AlterNet Special

AlterNet: What Unites Iraqis: Blocking Western
Petroleum Companies From Seizing Control of Their Oil

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on August 9, 2007

If passed, the Bush administration's long-sought "hydrocarbons framework" law would give Big Oil access to Iraq's vast energy reserves on the most advantageous terms and with virtually no regulation. Meanwhile, a parallel law carving up the country’s oil revenues threatens to set off a fresh wave of conflict in the shell-shocked country.

Subhi al-Badri, head of the Iraqi Federation of Union Councils, said last month that the "law is a bomb that may kill everyone." Iraq's oil "does not belong to any certain side," he said, "it belongs to all future generations." But Washington continues to push that bomb onto the Iraqi people, calling it a vital benchmark on the road to a fully sovereign Iraq. Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio accused his own party of "promoting" President Bush's effort to privatize Iraq's oil "under the guise of a reconciliation program."

As is the norm, nobody bothered to ask Iraqis what they thought of the controversy until recently, when a coalition of NGOs and other civil society groups commissioned a poll (PDF) to gauge Iraqis' reaction to the proposed legislation. It found that Iraqis from all ethnic and sectarian groups and across the political spectrum oppose the principles enshrined in the laws. Considering the multiethnic bloodbath we've witnessed over the past four years, it's an impressive display of Iraqi solidarity.

The package of oil laws represent one of the clearest examples of a dynamic that's fueled much of the country's political instability but is rarely discussed in the commercial media. While the war's advocates continue to sell the occupation of Iraq as part of a grand scheme to democratize the region, anything resembling true Iraqi democracy is in fact a tremendous threat to U.S. interests. The law, after all, was not designed with Iraqis' prosperity in mind; plans for throwing the country's oil sector open to (almost) unregulated foreign investment were hashed out by a State Department working group that included major players from the oil industry long before the planning for the invasion itself. These plans were discussed in the White House (under the guidance of Dick Cheney) before that - even before the attacks of 9/11.

The framework law - from what we know from a series of leaked drafts - will hand over effective control of as much as 80 percent of the country's oil wealth to foreign firms with minimal state participation. According to an analysis by the oil watchdog group Platform, Iraq stands to lose tens of billions of dollars in potential revenues under the contract terms being considered.

The administration claims that offering such lucrative terms is necessary given the dire need for investment in Iraq's war-torn oil infrastructure, but those investments could just as easily be made out of Iraq's existing operating budget or financed through loans - despite the chaos on the ground, Iraq's massive energy reserves would be more than enough collateral for even the strictest lenders.

So while most oil-producing states are moving toward more state control of their energy sectors - according to the Washington Post, "about 77 percent of the world's 1.1 trillion barrels in proven oil reserves is controlled by governments that significantly restrict access to international companies" - Iraqi lawmakers are under enormous pressure to go in the opposite direction. (See here for a detailed critique of the framework law.)

It should come as no surprise that Iraqis overwhelmingly reject this arrangement. According to the poll of 2,200 Iraqis released this week, almost two-thirds of Iraqis said they would prefer "Iraq's oil to be developed and produced by Iraqi state-owned companies" over foreign companies. Less than a third favored foreign control - less than the number who expressed a "strong preference" for the sector to remain under state control.

The findings cut across the divisions that have haunted the post-war occupation: 52 percent of Kurds, 62 percent of Sunni Arabs and 66 percent of Shia Arabs favored state control. Significant majorities in every metropolitan area and every region of the divided country agreed.

Opposition to the privatization scheme that U.S. lawmakers have pushed for with such zeal is reflected, too, in the Iraqi parliament, where a growing number of lawmakers have come out in opposition to the oil laws.

So, too have many experts in the field, including some of the technocrats who originally drafted the laws. Tariq Shafiq, one of the co-authors of the original version of the legislation, told UPI's Ben Lando that "the version penned by oil experts has been compromised by politics," and that he "no longer wants it approved." Farouk al-Qassem, another expert who worked on the original draft, came out against it earlier. "I think really the majority of the oil technocrats are against it," Shafiq told Lando.

There's evidence to support that statement; last month, more than 100 Iraqi oil experts, economists and legal scholars criticized the proposed legislation and urged the Iraqi parliament to put it on hold.

The most vocal opposition to the oil framework has come from Iraq's influential oil workers' unions. Hassan Jumaa Awaad, president of the Iraqi Oil Workers union, called the proposed hydrocarbon laws "more political than economic" and "unbalanced and incoherent," and said they threatened "to set governorate against governorate and region against region." Iraq's oil unions have threatened to "mutiny" if the law is passed as drafted.

In favor of the laws are the multinational energy companies who stand to gain tens of billions more profits in Iraq than they could expect from any other major oil producer's reserves. They're supported by Iraqi separatists - especially Shias in the South and Northern Kurds - who want control over the country's oil to rest in the hands of the regional authorities they dominate. They include Iraq's prime minister, Nouri Al-Maliki, and its president, Jalal Talabani.

Faced with such broad and intense opposition to a set of laws that were effectively crafted in Washington, London and Houston, the Iraqi government and the U.S. authorities in Baghdad have kept Iraqis in the dark over the details of the proposed legislation, brought all manner of pressure on lawmakers and, when that failed, used heavy-handed coercion to move the legislation forward.

According to the poll released this week, more than three out of four Iraqis - including nine of 10 Sunni Arabs - say "the level of information provided by the Iraqi government on this law" was not adequate for them to "feel informed" about the issue. Only 4 percent of Iraqis feel they've been given "totally adequate" information about the oil law.

But enough people did learn of the law and specifically its call for the use of "Production Service Agreements" (PSAs) - the onerous contract form favored by the United States and Big Oil - to elicit outrage among the Iraqi people. The Iraqi regime responded by renaming the long-term contracts "Exploration and Risk Contracts" (ERCs). According to Hands Off Iraqi Oil, a coalition of civil society groups, ERCs are "the equivalent of PSAs under a different name."

It's not just Iraqi citizens who have been kept in the dark; Raed Jarrar, an Iraq analyst with the American Friends Service Committee (and my frequent writing partner), has called Iraqi lawmakers to get a reaction to the draft legislation, only to be asked if he would send them a copy to review. According to Greg Muttit, an analyst with Platform, by the time Iraq's parliamentarians saw their first draft of the oil law, it had already been reviewed and commented on by U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, who "arranged" for nine major oil companies, including Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips, to "comment on the draft."

The regime in Baghdad, under pressure from Washington, has responded to opposition to the law in a profoundly undemocratic fashion. In May, Hassan Al-Shammari, the head of Al-Fadhila bloc in the Iraqi parliament, told AlterNet: "We're afraid the U.S. will make us pass this new oil law through intimidation and threatening. We don't want it to pass, and we know it'll make things worse, but we're afraid to rise up and block it, because we don't want to be bombed and arrested the next day." Armed Iraqi troops have faced down peaceful strikes called by the unions and arrested labor leaders who oppose the legislation. Last week, the Iraqi oil ministry directed "its agencies and departments not to deal with the country's oil unions" at all.

At this point, progress on the oil laws is stalled in Baghdad. The Kurds this week passed their own legislation, setting up what has the potential to become a whole new front in Iraq's multifaceted civil conflict. Senior Kurdish officials - most of whom are separatists - have vowed to block any legislation that doesn't include extensive regional autonomy over oil contracting, an issue opposed by most Iraqis and a serious problem for Iraqi nationalists.

Ultimately, the turmoil around Iraq's oil is a result of commercial interests being placed before the interests of the Iraqi people by an administration that routinely privileges its "free-market" ideology over common sense. Historians will no doubt note the great irony of Iraq's proposed oil law: What is considered a prerequisite for stability in Washington in fact threatens to tear the country further apart.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/59318/

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The Last Days of American Democracy?

By James Harris and Joshua Scheer, Truthdig
Posted on August 9, 2007

James Harris: On the phone we are talking to Elliot Cohen, the author of The Last Days of Democracy. Elliot, let's start with your theory. For the most part, you're saying that our government in the United States is coming to an end. And that we are headed toward a dictatorship, toward authoritarian rule. The idea that we will one day be like Nazi Germany was … is hard for a lot of Americans to swallow. Why do you believe it to be true?

Elliot Cohen: We are not saying things off the top of our heads; we do have the operations and secret prison camps in Europe, we torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. This regarding the Geneva Conventions and the NSA spying programs warrantlessly. Bush is issuing signing statements, which is tantamount to nullifying congressional lawmaking powers. Cancellation of habeas corpus, enabling individuals as enemy combatants just by virtue of whether the president deems that hostile to U.S. interests. I mean this goes on and on for individual facts as to why one might say that America is becoming a dictatorship. And as far as the issues of the media and how the media is being controlled, I think there's many insiders who admit the same facts that I've stated, in fact, they come from such - I mean, the issue here is not that the media is somehow an ideologue in cahoots with the government for ideological purposes. It's rather that the media is a moneymaking machine and is being controlled by the purse-strings - through the government.

Josh Scheer: Now, aren't there good people in the media who are trying to do something? Are they wimpy? Or are they not speaking loud enough? What do you think is the cause of the problem with the media?

Cohen: Well, the cause of the problem isn't the good journalists who are in the trenches and risking their lives to get out stories. They're still there. What happens is when the news is edited, what facts that are damaging to government, the censorship kicks in. And the stories just don't get out there from the mainstream. And, so, it's not that it is a sense of wimpiness of individuals who are risking their lives. I think there needs to be a realization, however, that is it really worth risking your life when the story is going to be cut, edited, censored, in a way that the news isn't going to get out. And so it's not at the lower levels of journalists in the trenches; it's the higher levels of editorship and ownership where - I mean there's a lot of reasons for this. First of all, when you look at the media and its interests, its bottom line is its major interests. And how does it attain its bottom line? Well, it does it through military contracts, for instance. Because these companies are not just newsrooms, they are giant conglomerates.

Take, for interest, General Electric. General Electric has interests in producing jet engines for military contracts with Lockheed Martin. And the war in Iraq is something that builds up these revenues, and when it comes to advancing the media ownership, how many cross-ownership markets and how far can you advance your national market? Well the FCC is the one that grants those wishes and … so there's lots of reasons why, not withstanding tax incentives and other little government perks, why the media would be beholden, you know, to the politicians who hold the reins of government. And when you have such an aggressive government as we do, which is ideological and has this desire to control and amass great power, then you have really a recipe for dictatorship. And that's what we have: We don't have an independent Fourth Estate doing its job. And we have problems there.

Scheer: That's what I'm talking about. When I say wimpy, I don't mean obviously the person in Iraq trying to cover for Indymedia. I'm talking about those people in power who are editors, who are publishers, who are the owners, shouldn't they have some kind of standard, because they are the Fourth Estate, speaking truth to power ... ?

Cohen: The way things are going is they're thinking as corporate executives and not journalists. They're thinking about their obligations to their shareholders; they're thinking about their bottom line. And that kind of thinking is incompatible with the Fourth Estate that's independent of government - not when you're in business with the government. One of the major problems as far as the media is concerned is media consolidation and these large corporations that control the media being not these good journalists of the Fourth Estate, but rather simply businessmen trying to make a profit.

Harris: I was reading something you said about the Internet and of course it's at least in one respect the ability of alternative press to be heard and seen by others who wouldn't normally see it. You say the regulations we're seeing right now are just one example of the way we are being stripped of our democracy, our, at least an access to continuing democracy. Explain that.

Cohen: The Internet is really a great bastion of democracy. If we didn't have the Internet we wouldn't even know about the Downing Street Memos, for example. Because the mainstream didn't cover it. And so what we're up against is, if we can hold on to the Internet, then we still have a source of a democratic press. But the problem is, it's being encroached upon just like mainstream media and it's in danger of becoming really an arm of these large corporations who are now dominating the Internet. And this started in 2000, well, well before. But in 2005 there was the landmark decision by the Supreme Court, which was the Brand X decision, where the court essentially turned over the pipes that send the information down the Internet to these large corporations.

It basically said that they own the conduit for the Internet. The Supreme Court ruled that the Internet is like a cable TV station and can be owned and can be operated like such. For instance, Fox broadcasts its program and you have no control - we have no control over what it broadcasts. Well, essentially, this is the way the Internet is now conceived, legally. They can send and control, you know, send things down and control the content. And if they can control the conduit, they can control the content of the Internet pipes. And even wireless there are these fights to try to hold on to control of the Internet, and that's the first stage to do away with what's common carriage, which means that just like on a phone conversation, anybody can enter a phone conversation and use the phones.

Well, the Supreme Court said that that is no longer the case with the Internet. The Net's not going to be seen as a telecommunications system but rather it's going to be conceived as an information system just like CNN or Fox cable. And what that does is open up the door effectively for various modes of control, and one of the ways in which these large corporations like Comcast are trying to control the Internet right now is through setting up these tollbooths where they are instituting, or want to institute - and there's a lot of powerful lobbies in Congress to try to do this - they are trying to set up these tollbooths which will regulate how much, what kind of bandwidth different Internet sites can have, depending upon how much they are wiling to pay. So we have a pay-for-play system where the bandwidth will determine how quickly you connect then, and whether or not you end up spinning out in cyberspace versus reaching lots of people. And obviously those corporations with the deepest pockets are going to be able to have the best connectivity. What that means is money is going to control truth.

Harris: Why don't we hear about this legislation? Why don't we hear about these efforts to control the Internet, to control wireless? Is this part of the systematic effort you are talking about?

Cohen: Yes, I believe that that's the case. Just to preface this in 2007, I won the Project Censored award for my article on the corporate takeover of the Internet. And the reason why I did was because Project Censored thought that it was the most censored story of - it actually goes back to 2005 when the decision I mentioned, the Supreme Court decision, was made. It wasn't heard at all on the mainstream. And why not? Well, part of the main reason, one of the main reasons, is that these companies really don't want to blow their cover. I mean, you have all these large corporations having interconnected board members.

I mean, they have contracts with each other, they have relationships with each other. And if they don't want this news covered because it's dangerous to their prosperity, it won't be covered. That's part of it, but the other part of it is even more unsettling. And that's where we find the government really having an interest in this, and much has been said in the progressive media about the Project for the New American Century, PNAC, but one of the issues of PNAC that hasn't been broached that much is the problem of the Internet and how that keys into the ideology of PNAC. Basically, what PNAC wants to do is to control the Internet. And they have been very explicit about this and a report called "Rebuilding America's Defenses" in 2000 - they specifically address this, so I think something about the Project for the New American Century, what its genesis is, before I say something about -.

Harris: I think a lot of people aren't aware of it, but are becoming, so please help them. …

Cohen: Right, the Project for the New American Century was begun around '97 or '98 by a bunch of individuals who ultimately showed up as the officials of the Bush administration. These people like Dick Cheney and even Scooter Libby and [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Richard] Perle and so many others who are controlling the government right now [or were controlling the government]. It even included [Donald] Rumsfeld.

Scheer: Some of them should be in prison, or are in prison.

Cohen: These individuals are now calling the shots for the Bush administration. So we can understand, we can assume that the ideologies espoused by the Project for the New American Century are really the perspectives of the Bush administration. Because they control the Bush administration, including the vice president. And, one of the things, the main interest of the Project for the New American Century, was really to control, to use military might, to corporatize and control the world. I mean, in just plain English. They entertained the idea of taking over Iraq, whether or not Saddam Hussein presented a threat; they were very specific. It didn't really matter as long as they can get that area and establish a permanent base there, that's what they wanted.

One of the things regarding the Internet that they talked about was the Internet has elements in a global commerce politics and power play. And they said that "any nation," and this is a quote, "wishing to assert itself globally must take account of this other new global commerce." And then they went on and said it's an invaluable tool, they said, "that could provide," and this is a quote, "America's military and political leaders," let me emphasize political leaders, "an offensive," not just a defensive, "for disabling an adversary in a decisive manner." And then when they were talking about cyberspace that it maintains that the Defense Department must establish control and provide for the security for the Internet. Now, when you bring in the Defense Department controlling the Internet - tell me if I'm speculating here - is that a recipe for controlling the Internet?

Scheer: Is this a new phenomenon with the government trying to control people? Because it seems that governments have always tried to do that, or is this Bush administration, and this time that we are in, something unique and even further than the Nazis or the communists or the Americans in the '20s, the '30s, the '40s and the '50s. Is this something that we are seeing right now that is different than the typical government control of its people?

Cohen: Well, if you're talking about, let's say, how much control did the Clinton administration exert over the government versus the Bush administration; or if you're comparing it with the Nazis, that's a different story. I think there's a strong parallel between the ways the Nazis proceeded and the way Bush is proceeding. If you look at the distinction between, say, the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, there's also a difference. It's to some extent a difference in degree, and in some extent, to some extent, it is a difference in kind. The different in degree is the interest in dealing with the media and engaging in quid pro quo. Certainly, the Clinton administration, which in 1996 signed into law the Telecommunications Act , which gave more control over larger markets to the media, the mainstream - these large corporations - and helped to move along this corporate consolidation. You know, these large corporations gaining, getting larger and larger and controlling more and more of the media. So, I mean, when you have this small group of individual corporations controlling the media, there's less competition. Even though there are more stations, but, in that case, you know, I know you want to get away from the media, it's hard to do that here.

Scheer: Well, I didn't mean to get away from the media, but I meant that in terms of having a conversation about the New American Century and things like that, I know they go hand in hand. I was talking more about Nazis, not about their brutality but their control of the media, or in this country we had the Red Scare in the '20s and we had McCarthyism, we had the Cold War, where we used fear, we used the media, to kind of control the message.

Cohen: And that's where it comes in now, the difference, it certainly, as I mentioned, the Clinton administration wanted to control the media, as I mentioned. It was involved in that. It engaged in quid pro quo and so forth, but the difference here, and this is the difference in kind, I believe, is the ideology that the Bush administration has and that's this amassing of power and control, this global domination theme, and this is what it lives and breathes for. Control. And, so, when you have this voracious appetite for control and then you have the media set up to accommodate it, there is a difference here that's going on between what we've seen in America before. And it's the kind of control and desire for control that's analogous to what we saw in Nazi Germany. ... What's different about this case is that we have technology that we never had before. If Nixon had more than his little tape recorders, he could do a lot more than he did as well.

Scheer: Yeah, I understand. It's just interesting to look at, say, watch a movie, or read the book, "All the President's Men," and go "Nixon's pretty bad with wiretapping and in terms of election fraud, and corruption, and those types of things"; it seems that it kind of goes in a revolutionary cycle. I want to talk about hope because we had a conversation with somebody the other day and it was talking about how some people don't hope, and that even [I] have been a little cynical. And I want to talk about your book because at the end you have something called "What's Now, Compatriots," and you talk about what you can do as an average citizen, and you put in a selected media guide, even though Truthdig's not in there yet. ...

Harris: We need to talk to you about that.

Scheer: But, I want to know, does that mean you have hope? Do you have hope that this system can be changed or do you think that it's hopeless and we should just kind of cower and go away?

Cohen: Never cower. Never cower. It's not over until it's over, and right now we need to understand that that's where we're heading. And it's easy enough to say, "Well, you know it happened in [Nazi] Germany, but we're different." That's a very pompous attitude. As though Americans are somehow different than Germans. They're not. They're people. And if we don't watch it, this is where we're heading. Well, what do we do about it? There's thing we can do. Well, one thing is for the average person to make sure that they're informed: To stop relying on mainstream media as much as they do, and to get their information from independent media. Then really when you look at the survival of dictatorships, and whether they thrive or not. They thrive on keeping people ignorant. And if the masses of people are just ignorant and they don't take responsibility for their failure to know, then we aren't looking in the face of hopeless dictatorship; people need to wake up.

They need to start learning about what's going on and they need to say, "We're as mad as hell and we're not going to take it." They need to join activist movements like, for instance, Free Press, which is an organization that's been really doing a lot to try to counteract the taking-over of the free Internet and the destruction of Internet neutrality. And a lot of other causes about media ... [like] organizing massive letter-writings to Congress. People need to start thinking in terms of doing these sorts of things. Peaceful assemblies. And demonstrations. These are constitutional rights, and as long as we have these rights in our Constitution we should make sure that we see that through. These are things that we need to do. Educators should stop placating and looking for fair and balanced and start speaking out because there's danger here and every educator has an obligation to step up onto the plate as a vanguard of democracy.

The lawyers of this nation, including the American Bar Association, need to present a unified front against violations of the rule of law. They did that at one point where they denounced Bush's instituting signing statements to do away with the congressional lawmaking authority and they made it clear that it was illegal and unconstitutional. But we need to be more unified as educators as citizens. As journalists too. I think the journalists associations and the schools of journalism need to start making a unified stand that, you know, journalists need to be vanguards of democracy.

We need to get back the Fourth Estate, and we can't simply support these large corporations allowing this go down the tubes and that's exactly what's going on. I think we need to take the unified stand. Is it going to happen? Well, you know, people like us, you and your site and the things that I'm trying to do with the book and doing these kinds of interview are the things that more of us need to take seriously. And listen and learn. Is that going to work? Well, I think that we better do that. It's better than laying down and playing dead.

Scheer: Well, thank you. I just want to talk about Free Press because we have interviewed people from Free Press and it's not just a liberal-Democrat issue; it's not just a conservative issue. Because with Net neutrality the Christian Coalition, that's their new issue they've set for this next election for the next many years, so it's not just a one-sided issue; it's keeping a free press. Keeping the Internet free, we can all agree, is the thing for the citizen.

Harris: … [H]ere's a question, and Josh speaks to this as well. Elliot, you were talking about PNAC, the Project for the New American Century, and you're also talking about media and how it's been manipulated severely in the last seven years. We've seen the government exposed; we've see the government abuse, that power can be misused. Does this reveal a problem perhaps, a more insoluble one that our government is flawed? That the system that we abide by, the Republic, is flawed? And if so, what do we do about that fact?

Cohen: I think that after they've ransacked the Constitution and the balance of powers and the like as they've done, it really is flawed. They've set some dangerous precedents. Was the system intact when they came in? I think it was. But any system, any system has vulnerabilities. There's no system of government and no system of any activity or operation that's entirely invulnerable. I think we have a good system and if we can only get it back and start recognizing the rule of law in implementing it. I think what's happening is that they are getting away with so many things. I mean, they refused to recognize subpoenas, they evoke executive privilege even with the Tillman case; I mean, this is absurd. They've gone to such absurd lengths of just disregarding the rule of law that anybody, no matter how perfect your system was, if they weren't going to follow the rules then the system wouldn't work.

So I think what Congress needs to realize is just that. They have to take the powers that they do have, they have some powers that they can exercise, but they're not doing it. I think this is human error. I think it's with people who are in power right now and the people are trying to do something about it. There's where the wimpishness comes in. They're being … the Congress is being wimpish. They need to impeach Bush. They can do that. But they're not. And it's not the system's fault; it's their fault.

Harris: And isn't that a sad fact, though? You see [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi there; you see Sen. [Harry] Reid there. They all seem to be talking the talk but nobody is actually getting anything done. And I think that's the most upsetting part, as Dr. Cohen just said.

Scheer: As Dr. Cohen said, and previous with people writing letters to Congress, I think that as a citizenry, and I need to do more. I'm sure everyone could do a little more ... to let them know that we're pissed off. And I think that's why the election [outcome of 2006] happened. The Democrats should learn from that and, you know, any time you get a system that large obviously things are going to fall through the cracks, but they can certainly, they should be responsible with the election and how much the Democrats have raised more than the Republicans. They should learn that the citizenry is upset.

James Harris is a radio producer and filmmaker based in San Francisco.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/59308/

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Save Gas, Eat Slow Food

By Molly Schwartz and Donna Schaper, The Nation
Posted on August 9, 2007

This essay is by Donna Schaper. The video is by video artist Molly Schwartz.

It was early evening, I was really hungry and the only relief in sight was the Ramapo Travel Plaza on the New York State Thruway. I put gas in the car and went in to see what gas they had for me. I grew up before the Thruway went in and listened to nothing but my extended family's extended conversations about how the road would destroy upstate. Later in my life, as the contracts were let for which agribusiness would manage the food on the Thruway, I wrote an article about local food.

At the time I didn't know what the local food movement was, just that local restaurants, instead of franchises up and down the automotive spine of the state, might be a way to limit the damage. I proposed to the Thruway Commission that local owners put up locally owned restaurants at each exit. That would make driving more interesting and keep fast food from threatening the feast of life. I imagine pork and sauerkraut at Exit 19, arugula salad at Exit 20, etc. I got confirmation that this was a good idea last Wednesday night as I sought nourishment in Ramapo.

Anyway, searching for my meat in due season, I realized there are only two franchises at Ramapo. One is McDonald's and the other is Uno's, a pizza place. I settled on the pizza place, only to observe that the warming tray was dead empty. I practically wept as I asked the young woman behind the counter if there was any hope for one such as I to get a pizza. "Sure," she said, "I'll make it fresh for you." "You will! How long will that take?"

My thoughts went utopian and my stomach gurgled. I was both thrilled at the idea of slow food on the Thruway and distraught at waiting for a freshly made pizza. She took care of my gurgle and left my utopia alone. "One and a half minutes," she said. So it was that I entered my own country of ambivalence about food. I want it slow and I want it fast. I want it local and I want it cheap. Mostly, when it comes to food, I want it now. When we have it now, it tends to taste like that "fresh" pizza in Ramapo.

Its virtue was that it was warm. Its sin was that it was made of something that long ago was grain, the white flour and something long ago, the tomato, that was fruit. The cheese was no longer cheese and if the pepperoni ever was food, I'll be surprised. As I wolfed down my warm glob of chemicals, I thought about the sources of my food. In Florida the tomato pickers get a pittance a bushel. Nobody could possibly pay the migrant workers any more than that because otherwise I'd never get that round, warm, 800-calorie, nutritionally worthless globule for just $6.99. You have to add the truck and its gas, the middleman's middleman's middleman, the lawyers they hire to fight the migrants so they don't get more for picking the tomatoes.

Then there are advertising costs to make me want the pizza. The unionbusting lawyers who make sure the woman who made it fresh for me doesn't make too much money. Then there is the package, which is at least 11 percent of the product. They don't charge me for eating this stuff in the car while driving down the Thruway. That pleasure is free. The culture of fast food is amazingly conformist, boring, tasteless and unhealthy - and people think that the slow food movement is a "weird" idea. You figure.

I remember my church in Miami with more fondness than is probably legitimate. That doesn't mean I like everything about it. Because some New England Yankees founded the congregation in 1925, every year on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, there used to be a pilgrim festival. The whole congregation had pilgrim outfits and pilgrim hats. The women would sit on one side of the congregation and the men on the other, just like in the days of yore, 1,200 miles north. The minister would read long-winded proclamations. Tableaux of live pilgrims would be the backdrop on the altar. Someone carried a big musket he had brought down from Boston. He led the procession with his wife, who carried an old Bible in with the gun.

Someone, not me, suggested the second year I was there that we might do a different Thanksgiving celebration. I foolishly and wisely agreed. We might have people from every nation that had migrated to Miami stand and wear some form of native dress and read some work from their own culture. The first year we had eleven nationalities in tableaux - one Pilgrim, one Peruvian, a Cuban, a Mayan, a Russian, a Dominican, a Parisian, a Haitian, a Nicaraguan and a Mexican. It was incredibly beautiful and moving - and made its point about who we were as a congregation. One of the sweetest older ladies in the congregation came up to me afterward: "Please, please, please, don't tell me we have to eat their food too. It just won't be right." What we eat is full of cultural prohibitions and permissions. What we eat is either a Eucharistic feast or a human folly. What we eat is emotional. What we eat is who we are. When we eat bad food in cars on Thruways, that is who we are.

In the long series of conversations that followed this retabling of the tableaux, the word "right" was used way too often. "Right" is just another way of saying "purity code." Who is to say who eats right? When we say, "I hope we don't have to eat their food too," what we are saying is that we hope feast never comes. We hope Eucharist never comes. We hope against justice at the table and for the right ways of doing things.

What is feast eating? It is the following out of Genesis 2:15: "The Lord God took the human into the garden and told them to till it and keep it." One garden, one humanity, one table coming from one garden. Back to the garden is feast eating. Real eating is supposed to be feast eating with everyone at the table of origin. We are to retable the tableaux.

But something very strange has happened to food in the richest country of the world. We can get a bad tomato just about any time of day in any season. We eat out of paper bags and drink the magnificent beverage of coffee out of Styrofoam cups. While we are drinking the coffee, we worry about the possibility of nuclear war over oil. We eat alone. We eat while driving. We eat but there is nothing sacred or beautiful or slow about it. My own people come to meetings and leave half a foreign country's worth of paper and Styrofoam behind. We have our coffee hour with paper cups. Kids eat chicken fingers over and over again - and slow food has to organize as an (increasingly popular and fast-growing) international movement. Imagine having to organize politically for the right to eat slowly and well. The fast food economy has created a world in which we have to protect ourselves from it.

Fast is the enemy of feast. In this supposedly wonderful world, many of us no longer know how to eat, or sleep with the peace of a shepherd. Imagine giving up eating and sleeping in order to follow orders about how to eat and sleep. Remember, she falsely said, "I can make that for you fresh."

When we get real about food, we look like utopians to others. They make fun of us as silly and wide-eyed. One look at her pizza and one made fresh ought to take that argument straight to the landfill. Every interaction in good food is slow, whole, just; every interaction in fast food is fast, distorted, tasteless and unjust. Who is the utopian? And who the fool?

Video artist Molly Schwartz traces how far food travels from field to fork. And Donna Schaper offers a meditation on fast food and slow, in an essay from Grassroots Gardening: Rituals for Sustaining Activism, published by Nation Books.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/59301/

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Pharmaceuticals in Our Water Supply
Are Causing Bizarre Mutations to Wildlife

By Greg Peterson, E Magazine
Posted on August 9, 2007

From inter-sex fish in the Potomac River to frog mutations in Wisconsin, federal officials are spending this summer studying the effects of pharmaceuticals such as pain killers and depression medicine on the environment, because the drugs have turned up in America's drinking water.

The cumulative effect of trace amounts of pharmaceuticals and personal-care products in the water on humans isn't yet known, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking preventative measures. Pharmaceuticals have already been linked to behavioral and sexual mutations in fish, amphibians and birds, according to EPA studies.

Better sensors have revealed that trace amounts of pharmaceuticals, including narcotics, birth control, antidepressants and other controlled substances, are in the drinking water and in U.S. rivers, lakes and streams. The growing public debate on pharmaceuticals in water will heat up this summer as experts on both sideas of the issue try to convince the public that it's either much ado about nothing or another example of humans ignoring early warning signs such as deformed frogs - the amphibian considered the canary in the coal mine when it comes to water issues.

The EPA suspects that part of the problem is consumers flushing old and unwanted drugs down toilets or drains. Americans are taking more drugs than ever - especially the aging baby boomer generation. Pharmaceuticals were found in 80 percent of the samples taken during a U.S. Geological Survey and EPA study of 139 streams in 30 states. Many of America's wastewater treatment plants are not designed to remove pharmaceuticals and personal care products, the EPA says.

A 1999 (EPA and German) study of pharmaceutical and other personal-care products concluded the "undetectable effects on aquatic organisms are particularly worrisome because effects could accumulate so slowly that major change goes undetected until the cumulative level of these effects finally cascades to irreversible change - change that would otherwise be attributed to natural adaptation or ecologic succession."

Meanwhile, federal officials continue to study the human health effects of the pharmaceutical compounds found in water known as endocrine disruptors, including possible links to neurological problems in children and increased incidence of some cancers. Federal officials are investigating a wide range of fish health problems in Cheasapeake Bay and its watershed. Several studies of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers have revealed inter-sex fish, a wide range of "abnormalities in which both male and female characteristics are present within the same fish."

The abnormalities include nine male smallmouth bass from the Potomac River near Sharpsburg, Maryland (about 60 miles upstream from Washington) that developed female eggs inside their sex organs. Inter-sex bass were also found in a study three years earlier, after fish kills about 170 miles upstream in the South Branch of the Potomac in Hardy County, West Virginia.

The suspected causes include "previously banned compounds…such as DDT and chlordane, natural and anthropogenic hormones, herbicides, fungicides, industrial chemicals and an emerging group of compounds that may act as endocrine disruptors," according to a 2006 summary of the various studies prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey. Other studies have linked endocrine disruptors to possible cancer in humans.

A recent survey of "cancer in Hardy County, where some residents get drinking water from the South Branch, found rates of cancer of the liver, gallbladder, ovaries and uterus that were higher than the state average," according to the Washington Post.

Officials are investigating whether there is a link between the increased cancer rates, river water and altered fish including the possible connection to wastewater discharges containing trace pharmaceuticals. This is disconcerting to residents of metro Washington, D.C., because the Potomac River is the main source (75 percent) of drinking water for 3.6 million residents, including the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

Regulatory issues won't be tackled for years to come, but the EPA isn't waiting for more study results before taking action. The EPA is educating the public and funding pharmaceutical programs by concerned groups and state and local government agencies.

In the short term, numerous grassroots and government pharmaceutical collection projects have sprung up worldwide from police stations to pharmacies to church parking lots.

One of the larger efforts was held in April in northern Michigan. A coalition called the Earth Keepers opened 19 free drop-off sites over a 400-square-mile area, geographically the largest one-day pharmaceutical collection in U.S. history. Funded by the EPA, Thrivent Financial and others, the faith-based collection involved 400 volunteers from more than 140 churches and temples, university students, an American Indian tribe and two nonprofit environmental groups.

The nonprofit Superior Water-shed Partnership arranged the technical side of the collection including law enforcement officers and pharmacists at all collection sites because of strictly enforced federal laws governing controlled substances with po-tential for abuse like narcotic pain medicine.

"The Earth Keeper network is one of the most effective tools for addressing Great Lakes pollution," said Carl Lind-quist, director of the Superior Watershed Partnership. "The pharmaceutical collection was a proactive approach to a serious environmental issue that is just getting national attention."

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the American Pharmacists Association recently launched "SMARxT DisPOSAL," a public education project about pharmaceuticals and fish that includes a traveling awareness show, brochures and a website for consumers and health professionals. The campaign will visit select U.S. cities this fall and be expanded in 2008.

Studies show that pharmaceuticals in the environment break down fairly quickly but get replenished at an alarming rate because of increased American drug use. America's huge healthcare network is addressing the problem of improperly disposed pharmaceuticals by education and "green chemistry" - encouraging drug companies to develop medications that break down more quickly.

Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (H2E) held a pharmaceutical waste management summit in May for its members including 1,600 hospitals that run 4,000 clinics and long-term care facilities. Hazardous chemical incinerators are used by many hospitals to dispose of unused pharmaceuticals. Industry experts say these incinerators have scrubbers and are closely monitored, yet incineration of medical waste "is highly problematic" and other solutions are needed.

"Incinerators are not the solution, but we knew we had to get pharmaceuticals out of sewers because waste water treatment plants are not capturing it," says Laura Brannen, H2E executive director. Green chemistry and a careful reduction in the amount of pharmaceuticals used by hospitals are among the "lifecycle approach" to solutions that Brannen supports.

Hazardous chemical waste management is heavily regulated, but pharmaceutical cleanup hasn't kept pace, according to H2E. "The current EPA regulations were designed to handle 55 gallon drums of chemicals out of industries," Brannen says. "The EPA needs to reassess their regulations ... they [haven't] updated the list of hazardous chemicals in pharmaceuticals in over 20 years. We must address the source - using less and making what we do use as environmentally preferable as possible. If we are only dealing with the pharmaceutical waste at the back door we are going to be buried."

In communities without pharmaceutical collection programs, the EPA is also concerned about diversion - unused drugs being stolen out of trash cans. They recommend crushing pills or capsules and mixing the drugs with cat litter or coffee grounds. The recreational use of prescription medicines is now the second worst drug problem facing American teenagers, according to the White House Office of National Dug Control Policy.

The White House says 6.4 million Americans admit abusing prescription drugs and most say they got the pharmaceuticals from friends or relatives. Pharmaceutical collections are one of several tools being used to reduce the problem by 15 percent over three years.

"While EPA continues to research the effects of pharmaceuticals in water sources, one thing is clear: improper drug disposal is a prescription for environmental and societal concern," says EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson. "Following these new guidelines will protect our nation's waterways and keep pharmaceuticals out of the hands of potential abusers."

Editors: If you are interested in reprinting this article, please contact Featurewell at: featurewell@gmail.com/212-924-2283.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/59305/