Iraq: The Next Rwanda?

So I was reading an article about the war in Iraq. It had a quote from a Sunni man in Iraq saying “I am facing the most difficult times of my life here in Baghdad. Since I am a Sunni, I became a target to be killed. You know that our army and police are Shia, so every checkpoint represents a serious threat to Sunnis. During the last three weeks, two of my friends were killed at check points belonging to the police. They first asked to show IDs and when they saw the Sunni family name, they killed them.”

Bit of Context

This summer I worked for a prof that was doing some work on terrorism. Some of my research led me to Iraq. One good book, Prince of the Marshes, tells the story of the Marshland Arabs in the South of Iraq. Under Sadam’s rule the population went from 400,000 to 20,000 as common people were attacked in their villages by modern military. Houses were burned and people shot. This was the response to an unsuccessful uprising. The same sort of treatment was visited on the Kurdish population in the north of the country.

All my research pointed to Saudi Arabia as the source of the violence. The fundamentalist public school system teaches intolerance and violence to children. Bin Laden got his education from a fundamentalist teacher that had been exiled from Egypt because of his radical violent views. This same school system is being exported to poorer countries as aid, making them the only alternative to poorer families that want their children to have a better life than themselves. Saudi is largely bankrolling the terrorists (with oil money they get from US soccer moms that drive massive SUVs and drive their kids around all day, ok, maybe some of them live in Canada too).

The majority of the population are Shia. So what will happen when the US leaves? But what happens if they stay? I think the only way out is an international peacekeeping force. Maybe some lessons can be learned from Rwanda. There was a majority population that blamed their violent oppression on a minority and turned the violence outward toward that minority.

liberal leadership race

Thought I would do a plug for a good Canadian news source (www.thetyee.com) . There are three intereting articles reviewing the writing of Bob Rae, Ignatieff, and Dione.

Rae:

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/12/01/BobRae/

Ignatieff:

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/11/27/ReadIgnatieff/

Dione:

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2006/10/12/StephaneDion/

Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development

The neo-classical view of economics is based on the idea that people are opportunistic and within the rule of law, will take advantage of anyone they can to get ahead in life.  This view of people has been forwarded by John Locke all the way up to Milton Friedman.  

This view extends beyond how people treat each other to how people treat the world they live in.  Natural resources are provided for human consumption and profit.  The more resources a person is able to harvest the richer that person will be.  

With the challenge of global warming and coming to the end of seemingly limitless resources the economy has been placed in a dichotomy with the planet.  In Al Gore’s movie The Inconvenient Truth there was a picture of a scale and on one side were gold bars and on the other side was the planet.  The message being that we can either have the planet or profits.  An even deeper seated meaning is that there is no profit without the planet.  In either case there are finite resources and the race is on to see who can claim most of the wealth that the world has to offer.  However, the race to convert limited resources into profit in the present without any concern for future generations is recast in management literature with different language as the fiduciary duty of managers to increase shareholder value by adding value to natural resources.    

Western style capitalism was critiqued by the Frankfurt School (1980s).  Led by Andre Gunder Frank (1980, 1996) and Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Theory (1982, 2004) uses the metaphor of the core and the periphery to describe how natural resources are drawn from the ‘hinterland’ to support the growth of the metropolis.  Harrold Adams Innis (1930) developed this theory in the Canadian context of the fur trade showing how furs were taken from Canada to support the growth of England.  

The colonial slave trader provides an interesting case study to explain world systems theory:
A British ship sails from England with guns and other finished products. Once they reached the African coast they used the guns to trade for slaves.  The newly acquired guns were then used to round up more slaves.  While more independent nations were enslaved the British ship was full of slaves and making its way to the Caribbean and North America.  Once there they sold those that had survived the voyage for cotton or other raw resources.  These resources were largely harvested by the slaves that fueled the trade.  The slave traders then returned home with raw materials to support the growing production capacity of Europe.  

This story has many variations all over the colonial world, in India, China and wherever else the quest for raw materials and markets led the ‘explorers.’

This story has also been given a modern interpretation.  

The marketing intern sits in his cubicle in the Las Angels head office thinking up what value or idea Nike or Coke will represent for this fiscal year.  He comes up with just do it, and it is good.  He writes a memo to his boss who books a meeting with the designers who try and capture motivation and decisive action in the lines of a shoe.  These designers and advertisers sell the idea that what people lack in their lives (motivation and decisive action) can be fulfilled by these products.  This emotional promise is exported across the world.  When it comes time to sell shoes the actual shoe is worth about ten dollars (most of which is shipping) and the other one hundred dollars goes to the emotional promise (branding).  

The marketing executive doesn’t care who buys the emotional lie, as long as sales go up.  Even if it is a guy living downtown who can barely make the rent but has to spend a thousand dollars on a jacket.  Not to mention the harm to society when people start chasing emotional fixes through their debit card.  

What these two stories show is that western capitalism is a feverish search for more profit and more consumer goods.  Growth is the supreme good.  Quality of life must always improve.  The problem is that humanity is reaching the limits of its growth.  Within ten to fifteen years the world supply of oil will peak essentially ending economic globalization.  That is not to mention green house gasses that are causing global warming.  

Enter Sustainable Development.  Sustainable development recognizes the limits of the earth and uses those resources in a way that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations to meet their own needs (WCED, 1987).  

The first problem is that the needs of the present generation are not being met.  There are 3 billion people that live on less than 2$ a day.  These people have to deficit spend their natural and economic capital just to survive.  Second, the needs of tomorrow will not be met.  This situation is caused by the need for endless growth and accumulation.  People that do ‘have’ will never ‘have’ enough.  

Sustainable development is a culture change.  My hope is that it will be a corrective measure to the endless accumulation that will kill not only western culture but humanity.  

Amos the oil reserve Savant

I live in a basement suite with my wife. It is a pretty plain place, all the appliances are thirty years old. Half of them still work, that is, when the power is turned on. The other half we just use for storage. That way the mice don’t get into our things. And everything is brown, I don’t know why. The curtains are dark brown, the walls are light brown, the table and chairs are medium brown. There is a red candle in the middle of the table, so I guess not everything is brown. Above the table is the only window in the place. I like the light it lest in, but there isn’t anything to see.

Our bed reminds me of a submarine, not that I’ve ever seen a submarine, but what I imagine a submarine bed would look like. It’s an alcove with a curtain. The bed just fit in with enough room for stuff to fall down behind it. Across from the bed is the toilet. At first I thought having the toilet next to the bed was pretty gross. Excuse my crudeness, but it comes in handy when my legs fall asleep – I like to read when I’m doing my business, and let’s be honest, who doesn’t?

Around the corner from the bathroom is my prize possession. A bookshelf filled with the immortality of the now dead; ideas that have survived years, even hundreds of years of ridicule and misinterpretation. But like most great ideas, what matters isn’t when it was written, but what was written. They help me understand the bigger picture of what I am going through, what it means to be human in a post-capitalist, post-oil world. Actually, it doesn’t even matter, being human is still the same thing as it was in the pre-capitalist, pre-oil world.

These ideas and thinking about what they mean transport me from the drab brown suite. I can get lost thinking about what they all mean for hours. That’s why it is handy that the bed is so close to the toilet. Maybe our brains and our bladders are connected, because when my bladder starts flowing, so do the ideas.

Around the corner from the bookshelf is the door. There isn’t much to say about the door. It has three diamond shaped windows, and you guessed it, the door is brown. The interesting thing is what is on the other side of the door. Life is on the other side of that door, well that and a half-flight of stairs up to 32^nd street. It used to be a really nice neighborhood with trees, and children laughing, all the fun stuff. Now it’s too urban for my taste – not my budget – it is concrete and chain-link fence.

“Hey, who the hell are you?” said a guy about 25, with his pants halfway to his knees sporting some pretty painful looking tattoos.

“I ain’t doin nothin, just going to get some food” I replied

“Did I ask where you were going? I asked WHO ARE YOU?”

“I just live downstairs, that’s all”

“Well have you seen Amos, that idiot that lives upstairs”

“No, and he isn’t an idiot. He has brain damage”

“I don’t care what he’s got, and he’s going to get a hell of a lot more if he doesn’t stop coming around my Dad’s store. He scares off the customers with all his drooling.”

That was it, he just walked off. Man, Amos sure is good at making people hate him. In the last six months there must have been about eight people that have been hanging around our place waiting to beat the shit out of him. I try to explain that there are some things that he just doesn’t know that he is doing.

One time when we were out together he just wigged out and slapped this woman right across the face. She returned the favor and he started crying on the floor like a little child. That made the woman feel so bad that she knelt down to say it was ok, but when she did he punched her right in the face and started laughing. I tried to explain to the lady but she ran out the door.

The next day the cops came for Amos. That time they only kept him in jail for three days. Something must have happened to him, because it took him a month to get back to normal after that.

For the most part he just sits at his desk in his place and pours over geological maps, for hours at a time. The doctors say he is a savant who is really good at finding oil reserves. It’s a gift that would have made him rich thirty years ago, but now there are only a few companies that still drill for the stuff. For a while people were frenzied about finding more and more oil. But then the reserves peaked. It just got more and more expensive to extract less and less oil. For a long time it was blamed on inflation, and international wars. There was even a period when it was blamed on executive excess. But through it all, the oil supply just got more and more expensive to extract. And they were using up fresh water to do it. So for every litre of oil that was extracted, four litres of water had to be pumped down the well. After awhile everyone, including the government, kind of gave up and accepted that it was time to downsize the lifestyle and accept their debt.

It’s kind of funny really, everyone kept saying that we had better let the companies have their way so they will stay and they can guarantee employment. Sure there were dissenters, but everyone was having the time of their life. Now we have a continual water shortage.

What is more fun than decorating a house to match the seasons? And keeping up with the latest fashions, or just trying not to be left behind? I like to call it mall fever, my wife calls it fashion fever, which has alliteration, so I know it is better, but I won’t tell her that.

Life was good, and it was increasingly good, and the rate of increase was increasing. But then things peaked, and so did government spending on social programs like hiring social workers. Which is what I went to school for. I had my job for two months before I got laid off. Unfortunately, my wife and I missed out on the good times, and we got what was left. It is like coming to a party at seven am. All that is left is the mess and you are stuck with clean-up duty.

I woke up in a Salvador Dali Painting

Kafka – The Castle

The basic idea with this book is that there is a land surveyor who was commissioned to measure the inside of the castle, but try as he might he can not get in to do his work.  His efforts to secure entrance to the castle are rebuffed at every turn by villagers and bureaucrats.  This is K.’s (the land surveyor) life quest.  He eventually dies of exhaustion and never completes the survey of the interior of the castle, and he never meets the count who rules the castle.  This can be an analogy for many things, religion (The elusiveness of God), psychology (never being able to understand our interior life), man’s quest to understand what makes up the universe.  

This summer I am working for one of my professors and he is overseas doing work in rural villages.  He came across a boy who was dying of dehydration because he has diarrhea.  He did what he could for him, but didn’t think he was going to make it.  It seems absurd that preventable diseases kill millions of people.  Ie. Malaria, it is the number one killer, and the medicine exists.  Forget aids, why not fight a disease that we have the cure for already?  Oh yeah, I forgot, aids kills North Americans, and one North American is worth a hundred Africans.  Silly me.  And besides, once we find the cure for aids will it be accessible to Africans?  (Scary stat: if you’re a child whose mother had aids while she was pregnant you have a 50% chance of not having aids, but if your mother is African it is more around the 4% mark, from the Steven Lewis book)

Which leads me back to Kafka, perhaps The Castle deserves a rewrite.  K. should show up in the village and begin his work as land surveyor in the village.  At every turn the measurements won’t add up though.  He will go back and measure everything a second time.  The measurements are all correct, but one street is one hundred kilometers and has three store fronts and looks the same as the next block up that is thirty meters.  Both streets look the same, have the same 3 shops and hold the same number of people.  

Back to malaria and diarrhea, at first I just thought that is the way it is, you know.  But then I took a step back and asked why.  It makes sense in the context, I can understand the mechanisms, but those mechanisms (colonialism, corruption, civil and regular war etc) don’t make moral sense.  

Ethiopia has problems with food security because of political conflict (read burning crops and killing livestock as a method of control).  This is a moral problem.  But where did they learn those tactics?  Didn’t Europeans come to North America and run a campaign of biological warfare against the native population?  Weren’t they in Africa too?  The only distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was tone of skin that was decided by their European warlords.  An even more direct link is the estimated ten trillion dollars worth of labour that was stolen from Africa and exported to North America and the Caribbean during the slave trade.  Maybe the current dictators of Africa learned it from somewhere.  

What I am saying is that the mechanisms that have created the context for Africa are the same mechanisms that have created North America.  What happens when we accept moral responsibility for our collective history?  All of a sudden it seems wrong to be thankful for our security and health because it is stolen.  

Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) isn’t charity and goodwill, it is debt repayment.  

Should people die of malaria in North America?  Then why is it alright in Africa?  Why does a rural African have to walk a hundred kilometers to get as to the same place a North American only has to walk thirty meters to get to?  This goes beyond the analogy… the boys family took him for a fourteen hour round trip to visit a clinic that couldn’t help him because they didn’t have any supplies.  That is a round trip it would take me thirty five minutes.  And I wouldn’t even have to go to the hospital because I have everything I need right in my medicine cabinet.  

A matter of discomfort for me becomes a matter of life and death in another country.  
This is what is absurd.  

I would illustrate K.’s world with Surrealist art, because all of a sudden Salvador Dali makes a lot more sense.  It is the way the world is.  If you look at his art rationally (with a standard unit of measure) it seems absurd.

I woke up in a Salvidor Dali Painting

Doublethink, Boredom and Bean Counters

Doublethink, Boredom and Bean Counters

This blog is based on two sources:

1. Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy, while I have never read it a friend was telling me about this part where there is a planet that had three classes.  There were people that made things and had practical skills, and there were the visionaries that dreamed of how to live, then there were the middle managers that dealt with papers, a very sustainable industry in the sense that they were self supporting, one application could last for years traveling through hundreds of hands and creating numerous jobs.  Well, this planet decided to round up all of these people and exile them, well these people found the planet earth and decided to settle.  


2. Canadians consume to most coffee per capita.

I think coffee consumption is a good indicator of the quality of life in a country.  I say this because I was at work and was not exactly riveted by the subject matter – which I don’t really understand because it is quite interesting (but maybe what I find interesting isn’t really that interesting).  I think it isn’t that interesting because it doesn’t express anything about me, there is no personal investment, I am working for someone else, not for myself.  This isn’t selfish because there is the difference between working for someone else and doing my work that benefits someone else.  I guess my work benefits my boss, but is my work really matter to him, or is it just job creation?  How many other people ask this question?  How many jobs are created just to have jobs?

I remember a story about homeless people having to separate black and brown grain for 8 hours a day to get food to eat.  At the end of the day the person who provided the food would mix all the separated grains into one pile so that there would be work for the next day.  Is this situation really much different than my job?  How many people spend their working life categorizing different things?  How many people write reports re-organizing information in previous reports and soon become sources for later reports?  The endless re-organization of information, is it all that different?  No wonder people are addicted to coffee, we need it to survive the monotony.  

Welcome to the information age.  With the rise of the complex society there are people that make decisions that affect the lives of millions of people (and billions in India and China).  These people need information to make the decisions.  This information has to be organized to see things in one way, and re-organized to see things in another way, so I do understand the importance of “separating the black and brown grain” but at the end of the day, there is still the haunting feeling that all I am doing is re-organizing information, regardless of how important it might be.  

Maybe society doesn’t have to be supported by 1/3 of the population who has to be bureaucrats.  What would happen if we organized on a local level?  There would still be a need for information, but maybe the one organizer of the small town could get the whole picture himself, and be able to make decisions that make sense for the people of that community.  But…would it end up being a third of the population anyway?  

I am not advocating anarchy, but asking the question: Does society need bean counters?  

Think of all the people that work at stats Canada.  All they do is organize information that informs a lot of decisions.  It is important to the workings of a modern society, but man is it soul killing.  So the question is, is there people that are really interested in stats?  Or is it something that they tell themselves they are interested in to survive and drink a lot of coffee to stay interested in?  

It is this phenomena that I have experienced where I will get really (emotionally) excited when I hear about the topic and am discussing it, then once I start my heart beat slows right down and I fall asleep.   The experience reminds me of doublethink from 1984 by Orwell.  Coffee is our mood control, it keeps us excited and we can chemically support the process of doublethink (telling ourselves we are excited and passionate about something that we aren’t really passionate and excited about, but still believing we are).  

If we get excited and passionate about something, how do we know we aren’t really if all the signs are there?  Well, that is what this blog is all about, the phenomena of interesting things being really boring.  

This is an internal disconnection; it makes us anxious, irritable, and entertainment seeking.  It leads to the question, what am I really excited about, who am I and how can I express that person?  

Well, good luck with that

On Journalism

On Journalism…

This summer Kara (my wife) and I went to hike the Grand Canyon.  On the way down we past a small town and it just hit me like a ton of bricks, it was one of those epiphany moments.  Democracy isn’t working.  It is stuck behind jargon and sectioned off for the elites that understand it and are involved in it.  There are so many barriers to being involved in a town council meeting.  Added to the jargon is the fact that they can just be so damned boring.  

Democracy can be exciting!  Imagine if a town council meeting was a debate about things that mattered to the community instead of, for example, the typo in section two paragraph four.  

Conspiracy theory: (take it or leave it) they hide the corporate agenda behind typos and boredom because if they debated the real issue then maybe their big polluting plant wouldn’t be given approval, so they discuss the technicalities of the law instead of the meaning of their action.  

Solution:  Put town council meetings into context and language that people can not only understand but get excited about and feel in control of their own community.  

Al Gore read a quote in his movie “The Inconvenient Truth:” “It is very hard for a man to understand something his salary depends on not understanding.”  With that in mind I am tired of old white men telling me just to be entertained and let them take care of all the boring things of running the town.  It is just really boring stuff that I am not interested in anyway.  

The old white man runs the corporations that are killing the planet – but I should be greatful for the job – ha.  They have screwed things up enough, their turn is over,  it is time for the people to decide what is good for themselves.  Not in the Marxist sense where another old white man takes over claiming the will of the people as legitimacy, but where people are aware of the issues that are affecting them at home.  

When Wal-mart is proposing to come into a community the town council shouldn’t put a public notice in the paper asking what people think of rezoning this piece of land for Wal-mart.  The question is a foregone conclusion.  Maybe there should be a town meeting asking if we want Wal-mart or a new development in the town at all.  There has to be a discussion to see if it is good for the town.  Maybe it is good for the town, I don’t know, but I sure would like to weigh the arguments and actually have some thought put into it instead of having every tide of boom and bust decide the economic and social well being of my community.  

A newspaper could do this, instead of being sensationalist.  A newspaper could broach the issues that matter to the community and provide context and a forum for left and right to meet, but not the abstract left and right, but the left and right that belong to a town.  Where both parties see things differently, but both care for the community and each other.  

A newspaper could provide a place for discourse.  

It is the revolution on a community scale.  Being aware of how we spend our lives, beyond the walls of our homes.