Thursday Thoughts

From Torontoist:

Tory MP Jason Kenney complained that Romeo Dallaire was overly harsh when Dallaire criticized the federal government's handling of the Omar Khadr case. Kenney is a former general who is credited with using meagre resources to save the lives of over 20,000 people during the Rwandan genocide in the face of massive indifference from the west…no, wait, sorry, that was Dallaire. Jason Kenney is a lifetime party hack who didn't finish his bachelor's degree. See, they're almost like twins!

From Paul Graham: al Naqba at 60 and the reflections of a recovered Zionist:

Looking back I am amazed at how easy it was to adopt completely contradictory political positions, for example, to cheer on American blacks in their struggle for civil rights and to be blissfully unaware of the grinding poverty and racist oppression of aboriginal people in my own community; to see the American invasion of Vietnam as a horrendous crime while cheering on the Israeli army as it triumphed in the "Six Day War" of 1967.

Young people are idealists by nature with an instinctive sympathy for underdogs of all kinds. Messages of freedom and equality resonate with youth, in part because they experience the inequality and lack of freedom that accompany parental control.

The direction their idealism takes and their ability to identify underdogs depends pretty much on what they learn, at home, at school, from the media. As the ‘60s progressed it became possible to understand the injustice and horror of the Vietnam War and the just demands of the American civil rights movement: these were on display on the evening TV news. Aboriginal people didn’t have a media voice; they were invisible. And as for Israel and my youthful Zionism, well, I blame American novelist Leon Uris. (Read the rest here)

Via illvox, Bolivian President Evo Morales' 10 commandments to save the planet:

1. In order to save the planet, the capitalist model must be eradicated and the North pay its ecological debt, rather than the countries of the South and throughout the world continuing to pay their external debts.

2. Denounce and PUT AN END to war, which only brings profits for empires, transnationals, and a few families, but not for peoples. The million and millions of dollars destined to warfare should be invested in the Earth, which has been hurt as a result of misuse and overexploitation.

3. Develop relations of coexistence, rather than domination, among countries in a world without imperialism or colonialism. Bilateral and multilateral relations are important because we belong to a culture of dialogue and social coexistence, but those relationships should not be of submission of one country to another. Read the other 7 here.

Greg Palast on the anti-Chavez Hysteria

As Arturo Quiran, resident of a poor folks' housing complex, told me, "Ten, fifteen years ago... there was a lot of oil money here in Venezuela but we didn't see it." Notably, Quiran doesn't particularly agree with Chavez' politics. But, he thought Americans should understand that under Chavez' Administration, there's a doctor's office in his building with "free operations, x-rays, medicines. Education also. People who never knew how to read and write now know how to sign their own papers."

Not everyone is pleased. As one TV news anchor, violently anti-Chavez, told me in derisive tones, "Chavez gives them (the poor) bricks and bread!" - how dare he! - so, they vote for him.

Big Oil has better ideas for Venezuela, best expressed in several Wall Street Journal articles attacking Chavez for spending his nation's oil wealth on "social programs" rather than on more drilling platforms to better fill the SUVs of Texas.

Chavez has committed other crimes in Washington's eyes. Not only has this uppity brown man spent Venezuela's oil wealth in Venezuela, he withdrew $20 billion from the US Federal Reserve. Weirdly, Venezuela's previous leaders, though the nation was dirt poor, lent billions to the US Treasury on crap terms. Chavez has said, Basta! to this game, and has called for keeping South America's capital in... South America! Oh, no!

Oh, and did I mention that Chavez told Exxon it had to pay more than a 1% royalty to his nation on the heavy crude the company extracted?

Like the rest of us, Palast doesn't agree with everything Chavez does, but he supports the right of the Venezuelan people to make their own decisions. He objects to the lies and misinformation - for instance he finds Chavez to be wildly popular, unlike the portrayal in the international media.

It's worth noting that Chavez' personal popularity doesn't extend to all his plans for "Bolivarian" socialism. And that killed his referendum at the ballot box. I guess Chavez should have asked Jeb bush how to count votes in a democracy.

So there you have it. Some guy who thinks he can take Venezuela's oil and oil money and just give it away to Venezuelans. And these same Venezuelans have the temerity to demand the right to pick the president of their choice! What is the world coming to?

In Orwellian Bush-speak and Times-talk, Chavez' referendum was portrayed before the vote as a trick, Saddam goes Latin. Maybe their real fear is that Chavez has brought a bit of economic justice through the ballot box, a trend that could spread northward. Think about it: Chavez is funding full health care for all Venezuelans. What if that happened here?

Read the Rest over at gregpalast.com

Also check out the coverage over at Paulitics: details about the proposed reforms and on media coverage

Winners of the "Latin America and the Millennium Development Goals" Journalism Awards

Daniel San Juan Tolentino dug his own grave. A pile of earth fell on him and buried him.

First Prize was awarded to this article on child labourers in Mexico. The quote is from one of the stories in the article, and refers to a 12-year old boy who was digging a ditch to prevent floods in the field where he worked. He was buried by an avalanche of mud.

None of the daily rituals carried out by 26-year-old biology student Flávia Santiago, who is seven months pregnant and anxiously awaiting the birth of her first child, was ever experienced by Nadja Batista Borges, 29, who dropped out of primary school in the third grade. She, too, is pregnant. But with her seventh child.

They probably love their babies equally. The difference lies in their addresses. Nadja lives in a 'favela' (shantytown) of Santo Amaro. Flávia lives with her husband in a comfortable apartment [in a well-off neighbourhood].

This quote is from the second place article about women and motherhood in Brazil, "Faces da maternidade" by Bruna Cabral and Mona Lisa Dourado, published in the Jornal do Commercio in Recife, Brazil.

"This kind of journalism, often consigned to the sidelines and neglected for obvious reasons, has shown its credentials and demonstrated that in Latin America, hidden behind more sensational reporting, there is this other kind, with a vocation for participating and a sense of its own usefulness," said one of the members of the jury. 466 articles were entered from 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The top five winners will be published in a book, and the top 3 also recieved cash prizes. More info on the competition here.

I tried to find more, but nothing much was available in English. I'd love to read the articles in full if they get translated. If anyone has more info or a link, please let me know!

Long live Mother Earth! Long live the mothers of the earth!

Probably one of the most powerful statements I've ever read.

Letter from the Landless Mothers

We speak to the sons and daughters of the land from all nations. To those who were not invited to the banquet. To those who have been waiting in the queue of history for centuries. We will not be spectators at a film waiting for the light to go out. It's time to believe in the possibility of defeating sorrow.

We are rising up with the mothers who are losing their sons and daughters in wars, in urban massacres, from the barrel of a rifle, in concentration camps, in acts of femicide and genocide, in domestic violence, in political persecutions, in armed sieges. We are rising up with the mothers who are losing their children because they don’t have milk, bread, land, or access to the knowledge accumulated by humanity. We are rising up with the mothers who are wandering with their sons and daughters, seeking a better world, We are rising up to call for social justice and dignity.

We raise our hands, our hoes, our scythes, and our consciences to call on all working women of the world to unite against those who exploit the land, life, the strength of our work and of our body.

We are directing ourselves to those who are said to be lords of the world. We don't want and we aren't asking for your permission to cut fences and to sow flowers and dreams. We will not hesitate to speak to you. We are struggling for land, for water, in defense of seeds and of biodiversity for the right to decide about our lives and our food, for the right to work, for our future and for solidarity among peoples.

"Development and modernity" advance over the world and open wounds. In your name, laws are passed that put humanity at risk. Against the green desert and despair we break the silence and we denounce the dust that is thrown over dreams and the prison of flowers. Your modernity is darkness and hunger and for this reason, is not in our interest. Don't you dare move ahead one step with your project of death!

The criminal manipulation of biogenetics, monoculture, agro-fuels, and agribusiness is an attempt to kill food sovereignty and the possibility of a ecologically correct and socially just world. We will not allow humanity to be destroyed. You should know that we will not accept that you kill our children through violence or for lack of food.

On this Mother's Day we reaffirm our determination to transform the countryside into a space for hope, happiness, and above all, for struggle. In our project, everyone has the right to a dignified life, a decent standard of living, and the sweet smell of flowers. We want to transform the world so that it may be more just and more egalitarian, and that all who live in it may be respected.

We will continue sowing revolutionary unrest on behalf of agrarian reform, social justice, and sovereignty of food and peoples. This is our mission and thus it must be for all peasant mothers persecuted by the violence of agribusiness and water-business.

What's left for the mothers of the world is to organize and struggle. We will struggle tirelessly against the neoliberal system that transforms food, water, land, people’s knowledge, and the bodies of women into commodities.

It's time to demand justice and punishment for those responsible for exploitation, violence, genocide, and massacres.

It's time to open up new passages, new men and new women.

It's time to set our sights on the new horizon.

We are standing up, spending night and day sculpting the fertility and the rebellion that are being born in the womb of mother earth.

Long live Mother Earth! Long live the mothers of the earth!

May 2007

MST – Agrarian Reform: for Social Justice and Peoples’ Sovereignty

The MST makes me so happy. Background here, here, and here,

Canadian Mining Giant Goldcorp and Corporate Social Responsibility

Dangerous levels of lead and arsenic have been found in the blood of Honduran villagers living downstream from a controversial gold and silver mine owned by Canada's Goldcorp Inc., the world's third largest gold mining firm.

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Nearly 60 percent of the mining and exploration companies in the world are Canadian. They generate more than 40 billion dollars annually, representing about four percent of Canada's gross domestic product (GDP).

"Canadians are appalled when they find out what some Canadian companies are up to in the South," but few Canadians know what is going on at mine projects in South America or elsewhere due to limited media coverage, says Karyn Keenan, programme officer with the Halifax Initiative, a coalition of Canadian environmental and human rights NGOs.

But little by little, media attention has grown, especially recently, when people from Latin America affected by mines appeared in 2006 at a series of public forums about the corporate social responsibility of Canada's mining, oil and gas sectors.

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An official report on regulating the sector's out-of-country operations will go before the Canadian government shortly. The report is "unprecedented in Canadian history," says Keenan, because it represents a consensus between NGOs, mining industry and government officials.

"Industry doesn't want strong, binding Canadian laws on their operations overseas, but there are some who know they need to do more than publish codes of ethics on their websites," she added.

Although the content of the report remains secret, it is expected to recommend that an independent dispute mechanism and ombudsman office be established to investigate complaints and conduct audits of Canadian mining, oil and gas operations abroad.

Whether the current conservative Canadian government will act on the report's recommendations remains to be seen.

Excerpted from IPS News

Free Education Isn't Always Enough

But it's a start.

When I was in Mexico last month, I saw lots of kids that were not in school on weekdays. I asked a local why these kids aren't in school and was told that although Mexico has good universal public education, these kids can't afford to lose the few pesos they can make selling oranges and handkerchiefs to tourists.

Even when education is free, many kids simply can't afford to go to school. Their income may be essential to the family, frequently they have to care for younger siblings, sometimes they are just trying to stay alive, not to mention there are often additional expenses (such as books, transportation, and uniforms) incurred even at public school.

Nearly 300 000 children in South Africa can't go to school because they don't have wheelchairs, hearing aids, crutches or even spectacles to make their lives easier. (more)

It is clear that the logical solution to this problem is to help these children with their particular needs. A Right-wing think tank's solution, however, would be to replace public education with private education, and hope that private charity can help send the poor kids to school.

The Fraser Institute believes because universal free public education is not providing the kind of results we'd like to see, it is a failure of the concept of public education.

This week, the United Nations 2005 World Summit in New York will address the lack of access to education for the lowest-income families around the globe. Its admirable goal is to achieve “universal primary education by 2015,” through increased international funding and government administration. The educational plight of the world’s poor seems inevitably to result in calls for such responses.

Though the big stick* of government intervention seems like a powerful tool for good, in the field of education its results have been disappointing and suggest that government interference in education is part of the problem, not the solution.

Evidence suggests that free, state-run education has not resulted in anywhere near the universal educational outcomes its advocates have promised. In many parts of the Western world, that failure is still evident after more than a century of concentrated effort, in Africa after many billions of dollars in international aid grants. These are humanitarian tragedies indeed and we must consider seriously the reasons for the failure.

Does the educational failure of the world’s poor reflect the impossibility of achieving lofty educational goals, or does it reflect misguided reliance on public financing and provision? Increasingly, the evidence suggests not that poor families are impossible to educate, but that free, state-run schools may not be the best way to deliver education to them.

Groundbreaking research by the University of Newcastle’s Dr. James Tooley in the slums of Africa, India and China reveals that a perhaps majority of students not enrolled in public schools in these countries are being educated in unregistered private schools, paid for by their parents.

Tooley’s research indicates significantly higher achievement among private-school students even after controlling for factors such as parental education and income. His fieldwork findings also show that when visited unannounced, fewer public-school teachers were engaged in teaching activities than their private-school counterparts were.

A recent BBC documentary provided vivid anecdotal evidence of this when it showed footage of teachers sleeping in African public-school classrooms and chatting on their cell phones, while students were left to their own devices.

Though governments in the developing world do not recognize the existence or contribution of private schools, their value is fully acknowledged by parents, who make great personal sacrifices to pay the tuition. One parent explains, “If you were offered free fruit in the market, you would know it was rotten. If you want good fruit, you have to pay for it. The same is true of education.”

Here in Canada, private schools are equally unsung heroes of education for our poorest citizens. An OECD report released this week reveals that even after accounting for parental education and income, private-school students in Canada do much better on mathematics tests than their public school counterparts. Statistics Canada tells us that 29 percent, nearly a third of children who attend private schools in Canada, are from families with incomes of less than $50,000. This suggests that many poor parents in Canada also value private education, despite the financial sacrifices it requires of them.

In fact, there is reason to believe that private schools may offer lower-income families better value for money than public schools offer taxpayers. Evidence of this comes from Children First: School Choice Trust, a greatly over-subscribed program in Ontario that offers grants to lower-income families. The program pays up to 50 percent of tuition at independent elementary school for 800 children whose household income is less than twice the poverty line. The average household income of Children First families is less than $28,000 while the average tuition of their schools is $4,400, about 56 percent of what is spent per student in the public system.

Why are these poor families choosing private schools that will cost them dearly, when public schools are available free of charge? Some want relief from bullying, others religious education, others cite smaller schools with greater academic emphasis and respect for teachers, while yet others help for a special education need. Each family seems to agree with the African parent’s analogy of the free fruit and that educational value offered by private schools is more than worth their financial sacrifices.

Chinese officials told Tooley’s research team private schools for the poor were “logically impossible.” Like those officials, government bureaucrats* will continue to deny the existence and potential of educational entrepreneurs, despite the cost of their denial to those poor families they purport to serve. And while they do, the admirable UN targets for universal education will prove continually elusive.
My Emphasis
* Note the bogeymen: "big stick of government intervention", "government bureaucrats". Can't you just HEAR the venom dripping from their mouths?

What planet are they on? The FI's solution would make sense only in a world in which poverty means not being able to afford both education and an iPod. Yes I'm still annoyed about this.

Related

Mexico: Mazahuas Choose Jail over Going Without Water

Although they live near a gigantic water distribution system, the indigenous Mazahuas lack access to water and live in deep poverty. Since Dec. 11, when they shut off the valves of one of the system's plants in protest, Mazahua women have kept up the vigil -- and warn that it could turn radical.

Read the Inter Press Service interview with one of the protesters. Some background on Mexico City's water problems here and here.

Bright Sparks of Light, on the Longest, Darkest Night

Well, Winter Solstice is upon us. Not only is it the longest night of the year, it is also a new moon this year, meaning a very dark night

2006 has been quite a dark year: Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Israel/Lebanon, Palestinian territories, AIDS, etc.

Despite all of this, there is room for hope; the longest, darkest night is the best for stargazing. The Bush Administration is crumbling, something which we hope will result in a major change in course. Support for the war in Iraq reaches a new low. The very exciting developments in Latin America include (among others) the increased integration of the new Cochabamba Declaration. Death penalty executions in the USA were this year the lowest in a decade. The hard work of dedicated activists and brilliant thinkers has had many positive results. The good news and signs of hope inspires me to say: "Merry Solstice"!

Download and watch Biology, Resistance and Restoration: Sustainability as an Infinite Game (Free 51 Minutes, ipod video, zipped 300mb download here). Paul Hawken inspires us to imagine a world of growth without inequality, wealth without plunder and work without exploitation.