Dec
27
Chad Oil Boon @ National Geographic Magazine
Here’s a great example of what John Perkins is talking about in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Something like 200,000 barrels of oil are coming out of this country every year, and much of the population is living on a dollar or two a day. There are less than 12 gas stations in the whole country. And billions—literally billions–of dollars have flowed into Chad for development. Actually the money never got to Chad, I suspect, but was paid to American contractors. A lot of money is being made here, and very little good is being done.
Dec
23
Just Like the Holocaust, With Recess
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An 8th grade teacher in New Hampshire asked his students to wear a yellow star like the ones Jews were required to wear by the Nazis during the Holocaust. If the students made the star and wore it to class they got an A+. Some students refused and instead wore yellow Post-In notes saying “We’re not Jewish.” One student wore a swastika instead and got an A+ for thinking “outside the box.”
The story raises a lot of good questions, not the least of which has something to do with why wasn’t it that easy to get an A+ when I was in 8th grade? I would have worn panties on my head if it meant an A+. The story has also enough sensitive, hot button issues to let just anybody who wants to feel a) outraged, b) offended or c) outraged that some people are offended.
The outraged/offended list so far has two main groups:
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Students who say the lesson implies Judaism is superior to other religions
Jewish groups who feel the lesson minimizes the Holocaust
The class was reading the Diary of Anne Frank and the teacher said he wanted students to get a sense of what it was like to be singled out, as Jews were by the Nazis. He says students really connect with the book and he wanted to take advantage of that. As the father of an 8th grader my experience is that he’s right. My daughter devoured the book and went to the library to find many, many more books about the Holocaust, Hitler and the Nazis.
For me the Holocaust came into focus on a cold, grey winter day in February, 1990. Getting out of a taxi outside the gates of Auschwitz it almost seemed like I was visiting a prep school somewhere in the states. Clean gravel paths and orderly brick buildings looked out of place behind the barbed wire and electric fences. Inside the building were dark and dingy. The place was empty, and we were left to wander around by ourselves. The most enduring images were the plywood platforms, barely two feet apart, where the prisoners slept. And the piles of shoes. And, of course, the ovens. We left stunned and rode back to Krackow in silence. I knew about the Holocaust. I knew about Auschwitz. But knowing wasn’t the same as seeing, it wasn’t the same as feeling.
It’s true that reading the Diary of Anne Frank or wearing a yellow star in class or watching the History Channel 24 hours a day or even wandering around the grounds of Auschwitz doesn’t really allow any of us to truly understand what it was like to live through the Holocaust, at least it’s a start. At least it gives kids a reason to think.
But then again, maybe it’s easy to be outraged or offended than to think.
Dec
20
The NSA, PETA, You, Me and Iraq
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I was urged by a friend to read “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” by John Perkins. I’d heard about the book, and always meant to read it, but as is often the case it took a nudge from someone whose thinking I respected to get me to pick it up.
Holy smokes….
Here’s the short version: John Perkins writes the story of his very lucrative career as an Economic Hitman, a term actually used by the few number of people who paid him so well. And what they paid him, and others, to do was to go into a developing country and cook up all sorts of enthusiastic forecasts about the red-hot economic growth that would occur if huge heaps of money were spent on things like hydro projects or oil exploration. But there was a catch. Actually a bunch of them. First, the forecasts were phony. Any economic growth that did occur usually benefitted a very small number of people in the country, while many more would lose the ability to make their living in a more traditional way. Secondly, this money came from loans from the US and World Bank in Washington, and never left this country. Instead, they went directly to huge US contractors like Bechtel, Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown and Root.
When the economic forecasts didn’t pan out, when the growth to the overall economy of the developing country didn’t happen, the country’s government ended up defaulting on the loans. So the US swooped in to help them with debt service payments, and in return called in favors–votes in the UN, the right to build military bases there or oil exploration rights. (I’ve seen this before–it happens all the time on the Sopranos.) In effect, the US owned the government. Perkins writes that in the few cases where this kind of economic exploitation didn’t work, jackals would be sent in to assasinate political leaders who didn’t cooperate. Then, as a last resort, some sort of a context for an invasion would be cooked up.
(You can pause here to reflect on how this strategy has applied in Iraq. The infrastructure was already in place and a powerful government very hostile to US interest was in firm control. Both of those had to be destroyed before teams of US Contractors could go in and work their economic miracles.)
Who is behind this? Perkins got his introduction to this lucrative and highly selective profession through his wife’s “Uncle Frank,” who worked for the National Security Agency (the NSA.) The NSA is a very secretive and very large government organization. If they were a company, based on their workforce and office space, they would be in the top 10% of the Fortune 500. Their budget is secret so we don’t know exactly how big they or what they spend their money on. But I’m pretty sure Economic Hit Men are in there somewhere. The NSA is also the agency that President Bush has sent to spy on Americans. (And with the most recent revelations that the FBI has also been watching Greenpeace, Catholic Workers and PETA who knows who the NSA has been keeping tabs on….maybe you. Mabye me.)
In Perkin’s time, as is the case now, there was a small cadre of good old boys moving from one big organization to another. Robert McNamara had been CEO of Ford before becoming Secretary of Defense before becoming Chairman of the World Bank. Today Dick Cheney is Secretary of Defense before becoming CEO of Halliburton before becoming the Vice President and chief instigator of the Iraqi Development Plan, also known as the Iraq War.
For me this is a very important book, and I think it is going to crystallize my thinking on a lot of these issues. Pick it up, check it out and see what you think. I’d love to hear.
Dec
19
Dr. Bronner
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Do you know who Dr. Bronner was? He made soap. You can still get it and peppermint soap seems to be the big seller. You can find it in the health food store–it’s a liquid soap in a plastic bottle with a blue label. The label is covered–and I mean COVERED with writing. Admonitions, cautions, instructions, prayers. There are a lot of hyphens as in “All-One-God-Faith,” and he mentions “Spaceship Earth” and some kind of birthcontrol method involving vaseline and lemons. Anyway, I was riding the train between New York and Maine the other day and I found that I had started scribbling frantic notes in the margin of the book I was reading. And on the bookmark. And in the overleaf. I wonder if this is how Dr. Bronner got started.
Dec
19
It wasn’t exactly The Nutcracker….
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It took us a good hour to get in, but once we were in, we were IN–inside Sing Sing, the famous maximum security prison just up the river from NYC. (And yes, that is where the phrase came from.) For fifteen years volunteers from the community have been going into Sing Sing to help the prisoners write and produce a play. Generally the only people to see it are other prisoners (even family members are not allowed in) but I was able to score an invitation to this show.
My first impression was that the prison was straight out of the movies. The prison bus we rode on could have been in the Shawshank Redemption and the auditorium was just like the one in the opening and closing scenes of Walk the Line. And boy, there are sure a lot of rules. I guess prisons are all about rules. And keeping people in. For that they had barbed wire, electric fences and lots of guard towers with guards and big guns.
It was interesting to chat with the guys who put the show on–including Phillip, the author of the play. He had been in for twenty years. He was polite, deferential and anxious to talk. It was strange to think that after the show I would be leaving to go look for a place to get some pizza and a beer, and Phillip and the rest of the cast would go back to their cells, where some might be spending the rest of their lives.
The play was set in a courtroom with flashbacks to a plantation in the south during slavery. During the first courtroom scene the guy playing the defense lawyer walked onstage. He was white. And I said to myself, “hmm…must be a volunteer from the community.” I guess that was me doing a little bit of racial profiling. Ironic, especially considering that the play was about racism. It was called “The N—– Trial” and the premise was that the “N” word was on trial. Phillip said the idea was to make people who use it (as many in the black community do) and those who don’t question their assumptions about how acceptable or uancceptable the word is.
There were a lot of things to think about that night….being around men who had committed violent crimes….rehabilitation….redemption…. But mostly I thought about power. Who has it and who doesn’t. Those guys in prison sure don’t have it but I couldn’t help wonder if powerlessness is what has landed so many minorities in jail in the first place.