Food speculation

In The Great Hunger Lottery, the World Development Movement has compiled extensive evidence establishing the role of food commodity derivatives in destabilising and driving up food prices around the world. This in turn, has led to food prices becoming unaffordable for low-income families around the world, particularly in developing countries highly reliant on food imports.

Nowhere was this more clearly seen than during the astonishing surge in staple food prices over the course of 2007-2008, when millions went hungry and food riots swept major cities around the world. The great hunger lottery shows how this alarming episode was fueled by the behaviour of financial speculators, and describes the terrible immediate impacts on vulnerable families around the world, as well as the long term damage to the fight against global poverty.

In the report we describe how the current situation came to pass, the risks of another speculation induced food crisis, and what specifically can be done by policymakers here in the UK as well as in the US and EU to tackle the problem.
To download the report.


You are requested to call the FSA - we are even giving you an example how to do it - on food speculation.

The joy of history about real people

If anything more exciting than glancing through what we historians have to call "sources" were invented, I would still continue to do the former...

The history of Christian anarchism is not just about thoughts or stories of things left undone because they are too difficult. Peter Maurin, who said this, should have known better himself.

The story of Christian anarchism as a tendency is about real people. Striving for a communal life as true Christians, like the Diggers or the Christian Fraternity (Zwijndrechtse Nieuwlichters). Being hardworking - and I mean really hardworking, the phrase is being misused nowadays for right-wing propaganda -, downtrodden and poor and yet proudly cherishing own gatherings where the Spirit is considered to be present. Making the people concerned come alive and calling them into or back into some collective memory is one of the most beautiful things I can think of.

When I came across Christian anarchism as a tendency in the workers' movement I soon heard about the Children of God (Kinderen Gods, in Frisian: Berne fan God), somewhere in the peat-moor areas of Frisia. An area forgotten by official history. Ideological class warfare at university level these days comes with the story that peat workers were not really all that poor after all. Of course they would say that, since the socialist and anarchist movements were born in that part of the Netherlands, and socialism did not happen, apart from Stalin's Gulag, everyone should know that by now.
Socialism means: no Coke or hamburgers and long queues for clothes without logo - repeat after me - and it was defeated by the United States of America.

So the peat workers are left aside, being declared not even poor and rebellious after all.
Yet they were. And the area is still the poorest of the Netherlands, the riches made by digging up the soil and selling it as a fuel went somewhere else. And the Children of God were doomed to even more oblivion than the socialist and anarchist movement.

Then two years ago I decided to gather what scarce sources there were to be found and write about the Children of God as precursors of the Christian anarchist movement. Since the peat workers cherished their own mystic preacher who said that there is only freedom to be had in real lived-through love of God the idea of their being forerunners seemed appropriate.
I gave them a mention in my article in the reader Religious anarchism. I wrote about them in the Annual on Anarchism (Jaarboek Anarchisme) and put the article on the net.
I pinched the only biographical article on the aforementioned preacher and put it on my own portrait gallery [a project under construction].

Yesterday I found a comment to this article by someone who thanks me for putting information on the net about her "well-known" ancestor. "Well-known" may be taken with a pinch of salt. A bit puzzled by her reaction I put the name of the preacher in the search engine and found I had inspired someone to write a Wikipedia-lemma in Frisian on the preacher, Marten Jans van Houten, which specifically quotes my article on the scarcity of sources.

Sources may be scarce, but stories may be told and live on, and whatever sources there are should be brought to the light and to life to remind the downtrodden and seemingly voiceless that they have had a voice all along.
Knowing to be part of this effort is my joy and my payment (I never got to work at a university - they have Business to be studied, not working class people).
A story I wanted to tell this day, First of May 2010.

Illustration: typical Frisian bell-cage in De Wilp, the village where Van Houten preached. His church has been torn down.

Sign for Chagos

The UK Government is considering declaring the Chagos Archipelago the World’s largest Marine Protected Area, in order to conserve its globally important coral reefs and related ecosystems.

This is a unique and vital opportunity for marine conservation, but the issue is not as simple as that.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has launched a consultation on Chagos. The consultation proposes three main options for a Marine Protected Area, all of which exclude any kind of fisheries or similar marine activities within the reef areas.

What these options do not take account of are the wishes of the Chagossian community. The islanders were removed from their homeland by the British Government in the late 1960s and have been campaigning ever since for their right to return.

The full no-take protection of reef areas (as proposed by the consultation) would provide no means for resettled islanders to utilise their marine resources for subsistence or income generation. Communities and Marine Protected Areas coexist across the world, and there is no reason why the islanders could not be successful stewards of their coral reef environment.

We endorse the efforts of the Foreign Secretary to protect the marine ecosystems of the Chagos archipelago but we call on him to work with the Chagos islanders and the Government of Mauritius to devise an MPA solution that makes provision for resettlement and protects Mauritius’ legitimate interests.

Further reading and site to sign on:
here.
Petition is now closed.

Fr. Jean-Juste remembered

Fr. Gérard Jean-Juste gets a moving obituary in the SF Bay View [and he even makes me feel a bit happy because of his thank you-speech on Youtube at the bottom of the article, as I have written for the SF Bay View a few times myself].

The closing word of Bill Quigley's piece, ¡Presente! as it should have been written, refers to the days when the Chilean bourgeoisie led by general Pinochet showed its ugly face against the parliamentarian non-violent socialist transformation of Chile. ¡Presente! was a reference to those who had been tortured and killed in Chile and could only be present in spirit.

A shrill reminder of what has been going on for so long now in so many parts of the world, Haiti not being the least scourged nation. Fr. Jean-Juste apparently did not die from being tortured, but he knew what it was like in the dungeons of the mighty.
May he rest in the presence of the One he prayed to most.

Rantings of the Spirit

Whitsunday - in my neck of the woods this increasingly uncomprehended feast still is prolonged with a Whitmonday.
There is a yearly gathering of anarchists in NL at the anarchist camping site in Appelscha, Fryslân, an opportunity which as far as I know no other European country can offer.
Yet I have only been there once, as a particpating observer - in the cold of the night, in the hot pre-summer's day - like it is this year. Listless lilting about the connection between feminism and anarchism and the need for all to be feminist - yeah, sure, comrades - I have been around in the movement too long not to know that this is a kind of churchgoing - never practice on Monday what you are preaching or being taught on Sunday.

So I skipped the Whitweekend-mobilisations generally, visited the camping site once at some other time and did not feel very welcome there - until the moment the regular campers noticed I was a Real Anarchist myself - and then immediately my beloved was told about the blessings of anarca-feminism (she was a feminist, and she sympathised a bit with anarchism but she did not want to be annexed to anarca-feminism just because of her gender - cannot blame her for that).
I think this abstract obsession with feminism has died down nowadays, but I still do not bother to go, in fact have spent most of my Whitsundays for the past several years - unbelievable, innit - in church.

This year was different, for reasons I do not need to dwell upon here and now.
There is still the news, which for some Anglophones is homophonous to noose.
As a special Pentecostal treat a doctor performing late abortions is shot dead in church. The not-so postchristian US of A in the noose.

The BBC gave prevalence to the news about a city in the Swat Valley completely destroyed by the Pakistani army in the War Against Terror.
Tellingly, the story has already been moved to a place where you cannot find it, or it even has been removed. Yet there are other sources on Mingora.
And our everloving Auntie tells a story about hundreds of thousands of Tamils still on the run in Sri Lanka. Earlier in the past week we heard twenty thousand human beings had been killed in the final days of "the war" - again, a War on Terror.

No news in this news, altogether.
Time to ask for consolation to the Spirit which was sent to console.

The Revolution isn't over in Nepal

There's no such thing as a complete revolution, a utopian end-point, as the Nepalese people are demonstrating at the moment (Links 10 May 2009)

After years of struggle; national strikes, Maoist and military imposed curfews, the bloodiest asassination of royals since the end of the Russian Tsars, and riots on the streets of Khatmandu, the Nepalese people finally overthrew the Royalists (2006) and last year and the communists stormed to power in a new federalist system.

Almost exactly a year later and the prime minister and some other goverment minister's are resigning in what Link and blogger Ben Peterson are calling a "soft coup" that suggests that Maoist and popular reform in favour of greater social justice are still being frustrated by monarchist military elites.

Video from Kathmandu

From Link:

"The UCPN (M) [Maoist party) has called for protests in the streets until its demands have been met. "The protests have been many and all over the place”, Peterson said. “They are organised by a whole range of different groups. Every different group has its own protest. The mood is angry.”

The protests ranged from involving hundreds, to tens of thousands, he said. However, he emphasised that these protests occurred simultaneously — there could be dozens of protests in Kathmandu at any one time. “Many of the people I have spoken to at the protests were not Maoists”, Peterson said.

As example of the mood, he explained: “The other night I was at the bus park, and about 20 people just waiting around for a bus spontaneously started chanting against the president.”

The foreign media have attempted to play up protests by right-wing NC supporters. The Sydney Morning Herald even featured a photo of an NC supporters protest with the caption “People’s Power”. Peterson said that before the UCPN (M) left government, there were some tiny protests involving a few hundred people at most. Since then, no such protests had occurred.

In some cases the police have attacked protesters, including tear gassing a demonstration by the pro-UCPN (M) Young Communist League. Police repeatedly attack attempts by protesters, mostly Maoist women, to demonstrate in front of the president’s offices. Protests in that are have been banned, resulting in regular clashes.

However, the state has held off from trying full-scale repression.

So far, the UCPN (M) has also held back from full-scale mobilisations. It has yet to organise a centralised, all-out demonstration that calls the greatest numbers onto the streets together. However, as the likely futile negotiations by the anti-Maoist parties drags on, that could be about to change."

War for the sake of war

A few days ago, in his unbearably simplified song of praise of Charles Darwin, Andrew Marr stumbled upon the European question of the barbarism of World War I. The barbarism - how could we think otherwise - was started by the Germans, the programme said. (In the story it was suggested there was some connection to evolution theory).

This barbarism could then, and can now only be a surprise if you discard the story of European expansion. The genocide on the original peoples of the Americas and Australia, using hunger as a tool of submission in nearby Ireland and at a larger scale in India, slaughter in Indonesia, Southern Africa and above all, the Congo, and the list is far from complete.
The slaughter in Congo is still going on, but now as then it is easy to look away.

The deadliest war in the world today is the Congo War, a.k.a., the African holocaust or the African World War, a covert U.S. war waged by African proxy armies to secure Congo’s unparalleled natural resources. To secure, above all, the “geostrategic” cobalt reserves in the Katanga Copper Belt, which runs through DR Congo’s southeastern Katanga Province and into its southeastern neighbor, Zambia.

Cobalt is essential to our military industries’ ability to manufacture the modern weapons of war. So, the Congo War, a.k.a. the African holocaust, is a war for the sake of war itself.

Even the complicit United Nations reports that the Congo War is the most lethal war in the world today, with the highest death toll since World War II, though the U.N. does so primarily to fundraise for ineffective mega-U.N. charities like UNESCO, UNICEF and the UNHCR. It has never censured the United States or any other imperial power for arming, advising and ultimately controlling myriad armies and militias in DR Congo.

Many Americans who supported Barack Obama had hoped for a de-escalation of the war, the perpetual, post-09/11 War on Terror, in Iraq, Gaza, Afghanistan and Pakistan and even the covert U.S. war in DR Congo, the war for the sake of war itself.

And many are now shocked by Obama’s decision to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq, to send 17,000 more to Afghanistan, to bomb Pakistani insurgents and to stand behind Israel, no matter how mercilessly it bombs Gaza. And, to hike the U.S. military budget by 4 percent in 2010, startling even Robert Gates, Bush’s former defense secretary, who is now Barack Obama’s.

The war in the Congo for minerals essential to warmaking all over the world uproots and kills Congolese in cities, towns and even remote villages.
The Congo War continues, with little protest visible beyond the Internet. It moved into a new phase on Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, when new, wholly illogical military alliances emerged. The official story advanced then and since by the U.S. State Department, the Rwandan, Ugandan and Congolese governments, and the U.N., then regurgitated by obedient corporate news outlets, is that the Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF), instructed by U.S. military advisers, crossed into southeastern DR Congo to join the Congolese Army (FARDC), the U.N. peacekeepers (MONUC) and the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) in hunting down rebel Gen. Laurent Nkunda, the former commander of the CNDP, one of the groups now allied to hunt down both him and his career enemies, the Forces Democratique de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR).

In December 2008, reports were that on the Ugandan border of Eastern Congo, U.S. military advisers had helped organize the Ugandan army (UPDF) to cross into northeastern DR Congo to join the Congolese army and the U.N. peacekeepers (MONUC) in hunting down the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). In March, the Congolese government agreed to let them stay, indefinitely.

In Kigali, Rwanda, on Jan. 7, 2009, soldiers with the Rwanda Defense Forces are trained by U.S. soldiers as part of U.S. Africa Command’s (Africom’s) African Deployment Assistance Phase Training (ADAPT) program. – Photo: www.Army.mil
These alliances and these accounts of them are so riddled with contradiction that deconstructing them would only play into the hands of those so carefully obscuring the fundamental reality of the Congo War. How many Americans would be anything but dizzy and confused by this list of acronyms for just the best known militias and armies fighting in DR Congo: CNDP, FDLR, UPDF, RDF, FARDC, MONUC?

So, let’s forget the acronyms; forget all the African militias and armies fighting proxy wars for the imperial interests of the U.S. and other imperial powers. Americans should understand instead why the U.S. is fighting a covert war in DR Congo.
High stakes

The stakes in the Congo War are enormously high. They include:

1) War itself, because, again, the Congo war is, above all, a war for cobalt, the mineral most essential to the manufacture of modern weapons of war. Cobalt is required to build jet fighter bomber engines, missiles, including nuclear missiles, battleships, including our nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, and virtually all modern industrially manufactured weapons of war, except perhaps biological and chemical weapons.

Cobalt is essential to the manufacture of anything requiring high grade steel.

Shocks in cobalt’s supply and price during the 1970s and early ‘80s led to a 1982 Congressional Budget Office document warning that the U.S. would have to be prepared to go to war to secure cobalt reserves so as to secure the power to manufacture for war, especially in time of war.


The war for control of Congo’s wealth has killed 6 million and displaced many millions more.
2) An ongoing African holocaust, the systematic destruction of the Congolese people. Six million have died, according to widely acknowledged sources including the International Relief Commission and the U.N. Forty-five thousand Congolese continue to die every month, with no end in sight; many die in refugee camps of starvation and easily curable disease, and one third of these are children.

3) Barack Obama’s legacy, and our legacy, as the Americans who elected him. Will our legacy be an ongoing African holocaust, another 6 million African Congolese lives? Will it be the expansion of Africom, the U.S. Africa Command, throughout Africa and the further plundering of Africa’s resources?

Some, including Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford, say that Barack Obama is “U.S. corporate empire in Black face” or that corporate America desperately needed a Black face now. This is arguable, especially given that, in 2007, Africa surpassed the U.S. wartorn Middle East as a source of U.S. oil imports.

However, though huge corporations generously filled Obama’s campaign coffers, so did many everyday Americans, who also organized and rallied for Obama with high hopes of peace and change. Many now at least seem to have a place at the table that they didn’t have before.

Can they use it to call for an end to the covert war in DR Congo? First, more Americans will have to find DR Congo on the map, even amidst the toughest times since the Depression.

To read further.

This story incidentally makes clear the real reason why former Belgian colony Rwanda - supposed to be francophone - adopted English as first European language, ending education in French altogether.

A home truth about the Crisis

As far as so-called poor countries ("Third World Countries") are concerned, there is no sudden crisis. There has been Reform or Structural Adjustment Programmes. Adjustment to what?
You are not supposed to ask such questions.

Here you can find in the hollow, meaningless language of the pseudo-science called "economics" a report on how structural adjustment works in Malawi. The alleged purpose of the adjustment is industrialisation. There is, however, no industry. Agriculture is geared for export. The functions of the state which might have made it a decent institution (education, public transport etc.) are being stripped as necessary retrenchment measures.

And then, after 27 years of structural adjustment, a problem is detected.
There is hunger in the land. The use of food aid in a country of agricultural exports is being discussed.

It is not a breach with normality that makes up the daily catastrophe. The catastrophe is that things are going on as usual.

The actual implosion of Capital has been going on since around 1975. But this implosion is only called a crisis when it reaches the so-called developed world.
Maybe this means that the way to get rid of this social relation called Capital is closer at hand.

A bitter statement seen from the perspective of those who have been living the crisis for so long. Where living may mean dying from starvation or despair.

(Written after having read this and this.)

From Right to Left and beyond the state

From Right to Left and beyond the state: Rethinking Indian Church and Mission is now available as a pdf online at the ASIRA page of the ASN website.

This e-book traces the relationship between the theology of the privileged and the growing formation of the colonial enterprise in India.