, and effective at both national and international levels.
“This expansion occurs to the detriment of our peoples and of Mother Earth,” warns Jose Antunez, a leader of the Ashaninka people of Peru.

Update by Matt Finer

This story, which highlights the threats facing the western Amazon from oil and gas development, not only involves one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth, but, as we have recently seen, is literally a matter of life and death for people in the region. While much of the previous scientific analysis and global attention has focused on the massive deforestation in the eastern Amazon in Brazil, our study was one of the first to highlight the magnitude and scope of threats facing the still largely intact western Amazon (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and western Brazil).

After its publication in the open-access scientific journal PLoS ONE in August 2008, the story did receive a considerable amount of international press, including pieces in the Guardian, New Scientist, Associated Press, and several major newspapers in South America. Our paper appeared at a particularly opportune time, when the media and public were focused on high oil prices and dependence on foreign oil. While our paper sounded the alarm about the impending crisis in the western Amazon and was noted by the scientific community, most of the complex issues raised in our paper largely continued to stay under the radar of the public and mainstream media in the United States.

In June 2009, there were deadly clashes in northern Peru between the police and indigenous peoples who had been protesting new government policies. These policies—enacted to comply with a free trade agreement with the US—promoted oil, gas, mining, logging, and biofuel projects on indigenous lands without their consent.  This issue was a major topic of discussion in our paper, under the heading of Free, Prior and Informed Consent. These events, which reportedly left over fifty people dead, resulted in a second round of press reports citing our article. The New York Times and Reuters, for example, highlighted our finding that the vast majority of the oil concessions in the Peruvian Amazon overlap titled indigenous lands.

The issues raised in our paper continue to be of critical importance. Oil and gas concessions (blocks) now cover more than 700,000 square kilometers in the western Amazon, even more than we estimated in 2008. The problem of new oil and gas exploration and development projects in sensitive areas is particularly severe in Peru and Bolivia, and increasingly so in Colombia. In contrast, a hopeful sign is that Ecuador continues to promote its innovative Yasuni-ITT Initiative, which we highlighted in our study. Ecuador is proposing to leave nearly one billion barrels of oil, 20 percent of its known reserves, locked in the ground forever in exchange for alternative sources of revenue from the international community.

As a means to make information from our research about the western Amazon more accessible, we established the WesternAmazon.org website to distribute information and the data from our studies. We also provide links to any news stories linked to our study and the issue of oil in the Amazon.

The post 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researcher: Frances Capell
Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff
Sonoma State University

The worldwide surplus of dollars is forcing foreign central banks to bear the costs of America’s expanding military empire. Keeping international reserves in “dollars” means that when US financial speculation and deficits payment pumps “paper” into foreign economies, these banks have little option but to recycle it into US Treasury bills and bonds—which the Treasury then spends on financing an enormous, hostile military build-up to encircle the major dollar-recyclers: China, Japan and Arab OPEC oil producers. These governments are forced to recycle dollar inflows in a way that funds US military policies in which they have no say in formulating, and which threaten them more and more belligerently.

To date, countries have been powerless to defend themselves against the fact that this compulsory financing of US military spending is built into the global financial system. Neoliberal economists applaud this as “equilibrium” as if it is part of economic nature and “free markets” rather than bare-knuckle diplomacy wielded with increasing aggressiveness by US officials. The mass media chime in, promoting the assumption that recycling the dollar to finance US military spending is the international community’s way of “showing faith in US economic strength” by sending “their” dollars here to “invest.” The implication is that a choice is involved. However, the foreigners in question are not consumers buying US exports, nor private-sector “investors” buying US stocks and bonds. The largest, most important foreign entities putting “their money” here are central banks, and it is not their money at all. They are sending back the dollars that foreign exporters and other recipients turn over to their central banks for domestic currency.
The US economy can create dollars freely, now that they no longer are convertible into gold, or even into purchases of US companies. Consequently, the US remains the world’s most protected economy. It alone is permitted to protect its agriculture by import quotas, having grandfathered these into world trade rules half a century ago. Congress refuses to let “sovereign wealth” funds invest in important US sectors.

US Treasury prefers foreign central banks to keep on funding its domestic budget deficit, which means financing the cost of America’s war in the Near East and encirclement of foreign countries with rings of military bases. The more capital outflows US investors spend to buy up foreign economies—¬the most profitable sectors, where the new US owners can extract the highest monopoly rents—the more funds end up in foreign central banks to support America’s global military build-up.

No textbook on political theory or international relations has suggested axioms to explain how nations act in a way so adverse to their own political, military and economic interests. Yet this is just what has been happening for the past generation.

The ultimate question is what countries can do to counter this financial attack. How can nations act as real nations, in their own interest, rather than in America’s interest? Any country trying to do what the United States has done for the past 150 years is accused of being socialist or protectionist—this from the most anti-socialist economy in the world.

The problem of speculative capital movements goes beyond drawing up a set of specific regulations. It concerns the scope of national government power. The International Monetary Fund’s Articles of Agreement prevent countries from restoring the “dual exchange rate” systems that many retained down through the 1950s and even into the 60s. It was widespread practice for countries to have one exchange rate for goods and services (sometimes various exchange rates for different import and export categories) and another for capital movements. Under US pressure, the IMF enforced the pretence that there is an “equilibrium” rate that just happens to be the same for goods and services as it is for capital movements. Governments that did not buy into this ideology were excluded from membership in the IMF and World Bank,¬ or were overthrown.

The implication today is that the only way a nation can block capital movements is to withdraw from the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO). For the first time since the 1950s this looks like a real possibility, thanks to worldwide awareness of how the US economy is glutting the global economy with surplus “paper,” and US resistance to stopping its free ride. From the US perspective, this is nothing less than an attempt to curtail its international military program of global domination.

Update by Michael Hudson
The largest “free lunch” in the world is the ability of the US Treasury to issue what is now $4 trillion in paper in exchange for foreign exports, the sale of foreign companies and real estate to US buyers, and US military purchases abroad. These three dynamics make up the US balance-of-payments deficit—which is “free” to the extent that foreign central banks recycle the surplus dollars into Treasury bonds and other US securities (including Fannie Mae junk mortgages between 2004 and 2007).

China has sought to limit its acquisition of dollars, and other countries are discussing how to limit further dollar inflows.

Corporate media continue to talk of a “global savings glut,” as if foreign governments invest in Treasury bills because they are “a good buy” and foreigners “have faith in the US economy.” But Treasury bills are only yielding 1 percent now, and the dollar is weakening, so it is not a good buy at all. Foreigners are trapped in the mechanics of the international financial system controlled by the US via the IMF and World Bank. At the recent G-20 meeting in April, countries reached an impasse. But the press did not explain the conflict of interest behind this impasse.

I have written about the dynamics of the dollar’s free ride in Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1972, new ed. Pluto Press 2002). The remarkable thing is that the information is “in plain sight,” in the sense that Edgar Allen Poe meant when he discussed how to hide the purloined letter. Reporters just don’t read the Federal Reserve Bulletin and the Treasury Bulletin for the month-to-month statistics that tell where the bodies are buried. Instead, they repeat handouts from the Treasury or Federal Reserve, ignoring the statistics on US Government liabilities to foreign central banks and other foreign holders.

The post 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion appeared first on Project Censored.

AlterNet, March 18, 2009
Title: “An Inside Peek: Why the World Water Forum Is a Sham”
Author: Jeff Conant

Democracy Now! March 23, 2009
Title: “Water Rights Activists Blast Istanbul World Water Forum as ‘Corporate Trade Show to Promote Privatization’”
Interviewee: Maude Barlow

KPFA, “Sunday Sedition,” March 29, 2009
Title: “Andria Lewis interviews Maude Barlow”

Student Researcher: Frances Capell
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, PhD
Sonoma State University

Water rights activists blasted the World Water Forum, held in Turkey in late March of 2009, as a corporate trade show promoting privatization of water. Three hundred Turkish activists gathered near the forum’s entrance and were faced with the overwhelming force of between 2,000 and 3,000 police. The forum opened with Turkish police firing tear gas and detaining protesters, who were shouting “Water for life, not for profit.”

According to its website, the World Water Forum is “an open, all-inclusive, multi-stakeholder process” where governments, NGOs, businesses and others “create links, debate and attempt to find solutions to achieve water security.”

However, the Forum’s main organizer, the World Water Council, is dominated by two of the world’s largest private water corporations, Suez and Veolia. Critics contend that the Council’s links to Suez and Veolia, as well as the large representation of the business industry in the Council, compromise its legitimacy. Corporate interests that make up the World Water Council are in constant contact with the World Bank and other financial institutions. Each Forum is set up as a quasi-United Nations event, to the extent of issuing a Ministerial Statement at the Forum’s close promoting global policy approaches to water and sanitation.

The Council promotes extraordinarily expensive and destructive dam and water diversion projects as well as policies such as Public-Private Partnerships (PPP’s) that put water services under private ownership. PPPs in Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, the US, and other countries have resulted in huge price hikes, water pollution, depletion and cut-offs which, in the language of the water justice movement, “deny people the right to water.” Despite these and other harmful impacts, the Istanbul Water Consensus aims to secure the commitment of local authorities to similar water policies. This year’s forum issued a communiqué that describes access to water as a “basic human need” rather than a human right, despite efforts by dissenting Latin American countries, France and Spain to introduce the right to water. They were reportedly blocked by Egypt, Brazil and the United States. In the minutiae of political verbiage, this apparently slight difference in terminology can have a profound significance. If water is defined as a “need” rather than a “right,” it becomes a commodity subject to trade and implies no obligation on the parts of governments to ensure access to it. If it is a human right, on the other hand, mandatory government policy is activated to assure unconditional access to everyone.

Activists from the People’s Water Forum—an alternative formation representing rural poor, the environment and organized labor— slammed the official event as a non-inclusive, corporate-driven fraud pushing for water privatization. They called for a more open, democratic and transparent forum.  A block of Southern governments led by Uruguay is building support for an alternative, legitimate forum to be led by the United Nations.

High-profile civil society voices such as Maude Barlow, senior adviser on water issues to the United Nations General Assembly, are calling for this to be the last corporately held World Water Forum. “The security is tight, because what they’re about is promoting privatization, promoting a corporate vision of the world,” she said, “and they want to pretend to the world that that’s the consensus of the world. And it isn’t.”

Barlow maintains that multinational water companies and the World Bank are not proper hosts for a World Water Forum. She proposes that it be held under the auspices of the General Assembly of the United Nations, keeping the right to clean commons in the public trust to avert a deeply inequitable situation in which water is diverted from the poor to those who can pay for it.
“The World Water Forum is bankrupt of new ways to address the growing water crisis in the world, because they have maintained an adherence to an ideology that is not working, that has dramatically failed,” Barlow remarked on Democracy Now! “What’s clear here is that the energy and the commitment and the brilliance and the ideas and the cultural change have come together. And this [the People’s Water Forum] is where the future of water is coming from, this movement here.”

Update by Jeff Conant
The World Water Council, a private consortium led by two of the world’s largest water corporations, has come to be seen in the global water sector as a legitimate host of the world’s largest water policy gathering. But policies promoted by the corporate body have led to profound inequity in water service provision worldwide, while also serving to move huge amounts of public money into private hands. The World Water Council and its triennial gathering, the World Water Forum, strongly promote so-called Public-Private Partnerships that put water services under private ownership. PPP’s in Argentina, Bolivia, Ghana, Tanzania, the US, and other countries have resulted in price hikes, decreased pollution control, and water cut-offs, patently denying people—and especially the poor—access to safe drinking water and sanitation services.

One way in which the World Water Council seeks legitimacy is through promoting the appearance that it’s flagship event, the World Water Forum (WWF), is sponsored or endorsed by the United Nations. So, when Father Miguel D’escoto, President of the UN General Assembly, and a vocal opponent of water privatization, received no response from the Directors of the World Water Council to his appeal to speak at the Fifth World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey, the curtain was drawn back and the Council’s legitimacy came into question.
Covering the WWF in Istanbul, I persistently raised the question at press events there, “Why did Father D’Escoto’s letter receive no response?” The answer from Loïc Fauchon, President of the Council, was that no such letter had been received.

Since then, however, we have learned that the Directors of the WWC have contacted Father D’Escoto’s office to meet with him, and have suggested that many of the WWF’s future activities might come under the auspices of the UN. They seem to have been shaken by the attention.
The one aspect of the Forum over which the Council seems to want to retain control, however, is the Ministerial process. As I noted in my article, “An Inside Peek: Why the World Water Forum is a Sham,” “At each Forum, a series of roundtable discussions between government ministers, corporate lobbyists and NGOs leads to a final Ministerial Statement which, while it has no teeth in international law, plays a significant symbolic role in projecting policies on the ground.”

I wrote at the time, “While this process happens entirely behind the scenes and is obscure to nearly all the Forum’s participants, it is perhaps the most influential aspect of the event. Over the next two days we expect to see the intrigue come to a head.”

In fact, the conclusion of the process resulted, on March 22, in a serious vote of dissent, with twenty-five country delegations signing a statement defending the human right to water, and an additional sixteen demanding that future Water Fora be hosted by the UN. This is the largest collective act of dissent that the WWF has seen since its inception.

There has been very little mainstream press attention to the issue; in fact, there is persistent dearth of attention to the dire issues of water and sanitation in general. One exception has been the French press, which took up the issue in a cover story in Le Monde the day after the Forum’s closing. In the United States, these issues receive almost no coverage at all outside of the extreme independent press—a shocking truth given that lack of access to safe water is the number one cause of disease and death worldwide.

The best sources of information on this story, and on global water policy in general, are to be found through Food & Water Watch (foodandwaterwatch.org), for whom I work as a researcher and advocate, World Development Movement (http://www.wdm.org.uk), Public Services International Research Unit (http://www.psiru.org) and Transnational Institute, (http://www.tni.org).

Update by Maude Barlow
One of the most contentious issues surrounding the growing global water crisis is the question of who is going to determine access and allocation; will it be the market, or will it be people through their elected governments? Is water a commodity to be put on the open market to the highest bidder or part of our commons, a public trust and a human right? This struggle is intense in communities around the world who are fighting big private water utilities delivering water on a for-profit basis or giant bottled water companies coming in and depleting local water supplies. But every three years, the fight goes global at the World Water Forum, a massive gathering of people that resembles a United Nations summit but is actually sponsored by the World Water Council, made up largely of the big water corporations, the World Bank and pro-corporate segments of the UN.

The fifth World Water Forum was held in Istanbul and, as you know from the story, was the target of intense criticism from activists and environmentalists from Turkey and around the world; Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, the President of the UN General Assembly; and many nation-state representatives who disagreed with the fact that the “right to water” was not in the final declaration. In the end, twenty-five countries signed a second declaration declaring their support for the right to water and many openly stated that the next World Water Forum should be sponsored by the General Assembly of the United Nations and not by big private water operators who stand to profit from the assembly.

Since the forum, the pressure for the General Assembly to take over this role has intensified, and in my role as Senior Advisor to the President of the UN General Assembly, I am urging the General Assembly to adopt an emergency resolution taking upon itself the responsibility of coming up with a global framework of action to deal with both the ecological and human crisis now upon the world, one that recognizes that water is a human right and therefore cannot be denied on the basis of the inability to pay.

This story matters because the growing water crisis is one of the most pressing threats of our time. But the only international body that presumes to speak for global policies and practices is one whose members are making billions as depleting water sources become market commodities and who deny water to those who cannot pay for it. It is a fundamental issue of democracy and of justice in deciding the future of policies that will affect the whole world.

There was very little media from North America covering this crucial story (thank heavens for Amy Goodman!) but it did get covered in Turkey and in the global South. For more information, go to Food and Water Watch, http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org, and the Blue Planet Project at http://www.canadians.org

The post 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researcher: Sarah Maddox
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips
Sonoma State University

Barack Obama appointed eleven members of the Trilateral Commission to top-level and key positions in his administration within his first ten days in office. This represents a very narrow source of international leadership inside the Obama administration, with a core agenda that is not necessarily in support of working people in the United States.

Obama was groomed for the presidency by key members of the Trilateral Commission. Most notably, Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973, has been Obama’s principal foreign policy advisor.

According to official Trilateral Commission membership lists, there are only eighty-seven members from the United States (the other 337 members are from other countries). Thus, within two weeks of his inauguration, Obama’s appointments encompassed more than 12 percent of Commission’s entire US membership.

Trilateral appointees include:
* Secretary of Treasury, Tim Geithner
* Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice
* National Security Advisor, Gen. James L. Jones
* Deputy National Security Advisor, Thomas Donilon
* Chairman, Economic Recovery Committee, Paul Volker
* Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair
* Assistant Secretary of State, Asia & Pacific, Kurt M. Campbell
* Deputy Secretary of State, James Steinberg
* State Department, Special Envoy, Richard Haass
* State Department, Special Envoy, Dennis Ross
* State Department, Special Envoy, Richard Holbrooke

There are many other links in the Obama administration to the Trilateral Commission. For instance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is married to Commission member William Jefferson Clinton.
Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner’s informal group of advisors include E. Gerald Corrigan, Paul Volker, Alan Greenspan, and Peter G. Peterson, all members. Geithner’s first job after college was with Trilateralist Henry Kissinger at Kissinger Associates.

Trilateralist Brent Scowcroft has been an unofficial advisor to Obama and was mentor to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. And Robert Zoelick, current president of the World Bank appointed during the G.W. Bush administration, is a member.

According to the Trilateral Commissions’ website, the Commission was formed in 1973 by private citizens of Japan, Europe (European Union countries), and North America (United States and Canada) to foster closer cooperation among these core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system. The website says, “The membership of the Trilateral Commission is composed of about 400 distinguished leaders in business, media, academia, public service (excluding current national Cabinet Ministers), labor unions, and other non-governmental organizations from the three regions. The regional chairmen, deputy chairmen, and directors constitute the leadership of the Trilateral Commission, along with an Executive Committee including about 40 other members.”
Since 1973, the Trilateral Commission has met regularly in plenary sessions to discuss policy position papers developed by its members. Policies are debated in order to achieve consensuses. Respective members return to their own countries to implement policies consistent with those consensuses. The original stated purpose of the Trilateral Commission was to create a “New International Economic Order.” Its current statement has morphed into fostering a “closer cooperation among these core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system.”
Since the Carter administration, Trilateralists have held these very influential positions: Six of the last eight World Bank Presidents; Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the United States (except for Obama and Biden); over half of all US Secretaries of State; and three quarters of the Secretaries of Defense.

Two strong convictions guide the Commission’s agenda for the 2009-2012 triennium. First, the Trilateral Commission is to remain as important as ever in maintaining wealthy countries’ shared leadership in the wider international system. Second, the Commission will “widen its framework to reflect broader changes in the world.” Thus, the Japan Group has become a Pacific Asian Group, which includes Chinese and Indian members, and Mexican members have been added to the North American Group. The European Group continues to widen in line with the enlargement of the EU.

Update by Patrick Wood
The concept of “undue influence” comes to mind when considering the number of Trilateral Commission members in the Obama administration. They control the areas of our most urgent national needs: financial and economic crisis, national security, and foreign policy.

The conflict of interest is glaring. With 75 percent of the Trilateral membership consisting of non-US individuals, what influence does this super-majority have on the remaining 25 percent?
For example, when Chrysler entered bankruptcy under the oversight and control of the Obama administration, it was quickly decided that the Italian carmaker Fiat would take over Chrysler. The deal’s point man, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is a member of the Trilateral Commission. Would you be surprised to know that the chairman of Fiat, Luca di Montezemolo, is also a fellow member?
Congress should have halted this deal the moment it was suggested.

Many European members of the Trilateral Commission are also top leaders of the European Union. What political and economic sway do they have through their American counterparts?
If asked, the vast majority of Americans would say that America’s business is its own, and should be closed to foreign meddlers with non-American agendas.
But, the vast majority of Americans have no idea who or what the Trilateral Commission is, much less the power they have usurped since 1976, when Jimmy Carter became the first Trilateral member to be elected president (Project Censored Story #1, 1976).

In light of today’s unprecedented financial crisis, they would be abhorred if they actually read Zbigniew Brzezinski’s (co-founder of the Commission with David Rockefeller) statement from his 1971 book, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, which states that, “The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”
Yet, this is exactly what is happening. The global banks and corporations are running circles around the nation state, including the United States. They have no regard for due process, Congress, or the will of the people.

Why have the American people been kept in the dark about a subject so great that it shakes our country to its very core?
The answer is simple: The top leadership of the media is also saturated with members of the Trilateral Commission who are able to selectively suppress the stories that are covered. They include:
• David Bradley, Chairman, Atlantic Media Company
• Karen Elliot House, former Senior Vice President, Dow Jones & Company, and Publisher, the Wall Street Journal
• Richard Plepler, Co-president, HBO
• Charlie Rose, PBS
• Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek
• Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman, US News & World Reports
There are many other top-level media connections due to corporate directorships and stock ownership.

For more information, this writer’s original 1978 book, Trilaterals Over Washington, is available in electronic form at no charge at http://www.AugustReview.com. This site also has many papers analyzing various aspects of the Trilateral Commission’s hegemony in the United States and elsewhere, since it’s founding in 1973.

The post 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team appeared first on Project Censored.

Associated Press, March 26, 2009
Title: “States consider drug tests for welfare recipients”
Author: Tom Breen

Student Researcher: Samantha Barowsky, Southwest Minnesota State University
Malana Men, Sonoma State University
Faculty Evaluator: Douglas Anderson, PhD
Southwest Minnesota State University

Many states are in the midst of an aggressive action to push thousands of eligible mothers off Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), traditionally known as welfare. Families are being denied aid so that savings can be redirected in state budgets.

Nationally, the number of welfare recipients fell more than 40 percent between 2001 and June 2008.  Louisiana, Texas and Illinois have each dropped 80 percent of adult recipients since January 2001. The state of Georgia had a 90 percent drop, with fewer than 2,500 Georgian adults receiving benefits, down from 28,000 in 2004.

In Georgia last year, only 18 percent of children living below 50 percent of the poverty line—which is less than $733 a month for a family of three—were receiving TANF.

In 2006, the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence conducted a survey to find out why so many women were suddenly failing to get welfare benefits. They discovered that caseworkers were actively discouraging women from applying. Welfare caseworkers were reportedly telling applicants that they would have to be surgically sterilized before they could apply for TANF. Disabled women were told they couldn’t apply because they didn’t meet work requirements. Others were warned that the state could take their children if they applied for benefits. Women are increasingly vulnerable to sexual assault and exploitation—sometimes by the state officials or caseworkers assigned to help them. Arrests of women for prostitution and petty crime went up as more and more families were denied welfare.

Students completing college degrees were misinformed that they would be denied aid once the turned twenty, regardless of graduation status. Students as young as sixteen were told that they must work full time or lose benefits.

Texas reduced its caseload by outsourcing applications to a call center, which not only wrongfully denied some families, but lost applications altogether.

In Florida, one innovative region started requiring TANF applicants to attend forty hours of classes before they could even apply. Clients trying to restore lost benefits had once been able to straighten out paperwork with the help of caseworkers. In 2005, officials assigned all such work to a single employee, available two hours a week. The area’s TANF caseload fell by half in a year.

Because of the recession, many Americans turn to the safety net of government assistance programs such as food stamps, unemployment benefits, or welfare. In an effort to discourage applicants, lawmakers in at least eight states want recipients to submit to random drug testing.

In March 2009, the Kansas House of Representatives approved a measure that mandates drug testing for the 14,000 people getting cash assistance from the state.  In February, the Oklahoma Senate unanimously passed a measure that would require drug testing as a condition of receiving TANF benefits. Similar bills have been introduced in Missouri and Hawaii. A member of Minnesota’s House of Representatives has a bill requiring drug tests of people who get public assistance under a state program there.

During the Clinton era of welfare reform, states were given a fixed amount of money regardless of need.  The TANF block grant was a $16.5 billion grant in which Georgia share alone was $370 million a year. States could divert the funds to any program vaguely related to serving the needy.  Since states receive the same amount of federal funds regardless of how many people received assistance, states were encouraged to deny benefits.  “Even if caseloads go to zero, they get the same amount of money,” notes Robert Welsh of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

States have used the surplus TANF money to expand childcare, job training, and transportation to help recipients find jobs. The Government Accountability Office found in 2006 that many states were moving federal welfare funds away from cash assistance to the poor, or even “work supports” like childcare, to plug holes in state budgets.

TANF is a gateway to education, drug rehabilitation, mental health care, child care, even transportation and disability benefits—tools for upward mobility.
“Welfare is the only cash safety-net program for single moms and their kids,” notes Rebecca Blank, an economist at the Brookings Institution, “One has to worry, with a recession, about the number of women who, if they get unemployed, are not going to have anywhere to turn.”

The post 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare appeared first on Project Censored.

Democracy Now! October 2, 2008
Title: “No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates”
Interviewee: George Farah

Student Researchers:  Erin Galbraith, Natalie Dale, and Kerry Headley
Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff
Sonoma State University

The Obama and McCain campaigns jointly negotiated a detailed secret contract dictating the terms of the 2008 debates. This included who got to participate, what topics were to be raised, and the structure of the debate formats.

Since 1987, a private corporation created by and for the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has sponsored the US Presidential debates and implemented debate contracts. In order to shield the major party candidates from criticism, CPD has refused to release debate contract information to the public.

In 1986, the Republican and Democratic National Committees ratified an agreement “to take over the presidential debates” from the nonpartisan League of Women Voters.  Fifteen months later, then-Republican Party chair Frank Fahrenkopf and then-Democratic Party chair Paul Kirk incorporated the Commission on Presidential Debates. Fahrenkopf and Kirk still co-chair the Commission on Presidential Debates, and every four years it implements and conceals contracts jointly drafted by the Republican and Democratic nominees.

Before the CPD’s formation, the League of Women Voters served as a genuinely nonpartisan presidential debate sponsor from 1976 until 1984, ensuring the inclusion of popular independent candidates and prohibiting major party campaigns from manipulating debate formats.

In 1980, the League invited independent candidate John B. Anderson to participate in a presidential debate, even though President Jimmy Carter adamantly refused to debate him.
Four years later, when the Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale campaigns vetoed sixty-eight proposed panelists in order to eliminate difficult questions, the League publicly lambasted the candidates for “totally abusing the process.” The ensuing public outcry persuaded the candidates to accept the League’s panelists for the next debate.

And in 1988, when the George Bush and Michael Dukakis campaigns drafted the first secret debate contract—a “Memorandum of Understanding” that dictated who got to participate, who would ask the questions, even the heights of the podiums—the League declined to implement it. Instead, the League issued a blistering press release claiming, “the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.”

The major parties, however, did not want a sponsor that limited their candidates’ control. Consequently, the CPD was created to step in.
Since the CPD took control of the presidential debates in 1988, the debates have been primarily funded by corporate contributions. Multinational corporations with regulatory interests before Congress have donated millions of dollars in contributions to the CPD, and debate sites have become corporate carnivals, where sponsoring companies market their products, services, and political agendas. Tobacco giant Phillip Morris was a major sponsor in 1992 and 1996. The major contributor, Anheuser-Busch, has sponsored presidential debates in its hometown of St. Louis in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008.

That the CPD has been able to raise millions of dollars in corporate contributions is not surprising.  Frank Fahrenkopf and Paul Kirk, who co-chair and control the CPD, are registered lobbyists for multinational corporations. Kirk has collected $120,000 for lobbying on behalf of Hoechst Marion Roussel, a German pharmaceutical company.  Fahrenkopf earns approximately $900,000 a year as the chief lobbyist for the nation’s $54 billion gambling industry.  As president of the American Gaming Association, Fahrenkopf directs enormous financial contributions to major party candidates and saturates the media with “expert” testimony extolling gambling’s “many benefits.” “We’re not going to apologize for trying to influence political elections,” said Fahrenkopf.

“These are the guys,” author George Farah points out, “deciding who gets to participate in the most important political forums in the United States of America.”

He adds, “Kirk and Fahrenkopf’s lobbying practices demonstrate a willingness to protect corporate interests at the expense of voters’ interests. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that the co-chairs of the CPD are willing to protect major party interests at the expense of voters’ interests.”

The current structure enables corporations to give money to both the Democratic and Republican parties, which essentially supports their duopoly over the political process and excludes third party voices that may be hostile to corporate power.

Historically, third party candidates have played critical roles in our democracy by introducing popular and groundbreaking issues that were eventually co-opted by major parties—such as the abolition of slavery, women’s right to vote, social security, child labor laws, public schools, the direct election of senators, paid vacation, unemployment compensation, and the formation of labor unions.  With third-party candidates excluded from discourse, they can’t break the bipartisan silence on issues where the major parties are at odds with most Americans.

Of past debates, Farah questions, “In a country where corporations are the dominant political and economic force, why did the debates pass without the word “corporation” being spoken? . . . What about campaign finance reform? Corporate crime? Environmental devastation? Child poverty and homelessness? Free trade and globalization? Media concentration? Military spending? Immigration? Civil liberties and privacy rights?”

For the last twenty years, while the CPD has sponsored the presidential debates, challenging questions, assertive moderators, follow-up questions, candidate-to-candidate questioning, and rebuttals have been excluded from presidential debates.  The CPD’s formats have typically prevented in-depth examination of critical issues and allowed the candidates to recite a series of memorized sound bites.
Walter Cronkite has called CPD-sponsored presidential debates an “unconscionable fraud.”

The post 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researchers: Ben Kaufman and Rosemary Scott
Faculty Evaluator: Kelly Bucy, PhD
Sonoma State University

On October 17, 2008, three days after Bank of America Corporation received $25 billion in federal bailout funds, they hosted a conference call to organize opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Participants, including AIG, were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the EFCA, as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans who could be used to help block the passage of the pro labor bill that would make it easier for employees to organize into unions.

Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, and Rick Berman, founder of the Center for Union Facts, led the hour-long phone call that framed the legislation as a threat to American capitalism. The legislation—which would allow workers to form unions either by holding traditional elections or by having a majority of employees sign written forms—is virtually certain to face a Republican filibuster. Obama and Senate Democrats have stated their commitment to the bill.

Donations of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars were needed, it was argued, to prevent America from turning “into France.” “If a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to [former Sen.] Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be shot. They should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs,” Marcus declared.
One of the callers suggested that participants send major contributions to Berman’s organization as a way of affecting the election without violating the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. “Some organizations have written checks for $250,000, $500,000, some for $2 million for this,” said the caller, likely Steven Hantler, director of Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at Bernie Marcus’ Marcus Foundation.
According to author Sam Stein, reform groups are sending letters to congressional committee chairs and to the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, urging an investigation into whether bailout recipients used taxpayer money to benefit political candidates or organizations. “We’re calling for Congress to investigate whether Bank of America, AIG, or other recipients of $billions in bailout money, used taxpayer dollars to send ‘large contributions’ to any political organizations,” reads the letter. “Congress has a responsibility to oversee the $700 billion bailout of the financial services sector. That means making sure that these taxpayer funds are used transparently, and in ways that benefit regular people—not special interests.”

Berman said that there “was nothing on that call that spoke to funneling money to anybody.” Either way, Bank of America did use time and resources to host the anti-EFCA forum, on which individuals were urged to make political donations. That alone has compelled groups advocating government reform to raise concerns with Congress.

“What they’ve apparently done is taken taxpayer money and siphoned it to their political servants—right-wing Republicans,” said Rep. Alan Grayson. A letter read, “In our current system, special interests believe they can buy policies from Congress through campaign contributions, and the public believes this as well. Wall Street companies routinely spend millions in campaign contributions and lobbying to resist oversight of the practices that led to the current economic crisis.

“Bank of America is now not only getting bailout money. They are lending their name to participate in a campaign to stop workers from having a majority sign up [provision],” said Stephen Lerner, Director of the Private Equity Project at SEIU. “The biggest corporations who have created the problem are, at the very time, asking us to bail them out and then using that money to stop workers from improving their lives.”

The post 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researcher: Chelsea Davis
Faculty Evaluator: Elaine Wellin, PhD
Sonoma State University

In September 2008 Ecuador became the first country in the world to declare constitutional rights to nature, thus codifying a new system of environmental protection.

Reflecting the beliefs and traditions of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, the constitution declares that nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” This right, the constitution states, “is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people that depend on the natural systems.”
The new constitution redefines people’s relationship with nature by asserting that nature is not just an object to be appropriated and exploited by people, but is rather a rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law.

Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Environmental Legal Defense Fund, worked closely over the past year with members of Ecuador’s constitutional assembly on drafting legally enforceable Rights of Nature, which mark a watershed in the trajectory of environmental law.

Ecuador’s leadership on this issue may have a global domino effect. Margil says that her organization is busy fielding calls from interested countries, such as Nepal, which is currently writing its first constitution.

For all of the hope and tangible progress the Rights of Nature articles in Ecuador’s constitution represent, however, there are shortcomings and contradictions with the laws and the political reality on the ground. A fundamental flaw in the constitution also exists due to Correa’s refusal to include a clause mandating free, prior, and informed consent by communities for development project that would affect their local ecosystems.

“I expect them [the multinational extractive industries] to fight it,” says Margil. “Their bread and butter is based on being able to treat countries and ecosystems like cheap hotels. Multinational corporations are dependent on ravaging the planet in order to increase their bottom line.”

The new Mining Law, introduced by Ecuador’s own President Rafael Correa and backed by Canadian companies, which hold the majority of mining concessions in Ecuador, is a testament to Margil’s forecast. The Mining Law would allow for large-scale, open pit metal mining in pristine Andean highlands and Amazon rainforest. Major nationwide demonstrations are being held in protest, with groups accusing Correa of inviting social and environmental disaster by selling out to mining interests.

Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag, who has been a tireless defender of the environment against transnational mining companies, says that while the new constitution looks good on paper, “in practice governments like Correa’s will argue that funding his political project, which will bring ‘well being and relieve poverty,’ overrules the rights of nature.”
Yet even as Ecuadoran President Correa embraces the extractive economic model of development, the inclusion of the rights of nature in a national constitution sets inspiring and revolutionary precedent. If history is any indicator, Ecuadorians will successfully fight for the Rights of Nature, with or without their president.

Update by Cyril Mychalejko
When Ecuadorians drafted and passed a new constitution, which gave nature inalienable rights, the US media largely ignored this historic development. In the case of the Los Angeles Times, one of the few mainstream outlets to cover the story, the newspaper’s editorial board trivialized the development (“Putting Nature in Ecuador’s Constitution,” September 2, 2008) by suggesting it sounded “like a stunt by the San Francisco City Council” and that it seemed “crazy.”

“As ecological systems around the world collapse, we need to fundamentally change our relationship with nature. This requires changes in both law and culture, and ultimately our behavior as part of nature,” said Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Defense Fund, who is disappointed in how the US media largely ignored the story.

In Ecuador, at the time of the constitutional vote, the optimism over how the “Rights of Nature” clauses would translate into policy was guarded.
“As exciting as these developments are, it was also inevitable that the people in power would, and will, find ways to circumvent, undermine, and ignore those rights,” said Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag.

According to Zorrilla, a major disappointment has been President Rafael Correa’s new mining law.

“The law takes rights-to-nature loopholes and widens them so that giant dirt movers could easily drive through them,” said Zorrilla, who has been working with communities of Ecuador’s Intag region to resist mining and promote sustainable development. “To mention a couple of examples, the law does not prohibit large-scale mining in habitats harboring endangered species, nor the dumping of heavy metals in rivers and streams.”

Indigenous leaders responded by filing a lawsuit before Ecuador’s Constitutional Court in March 2009, seeking to overturn the mining law, which they believe is unconstitutional. Article 1 of the “Rights of Nature” clauses states: “Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.”

Regardless of the ongoing struggles to ensure that the true meaning and scope of the constitution is upheld, Dr. Mario Melo, a lawyer specializing in Environmental Law and Human Rights and an advisor to Fundación Pachamama-Ecuador, believes that the nature clauses which reflect the traditions of indigenous peoples could offer a path to an ecologically sustainable future.
“I consider that the recognition of the ‘Rights to Nature’ as a progress on a global scale and one that deserves to be globally broadcast and commented on as a contribution from Ecuador towards the search of new ways of facing the environmental crisis due to climate change.”

The struggles of Ecuadorian social movements and the Ecuadorian government to uphold the “Rights of Nature” and to create a new development model that places human beings as interdependent parts of nature, rather than dominant exploiters of nature, is something we should continue to monitor and learn from.

The post 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature appeared first on Project Censored.

Dissindentvoice.org, Black Star News, and San Francisco Bay View, March 6, 2009
Title: “Africom’s Covert War in Sudan”
Author: Keith Harmon Snow

Michelcollon.info, April 1, 2009
Title: “The Darfur crisis: blood, hunger and oil”
Author: Mohamed Hassan interview with Grégoire Lalieu and Michel Collon

Student Researcher: Curtis Harrison
Faculty Evaluator: Keith Gouveia J.D.
Sonoma State University

The United States promoted the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) indictment of Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes in Darfur, in order to justify continuing Western exploitation and military interventions in the resource-rich region.

“America is an opportunist country,” explains Sudanese Ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad. “They want to use the ICC without being a party to it.” In effect, he said, US soldiers can have immunity, but not the president of Sudan.

At a UN press conference, the ambassador also challenged reporters to show him any photographs or film footage from Darfur that would equal the destruction of human lives and homes in Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan. “Did anybody ask who is accountable for this damage and destruction?”

Asked why Sudan was being singled out, the Sudanese envoy said Western nations are eyeing Sudan’s newly discovered oil riches.
Western nations have been marginalized in the region, in terms of both oil exploration and arms supplies, by China, which has in recent years become one of Sudan’s closest political, economic and military allies. Mohamad explains that the US, UK and France, “harbor a desire to revive their colonial dreams in Sudan.”

Keith Harmon Snow warns, “It is difficult to make sense of the war in Darfur —especially when people see it as a one-sided “genocide” of Arabs against blacks that is being committed by the Bashir ‘regime’—but such is the establishment propaganda. The real story is much more expansive, more complex, and it revolves around . . . deeper geopolitical realities.”

Michele Colon explains that when the British Empire invaded and colonized Egypt in 1898, Sudan, by extension, became an Anglo-Egyptian colony. As in other African colonies, Great Britain applied the “divide-and-rule” policy. Sudan was divided into two parts. In the north they kept Arabic as the official language and Islam as religion. In the south, the English language was imposed and missionaries converted people to Christianity.  There was no trade between the two areas. The British imported Greek and Armenian minorities to create a buffer zone. Great Britain also imposed a modern economic system that we could call capitalism. They built one train line to connect Egypt and Sudan and another to connect Khartoum to Port Sudan. These looting lines were used to siphon resources from Sudan into Great Britain and to be sold on the international market. Khartoum became an economically dynamic center of colonial activity.

This imposed division of Sudan and the choice of Khartoum as its economic center led to a series of civil wars.

When Sudan gained independence in 1956, there were still no relations between the two parts of the country. The first civil war was sparked by Southern Sudan’s demand for an equitable share of the control and wealth of the country, which was still concentrated in Khartoum. When in 1978 Chevron discovered important oil fields in Southern Sudan, a second civil war broke out as Northern Sudan sought control of those revenues.

Relationships soured between US and Sudan as Chevron’s motives in the region conflicted with those of the new Khartoum-based president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir.
In this setting, Colon notes, with Sudanese oil slipping away from American interests, China came in, offering to buy raw minerals and oil from Sudan at international market prices. Whereas Africa used to be the private hunting grounds of the West, China now competes for domination of the rich African continent.

The Western agenda in Darfur, Sudan is to win back control of natural resources by weakening the Arab government and establishing a more “friendly” government that will accommodate the corporate interests of the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Israel.

The ICC was used in the strategy to turn world opinion against al-Bashir and the government of Sudan, and to further divide and destabilize the region. The legitimacy of the court is being questioned as it shows itself to be a tool of Western hegemony.

Following on the heels of the announcement that the ICC handed down seven war crimes charges against al-Bashir, a story broadcast into every American living room by day’s end, President al-Bashir ordered the expulsion of ten international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were operating in Darfur under the veneer of humanitarian aid.

Snow points out that this expulsion was used to further ramp up Western public demand for military intervention. “Mainstream broadcasters expressed moral outrage and complained that ‘hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees will now be subjected to massive unassisted suffering’—as opposed to the assisted suffering they previously faced,” Snow continues, “but they never ask with any serious and honest zeal, why and how the displaced persons and refugees came to be displaced to begin with. Neither do they ask about all the money, intelligence sharing, deal making, and collaboration [between many “humanitarian” NGOs and] private or governmental military agencies.”

What is not reported in English-speaking press is that the US had just stepped up its ongoing war for control of Sudan. There are US Special Forces on the ground throughout the region, and the big questions are, 1) How many of the killings are being committed by US proxy forces and blamed on al-Bashir and the government of Sudan? And 2) Who funds, arms and trains the rebel insurgents?
Colon concludes that while the Western strategy is to magnify regional conflicts in order to mobilize international opinion and destabilize the Sudanese regime, “the truth is that if Khartoum were to stop dealing with China, the US would not mention Darfur again.”

Update by Keith Harmon Snow

How do you whitewash a whitewash? Having manufactured the massive body of propaganda needed to persuade the English and Hebrew speaking world that an unadulterated genocide is occurring in Darfur, Sudan, committed by the heavily armed Arab Government of Sudan—and its ‘Janjaweed’ militias—against an unarmed civilian population of black Africans; having inflated death tolls and exaggerated the levels of violence (even as violence and death tolls are diminishing or nonexistent); having masked all military involvement of Western countries behind the moral imperatives of altruistic western charity and aid (our self-less Judeo-Christian dedication to humanitarian action); having duped millions of people into following your charade by throwing money at them, hidden behind glossy brochures, congressional lobbies and vested-interest advertorials; having organized good-intentioned people into a ‘grassroots’ collective falsely equated with the Apartheid movement; and having been discovered to be a massive body of deceptions, mischaracterizations, selective facts and outright lies, where do we go from here?

The brief exposé “AFRICOM’S Covert War in Sudan” merely scratched the surface of the massive body of ‘Save Darfur’ propaganda, one of the false narratives created by the Empire to obliterate its culpability in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. It has been completely ignored by the establishment press, and receives equally indifferent, or even hostile, treatment from the left liberal ‘progressive’ press.
Indeed, there is no doubt that genocide has occurred in Sudan, be it Darfur or Kordofan or the mountains of Juba. But genocide is concomitant with the imperial enterprise all over Africa, and all over the world, and that is the political economy of genocide.

For some excellent news coverage and exposés of the establishment’s false narratives on Sudan, or other places, see the work of Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon in Black Agenda Report (e.g. Dixon: “Darfur “Genocide” Lies Unraveling—Only 1,500 Darfuris Died in 2008, Says African Union,” June 24, 2009); also look to editor Milton Alimadi at Black Star News (see, e.g. Amii Omara-Otunu, “Western Humanitarianism or Neo-Slavery,” November 7, 2007; or Alimadi, “U.S. Illegally Trained Uganda on Torture,” April 19, 2009; or keith harmon snow, “The U.S. and Genocide of Acholi,” July 5, 2007).
The true grassroots movements to help Sudan, Uganda and Congo can be supported through the non-government organizations Friends of the Congo (.org), Campaign to End Genocide in Uganda Now (http://www.CEGUN.org), and UNIGHT For the Children of Uganda (ww.unight.org).

One of the final war crimes of George W. Bush was his order to the Pentagon to immediately airlift military equipment to Rwanda, destined for Darfur, to the genocidal government of Paul Kagame, one of the protagonists destabilizing Congo and Sudan. Also backing the Rwandan Defense Forces and Ugandan People’s Defense Forces covert operations in Sudan, the Obama Administration has escalated military involvement in all frontline states: Chad, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia. Meanwhile, all the foreign-backed rebel groups in Darfur recruit and deploy child soldiers, with some 6,000 armed children in Darfur and 8,000 in Sudan.

Weapons shipped by Israelis, including radioactive shells, were not the first to be sent illegally through Kenya—most weapons shipments cross the Kenya-Uganda border at night—but the government of Kenya arrested one official who spoke freely about their true destination (Africa Research Bulletin, Vol. 46, No. 1). Washington was quick to point out that “it may not be illegal for Kenya to provide weapons to Sudan”—in violation of the international arms embargo—and the Pentagon continues to fortify South Sudan in advance of its scheduled ‘independence’ (2012), while South Sudan’s de facto ‘president,’ General Salva Kiir Mayardit, has an open-door in Washington (Africa Research Bulletin, Vol. 46, No. 1). The bulk of South Sudan’s 2008 budget ($US 2.5 billion), involving huge USAID and other ‘aid’ donors, was spent on weapons. And the International Crises Group, and its clones—ENOUGH! and Resolve Uganda and Raise Hope for Congo—are all talking about peace, but peddling war (see Milton Alimadi, “Resolve, Enough! So Called Peace Organizations Promote War in Uganda,” Black Star News, June 17, 2009,

Keith Harmon Snow is the 2009 Regent’s Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work outside of academia contesting official narratives on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, while also working as a genocide investigator for the United Nations and other bodies. He is also a past and present (2009) Project Censored award winner. His work can be found through his website, http://www.allthingspass.com.

The post 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan appeared first on Project Censored.

Upside Down World, June 25, 2008
Title: “Bush Administration Accused of Withholding ‘Lifesaving’ Aid to Haiti”
Author: Cyril Mychalejko

Upside Down World, August 4, 2008
Title: “RFK Center Releases Documents Outlining US Actions to Block Life-saving Funds to Haiti”
Authors: RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights

Student Researchers: Elizabeth Vortman, Leora Johnson, and Rob Hunter
Faculty Evaluators: Karen Grady, PhD and Sasha Von Meier, PhD
Sonoma State University

The US government plans to expropriate and demolish the homes of hundreds of Haitians in the shantytown of Cité Soleil to expand the occupying UN force’s military base. The US government contractor DynCorp, a quasi-official arm of the Pentagon and the CIA, is responsible for the base expansion. The base will house the soldiers of the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH). Cité Soleil is the most bullet-ridden battleground of the foreign military occupation, which began after US Special Forces kidnapped and exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on February 29, 2004. Citizens have since been victimized by recurring massacres at the hands of MINUSTAH.

DynCorp’s $5 million contracts include expansion of the principal base, the rebuilding of the Cité Soleil police station and two other militarized outposts, as well as training support and procurement of equipment.

According to Cité Soleil mayor Charles Joseph and a DynCorp foreman at the site, the State Department’s US Agency for International Development (USAID) provides funding for the base expansion—a very unorthodox use of development aid.

Lawyer Evel Fanfan, the president of the Association of University Graduates Motivatd For A Haiti With Rights (AUMOHD), says that about 155 buildings would be razed as the base expansion moves forward. As of March 2009, eighty homes have been demolished. Most of the buildings targeted are homes, but one is a church.

“They started working without saying a word to the people living there,” Fanfan said. “The authorities have not told them what is being done, if they will be relocated, how much they will be compensated or even if they will be compensated.”

Alarmed residents of the area formed the Committee for Houses Being Demolished (KODEL), which contacted AUMOHD. Fanfan put out a press release and KODEL held a press conference.
“MINUSTAH soldiers came to our press conference and told us to get a lawyer to talk to the American Embassy because the American Embassy is responsible for the work,” said Pastor assistant, Eddy Michel.

“Legally, the Haitian government has not authorized anybody to do anything,” said Fanfan. “The Cité Soleil mayor, Charles Joseph, supposedly authorized the construction, but there is no paper, no decree, no order which authorizes it.”

On March 25, 2009 US Ambassador to Haiti, Janet Sanderson, was joined by the head of MINUSTAH, Hedi Annabi, in a ceremony to inaugurate the newly overhauled base, which will house thirty-two Haitian policemen, including a specialized anti-riot counter-insurgency unit, as well as a larger number of UN troops.

A March 31, 2008 a DynCorp press release explained. “Under the Haiti Stabilization Initiative task order, DynCorp International will provide training support for up to 444 Haitian National Police. The task order includes DynCorp International procurement of the Haitian police force’s basic and specialized non-lethal equipment, vehicles and communications equipment. The value of this work is $3 million. DynCorp International has also been tasked to refurbish the main police station in Cité Soleil. This station will function as the primary location for this new specialized unit. The refurbishment work will be more than $600,000.”

Related evidence of US tampering with Haiti’s sovereignty and democratic processes surfaced on June 23, 2008, when human rights groups, Zamni Lasante (Partners in Health’s flagship program in Haiti), the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights (RFK Center) released a report revealing the Bush administration’s blocking of “potentially lifesaving” aid to Haiti in order to meddle in the impoverished nation’s political affairs.

In addition to being the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti also has some of the worst water in the world, ranking last in the Water Poverty Index.

The RFK Center released internal US Treasury Department documents on August 4, 2008, exposing politically motivated actions by the US government to stop the dispersal of $146 million in loans that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved for Haiti. The IDB originally approved the loans in July 1998, including $54 million for urgently needed water and sanitation projects.

However, documents show that IDB and US Department of Treasury staff sought ways to tie the loans’ release to unrelated political conditions that US leaders wanted the Haitian government to comply with. This intervention was in direct violation of the IDB’s charter, which bars the Bank from basing decisions upon the political affairs of member states.

“After several years of investigating the withholding of these loans, we now have clear and detailed evidence of egregious intervention by the US government and the IDB to stop life-saving funds to Haiti,” said Monika Kalra Varma, Director of the RFK Center. “With their transgressions now public, they must heed the call for monitoring and transparency. We urge them to implement the necessary oversight mechanisms to prevent a reoccurrence of behind-the-scenes malfeasance, and above all, to fulfill their obligations to the Haitian people.”

Update by Cyril Mychalejkou
When the Bush administration withheld aid to Haiti intended to fund water and sanitation projects designed to improve “the quality of life—particularly for women and children—and to reduc[e] incidence of disease and child mortality,” it did so in a country that according to Washington DC-based International Action, is where “water is the leading cause of infant mortality and illness in children . . . Haiti now has the highest infant mortality rate in the western hemisphere . . . [and] more than half of all deaths in Haiti were due to water-borne gastro-intestinal diseases.”

Despite the report released in June by the RFK Center which labeled the action as “one of the most egregious examples of malfeasance by the United States in recent years,” and the internal US Treasury Department documents released in August that prove the blocking of the loan was politically motivated, there was a virtual media blackout of the findings. The New York Times published a 487-word article (“Rights Groups Assail US for Withholding Aid to Haiti, Citing Political Motives,” June 24, 2008) covering the release of the report, but it never followed up. And despite admitting that the Bush administration was displeased with former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and that President Bush encouraged the coup that removed Aristide from office in 2004, the Times was either unable to, or refused to, recognize that the blocking of aid may have been a deliberate action to create a climate that would cause political and social unrest—conditions that could encourage parts of the Haitian population to acquiesce to an overthrow of their democratically-elected government. But this was something Jeffrey Sachs, former advisor to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, recognized. In an article in the Los Angeles Times (“From His First Day in Office, Bush Was Ousting Aristide,” March 4, 2004) Sachs wrote, “US officials surely knew that the aid embargo would mean a balance-of-payments crisis, a rise in inflation and a collapse of living standards, all of which fed the rebellion.”1

The fact that the Bush administration may have caused the deaths of thousands of Haitians by blocking aid for cynical and self-interested political purposes was not a story worthy of coverage by the US mainstream media. Neither was the Bush administration’s role in the violent coup that removed President Aristide, or the fact that selectively rewarding or withholding aid is used as a foreign policy tool in order to influence, destabilize and overthrow governments. But there are media outlets and organizations readers can turn to in order to follow developments like these as they happen. For more information on

Haiti and Latin America, see:
http://www.UpsdideDownWorld.org
http://www.RFKcenter.org
http://www.Haitianalysis.org
http://www.Nacla.org
http://www.haitiliberte.com
http://www.rightsaction.org
http://www.zcommunications.org

1. Dan Beeton, “What the World Bank and IDB Owe Haiti,” Global Policy Forum, July 25, 2006.

Update by Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights
RFK Center and Zamni Lasante’s investigation published in Upside Down World on August 26, 2008 provides new insight into the role of US officials in stalling loans destined to Haiti. The article contains an overview of documents released by the United States government, after a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights (RFK Center) and Zanmi Lasante (ZL).  This FOIA request sought to expose the actions of officials at the United States Treasury Department and the Inter American Development Bank to illegally block potentially life-saving social sector loans to Haiti.  The public release of the documents marked the end of a years-long battle to expose the United States government’s role.

However, it also marked the beginning of the call for accountability.  This article and the related report published by RFK Center and ZL, along with the Center for Justice & Human Rights at the NYU School of Law and Partners In Health, brought a renewed level of awareness of this issue among non-governmental organizations, the Haitian diaspora, and officials in the Governments of Haiti and the United States. This summer, the report will be released in Haiti in both Kreyol and French.

The groundbreaking report, “Wòch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti,” examines the FOIA documents and the impact of the behind-the-scene actions they detail as well as providing an account of the human costs of these actions and analyzing whether human rights were violated. This report, including the FOIA analysis, was profiled by the New York Times, Miami Herald, and other major media.

Since the release of this report, members of Congress have begun to investigate possible malfeasance around the loans and explore policy solutions to prevent it from happening again.  The experience and information gained in writing the report and advocating for accountability in this instance has assisted RFK Center in developing wider advocacy efforts regarding foreign assistance reform and the human rights-based argument for donor accountability.

Despite the article and report, the people of Haiti continue to suffer due to actions taken by the United States, through the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).  The community of Port-de-Paix, first scheduled to receive funds from these loans as early as 2001, still awaits the rehabilitation of its public water system.  The delays in disbursement added a new set of obstacles to the existing hurdles faced by development projects in Haiti.  The lasting impact of the US interference with the loans is felt most by the young children in Haiti, as they continue to survive without access to safe, sufficient and clean water.  However, the release of the FOIA documents and report has created a constructive space for dialogue with the IDB.  In the time since the report was released, the IDB in Port-au-Prince has finally and has worked hard to implement the water projects without further delay.  While progress on the ground is slow, steps taken since the release of the report finally show signs that water will one day come to Port-de-Paix, and hopefully other parts of Haiti which have sought these resources since 2001.

For more information, see:
Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights: http://www.rfkcenter.org/
Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante:  http://www.pih.org/where/Haiti/Haiti.html
Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU Law School:
http://www.chrgj.org
Or read the entire report at: http://www.rfkcenter.org/files/080730_Haiti RighttoWater_FINAL.pdf.

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