I can’t post all the newspaper here. I do not have the time to post all the graphics either.It is a large tabloid size 38 page newspaper intended to be handed out face to face, as well as stacks placed in the usual cafes, bars, corner stores etc..and shipped free of charge to like minded small orgs to distribute. The internet is a wealth of information. Please go to counterpunch.org, blackagenda.com and commondreams.org. for more concise and internet readable information. But Holler from the Rooftops is a propaganda call out, not a blog, or a typed twittered truncation. It is a tangible thing. It is trying to be the dusty old traditional version of a workers’ left newspaper as not only a subjective anti-imperialist news source, but a medium to encourage bottom up democracy.
TO GET THE FIRST ISSUE, 38 PAGES LONG, SEND A DOLLAR OR TWENTY TO HOLLER AT PO BOX 40656, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94140. email me at hollerfromtherooftops@yahoo.com
IRAQ: A SCREAMING CAME ‘CROSS THE SKY…NO TEARS IN THE EAGLE’S EYE
The sanctions under Clinton and Gore killed at least 300,000 Iraqi citizens. This fact is mostly ignored in the present as it was then, though Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s admission on 60 minutes still rings in some ears. “The price is worth it.” Our press ignored by outright omission, or page 15 burying, the almost weekly air strikes right up to the Bush Cheney election.
From an imperialist ‘liberal’ mainstream media outlook, all was going fine until Bush lied ‘us’ into the invasion. You can ignore that Al Gore completely supported the invasion, as did the majority of upper level democrats. Since then we have had constant referrals to mismanagement and corruption following the invasion. All true in that respect, but with no respect to the human toil of the country we have devastated. With repeated bellicose assertions from H. Clinton to Kerry to Pelosi to Obama that “Iraqis have to step up to the plate and stop the violence.” From that perspective the U.S. citizen could get the impression that perhaps the invasion to overthrow a murdering dictator would not have been such a bad thing: if the institution of an allied Iraq with privatized resources, even on the Saudi or Egyptian model of dictatorship, could have been achieved. And of course, as their story line runs, the vast majority of the violence and terror was unleashed willy nilly by Iraqis upon Iraqis to settle scores, or to gain power. The ‘tribal’ thing you understand. The truth is that the USA military as you read this, has Apaches raking rooftops and firing missiles at doors of houses…. and drones killing innocents. And we are weekly dropping 500 pound bombs on insurgents. A term encompassing the entire population that resists the occupation, or merely stands in the way. The US government, that is ‘we’, destroyed half of the country’s water carrying capacity in the first gulf war, imposed sanctions, which limited hardware to repair it, then continued to bomb. We are funding fascist militias some of whom are chopping up women, merely for the fact they are educated, and leaving them in ditches alongside the road.
“Iraq, where women once had more rights and freedom than most others in the Arab world, has turned deadly for women who dream of education and a professional career…. Basra police chief Gen. Jalil Hannoon told reporters and Arab TV channels in December that at least 40 women had been killed during the previous five months in that city alone….. The militias dominated by the Shia Badr Organisation and the Mehdi Army are leading imposition of strict Islamist rules. The Shia-dominated Iraqi government is seen as providing tacit and sometimes direct support to them. “The situation in Baghdad is not very different,” Mazin Abdul Jabbar, social researcher at Baghdad University told IPS. “All universities are controlled by Islamic militiamen who harass female students all the time with religious restrictions.”
“Women have nowhere to go to spend leisure time,” Um Ali, a married woman in Baquba, told IPS. “Our time is spent only at home now. I have not traveled outside Baquba for more than four years. The only place I can go to is my parents’ home. Housekeeping and children have been all my life; I have no goals to attain, no education to complete. Sometimes, I can’t leave home for weeks.” In northern Kurdish controlled Iraq, ‘honour killings’ continue. In the ancient tradition of ‘honour killing’, the view is that a family’s honour is paramount. As of last December, at least 27 Kurdish women were murdered on suspicion of having had ‘illicit’ affairs in the previous four months, according to Youssif Mohamed Aziz, the regional minister of human rights.” (a)
A conquering army in modern times resorts to air power when the natives prove too dangerous; when people at home are complaining about American casualties. And so civilian massacres increase. 4/16/9 The Independent/UK Kim Sengupta “Air strikes and artillery barrages have taken a heavy toll among the most vulnerable of the Iraqi people, with children and women forming a disproportionate number of the dead. Analysis carried out for the research group Iraq Body Count (IBC) found that 39 per cent of those killed in air raids by the US-led coalition were children and 46 per cent were women. Fatalities caused by mortars, used by American and Iraqi government forces as well as insurgents, were 42 per cent children and 44 per cent women.”
Dahr Jamail. “Helicopters and fighters of the coalition forces attack farmers who work at night on their farms,” said a local farmer who did not want to be named. “Due to the water quotas, farmers are forced to water their farms even at night.
“….Some farmers have been shot in firing by coalition forces. Farmers would rather neglect their farms than risk death.” By now, the supervisor said, 90 percent of local farmers in Diyala have left their farms and orchards because “the farms have been severely attacked by diseases and the shortage of water.” Also, he said, the prices of imported vegetables and fruit have increased tremendously.”
And as is predictable when a country ruled by corporate profit making invades, only the rightist forces will be allowed to prevail, and so violence increases under the ‘anti-insurgency’ tactic of divide and conquer…
Jamail: “When we discuss sectarianism in Iraq, we mustn’t underestimate the role the US has played in fostering it. From the beginning, including the US-installed Iraqi Governing Council, which was structured to appoint positions of power strictly along sectarian and ethnic lines, the US has been playing the game of divide and rule. The most important element of this, I believe, is the US role in establishing sectarian based death squads in Iraq. I discuss this at length in my book; but, in sum, Negroponte and Steele, two men who did the same in Central America in the 1980s, played crucial roles in organizing and facilitating these death squads. These death squads, along with sectarian-based militias
..have split Baghdad up into sectarian neighborhoods; and, today, we’re looking at the end-game of this process where the capital is now nearly completely segregated.”
In the USA parameter of circular empire doublespeak; the voices of both Americans and Iraqis against any intervention, against the sanctions that decimated a middle class and literally starved the masses, were absent, and now buried in the little read history of ‘the left’. On websites, in books with readership of a few thousand. We have two parties and two viewpoints; neither which include the majority of the USA population, nor of course the Iraqi people. There was at least a 30% unemployment rate during the sanctions in a dictatorship that previously had the largest and most educated and well fed population of the middle east, outside of Israel. Where water, housing, food, and jobs, and school were almost guaranteed, if you kept your mouth shut. Where near half the doctors were women. Now after the sanctions, the invasion, the mass murder, there are over one million Iraqi’s dead, two million refugees outside the borders, and one million internally displaced…. intermittent electricity in most areas outside the Kurdish zone, fouled water, rampant inflation, rampant disease and lack of medical care and over 50% unemployment. Archeological sites were destroyed by the US military and looters. And yes, still nearly everyday, helicopters and drones are ‘targeting insurgents’.
Dahr Jamail’s “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Reporter in Occupied Iraq,” with author Interview.By Leslie Thatcher
Quite soon after his arrival, he observes US troops fanning out in the street from a balcony where he stands with Iraqi interpreter and driver Hamoudi. Jamail describes one soldier twitching, jerking and swiveling as he walks backward. Hamoudi leans over and says, “Look at that poor bastard. It’s clear to anyone with eyes that he has mental problems from being here doing this shit job. Dr. Aisha Abdulla in the supply room at Yarmouk Hospital rages against the occupiers: “They’ve destroyed the foundations of Iraq – what do you think we can do without foundations? Even if the Americans stay here 15 years, there will be no security … Anything they do or build is superficial, not fundamental. Abu Ghraib attacked the dignity of the Iraqi people. Did America not become barbarians from killing Indians, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Afghanis, and bombing us and our young children, who now have psychological scars? If these did not reveal the true barbarian nature of America, then Abu Ghraib did. I never liked Saddam, nor did I support him, but at least under the dictator there was order and some basic services. Now, there is no order, no electricity, no fundamental stability.” One detainee released in the spring of 2004, tells Jamail, “The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house.” An Iraqi policeman comments on the case of an Iraqi driving home from work who was gunned down by US troops, “This is the usual policy of the Americans. They always shoot first, because there is nobody to punish them for their mistakes.” CONTINUED PAGE 3
THE EARTH IS NOT AN ISSUE,
OR THINGS TO DO LIST
Subtitle: One way to bring on the death of billions, and destroy the environment even quicker: crawl into a rabbit hole with wallet and bumper sticker.
Al Gore admitted, “I realize now, individual solutions will not solve the crisis”.
Great, after ten years of deluding people, and a career as a politician supporting corporate earth rape, return the Novel Prize.
If you keep up on the continuing evidence of the devastating vortex humans and earth are descending into, it is not a hyperbole to suggest it is akin to nuclear bombs being dropped from a swirling umbrella. Everywhere, there is a target, the bombs drop and spread destruction and then breed an exponential rot. Permafrost melting in Siberia, very dangerous methane then leaking out, glaciers melting almost everywhere; glaciers that provide runoff for billions during the summer, mass deforestation, …. I am not quoting any science peer reviewed agreements that the ‘tipping point’ may have already been reached. The articles are easily found on the web. I am only offering the missing bigger pictures. Absent starkly. We are not destroying the planet with a car culture, or a ‘consumerist’ culture-those are effects and symptoms- we are destroying the planet and the life support system for billions of humans, while incrementally advancing the extinction of thousands of animal and plant species, forever gone, through support of a worldwide political and economic system. They are easily identified systems with actors intertwined worldwide. To center on one aspect of the ‘danger’ is to make the larger goal impossible. Reflect on the innumerable ‘ways to save the planet” we’ve been reading for ten years. (1) These lists are not provided with a stipulation; the headlines are not geared to pull you in to learn real facts. They actually claim, ‘you’ can save the planet, that is, slow global warming, stop deforestation, slow car pollution, or stop corporate agribusiness by doing these ‘things’. A crisis is not solved by lies and feel good pullover quilted comfort blurbs. There is NOTHING you can do with your personal living style that will slow global warming, stop the evisceration of the worlds’ fisheries, save the world’s water supplies, nor even slow deforestation. No ballot proposition, or any future elected politician that you vote for will do any of the above either.
“…and if consumers demand that all so-called “natural” products move in a genuine, third party-certified “transition to organic” direction, the U.S. will be well on its way to solving three of the nation’s most pressing problems: climate change, deteriorating public health, and Peak Oil.”
The above clip is a perfect example. A vigorous and well meaning organic farmers’ association has a spokesperson make a completely irresponsible and totally unfactual claim. Can anyone, with one iota of critical thinking capacity, one bit of sense, think that even if organic eating increased a million percent in the next few years in the USA, that ‘we’ will be on the way to solve the ‘problems’ inherent in a global system of pillage for profit? That this will counteract increased militarization, new coal plants every month, countries (South Korea, China, Russia, etc) buying millions of acres of farmland in Africa for monoculture export farming? Can consumer demand suddenly create an atrophy of the corporate and militaristically controlled monopolies of truck, ship, and air transport of monoculture agribusiness and goods transport? One cargo ship from China equals ten thousand cars, no kidding. Not only does ‘consumer demand’ make no macro sense when limited to a few million in the first world, it makes no sense in every aspect of this micro consumer approach. You have effectively shut off the big picture. If by buying organic you think you have some effect, outside of helping good farmers, and eating more healthy, you have deluded yourself about the massive problems that need to be addressed.
Britain and other European governments have been accused of underestimating the health risks from shipping pollution following research which shows that one giant container ship can emit almost the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50m cars. Confidential data from maritime industry insiders based on engine size and the quality of fuel typically used by ships and cars shows that just 15 of the world’s biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world’s 760m cars. Low-grade ship bunker fuel (or fuel oil) has up to 2,000 times the sulphur content of diesel fuel used in US and European automobiles. guardian.co.uk April 2009
And.. In international waters ship emissions remains one of the least regulated parts of our global transportation system. The fuel used in ships is waste oil, basically what is left over after the crude oil refining process. It is the same as asphalt and is so thick that when cold it can be walked upon . It’s the cheapest and most polluting fuel available and the world’s 90,000 ships chew through an astonishing 7.29 million barrels of it each day, or more than 84% of all exported oil production from Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil exporter. Shipping is by far the biggest transport polluter in the world. There are 760 million cars in the world today emitting approx 78,599 tons of Sulphur Oxides (SOx) annually. The world’s 90,000 vessels burn approx 370 million tons of fuel per year emitting 20 million tons of Sulphur Oxides. That equates to 260 times more Sulphur Oxides being emitted by ships than the worlds entire car fleet. One large ship alone can generate approx 5,200 tonnes of sulphur oxide pollution in a year, meaning that 15 of the largest ships now emit as much as the worlds 760 million cars.
How can so many US ‘green’ experts miss the two biggest polluters on the planet: the USA Military and the global transport of goods? Have you every read a mainstream environmental article that stated the obvious fact: all goods the people buy must be manufactured nearby? It’s food and ‘type’ of consumption. And a food revolution won’t happen without a social and political and economic revolution in the first place. Billions of people all over the world must have land and liberty in order to build a truly sustainable decrease of the rate of global warming and deforestation. Ten thousand or so more ‘american’ farmers won’t make a shit of difference, and thinking so, leads people to deny the biggest enemy of sustainable farming. The USA government is one of the biggest obstacles to this happening: often through military means, direct as the invasion of Iraq, funding of coups in Latin America, and indirect through support of arms sales to dictatorships, and directly through IMF/World bank shock treatments of privatization and forcing nations to become ‘liberal markets’ open to corporate monoculture farming and forcing agriculture export to pay off debt. And of course internal subsidization in the billions to corporate farms, who by the way also won’t pay a living wage despite astronomical profits. What about the manufacture of goods? What is actually in these containers on cargo ships that pollute more than all us driving our cars to work?
The United States continued its years’ long trend of exporting scrap paper and commodities, while importing orders of magnitude greater amounts of high value-added manufactured goods. In 2007, U.S. retail giants, Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot and Sears were the four largest importers of ocean freight containers, at 720,000, 435,000, 365,300, and 248,600 twenty-foot equivalent container units (TEUs), respectively, according to data compiled by the Port Import/Export Reporting Service (PIERS) run by the Journal of Commerce.The combined imports of the four companies — 1,768,900 TEUs — equaled the total exports of containers for the top 21 U.S. exporting companies. More than half of those 21 exporters filled containers with scrap paper. Most all of this waste is re-manufactured into cardboard to pack valuable manufactured goods for export back to the United States. Like the millions of products headed to American shores, it is cheaper to manufacture cardboard in China than it is in the United States.” (www.manufacturingnews.com/news/08/0731/PIERS.html)
Half the USA exporters were sending scrap. So our ‘recycling’ making two trips across the Pacific Ocean is another vast and unreported global warming contribution.
The people that write these articles on consumer solutions never have any working class or (non-free market) economists’ or third world farmers’ knowledge of the basic horrendously destructive level of scale of ‘trusts’ and government subsidized and militaristic control over resources, land, and credit, nor the very basic knowledge that capitalism does not on such a large scale, ‘encourage competition’ and ‘encourage choice’. Corporate capitalism becomes monopolistic. It’s the nature of an economic system that demands profits over everything, to be predatory to all competition, and to treat all resources as ‘infinite’ since the basic tenant of capitalistic economics is that profit has infinite potential. At this point most of us would agree, capitalism is the economic system akin to riding an out of control train to the cliff…the tipping point. Any reasonable ‘environmental’ solution to the global warming crisis, deforestation, and monoculture corporate farming, etc. has to engage a vigorous and progressive solution that goes past a ‘managed’ centralized statist control of economics inching towards more ‘green capitalism’ as often exampled via European states. It must be vast and furious, outside their business ‘democratic’ summits.
A solution, or a path of real progress, has to address how fast, and how internationally, we can dismantle capitalism and the elite political systems; and it’s social base the managerial class all supported by militaries. We have to be focusing on how to move faster and at the same time continue any possible stopgaps of what ‘they’ are doing. Let me qualify here, before any light bulb changers fire off nasty emails. (And isn’t it always via the Internet, not face to face discussion or via social organization?) Everything we do ourselves YES matters. Consumerist changes matter to us as a path to a larger coherence about how our systems, and lifestyles affect people and nature. Choices and incremental local change matter: to the well being of sustainable farmers, collectives working to support more ‘green’ alternatives, to reduce the very dangerous pollution in our cities, the well being of our neighbors (!!!), and our own health and local water supplies. But none of our choices, or slowly expanding municipal and state regulations will in any way slow the destruction, or slow global warming, or as the simplest example: create ‘green’ transportation. These choices and laws, are always beneficial but they ONLY chip away in very minute ways the speed of ultimate destruction of the planet, of ultimate corporate hegemony over the entire worlds’ water, food, resources supply, they only lay a few rocks in the way of the train rushing to a cliff. Opening a window, sticking your hands out, putting your feet on the pavement out the door of a car that is rushing to a head-on collision slows by drag but the car crashes anyway and its passengers die.
To illustrate the local only myopia: The coming economic worldwide depression (or recession in certain nations) is largely being ignored as the meth amped destructive force by most USA ‘greens’ it will be. Instead, it is often being hurrahed weekly on the web as an ‘opportunity’….for people to ‘become more local’ and more ‘detached from the grid’ etc. A near blind obtuseness to reality. The gorilla will have to replace its declining profits. They already have begun. Since the decline in worldwide stocks, the crash in worldwide property speculation last year, tens of millions of acres have been brought up as a ‘bet’ for future equity, and the commodities markets in grains have drastically jumped, starving more people. The increase of murder against the worlds’ small farmers, and the worlds’ remaining forests will be like Sarah Palin mixed with Stalin on steroids. 100,000 farmers in India have committed suicide since that country’s opening up to more corporate agriculture and so called ‘neo liberalism’ of their economy. (While Hillary Clinton visited there and promised more military support and more exchange of nuclear bomb making tools!) The coming depression will wipe out at least half of ‘organic’ small farms. They cannot compete with corporate agriculture in subsidies (thanks Nancy Pelosi!), nor in the near monopoly control of distribution systems and political control, nor in a maximist corporate banking/credit system that is completely international and untouchable through any one nation’s political system. Already thousands of organic farms are near bankruptcy due to consumer’s cutbacks on food spending.(2)
And then there are the food conglomerates. A ring of three to four corporations that control ¾’s of the seed supply and the near majority of our politicians, and heavily invested in every corner of the ‘third world’. Hell, Obama thought it ok to fly on an Archer Daniels Midland private plane the first year in the senate. Clinton’s NAFTA allowed Cargill to merge with Mexican Gruma to control half their corn supply. Prices then doubled there. And now, the pressure is on to match the ‘organic’ food prices coming from China. “Organic” indeed.
Ari LeVaux, AlterNet. “Even as demand for organic food continues to explode, organic farmers in America are getting thrown under the beet cart they helped build. The Chinese are taking over market share, especially of vegetables and agricultural commodities like soy, thanks to several American-based multinational food corporations that have hijacked the organic bandwagon they only recently jumped onto…..Multiple Midwestern farmers and farmers cooperatives in the heart of American soy country were told by Silk they had to match the rock-bottom cost of Chinese organic soybeans — a price they simply could not meet. Organic agriculture is labor-intensive, and China’s edge comes largely from its abundance of cheap labor.”
To restate, your pocketbook does not change the corporate system. It is global, aided by massive militaries, and growing in strength daily. Consumer choices do not stop the USA government either. Under the new change ‘green’ administration we can see one act that wipes out what millions in California could do with progressive spending habits. That is, Obama has oked mountain top removal of coal, continuing Bush policy.
If we as ‘americans’ are going to join the billions of the other people on this planet as citizens of the earth, and concerned humanists, as outraged and panicked as most of us are, in an attempt to even slow the oncoming tsunami of the degradation of our own life support system (nature) and attempt to slow global warming, with its now obvious death kneel for billions of humans, there are no ‘consumerist’ solutions whatsoever. There are no individual actions, that is, life style changes as a solitary person, that will affect in any way the coming destruction.
It is near impossible to argue with people that believe these ‘steps’. They become morally superior and when approached with facts delve into the complete turgid miasma of “What IF everyone did what I do? Why can’t everyone do what I do? Why aren’t YOU doing what I do!” That is not argument, and certainly not groundwork for real progress or social organizing. I can say the same about my government killing people every day. “Well I refuse to kill anyone. And what IF we all do the same? War and hunger would stop!” The individual action as an ‘influence’ and as a progressive erosion against power structures, political and economic, is akin to sky-god and end time religious fever. Only in fairly recent times have you seen large sections of the working people of democracies accept basically ‘capitalist’ solutions to the destructive and oppressive power elites’ own economic system(!). Prior to the 1960’s most ‘progressives’ and libertarian leftists in the democracies saw a political and economic worldwide hierarchy as the enemy. Remember all those ‘outdated’ old tired lefty slogans such as ‘internationalism’, end militarism, land and freedom, all power to the people? In the post-modern era, mass solidarity and action was replaced by solitary urges and individualistic focus relying on the symbol of ‘buying things’, wherein rich people wearing furs is a focus, to take one pathetic example, other than a focus attacking the structure of their gross wealth as they profit off of millions starving and dying in their wars. Many Anarchists, historically the most logical and forward thinking of the ‘left’ have even embraced this idea of altering consumer practices as some leap forward, mostly in the UK and the USA. Chumbawamba’s second major label album devoted it’s entire booklet text against ‘consumerism”, with no text about actual social organizing against states and their militaries. I can’t even remember if I liked the CD’s music. I threw it out the window onto Folsom street, hoping some worker would walk over top of it. Some so called anarchists routinely in the democracies demonstrate against one issue ‘important actions’, throw one day infantile fits over consumerism, organize buy nothing days, and through tiresome peer pressure socially shut down any mass organizing actions within the masses by taking higher ‘moral’ ground against meat eaters, car drivers, people that work for bad corporations, claiming tiny cooperatives can undermine capitalism, and telling anarchists/workers that mass organizing for a better world is just not feasible. “Clean up your own backyard first,” many punk anarchists adopted an apolitical bourgeois hippy slogan. And if you shout ‘class war’ back at them, they call you a Leninist or even funnier, a ‘workerist’.
Lierre Keith in her book “Vegetarian Myth” on PM Press puts much of my past 15 years of raves more succinctly. I disagree much with this book, particularly with the overall impression it gives that there can’t be a sustainable ‘fairly green’ grain diet mixed with no meat, and other healthy fats and protein, but as an ex-20 year vegan she is on spot about ‘american’s’ moralistic crapola on how to change the world….
“…and these kinds of personal choices, particularly when they involve buying something, have been embraced by the mainstream environmental movements as solutions. They aren’t. If you hear nothing else in this book, here this: there is no personal solution. And this reifying individual action cuts right to the heart of the divergence between liberals and radicals.
So here’s the basic education in revolution that you didn’t get in public school. There are two cardinal differences between liberalism and radicalism. The first can be characterized as idealism versus materialism. Liberalism is idealist. The crucible of social reality is the realm of ideas, in concepts, language, attitudes. In contrast, radicalism is materialist. Radicals see society as composed of actual institutions—economic, political, cultural—which wield power, including the power to use violence.
The second disagreement is on the primary social unit. Liberalism is individualist, locating the basic organization of society in the individual. Hence, liberal strategies for political change are almost exclusively individual actions. For radicals, the basic social unit is a class, or group whether that’s racial class, sex caste, economic class, or other grouping. Radicalism of whatever stripe understands oppression as group-based harm. For liberals, defining people as members of a group IS the harm. …..” GO TO PAGE 2
