Elsewhere Today 434
Aljazeera:
US welcomes Mahdi army freeze
THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2007
9:07 MECCA TIME, 6:07 GMT
The US military has welcomed an order given by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shia leader, to freeze his Mahdi army militia's activities following deadly clashes in southern Iraq.
"Any time someone in Iraq, especially a leader, wants to use non-violent methods to solve problems ... we encourage this," said spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Chris Garver.
"As always, the proof will be what we see on the street but we encourage any leader to work to end criminality ... end violence and seek non-violent methods to move Iraq forward," Garver said.
Al-Sadr suspended armed action by his Mahdi army to remove rogue elements, his aide said.
Hazim al-Araji, an aide to al-Sadr, read a statement from the Shia leader saying "we declare the freezing of Mahdi army without exception in order to rehabilitate it in a way that will safeguard its ideological image within a maximum period of six months starting from the day this statement is issued."
Asked if Wednesday's unexpected order meant no attacks on US troops, another senior aide who declined to be identified said: "All kinds of armed actions are to be frozen, without exception."
Test of authority
Al-Araji said the decision had been taken after 52 people were killed in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala in fighting between the Mahdi army and another Shia bloc - the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), whose armed wing controls much of the south.
On Thursday, Iraqi security forces arrested 72 fighters following the Karbala clashes, the defence ministry said.
A ministry statement said a number of weapons had also been confiscated during a search of homes across the southern city.
Analysts said al-Sadr's six-month order would be a test of his authority over the group, which is believed to have fragmented and, according to the US, has received funding, training and weapons from Iran.
Also on Wednesday, Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, said that fighters from the Mahdi army and the SIIC who were involved in the violence in Karbala had wanted to blow up the Imam Hussein shrine, one of the holiest to Shia Muslims.
"From our initial investigation, we found some evidence of who did this act ... the intention of this act was to storm into the shrine of Imam Hussein and blow it up," al-Maliki said from inside the shrine during a visit to Kerbala, 110 km south of Baghdad.
The Mahdi army denied the allegation.
While his ministers have left the cabinet, al-Sadr's political bloc holds 30 seats in parliament and is still part of the ruling Shia Alliance.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0F0F574C-7080-46E4-87AB-765B62535B73.htm
AllAfrica: Election Tensions
Could Help Or Hinder Democratic Process
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
29 August 2007
Freetown
The risk that Sierra Leone could again descend into the chaos and civil war of the 1990s remains unlikely ahead of the second round of presidential elections on 8 September, according to international officials - even after outgoing president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah threatened to impose a state of emergency following election-related riots in the main diamond town of Kono on 27 August and the stabbing of at least six people in Freetown.
"We are keeping a close eye on the situation but we do not anticipate things deteriorating significantly," head of the UN's Integrated Office in Sierra Leone Victor Angelo told IRIN on 28 August.
His spokesman Christain Stohmann said the violence was a sign that tensions are high as the second round is going to be close. "But the party leaders are doing their best to rein in their followers and we think the security forces now have the training and capacity to keep the situation under control."
In fact, many observers believe the tensions are good news for democracy.
Analysts had deemed the incumbent Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) a certain winner until 2005 when a faction led by a former SLPP interior minister, Charles Margai, broke away to create a new party, the People's Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC).
That weakened the SLPP and in the first round of voting on 11 August it lost its majority in parliament to the main opposition All People's Congress (APC).
Now for the run-off presidential elections on 8 September, Margai has thrown his support behind opposition leader Ernest Koroma.
Open race
All pundits agree the election could still go either way. "What is happening is that candidates are realising they need to do something if they expect constituents to vote for them, and constituents are realising that their vote really counts for something," George Biguzzi, the bishop in the northern town of Makeni, who was a key mediator during the conflict, told IRIN.
What is also happening is that the old system of voting along regional and ethnic lines may be being replaced, he said.
"The SLPP ruling party had almost monolithic support from the Mende [widely seen as Sierra Leone's largest ethnic group, based in the south]. Now Mende voters are divided between SLPP and the new PMDC and some may vote for the APC [which traditionally has its stronghold amongst the northern ethnic groups]," the bishop said.
None of the pundits were sure how many of Margai's Mende supporters would vote for someone outside of their ethnic group.
Possible divisions
One diplomat who asked not to be identified told IRIN the country may still divide along ethnic-regional lines, with only half the country accepting the results. "That is a worst case scenario after which the fragile peace that has taken so long to build could collapse."
One key constituency in the run-off is the Kono ethnic group, who are related to the Mende. They had reportedly sworn a collective allegiance to the ruling SLPP, according to several sources, yet individually many appear to want to break with tradition and vote for the opposition candidate.
That may partly explain the tension that resulted in riots there.
Riots
Rioters in Kono destroyed a house and other property and fired sling shots at each other, the deputy inspector of police in Kono, Santigie Koroma, told UN radio on 28 August, but he said the most serious injury was a broken thumb.
Even so, the authorities in Kono imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew and the next day calm returned, Koroma said.
In Freetown on 27 August police used tear gas to disperse rock-throwing ruling-party and opposition supporters. Witnesses said hundreds of riot police were in the area on high alert.
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
Copyright © 2007 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200708290680.html
AlterNet: The Rip-off in Iraq:
You Will Not Believe How Low the War Profiteers Have Gone
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on August 30, 2007
How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins - he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.
You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress - until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.
Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good - four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.
A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.
You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate," they write, adding that "the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles" and that "during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt." The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.
When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill - after all, you're a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.
You blink. Fuck if you know. "I have some conjecture, but that's all it would be" is your deadpan answer.
The room twitters in amazement. It's hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.
Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your company's compensation. Touchy subject - you've got a "cost-plus" contract, which means you're guaranteed a base-line profit of three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend, the more you make - and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But before this milk-faced congressman can even think about suggesting that you give these millions back, you've got to cut him off. "So you won't voluntarily look at this," Van Hollen is mumbling, "and say, given what has happened in this project … "
"No, sir, I will not," you snap.
"… 'We will return the profits.' …"
"No, sir, I will not," you repeat.
Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home, take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the little woman… . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your president's administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485 million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now assessed at $929,974, and you're sure as hell not giving it back to anyone.
"Yeah, I don't know what I expected him to say," Van Hollen says now about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the money back. "It just shows the contempt they have for us, for the taxpayer, for everything."
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity - to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over - not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure - American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted. Since time immemorial, the distribution of government largesse had followed a staid, paper-laden procedure in which the federal government would post the details of a contract in periodicals like Commerce Business Daily or, more recently, on the FedBizOpps Web site. Competitive bids were solicited and contracts were awarded in accordance with the labyrinthine print of the U.S. Code, a straightforward system that worked well enough before the Bush years that, as one lawyer puts it, you could "count the number of cases of criminal fraud on the fingers of one hand."
There were exceptions to the rule, of course - emergencies that required immediate awards, contracts where there was only one available source of materials or labor, classified deals that involved national security. What no one knew at the beginning of the war was that the Bush administration had essentially decided to treat the entire Iraqi theater as an exception to the rules. All you had to do was get to Iraq and the game was on.
But getting there wasn't easy. To travel to Iraq, would-be contractors needed permission from the Bush administration, which was far from blind in its appraisal of applicants. In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O'Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O'Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron's moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan's community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was … an anti-smoking campaign.
Town-selectmen types like Haveman weren't the only people who got passes to enter Iraq in the first few years. The administration also greenlighted brash, modern-day forty-niners like Scott Custer and Mike Battles, a pair of ex-Army officers and bottom-rank Republican pols (Battles had run for Congress in Rhode Island and had been a Fox News commentator) who had decided to form a security company called Custer Battles and make it big in Iraq. "Battles knew some people from his congressional run, and that's how they got there," says Alan Grayson, an attorney who led a whistle-blower lawsuit against the pair for defrauding the government.
Before coming to Iraq, Custer Battles hadn't done even a million dollars in business. The company's own Web site brags that Battles had to borrow cab fare from Jordan to Iraq and arrived in Baghdad with less than $500 in his pocket. But he had good timing, arriving just as a security contract for Baghdad International Airport was being "put up" for bid. The company site raves that Custer spent "three sleepless nights" penning an offer that impressed the CPA enough to hand the partners $2 million in cash, which Battles promptly stuffed into a duffel bag and drove to deposit in a Lebanese bank.
Custer Battles had lucked into a sort of Willy Wonka's paradise for contractors, where a small pool of Republican-friendly businessmen would basically hang around the Green Zone waiting for a contracting agency to come up with a work order. In the early days of the war, the idea of "competition" was a farce, with deals handed out so quickly that there was no possibility of making rational or fairly priced estimates. According to those familiar with the process, contracting agencies would request phony "bids" from several contractors, even though the winner had been picked in advance. "The losers would play ball because they knew that eventually it would be their turn to be the winner," says Grayson.
To make such deals legal, someone in the military would simply sign a piece of paper invoking an exception. "I know one guy whose business was buying weapons on the black market for contractors," says Pratap Chatterjee, a writer who has spent months in the Mideast researching a forthcoming book on Iraq contracts. "It's illegal - but he got military people to sign papers allowing him to do it."
The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the "entrepreneurship" of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent "three sleepless nights" putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking "like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later." The two simply "presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."
The deal charged Custer Battles with the responsibility to perform airport security for civilian flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad's airport during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, "I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog." When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and "refuse to sniff the vehicles" - as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.
Like most contractors, Custer Battles was on a cost-plus arrangement, which means its profits were guaranteed to rise with its spending. But according to testimony by officials and former employees, the partners also charged the government millions by making out phony invoices to shell companies they controlled. In another stroke of genius, they found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company markings and billed them to U.S. taxpayers as new equipment. Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. "Yes - $100 bills in plastic wrap," Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. "We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while."
The Custer Battles show only ended when the pair left a spreadsheet behind after a meeting with CPA officials - a spreadsheet that scrupulously detailed the pair's phony invoicing. "It was the worst case of fraud I've ever seen, hands down," says Grayson. "But it's also got to be the first instance in history of a defendant leaving behind a spreadsheet full of evidence of the crime."
But even being the clumsiest war profiteers of all time was not enough to bring swift justice upon the heads of Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles - and this is where the story of America's reconstruction effort gets really interesting. The Bush administration not only refused to prosecute the pair - it actually tried to stop a lawsuit filed against the contractors by whistle-blowers hoping to recover the stolen money. The administration argued that Custer Battles could not be found guilty of defrauding the U.S. government because the CPA was not part of the U.S. government. When the lawsuit went forward despite the administration's objections, Custer and Battles mounted a defense that recalled Nuremberg and Lt. Calley, arguing that they could not be guilty of theft since it was done with the government's approval.
The jury disagreed, finding Custer Battles guilty of ripping off taxpayers. But the verdict was set aside by T.S. Ellis III, a federal judge who cited the administration's "the CPA is not us" argument. The very fact that private contractors, aided by the government itself, could evade conviction for what even Ellis, a Reagan-appointed judge, called "significant" evidence of fraud, says everything you need to know about the true nature of the war we are fighting in Iraq. Is it really possible to bilk American taxpayers for repainted forklifts stolen from Iraqi Airways and claim that you were just following orders? It is, when your commander in chief is George W. Bush.
There isn't a brazen, two-bit, purse-snatching money caper you can think of that didn't happen at least 10,000 times with your tax dollars in Iraq. At the very outset of the occupation, when L. Paul Bremer was installed as head of the CPA, one of his first brilliant ideas for managing the country was to have $12 billion in cash flown into Baghdad on huge wooden pallets and stored in palaces and government buildings. To pay contractors, he'd have agents go to the various stashes - a pile of $200 million in one of Saddam's former palaces was watched by a single soldier, who left the key to the vault in a backpack on his desk when he went out to lunch - withdraw the money, then crisscross the country to pay the bills. When desperate auditors later tried to trace the paths of the money, one agent could account for only $6,306,836 of some $23 million he'd withdrawn. Bremer's office "acknowledged not having any supporting documentation" for $25 million given to a different agent. A ministry that claimed to have paid 8,206 guards was able to document payouts to only 602. An agent who was told by auditors that he still owed $1,878,870 magically produced exactly that amount, which, as the auditors dryly noted, "suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash."
In short, some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. "Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. "But that's exactly what our government did."
Because contractors were paid on cost-plus arrangements, they had a powerful incentive to spend to the hilt. The undisputed master of milking the system is KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary so ubiquitous in Iraq that soldiers even encounter its customer-survey sheets in outhouses. The company has been exposed by whistle-blowers in numerous Senate hearings for everything from double-charging taxpayers for $617,000 worth of sodas to overcharging the government 600 percent for fuel shipments. When things went wrong, KBR simply scrapped expensive gear: The company dumped 50,000 pounds of nails in the desert because they were too short, and left the Army no choice but to set fire to a supply truck that had a flat tire. "They did not have the proper wrench to change the tire," an Iraq vet named Richard Murphy told investigators, "so the decision was made to torch the truck."
In perhaps the ultimate example of military capitalism, KBR reportedly ran convoys of empty trucks back and forth across the insurgent-laden desert, pointlessly risking the lives of soldiers and drivers so the company could charge the taxpayer for its phantom deliveries. Truckers for KBR, knowing full well that the trips were bullshit, derisively referred to their cargo as "sailboat fuel."
In Fallujah, where the company was paid based on how many soldiers used the base rec center, KBR supervisors ordered employees to juke the head count by taking an hourly tally of every soldier in the facility. "They were counting the same soldier five, six, seven times," says Linda Warren, a former postal worker who was employed by KBR in Fallujah. "I was even directed to count every empty bottle of water left behind in the facility as though they were troops who had been there."
Yet for all the money KBR charged taxpayers for the rec center, it didn't provide much in the way of services to the soldiers engaged in the heaviest fighting of the war. When Warren ordered a karaoke machine, the company gave her a cardboard box stuffed with jumbled-up electronic components. "We had to borrow laptops from the troops to set up a music night," says Warren, who had a son serving in Fallujah at the time. "These boys needed R&R more than anything, but the company wouldn't spend a dime." (KBR refused requests for an interview, but has denied that it inflated troop counts or committed other wrongdoing in Iraq.)
One of the most dependable methods for burning taxpayer funds was simply to do nothing. After securing a contract in Iraq, companies would mobilize their teams, rush them into the war zone and then wait, citing the security situation or delayed paperwork - all the while charging the government for housing, meals and other expenses. Last year, a government audit of twelve major contracts awarded to KBR, Parsons and other companies found that idle time often accounted for more than half of a contract's total costs. In one deal awarded to KBR, the company's "indirect" administrative costs were $52.7 million, and its direct costs - the costs associated with the actual job - were only $13.4 million.
Companies jacked up the costs even higher by hiring out layers of subcontractors to do their work for them. In some cases, each subcontractor had its own cost-plus arrangement. "We called those 'cascading contracts,' " says Rep. Van Hollen. "Each subcontractor piles on a lot of costs, and eventually they would snowball into a huge payout. It was a green light for waste."
In March 2004, Parsons - the firm represented by Earnest O. Robbins - was given nearly $1 million to build a fire station in Ainkawa, a small Christian community in one of the safest parts of Iraq. Parsons subcontracted the design to a British company called TPS Consult and the construction to a California firm called Innovative Technical Solutions Inc. ITSI, in turn, hired an Iraqi outfit called Zozik to do the actual labor.
A year and a half later, government auditors visited the site and found that the fire station was less than half finished. What little had been built was marred by serious design flaws, including concrete columns so shoddily constructed that they were riddled with holes that looked like "honeycombing." But getting the fuck-ups fixed proved problematic. The auditors "made a request that was sent to the Army Corps, which delivered it to Parsons, who then asked ITSI, which asked TPS Consult to check on the work done by Zozik," writes Chatterjee, who describes the mess in his forthcoming book, Baghdad Bonanza. The multiple layers of subcontractors made it almost impossible to resolve the issue - and every day the delays dragged on meant more money for the companies.
Sometimes the government simply handed out money to companies it made up out of thin air. In 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers found itself unable to award contracts by the September deadline imposed by Congress, meaning it would have to "de-obligate" the money and return it to the government. Rather than suffer that awful fate, the corps obligated $362 million - spread out over ninety-six different contracts - to "Dummy Vendor." In their report on the mess, auditors noted that money to nobody "does not constitute proper obligations."
But even obligating money to no one was better than what sometimes happened in Iraq: handing out U.S. funds to the enemy. Since the beginning of the war, rumors have abounded about contractors paying protection money to insurgents to avoid attacks. No less an authority than Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, claimed that such payoffs are a "significant source" of income for Al Qaeda. Moreover, when things go missing in Iraq - like bricks of $100 bills, or weapons, or trucks - it is a fair assumption that some of the wayward booty ends up in the wrong hands. In July, a federal audit found that 190,000 weapons are missing in Iraq - nearly one out of every three arms supplied by the United States. "These weapons almost certainly ended up on the black market, where they are repurchased by insurgents," says Chatterjee.
For all the creative ways that contractors came up with to waste, mismanage and steal public money in Iraq, the standard remained good old-fashioned fucking up. Take the case of the Basra Children's Hospital, a much-ballyhooed "do-gooder" project championed by Laura Bush and Condi Rice. This was exactly the sort of grandstanding, self-serving, indulgent and ultimately useless project that tended to get the go-ahead under reconstruction. Like the expensive telephone-based disease-notification database approved for use in hospitals without telephones, or the natural-gas-powered electricity turbines greenlighted for installation in a country without ready sources of natural gas, the Basra Children's Hospital was a state-of-the-art medical facility set to be built in a town without safe drinking water. "Why build a hospital for kids, when the kids have no clean water?" said Rep. Jim Kolbe, a Republican from Arizona.
Bechtel was given $50 million to build the hospital - but a year later, with the price tag soaring to $169 million, the company was pulled off the project without a single bed being ready for use. The government was unfazed: Bechtel, explained USAID spokesman David Snider, was "under a 'term contract,' which means their job is over when their money ends."
Their job is over when their money ends. When I call Snider to clarify this amazing statement, he declines to discuss the matter further. But if you look over the history of the Iraqi reconstruction effort, you will find versions of this excuse everywhere. When Custer Battles was caught delivering broken trucks to the Army, a military official says the company told him, "We were only told we had to deliver the trucks. The contract doesn't say they had to work."
Such excuses speak to a monstrous vacuum of patriotism; it would be hard to imagine contractors being so blithely disinterested in results during World War II, where every wasted dollar might mean another American boy dead from gangrene in the Ardennes. But the rampant waste of money and resources also suggests a widespread contempt for the ostensible "purpose" of our presence in Iraq. Asked to cast a vote for the war effort, contractors responded by swiping everything they could get their hands on - and the administration's acquiescence in their thievery suggests that it, too, saw making a buck as the true mission of the war. Two witnesses scheduled to testify before Congress against Custer Battles ultimately declined not only because they had received death threats but because they, too, were contractors and feared that they would be shut out of future government deals. To repeat: Witnesses were afraid to testify in an effort to recover government funds because they feared reprisal from the government.
The Bush administration's lack of interest in recovering stolen funds is one of the great scandals of the war. The White House has failed to litigate a single case against a contractor under the False Claims Act and has not sued anybody for breach of contract. It even declined to join in a lawsuit filed by whistle-blowers who are accusing KBR of improper invoicing in Fallujah. "For all the Bush administration claims to do in the war against terrorism," Grayson said in congressional testimony, "it is a no-show in the war against war profiteers." In nearly five years of some of the worst graft and looting in American history, the administration has recovered less than $6 million.
What's more, when anyone in the government tried to question what contractors were up to with taxpayer money, they were immediately blackballed and treated like an enemy. Take the case of Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, an outspoken and energetic woman of sixty-three who served as the chief procurement executive for the Army Corps of Engineers. In her position, Greenhouse was responsible for signing off on sole-source contracts - those awarded without competitive bids and thus most prone to corruption. Long before Iraq, she had begun to notice favoritism in the awarding of contracts to KBR, which was careful to recruit executives who had served in the military. "That was why I joined the corps: to stop this kind of clubby contracting," she says.
A few weeks before the Iraq War started, Greenhouse was asked to sign off on the contract to restore Iraqi oil. The deal, she noticed, was suspicious on a number of fronts. For one thing, the company that had designed the project, KBR, was the same company that was being awarded the contract - a highly unusual and improper situation. For another, the corps wanted to award a massive "emergency" contract to KBR with no competition for up to five years, which Greenhouse thought was crazy. Who ever heard of a five-year emergency? After auditing the deal, the Pentagon found that KBR had overcharged the government $61 million for fuel. "The abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR," Greenhouse testified before the Senate, "represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career."
And how did her superiors in the Pentagon respond to the wrongdoing highlighted by their own chief procurement officer? First they gave KBR a waiver for the overbilling, blaming the problem on an Iraqi subcontractor. Then they dealt with Greenhouse by demoting her and cutting her salary, citing a negative performance review. The retaliation sent a clear message to any would-be whistle-blowers. "It puts a chill on you," Greenhouse says. "People are scared stiff."
They were scared stiff in Iraq, too, and for good reason. When civilian employees complained about looting or other improprieties, contractors sometimes threatened to throw them outside the gates of their bases - a life-threatening situation for any American. Robert Isakson, a former FBI agent who worked for Custer Battles, says that when he refused to go along with one scam involving a dummy company in Lebanon, he was detained by company security guards, who seized his ID badge and barred him from the base in Baghdad. He eventually had to make a hazardous, Papillon-esque journey across hostile Iraq to Jordan just to survive. (Custer Battles denies the charge.)
James Garrison, who worked at a KBR ice plant in Al Asad, recalls an incident when Indian employees threatened to go on strike: "They pulled a bus up, got them in there and said, 'We'll ship you outside the front gate if you want to go on strike.' " Not surprisingly, the workers changed their mind about a work stoppage.
You know the old adage: You don't pay a hooker to spend the night, you pay her to leave in the morning. That maxim also applies to civilian workers in Iraq. A soldier is a citizen with rights, a man to be treated with honor and respect as a protector of us all; if one loses a limb, you've got to take care of him, in theory for his whole life. But a mercenary is just another piece of equipment you can bill to the taxpayer: If one is hurt on the job, you can just throw it away and buy another one. Today there are more civilians working for private contractors in Iraq than there are troops on the ground. The totality of the thievery in Iraq is such that even the honor of patriotic service has been stolen - we've replaced soldiers and heroes with disposable commodities, men we expected to give us a big bang for a buck and to never call us again.
Russell Skoug, who worked as a refrigeration technician for a contractor called Wolfpack, found that out the hard way. These days Skoug is back home in Diboll, Texas, and he doesn't move around much; he considers it a big accomplishment if he can make it to his mailbox and back once a day. "I'm doing a lot if I can do that much," he says, laughing a little.
A year ago, on September 11th, Skoug was working for Wolfpack at a base in Heet, Iraq. It was a convoy day - trucks braved the trip in and out of the base every third day - and Skoug had a generator he needed to fix. So he agreed to make a run to Al Asad. "If I would've realized that it was September 11th, I never would've went out," he says. It would turn out to be the last run he would ever make in Iraq.
An Air Force vet, Skoug had come to Iraq as a civilian to repair refrigeration units and air conditioners for a KBR subcontractor called LSI. But when he arrived, he discovered that LSI had hired him to fix Humvees. "I didn't know jack-squat about Humvees," he says. "I could maybe change the oil, that was it." (Asked about Skoug's additional assignment, KBR boasted: "Part of the reason for our success is our ability to employ individuals with multiple capabilities.")
Working with him on his crew were two other refrigeration technicians, neither of whom knew anything about fixing Humvees. Since Skoug and most of his co-workers had worked for KBR in Afghanistan, they were familiar with cost-plus contracting. The buzz around the base was that cost-plus was the reason LSI was hiring air-conditioning guys to work on unfamiliar military equipment at a cost to the taxpayer of $80,000 a year. "They was doing the same thing as KBR: just filling the body count," says Skoug.
Thanks to low troop levels, all the military repair guys had been pressed into service to fight the war, so Skoug was forced to sit in the military storeroom on the base and study vehicle manuals that, as a civilian, he wasn't allowed to check out of the building. That was how America fought terrorism in Iraq: It hired civilian air-conditioning techs to fix Humvees using the instruction manual while the real Humvee repairmen, earning a third of what the helpless civilians were paid, drove around in circles outside the wire waiting to get blown up by insurgents.
After much pleading and cajoling, Skoug managed to convince LSI to let him repair some refrigeration units. But it turned out that the company didn't have any tools for the job. "They gave me a screwdriver and a Leatherman, and that's it," he recalls. "We didn't even have freon gauges." When Skoug managed to scrounge and cannibalize parts to get the job done, he impressed the executives at Wolfpack enough to hire him away from LSI for $10,000 a month. The job required Skoug, who had been given no formal security training, to travel regularly on dangerous convoys between bases. Wolfpack issued him an armored vehicle, a Yugoslav-made AK-47 and a handgun, and wished him luck.
For nearly a year, Skoug did the job, trying at each stop to overcome the hostility that many troops felt for civilian contractors who surfed the Internet and played pool and watched movies all day for big dollars while soldiers carrying seventy-pound packs of gear labored in huts with broken air conditioning the civilian techs couldn't be bothered to repair. "They'd have the easiest thing to fix, and they wouldn't do it," Skoug says. "They'd write that they'd fixed it or that they just needed a part and then just leave it." At Haditha Dam, Skoug witnessed a near-brawl after some Marines, trying to get some sleep after returning from patrol, couldn't get a group of "KBR dudes" to turn down the television in a common area late at night.
Toward the end of Skoug's stay, insurgent activity in his area increased to the point where the soldiers leading his convoys would often drive only at night and without lights. Skoug and his co-workers asked Wolfpack to provide them with night-vision goggles that cost as little as $1,000 a pair, but the company refused. "Their attitude was, we don't need 'em and we're not buying 'em," says Thomas Lane, a Wolfpack employee who served as Skoug's security man on the night of September 11th.
On that evening, the soldiers leading the convoy refused to let Skoug drive his own vehicle back to Heet without night-vision goggles. So a soldier took Skoug's car, and Skoug was forced to be a passenger in a military vehicle. "We start out the front gate, and I find out that the truck that I was in was the frickin' lead truck," he recalls. "And I'm going, 'Oh, great.' "
The bomb went off about a half-hour later, ripping through the truck floor and destroying four inches of Skoug's left femur. "The windshield looked like there was a film on it," he says. "I find out later it was a film - it was blood and meat and stuff all over the windshield on the inside." Skoug was loaded into the back of a Humvee, his legs hanging out, and evacuated to an Army hospital in Germany before being airlifted back to the States.
When Skoug arrived, it was his wife, Linda, who had to handle all his affairs. She was the one who arranged for an air ambulance to take him to Houston, where she had persuaded an orthopedic hospital to admit him as a patient. She had to do this because almost right from the start, Wolfpack washed its hands of Russell Skoug. The insurance policy he had been given turned out to be useless - the company denied all coverage, beginning with a $72,597 bill for his stay in the German hospital. Despite assurances from Wolfpack chief Mark Atwood that he would cover all Skoug's expenses, neither he nor the insurance company would pay for the $16,000 trip in the air ambulance. Nobody paid for the operations Skoug had in Houston - as many as three a day, every day for a month. And nobody paid for his subsequent rehab stint in another Houston hospital - despite the fact that military law requires every company contracting with the government to fully insure all of its employees in the war zone.
Now that he's out, sitting at home on his couch with only partial use of his left hand and left leg, Skoug has a stack of unpaid medical bills almost three inches tall. As he speaks, he keeps fidgeting. He apologizes, explaining that he can't sit still for very long. Why? Because Skoug can no longer afford pain medication. "I take ibuprofen sometimes," he says, "but basically I just grin and bear it."
And here's where this story turns into something perfectly symbolic of everything that the war in Iraq stands for, a window into the soul of for-profit contractors who not only left behind a breathtaking legacy of fraud, waste and corruption but, through their calculating, greed-fueled hijacking of this generation's broadest and most far-reaching foreign-policy initiative, pushed America into previously unknown realms of moral insanity. When I contact Mark Atwood and ask him to explain how he could watch one of his best employees get blown up and crippled for life, and then cut him loose with debts totaling well over half a million dollars, Atwood, safe in his office in Kuwait City and contentedly suckling at the taxpayer teat, decides that answering this one question is just too much to ask of poor old him.
"Right now," Atwood says, "I just want some peace."
When Linda Skoug petitioned Atwood for help, he refused, pointing out that he had kept his now-useless employee on the payroll for four whole months before firing him. "After I have put forth to help you all out," he wrote in an e-mail, "you are going to get on me for your husband not having insurance." He even implied that Skoug had brought the accident upon himself by allowing the Army to place him at the head of the convoy: "He was not even suppose [sic] to be in the lead vehicle to begin with."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of the Iraq War in a nutshell. In the history of balls, the world has never seen anything like the private contractors George W. Bush summoned to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Collectively, they are the final, polished result of 231 years of natural selection in the crucible of American capitalism: a bureaucrat class capable of stealing the same dollar twice - once from the taxpayer and once from a veteran in a wheelchair.
The explanations that contractors offer for all the missing dollars, all the myriad ways they looted the treasury and screwed guys like Russell Skoug, rank among the most diabolical, shameless, tongue-twisting bullshit in history. Going back over the various congressional hearings and trying to decipher the corporate responses to the mountains of thefts and fuck-ups is a thrilling intellectual journey, not unlike tackling the Pharaonic hieroglyphs or the mating chatter of colobus monkeys. Standing before Congress, contractors and the officials who are supposed to monitor them say things like "As long as we have the undefinitized contract issue that we have ... we will continue to see the same kinds of sustension rates" (translation: We can't get back any of the fucking money) and "The need for to-fitnessization was viewed as voluntary, and that was inaccurate as the general counsel to the Army observed in a June opinion" (translation: The contractor wasn't aware that he was required to keep costs down) and "If we don't know where we're trying to go and don't have measures, then we won't know how much longer it's going to take us to get there" (translation: There never was a plan in place, other than to let contractors rip off every dollar they could).
According to the most reliable estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success? There's no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don't pay the bills.
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/60950/
Guardian:
Climate warning raises long-term flood fears
Plans to protect Britain do not heed the risk of rising river levels caused by global warming, a study finds
Steven Morris and Alok Jha
Thursday August 30 2007
Scientists have urged the government to consider the full impact of global warming when drawing up plans to protect Britain from flooding. A study from the Met Office's Hadley Centre predicts that river levels will rise higher than anticipated because existing computer models do not take into account the effects of climate change on plant life.
In a warmer world, say scientists, less water will be drawn up by plants, causing greater flows into rivers like the Thames and the Severn, which burst their banks last month bringing chaos to large parts of England.
The study results, published today in the journal Nature, show that, if carbon dioxide emissions go unchecked, climate change and its effect on plants will have increased river flow by 13% in Europe over the course of 300 years.
"Current impact assessments will need to be reworked," said Richard Betts, the climate scientist who led the research.
The study comes weeks after floods swept through several areas of the UK. Although the water has receded, thousands of people are homeless or living in the dirty shells of their houses.
"It's been terrible," said Mr Jasper, a 50-year-old decorator from Gloucester. "The insurance company has been hopeless. We've been living in horrible conditions while we wait for them to tell us what's happening. It's affecting my health and my partner is off work because of stress." Finally this week a surveyor gave him the go-ahead to start hacking away at his walls. "At this rate it will be next Christmas, never mind this, before we are right," Mr Jasper said.
Next door is empty. It is the home of 89-year-old Gladys Davies, now living with her daughter, Eunice Mann. It is not clear when, or if, she will be able to move back in. Like many of the most vulnerable people caught in the floods she did not have insurance. "We haven't dared bring her back here. I don't think she could bear to see what's happened," said Mrs Mann.
The death of one elderly woman in the street has already been blamed on the shock of returning to a wrecked house.
Figures seen by the Guardian show the scale of the problem as Gloucestershire and Worcestershire try to recover from the biggest floods on record. Gloucestershire county council estimates it will have a bill of between £50m-£55m. Fixing up damaged roads, footpaths and bridges will cost £25m alone, an entire year's budget for the highways. Almost £3m will be spent on repairs to 53 schools in the area.
Private companies have also taken a hit from which many will not recover. The flooding directly affected 500 businesses and another 15,000 suffered after their water supply was turned off for a week.
There have been visits by ministers to the county but the perception is that little money is coming through. So far, £2.5m has been made available for district councils to pay for recovery from the floods and £600,000 has been handed over for schools. But the council has yet to meet the Department for Transport over the massive highways bill, and fears some roads that were seriously damaged will stay shut for the foreseeable future.
In Hull, where more than 7,000 homes were flooded and a man died in a storm drain, the council is also counting the cost of the rains, which could be as high as £200m. An interim report says the city's drainage system was overwhelmed by the water because its flood protection plans were based on such heavy rainfall arriving only one year in every 30.
The study also highlighted problems arising from various bodies, including the Environment Agency, and councils and water companies, being responsible for different parts of the drainage system. That difficulty is likely to be replicated elsewhere. The report also urged the Environment Agency to find out whether its flood warning systems could be expanded to cover flash rainfall.
The picture in Worcestershire is also bleak and there are fears that the county's flood bill could be in the region of £5m- £10m - a big chunk of the £15m it holds in its reserves.
Tourism has taken a huge hit in Worcestershire with two sporting attractions, Worcester Racecourse and the New Road county cricket ground, out of action for the season. The breaking news on the cricket club's website yesterday was that grass had been seen at the site.
In the Malvern hills town of Upton upon Severn, which was cut off during the floods, riverside pubs are stricken and shopkeepers along the high street report poor business. "It has been a ghost town in these last weeks," said Kate Harding, landlady of Ye Olde Anchor Inn, who defiantly handed out glasses of pink champagne on the first Sunday of the floods.
The village of Sandhurst, which stands on the banks of the Severn in Gloucestershire, was one of the most isolated areas during the floods, accessible only by boat or aircraft. Now, however, life is beginning to return to normal.
At Abloads Court, a mainly 17th century farmhouse, three ponies were this week grazing in the paddock. They achieved worldwide fame after the Guardian pictured them living in the Sandhurst house during the floods. Their owner, Dawn Melvin said: "The horses loved the boot room. They spent five days in there. When we moved back into the house we left the door open so they could still get back in when they wanted."
Her neighbours, Sandra Wickenden and Dave Munn, are living in a caravan in their own garden. Will they move out? "No, that's definitely not on the agenda," said Mr Munn. "If it floods, it floods. You have to accept it and get on. We're staying."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/aug/30/weather.flooding
Mail & Guardian:
In search of coherence
Binyavanga Wainaina: CONTINENTAL DRIFT
27 August 2007
It seems, despite the best efforts to manufacture our nations, that things will be built from the ground up. I have spent the past few months travelling around West Africa and everywhere where people have created enclaves of coherence there is growth and progress.
I went to Touba, in Senegal - a city of nearly a million people. Here anybody of the Mouride movement (and others, I believe) can get a plot of land for almost nothing and not pay for water. There are no council taxes. The religious authorities build roads and supply free water. Welcome to West Africa’s fastest-growing city.
Touba is built on the dreams of one man: Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, the founder of the Mouride brotherhood. It is he who laid out the idea for a city in the desert; it is he who instigated trade-offs with the French to get them to give him the deed to 40 000 acres for his city. And it is he who demanded complete obedience from his adherents - an idea that scares me more than a little.
I don’t know why it seems that Touba is a more egalitarian city than Dakar, it just does. It may be because the religious obedience demanded has more to do with work - immigrants are united in Touba by a phenomenal work ethic that is part of the movement. Maybe it is because most of the rules and laws that govern the city are tailored to make it work, and to make working and growing there easy. There is little bureaucracy and most things are run by citizen volunteer groups.
Dakar, the city of colonial heritage, has been drowning for decades in fake ambitions. Abdoulaye Wade, the Senegalese President, is keen to impress on the world the utter “world-classness” of his city. As you drive from the airport, monuments rise, groaning and heaving and announcing a new African renaissance. Massive highways are being dug and the new streetlights look cheap, flashy and unlikely to last more than a couple of years. Word has it that Wade is keen to impress representatives of the Islamic countries gathering in the capital sometime in 2008.
Dakar is beautiful in many senses: the live music, the massive wrestling bouts, the croissants and the beautiful people. But Dakar is also the most expensive city I have been to on the continent. It is not clear to me exactly why. I suspect it has something to do with the high cost of needing to import things wholesale from France to maintain its sense of self.
Apart from the towers of the mosque, Touba is a more practical and lucid city. The roads in need of tarring get tarred and there are wells everywhere. In the evenings, women come out and gather at the ends of their streets and clean up. There is no expectation that some city council official will come and deal with anything outside of the gate. I can imagine a small-town person landing in Dakar with $2 000 in savings and soon finding himself on the street, broke and broken. But if he went to Touba he could end up owning a small garage or shop.
Maybe the question here has less to do with religion. In Lagos I met a man who told me he goes to all-night vigil parties at his church to gain the strength to go out on the streets every day and sell goods to people who are likely to insult him. You cannot survive the city without a kind of fever of hope.
I went to a city in the making, on the road to Ibadan, not far from Lagos. Redeemer’s Camp is made up of thousands of hectares of Pentecostal lands that began as another idea for a retreat, with stories about pythons and demons and visions. Today - now that there are roads and Montessori schools and drains and crime-free, middle-class suburbs - church billboards talk less about demons and pythons and more about sexual health in marriage and investing in the stock exchange. One of Nigeria’s biggest banks has announced it will help build a new city there, where land is cheap and dreams seem possible.
Reason is built on harrowed ground.
While Dakar heaves and spins on the same axis, piling bureaucracy upon problem-solving bureaucracy, Touba names the simple things: what to do in the morning, how to do it, why we do it. It defines itself as much through its stated mission as through the daily transactions and interactions of its citizens.
Dakar insists on good manners and form and dictates them on everybody. It is much more fun than Touba, if you can afford it, but it does not make clear what it can do for you, unless you are arriving with French expatriate hardship allowances. Or if, by the people you know or were born into, you find you need no coherence around you to thrive.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=317582&area=/columnist_wainaina/#
New Statesman:
"Occupy, resist, produce"
Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis
Published 30 August 2007
In response to Argentina's economic catastrophe of 2001, unemployed workers took over the running of bankrupt factories. In this exclusive essay, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis explain how, six years on, these tiny co-operatives have nurtured a powerful social movement
On 19 March 2003, we were on the roof of the Zanón ceramic tile factory, filming an interview with Cepillo. He was showing us how the workers fended off eviction by armed police, defending their democratic workplace with slingshots and the little ceramic balls normally used to pound the Patagonian clay into raw material for tiles. His aim was impressive. It was the day the bombs started falling on Baghdad.
As journalists, we had to ask ourselves what we were doing there. What possible relevance could there be in this one factory at the southernmost tip of South America, with its band of radical workers and its David and Goliath narrative, when bunker-busting apocalypse was descending on Iraq?
But we, like so many others, had been drawn to Argentina to witness first-hand an explosion of activism in the wake of its 2001 crisis - a host of dynamic new social movements that were not only advancing a bitter critique of the economic model that had destroyed their country, but were busily building local alternatives in the rubble.
There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies". Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. It is an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers: "We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."
The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale - some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country's other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country's deeply unequal "recovery". Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: this is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.
Like a number of other emerging social movements around the world, the workers in the recovered companies are rewriting the script for how change is supposed to happen. Rather than following anyone's ten-point plan for revolution, the workers are darting ahead of the theory - at least, straight to the part where they get their jobs back. In Argentina, the theorists are chasing after the factory workers, trying to analyse what is already in noisy production.
These struggles have had a tremendous impact on the imaginations of activists around the world. At this point, there are many more starry-eyed grad papers on the phenomenon than there are recovered companies. But there is also a renewed interest in democratic workplaces from Durban to Melbourne to New Orleans.
That said, the movement in Argentina is as much a product of the globalisation of alternatives as it is one of its most con tagious stories. Argentinian workers borrowed the slogan "Occupy, Resist, Produce" from Latin America's largest social movement, Brazil's Movimiento Sin Terra, in which more than a million people have reclaimed unused land and put it back into community production. One worker told us that what the movement in Argentina is doing is "MST for the cities". In South Africa, we saw a protester's T-shirt with an even more succinct summary of this new impatience: "Stop Asking, Start Taking".
The movement in Argentina is frustrating to some on the left who feel it is not clearly anti-capitalist, those who chafe at how comfortably it exists within the market economy and see worker management as merely a new form of auto-exploitation. Others see co-operativism, the legal form chosen by the vast majority of the recovered companies, as a capitulation in itself - insisting that only full national isation by the state can bring worker democracy into a broader socialist project.
Workers in the movement are generally suspicious of being co-opted to anyone's political agenda, but at the same time cannot afford to turn down any support. More interesting by far is to see how workers in this movement are politicised by the struggle, which begins with the most basic imperative: Workers want to work, to feed their families. Some of the most powerful new working-class leaders in Argentina today discovered solidarity on a path that started from that essentially apolitical point. Whether you think the movement's lack of a leading ideology is a tragic weakness or a refreshing strength, the recovered companies challenge capitalism's most cherished ideal: the sanctity of private property.
The legal and political case for worker control in Argentina does not only rest on the unpaid wages, evaporated benefits and emptied-out pension funds. The workers make a sophisticated case for their moral right to property - in this case, the machines and physical pre mises - based not just on what they are owed personally, but what society is owed. The recovered companies propose themselves as an explicit remedy to all the corporate welfare, corruption and other forms of public subsidy the owners enjoyed in the process of bankrupting their firms and moving their wealth to safety, abandoning whole communities to economic exclusion.
This argument is, of course, available for immediate use in the United States and Europe. But this story goes much deeper than corporate welfare, and that's where the Argentinian experience will really resonate with us. It has become axiomatic on the left to say that Argentina's crash was a direct result of the IMF orthodoxy imposed on the country with such enthusiasm in the neoliberal 1990s. In their book Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories, to which this essay forms the introduction, the Lavaca Collective makes clear that in Argentina, just as in the US occupation of Iraq, those bromides about private sector efficiency were nothing more than a cover story for an explosion of frontier-style plunder - looting on a massive scale by a small group of elites. Privatisation, deregulation, labour flexibility: these were the tools to facilitate a massive transfer of public wealth to private hands, not to mention private debts to the public purse. Like Enron traders, the businessmen who haunt the pages of this book learned the first lesson of capitalism and stopped there: Greed is good, and more greed is better. As one Argentinian worker says: "There are guys that wake up in the morning thinking about how to screw people, and others who think: how do we rebuild this Argentina that they have torn apart?"
In the answer to that question, you can read a powerful story of transformation. Capitalism produces and distributes not just goods and services, but identities. When the capital and its carpetbaggers had flown from Argentina, what was left was not only companies that had been emptied, but a whole hollowed-out country filled with people whose identities - as workers - had been stripped away as well. As one of the organisers in the movement wrote to us: "It is a huge amount of work to recover a company. But the real work is to recover a worker and that is the task that we have just begun."
On 17 April 2003, we were on Avenida Jujuy in Buenos Aires, standing with the Brukman workers and a huge crowd of their supporters in front of a fence, behind which was a small army of police guarding the Brukman factory. After a brutal eviction, the workers were determined to get back to work at their sewing machines.
In Washington, DC, that day, USAID announced that it had chosen Bechtel Corporation as the prime contractor for the reconstruction of Iraq's architecture. The heist was about to begin in earnest, both in the United States and in Iraq. Deliberately induced crisis was providing the cover for the transfer of billions of tax dollars to a handful of politically connected corporations.
In Argentina, they'd already seen this movie - the wholesale plunder of public wealth, the explosion of unemployment, the shredding of the social fabric, the staggering human consequences. And 52 seamstresses were in the street, backed by thousands of others, trying to take back what was already theirs. It was definitely the place to be.
In 2004, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis released "The Take", a film about worker-run factories in Argentina.This essay is an edited extract from their introduction to "Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories", written by the Lavaca Collective (Haymarket Books, $16)
http://www.newstatesman.com/200708300023
Página/12:
¡Vade retro, aeropuerto!
Por Rodrigo Fresán
desde Barcelona
Jueves, 30 de Agosto de 2007
UNO Escribo como si se tratase de uno de esos mensajes pensados para introducir en una botella que se arrojará al mar esperando que alguien la encuentre y la rompa y lea lo que está ahí adentro. Escribo a punto de adentrarme una vez más en ese territorio conocido pero que uno querría desconocer. Escribo y un amigo me cuenta que uno de los pilotos de aquel avión de TAM que el pasado julio siguió de largo y se estrelló aterrizando en San Pablo estaba escribiendo un libro de memorias: Sem medo de voar. Sin miedo a volar, sí, y el título me parece más que pertinente porque ese miedo ancestral ha sido suplantado en por un nuevo miedo: el miedo al aeropuerto.
DOS El aeropuerto como terra incognita es –en el moderno imaginario– el equivalente a la casa embrujada. Un lugar por el que correr y gritar impulsados por el sadismo de los que te programan el vuelo de conexión con minutos de margen por el solo placer de hacerte transpirar entre puerta y puerta de embarque y obligarte a pensar, durante todo el viaje, que tu equipaje se ha esfumado, entre un y otro avión, en el aire, porque “lo importante es no perder el slot de despegue”. Así, bienvenidos al sitio en el que uno se consagra como víctima y se sabe sujeto a turbulencias terrenas mientras no deja de preguntarse si todo eso que leyó –sobre la deficiencia de satélites, sobre el volátil temperamento de los controladores aéreos, sobre los defectos de fabricación de toda una partida de 707, sobre la cantidad de gérmenes casi mortales que se incuban en la atmósfera presurizada, o sobre (caso Madrid) la revelación de que las rutas de la nueva terminal cruzan un espacio protegido para buitres y águilas y han aumentado las posibilidades de que un pajarraco de diez kilos se empotre contra una turbina– será verdad incontestable o siniestra leyenda urbana. Ya saben: uno llega ahí unas dos horas antes del avión (aunque ahora recomiendan que sean tres) y cualquier cosa puede ocurrir. Colas interminables. Boicot de empleados que deciden tomar las pistas (caso Barcelona el año pasado). Vecinos de barrios próximos franqueando las vías de acceso en protesta por el ruido de boeings pasando cada vez más bajo y más cerca de sus casas. Inesperada huelga de los encargados de subir y bajar maletas. Manifestación súbita (todo es posible) del rodaje de la nueva película de Woody Allen. Personal de a bordo que se perdió de camino al aeropuerto. Introducción del pasaje durante horas en un avión que no sale. Suspensión de vuelo y posterior orbitar hasta nuevo aviso en alguno de esos hoteles que rodean al engendro. Y –posibilidad que se incrementará radicalmente a partir de junio ’08, con la desaparición del papel y la implementación total del ticket electrónico– el que nuestro nombre no aparezca en las computadoras, o que nuestro número de pasaporte esté mal escrito, o que se caiga el sistema y entonces... Y todos éstos, se entiende, son problemas de lujo: mucho peor la pasan los que llegan en busca de una tierra prometida o a visitar a un familiar y son devueltos al punto de origen previo paso por algo que se llama –nombre desde ya inquietante– “sala de retornados”. Lejos –muy lejos– han quedado los tiempos en que el personal del aeropuerto en la novela de Arthur Hailey se encargaba de guiar y salvar y traer de vuelta a casa a la nave en problemas con la tripulación intoxicada (siempre pedir pollo, nunca pescado) o atacada (como en una de las películas más absurdas de la historia) por serpientes excitadas. Ahora todo está mucho más cerca –me pregunto cómo el inglés no lo hizo todavía– de una novela de J. G. Ballard. El aeropuerto como espacio alienante y alien donde todo es ruido y mensajes incomprensibles por los altavoces. Y nunca hay un reloj cerca. Y las pizarras que dicen delayed hacen ese ruidito como de aleteo de pájaro mecánico. Y por miedo al terrorismo se aterroriza al pasajero obligándolo desde a desnudarse hasta a catar frente a un policía la comida del bebé. Y, cuando el vuelo se ha perdido, el equipaje se ha extraviado y el espanto ha alcanzado alturas de vértigo, se nos ofrece con una sonrisa torcida llenar algo que se llama libro de quejas y cuya única función es dejar por escrito aquello que nadie se digna escuchar para que nadie se digne leerlo. Y ya saben: la responsabilidad de todo nunca es de la compañía sino del mal tiempo que hace, siempre, en otra parte, lejos.
TRES De ahí que la noticia de la creación de una especie de línea aérea bendecida por el Vaticano y de nombre Mistral Air me haya producido una sacra inquietud. Slogan en los fuselajes donde se lee Busco tu rostro, Señor, destino a los principales lugares de peregrinación (Jerusalén, Lourdes, Fátima, Guadalupe y sucursales donde alguna vez aparecieron todas esas personas que vuelan sin necesidad de buscar pase de abordaje antes) y fundada nada más y nada menos que por Bud Spencer: aquel fornido italiano que repartía trompadas junto a Terence Hill en los recocidos spaghetti–westerns de Trinity. Y yo me pregunto a qué obedece el bautismo de una compañía litúrgica y con alas. ¿Será ésta la admisión de que una potencia celestial debe hacerse cargo del asunto? Si uno pierde la paciencia y reclama, ¿vendrá Bud Spencer y buscará y encontrará tu rostro con un tortazo para que te calmes, Señor? ¿O te amenazarán con la sala de retornados a las puertas del cielo? ¿El agua que sirven estará bendita? ¿Las azafatas serán monjas de esas que llevan guitarra y se pondrán a cantar durante las tormentas? ¿O te mandarán a rezar diez Padrenuestros para así alejar a truenos y rayos y buitres? ¿Darán sólo películas bíblicas? ¿Cinturones de seguridad con púas para la autoflagelación? ¿Se repartirán estampitas perfumadas para las manos? ¿El capitán –te alabamos, piloto– informará de la presencia de ángeles en las nubes que se ven desde el lado izquierdo? ¿Se nos enseñará un undécimo mandamiento: No le dirigirás la palabra al desconocido del asiento de al lado a menos que sea imprescindible? Si alguien vomita, ¿vendrá al exorcista de a bordo? ¿Se restarán pecados al viajero frecuente en lugar de sumarle millas? ¿Se venderán reproducciones del Santo Sudario en el servicio de duty-free? Si se cae un avión, ¿se indemnizará a familiares o atribuirán todo a la voluntad divina? ¿Se excomulgará al que esté leyendo El código Da Vinci? ¿Se encargarán misas por valijas perdidas y descarriadas? ¿Se exclamará “¡Milagro!” cada vez que se cumpla el horario? Quién sabe... En lo que a mí respecta, preferiría que la Santa Sede se hiciera cargo más de las enmiendas de faltas y malas acciones de los aeropuertos que de los aviones. Pero enseguida pienso en todas esas iglesias que, durante los terremotos, siempre están llenas y siempre se derrumban sobre los feligreses. Y entonces, mejor, dejémoslo así. Después de todo, uno ya se aproxima a los aeropuertos laicos con humildad, la cabeza gacha, casi de rodillas, dispuesto a recibir estigmas varios, los ojos volteados al cielo, listo para el martirologio, rezando y pensando mentalmente en mensajes náufragos como éste. El problema es que después cuesta tanto meterlo en una de esas pequeñas botellas que te dan ahí arriba. Esas botellitas que, sem medo de voar, uno bebe procurando olvidar todo lo que le pasó y que volverá a pasarle abajo: en esta tierra de terrores y de errores, de aerrorpuertos y aterrorpuertos, donde, como enseñan los religiosos, la culpa de que algo no salga bien siempre la tiene uno o los otros –nunca ellos– por los siglos de los vuelos, amén.
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Página/12:
“Soy reacio a embanderarme en algo muy estructurado”
ENTREVISTA AL DIBUJANTE FRANCISCO SOLANO LOPEZ, CREADOR, JUNTO CON OESTERHELD, DE “EL ETERNAUTA“
Estilista nato, es el centro de la exposición Operación Masacre, que se inaugura hoy. Referente ineludible de varias generaciones, Solano López dice que, pese a la connotación política de su trabajo, siempre prefirió ser “independiente”. Y concluye: “A mí me da la sensación de que con la historieta se puede decir casi todo”.
Jueves, 30 de Agosto de 2007
Algunos dibujantes pueden presumir de haber hecho historia en el arte popular de la Argentina. Con más de cincuenta años de trabajo en sus espaldas, dos exilios, una de las historietas más famosas que Argentina dio al mundo y un reconocimiento que recorre Europa y Estados Unidos, Francisco Solano López podría ser uno de esos que presumen. Pero no. El dibujante de 78 años, cocreador de El Eternauta, estilista excepcional de las viñetas, centro de la exposición Operación Masacre que abre hoy en Piedras 1065 (ver aparte) es un tipo humilde. Es el mismo que recibe a Página/12 en su departamento de Almagro con sencillez y amabilidad para charlar durante dos horas sobre su vida, su obra, la historia del comic y las influencias de Goya y Rembrandt en sus dibujos. Acaba de ser publicado Rescate - Las historietas perdidas de Solano López, un tomo de 128 páginas que reúne el conjunto de sus historias inéditas en la Argentina (ver aparte).
–Durante el siglo XX han pasado cosas de las que no somos muy conscientes: la aparición del cine, de la aviación, de las armas atómicas. En todas esas secciones de la realidad del género humano está metida la historieta, que nació humildemente como un entretenimiento para enganchar a los inmigrantes analfabetos de Estados Unidos y 20 años después apareció un tipo como Roy Crane, que creó la estructura de la aventura realista en historietas. El hombre tenía un estilo muy dinámico, buena síntesis. Representaba el dominio anglosajón en todo el mundo a través de Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune.
–¿Usted cuándo leía eso?
–Eso en los años ’20, claro. En los ’40 apareció Flash Gordon, Ming, toda esa ciencia ficción fantástica. Historias de aventuras que acompañaban el estallido tecnológico del siglo XX, con la civilización occidental llegando a esos confines inexplorados por entonces: el Congo, el desierto del Africa, la selva, todos lugares “misteriosos”. La historieta, como Hollywood, exploró esos lugares a la vez conectados con la ciencia, la tecnología, y siempre en un tono menor, algo más dedicado a los chicos.
–Eso al principio.
–Claro, pero pasó el tiempo y resulta que esos mismos personajes terminaron siendo desarrollados en producciones cinematográficas de alto costo, para un público total. Hollywood creó esa especie de necesidad total y por una cuestión ideológica también, que los ayudó en la Guerra Mundial, en la Guerra Fría, definiendo un enemigo para contener. La historieta acompañó todo eso.
–¿Entonces la historieta es también política?
–Termina siendo política también. La prueba está en que el propio Oesterheld, después de hacer el primer Eternauta, cuando se metió en política, la metió a ella en las historietas, ¡y a mí sin preguntarme! A mediados de los años ’50 apareció un tipo como Oesterheld y, no creo que él lo inspiró, sino que hubo un movimiento también en Europa, cuando los guionistas exploraron temas sociales, psicológicos.
–¿Usted en cierta manera no militó a través de la historieta?
–Yo soy reacio a embanderarme en algo que tenga una estructura, porque me quita independencia de pensamiento. Preferí hacer eso que dice usted, intentar alguna historia con otros en donde mandamos nuestro mensaje político, que sí, es más bien contestatario, pero siempre independiente. A mí me da la sensación de que con la historieta se puede decir casi todo.
–En lo artístico, ¿qué implicó esto de no cerrarse a ninguna estructura?
–Depende del mercado. Por ejemplo, los franceses tienen una cosa muy estructurada, con la que no me sentí cómodo trabajando. Ellos, más que historietas mensuales, sacan mucho tomos y no los venden en los kioscos, sino en las librerías. Si sacás un tomo, mi exploración estilística le saca homogeneidad.
Leyendo Rescate – Las Historietas perdidas de Solano López (Domus), la evolución estilística de la que habla Solano López queda en evidencia: texturas hechas con lápiz para la adaptación de Operación Masacre, tinta, pincel y Rotring en las otras.
–Yo me siento medio un francotirador por esto. En Rescate son ocho o nueve historias cortas que tienen una temática muy diferente, e incluso un tratamiento técnico diferente. Esto no es un capricho sino el deseo de variar, la evolución natural mía, que de pronto me siento cansado con un medio y encuentro que hay otro con el que puedo conseguir alguna cosa que me interesa. Lo mismo con la temática...
–Aunque cambian los temas, sus historias siempre tienen un tema social. ¿Será por eso que siguen vigentes?
–Puede ser. La temática social y política siempre aparece por ahí. Yo no adscribo a ninguna ideología ni nada, excepto la apertura.
–Usted publicó mucho en Inglaterra e Italia, pero el mercado norteamericano, que es muy fuerte, siempre costó.
–Ahora los norteamericanos se están abriendo un poco, obligados también por la invasión del manga, que no ha llegado sólo acá. Yo en una época me acerqué, ya tenía un equipo formado para la Fleetway de Inglaterra, y probé con una editorial que tenía historietas de terror, pero tampoco cundió porque ellos sentían que estaba lejos para tener una colaboración regular. Yo lo sentía una tontería, decía: “¿Ellos no sabrán que yo les mando a los ingleses 25 páginas por semana desde hace seis años?”
–¿Y Marvel, o DC?
–La Marvel y la DC están hechas para el superhéroe, y eso te condiciona la forma de trabajo y el estilo, que para mí no tienen atractivo.
–¿Ninguna oportunidad?
–Estuve en una feria de San Diego y me puse en la cola para ver a un editor de la Vertigo, que por lo que yo sabía era más elástica, con otra temática, otros climas, y él mismo me dijo “acá no te van a pagar lo que te merecés”. Me dijo “oh, Solano, Solano López, no venga acá, no vale la pena” y me recomendó algún nombre para que fuera a buscar.
–Esto fue relativamente reciente, ¿no? La línea Vertigo de DC surgió hace algunas décadas nomás.
–Sí, después me conecté con Dark Horse, que es más chiquita y está más atenta a lo que viene de afuera. De hecho, en Rescate, la última historia tiene 26 páginas y la hice con un guionista de esa editorial. También les hice una de aliens, con buenos guionistas, que contaban la historia de un cachorro de alien que tenía una enfermedad y era medio un marginal y lo envían a un satélite de los ricos.
–Y después de tanta carrera, ¿qué queda todavía pendiente?
–Quedó en el tintero el tratamiento de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza. Eso que aparece en Rescate es un prólogo, así lo pensamos con mi hijo, diez páginas que después se convertían en una narración épica de la resistencia y el sacrificio de todo un pueblo. Pero yo lo llevé por Europa y noté que no había mucho interés.
–Eso fue durante su exilio en España. ¿Cómo fue esa época?
–Para mí fue agradable. Era una época muy difícil, claro, en el medio de los años ’70, haciendo una historieta montonera que me pasaba Oesterheld desde la clandestinidad y mi hijo preso por un grupo de tareas que lo fue a buscar, primero a mi casa y luego a la pensión donde vivía: rodearon la manzana y se lo llevaron. Yo conseguí ponerlo al costado de los centros clandestinos y quedó detenido en la policía de la Capital Federal. Un año después pude sacarlo e irnos juntos a España. Pero fue un alivio.
–¿Ahora en qué está trabajando?
–Ahora no estoy trabajando porque ustedes no me dejan... (se ríe). Me entrevistaron mucho en estos días. Tengo a Maiztegui, que está trabajando ahora en las sesenta páginas finales de La búsqueda de Elena, el encuentro de este último tramo de la historia en que Juan Salvo se encuentra con su mujer, que a su vez ha sido tomada por otro bando interestelar. Tengo amigos que me piden que me meta con el Martín Fierro. Lo tengo a Sampayo que va a venir a radicarse a Baires para hacer algo con él, sin necesidad de reeditar Evaristo, sino otra historia distinta. Quizá Clown, que figura ahí en el libro también.
Exiliado dos veces y con un amplio y notable trabajo a veces opacado por el éxito de El Eternauta, hoy Solano López vive momentos de reconocimiento: publicación de trabajos inéditos o sólo editados en Europa, una exposición de sus originales y el cariño de los lectores, que lo siguen llamando Maestro. Y no les falta razón.
Entrevista: Andrés Valenzuela.
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The Independent: Welcome to Hillywood:
how Rwanda's film industry emerged from genocide's shadow
By Steve Bloomfield in Kigali
Published: 30 August 2007
Eric Kabera was sitting beside the pool at Kigali's Mille Collines hotel when he decided to make Rwanda's first feature film. It was 1997, the influx of foreign journalists had slowed and his work as a local fixer had dropped off with it.
A Rwandan Tutsi who had spent most of his life in exile in Goma, eastern Zaire, it was the lack of global attention paid to his country's genocide that concerned him, not the lack of work. A film about the genocide would, he thought, remind people across the world of what happened in three terrible months in 1994.
Together with Nick Hughes, a British film-maker, Kabera made 100 Days, the first film about the genocide. It would not be the last. After struggling for four years to get it released, 100 Days spawned a number of successors, the most notable of which, Hotel Rwanda, was based on what had taken place at the Mille Collines. Starring Don Cheadle and the British actress, Sophie Okonedo, the film was nominated for three Oscars.
The events in Rwanda are now burnt into the collective consciousness as the last genocide of the 20th century. In just 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were slaughtered by extremist Hutus while the rest of the world sat and watched.
A further reminder will hit cinemas next month with the release of Shake Hands With The Devil, a film based on the memoirs of General Roméo Dallaire, the commander of the undermanned and undermined UN force in Rwanda during the slaughter.
Kabera, who now wants to make a comedy, finds himself a victim of the potent profile he helped to create for the country. "It has nothing to do with genocide," he said. "It's a comedy about a beautiful girl. But I talk to investors and they say: 'a comedy in Rwanda? I don't see that'.
"That's the problem we have now. These films are sending a message about Rwanda, so at least people know where we're from, but it means that everybody who sees it sees the genocide and nothing else. It is a good introduction but we want to go beyond the genocide. We want to present a new face of Rwanda."
To do this means creating a film industry. The flow of film crews in and out of Rwanda over the past few years has created a buzz among local film-makers but it has been hard to capitalise on it. "People come, they shoot, they go," says Kabera. "There was no film culture to speak of. I wanted to grow that culture."
He started slowly, setting up the Rwanda Film Centre as a place to train young, film-makers. Two were trained in the first year, a handful the next. By 2005 Kabera felt he had enough films to put together Rwanda's first film festival. More than 100 were shown in all, most from overseas.
Not content with showing films in the capital, Kigali, Kabera decided a selection of those made by Rwandans needed to be taken out to the rural areas.
"One of the catalysts for the genocide was that people had no idea what life was like outside their own village," he says. "We were too insular."
Rwanda is marketed to the world as, "the land of a thousand hills". The travelling film festival was, somewhat inevitably, named "Hillywood". In a country with just one television station and few cultural events outside Kigali, Hillywood has taken off in a way even Kabera did not expect.
Half a dozen short films are played on an inflatable screen in seven different locations on seven successive days. Up to 10,000 people come to each show. "At 10 o'clock we finish and all these people are saying 'More! More! Give us more films!' But we don't have any more," said Kabera.
Topping the bill this year was Hey, Mr DJ! about an arrogant young disc jockey who discovers he is HIV positive. Others looked at issues ranging from poverty and education to love and friendship, and were made in Rwanda's most widely spoken language, Kinya-rwanda. Hillywood has also had its first brush with Hollywood. The Tribeca Film Festival in New York, set up by Robert De Niro, celebrated Rwandan cinema in May. Three short films were shown – Scars Of My Days by Gilbert Ndahayo, A Love Letter To My Country by Thierry Dushimirimana and Behind These Walls by Pierre Lalumiere Kayitana – all of which portrayed Rwanda as it is now, rather than the genocide.
The event coincided with a visit to the US by Rwanda's President, Paul Kagame, who was accompanied to the film festival by Bill Clinton who said the films were an example of a, "modern rich culture rooted in who they are without denying where they have been; looking toward where they can go and what they can become."
Kabera and his team at the Rwanda Film Centre are now trying to put together a schedule for next year's Hillywood and the Kigali film festival. Foreign films, many of them African, will be on the bill alongside some made by Rwandans. Bamako, a Malian film that has won rave reviews in the US and the UK, is pencilled in for the opening night at Kigali's five-star Serena hotel. Despite the progress that has been made in the last 10 years, Rwanda still does not have a purpose-built cinema.
Kabera is trying to rectify that. More than 30 workmen are constructing a cinema in Kigali's new 2020 estate, on a hill high above the city centre. A grand looking new building, situated in a square just around the corner, was Kabera's first choice but the owners of the new estate decided to turn it into a church instead.
Standing in the middle of the building site, Kabera shows where the main auditorium seating 300 people will be. "And up there," he says, pointing to an as yet unbuilt first floor, "there will be a pastry and coffee shop, while over there we'll have a training centre."
The only problem is money. Kabera estimates it will cost around $600,000 (£300,000) to build the whole cinema and he only has $100,000 so far. When the money runs out building work will come to a stop.
"I wanted to get started though," he says. "I hope it will be easier to get more money once we've started."
He plans to visit the UK in September and has already considered asking the journalists he worked for a decade ago for a donation. "I worked with Fergal Keane and George Alagiah at the BBC.
"For people to go beyond the genocide is very difficult. But I think people will realise Rwandans can do comedy.
"We can't forget our past – it's in our every day lives – but we have to choose. Do we get stuck with it or do we get on and face the prospect of a better future?"
A nation's trauma filmed
100 Days (2001)
Released four years after filming, the film centres on Josette, a young Tutsi girl. She finds sanctuary in a church, supposedly protected by UN forces but the church's Hutu priest deceives Josette and agrees to spare her life only if she submits to his sexual advances.
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
The film was nominated for 26 awards, winning 12. Paul Rusesabagina turns the luxury Kigali hotel he manages into a safe haven for as many Tutsi refugees as he can, saving many lives. One reviewer termed this film an "African Schindler's List".
Shake Hands With The Devil (2007)
An award-winning documentary film about Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire, the man given the responsibility of maintaining peace in Rwanda. Despite his best efforts, left with only a handful of soldiers and no support from UN headquarters, Dallaire was powerless to stop the genocide. This "hard-hitting" film, based on his memoirs, promises to be "the most powerful documentary produced about the Rwandan genocide".
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article2906341.ece
ZNet | Repression
Big Brother Democracy
How Free Speech and Surveillance Are Now Intertwined
by Naomi Klein; The Nation; August 29, 2007
Recently, as protesters gathered outside the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit in Montebello, Quebec, to confront US President George W. Bush, Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Associated Press reported this surreal detail: "Leaders were not able to see the protesters in person, but they could watch the protesters on TV monitors inside the hotel ... Cameramen hired to ensure that demonstrators would be able to pass along their messages to the three leaders sat idly in a tent full of audio and video equipment ... A sign on the outside of the tent said, 'Our cameras are here today providing your right to be seen and heard. Please let us help you get your message out. Thank You.'"
Yes, it's true: Like contestants on a reality TV show, protesters at the SPP were invited to vent into video cameras, their rants to be beamed to protest-trons inside the summit enclave. It was security state as infotainment - Big Brother meets, well, Big Brother.
The spokesperson for Prime Minister Harper explained that although protesters were herded into empty fields, the video-link meant that their right to political speech was protected. "Under the law, they need to be seen and heard, and they will be."
It is an argument with sweeping implications. If videotaping activists meets the legal requirement that dissenting citizens have the right to be seen and heard, what else might fit the bill?
How about all the other security cameras that patrolled the summit - the ones filming demonstrators as they got on and off buses and peacefully walked down the street? What about the cellphone calls that were intercepted, the meetings that were infiltrated, the e-mails that were read? According to the new rules set out in Montebello, all of these actions may soon be recast not as infringements on civil liberties but the opposite: proof of our leaders' commitment to direct, unmediated consultation.
Elections are a crude tool for taking the public temperature - these methods allow constant, exact monitoring of our beliefs. Think of surveillance as the new participatory democracy; of wiretapping as the political equivalent of Total Request Live.
Protesters in Montebello complained that while they were locked out, CEOs from about thirty of the largest corporations in North America - from Wal-Mart to Chevron - were part of the official summit.
But perhaps they had it backward: The CEOs had only an hour and fifteen minutes of face time with the leaders. The activists were being "seen and heard" around the clock. So perhaps instead of shouting about police state tactics, they should have said, "Thank you for listening." (And reading, and watching, and photographing, and data-mining.)
The Montebello "seen and heard" rule also casts the target of the protests in a new light. The SPP is described in the leaders' final statement as an "ambitious" plan to "keep our borders closed to terrorism yet open to trade." In other words, a merger of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the homeland security complex - NAFTA with spy planes.
The model dates back to September 11, when the US Ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, pronounced that in the new era, "security will trump trade." But there was an out clause: The trade on which Canada's and Mexico's economies depend could continue uninterrupted, as long as those governments were willing to welcome the tentacles of the US "war on terror." Canadian and Mexican business leaders leapt to surrender, aggressively pushing their governments to give in to US demands for "integrated" security in order to keep the goods and tourists flowing.
Almost six years later, the business leaders at Montebello - under the banner of the North American Competitiveness Council, an official wing of the SPP - were still holding up "thickening borders" as the bogeyman. The fix? According to the SPP website, "technological solutions, improved information-sharing, and, potentially, the use of biometric identifiers."
From experience we know what this means: continent-wide no-fly lists, searchable and integrated databases, as well as the $2.5 billion contract to Boeing to build a "virtual fence" on the northern and southern borders of the United States, equipped with unmanned drones.
In short, under the SPP vision of the continent, "thick" borders will soon be replaced with a nearly invisible web of continental surveillance - almost all of it run for profit. Two members of the SPP advisory group - Lockheed Martin and General Electric - have already received multibillion-dollar contracts from the US government to build this web. In the Bush era, security doesn't trump big business; it may be the biggest business of all.
In the run-up to the SPP summit, a spate of surveillance scandals helped paint a fuller picture. First, Congress not only failed to curtail the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping but opened the door to snooping into bank records, phone call patterns and even physical searches - all without any onus to prove the subject is a threat.
Next, the Boston Globe reported on plans to link thousands of CCTV cameras on streets, subways, apartment buildings and businesses into networks capable of tracking suspects in real time. And on August 15, confirmation came that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency - the arm of the US military that runs spy planes and satellites over enemy territory - would be fully integrated into the infrastructure of domestic intelligence gathering and local policing, becoming what the agency calls the "eyes" to the NSA's "ears."
Add a few more high-tech tools - biometric IDs, facial-recognition software, networked databases of "suspects," GPS bundled into ever more electronic devices - and you have something like the world of total surveillance most recently portrayed in The Bourne Ultimatum.
Which brings us back to the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Who needs clumsy old border checks when the authorities are making sure we are seen and heard at all times - in high definition, online and off-, on land and from the sky? Security is the new prosperity. Surveillance is the new democracy.
This column was first published in The Nation (www.thenation.com).
Naomi Klein is the author of "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" and "Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate." You can read more at NaomiKlein.org.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=13644
ZNet | U.S.
Two Years Post-Katrina
Racism and Criminal Justice in New Orleans
by Jordan Flaherty; August 30, 2007
Two years after the devastation of New Orleans highlighted racism and inequality in the US, the disaster continues. New Orleans' health care and education systems are still in crisis. Thousands of units of public housing sit empty. Nearly half the city's population remains displaced. A report released this week by the Institute for Southern Studies reveals that, out of $116 billion in federal Katrina funds allocated, less than 30% has gone towards long-term rebuilding—and half of that 30% remains unspent.
The city's criminal justice system, already rated among the worst in the nation by human rights organizations pre-Katrina, continues to be in crisis. After the storm, thousands of prisoners were abandoned in Orleans Parish Prison as the water was rising. In the days after Katrina, mainstream media depicted the people of New Orleans as looters and criminals, and a makeshift jail in a bus station was the first city function to re-open, just days after the storm.
For Robert Goodman, an activist for criminal justice reform who was born and raised in the schools and prisons of Louisiana, this demonizing and criminalization of the survivors was no surprise. He tells me that the primary crisis of New Orleans is a discriminatory and corrupt criminal justice system, adding that, "every time a black child is born in Louisiana, there's already a bed waiting for him at Angola State Prison.".
On May 9, 2006, Robert Goodman's brother was killed in an encounter with the New Orleans police. This was another death in a long list of civilian deaths at police hands, a list that also includes three deaths in Orleans Parish Prison this year. Advocates say these deaths have not received proper investigation, and point to larger, systemic problems.
A Broken System
For poor Black kids growing up in New Orleans, the education system functions as a school to prison pipeline. In New Orleans, 95% of the detained youth in 1999 were Black. In 2004, Louisiana spent $96,713 to incarcerate each child in detention, and $4,724 to educate a child in the public schools. "When I went to prison, I was illiterate," Goodman tells me. "I didn't even know anything about slavery, about our history."
New Orleans' public defense system is in such poor shape that Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter recently complained that, "indigent defense in New Orleans is unbelievable, unconstitutional, totally lacking the basic professional standards of legal representation, and a mockery of what a criminal justice system should be in a Western civilized nation."
Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the US – if Louisiana were a country, it would have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Orleans Parish Prison, the city jail, was - pre-Katrina - the eighth largest jail in the US. Advocates complain that there is no forum for oversight over the jail or Marlin Gusman, the criminal Sheriff who oversees it. "We've suffered under a policy where the city builds a huge jail that is then required to be filled with human beings, or else it's a waste of money," states civil rights attorney Mary Howell.
Robert Goodman is fighting to change the system that took away his brother, as part of a grassroots organization called Safe Streets Strong Communities. Safe Streets is struggling not just to reform the entire system, from policing and public defense to prison, but also to reframe the debate around these issues.
Safe Streets began as a coalition of grassroots activists and organizers from a number of organizations who came together post-Katrina to respond to the immediate crisis. "Our first priority was to help those individuals who had been in Orleans Parish Prison prior to Katrina, many of whom were being held illegally for minor, non-violent offenses," explains co-director Norris Henderson. "In the early days, right after the storm, Safe Streets was basically performing triage for a broken system."
In the transition from the crisis of Katrina to the long-term catastrophe that the city is still in, Safe Streets focused their energy on building their base, ensuring that people in communities most affected were shaping the priorities and making the decisions of the organization.
The organization has been a vital leader in the struggle for a just recovery for New Orleans. Shortly after Safe Streets began pressuring on the issue, the city's indigent defense board was completely reconstituted and now includes people that actually care about poor people receiving a fair trial. After they turned their focus to issues around policing, the city approved and funded an office of the independent monitor to oversee the police. In addition, the city council has begun looking at downsizing Orleans Parish Prison, as well as reducing the sheriff's budget, and tying it to reform and greater accountability – also a part of Safe Street's strategy.
More importantly, they affected the debate around criminal justice in the city. Within a few months after the storm, instead of talk of more prisons, journalists and politicians were looking at the system, and the roots of the problems. Evidence of widespread police misconduct and people locked up for months without charges began to be reported.
For those that have been victimized by law enforcement violence, organizing and talking about what they have faced has already been transformative. "I can't imagine where my family would be if it weren't for Safe Streets," Goodman tells me. "We would have been pushed to the side. This organizing inspired my mother to live another day."
----------------------
Jordan Flaherty is an editor of Left Turn Magazine, a journal of grassroots resistance. His previous articles from New Orleans are online at http://www.leftturn.org. To contact Jordan, email: neworleans@leftturn.org. On myspace: http://www.myspace.com/secondlines
A version of this story originally appeared in the July/August issue of ColorLines Magazine. See a special online collection of Katrina-related reporting at http://www.colorlines.com/.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=13655
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