Notes from the field

SUBHEAD: This land of milk and honey is tangible and real, but it comes with strings attached.

By Mark on 20 February 2012 for Club Orlov -
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/02/notes-from-field.html)


Image above: "The Last View of Home" by Richard Redgrave, 1858. From (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Redgrave_-_The_Emigrants%27_Last_Sight_of_Home.jpg).

You hear a lot of talk about relocalization and deindustrialization. The pastoral life, the good old days. How romantic! Reality pays you a visit when your pick-axe hits a rock, a chunk hits your face, and you taste your own blood.

Unaware of it at the time, I was a child of privilege, one of five born to a Chairman of Earth and Space Sciences at a State University in New York. We were all expected to be high achievers. I fulfilled the expectation and put in 32 years as an engineer helping the über-wealthy zip around the skies in personal rocket ships from one golf game to another while chalking it off as business expenses, when all I ever really wanted to do was sit out in the woods and cook some food on a stick over a fire.

In 1994 I acquired a 160 acre tract of land in southeast Kansas, for a price only slightly above chicken feed, as a weekender place to go sit by that fire and decompress from the rat-race. 18 years ago the future didn't look quite so ominous. Reel forward to the present and this full-time back-to-the-land experiment is starting to look like a pretty good idea. Some stark realities become self evident however when you are actually 'living the life'. Talking about it is easy. Doing it is something altogether different. Here is where I wish to convey a few 'notes from the field':

1. You realize after a while it is mostly hard, dirty, repetitive and boring. Mud, blood, shit, sweat, discomfort, disappointment, death. There are rewards, but you have to have a passion for it to endure. People who have grown up ranching already know these things of course, but they don't have to adapt. They know the life.
   
   
2. If you create an artificial abundance of anything, Mother Nature will do her best to return things to the status quo. Plant a large garden and you will have more venison than you can eat. Goats are not native to this region, coyotes are. Eagles, hawks, owls, raccoons, possums, foxes and bobcats are also native here. Chickens are not. They will all eat your chickens, given a chance.
   
   
3. If you want to eat meat, you have to kill something. It's brutal and unpleasant. Blood is blood, you best get used to it. Warm guts smell bad. They smell different, depending on what you just killed, but they all smell bad. The first time you shove an arm elbow deep in warm guts and blood to tear loose some connective tissue, you are hard pressed to not lose your lunch. It begins to get a bit easier when you have a chilled carcass with the hide peeled off, and the pieces you hack off start to look like something you would buy in a grocery store, but the lifeless eyes continue to stare.
   
   
4. Intellectual deprivation. This was unexpected. It doesn't become apparent right away because you're so damned glad to be away from the crush of humanity and the demolition derby approach to getting around. Land is inexpensive in certain regions for a reason. Living elsewhere is much easier (so far). In this case, the regional economy has been in decline for 70 years. The population has declined nearly 80% from its peak, and the brain drain is close to 100%. Most anybody with ambition left long ago, and most youth leave, never to return. It is not hard now to understand why, historically, tribes of 1 to 5 haven't fared well. You need some minimum critical mass of human interaction to be able to survive psychologically, and some degree of specialization and division of labor just to cover all the bases. For those of you considering it, the 'survivalist bunker' approach to dealing with the future would be ill advised. Social interaction is not just something nice, it is an imperative.

Not to be too glum, on the upside there is sunshine, fresh air, fresh meat, eggs, milk, cheese, honey, fruits, nuts, vegetables, abundant wildlife and beautiful scenery. You don't need to 'go to the gym' to stay in shape either.

To peer into the future and see nothing beyond an endless re-run of this hard living is enough to put fear and dread in most hearts. I find it increasingly difficult to believe that dispossessed cubicle dwellers will be able to adapt physically or mentally.

In this setting it is not hard to envision the emergence of a tradition where you take each seventh day off from the grunt work and get together with your friends and neighbors just to celebrate the fact you are still breathing. No deities or voodoo required. Then just for fun, throw a big feast every solstice and equinox and invite everybody. Wait... haven't we been there before?

People tend to think of a 'land of milk and honey' as something idyllic and easy. This land of milk and honey is accessible, tangible and real, but it comes with strings attached.
.

Greek Slavery & The General Strike

SUBHEAD: The German finance minister said “The promises from Greece aren’t enough for us any more”.

By Nicholas Mirzoeff on 12 February 2012 for nicholasmirzoeff.com -
(http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/O2012/2012/02/12/greece-slavery-and-the-general-strike/)


Image above: on 2/12/12 a homeless Greek woman in front of sign that reads,"We should not live as slaves". From original article.

oday the Greek parliament met to approve the deliberately humiliating terms of the German-backed bond rescue plan (aka the bailout). In the streets, it is more precisely defined as slavery. The response is, as it has long been, to organize the general strike. For globalized neo-liberalism this is the moment to bring an “end” to 2011, a year after their man in Egypt, Mubarak, had to step down.

Estimates suggest 50,000 people in the street in Athens, perhaps as many as 100,000 with thousands more elsewhere, and many buildings occupied. The inevitable riot police and tear gas have been deployed. Exarchia, the radical district resounded to explosions. As fires burned, allegations circulated that the police had started them or ignored them. (Watch on Livestream here.)

The scenes were extraordinary–Starbucks on fire, smoke bombs, riot police–with the word “chaos” on every Greek website.

The troika-installed Prime Minister Papademos–whose name seems to evoke a patriarchal “father of the people”–pushed the market line about debt refusal:

It would create conditions of uncontrolled economic chaos and social explosion. The country would be drawn into a vortex of recession, instability, unemployment and protracted misery.

Such remarks fly in the face of existing reality, in which those are already the prevailing conditions. Official unemployment exceeds 20%. Reports have suggested people returning to family farms in the countryside and islands from the cities in order to survive. The Church feeds 250,000 people a day in a country of 11 million people. Homelessness has increased by 25% (although the absolute numbers are low by U. S. standards. The official EU statistics agency Eurostat reports that one-third of the country is living in poverty. And yet Papademos called for more “sacrifice.”

Nonetheless, even this is not enough for the one percent: “The promises from Greece aren’t enough for us any more,” the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, said in an interview published in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. When the vote is passed, the minimum wage will be cut by over 20%, pensions will be reduced and the already ruined state will cut back still further. The graffiti in the streets calls this slavery.

Image above: The scenes were extraordinary - Starbucks on fire, smoke bombs, riot police. From original article.

“We should not live as slaves,” it reads [Na men zesoume san douloi]. Evocatively, the word “doulos” is used for “slave,” the same term used by Aristotle in his Politics to approve the institution of slavery. His meditation on slavery is in fact one of governance, which manifests itself as the necessity of dominance.

I’m going to quote at some length because it is the inability to “reason” according the “logic” of the markets that is being used to justify Greek slavery today. It’s also important to read this to realize how thoroughgoing and long-lasting the Western commitment to slavery has been.It is also a passage that contains within it so many of today’s critical concerns from the human/nonhuman, to the “soul at work” (Bifo), governmentality, Rancière’s division of the sensible, and the persistence of slavery. Let us note this is not a coincidence:

for that some should govern, and others be governed, is not only necessary but useful, and from the hour of their birth some are marked out for those purposes, and others for the other, and there are many species of both sorts….Those men therefore who are as much inferior to others as the body is to the soul, are to be thus disposed of, as the proper use of them is their bodies, in which their excellence consists; … they are slaves by nature, and it is advantageous to them to be always under government. He then is by nature formed a slave who is qualified to become the chattel of another person, and on that account is so, and who has just reason enough to know that there is such a faculty, without being indued with the use of it; for other animals have no perception of reason, but are entirely guided by appetite, and indeed they vary very little in their use from each other; for the advantage which we receive, both from slaves and tame animals, arises from their bodily strength administering to our necessities; for it is the intention of nature to make the bodies of slaves and freemen different from each other {1254b-1255a}

The present rhetoric of the “lazy” Greeks, shiftlessly avoiding tax payments and demanding state support defines people driven entirely by appetite. They must therefore become the chattel of the troika, despite the likelihood that the cuts will still worsen the economy and necessitate yet more support for the external bond markets. What matters is that the Greeks be made an example: “Can’t pay! Won’t pay!” is reworked into “Can’t pay? Become a slave.”

In Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois insisted that the enslaved had ended chattel slavery themselves by mass migration from South to North at the beginning of the Civil War, long before the Emancipation Proclamation:

This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps half a million people.

The result of the strike was an abolition democracy, whose participatory process centered on education and the capacity to be self-sustaining. The measures have passed. The occupations have been ended. It’s up to us to keep this present, to remain in the moment, to be present.

.

Indentured service to the rich

SUBHEAD: Through Costco, slaves put squid on U.S. dining tables from South Pacific’s cruelest catch.

By E. Benjamin Skinner on 23 February for Bloomberg News -
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-23/slaves-put-squid-on-u-s-dining-tables-from-south-pacific-catch.html)


Image above: Escaped former indentured worker Yusril, with his son in Indonesia. From original article.

On March 25, 2011, Yusril became a slave. That afternoon he went to the East Jakarta offices of Indah Megah Sari (IMS), an agency that hires crews to work on foreign fishing vessels. He was offered a job on the Melilla 203, a South Korea-flagged ship that trawls in the waters off New Zealand. “Hurry up,” said the agent, holding a pen over a thick stack of contracts in a windowless conference room with water-stained walls. Waving at a pile of green Indonesian passports of other prospective fishermen, he added: “You really can’t waste time reading this. There are a lot of others waiting, and the plane leaves tomorrow.”

Yusril is 28, with brooding looks and a swagger that belies his slight frame. (Yusril asked that his real name not be used out of concern for his safety.) He was desperate for the promised monthly salary of $260, plus bonuses, for unloading fish. His wife was eight months pregnant, and he had put his name on a waiting list for the job nine months earlier. After taking a daylong bus ride to Jakarta, he had given the agent a $225 fee he borrowed from his brother-in-law, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Feb. 27 edition. The agent rushed him through signing the contracts, at least one of which was in English, which Yusril does not read.

The terms of the first contract, the “real” one, would later haunt him. In it, IMS spelled out terms with no rights. In addition to the agent’s commission, Yusril would surrender 30 percent of his salary, which IMS would hold unless the work was completed. He would be paid nothing for the first three months, and if the job were not finished to the fishing company’s satisfaction, Yusril would be sent home and charged more than $1,000 for the airfare. The meaning of “satisfactory” was left vague. The contract said only that Yusril would have to work whatever hours the boat operators demanded.

Locked In

The last line of the contract, in bold, warned that Yusril’s family would owe nearly $3,500 if he were to run away from the ship. The amount was greater than his net worth, and he had earlier submitted title to his land as collateral for that bond. Additionally, he had provided IMS with the names and addresses of his family members. He was locked in.

What followed, according to Yusril and several shipmates who corroborated his story, was an eight-month ordeal aboard the Melilla 203, during which Indonesian fishermen were subjected to physical and sexual abuse by the ship’s operators. Their overlords told them not to complain or fight back, or they would be sent home, where the agents would take their due. Yusril and 23 others walked off in protest when the trawler docked in Lyttelton, New Zealand. The men have seen little if any of what they say they are owed. Such coerced labor is modern-day slavery, as the United Nations defines the crime. (The South Korean owners of the Melilla ships did not respond to requests for comment.)

Debt Bondage

The experiences of the fishermen on the Melilla 203 were not unique. In a six-month investigation, Bloomberg Businessweek found cases of debt bondage on the Melilla 203 and at least nine other ships that have operated in New Zealand’s waters. As recently as November 2011, fish from the Melilla 203 and other suspect vessels were bought and processed by United Fisheries, New Zealand’s eighth-largest seafood company, which sold the same kinds of fish in that period to distributors operating in the U.S. (The U.S. imports 86 percent of its seafood.) The distributors in turn sold the fish to major U.S. companies. Those companies -- which include some of the country’s biggest retailers and restaurants -- sold the seafood to American consumers.

Yusril’s story and that of nearly two dozen other survivors of abuse reveal how the $85 billion global fishing industry profits from the labor of people forced to work for little or no pay, often under the threat of violence. Although many U.S. seafood companies and retailers claim not to do business with suppliers who exploit their workers, the truth is far murkier.

Musty Quarters

Hours after Yusril arrived in Dunedin, New Zealand, the Melilla 203 officers put him to work unloading squid on the 193- foot, 26-year-old trawler. The ship was in bad shape, and the quarters were musty, as the vessel had no functioning dryer for crew linens or work clothes. Yet the conditions seemed comparatively decent to Yusril.

Two years earlier he had worked on the Dong Won 519, operating under the auspices of Sanford Ltd., a 130-year-old, $383 million New Zealand company. On that boat, Yusril says the officers hit him in the face with fish and the boatswain repeatedly kicked him in the back for using gloves when he was sewing the trawl nets in cold weather. Most unnervingly, the second officer would crawl into the bunk of Yusril’s friend at night and attempt to rape him. When asked for comment, Chief Executive Officer Eric Barratt said Sanford’s observers, which the company placed on all their foreign-chartered vessels (FCVs), reported that the ships “don’t have any issues with labor abuse.”

Conditions Worsen

When the Melilla 203 set sail for the deep waters of the Southern Ocean, conditions worsened, according to the accounts of Yusril and a dozen other crew members. The ship trawled for up to two months at a time, between 12 and 200 miles offshore. The boatswain would grab crew members’ genitals as they worked or slept. When the captain of the ship drank, he molested some of the crew, kicking those who resisted. As nets hauled in the catch -- squid, ling, hoki, hake, grouper, southern blue whiting, jack mackerel, and barracuda -- the officers shouted orders from the bridge. They often compelled the Indonesians to work without proper safety equipment for up to 30 hours, swearing at them if they so much as asked for coffee or a bathroom break. Even when fishermen were not hauling catches, 16-hour workdays were standard.

Fatigue

The resulting fatigue meant accidents, which could bring dismemberment in the cramped below-deck factory where the fish were headed and gutted by hand, then passed along conveyor belts to be frozen. Over the past decade at least two crew members of the Melilla ships have died, according to local newspaper accounts and reports by Maritime New Zealand, a government regulatory body. Dozens of Melilla crew members suffered injuries, some crippling.

When Ruslan, 36, a friend of Yusril’s on the 203, snapped two bones in his left hand in a winch, it took three weeks before he was allowed to go to a hospital. The morning after his discharge he was ordered back to work but could not carry out his duties. The company removed him before any follow-up medical appointments. “I was a slave, but then I became useless to the Koreans, so they sent me home with nothing,” he says.

Today, back in his home village in Central Java, Ruslan has a deformed hand. While IMS, the recruiting agency, finally paid him $335 for three months of work, it has blacklisted him, according to Ruslan, because he spoke to investigators, and it has refused to help with medical bills.

Ecological Infractions

During the last decade, New Zealand authorities repeatedly fined or seized the Melilla ships for ecological infractions, such as a 2005 oil discharge in Lyttelton (LPC) Harbor, which the country monitored by satellite and occasional inspections by Ministry of Fisheries observers. Crimes against humanity were secondary. Scott Gallacher, a spokesman for New Zealand’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (which merged with the Ministry of Fisheries in July), explained that “observers are not formally tasked” with assisting abused crew, though they may report abuses to the Department of Labour. Yet Yusril said that when he once whispered a plea for help, an observer expressed sympathy but said it was “not my job.”

New Zealand authorities had plenty of prior evidence of deplorable working conditions on foreign vessels like the Melilla. On Aug. 18, 2010, in calm seas, a Korean-flagged trawler called the Oyang 70 sank, killing six. Survivors told the crew of the rescuing vessel their stories of being trafficked. A report by Christina Stringer and Glenn Simmons, two researchers at the University of Auckland Business School, and Daren Coulston, a mariner, uncovered numerous cases of abuse and coercion among the 2,000 fishermen on New Zealand’s 27 FCVs.

New Zealand Inquiry

The report prompted the government to launch a joint inquiry. The researchers gathered testimony from New Zealand observers who saw abuses being committed even after they had boarded ships. “Korean officers are vicious bastards,” one observer said, as quoted in the report. The source said a factory manager “rapped” a 12-kilogram (26 pounds) stainless steel pan over a crew member’s head, splitting the top of it, with blood “pissing out everywhere.” The observer said he gave the Indonesian fisherman 26 stitches.

After eight months on the Melilla 203, Yusril and 23 other crew members protested their treatment and pay to the captain. The move came after a Department of Labour investigator visited the ship in November 2011, when it was docked in Lyttelton. The official gave Yusril a fact sheet stipulating that crew members were entitled to minimum standards of treatment under New Zealand law, including pay of at least $12 per hour. When deductions, agency fees, and a manipulated exchange rate were subtracted, the fishermen were averaging around $1 per hour.

Retribution Threats

The captain dismissed the document and threatened to send them home to face retribution from the recruiting agency. Believing that the New Zealand government would protect them from such a fate, Yusril and all but four of the Indonesian crew walked off the boat and sought refuge in Lyttelton Union Parish Church. Aided by two local pro bono lawyers, they decried months of flagrant human rights abuses and demanded their unpaid wages under New Zealand’s Admiralty Act.

Ten miles from Lyttelton, in neighboring Christchurch, stands the headquarters of United Fisheries, the company that exclusively purchased the fish that Yusril and his mates caught. The building features gleaming Doric columns topped with friezes of chariot races. It was designed to resemble the temples to Aphrodite in Cyprus, the homeland of United founder Kypros Kotzikas.

‘High Standard’

The patriarch started in New Zealand with a small fish-and- chip restaurant. Some 40 years later, his son, Andre, 41, runs a company that had some $66 million in revenue last year. Although three Melilla crew members, citing abuse, had run away nine days before I spoke with Kotzikas, he told me he had heard of no complaints from crew on board the ships, and he had personally boarded the vessels to ensure that the conditions “are of very high standard.”

“I don’t think that claims of slavery or mistreatment can be attached to foreign charter vessels that are operating here in New Zealand,” he said. “Not for responsible operators.”

In an e-mail, Peter Elms, a fraud and compliance manager with Immigration New Zealand, cited a police assessment that found that complaints from crews amounted to nothing more than disputes over work conditions, alleged minor assaults, intimidation, workplace bullying and non-payment of wages. Elms said his department had two auditors who visited each vessel every two or three years, and they had found nothing rising to the level of human trafficking, a crime punishable in New Zealand by up to 20 years in prison.

‘Beautiful Stuff’

Kotzikas said that while New Zealand’s labor laws are “a thousand pages of, you know, beautiful stuff,” he believed they did not necessarily apply beyond New Zealand’s 12-mile territorial radius.

Half of United Fisheries’ annual revenue is generated outside New Zealand, spread across five continents. In the U.S., which imports an estimated $14.7 billion worth of fish annually, regulators are beginning to pay attention to the conditions under which that food is caught.

The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, as of Jan. 1, requires all retailers with more than $100 million in global sales to publicly disclose their efforts to monitor and combat slavery in their supply chains. The law covers some 3,200 corporations that do business in the state, including several that trade in seafood.

Kotzikas said his company sold ling, a species of fish caught by the Melilla crews, to Costco Wholesale Corp, America’s largest wholesaler and the world’s seventh-largest retailer.

Costco

As is true with many seafood exports from New Zealand, the exact quantity of United’s sales to Costco was untraceable through public shipping records. Costco did not respond to requests for comment about the sales and the abuse allegations.

In New Zealand, there is no independent auditing of catch method once a fish has been landed and processed. Ling caught by longlines is considered to be of higher quality and more environmentally sustainable than ling hauled by trawlers. As a result, longline-caught fish can fetch double the price, providing incentive for fraud and mislabeling.

As recently as 2008 the Melilla ships were fined more than $300,000 for “trucking,” which means misreporting catches from one fishing area to another. New Zealand officials have not, however, accused them or any other vessel of trying to mislabel trawler-caught fish as longline-caught.

‘Well Away’

Dean Stavreff, managing director of Quality Ocean --- the Christchurch-based company that exported the fish and whose largest shareholder is Kotzikas -- said Costco purchases ling processed through the facility at United Fisheries headquarters. While he didn’t oversee that process, Stavreff insisted that all of the ling that Quality Ocean sold Costco had been caught on “longline” vessels operated by Talley’s Group Ltd and Okains Bay, two companies that “stay well away from the alleged slave labor that is associated with the Melilla ships.”

Costco advertises that it offers only chilled, longline- caught ling to U.S. consumers. The retailer, which annually audits United’s processing facility but not its vessels, had issued the company a six-page Supplier Code of Conduct, which laid out minimum labor conditions and specifically prohibited slave labor, human trafficking and physical abuse of employees.

Other large U.S. retailers also do business with United Fisheries. (Thirteen employees at nine seafood companies contacted for this article agreed to speak only on background.) PF Chang’s China Bistro Inc, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based chain with more than 200 restaurants worldwide and more than $1.2 billion in annual revenue, purchased squid exclusively through Turner, a California-based importer.

Squid

According to Import Genius and Urner Barry shipping records, Turner bought at least 568,554 pounds of squid from United since Nov. 2010. Squid was one of the most common seafood species caught by fishermen held on the Melilla boats, according to Yusril and other crew members. Turner did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for PF Chang’s declined to comment on record.

Honolulu-based importer P&E Foods Inc has also bought at least 48,940 pounds of squid from United since November 2010. According to P&E’s president, Stephen Lee, his company sells squid to Sam’s Club, the 47 million-member wholesaler. Lee said he was unaware of allegations of abuse on ships chartered by United, a company with which Lee has done business for “20, 30 years.” He added that he did not know whether any of P&E’s buyers required him or his suppliers to sign a code of conduct for labor practices. Carrie Foster, senior manager for corporate communications at Sam’s Club, said her company does require such signed agreements from their suppliers.

Risking Punishment

Another New Zealand company with ties to U.S. retailers is Sanford, the country’s second-largest seafood enterprise. On Nov. 3, I interviewed crew members of the Dong Won and Pacinui vessels, charters catching fish for Sanford, near the docks at Lyttelton. These men risked punishment by speaking out: Less than a week earlier three Pacinui crew members who had complained were sent back to Indonesia to face the recruiters.

A Dong Won deckhand said he felt like a slave as he simulated a Korean officer kicking him on the ground. Their contracts, issued by IMS and two other Indonesian agents, were nearly identical to those signed by the Melilla crew. They reported the same pay rates, false contracts, doctored time sheets and similar hours, daily abuse, intimidation, and threats to their families if they walked away.

Audits

After several desertions over the past decade, New Zealand labor audits of the Dong Won ships turned up some of the same complaints. In 2010, Sanford assured the government that it would improve oversight of foreign-chartered vessels and address allegations of abuse or wage exploitation. Barratt, Sanford’s CEO, said observers of his company’s foreign vessels did not find instances of abuse and that three deported Pacinui crew had returned voluntarily.

According to Barratt, his company exports to the U.S. through at least 16 seafood distributors, the majority through Mazzetta Co LLC, a $425 million corporation based in suburban Chicago that is the largest American importer of New Zealand fish. Mazzetta sells the same species caught on the Dong Won and Pacinui ships to outlets across the country. On Feb. 21, after the publication of an online version of this article, CEO Tom Mazzetta sent Barratt a letter demanding an investigation of labor practices on Sanford’s foreign-chartered vessels.

Sanford also sells to the $10 billion supermarket chain Whole Foods Market Inc, Barratt said. Whole Foods spokeswoman Ashley Hawkins said that “for proprietary reasons we cannot reveal who we source from for our exclusive brand products.”

‘In Compliance’

Asked about allegations that FCVs in New Zealand employ slave labor, Hawkins said Whole Foods is “in compliance with the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, New Zealand is not considered high-risk.”

Other buyers of Sanford’s fish include Nova Scotia-based High Liner Foods Inc, which sells products containing the same seafood as that caught by the indentured fishermen on the Dong Won and Pacinui ships. High Liner’s customers include U.S. retailers such as Safeway Inc, America’s second-largest grocery store chain, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world’s largest retailer. When alerted by Bloomberg Businessweek, spokespeople for both retailers pledged swift investigations.

“As with all of our suppliers, we have a process under way to obtain documentation” that High Liner complies with human trafficking laws and reviews its supply chain to ensure compliance, said Brian Dowling, Safeway’s vice president of public affairs, on Feb. 17.

‘Following Up’

“We have not yet received certification from High Liner,” Dowling said. “However, we are following up with them immediately and asking that they provide us with certification.”

High Liner CEO Henry Demone said he “abhorred” slavery and labor abuse and that his company “tries very hard to do the right thing.” He said in the case of the FCVs used by Sanford, “we bought from a company whose labor practices in the plant were fine. We audited that. We didn’t audit the fishing vessels. But we relied upon a well-known New Zealand-based company and their assurance of 100 percent observer coverage.”

It is unclear exactly how much seafood caught by indentured fishermen ends up on the plates of American consumers. Public shipping records -- which do not report seafood imported on planes, and only detail some seafood imported to the U.S. by boat -- are sparse, and seafood distributors rarely disclose their specific suppliers. Alastair Macfarlane, a representative of New Zealand’s Seafood Industry Council, declined to comment on which American companies might be buying fish from troubled vessels such as the Melilla 203.

Tainted Fish However, an analysis of several sources of data --including New Zealand fishery species quota and FCV catch totals made available by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry --suggests roughly 40 percent of squid exported from New Zealand is caught on one of the vessels using coerced labor. Perhaps 15 percent of all New Zealand hoki exports may be slave-caught, and 8 percent of the country’s southern blue whiting catch may be tainted.

Despite the prevalence of foreign-chartered vessels, which in 2010 earned $274.6 million in export revenue and hauled in 62.3 percent of New Zealand’s deepwater catch, some companies have determined they are not worth the risk.

“The reputational damage is immeasurable,” says Andrew Talley, director of Talley’s Group, New Zealand’s third-largest fishing company, which submits to third-party audits on its labor standards, a condition of its contract to supply McDonald’s Corp with hoki for its Filet-O-Fish sandwiches.

‘Hard-Earned’ Reputation

“New Zealand seafood enjoys a hard-earned and world- leading reputation as a responsible fisheries manager, with a product range and quality to match,” says Talley. “There is nothing responsible at all about using apparently exploitative and abusive FCVs.”

The main thoroughfare that bisects Yusril’s Central Java village feeds into a chain of divided tollways that run all the way to Jakarta. Travelers along the road quickly leave the briny air of the fishing kampungs and pass through green rice paddies dotted with water buffalo and trees bearing swollen, spiky jackfruit. Sixty years ago, Yusril’s grandfather worked that land. Today, thousands journey along the highway to seek new lives.

When I found him last December, Yusril was back in his in- laws’ modest home, tucked well off a side road. He was out of work and brainstorming ways to scratch out a living by returning to his father’s trade, farming. IMS, the recruiting agency in Jakarta, had blacklisted him and was refusing to return his birth certificate, his basic safety training credentials, and his family papers. It was also withholding pay, totaling around $1,100. In total, Yusril had been paid an average of 50¢ an hour on the Melilla 203. (An IMS attorney did not respond to repeated e-mails requesting comment. When I showed up at the agency’s offices in Jakarta, a security guard escorted me out.)

Two of the 24 men who walked off the Melilla 203 returned to work on the ship rather than face deportation. The ship’s representatives flew the remaining 22 resisters back to Indonesia. When they returned to Central Java, the resisters say they were coerced by IMS into signing documents waiving their claims to redress for human rights violations in exchange for their originally stipulated payments of $500 to $1,000. Yusril was one of two who held out. On Jan. 21, when I last spoke to him, I asked why he had refused to sign the document.

“Dignity,” said Yusril, pointing to his heart.

---

Slaves, Squids, Costco in Hawaii

SUBHEAD: Some fish and squid sold in Hawaii are alleged product of slave labor.

By Larry Geller on 1 March 2012 for Disappeared News -
(http://www.disappearednews.com/2012/03/some-squid-and-fish-sold-in-hawaii-are.html)

Some fish you may buy at Costco or Sams Club or eat at P.F. Chang may have been caught with slave labor, according to an article in Business Week. The article detailed how Indonesian workers were recruited, cheated, and enslaved on fishing vessels operating off the coast of New Zealand. Some were maimed or died on board the slave ships.

The catch, the product of human slavery and death, has found its way to Honolulu, according to the story. Specifically, the author traces fish sold by Christchurch-based United Fisheries, which charters ships allegedly manned by slaves, to outlets in Hawaii:

Honolulu-based importer P&E Foods has also bought at least 48,940 lb. of squid from United since November 2010. According to P&E’s president, Stephen Lee, his company sells squid to Sam’s Club, the 47 million-member wholesaler. Lee said he was unaware of allegations of abuse on ships chartered by United, a company with which Lee has done business for “20, 30 years.” He added that he did not know whether any of P&E’s buyers required him or his suppliers to sign a code of conduct for labor practices. Carrie Foster, senior manager for corporate communications at Sam’s Club, said her company does require such signed agreements from their suppliers.

[Business Week, The Fishing Industry's Cruelest Catch: In the waters off New Zealand, scores of indentured workers are trawling for seafood—and you may be buying it, 2/23/2012]

Also:

P.F. Chang’s China Bistro (PFCB), a Scottsdale (Ariz.)-based chain with more than 200 restaurants worldwide and more than $1.2 billion in annual revenue, purchased squid exclusively through Turner, a California-based importer. According to Import Genius and Urner Barry shipping records, Turner bought at least 568,554 lb. of squid from United since November 2010. Squid was one of the most common seafood species caught by fishermen held on the Melilla boats, according to Yusril and other crew members. Turner did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for P.F. Chang’s declined to comment on record.

Even Costco, a generally respected company, was implicated:

In our interview, Kotzikas said his company sold ling, a species of fish caught by the Melilla crews, to Costco Wholesale (COST), America’s largest wholesaler and the world’s seventh-largest retailer. As is true with many seafood exports from New Zealand, the exact quantity of United’s sales to Costco was untraceable through public shipping records. Costco representatives did not respond to requests for comment about the sales and the abuse allegations.

Until Costco responds, the best thing to do may be to ask about the fish before purchasing. If it’s from New Zealand, not only should it not be purchased, but you could post comments here about what you learn.

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Cutting off Iran's central bank

SUBHEAD: As an act of war, there's no point reducing Iranian oil exports 20% if oil prices rise 30%.

By Indira Lakshmanan on 24 February 2012 for Bloomberg News -
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-24/swift-may-expel-iran-s-central-bank-hindering-oil-payments.html)


Image above: Iran's nuclear research facility in Busher on the Perisn Gulf. From (www.alphabetics.info/international/2010/06/04/irans-nuclear-program-growing-suspicions/).

[IB Editor's note: It seems that the US is getting ready to justify conflicts with Syria and its ally Iran at the same time it's losing Afghanistan and Iraq. This while Obama states that the US is pivoting its military attention the the Pacific (read China). Who is kidding who? We're broke. More sanctions that strangle Iran will be an act of war that America (and Europe) can ill afford. It will be China that, in the end, will dictate where Iranian oil will go.]

The financial messaging service for most international money transfers has told U.S. officials it is prepared to cut off Iran’s central bank, according to people involved in the talks, an action that would be a blow to Iran’s already battered economy.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, known as Swift, dispatched its top lawyer to Washington for discussions this week in response to proposed U.S. legislation targeting Swift and its board, whose chairman is Yawar Shah of Citigroup Inc. and deputy chairman is Stephan Zimmermann of UBS AG.

Swift’s general counsel Blanche Petre said the Belgium- based service is prepared to expel Iranian institutions sanctioned by the European Union as well as Iran’s central bank, according to aides to U.S. lawmakers who met with Petre and spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

A spokeswoman for Swift, JoAnn Healy, declined to comment on private meetings involving its officials.

Acting against the Iranian institutions would be “a very serious step, disruptive to the users, but also to the financial community as a whole,” Healy said today in an e-mailed response to questions. “It is a complex situation that needs to take into consideration the implications to the functioning of the global payments system, as well as to the continued flow of humanitarian payments to the Iranian people.”

Going Further

The Obama administration, which has imposed more sanctions on Iran than any nation or past U.S. administration, has expressed wariness about the unintended consequences of expelling all Iranian entities from Swift, according to the aides to lawmakers. Treasury Department and White House officials declined to comment on discussions with Swift and EU authorities.

By including Iran’s central bank, Swift’s proposal goes further than lawmakers or the administration sought, and might roil oil markets on concern that buyers will be unable to pay the second-largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for its 2.2 million barrels a day of oil exports.

“This is the financial equivalent of warfare,” Avi Jorisch, a former U.S. Treasury official, said in an interview. “The administration is very concerned about anything that would spike oil markets. Cutting off Iran’s central bank from Swift would do just that, but at same time, it would deal a knockout blow to Iran’s ability to use the international financial system.”

‘Need to Choose’

“We need to choose at this point if we want Iran to get a nuclear bomb or take the chance that oil markets will spike,” he said.

Oil climbed for a seventh day, the longest sustained price increase since January 2010, as escalating tension with Iran threatens supplies and on signs of a global economic recovery. Crude oil for April delivery rose 1.8 percent to $109.77 a barrel, the highest settlement on the New York Mercantile Exchange since May 3.

Following a Nov. 8 report by United Nations inspectors that raised questions about Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. and EU have imposed an increasingly stringent array of economic penalties on Iran to try to force its leaders to make concessions on their nuclear development. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna said in an 11-page restricted report obtained today by Bloomberg News that Iran tripled its production of enriched uranium since November and rejected concerns about its possible pursuit of nuclear weapons.

First Expulsion

Iran says its nuclear program is for civilian energy and medical research. Western intelligence agencies say they have evidence suggesting Iran is seeking the capability to make a nuclear bomb.

In its 39 years, Swift has never expelled any institution from the cooperative of 10,000 member banks and organizations in 210 countries. Swift transmits an average of 17 million financial messages a day, facilitating trillions of dollars in cross-border payments, officials said. According to its annual report, 19 Iranian member banks and 25 financial institutions sent and received 2 million messages through Swift in 2010.

Swift authorities said Feb. 17 they were prepared to comply with any new EU regulations instructing them to expel sanctioned Iranian entities. EU officials say regulations for financial messaging services should be ready within weeks. If Swift expels all EU-sanctioned Iranian institutions, the pending U.S. legislation may be amended or shelved, congressional aides said.

Swift Bylaws

Swift doesn’t actually need to wait for the EU to issue new rules. Its own bylaws give it the authority to expel any user who is “subject to sanctions,” or any member whose use may adversely affect Swift’s “reliability” or “reputation.” The European Central Bank’s guidelines for Target2, the system that settles transactions in euros through the Swift gateway, bar access to those engaged in “money laundering and the financing of terrorism, proliferation-sensitive nuclear activities and the development of nuclear weapons delivery systems.”

Swift officials confirmed its bylaws include multiple provisions permitting expulsion.

“Swift is engaging with U.S. and EU authorities, as well as the G-10 central banks, which oversee Swift, to find the right multilateral legal framework,” Healy said.

Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, said he believes Swift is seeking “political cover to do something unprecedented” that might set an unwanted example for governments to press for the expulsion of other members.

‘Political Football’

“They want to be able to say, ‘We are governed by European law and only if the Europeans tell us we have to remove these institutions do we comply,’” Dubowitz, who has advised lawmakers and the administration on the implications of a Swift ban on Iran, said in an interview. “Otherwise, they risk becoming a political football if China asks them to expel Taiwanese banks, for example.”

The EU and the U.S. have sanctioned more than 20 Iranian banks or financial institutions for involvement in illicit activities. The EU also froze the EU assets of the Iranian central bank to prevent financing of nuclear activities, while ensuring that legitimate trade can continue under strict conditions, Maja Kocijancic, an EU foreign-policy spokeswoman, said today from Brussels.

Oil Payments

Trevor Houser, an energy analyst and partner at Rhodium Group, a New York-based economic research firm, said in an interview that “expelling Iran’s central bank from Swift would complicate Iran’s ability to receive payment for the crude oil it exports and could accelerate a reduction in Iranian supply more quickly than Western officials would like to see in the interest of keeping oil markets in balance.”

“U.S. and EU officials have a tough needle to thread: They’re trying to reduce Iranian revenue while preventing a spike in global oil prices,” said Houser, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “Blunt instruments like removing Iran’s central bank from Swift risk making that process even harder to manage than it already is.”

Bank-to-Bank Payments

Houser said Iran would still be able to set up bank accounts at the same financial institutions as oil buyers, allowing them to process payments intra-bank, without the need for a messaging system. Iran might also send messages through Telex or e-mail, or accept payment for oil through other means.

Dubowitz said he is concerned that expelling Iran’s central bank from Swift might complicate legal trade in food, medicine and oil. He recommended EU regulators and Swift work closely with the U.S. to minimize the risk of an oil price spike.

“If the central bank can be expelled from Swift while allowing permitted oil trades to occur through other legal mechanisms, I would fully support its expulsion,” he said.

“There is little point in driving 20 percent reductions in Iranian oil exports if global oil prices then increase by 30 percent,” he said. “That will only enrich Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei while plunging the rest of us into an oil- led recession.”

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Remotely Piloted Corporate War

SUBHEAD: How privatized corporate war became the American Way of Life .

By Tom Englehardt on 23 February 3012 for Tom Dispatch -
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175507/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_arrival_of_the_warrior_corporation)


Image above: 30,000 drones are planned for US surveillance in next ten years.From (http://www.irishtimez.com/2012/02/bill-clears-path-for-30000-surveillance-drones-over-us-in-next-ten-years/).

In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles.

When the first American drone assassins burst onto the global stage early in the last decade, they caught most of us by surprise, especially because they seemed to come out of nowhere or from some wild sci-fi novel. Ever since, they've been touted in the media as the shiniest presents under the American Christmas tree of war, the perfect weapons to solve our problems when it comes to evildoers lurking in the global badlands.

And can you blame Americans for their love affair with the drone? Who wouldn’t be wowed by the most technologically advanced, futuristic, no-pain-all-gain weapon around?

Here’s the thing, though: put drones in a more familiar context, skip the awestruck commentary, and they should have been eerily familiar. If, for instance, they were car factories, they would seem so much less exotic to us.

Think about it: What does a drone do? Like a modern car factory, it replaces a pilot, a skilled job that takes significant training, with robotics and a degraded version of the same job outsourced elsewhere. In this case, the “offshore” location that job headed for wasn’t China or Mexico, but a military base in the U.S., where a guy with a joystick, trained in a hurry and sitting at a computer monitor, is “piloting” that plane. And given our experience with the hemorrhaging of good jobs from the U.S., who will be surprised to discover that, in 2011, the U.S. Air Force was already training more drone “pilots” than actual fighter and bomber pilots combined?

That’s one way drones are something other than the futuristic sci-fi wonders we imagine them to be. But there’s another way that drones have been heading for the American “homeland” for four decades, and it has next to nothing to do with technology, advanced or otherwise.

In a sense, drone war might be thought of as the most natural form of war for the All Volunteer Military. To understand why that’s so, we need to head back to a crucial decision implemented just as the Vietnam war was ending.

Disarming the Amateurs, Demobilizing the Citizenry

It’s true that, in the wake of grinding wars that have also been debacles -- the Afghan version of which has entered its 11th year -- the U.S. military is in ratty shape. Its equipment needs refurbishing and its troops are worn down. The stress of endlessly repeated tours of duty in war zones, brain injuries and other wounds caused by the roadside bombs that have often replaced a visible enemy on the “battlefield,” suicide rates that can’t be staunched, rising sexual violence within the military, increasing crime rates around military bases, and all the other strains and pains of unending war have taken their toll.

Still, ours remains an intact, unrebellious, professional military. If you really want to see a force on its last legs, you need to leave the post-9/11 years behind and go back to the Vietnam era. In 1971, in Armed Forces Journal, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., author of a definitive history of the Marine Corps, wrote of “widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917.”

The U.S. military in Vietnam and at bases in the U.S. and around world was essentially at the edge of rebellion. Disaffection with an increasingly unpopular war on the Asian mainland, rejected by ever more Americans and emphatically protested at home, had infected the military, which was, after all, made up significantly of draftees.

Desertion rates were rising, as was drug use. In the field, “search and evade” (a mocking, descriptive accurate replacement for “search and destroy”) operations were becoming commonplace. “Fraggings” -- attacks on unpopular officers or NCOs -- had doubled. ("Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.") And according to Col. Heinl, there were then as many as 144 antiwar “underground newspapers” published by or aimed at soldiers. At the moment when he wrote, in fact, the antiwar movement in the U.S. was being spearheaded by a rising tide of disaffected Vietnam veterans speaking out against their war and the way they had fought it.

In this fashion, an American citizen’s army, a draft military, had reached its limits and was voting with its feet against an imperial war. This was democracy in action transferred to the battlefield and the military base. And it was deeply disturbing to the U.S. high command, which had, by then, lost faith in the future possibilities of a draft army. In fact, faced with ever more ill-disciplined troops, the military’s top commanders had clearly concluded: never again!

So on the very day the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, officially signaling the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam (though not quite its actual end), President Richard Nixon also signed a decree ending the draft. It was an admission of the obvious: war, American-style, as it had been practiced since World War II, had lost its hold on young minds.

There was no question that U.S. military and civilian leaders intended, at that moment, to sever war and war-making from an aroused citizenry. In that sense, they glimpsed something of the future they meant to shape, but even they couldn’t have guessed just where American war would be heading. Army Chief of Staff General Creighton Abrams, for instance, actually thought he was curbing the future rashness of civilian leaders by -- as Andrew Bacevich explained in his book The New American Militarism -- “making the active army operationally dependent on the reserves.” In this way, no future president could commit the country to a significant war “without first taking the politically sensitive and economically costly step of calling up America’s ‘weekend warriors.’”

Abrams was wrong, of course, though he ensured that, decades hence, the reserves, too, would suffer the pain of disastrous wars once again fought on the Eurasian mainland. Still, whatever the generals and the civilian leaders didn’t know about the effects of their acts then, the founding of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) may have been the single most important decision made by Washington in the post-Vietnam era of the foreshortened American Century.

Today, few enough even remember that moment and far fewer have considered its import. Yet, historically speaking, that 1973 severing of war from the populace might be said to have ended an almost two-century-old democratic experiment in fusing the mobilized citizen and the mobilized state in wartime. It had begun with the levée en masse during the French Revolution, which sent roused citizens to the front to save the republic and spread their democratic fervor abroad. Behind them stood a mobilized population ready to sacrifice anything for the republic (and all too soon, of course, the empire).

It turned out, however, that the drafted citizen had his limits and so, almost 200 years later, another aroused citizenry and its soldiers, home front and war front, were to be pacified, to be put out to pasture, while the empire’s wars were to be left to the professionals. An era was ending, even if no one noticed. (As a result, if you’re in the mood to indulge in irony, citizen’s war would be left to the guerrillas of the world, which in our era has largely meant to fundamentalist religious sects.)

Just calling in the professionals and ushering out the amateurs wasn’t enough, though, to make the decision truly momentous. Another choice had to be married to it. The debacle that was Vietnam -- or what, as the 1970s progressed, began to be called “the Vietnam Syndrome” (as if the American people had been struck by some crippling psychic disease) -- could have sent Washington, and so the nation, off on another course entirely.

The U.S. could have retreated, however partially, from the world to lick its wounds. Instead, the country’s global stance as the “leader of the free world” and its role as self-appointed global policeman were never questioned, nor was the global military basing policy that underlay it. In the midst of the Cold War, from Indonesia to Latin America, Japan to the Middle East, no diminution of U.S. imperial dreams was ever seriously considered.

The decision not to downsize its global military presence in the wake of Vietnam fused with the decision to create a military that would free Washington from worry about what the troops might think. Soon enough, as Bacevich wrote, the new AVF would be made up of “highly trained, handsomely paid professionals who (assuming that the generals concur with the wishes of the political leadership) will go anywhere without question to do the bidding of the commander-in-chief.” It would, in fact, open the way for a new kind of militarism at home and abroad.

The Arrival of the Warrior Corporation

In the wake of Vietnam, the wars ceased and, for a few years, war even fled American popular culture. When it returned, the dogfights would be in outer space. (Think Star Wars.) In the meantime, a kind of stunned silence, a feeling of defeat, descended on the American polity -- but not for long. In the 1980s, the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, American-style war was carefully rebuilt, this time to new specifications.

Reagan himself declared Vietnam “a noble cause,” and a newly professionalized military, purged of malcontents and rebels, once again began invading small countries (Grenada, Panama). At the same time, the Pentagon was investing thought and planning into how to put the media (blamed for defeat in Vietnam) in its rightful place and so give the public the war news it deserved. In the process, reporters were first restrained from, then “pooled” in, and finally “embedded” in the war effort, while retired generals were sent into TV newsrooms like so many play-by-play analysts on Monday Night Football to narrate our wars as they were happening. Meanwhile, the public was simply sidelined.

Year by year, war became an ever more American activity and yet grew ever more remote from most Americans. The democratic citizen with a free mind and the ability to rebel had been sent home, and then demobilized on that home front as well. As a result, despite the endless post-9/11 gab about honoring and supporting the troops, a mobilized “home front” sacrificing for those fighting in their name would become a relic of history in a country whose leaders had begun boasting of having the greatest military the world had ever seen.

It wasn’t, however, that no one was mobilizing. In the space vacated by the citizen, mobilization continued, just in a different fashion. Ever more mobilized, for instance, would be the powers of big science and the academy in the service of the Pentagon, the weapons makers, and the corporation.

Meanwhile, over the years, that “professional” army, that “all volunteer” force, began to change as well. From the 1990s on, in a way that would have been inconceivable for a draft army, it began to be privatized -- fused, that is, into the corporate way of war and profit.

War would now be fought not for or by the citizen, but quite literally for and by Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, KBR, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater (later Xe, even later Academi). Meanwhile, that citizen was to shudder at the thought of our terrorist enemies and then go on with normal life as if nothing whatsoever were happening. (“Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed,” was George W. Bush’s suggested response to the 9/11 attacks two weeks after they happened, with the “war on terror” already going on the books.)

Despite a paucity of real enemies of any substance, taxpayer dollars would pour into the coffers of the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, as well as a new mini-homeland-security-industrial complex and a burgeoning intelligence-industrial complex, at levels unknown in the Cold War years. Lobbyists would be everywhere and the times would be the best, even when, in the war zones, things were going badly indeed.

Meanwhile, in those war zones, the Big Corporation would take over the humblest of soldierly roles -- the peeling of potatoes, the cooking of meals, the building of bases and outposts, the delivery of mail -- and it would take up the gun (and the bomb) as well. Soon enough, even the dying would be outsourced to corporate hirees. Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan would be flooded with tens of thousands of private contractors and hired guns, while military men trained in elite special operations units would find their big paydays by joining mercenary corporations doing similar work, often in the same war zones.

It was a remarkable racket. War and profit had long been connected in complicated ways, but seldom quite so straightforwardly. Now, win or lose on the battlefield, there would always be winners among the growing class of warrior corporations.

The All-Volunteer Force, pliant as a military should be, and backed by Madison Avenue to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars to insure that its ranks were full, would become ever more detached from most of American society. It would, in fact, become ever more foreign (as in “foreign legion”) and ever more mercenary (think Hessians). The intelligence services of the national security state would similarly outsource significant parts of their work to the private sector. According to Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post, by 2010, about 265,000 of the 854,000 people with top security clearances were private contractors and “close to 30% of the workforce in the intelligence agencies [was] contractors.”

No one seemed to notice, but a 1% version of American war was coming to fruition, unchecked by a draft Army, a skeptical Congress, or a democratic citizenry. In fact, Americans, generally preoccupied with lives in which our wars played next to no part, paid little attention.

Remotely Piloted War

Although early drone technology was already being used over North Vietnam, it’s in another sense entirely that drones have been heading into America’s future since 1973. There was an eerie logic to it: first came professional war, then privatized war, then mercenary and outsourced war -- all of which made war ever more remote from most Americans. Finally, both literally and figuratively, came remote war itself.

It couldn’t be more appropriate that the Air Force prefers you not call their latest wonder weapons “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or UAVs, anymore. They would like you to use the label "remotely piloted aircraft" (RPA) instead. And ever more remotely piloted that vehicle is to be, until -- claim believers and enthusiasts -- it will pilot itself, land itself, maneuver itself, and while in the air even choose its own targets.

In this sense, think of us as moving from the citizen’s army to a roboticized, and finally robot, military -- to a military that is a foreign legion in the most basic sense. In other words, we are moving toward an ever greater outsourcing of war to things that cannot protest, cannot vote with their feet (or wings), and for whom there is no “home front” or even a home at all. In a sense, we are, as we have been since 1973, heading for a form of war without anyone, citizen or otherwise, in the picture -- except those on the ground, enemy and civilian alike, who will die as usual.

Of course, it may never happen this way, in part because drones are anything but perfect or wonder weapons, and in part because corporate war fought by a thoroughly professional military turns out to be staggeringly expensive to the demobilized citizen, profligate in its waste, and -- by the evidence of recent history -- remarkably unsuccessful. It also couldn’t be more remote from the idea of a democracy or a republic.

In a sense, the modern imperial age began hundreds of years ago with corporate war, when Dutch, British and other East India companies set sail, armed to the teeth, to subdue the world at a profit. Perhaps corporate war will also prove the end point for that age, the perfect formula for the last global empire on its way down.

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Japanese Debris Conference

SUBHEAD: The Kauai Surfriders hosted a conference on Japanese tsunami debris and its impact on Hawaii.

By Robert A. Zelkovsky on 24 February 2012 for Surfriders Kauai -
(http://surfriderkauai.ning.com)


Image above: View from plane of Japanese tsunami debris in mid Pacific Ocean. From (http://www.projectaware.org/update/tsunami-debris-set-hit-us).

The Japan Tsunami Debris Conference speaker presentations (4) are now on Youtube with captions. Mahalo to those who contributed to the caption process.

Also being shown with closed captions on Kaua`i Oceanic Cable channel 52, Hö`ike, Sundays at 8pm, each week a different speaker.

[IB Editor's note: All videos below have the same 2 minute introduction. Past the 2 minute mark are the distinct discussions.]

Japan Tsunami Debris Conference - Part 1

Video above: Dr. Nikolai Maximenko, U. of H. - ocean currents. From (http://youtu.be/OL6qN7qs1Io).

Japan Tsunami Debris Conference - Part 2

Video above: Dr. Henrieta Dulaiova, U. of H. - radioactivity. From (http://youtu.be/mU4YwpOwBYE).

Japan Tsunami Debris Conference - Part 3

Video above: Japan Tsunami Debris Conference - Ms. Carey Morishige, N.O.A.A. monitoring. From (http://youtu.be/8eIWuwD4oFY).

Japan Tsunami Debris Conference - Part 4

Video above: Japan Tsunami Debris Conference - Dr. Carl Berg, Kaua`i Surfrider community. From (http://youtu.be/yFodmIV1Gjg).

All video by Dr. Robert A. Zelkovsky
Contact:
(808) 822-4893
(808) 634-6597
Robert@bamboomoonvideo.com

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Tsunami Debris is Coming 2/14/12

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Koloa Camp Petition

SUBHEAD: You can help preserve the culture of old Hawaii and hold back the Californication of Kauai.

By John Pratt on 23 February 2012 in Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/02/koloa-camp-petition.html)


Image above: Photo of road in Koloa Camp from Garden Island artice stylized by Juan Wilson. From (http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/koloa-camp-residents-to-be-evicted/article_5979483c-26ea-11e1-8d4f-0019bb2963f4.html#2).

IB Editor's note: Island Breath has been asked to provide access to a petition form for John Pratt. His PDf file can be accessed below. Those interested in helping save Koloa Camp can download the petition, print it, and, hopefully, obtain 10 signatures by March 3rd. The text of the petition is as follows.

Aloha All, we are looking for another 2,300 signatures for our "Support Koloa Camp" petition. Each page has room for 10 signatures, and it takes about 15 minutes to fill the page. Can you please help us with the petitions? If you e-mail me, jsclyde@aloha.net, I will send you a copy. Please try and get it filled out and returned to me by the end of next week.
Most of the tenants here are seniors to elderly, and the stress of the eviction is taking its toll. If we are going to prevail, we will need the help of many others in the community, and support with this petition will be very important.

We, the undersigned residents and voters of Kaua’i support the Koloa Camp Tenants in their request to continue living and to purchase their homes at Koloa Camp, the location of some of the original plantation housing for the oldest sugar plantation in the state. Even as Kauai develops and changes, we must honor and sustain the people who, by their blood, sweat, tears and talent, have created Koloa Town and its sense of place.

We call upon Grove Farm to withdraw their eviction notices and to work with the tenants, Peter Savio and the county to seek a win-win solution for Koloa Camp. We pledge to stand with the tenants in their fight to save their homes.


Image above: A jpeg image of the petition. Please click on it for this link (www.islandbreath.org/2012Year/02/120224SupportKoloaCamp.pdf) to obtain a PDF file for signatures.
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Deniers of Peak Oil & Climate Change

SUBHEAD: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?

By Alice Friedmann on 20 February 2012 for Energy Skeptic -
(http://energyskeptic.com/2012/climate-change-deniers)


Image above: Captain Macrea threatened by technology in movie "Wall-E". From (http://www.puzzlepuzzles.com/captain-mccrea-commander-of-the-axiom-puzzle_1153.html).

Since there’s nothing that can be done about climate change, because there’s no scalable alternative to fossil fuels, I’ve always wondered why politicians and other leaders, who clearly know better, feel compelled to deny it. I think it’s for exactly the same reasons you don’t hear them talking about preparing for Peak Oil.

1) Our leaders have known since the 1970s energy crises that there’s no comparable alternative energy ready to replace fossil fuels. To extend the oil age as long as possible, the USA went the military path rather than a “Manhattan Project” of research and building up grid infrastructure, railroads, sustainable agriculture, increasing home and car fuel efficiency, and other obvious actions.

Instead, we’ve spent trillions of dollars on defense and the military to keep the oil flowing, the Straits of Hormuz open, and invade oil-producing countries. Being so much further than Europe, China, and Russia from the Middle East, where there’s not only the most remaining oil, but the easiest oil to get out at the lowest cost ($20-22 OPEC vs $60-80 rest-of-world per barrel), is a huge disadvantage. I think the military route was chosen in the 70s to maintain our access to Middle East oil and prevent challenges from other nations. Plus everyone benefits by our policing the world and keeping the lid on a world war over energy resources, perhaps that’s why central banks keep lending us money.

2) If the public were convinced climate change were real and demanded alternative energy, it would become clear pretty quickly that we didn’t have any alternatives. Already Californians are seeing public television shows and newspaper articles about why it’s so difficult to build enough wind, solar, and so on to meet the mandated 33% renewable energy sources by 2020.

For example, last night I saw a PBS program on the obstacles to wind power in Marin county, on the other side of the Golden Gate bridge. Difficulties cited were lack of storage for electricity, NIMBYism, opposition from the Audubon society over bird kills, wind blows at night when least needed, the grid needs expansion, and most wind is not near enough to the grid to be connected to it. But there was no mention of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) or the scale of how many windmills you’d need to have. So you could be left with the impression that these problems with wind could be overcome.

I don’t see any signs of the general public losing optimism yet. I gave my “Peak Soil” talk to a critical thinking group, very bright people, sparkling, interesting, well-read, thoughtful, and to my great surprise realized they weren’t worried until my talk, partly because so few people understand the Hirsch 2005 “liquid fuels” crisis concept, nor the scale of what fossil fuels do for us. I felt really bad, I’ve never spoken to a group before that wasn’t aware of the problem, I wished I were a counselor as well. The only thing I could think of to console them was to say that running out of fossil fuels was a good thing — we might not be driven extinct by global warming, which most past mass extinctions were caused by.

3) As the German military peak oil study stated, when investors realize Peak Oil is upon us, stock markets world-wide will crash (if they haven’t already from financial corruption), as it will be obvious that growth is no longer possible and investors will never get their money back.

4) As Richard Heinberg has pointed out, there’s a national survival interest in being the “Last Man (nation) Standing“. So leaders want to keep things going smoothly as long as possible. And everyone is hoping the crash is “not on my watch” — who wants to take the blame?

5) It would be political suicide to bring up the real problem of Peak Oil and have no solution to offer besides consuming less. Endless Growth is the platform of both the Republican and Democratic parties. More Consumption and “Drill, Baby, Drill” is the main plan to get out of the current economic and energy crises.

There’s also the risk of creating a panic and social disorder if the situation were made utterly clear — that the carrying capacity of the United States is somewhere between 100 million (Pimentel) and 250 million (Smil) without fossil fuels, like the Onion’s parody “Scientists: One-Third Of The Human Race Has To Die For Civilization To Be Sustainable, So How Do We Want To Do This?”

There’s no solution to this problem, and too many problems are already getting out of hand on a daily basis at local, state, and national levels, plus all that matters is the next election — who’s going to work on a future problem with no solution? Jimmy Carter is perceived as having lost partly due to asking Americans to sacrifice for the future (i.e. put on a sweater).

I first became aware of this at the 2005 ASPO Denver conference. Denver Mayor Hickenlooper pointed out that one of his predecessors lost the mayoral election because he didn’t keep the snow plows running after a heavy snow storm. He worried about how he’d keep snow plows, garbage collection, and a host of other city services running as energy declined.

A Boulder city council member at this conference told us he had hundreds of issues and constituents to deal with on a daily basis, no way did he have time to spend on an issue beyond the next election.

Finally, Congressman Roscoe Bartlett told us that there was no solution, and he was angry that we’d blown 25 years even though the government knew peak was coming. His plan was to relentlessly reduce our energy demand by 5% per year. Not efficiency, that doesn’t work due to Jevons paradox.

There is no solution — leaders can’t even propose everyone become a farmer or rancher, because there simply isn’t enough land and water (rainfall, aquifer, snow melt) to do that in the United States.

The only solution that would mitigate suffering is to mandate that women bear only one child. Fat chance of that ever happening when even birth control is controversial, and Catholics are outraged that all health care plans are now required to cover the cost of birth control pills. Congressman Bartlett, in a small group discussion after his talk, told us that population was the main problem, but that he and other politicians didn’t dare mention it. He said that exponential growth would undo any reduction in demand we could make, and gave this example: if we have 250 years left of reserves in coal, and we turn to coal to replace oil, increasing our use by 2% a year — a very modest rate of growth considering what a huge amount is needed to replace oil — then the reserve would only last 85 years. If we liquefy it, then it would only last 50 years, because it takes a lot of energy to do that.

Bartlett was speaking about 250 years of coal reserves back in 2005. Now we know that the global energy from coal may have peaked last year, in 2011 (Patzek) or will soon in 2015 (Zittel). Other estimates range as far as 2029 to 2043. Heinberg and Fridley say that “we believe that it is unlikely that world energy supplies can continue to meet projected demand beyond 2020.” (Heinberg).

6) Political (and religious) leaders gain votes, wealth, and power by telling people what they want to hear. Several politicians have told me privately that people like to hear good news and that politicians who bring bad news don’t get re-elected. “Don’t worry, be happy” is a vote getter. Carrying capacity, exponential growth, die-off, extinction, population control — these are not ideas that get leaders elected.

7) Everyone who understands the situation is hoping The Scientists Will Come up With Something. Including the scientists. They’d like to win a Nobel prize and need funding. But researchers in energy resources know what’s at stake with climate change and peak oil and are as scared as the rest of us. U.C.Berkeley scientists are also aware of the negative environmental impacts of biofuels, and have chosen to concentrate on a politically feasible strategy of emphasizing lack of water to prevent large programs in this from being funded (Fingerman). They’re also working hard to prevent coal fired power plants from supplying electricity to California by recommending natural gas replacement plants instead, as well as expanding the grid, taxing carbon, energy efficiency, nuclear power, geothermal, wind, and so on — see http://rael.berkeley.edu/projects for what else some of UCB’s RAEL program is up to. Until a miracle happens, scientists and some enlightened policy makers are trying to extend the age of oil, reduce greenhouse gases, and so on. But with the downside of Hubbert’s curve so close, and the financial system liable to crash again soon given the debt and lack of reforms, I don’t know how long anyone can stretch things out.

8) The 1% can’t justify their wealth or the current economic system once the pie stops expanding and starts to shrink. The financial crisis will be a handy way to explain why people are getting poorer on the down side of peak oil too, delaying panic perhaps.

Other evidence that politicians know how serious the situation is, but aren’t saying anything, are Congressman Roscoe Bartlett’s youtube videos ("Urban Danger" seee below). He’s the Chairman of the peak oil caucus in the House of Representatives, and he’s saying “get out of dodge” to those in the know. He’s educated all of the representatives in the House, but he says that peak oil “won’t be on their front burner until there’s an oil shock”.

9) Less than one percent of our elected leaders have degrees in science. They’re so busy raising money for the next election and their political duties, that even they may not have time to read enough for a “big picture view” of (systems) ecology, population, environment, natural resources, biodiversity / bioinvasion, water, topsoil and fishery depletion, and all the other factors that will be magnified when oil, the master resource that’s been helping us cope with these and many other problems, declines.

10) Since peak fossil fuel is here, now (we’re on a plateau), there’s less urgency to do something about climate change for many leaders, because they assume, or hope, that the remaining fossil fuels won’t trigger a runaway greenhouse. Climate change is a more distant problem than Peak Oil. And again, like peak oil, nothing can be done about it. There’s are no carbon free alternative liquid fuels, let alone a liquid fuel we can burn in our existing combustion engines, which were designed to only use gasoline.

11) I think that those who deny climate change, despite knowing it is real, are thinking like chess players several moves ahead. They hope that by denying climate change an awareness of peak oil is less likely to occur, and I’m guessing their motivation is to prevent stock markets from failing, panic, and to keep our oil-based nation going as long as possible.

12) Politicians and corporate leaders probably didn’t get as far as they did without being (techno) optimists, and perhaps really believe the Scientists Will Come Up With Something. I fear that scientists are going to take a lot of the blame as things head South, even though there’s nothing they can do to change the laws of thermodynamics.

Conclusion

What I’d like to know is if there are plans or strategies to let the air out of the tires of civilization as slowly as possible to prevent panic and sudden discontinuities.

Given history, I can’t imagine the 1% giving up their wealth (especially land, 85% of which is concentrated among 3% of owners). I’m sure they’re hoping the current system maintains its legitimacy as long as possible, even as the vast majority of us sink into 3rd world poverty beyond what we can imagine, and then are too poor and hungry to do anything but find our next meal.

Until there are oil shocks and governments at all levels are forced to “do something”, it’s up to those of us aware of what’s going on to gain skills that will be useful in the future, work to build community locally, and live more simply. Towns or regions that already have or know how to implement a local currency fast will be able to cope better with discontinuities in oil supplies and financial crashes than areas that don’t. I would hope that cities are looking at how to collect garbage less often, beef up water delivery and sewage treatment infrastructure, and so on right now rather than wait until a crisis, when energy is most likely to go to agriculture and transportation first before trickling down to other essential services.

I wish it were possible for scientists and other leaders to explain what’s going on to the public, but I think scientists know it wouldn’t do any good given American’s low scientific literacy, and leaders see the vast majority of the public as big blubbering spoiled babies, like the spaceship characters on floating chairs in Wall-E, who expect, no demand, happy Hollywood endings.

Image above: Obese passengers aboard spaceship Axiom after trashing Earth in movie "Wall-E". From (http://www.mansgreatestmistake.com/health-and-cars/cars-are-making-us-obese).

References

If you want an article to send to a denier you know, it would be hard to do better than Donald Prothero’s “How We Know Global Warming is Real and Human Caused“.

Fingerman, Kevin. 2010. Accounting for the water impacts of ethanol production. Environmental Research Letters.

Heinberg, R and Fridley, D. 18 Nov 2010. The end of cheap coal. New forecasts suggest that coal reserves will run out faster than many believe. Energy policies relying on cheap coal have no future. Nature, vol 468, pp 367-69.

Patzek, t. W. & Croft, G. D. 2010. A global coal production forecast with multi-Hubbert cycle analysis. Energy 35, 3109–3122.

Pimentel, D. et al. 1991. Land, Energy, and Water. The Constraints Governing Ideal U.S. Population Size. Negative Population Growth.

Smil, V. 2000. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production. MIT Press.

Urban Danger. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett youtube videos:

• Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGE1omIaRMI
• Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBiTrQuZuUQ
• Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGJHwzsPdpY

Zittel, W. & schindler, J. energy Watch Group, Paper no. 1/07 (2007); available at http:// go.nature.com/jngfsa

• Alice Friedemann knew about the energy crisis for decades because her geologist grandfather, Francis Pettijohn, was a friend of M. King Hubbert. Alice has been part of the peak oil community since discussions began on EnergyResources and attended many ASPO conferences.
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