Sandra Finley

2016-10-02 Excerpt from interview with winner of 2016 Pulitzer Prize, Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen. his book “The Sympathizer”.

 Culture and Ethics, Peace or Violence, Propaganda  No Responses »
Oct 032016
 

The interview by Eleanor Wachtel is far-ranging and informative.

I transcribed the short portion (appears below) in which Vietnamese-American author,  Viet Thanh Nguyen,  discusses a perception of American wars that is not universal.   I think this other perception with its variations is spreading.  (Ref  2016-03-22 There are two sides to the story. Why do we hear only one? (Terrorists & Context: CIA – examples Mossadegh, Lumumba, Arbenz, Guevera, Allende)

The audio link to the full interview,  and more info from the website also appears below.

Recommend:   Do a web search.   You will be blown away by what Viet Thanh Nguyen has accomplished  – – a major contributor to the Good of the World.

 

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Listen to the full interview,  52:08

His ambitious, disturbing, and darkly comic novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.

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SHORT EXCERPT  TRANSCRIBED   (followed by more info from the website)

Wachtel (Interviewer):    ”  . . .   from around the age of twelve you became an avid student of the war that brought your family to America.  …

Viet Thanh Nguyen:    I certainly grew up knowing that there had been a war and that it had shaped my family fundamentally.  And that it was something that was a major issue not just for the Vietnamese people I was growing up among, but among Americans as well and there was no way to get away from that because it was so omnipresent in American culture.

So it was easy to see Apocalypse Now at a very young age because that was what was available in the video store to rent.   It was easy to go out to movies and watch Platoon by Oliver Stone   . . .  what was also easy was my deliberate decision to go into the Library and read as much as I could about the Vietnam War  . . .  I was reading novels, histories, along with watching these Hollywood films.   . . .  that really indelibly shaped my understanding of both American culture and the Vietnam war.  . . . oftentimes very traumatic to deal with

That was the beginning of a lifetime journey although I didn’t know it at the time when I was a kid

Wachtel:  what did you take from the movies, for instance Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now ?

Viet Thanh Nguyen:    I took from it that obviously this war was enormously important for Americans;  they were spending all this time making these movies and watching them.

I also took from it that there was no place in this American imagination, this American memory and history for Vietnamese people like me.  Or that our place was a very problematic place.   It was to be killed or silenced or victimized but in any role we were there simply as a backdrop for an American drama.  This was a very difficult thing to deal with because obviously growing up in a Vietnamese community we were not the backdrop of our own lives.   The war was central to us.

I always knew that this was actually also a crucially important war for us and that all the stories and  emotions and subjectivities that I was witness to as a kid among the Vietnamese people were not being heard or seen or understood by the larger American community.   And how Americans saw this war was also in many ways how the world was seeing it because of the power of American culture and the way that American stories were disseminated because of that power.

Wachtel:   Yes because unusually as you point out, here history was written by the losers.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:    Yeah, this is one of the ironies.  I think it has to do with the unique nature of the United States and the wars that it has been fighting since WW2 or the Korean War.

Basically the U.S. is a global power after WW2 and it’s fighting all these wars.   It hasn’t won a war since WW2.

Korean War was a stalemate.

Vietnam war was a defeat.

Every major war since then can hardly be declared as a victory.

What this means is that even if the U.S. doesn’t win wars  its global power, its military power, combined with its economic power and its soft power through Hollywood and the public culture industry means that it can tell its own stories in its own ways and spread them all over the world and everybody all over the world has to confront them because that’s how pervasive American culture is.

Wachtel:  even the naming of the war.   To North Americans it’s called the Vietnam war but in Vietnam it’s often referred to as the American war and you say that both are in fact misnomers.

Viet Thanh Nguyen:    Yeah, they both are.  The war involved more than just the United States and Vietnam  It involved Laos and Cambodia.  These countries were not just postscripts or sideshows;  they were equally involved in the war.

They were devastated by what happened and both Vietnam and the U.S. were responsible for extending the war into these two countries, along with China and the Soviet Union.   So it was also a global war.  This was a hot war taking place in the middle of a cold war.  All these countries were meddling in this region.

Laos and Cambodia paid the heaviest prices for what happened.

But for the Americans to call it the Vietnam War  and for the  Vietnamese to call it the American War means that both countries can forget what happened to Laos and Cambodia.  It serves both their interests to forget.

Listen to the full interview,  52:08

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BACK TO THE WEB-SITE INFO:

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in what was previously known as South Vietnam in 1971. Four years later, after the fall of Saigon, his family was forced to flee to the United States as refugees, eventually settling in California. His first novel The Sympathizer, is an ambitious, disturbing novel that explores the aftermath of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a Communist Party spy who escapes Saigon for California, where he carries on his double life through assassinations and the making of a Hollywood war film.

The Sympathizer, was on 30 “best of the year” lists and won numerous awards, including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. Nguyen spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from Los Angeles.

On the degradation of Vietnamese “boat people”

By 1978 Vietnam was a poor country. People were starving, there was a lot of desperation and the victorious Vietnamese government was persecuting people who had been affiliated with the defeated regime. People started fleeing the country, and for most people — tens of thousands of people — their only option was to flee by boat.

It was a huge issue for the Vietnamese refugee community to see their compatriots going through this horrible experience. There are some estimates that half the people who took to the seas by boat didn’t make it to their destination. So as a boy, I was aware that the rest of the world saw the Vietnamese people in this way, as victims of war and as “boat people,” as the press labeled them. But this seemed really inadequate to me, because I knew the complexities of Vietnamese life and I knew that thinking of them as “boat people” automatically was demeaning. It brought pity to them and in some cases helped to rescue them, but it was also a way of relegating them to a really abject status. There had to be another way to think of these people. So I choose to think of them as heroic. They undertook a really risky journey, knowing that these were the odds, and to see them purely as victims was woefully inadequate.

So I try to contest this term, try to get readers to think about what it was like to be a refugee. And obviously while writing that, I was cognizant of the fact that we’re still seeing refugees today, and that much of the rest of the world, when they look at refugees, they continue to see them as abject victims.

The shattering effects of war on families

I think this experience of having people separated from their families and having families divided is actually not that unusual. Many Vietnamese families that I know endured similar kinds of experiences. In some cases, families were able to reunite, but sometimes they remained divided for decades. My father didn’t see his siblings for 40 years, from 1954 until the early 1990s, when my family returned. My mother didn’t see her family for 20 years, and they didn’t see my adopted sister [who stayed in Vietnam to watch the family property when the rest of the family fled to the U.S. in 1975] during that time either. We didn’t talk about it. It was a very sensitive subject. Even today, my parents don’t really talk about it.

A refugee child, growing up in two worlds

I was growing up in San Jose in a Vietnamese household. My world, domestically, was all about Vietnamese people. But then I had to venture out, to go to school, and I watched American movies and TV shows in my free time. So that was my exposure to American culture. It was a very bifurcated kind of existence, and I think that was actually very common for people of my generation. We had to live in these two worlds. Our parents and our grandparents were not living in the American world — they were trying to avoid it as much as they could.

I was intimately familiar with the Vietnamese world, but at the same time I was also intimately familiar with the English-language world. So no matter where I was, I couldn’t help but bring that other world with me. Of course I would understand the customs, the history my parents were trying to relay to me. But at the same time I would also look at them as if they were foreign, because I couldn’t help but see them through the eyes of what I imagined the American world to be.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s comments have been edited and condensed.

Music to close the interview: “Một cõi đi về” composed by Trịnh Công Sơn, performed by Diva Viet. 

2016-08-25 Revisiting the lessons of the Battle of Seattle and its aftermath, by Walden Bello.

 Change, Empowerment, Freedom of Speech. (Remove some wrong postings from category)  No Responses »
Sep 282016
 

Thanks to Janet,  an excellent article.  A couple things first:

 

I wondered,  Who is Walden Bello?

He is an intrepid activist, teacher, scholar.  One in that legion of dispersed leaders who make me believe that my small contributions will help to drive the changes we so badly need.

About Walden Bello,  see  http://www.waldenbello.org/about-walden/ 

 

Background to the Battle in Seattle, you may be interested:

2010-04-29 Is it armies and war that win civil rights (democracy)?    Soundtrack for a Revolution.    (speaks to one of the biggest myths of our time.)

2010-05-07 David Korten, Agenda for a New Economy. The revolt against Wall Street, Around the world.

2016-07-08 Rulers cannot rule unless we agree to let them rule. Democracy overtaken by Corporatocracy = coup d’état. Citizens fight to regain democracy = Revolution (insurgency) . Corporatocracy fights to hold on = counter insurgency.

2008-11-23 Battle in Seattle, the movie. Highly recommended. Resistance WTO, SPP.

2016-02-06 “Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion”, by Randal Marlin

 

And now to THE ARTICLE by Walden Bello!

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

 

Revisiting the lessons of the Battle of Seattle and its aftermath

https://www.tni.org/en/article/revisiting-the-lessons-of-the-battle-of-seattle-and-its-aftermath

25 August 2016

Walden Bello shares some reflections on the meaning of Seattle for change in knowledge systems, discusses how despite the deep crisis of neoliberalism, finance capital has managed to retain tremendous power, and appeals for a new comprehensive vision of the desirable society.

Speech delivered at the opening plenary session of the 111th Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington State Convention Center, August 19, 2016

WTO protests in Seattle, November 30, 1999 Pepper spray is applied to the crowd. / Photo credit Steve Kaiser @Wikicommons

 

I had many lessons from the Battle of Seattle, and one of them is that policewomen can deal it out as good as any policeman. I got beaten up, badly but obviously not fatally by one of Seattle’s Best. Yesterday, I decided go down memory lane and visit the scene of the crime. I remember seeing Medea Benjamin of Code Pink being treated fairly roughly and I rushed forward to try to get the police to stop it. At that point, a policewoman rushed me and started beating me with her baton while dragging me and dumping me on the street, with the coup de grace being a well planted kick to my derriere. But that was not the biggest blow of all. The biggest was to my ego: I was beaten and kicked but was seen as not fit to be arrested.

 

Like Caesar, I will divide my talk into three parts. First, some reflections on the meaning of Seattle for change in knowledge systems. Second, a discussion of how despite the deep crisis of neoliberalism, finance capital has managed to retain tremendous power. Third, an appeal for a new comprehensive vision of the desirable society.

Seattle and the Crisis of Neoliberalism

 

We are all familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s theory of how change takes place in the physical sciences. Dissonant data can no longer be accommodated in the old paradigm until someone comes out with a new one where they can be explained. Social scientists have appropriated Kuhn in their efforts to explain the displacement and replacement of hegemonic thinking in politics, economics, and sociology. I think that while, as in the case of the displacement of Keynesianism in the late seventies and of the rational choice and efficient market hypothesis during the recent financial crisis, the role of dissonant data has been exhaustively studied, explanations of change in knowledge systems have failed to adequately take into account the role of collective action.

 

The Battle of Seattle underlines in my view the very critical, if not decisive role of collective mass action in displacing knowledge systems. Let me explain.

 

It is now generally accepted that globalization has been a failure in terms of delivering on its triple promise of lifting countries from stagnation, eliminating poverty, and reducing inequality. The ongoing global economic crisis, which is rooted in corporate-driven globalization and financial liberalization, has driven the last nail into the ideology of neoliberalism.

 

But things were very different over two decades ago. I still remember the note of triumphalism surrounding the first ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Singapore in November 1996. There, we were told by representatives of the U.S. and other developed countries that corporate-driven globalization was inevitable, that it was the wave of the future, and that the sole remaining task was to make the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the WTO more “coherent” in order to more swiftly get to the neoliberal utopia of an integrated global economy.

 

Indeed, the momentum of globalization seemed to sweep everything in front of it, including the truth. In the decade prior to Seattle, there were a lot of studies, including United Nations reports, that questioned the claim that globalization and free market policies were leading to sustained growth and prosperity. Indeed, the data showed that globalization and pro-market policies were promoting more inequality and more poverty and consolidating economic stagnation, especially in the global South. However, these figures remained “factoids” rather than facts in the eyes of academics, the press, and policymakers, who dutifully repeated the neoliberal mantra that economic liberalization promoted growth and prosperity. The orthodox view, repeated ad nauseam in the classroom, the media, and policy circles was that the critics of globalization were modern-day incarnations of Luddites or, as Thomas Friedman disdainfully branded us, believers in a flat earth.

 

Then came Seattle in 1999. After those tumultuous days in this city, the press began to talk about the “dark side of globalization,” about the inequalities and poverty being created by globalization. After that, we had the spectacular defections from the camp of neoliberal globalization, such as those of the financier George Soros, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the star economist Jeffery Sachs. The intellectual retreat from globalization probably reached its high point of sorts in 2007 in a comprehensive report by a panel of neoclassical economists headed by Princeton’s Angus Deaton and former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff, which sternly asserted that the World Bank Research Department—the source of most assertions that globalization and trade liberalization were leading to lower rates of poverty, sustained economic growth, and less inequality—had been deliberately distorting the data and/or making unwarranted claims.

 

True, neoliberalism continues to be the default discourse among many economists and technocrats. But even before the recent global financial collapse, it had already lost much of its credibility and legitimacy. What made the difference? Not so much research or debate but action. It took the anti-globalization actions of masses of people in the streets of Seattle, which interacted in synergistic fashion with the resistance of developing country representatives here in the Sheraton Convention Center and a police riot, to bring about the spectacular collapse of a WTO ministerial meeting and translate those factoids into facts, into truth. And the intellectual debacle inflicted on globalization by Seattle had very real consequences. Today, the Economist, the prime avatar of neoliberal globalization, admits that the “integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front,” and a process of “deglobalization” that it once considered unthinkable is actually unfolding.

 

Seattle was what Hegel called a “world-historic event.” Its enduring lesson is that truth is not just out there, existing objectively and eternally. Truth is completed, made real, and ratified by action. In Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action that discredited an intellectual paradigm that had served as the ideological warden of corporate control.

 

I would not say that neoliberalism was defeated in Seattle. But, to use a war metaphor, Seattle was certainly the Stalingrad of neoliberalism. It would take another decade before it would be definitively rolled back, and it took the global financial crisis to do this, with its sweeping away of the Rational Choice Theory and the Efficient Markets hypothesis that had been the cutting edge of the globalization of finance.

 

Finance Capital’s Persistent Structural Power

 

But the rollback of the neoliberal paradigm is only half the story. Even with its ideational crisis, the forces of global capital have waged a fierce rearguard battle. As an example of this let me just take the case of finance capital’s successful effort to resist any change in the face of the naked necessity and social consensus for comprehensive reform.

 

When the ground from under Wall Street opened up in autumn 2008, there was much talk of letting the banks get their just desserts, jailing the “banksters”, and imposing draconian regulation. The newly elected Barack Obama came to power promising banking reform, warning Wall Street, “My administration is the only thing that stands between you and the pitchforks”.

 

Yet nearly eight years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, it is evident that those who were responsible for bringing it about have managed to go completely scot-free. Not only that, they have been able to get governments to stick the costs of the crisis and the burden of the recovery on their victims.

 

How did they succeed? The first line of defense for the banks was to get the government to rescue the banks from the financial mess they had created. The banks flatly refused Washington’s pressure on them to mount a collective defense with their own resources. Using the massive collapse of stock prices triggered by Lehman Brothers going under, finance capital’s representatives were able to blackmail both liberals and the far-right in Congress to approve the US$700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Nationalization of the banks was dismissed as being inconsistent with “American” values.

 

Then by engaging in the defensive anti-regulatory war that they had mastered in Congress over decades, the banks were able, in 2009 and 2010, to gut the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of three key items that were seen as necessary for genuine reform: downsizing the banks; institutionally separating commercial from investment banking; and banning most derivatives and effectively regulating the so-called “shadow banking system” that had brought on the crisis.

 

They did this by using what Cornelia Woll termed finance capital’s “structural power”. One dimension of this power was the US$344 million the industry spent lobbying the U.S. Congress in the first nine months of 2009, when legislators were taking up financial reform. Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, alone received US$2.8 million in contributions from Wall Street in 2007–2008. But perhaps equally powerful as Wall Street’s entrenched congressional lobby were powerful voices in the new Obama Administration who were sympathetic to the bankers, notably Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Council of Economic Advisors’ head Larry Summers, both of whom had served as close associates of Robert Rubin, who had successive incarnations as co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Bill Clinton’s Treasury chief, and chairman and senior counsellor of Citigroup.

 

Finally, the financial sector succeeded by hitching the defense of its interests to one of the few remaining resonant assumptions of an otherwise crumbling neoliberal ideology: that the state is the source of all things bad that happens in the economy. While benefiting from the government bailout, Wall Street was able to change the narrative about the causes of the financial crisis, throwing the blame entirely on the state.

 

This is best illustrated in the case of Europe. As in the U.S., the financial crisis in Europe was a supply-driven crisis, as the big European banks sought high-profit, quick-return substitutes for the low returns on investment in industry and agriculture, such as real-estate lending and speculation in financial derivatives, or placed their surplus funds in high-yield bonds sold by governments. Indeed, in their drive to raise more and more profits from lending to governments, local banks, and property developers, Europe’s banks poured US$2.5 trillion into Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain.

 

The result was that Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 148 percent in 2010, bringing the country to the brink of a sovereign debt crisis. Focused on protecting the banks, the European authorities’ approach to stabilizing Greece’s finances was not to penalize the creditors for irresponsible lending but to get citizens to shoulder all the costs of adjustment.

 

The changed narrative, focusing on the “profligate state” rather than unregulated private finance as the cause of the financial crisis, quickly made its way to the USA, where it was used not only to derail real banking reform but also to prevent the enactment of an effective stimulus programme in 2010. Christina Romer, the former head of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that it would take a US$1.8 trillion to reverse the recession. Obama approved only less than half, or US$787 billion, placating the Republican opposition but preventing an early recovery. Thus the cost of the follies of Wall Street fell not on banks but on ordinary Americans, with the unemployed reaching nearly 10 percent of the workforce in 2011 and youth unemployment reaching over 20 percent.

 

The triumph of Wall Street in reversing the popular surge against it following the outbreak of the financial crisis is evident in the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections. The U.S. statistics are clear: 95 percent of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1 percent; median income was US$4,000 lower in 2014 than in 2000; concentration of financial assets increased after 2009, with the four largest banks owning assets that came to nearly 50 percent of GDP. Yet regulating Wall Street has not been an issue in the Republican primary debates while in the Democratic debates, it has been a side issue, despite the valiant efforts of candidate Bernie Sanders to make it the centerpiece.

Bernie Sanders Rally in Denver, Colorado at the Colorado Convention Center. / Photo credit Hans Watson @Flickr

 

The political institutions of one of the world’s most advanced liberal democracies were no match for the entrenched structural power of the financial establishment. As Cornelia Woll writes, “For the administration and Congress, the main lesson from the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 was that they had only very limited means to pressure the financial industry into behavior that appeared urgently necessary for the survival of the entire sector and the economy as a whole”.

 

In Greece, the austerity policies provoked a popular revolt – expressed in the June 2015 referendum on the bailout in which over 60 percent of the Greek people rejected the deal – but in the end their will was trampled on as the German government forced Tsipras into a humiliating surrender. It is clear that the key motives were to save the European financial elite from the consequences of their irresponsible policies, enforcing the iron principle of full debt repayment, and crucifying Greece to dissuade others, such as the Spaniards, Irish, and Portuguese, from revolting against debt slavery. As Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of Germany’s Bundesbank, admitted some time back, the draconian exercise in Greece was about “protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs”.

 

Yet, the victory of the banks is likely in the end to be pyrrhic. The combination of deep austerity-induced recession or stagnation that grips much of Europe and the U.S. and the absence of financial reform is deadly. The resulting prolonged stagnation and the prospect of deflation have discouraged investment in the real economy to expand goods and services.

 

With the move to re-regulate finance halted, the financial institutions have all the more reason to do what they did prior to 2008 that triggered the current crisis: engage in intense speculative operations designed to make super-profits from the difference between the inflated price of assets and derivatives based on assets and the real value of these assets before the law of gravity causes the inevitable crash.

 

The non-transparent derivatives market is now estimated to total US$707 trillion, or significantly higher than the US$548 billion in 2008. According to one analyst, “The market has grown so unfathomably vast, the global economy is at risk of massive damage should even a small percentage of contracts go sour. Its size and potential influence are difficult just to comprehend, let alone assess.” Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the SEC, agreed, telling one writer that none of the post-2008 reforms has “significantly diminished the likelihood of financial crises”.

 

The question then is not if another bubble will burst but when. And for us here, the key lesson is that in spite of the ideological discrediting of neoliberalism and popular anger at the depredations of the banks, the structural power of capital remains immense and has prevented any significant financial figure from being jailed, much less allowed significant reform.

 

The Need for A New Comprehensive Vision

 

My sense is that the persistence of Capital’s structural power is related to the fact that while the combination of objective developments, intellectual critique, and collective action eroded the legitimacy of neoliberalism, we have had a signal failure to articulate the bold alternative that can match the depth of the crisis of capitalism that we are in.

 

There is great, seething discontent out there, at the multiple crises triggered by capitalism. I wish, however, one could say, as one great revolutionary did at another time and place, “There is great tumult under heaven, the situation is excellent.” Unfortunately, the situation is not excellent, since many of those who have been run over by corporate-driven globalization are turning to demagogues and ideologues of the right such as Donald Trump, Marin Le Pen, and, in my own country, President Rodrigo Duterte, who has managed to convince a large section of the citizenry that crime and drugs are the root of the country’s problems and that the main cure for the ills of the country is to kill ‘em all, pushers and users alike. In this regard, let me say that the US and Europe have no monopoly on dangerous right wing demagogues with a heated, angry mass base, a great many of them resentful people from the suffering middle classes, who want simple solutions and are willing to countenance violence to bring about the leader’s version of heaven on earth. The key difference at this point is that your demagogues are still on the sidelines chopping at the bit to grab power while ours has already come to power by electoral means.

 

Undoubtedly, part of the problem is the failure of the traditional forces of the left to educate their core bases of support, such as the white working class. Another part has been the inability to integrate minority populations into the ranks of the left, which has traditionally been the home of the disenfranchised and marginalized, forcing some to turn to radical fundamentalist groups such as ISIS. Thus the very real hurts imposed on so many sectors by corporate-driven globalization have been successfully joined to myths about displacement and crime by immigrants, on the one hand, and to the very real failures of immigrant integration, on the other. Donald Trump, Marin Le Pen, and ISIS have been very astute in taking advantage of the openings that were made by the left, by those who brought about the Seattle debacle of neoliberalism, by those who had been in the forefront of the anti-globalization and the Occupy Movement. These people have been eating our lunch.

 

I will not go further into the sociological reasons for their success and our failure, since many others have done that, but I do want to raise one question, and that is whether it is not overdue for us to take on the super-ambitious task of creating that overarching vision, language, and program to spell out the alternative and flesh it out. Bernie Sanders started this brave task by calling for “democratic socialism,” something that has resonated in the Philippines and the global South. I think it is urgent that we flesh it out since the other side is already fleshing out their alternative in the form of Trumpism or National Frontism or Brexitism, a task which marries some of our intellectual critique of capitalism with the highly charged emotional appeal to return to an idealized past of white homogeneity, cultural purity, or religious uniformity. I think it is urgent that we overcome our fears of articulating Grand Narratives and lay out a vision that lays out the overcoming of the present world blighted by Capital through common struggle, with the end being the construction of societies that harness men and women’s deepest instinct–to use a loaded word—and that is, cooperation. Needless to say, such an endeavor must also be one that acknowledges the limitations, failures, and distortions of past efforts at building post-capitalist societies, especially when it came to dealing with issues of democracy, gender, and the environment.

 

I am not usually a bible quoting speaker, but there is definitely something profound in that passage in Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It would be tragic if people were left to the phlegmatic alternatives posed by the historically bypassed Social Democrats in Europe, the tiresome Clintons in the United States, and uninspiring elite-run reform movements in the global South. Such political alternatives are no match for the counterrevolutionary movements that are on the march.

2016-09-08 U.S. veterans support legal fight by Yemeni man whose relatives were killed in drone strike, L.A. Times

 Drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles / UAVs), Freedom of Speech. (Remove some wrong postings from category)  No Responses »
Sep 082016
 

by W.J. Hennigan

Faisal bin Ali Jaber

Nicholas Kamm / AFP/Getty Images

Yemeni engineer Faisal bin Ali Jaber, whose brother-in-law and nephew were killed in a 2012 drone strike, speaks at a news conference in November 2013 in Washington.

Three military veterans once involved in the U.S. drone program have thrown their support behind a Yemeni man’s legal fight to obtain details about why his family members were killed in a 2012 strike.

The veterans’ unusual decision to publicly endorse the lawsuit against President Obama and other U.S. officials adds another twist to Faisal bin Ali Jaber’s four-year quest for accountability in the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew, who he believes needlessly fell victim to one of the most lethal covert programs in U.S. history.

The former enlisted service members told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a recent filing that they believe the 2012 drone strike serves as a case study of how mistakes frequently occur in the nation’s targeted-killing program, where life-or-death decisions are based upon top-secret evidence.

The veterans say they “witnessed a secret, global system without regard for borders, conducting widespread surveillance with the ability to conduct deadly targeted killing operations.”

Though the veterans did not disclose any personal knowledge of the strike that is alleged to have killed Jaber’s relatives, they claim the military frequently labels the deaths of unknown victims as “enemy kills.”

Separately, a 24-page report released Thursday by the Santa Monica-based Rand Corp. found that despite recent information released by the Obama administration on U.S. policies about targeted drone killings, the process still involves ambiguities in interpretations of international law and too many generalities.

“I’m a believer that transparency is essential in public debate in order to make the right decisions,” said Lynn Davis, the study’s lead author and former State Department undersecretary for arms control and international security affairs. “The need for transparency is all the more important in an election year with the knowledge that this program will be handed to a new administration.”

The veterans’ 17-page filing urges the court to overturn a previous decision to throw out Jaber’s case. The filing is signed by Cian Westmoreland, a former Air Force technician who worked on communications equipment that enables drones to fly by remote control;  Lisa Ling, an Air National Guard technician who worked on intelligence equipment; and Brandon Bryant, an Air Force sensor operator who controlled cameras on drones.

In an interview, Westmoreland said the American public and innocent victims of the drone program deserve to know how decisions are made.

“People have the right to know how a screw-up can lead to the death of their family members,” Westmoreland said. “This is about accountability, transparency and how we, as a military, can learn from our mistakes.”

Ling said that as a veteran, she has an interest in promoting transparency for any U.S. drone strikes that may have been carried out in violation of domestic or international law. “Faisal deserves the truth,” she said in an interview.

People have the right to know how a screw-up can lead to the death of their family members.

— Cian Westmoreland, former Air Force technician

 

The filing, called an amicus curiae, or “friend of the court” brief,  comes as the Obama administration has promised greater transparency and oversight on the counter-terrorism strikes that have targeted thousands of Islamic militants in remote corners of the globe. The shadow campaigns are being carried out in many countries where the U.S. has not declared war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and Somalia. The drone program in those countries is run by the CIA and the U.S. military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command.

The White House, Air Force and Justice Department declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

Jaber, a 58-year-old engineer from Sana, Yemen, who now lives in Montreal, has visited Washington and met with members of Congress and the Obama administration to describe why he thinks his brother-in-law, Salem bin Ali Jaber, a Muslim imam, and his nephew, Waleed bin Ali Jaber, a police officer, were mistakenly targeted.

Jaber said his brother-in-law had given a sermon in Khashamir to denounce Al Qaeda’s ideology. Days later, on Aug. 29, 2012, Salem met several men who came to the village in central Yemen, and brought Waleed in case anything went wrong.

That summer evening, as villagers watched near the local mosque, four missiles exploded while the men spoke under a palm tree. Jaber believes the visitors were Al Qaeda members, and his relatives were collateral damage.

He said he was later handed a plastic bag by Yemeni government officials with $100,000 in freshly minted, sequentially marked $100 bills wrapped in rubber bands.

Reprieve, an international humanitarian group, sued the U.S. government for wrongful death on June 7, 2015, alleging the drone strike constituted an extrajudicial killing in violation of customary international law.

The lawsuit was dismissed in February on the grounds that ruling on the case “would require the court to second-guess the executive’s policy determinations in matters that fall outside of judicial capabilities.”

Jaber, who appealed the lower court ruling on Aug. 22, said in an interview he has not spent the $100,000 and does not want more money from the U.S. government. He wants an apology.

The administration, in most cases, has refused to acknowledge the existence of the drone program or answer questions about how decisions were made about who is targeted. That began to change this year as the administration started to reveal more about the program, making good on Obama’s promise for greater transparency and oversight in a May 2013 speech at National Defense University.

Last month, the White House released a redacted version of its “playbook” for the lethal U.S. drone program, which set a legal framework for deciding whom to kill, where and under what circumstances. The 18-page document was drawn up in May 2013.

In July, the White House revealed that 64 to 116 civilians had been wrongly killed in 473 strikes launched between the time Obama was inaugurated and the end of last year. The president also issued an executive order promising to “acknowledge U.S. government responsibility for civilian casualties.”

Jaber said his case offers the first chance for Obama to make good on his executive order.

william.hennigan   AT    latimes.com

Twitter: @wjhenn

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2016-09-04 Iraqi Woman Uses Chilcot Report in War Crimes Lawsuit Against George W Bush, Truthout

 George Bush war criminal  No Responses »
Sep 052016
 

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37484-iraqi-woman-uses-chilcot-report-in-war-crimes-lawsuit-against-george-w-bush

Marjorie Cohn

President George W. Bush discusses the Iraq war in Washington, May 24, 2007. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)President George W. Bush discusses the Iraq war in Washington, May 24, 2007. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)

 

Sundus Saleh, an Iraqi woman, first filed her lawsuit against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz in September 2013. Alleging that the Iraq War constituted an illegal crime of aggression, Saleh filed the suit on behalf of herself and other Iraqis in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The district court dismissed Saleh’s lawsuit in December 2014, saying the defendants acted within the scope of their employment when they planned and carried out the Iraq War. Saleh then appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In her appeal, Saleh is arguing that the Bush officials were acting from personally held convictions that the US should invade Iraq, regardless of any legitimate policy reasons, and that theyknowingly lied to the public when they fraudulently tied Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

Inder Comar, Saleh’s lawyer, explained, “Nuremberg held that domestic immunity was not a defense to allegations of international aggression. Everything the Germans did was legal under the law. We are asking the Ninth Circuit to reject the application of domestic immunity in this case, in line with the holdings of Nuremberg.”

On July 22, Saleh urged the Ninth Circuit to take judicial notice of portions of the Chilcot Report, which makes factual conclusions about the run-up to the Iraq War. A court can take judicial notice of a fact that is not subject to reasonable dispute and can be accurately and readily determined from sources whose accuracy cannot be reasonably questioned. That includes public records, such as reports issued by a commission of inquiry.

The report was published by the Iraq Inquiry Committee, an independent committee established by the British government, on July 6, 2016, after six years of investigation, research and drafting.

Here are four of the excerpts from the report that Saleh has submitted to the court for judicial notice:

24. President Bush decided at the end of 2001 to pursue a policy of regime change in Iraq.

68. On 26 February, 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, advised that the US Administration had concluded that containment would not work, was drawing up plans for a military campaign later in the year, and was considering presenting Saddam Hussein with an ultimatum for the return of inspectors while setting the bar “so high that Saddam Hussein would be unable to comply.”

74 Mr. [UK Foreign Secretary Jack] Straw’s advice of 25 March proposed that the US and UK should seek an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to re-admit weapons inspectors. That would provide a route for the UK to align itself with the US without adopting the US objective regime change. This reflected advice that regime change would be unlawful.

89. Sir Richard Dearlove reported that he had been told that the US had already taken a decision on action – “the question was only how and when;” and that he had been told it intended to set the threshold on weapons inspections so high that Iraq would not be able to hold up US policy.

The report includes copies of notes between Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which they discussed the invasion of Iraq as early as October 2001.

Eight months before the invasion of Iraq, Blair wrote to Bush, saying “I will be with you, whatever.” In July 2002, Blair had told Bush that removing Hussein from power would “free up the region” even though Iraqis might “feel ambivalent about being invaded.”

The report concluded that Hussein posed no imminent threat on March 20, 2003, the date the US and the UK invaded Iraq. It also noted that a majority of the United Nations Security Council favored continuing UN monitoring and inspections.

Legal Experts Conclude War was Illegal

The committee also published submissions by legal experts who concluded the war was illegal and constituted aggression against Iraq.

Philippe Sands said, “Distinguished members of the legal community in the United Kingdom have also concluded without ambiguity that the war was unlawful.”

Sir Michael Wood stated, “the use of force against Iraq in March 2003 was contrary to international law,” in that it “had not been authorized by the Security Council, and had no other legal basis in international law.”

Elizabeth Wilmshurst concurred, noting, “the facts did not justify the use of force in self-defence. Existing Security Council resolutions did not authorize the use of force. There was no other legal justification. A desire to change the regime did not give a legal basis for military action,” adding, “I regarded the invasion of Iraq as illegal.”

An international group of lawyers (including former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and I) filed an amicus brief supporting Saleh’s legal claims. Clark told Truthout at the time, “In this case, as many as 3.5 million people have lost their lives as a consequence of the crime of aggression — the illegal use of force perpetrated against the people of Iraq — and the country’s development has been set back countless years.”

Allegations Against Team Bush

The UN Charter, which was created by the countries of the world in 1945 to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” prohibits the use of military force except in self-defense or with Security Council approval. Neither of these two conditions was present before the US-UK invasion of Iraq. Iraq did not pose an imminent military threat to any UN member country on March 19, 2003, and the Security Council did not approve the invasion.

A “crime against peace” is defined by the Nuremberg Charter as “planning, preparation, initiation or waging a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.” The US-UK war against Iraq was a war of aggression.

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg held, “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

In his opening statement as chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said, “No political, military, economic, or other considerations shall serve as an excuse or justification” for a war of aggression. He added, “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them.”

Saleh’s complaint cites statements made by the defendants as early as 1998 which indicate their intention to change Iraq’s regime. For example, in his testimony before the House National Security Committee on Iraq, Wolfowitz advocated the removal of Hussein and the formation of a provisional government that would “control the largest oil field in Iraq.”

On September 12, 2001, Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing Afghanistan so the United States should consider bombing Iraq, which had better targets. Bush said at the time that the US should change Iraq’s government.

In July 2002, Dearlove, reporting on recent meetings in the US, said, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Bush, Cheney and Rice used faulty intelligence in order to better market a war with Iraq to the American people.

The defendants engaged in a pattern and practice of deceiving the American public into believing that a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq existed in order to win approval for the crime of aggression against Iraq.

On September 14, 2004, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stated, “I have indicated that [the invasion of Iraq] was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view and from the Charter’s point of view it was illegal.”

Justice Jackson called the crime of aggression “the greatest menace of our times.” More than 70 years later, his words continue to ring true.

“The invasion [of Iraq] resulted in the total destruction of a beautiful, peaceful country,” Saleh told Truthout in 2015. “The invasion didn’t destroy only the country’s infrastructure, buildings and heritage; it destroyed millions of families and their dreams.”

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

2016-08-10 Teachers investigate whether University of Calgary is in bed with Big Oil, National Observer

 Take back the University  No Responses »
Aug 262016
 

This is a back-up copy in case the original disappears.   You may wish to go to the URL (copy & paste):   http://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/08/10/analysis/teachers-investigate-whether-university-calgary-bed-big-oil

 

By Christopher Adams in Analysis, Politics

University of Calgary President Elizabeth Cannon, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and a student at the University of Calgary on April 15, 2015.  File photo by The Canadian Press.

 

In Calgary, a lot of people see the energy industry and universities as natural partners.

After all, Calgary is a proud oil town. The city’s website on economic development boasts that the city is home to all of the country’s major oil company headquarters and has the highest head office concentration of any city in Canada. It’s a city where “decisions are made and deals are brokered.”

But when it comes to the city’s higher education, the enthusiasm for the industry coming from its largest university has prompted some uncomfortable questions. Is the University of Calgary in bed with the oil industry or do any of its relationships compromise academic freedom?

The university has generally brushed off these questions, suggesting that some controversies it had in the past were isolated incidents or taken out of context. But with at least one independent investigation underway into allegations of academic meddling, the institution’s reputation is hanging in the balance.

A probe, launched by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), is focusing on the university’s relationship with pipeline company Enbridge, and allegations of conflict of interest and academic meddling that surrounded their partnership. The university has denied anything inappropriate took place, and the company has also denied allegations of corporate interference. But this case follows other controversies:

  • In 2007, the university shut down a pair of research accounts when an audit concluded they were being used for partisan purposes by climate change doubters at an organization called the Friends of Science, with significant funding from a fossil fuel company, Talisman Energy.
  • In 2013, the association of university teachers released a report following an investigation of partnerships between corporate donors and a dozen universities. It found that the University of Calgary, through multiple research agreements, allowed oil companies like Nexen, Royal Dutch Shell and Husky Energy to dictate how funding they provided was spent. The report concluded that these arrangements had compromised the university’s academic integrity.
  • In 2014, a “think tank” housed out of the University of Calgary that was doing advocacy work to promote the oil and gas companies, wound down its operations in the midst of a police investigation looking into what it did with millions of dollars in federal and provincial government funding.

 

U of C Urban Studies Department Coordinator Byron Miller says ties to industry are the source of the “unspoken, but nonetheless understood sense that we have to be careful about what we [professors] say and do.”

While Miller acknowledges that some faculty feel the chill more strongly than others, CAUT executive director David Robinson said he had received enough evidence of conflict of interest and suppression of academic freedom to launch an investigation.

 

A campus in the heart of the oilpatch

 

The University of Calgary campus is largely reflective of the city’s downtown core. You can walk from a Petro-Canada-branded engineering building to a learning centre built with funding from oil and gas philanthropist Don Taylor in under the same amount of time you can from Enbridge’s corporate headquarters to Suncor’s downtown.

And although times have been tough for business in recent years due to falling global oil prices, there are over 1,500 energy companies in Calgary — Cenovus, Enbridge, and Suncor among them. The city’s ever-growing skyline is dominated by skyscrapers housing oil companies and the law firms and financial brokers integral to their practice.

“[Calgary] is where the money is. It’s where the players are,” former policy director at the Parkland Institute Regan Boychuk said. “It’s only natural that this would be the first point of contact for such initiatives. The school has obviously made it clear over the years that it’s quite receptive to these sorts of initiatives by the oil patch.”

Boychuk said that oil companies want to be associated with academic institutions such as universities to boost their reputations. He cited polling from the U of C’s School of Public Policy (SPP) that showed “oil executives and oil companies have the credibility of used car salesmen.”

But the credibility of an oil executive can magically shoot through the roof if he or she is standing next to an academic.

“People don’t trust what [oil companies] say, so when they want to make their arguments they have a much better chance [to be taken seriously by] supporting universities and think-tanks. They fund think-tanks and university research to have academics and economists make those arguments,” Boychuk said.

That’s what the university teachers association has been investigating.

 

University of Calgary and Enbridge: friends with benefits?

 

CAUT’s probe is focusing on the university’s Centre for Corporate Sustainability, which was previously sponsored by pipeline giant Enbridge Inc. The centre even used to have Enbridge’s name in its title before the company shifted some of its funding to the university’s School of Public Policy in 2014.

At the time that the centre was being set up, several academics questioned whether Enbridge was trying to use the university’s name to boost the company’s environmental credentials following the devastating pipeline disaster that released millions of litres of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River in Marshall, Michigan in July 2010. Meantime, the University of Calgary’s president, Elizabeth Cannon, was sitting as a director of Enbridge Income Fund Holdings, taking home $130,500 in 2015, while making over $600,000 at the university the same year.

To some, her paycheque from Enbridge appeared to put her in a conflict of interest.

Emails released to the CBC through a freedom of information request provide a trail of evidence highlighting the concerns among faculty members. In one email exchange reported by the CBC, former director of the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability Joe Arvai told former dean of the Haskayne School of Business, Leonard Waverman, that he was worried about Enbridge’s objectives.

“I am not sure what we are signing up for. I have the impression that Enbridge sees the centre as a PR machine for themselves, whereas I see it as an academic research centre,” Arvai wrote.

And in a 2011 email sent to Waverman by U of C Professor Harrie Vredenburg, Vredenburg said the name of the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability — which was formerly called the Enbridge Centre for International Resource Industries and Sustainability — “smacks of us being apologists for the fossil fuel industry rather than independent scholars and teachers doing work in a broadly defined area.”

“We built IRIS over 17 years now with strong industry support but without being seen as industry apologists. I’m concerned that we may have stepped over the line,” Vredenburg wrote.

CAUT’s Robinson said the evidence warranted a closer look into whether academic freedom was being repressed and whether big oil’s influence was at play.

But the university administration refused to meet with the association’s investigators and warned its professors of the potential fallbacks if they chose to participate in an April fact-finding visit by CAUT.

Provost Dru Marshall sent an email to faculty at noon on March 18 warning that their identities may not be protected if they spoke to the association’s investigators.

“CAUT is an external body that has no official standing on our campus, and is not bound by our policies, including those that protect privacy and confidentiality,” Marshall wrote, adding that “Those of you who choose to participate have the right to express your opinions, and your freedom to do so will be respected. You are reminded that your privacy may not be protected by CAUT, and if you provide sensitive or confidential information to CAUT, that confidentiality may not be protected.”

The tone of the provost’s email made people uncomfortable. Robinson said the notion that CAUT wouldn’t respect the privacy of those they interviewed was totally inaccurate, and described the email as “more than a hint that they didn’t want us on their campus.”

Miller, the urban studies department coordinator, said it didn’t surprise him. He “just regarded it as what we might expect” because “university administration wants to put this story to rest.”

The university says it isn’t under the influence of corporate backers and defends the investments it receives from industry. U of C media relations says corporate funding can “benefit the university without compromising the values of the institution,” adding that there are “rigorous standards to ensure research independence and academic freedom.”

When the Board of Governors commissioned an investigation into conflict of interest after the CBC exposed the relationship between Enbridge and the university, they cleared President Cannon of any breach of University of Calgary procedures.

Enbridge dismissed the criticism as well. The Calgary-based pipeline company had said the CBC story that revealed Enbridge’s involvement in the centre made “unfair and false allegations that Enbridge attempted to influence the centre’s operations and infringed on academic freedom.”

When asked for additional comment, Enbridge referred National Observer to their November, 2015 statement on their relationship with the U of C.

 

CAUT President David Robinson said the University of Calgary has jeopardized its academic integrity through oil-industry partnerships. Photo courtesy CAUT.

 

Big influence, bought dirt cheap

 

The Enbridge Centre yielded $2.25-million spread over 10 years, a marginal sum compared to the hundreds of millions the university receives annually.

The University of Calgary’s Development Office — the fundraising arm of the university — generated $218.9-million for the university in 2015, an increase of $71.5-million from the previous year. The U of C hopes to raise $1.3-billion from private donors over the next five years, a goal they’re over halfway to reaching. Robinson said the Development Office has gained a lot of influence within the institution.

But he finds it baffling that the University of Calgary was “so quick to sacrifice their integrity for a relatively small amount of money” from Enbridge.

“They’re given a mandate to get donations and private sector contracts and are often going into territory they shouldn’t be going into,” Robinson said. “Clearly I think in light of constant funding pressures, the allure of private sector funding might be a little seductive. But you have to balance that with the price you’re paying for it.”

When asked to respond to Robinson’s statement, the university’s media relations team sent National Observer a copy of the Board of Governors’ investigation that cleared them of allegations of academic “wrongdoing.”

 

“I really don’t feel that I can talk with you about this”

 

David Keith was once a star professor at U of C but left over big oil’s influence on the university. Keith is the former director the U of C’s Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy (ISEEE), and was involved in the CBC investigation into the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability.

He declined an interview for this story, but has been critical of the U of C’s corporate partnerships in the past.

Speaking about ISEEE, Keith said the university was unable to strike a balance between corporate interests and environmental research. He told the CBC in 2013 that the university removed another academic from ISEEE at the request of pipeline company Enbridge, essentially compromising the academic integrity of an ostensibly academic research institution.

At the time, Keith said that kind of action “fundamentally misconceives the university’s role.”

And, during the 2015 investigation into the Centre for Corporate Sustainability, he said that from his “conversations with many people who were involved, including Joe [Arvai], but several others, and not just conversations, but detailed notes and emails, my understanding is that Joe Arvai was removed as director of the centre before its formation at the specific request of Enbridge.”

But Enbridge spokesman Graham White said the company made “no such request,” calling it a “misrepresentation that was clarified in our public statement,” which reads: “the then director of the Centre advised that due to other affiliations and commitments, he might not be able to fulfill his role. At that time, Enbridge sought assurances from the University that if the director could not fulfill his duties, a search would begin for his replacement.”

Keith, who left for Harvard in 2011, told the CBC in 2015 that “I’m not claiming that some good analysis from the U of C would have magically saved the province, but better, more unbiased, more forward-looking analysis could have helped us collectively make better decisions, and we lost that.”

Former ISEEE Director and U of C Professor David Layzell “stepped down” from his post in 2012 to “focus on his own research.” When asked for an interview about the University of Calgary’s administrative culture, Layzell said over email that “I really don’t feel that I can talk with you about this.”

He added: “Maybe that says more than us actually talking.”

 

University of Calgary President Elizabeth Cannon was also a director on an Enbridge board when the controversy erupted. Photo by Louie Villanueva.

“Downright scared”

 

Layzell is not the only professor who finds it difficult to talk. University of Calgary geography professor Gwendolyn Blue, during an October 2015 interview just weeks before the federal election, said university employees were discouraged from making politicized comments because of “our current political conjuncture.”

And the chill extends well beyond election time. Blue said there’s an atmosphere at the U of C that, while difficult to describe, it “prevents a critical commentary, particularly around corporate influence.”

“It’s hard when you live in a company town to throw stones at the company. There’s no easy good guy or bad guy,” she said. “It’s blurry and it’s messy. There’s no knight in shining armour who’s going to come in on a clean energy horse to save us.”

Some professors will only speak on condition of anonymity. One professor at the university told National Observer of feeling “downright scared.” The professor described feeling frightened about criticizing aspects of the university’s strategic plan. Having gotten in trouble before, it seemed unwise to risk further discipline, this source said.

Tenured University of Calgary political science Professor Barry Cooper wrote in the Calgary Herald in 2015 that the University of Calgary’s management culture is “deeply flawed,” and pointed to university president Elizabeth Cannon’s role on the board of directors for the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability

Cooper said that while he didn’t catch any flack from university administration after the Herald published his column, he admitted that his colleagues may not have been so lucky if they were in his shoes. He said “some of his junior colleagues” told him that they aren’t willing to be as critical of the university because they don’t have tenure.

But Cooper said that “the U of C administration doesn’t have such a hot rep anyway.” If they ever tried to “do something [against] exercising what’s essentially freedom of opinion, they would have the full weight of all the people that disagree with them come down on their heads.”

(Coincidentally, Cooper was also the faculty member involved with the climate-doubting Friends of Science, helping the group set up their “research accounts” at the university that were funded in part by Talisman Energy.)

U of C economics professor Trevor Tombe said the university has never tried to sway his research or intimidate him — even when he discusses environmental policy that might be at odds with some of the university’s corporate partners.

“As any institution populated with people will be, there might be cases where someone oversteps where they shouldn’t. That doesn’t make it an institutional-level problem, that makes it the mistake of that particular individual,” Tombe said.

Another interview request made by the National Observer to engineering professor Denis Onen was re-routed to University of Calgary communications manager Marina Geronazzo. She also referred to the university’s report into the Enbridge Centre that found “no improper conduct by anyone involved in connection with the creation and operation of the centre.”

“We trust this material serves to provide full context and conclusion related to this matter,” her email read.

In another email, she wrote: “Professor Onen has advised he does not feel he is qualified to speak on this.”

 

“On paper, it looked okay.”

 

The teachers association has been tracking issues at the Enbridge Centre since at least 2013 when it found that most universities don’t outline protections for academic freedom when they strike deals with industry. At that time, the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability was seen as “one of the better ones.”

“On paper, it looked okay,” Robinson said. “We have to distinguish between what’s on paper and what’s in practice and that maybe the practice in this case wasn’t really reflective of what the agreement actually was.”

In its 2013 report on corporate influence at universities, the university teachers association determined that a different funding deal — the $10.2-million agreement to form the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for In Situ Energy (AICISE) –had compromised the U of C’s academic integrity. AICISE partnered the U of C with companies like Nexen, Shell and Repsol with the stated goal of researching technologies that help reduce the environmental impact of oilsands extraction.

But the association found that control over AICISE research was given to a 10–11 person “management advisory board” comprised mainly of non-academic, private sector members. This board has the power to approve or reject plans and budgets proposed under AICISE, and a majority vote is all that’s needed to carry budgetary and research decisions.

Inconvenient details of yet another research deal — the Consortium for Heavy Oil Research — also surfaced in the association’s report. It found that deals struck with donors like Husky and Nexen stipulated those companies could pull research funding if it wasn’t advancing projects they liked.

The details of the deals described in the 2013 report were not previously known to the public, at the time it was published, but university administrators said that although they didn’t contain specific protections for academic freedom or “other important principles,” things like peer-review and university policy would protect students and staff from breaches of academic integrity.

At the time, former University of Calgary Faculty Association President Robert Sutherland said those most affected by the deals — students and staff — had no way to understand how their experience on campus would change.

“The secrecy and lack of transparency of these agreements is extremely important,” Sutherland said in 2013. “We’re talking about public institutions that have public boards of directors that are supposed to be looking after our interests and they entered into secret agreements.”

Problems over secrecy have dogged the University of Calgary under Cannon’s presidency. The CBC obtained documents through a Freedom of Information request and reported that they showed that Cannon personally approved more than $90,000 in legal fees to fight an information request from the public broadcaster. The story in question detailed a 2012 information request that outlined the relationship between the U of C and the fundraising arm of the Conservative party.

The university has denied that Cannon approved or signed the expenses, saying that it was its acting general counsel who signed them.

That, according to Robinson, is a fundamental problem with university culture. He says universities should be open to scrutiny, but we’re seeing a shift toward secrecy.

 

The Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability was housed under the Haskayne School of Business, pictured above. Photo by Louie Villanueva.

 

The funding model has changed, but “oily schemes” not needed

 

On June 24, the University of Calgary approved the largest budget in its 50-year history, $1.27-billion. The provincial government is providing $446.5-million — less than half of the public university’s 2016-17 operations.

Most university administrators point to a lack of “predictable and stable” government funding as the cause of their corporate partnerships. And Alberta universities have seen their share of near-crippling funding cuts in the past five years.

The former Progressive Conservative government cut over $140 million from post-secondary in 2013 and cut again by around two per cent in 2015. Far from replacing money from previous budget cuts, the new NDP government froze tuition fees. The U of C isn’t anticipating any new provincial funding for 2017-18 due to Alberta’s current financial woes.

But the University of Alberta, which also saw cuts to its funding before the NDP were elected in 2015, remained largely unscathed in terms of corporate partnership scandals. U of A biology professor David Schindler has been consistently impressed by the his school’s capacity to fend off bad corporate deals.

“The U of A’s policy on accepting money from industry, government, foundations or private individuals is also very clear that there will be no strings attached by the donor as to what can be reported,” Schindler said. “I don’t think any of the oily schemes outed at the U of C would have ever gotten in the door at the U of A.”

The teachers association expects it will conclude its University of Calgary investigation at the end of August, with publication some time in the fall.

2016-08-04 Easiest, most lucrative and safest theft is of public goods and money

 Freedom of Speech. (Remove some wrong postings from category)  No Responses »
Aug 232016
 

The easiest and safest theft is of public goods, public assets and public money.

And they offer some of the biggest pay-offs.

The owner of public assets is a pushover.

The thieves are highly Unlikely to be prosecuted when the “whodunit” is figured out.

No wonder corporations flock to the Governments.

I found the documentation that really makes the case for the potash industry.   It can be applied elsewhere, too.

Potash was taken over by the Government (“nationalized” – – became a crown corporation) in 1975 when the potash companies refused to pay a reserve tax to the people of Saskatchewan.   The new crown corporation worked well, putting money into public coffers.

Not much later and after propaganda campaigns about the “inefficiency” of Governments, the Conservative Government of Grant Devine (1982-91)  privatized the industry, back to the good ol’ days (pre-1975).   (It also completely dismantled the excellent dental programme for kids  in Saskatchewan schools.)

The “good ol’ days” are indeed very good for some people.  It is standard practice for retired politicians of the right stripe to be appointed to Boards of Directors of  companies.  It is not uncommon for retired politicians and other “supporters” to receive more than a million dollars a year by sitting on various Boards.  Not a bad pay-off for doing a privatization deal while you’re in office.

TWO ARTICLES DOCUMENT THE SIZE OF THE HEIST
  1.  Today, the highest paid CEO in all Canada is from that “privatized”  potash industry.

2014-04-08 PotashCorp CEO Bill Doyle receives   $24,761,371 million   (U.S.$)   upon retirement.

CEO Doyle is only ONE of the retiring executives from the Potash Corp,  he pocketed US$24 million.   A VP cashed in for $26 million.  These numbers are on top of large salaries and perks through the years – – this is only the retirement cash-out.   Lord knows how many others hit the jackpot – how many VPs are there?

There would have been some gravy, but not this size of jackpot, had the Conservative Government of Grant Devine not privatized the industry for their friends or ideology or self-interest.

I don’t get it – – how the people of Saskatchewan voted AGAINST their own interests by putting these politicians in power.   Propaganda?  Brain-washing?  They have only themselves to thank for the huge disparities created by the huge heist, theft of public money.   Maybe the voters are masochistic?   Don’t hear too much about it in the media.

The above article and the following one also show the OTHER money these executives are receiving.

Repeat:   NONE of it would have been possible without the privatization by the Devine Govt.    Cabinet Ministers are held accountable for compensation paid by Crown Corporations.   The following article tells of the failed attempts to rein in the greed.

2. 2008-11-07  PotashCorp President & CEO Bill Doyle rolling in dough, made $47,092 a day in 2007 while unionized hourly workers at striking mines averaged $213, by Joe Kuchta

 

There are other stories that teach the same lesson :

the  Easiest, most lucrative and safest theft is of public assets.  

Forget about hi-jacking Brinks trucks!

2016-08-18 Update, research on Mercury fillings (aka Dental amalgam or “silver” fillings – ha!)

 Mercury poisoning, dental amalgams. See also Vaccinations.  No Responses »
Aug 182016
 

Many thanks to dentist Dr. Dave Warwick, Hanna AB,  for providing an update and bibliography on the Research on the health effects of mercury fillings.

Scroll past the indented paragraphs (which are for newcomers), straight to heading    From: dentist Dr. David Warwick, Hanna AB.

 

The less spirited would have sighed and gone away

The intrepids keep on singing and smiling

A warning to the Harmful Status Quo

While you get high in the evening

Others may be turned on by

Un-doing the harm

And culprits in the doing

I see where we have on this blog more than 80 postings collected through the years, on mercury poisoning from dental amalgams (under the category “Health”).    Some are about the UN Treaty to get rid of products containing mercury (we are poisoning ourselves and the environment in which we have to live.  Mercury travels.).    Dave participated in, for example,

2012-10-18 Dental “amalgam”: spread the word, 5th and final round of international negotiations, Mercury Treaty.

    (the posting contains links to more material)

– – – – – – – – –

REQUEST sent to  Dave, Aug 16, 2016:

Why I called you

QUESTION (perennial):   is there information that should be shared, would be helpful, in event that law suit over mercury fillings is pursued?

I don’t want to pre-judge the likelihood that a suit would ever be launched in Canada;  it’s come up again.

Has anything changed?   Is the liability issue, for Government Health Depts and for the Dental Industry so huge that liability will never be acknowledged?     (which would be why all the solid information that can be brought to bear is not heard or acted upon.   Can they not understand that they just have to stop putting mercury into people’s mouths?   and they have to re-train to know how to remove mercury fillings with the least damage possible to themselves, their staff and the patients? )

How much is explained by:  2011-06-28 Canada’s chief dentist works for the amalgam industry. No wonder mercury fillings receive an exemption!  ?

A woman Susan my age from Vancouver  who has MS is incensed about the mercury fillings and vaccinations.  Has done a lot of research.

She talked with a Vanc Law Firm:

The law firm I emailed to last week phoned today and stated that she would speak with her co-workers as to joining a class action lawsuit or whatever and will get back to me later in the week.  That sounds like a good thing as I have no other thoughts on how to proceed.  A class action lawsuit will send a definite message to our mercury-loving government officials who don’t care if we live or die that they should have never allowed amalgam fillings to be installed in peoples’ teeth!!!!! when they absolutely knew better.

She is conversant with Dr Vimy’s work.   Grant reminded me:  Vimy did the “smoking teeth” video (click the link,  Smoking Teeth is the first in this list of videos).   There’s his research using insertion of amalgam in sheep.   

The most recent I could find online re Vimy is 2011 (he is retired),   a short CBC newscast   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HavLXo_0Xpk     He is well-spoken, good interview.     (end)

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

the route that will bear actual results ?

–          keep sharing information, grow the number of people who are informed.

–          Simultaneously use the UN Treaty on Mercury to bring pressure on the dental colleges to stop the insertion of MORE mercury fillings.

–           Conversations with the institutions that certify Dental Hygienists & Assistants to emphasize the health risks to these women

–          Which leaves individual older dentists who refuse to change their ways as culprits.

–          Dental Colleges (some or all?)  run clinics in which dental students develop their craft.  People who can’t afford to pay a dentist qualify as “the patients”.   A young female friend who is a law student went for a filling last year.   She didn’t know about mercury fillings.  That’s what they filled her tooth with.   (The College has received information about the UN Treaty, etc..  Information makes no difference.  They dismiss it as crazy people who don’t know the science.)   A fellow who came to the Mercury Jamboree is First Nations.  The Clinic at the Dental College serves many First Nations people.  They all get mercury fillings.

Anyhow – – be persistent and patient.  Others have to assume responsibility, too.   Perhaps there will be yet more attention paid to the effects of the mercury poisoning on brain functioning:

Huge numbers of baby boomers have had mercury fillings off-gassing in their bodies for decades now.   They have added body burden from vaccinations that use ethyl mercury as a preservative.   Sixty years of Mercury going to the brain . . .  it’s not as if the evidence isn’t there, if you want to find it.

Our immune systems are different,  we have different strengths and weaknesses in our immune capabilities.   Poisoning by mercury, or other toxics,  does not manifest with the same symptoms in everyone.  The symptoms (the “disease”) will be different depending on factors like previous exposures,  inter-generational damaged DNA, previous injuries,  unknowables  (many poisons are invisible – think carbon monoxide, think chemicals).  But enough!   …   except

Never mind the mercury that pregnant and breast-feeding baby-boomer-women transmitted to their offspring, who were then given more doses of mercury through vaccinations that definitely contained thimerasol (mercury) as a preservative.

None of this is new – – it’s the lead in gasoline, mercury in paint, cancer in tobacco, Erin Brockavitch, no-we’re-not-torturing-people stories all over again.

The effects of mercury on brain,  one small part:   we need to re-contact these people with Dave’s update:    2012-07-07 Letter to Health Insurance (mental illness claims approach 50%): stop mercury fillings, reduce mental illness claims.

 

From: dentist Dr. David Warwick, Hanna AB

The liability issue still comes down to what the scientific evidence shows… up until 2012 one could conclude that the evidence is inconclusive……The studies by Woods et.al. throughout the last few years on genetic susceptibility may have changed this.  There are 4 studies that he has published which indicate genetically susceptible sub populations show toxicity to the levels of mercury given off by amalgam.  This study does a nice job of summarizing this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905169/

As well, I am working with a few other folks to publish a paper that further explores susceptible groups to mercury.  Our first attempt at publishing was turned down so we are rewriting as we speak… I can’t give you any of the text for the new paper, but the bibliography to date is copied below…

there are two other strategic prongs to discontinuing the use of amalgam.  That is the environmental and the occupational issues.  The other study we are working on deals with unrealized mercury exposure caused by amalgam particulate.  The first submission was denied because of a lack of numbers… so we are working to increase our “n”s and hope to resubmit in October.

As far as question 2,  the Health agencies such as Health Canada use earlier studies that use the same data that Woods used in his recent studies to prove “safety”.  Nobody has challenged them on this yet.

On the occupational side of things, Alberta Occupational Health and Safety recommended discontinuing amalgam in 2011 ( https://work.alberta.ca/documents/OHS-WSA-handbook-dental-workers.pdf  page 23), so they have their butts covered but nobody was listening or wanted to listen.

Environment Canada is a pawn to Health Canada and has no balls.  It’s pretty much the same in the states with their three related government organizations.

By the way, one of the fellows I talked to from Health Canada, Phillip Neufeld, stated that the achilles heal of amalgam is the occupational issues.  Not that they cannot be overcome, but that the general practice of placing and removing amalgams generally represents an unacceptable level of exposure.

This is a provincial jurisdiction that would involve the dental colleges, the dental assistant and dental hygienist associations and the provincial occupational safety folks.   Every province is different, however the key is to rock one, then the others will topple.  I hope that the study I am working will increase the conversation regarding occupational and patient safety.

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Vähänikkilä H, Tjäderhane L, Nieminen P. The statistical reporting quality of articles published in 2010 in five dental journals. Acta Odontol Scand. 2015 Jan;73(1):76-80. doi: 10.3109/00016357.2014.954612. Epub 2014 Nov 6.

Stegenga J1. Is meta-analysis the platinum standard of evidence? Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2011 Dec;42(4):497-507. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2011.07.003.

Woods JS, Heyer NJ, Echeverria D, Russo JE, Martin MD, Bernardo MF, Luis HS, Vaz L, Farina FM,  Modification of Neurobehavioral effects of Mercury by genetic polymorphism of coproporphyrinogen oxidase in children   Neurotoxicol Teratol. 2012 Sep; 34(5): 513–521.

Health Canada. The Safety of Dental Amalgam. 1996. http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/dhp-mps/alt_formats/hpfb-dgpsa/pdf/md-im/dent_amalgam-eng.pdf

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Richardson GM, Mercury Exposure and Risks from Dental Amalgam in Canada: The Canadian Health Measures Survey 2007-2009 Human and Ecological Risk Assessment Nov. 2012

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