Credit crunch? The real crisis is global hunger

 

And if you care, eat less meat

A food recession is under way. Biofuels are a crime against humanity, but - take it from a flesh eater - flesh eating is worse

 

Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession that is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch. You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters over the past year, that of wheat by 130%. There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices.

But I bet that you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, the global grain harvest broke all records last year - it beat the previous year's by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?
There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people.
I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that "the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol ... could feed one person for a year". This year global stockpiles of cereals will decline by around 53m tonnes; this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels will consume almost 100m tonnes, which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis.
On these pages yesterday Ruth Kelly, the secretary of state for transport, promised that "if we need to adjust policy in the light of new evidence, we will". What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity, in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.
But I have been saying this for four years, and I am boring myself. Of course we must demand that our governments scrap the rules that turn grain into the fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.
While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the UK it has scarcely changed since the government started gathering data in 1974. At just over 1kg per person per week, it's still about 40% above the global average, though less than half the amount consumed in the United States. We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogram of flesh they produce; a kilogram of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.
In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby's book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet produced by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half Britain's current total). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.
But I cannot advocate a diet that I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans, and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk that I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.
What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9 billion by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain. Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians such as Ruth Kelly are able to "adjust policy in the light of new evidence" and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tonnes of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK's average consumption.
This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it doesn't contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that if animals were kept only on land that is unsuitable for arable farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world could produce between a third and two-thirds of its current milk and meat supply. But this system then runs into a different problem. The Food and Agriculture Organisation calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely. The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible. Let's reserve it - as most societies have done until recently - for special occasions.
For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. This is a freshwater fish that can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency - about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat - of any farmed animal. Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.
Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

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A reminder of the real cost of living

 

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Friends in India who work with rural women say that lentils are no longer affordable

Monday, 14 April 2008

Suddenly you notice the costs have really shot up. For me the wake-up call came with the last few supermarket bills, which were already too high because we now need so many more fancy foods. The hairdresser costs a third more than this time last year, petrol too, and on Saturday the Chinese restaurant in the West End charged punitive prices, perhaps to pay for the Olympics back home. So, there will have to be longer gaps between getting the roots done, more trips to Shepherd's Bush market for fruit, meat and veg, and obviously less dining out.

The man of the house is fretting about the bigger things – the value of our ISAs and the mortgage. So, yes, we are, like most middle-class people, feeling less flush. Hardly what you could call privation, a necessary adjustment perhaps to a life of too much already (16 pairs of shoes, for example, when I last counted mine, some though 10 years old, is still excessive).
We have been content enough to stay put in the same property for 30 years and so are spared the current credit-crunch panic. For many others, by contrast, the present and future feel unnaturally bleak and the thought of cutting back is an affront. After years of growth, people feel entitled to more and more. Owning two or three homes was almost a norm for the successful until now, when such expectations are having to shrivel. Thrift feels to them like shame and induces self-pity that should be put on stage by Mike Leigh.
It is time to remind the blubbing and snivelling middle classes to be thankful and grateful for what they have, that babies are perishing in the poorest countries of the world, partly because we are so greedy and needy. These innocents and their families are not suffering the effects of the Northern Rock fiasco, having precious homes repossessed, losing jobs and enduring tumbling share prices. They walk about in the lands of no hope, through the valleys of death, try to keep their own alive for a little while longer.
I recently overheard two mums with humongous cars, chatting outside my daughter's old primary school, moaning as if there was no tomorrow. They had to cut down the skiing to only five days, said one, and her hubby was really upset about that sacrifice. Another confessed that they had reluctantly decided to stay put in their five-bedroom house and extend it, rather than move. Then the clincher: "Really nobody cares about people like us do they? How much more do they think we can take? Who do you vote for?"
Perhaps when next in the Maldives, they can ask the hotel staff about families and incomes, about powerlessness and sacrifices and how much more can they take. Britons travel to more "unspoilt" places than ever before and are only more indifferent to the people in those destinations. And now, suddenly, inequality threatens universal commotion, rebels against the established order.
The spreading unrest disturbs three cold, resolute masters of the universe. Our Chancellor, Alistair Darling, warns that international ethanol programmes to meet growing demands for biofuel are creating catastrophic food shortages and provoking riots the world over – in Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, parts of India.
These will spread as the poor no longer have anything to lose. The price of wheat has risen by 130 per cent this year and rice by 74 per cent. Friends in India who work to improve the lives of rural women say that dhal lentils are no longer affordable. Grain for food production has been slashed. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, fears that "hundreds of thousands of people will be starving.
Children will be suffering from malnutrition with consequences for all their lives". Sensitive to sub-prime US and UK gloom, M Strauss-Kahn tailors his message, saying "it is not only a humanitarian question" but one of western self-interest. Trade imbalances could affect economic advantage. Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, this weekend described the situation for the poor as "catastrophic".
If you want to understand why illegal migration is growing so out of control, here is one reason – a reason which anti-immigration campaigners do not examine or acknowledge. It is our fault that so many desperate people come to our doors. Well, wouldn't you do the same? The poorest cannot travel but the next social layer up fears it will be them next, once savings are gone, and so they flee to places of plenty.
So is globalisation then, just a re-branding of exploitative, naked capitalism? Not really. Market liberalisation has brought about some, possibly considerable, generation of wealth. There are more stupendously rich people in developing countries than ever before. The middle classes are growing in number. Quickly and inevitably these winners turn into sinners, unconcerned about the poor in their midst.
The system also, says Arundhati Roy, "allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative, capital-hot money – into and out of Third World countries and then dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into those economies".
Britain is held to this ransom too – remember the threats by non-doms when they were asked to pay a pitifully small amount of extra tax?
But in poor countries, the might of the capitalists and institutions like the IMF and World Bank is deadly. Says Roy: "With a combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies and devastate them." To the point of death through starvation, as now.
International development agencies have discouraged agricultural sectors in the Third World, pushed cash-crop production and multinational industrialisation. And, meanwhile, there is the demented search for alternatives to oil to free the West from dependency on the Middle East. Biofuel was our salvation, even though we knew what the abominable price would be.
Mr Zoellick brings up the uncomfortable truth, saying: "While many in the US and Europe worry about filling their [vehicle] tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it is getting more and more difficult everyday."
Things must be very bad indeed for the G7, the IMF and World Bank to speak out more ominously than aid agencies, which frequently have to use apocalyptic tones to arouse concern for disaster victims. In 1968, the children of the rich nations protested against the established order. Maybe 2008 will be the year the poor finally had enough. Perhaps the powerful are smelling revolution in the air and are scared.
y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk

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How to do business like the Mafia

 The letters of jailed Cosa Nostra boss Bernardo Provenzano are full of insights into his leadership style. The result could be a how-to manual for company directors. Clare Longrigg opens the mafiosi's management handbook  
They're violent, they're ruthless, they have caused misery to many, but you can't fault their business sense: mafia bosses know how to make a profit. Its practices may be largely illegal, but Cosa Nostra is not as retrograde, or conservative, as it has often been portrayed. Its raison d'etre is profit. Like any business, it is pragmatic and constantly changing to exploit new opportunities.
Big business has learned how to sell itself to the public, with television shows such as The Apprentice and Dragons' Den granting us a view of harsh but compellingly competitive environments. Businessmen such as Sir Alan Sugar, Duncan Bannatyne and Peter Jones have become unlikely media personalities. But the mafia has been using these methods for years.
When Bernardo Provenzano took over the organisation in the mid-90s, he inherited a depleted and demoralised workforce, who had scuppered their own access to politics and industry. The bombs that killed anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino had created a PR disaster and a law enforcement backlash. Hundreds of mafiosi were in prison, and many of them were so disillusioned with the organisation that they were telling the authorities everything they knew.
Magistrates and mafiosi agree: Provenzano was the charismatic force who revived the fortunes of Cosa Nostra. It has been said of Provenzano, as of so many mafia entrepreneurs, that had he turned his talents and resources to legitimate business, he would have been extremely successful. Fortunately, the mafia's particular modus operandi - the use or threat of violence to create monopolies and price-fixing cartels - is not part of general business practice. But his "System" turned around a failing organisation with far-sighted tactics worthy of any business impresario. The fact that he wrote his reforms by letter means that we have what amounts to seven rules for running a successful business.
Rule 1: Submersion
When a company is failing, the first step is to take it below the radar. You want to lose that cursed epithet "troubled" as quickly as possible, even if it means disappearing from the business pages."It's the sensible thing to do - you bury your mistakes and get on with it," says Peter Wallis (known as Peter York in his other guise, as a social commentator), management consultant at SRU Ltd. You also want to buy shareholders' patience and convince them to hold their nerve and trust you.
"Our aim was to make Cosa Nostra invisible, giving us time to regroup," recalled Provenzano's lieutenant, Nino Giuffrè, who collaborated shortly after his arrest in 2002. After a series of power struggles that had left many dead, businessmen were understandably reluctant to return calls. Mafiosi were instructed to avoid any activity that would attract publicity. If a factory owner refused to pay protection, no one was to set fire to the machinery or blow up the trucks. Peaceful persuasion was the only way.
By contrast with the old-style system of shoot first and ask questions later, any hostile action would have to be thoroughly assessed for potential PR damage. "It was essential to weigh up whether a person could do more damage dead or alive," revealed Giuffrè.
Announcing his system, Provenzano warned that recovery would take time: members might have to wait between five and seven years before they were making profits again. Rebuilding links with business and politicians could only be done out of the glare of publicity. In relative obscurity, Cosa Nostra would be repositioned to shake off its parasitic image and become part of the industrial and political institutions.
Rule 2: Mediation
"Be calm, clear, correct and consistent, turn any negative experiences to account, don't dismiss everything people tell you, or believe everything you're told. Always try to discover the truth before you speak, and remember that, to make your judgment, it's never enough to have just one source of information."
This letter has been described as "a manifesto of Cosa Nostra under Bernardo Provenzano". After a decade of unspeakable violence under the previous leader, Totò Riina, Provenzano changed the culture of Cosa Nostra by instructing his men in the art of negotiation and the importance of dialogue.
Provenzano was decisive, and on occasion demanded swift and direct answers to his questions, but he could be a ditherer when it suited him. Playing for time, he encouraged his men to negotiate agreements between them. If that failed, Provenzano was at his typewriter night and day, offering his wisdom and experience (and just occasionally, a little double-dealing) to resolve disputes.
Like any company director, who carefully crafts his or her media persona, Provenzano didn't want to come across as a tyrant, he wanted to be a "kindly dictator". He coordinated the activities of different and competing groups, without imposing his will. He was the uncontested boss, but he gave the impression that his decisions were reached after long consultation.
Rule 3: Consensus
Provenzano answered letters from every level of society about job vacancies, exam results, local health and hospital administration. Like the charity work carried out by major corporations today, Provenzano was clear: the mafia must present itself as a positive element of society. The boss had to appear as a beneficent figure, an uncle whose advice and consent was sought on all matters - business and personal. He understood that persuading the people they need you is a far more effective way of promoting your business than imposition and violence.
"Let me know whatever [the people] need," he wrote to his adviser, "they must expect nothing but good from us."
One key step in the organisation's recovery was recapturing the popular consensus. The mafia has always relied on the obedience (goodwill might be putting it too strongly) of the community. In the business of selling protection, social control is essential: if your "clients" unite and rebel, you're in trouble.
Rule 4: Keep God on your side
Part of Provenzano's bid to reclaim the people's trust and rehabilitate Cosa Nostra with its traditional followers was to assume a mantle of piety. He presented himself in pastoral role - trustworthy and authoritative. His letters read like the parish priest's homily, and he would send his men tracts copied from the Bible.
Investigators tried hard to discover a hidden code beneath all the underlined passages in his Bible. In fact, it seems, he found them genuinely useful as leadership tools.
Provenzano's choice of tracts revealed, according to investigators, "a certain attention to rules, to punishments, guilt and vengeance, as though he were searching for some inspiration and authority to support him in his responsibilities and the decisions that were a necessary part of being the head of an organisation".
In an approach adopted by politicians including Tony Blair, Provenzano's letters contain the strong implication that God is exercising his will through him ("May the Lord bless you and keep you ... know that where I can be of use to you, with the will of God, I am completely at your disposal ... ").
The status as homespun churchgoer also worked for George Bush in his pursuit of popular consensus. "Bush's religion is very variable," comments Wallis. "He courts rightwing evangelicals but he doesn't buy the whole package; he merely wants to relate to them."
Rule 5: Be politically flexible
Businessmen from all walks of life and political persuasion usually find themselves co-opted on to a government advisory board eventually. The East End boy made good is not your traditional Labour supporter, but Sir Alan Sugar has reportedly been advising Gordon Brown on enterprise. "This government's not Labour, it's old-fashioned Tory," he says. "I prefer Gordon to Tony. Blair was refreshing but Brown is more like me. He has a strong work ethic."
Provenzano took this further, changing his political allegiance whenever it suited him. He looked for politicians who were prepared to pursue his self-serving demands for lighter sentences against convicted mafiosi, as well as the end of protection for collaborators. "Links were to be forged behind the scenes with politicians who had no trace of connection to scandal or sleaze," recalled Giuffrè. "If a politician was seen to be supported by men of honour of a certain rank, within 24 hours he'd be destroyed by the opposition."
Rule 6: Reinvention
In case of a political scandal, or a business failure, it is vital for the new boss to be able to distance himself from the whole affair. Indeed, he may find it useful to take on a new persona altogether. When Stuart Rose returned to Arcadia after three years to rescue it, he said: "What is interesting is that people here think I haven't changed, but I have been gone three years. I am not the same Stuart Rose, I have changed a lot."
With Provenzano's new directives, not only did the negative headlines cease, but he managed to dissociate himself from the scandals that had gone before. Like everyone else, he had emerged from Cosa Nostra's most violent decade with his reputation in tatters; his advisers helped him to "get his virginity back", in Giuffrè's interesting phrase. With the help of his PR-savvy advisers, he made sure no one associated him with the violent years, and created his image as the peacemaker.
"When I got out of prison," Giuffrè recalled, "I found Provenzano a changed man; from the hitman he once was, now he showed signs of saintliness."
Rule 7: Modesty
During his career, Provenzano transformed himself from a hired thug, to business investor, political mastermind and, ultimately, strategist and leader. Part of his mystique was that no one really knew whether he was a genius or an illiterate chancer. To emphasise his humble character and present himself as a simple man of the people he would write letters full of spelling and grammatical mistakes, and always signed off with the same humble apology: "I beg your forgiveness for the errors in my writing ..."
Every letter ends with the same saintly and affectionate benediction and an apology for grammatical errors. The bad spelling and schoolboy mistakes detracted nothing from the authority of its writer. For a man who moved easily in the worlds of business and politics, it was apparently part of a carefully constructed image. Investigators maintain his semi-literacy was a deliberate ruse.
It's a strategy that political and business leaders have used to good effect. "George Bush's family is as upper-class as you're going to get in the United States," says Wallis. "He is not a real Texan. To what extent he talks like that out of incompetence, to what extent it is crowd- pleasing, we don't know - but we know it works."
Similarly, Justin King, multimillionaire saviour of Sainsbury's, says: "I'm not a book reader ... I'm just a normal bloke." Sugar has never disavowed his East End roots, his upbringing in a Hackney council house. He doesn't give himself airs, but the point is still made: he grew up with no privileges, but he is the one with the power.
Provenzano took false modesty a step further, suggesting (almost entirely untruthfully) that he would rather have someone else in charge. "They want me to tell them what to do," he wrote, "but who am I to tell them how to conduct themselves? I can't give orders to anyone, indeed I look for someone who can give orders to me."
Unfortunately for him, since his arrest in 2006, his wishes have been fulfilled.
· Boss of Bosses: How Bernardo Provenzano Saved the Mafia is published by John Murray (rrp £20). To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

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Pushy parents: the naked truth

If you decide to hothouse your child, don't be surprised if they turn out to act rather wildly
Carol Midgley
A few days ago I stood, notebook poised hopefully, outside the new-build Salford flat where Sufiah Yusof, child maths prodigy-turned-prostitute, now twiddles her nipples for clients at £130 an hour.

Sufiah, who won a place at Oxford at age 13 after being pressured mercilessly by her father, is now 23 and has just been exposed by the News of the World as being a “Genius on the Game”. It is here, on a bed made up in the lounge, that she gets her kit off for punters who book via her online escort agency.

Apart from asking the obvious - whether this new lifestyle direction is purely to punish her parents - I wanted her take on the theory that overbearing parents risk making anarchists or even dropouts of their children. Alas, she had already done an exclusive newspaper deal and duly told her story dressed in a leopardskin bra and brandishing a riding crop - predictable, perhaps, since hookers don't tend to perform for free. “I have studied so intensely for so many years I wanted to have fun,” she said.

Whether pleasuring businessmen en route home to their wives is much fun is debatable. But every pushy parent in the land would be advised to cut out the picture of the beautiful Sufiah gyrating naked (and get this - looking absolutely delighted to be doing so) and consult it each time they are tempted to strong-arm their child into yet another “improving” activity or extra Mandarin lesson. Sufiah was taught by her father under the Accelerated Learning Technique and apparently made to study alone for hours in freezing rooms to keep her brain alert. As a further discipline, he pushed her so hard at tennis that she was seeded No 8 in the country for under-21s.

Obviously Sufiah's case is extreme - most overachieving kids do not run away from university, as she did at 15, describing her childhood as a “living hell”, and later make a living turning tricks. But it does serve as a warning that if you push children too hard to “win” they might defiantly set out to “lose”. As one reader of her story writes on a website: “You can't treat children like lab rats and expect them not to bite you.”

The phrase coined by psychologists is “helicopter” parents - hovering busily over every aspect of their kids' lives, doing their homework, lying to get into faith schools and absorbing their every achievement as their own. But perhaps the abbreviation “hell” would do just as well. This seems to be dawning on the nation's grandparents.

A report this week claimed that grandmothers see their grown-up (middle-class) children as competitive obsessives who approach parenthood in exactly the same way as their careers - with targets, checklists and ruthless ambition. Professor Rachel Thomson, of the Open University and co-director of The Making of Modern Motherhood report, said grandmothers were horrified by the “modern pressure and compulsion on parents to be constantly busy and sociable, taking their child to every class available, being up to date on endless independent research into everything from developmental goals to nutrition”.

Why are so many parents obsessed with their offspring being conspicuous overachievers that they are willing to sacrifice their childhoods for it? Do they now regard the word “average” (regarded as quite good, ie normal, in my day) as now equal to “shameful”? Maybe they truly do believe that the formula of right school/right hobbies/right university automatically equals wonderful, happy life. Ask the parents of child prodigies and many will tell them to be careful what they wish for.

Child Genius, a Channel 4 documentary series that will be broadcast next Wednesday, will show the other side of being superbright; the lack of friends, the family tensions, the struggle to find a school able to cope, and in one case a moody “genius” boy of 13 being threatened with expulsion for taking a replica gun in to his private school. In any case many “genius” children go on to become fairly mediocre in adult life: their dazzling light cannot be sustained indefinitely. One parent in the C4 programme says that, if not handled properly, her daughter's gift could turn out to be a curse. Another says: “It's fine having a brain but if you can't mix in society there's no point.”

Well, quite. And in the same way, if pushy parents focus exclusively on ripening their child's intellect, they must accept that their emotional development will be stunted. There was something needily childlike about Sufiah saying “My clients treat me like a princess”, as if they provide the affection she was denied as a girl. As long ago as 1978 the psychologist Peter Congdon wrote a guide for parents of gifted children in which he said: “Accelerating mental development is sometimes bought at the expense of slowing down the pace of social and emotional growth. The result can be a lopsided and maladjusted individual.”

This applies in other ways too. The pitiful decline of Britney Spears, hothoused within the showbiz industry from a tender age, may be seen as a modern parable of what can happen when teenagers are denied a normal adolescence (as, of course, is Michael “Neverland” Jackson). Spears was not allowed youthful high jinks. Her job was to peddle the clean-living, God-fearing, virginal ideal to the masses while, strangely, dancing provocatively on video. So she had her drugs and alcohol backlash years later when she was a mother. Now, aged 26, with two children and two marriages behind her, she was recently carted off to a psychiatric unit. Doesn't that make you feel better about your teenagers getting drunk?

We cannot ask Sufiah's father, Farooq, whether he regrets the albatross that he placed around his daughter's neck because he has just started an 18-month prison sentence for sexually assaulting two 15-year-old girls that he was tutoring in maths. But her mother says: “Part of me is haunted by the notion we had driven her to that.” You don't say.

What would haunt me more is that in the newspaper “glamour” pictures and video that you can view online Sufiah looks genuinely happy, relieved almost. It comes to something when a child's spirit has been so crushed by her family's ambition that she considers prostitution a lucky escape.

But since her father treated her as little more than an object it is hardly surprising that, with paying punters in her Salford flat, she continues to behave like one.

Jesus Knows a Camel When He Sees One

We Are NOT Passing Through The Eye Of That Needle, America….

By Jason Miller

10 April, 2008
Countercurrents.org

Dedicated to Bobbie L.

In the sermon just minutes before his death, Archbishop Oscar Romero (a man who truly practiced the teachings of Christ) reminded his congregation of the parable of the wheat. “Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ, will live like the grains of wheat that dies. It only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses; that God wants; that God demands of us. I am bound, as a pastor, by divine command to give my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvadoreans, even those who are going to kill me.”

—These words appeared in a newspaper just two weeks before Archbishop Romero was shot (by a filthy Right Wing Death Squad supported by the US) while celebrating Holy Communion in the hospital which had been his home since his enthronement in 1977.

“You could piss off Jesus Christ himself!”

—Russ Miller

In 1947 Harry Truman wrote to Pope Pius XII that the United States “is a Christian nation.” This proclamation came from the man responsible for the “Christian act” of annihilating over 200,000 Japanese civilians by unleashing nuclear hell.

George W. Bush, who has perpetrated war crimes for which he should be hanged and whose entire being is drenched with the blood of over a million Iraqis and 4,000 US soldiers, has often spoken openly about his “Christian faith.” Imagine that. Our “Christian nation” is led by a craven, mean-spirited, remorseless, conscienceless mass murderer.


Unfortunately for those who truly embrace Christ’s undeniably moral teachings and yearn to identify the United States as collectively Christian, as a nation we have much more in common with imperial Rome, an empire that persecuted its Christian populace to varying degrees for about 300 years (until Constantine I made it legal to practice Christianity in 313).

How could it be otherwise? The United States is the chief apologist and defender for the global cancer known as the “American Way,” which includes American capitalism, industrial civilization, imperialism, cultural genocide, consumerism, and the myriad ills plaguing our planet and its inhabitants thanks to these grotesqueries. In fact, as exploitative and brutal as they were, Pontius Pilate and the empire he served paled in comparison to the Unites States. Like the Romans, we dominate the world and siphon off its riches so we can wallow in hedonistic delights and creature comforts. Yet the American Empire has added a whole new dimension to lordship of the planet. With our technology run amok, we are simultaneously exploiting and destroying the planet.

The “American Way of Life,” which George H.W. Bush proclaimed to be “non-negotiable,” is a system based on greed, narcissism, selfishness, mean-spiritedness, economic subjugation, belligerence, and militarism. How could a person in their right mind truly believe that the Christian God, and Christ in particular, would embrace, condone, or bless a means of existence premised on such contemptible elements?

Romans 13:8 reads, “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.”

We US Americans loved our neighbors in Vietnam so much that we slaughtered 3 million of them. And surely the millions of Iraqis we have murdered through our slow motion genocide (beginning with the Gulf War, progressing by way of the draconian economic sanctions under Clinton that resulted in the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children, and continuing to this very day via the war crimes of the Bush Regime) recognized our deep adoration as they died. Throughout our history, we have committed a multitude of “loving acts” that have resulted in torment, suffering and death for millions upon millions of people. (For a detailed analysis of the history of our deeply malevolent foreign policy, visit http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com
/Foreign_Policy/US_ForeignPolicy.html)

Matthew 6:24 reminds us that, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

Sorry, God. You can’t have our souls. We owe them to the company store. Under our glorious free market system, which is nominally constrained by a government infested with crony capitalists, wage and debt slavery are virtually inevitable for a majority of the population. A tiny percentage of the population in the US owns and controls nearly all the wealth and means of production, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs and to bend to their powerful economic will (though one can successfully argue that we can defy them by choosing to exercise our “God-given” right to sleep under a bridge). So devout is our faith in mammon and so strong is our desire for wealth that many of us actually continue to believe the idiotic myth (which our opulent masters love to perpetuate) that we live in a meritocracy where “anyone can get rich if they just work hard enough.”

Luke 14:33 delivers the message that, “So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.”

Forsaketh all that we hath? Are you kidding? We are the most avaricious creatures the world has ever known. Comprising only 5% of the world’s population, we greedily consume over a fourth of the world’s resources. Gluttony be thy name, America. And to ensure that our repulsive parasitism isn’t interrupted, we feed the military industrial complex (http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1241.shtml/) around 700 billion of our tax dollars each year to maintain our imperial killing machine. We spend nearly as much on war as the rest of the world combined. Bearing in mind that only five out of a hundred human beings on the Earth are US Americans, think how absurd it is to argue that we need that much firepower to “defend ourselves.” The truth is that we hath far more than our share and we are not planning on forsaking that which we hath anytime soon.

Matthew 6:20 cautions people to, “….store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal;”

Perhaps we need to worry more about the worms devouring our rotting souls than the moths and rust attacking the multitude of worldly treasures that have become our raison de’etre. Acquiring more, more and still more is the American obsession. When is enough enough, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Pete Coors, Richard Mellon-Scaife, Michael Dell, Helen Walton and the rest of your despicable ilk?

And many of the rest of us pursue the American Dream of fame and fortune with the ferocity of a pack of starving wolves devouring a fresh kill. Television, which rivals mammon for dominance in the pantheon of the perverse gods many US Americans truly worship, is rife with programs (they don’t call it “programming” for nothing) which glorify our sick fascination with the status, power, and (at least temporary) satiation of greed that comes with material prosperity. Yes indeed, The Apprentice, Deal or No Deal, The Moment of Truth, and a veritable smorgasbord of similarly inane, shallow and narcissistic vulgarities are essential building blocks for those who are determined to achieve the spiritual perversion so characteristic of the quintessential “American.”

“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves.”

–Matthew 21:12

Few decent human beings (save those still suffering the mental disease of allegiance to capitalism–which is inculcated into us from birth and constantly perpetuated by the filthy whores of the corporate media) could imagine Jesus Christ walking onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange without a whip in hand to drive out our rotten-to-the-core modern day money changers.

“Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?”

”I tell you the truth,” Jesus said, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me….”

”Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”

—Matthew 25: 37-43

Given the above, as a rational and moral person, dear reader, what do you suppose Christ would think of a feculent, cynical system such as ours that values wealth and fame over people, pours buckets of money into wars that generate buckets of blood, maintains a “justice” system used to maintain the deep class divisions (in our allegedly “classless society”) by coddling and protecting privileged contemptible criminals (i.e. Bush and Cheney) while condemning many non-violent impoverished offenders to the hell of the prison industrial complex (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199812/prisons), and rains money upon the opulent when they are “needy” while offering tooth and nail resistance to nearly any attempt to aid the poor (witness the rapid-fire $30 billion bailout of Bear Stearns and the criminally slow and inadequate response to the Katrina crisis in New Orleans)?

The day we empty our prisons of non-violent petty criminals and fill them with the likes of Clinton, O’Reilly, Scalia, Koch, and Condi Rice (the power elite and their enablers), bring our imperial legions home, down-size our military to a modest defensive-sized force, cut all “aid” to the murderous state of Israel, utilize our nation’s wealth to eliminate homelessness and hunger AND to provide universal healthcare and higher education, eliminate corporate person-hood, nationalize industries vital to human survival (i.e. health care, oil, utilities, food), criminalize factory farming, permanently shut down Wall Street and Madison Avenue, and sweep away the last vestiges of the virulent planetary affliction known as consumerism….that will be the day that we will begin to even resemble a nation that wouldn’t leave Christ retching in disgust.

Meanwhile, as a nation premised on savage capitalism, we are the antithesis of a Christian nation. Collectively we are an abomination. May God and the rest of the world have mercy on us all as our precious empire crumbles.

Jason Miller is a recovering US American middle class suburbanite who strives to remain intellectually free. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at JMiller@bestcyrano.com

An Analysis of Obama-mania

Super Tuesday II, as Fox dubbed it, took some steam out of the Obama bandwagon, but he's still the likely Democratic nominee, and therefore the likely president- to-be. Which is remarkable, really-a nonparticipant can only stand slack jawed in awe of Obamamania. Previously rational people whom LBO admires, like Barbara Ehrenreich and Christopher Hayes, have fallen in love with the Senator's brand of change we can believe in, a slogan that has to be one of the emptiest since Sandburg's 'The people, yes!,' that the New Party used in New York in the early 1990s. Obama has become the Tokio Hotel of politics.



On what is this mania based? Obama is inspiring the young, lifting the alienated off their couches, and catalyzing a new movement for ... change, presumably one we can believe in. The content of this change is hard to specify. Some serious leftists we know and love point to Obama's roots as a community organizer in Chicago, though many people in a position to know say he didn't rock many boats in those days. He was embraced by foundation liberals, however, who greased his way into the Harvard Law School via a lakefront condo.



All of which doesn't make Obama uniquely bad: he's just another mainstream Democrat with a sleazy real estate guy in his past. Though he's being touted as an early opponent of the Iraq war, he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004: 'There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position ...' He voted to renew the PATRIOT Act, campaigned for happy warrior Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont in 2006, and wants to increase the size of the U.S. military. He supports Israel's continuing torture of the Palestinians penned into the Gaza Strip. A Congressional Quarterly study found his Senate voting record was virtually indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton's; the only major difference in their votes is a surprising one: a move to limit class actions suits against corporations, which Clinton voted against, and Obama for. Obama's vote was against the preferences of a Dem financial base, trial lawyers, but pleasing to the Fortune 500 and Wall Street.



In this binary world, when you criticize Obama, people immediately include you're a Hillary Clinton fan. Uh, no. Her politics are bellicose and neoliberal. Her 'experience' consists largely of having watched her husband be president for eight years, though it's likely they were sleeping in separate bedrooms for much of the time. A plague on all their houses.



Agendas



Some more thoughtful victims of Obama Disease point to detailed position papers on the candidate's website. These must always be taken with a grain of salt, especially during primary season. Candidate Bill Clinton promised to 'invest in people' and ended up being the president of 'a bunch of fucking bond traders,' as Hillary's husband memorably put it. LBJ campaigned as the peace candidate in 1964, and ended up killing a million Indochinese.



Obamians also point to his rejection of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC); they put him on their list of rising stars, and he asked to be removed. Encouraging-except for the fact that his chief economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, the fellow who told the Canadians not to take the anti-NAFTA rhetoric seriously, is the DLC's chief economist. Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures. That hire is more significant than asking to be struck from a list.



Big capital would have no problem with an Obama presidency. Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for him at his Greenwich house last spring, 'The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,' one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they're socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he's the man to do their work. They're also confident he wouldn't undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth. You could say the same about Clinton-but you know those hedge fund guys. They like a contrary bet. A share of Obama stock on the Iowa Electronic Market was 30 on May 19, 2007, the day of Jones's Obama bash; it peaked at 86 on March 1, a gain of 187% (in a year where triple digits are rare). It's since settled back into the low 70s, which is still quite a gain.



The phantasmic



LBO would be the last to argue that politics is all about rationality. Fantasy matters. But fantasy can have some relationship to policy. Take the example of Ronald Reagan, a man for whom Obama professed some admiration for having rolled back the 'excesses of the 1960s and 1970s' and bringing back 'a sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.' Reagan promised to make America 'stand tall again' and 'to get government off the backs of the people.' Certainly these phrases didn't appeal to the rational faculties of the electorate, but they did correspond with a military buildup, a greater willingness to go to war, and an economic agenda of deregulation and reverence for private wealth. And Reagan had real political forces behind him-first, his cabal of right-wing Southern California businessmen, later supplemented by the corporate and financial establishment, and operating with a playbook written by movement conservatives and the Heritage Foundation.



What does Obama have? A lot of slogans that connect with nothing in the real world; in fact, their very emptiness may be the source of their appeal, because it allows people to project whatever they want to onto him, without getting bogged down in specifics, as Reagan liked to say. (Under attack from Clinton and McCain, he did get specific in his long Wisconsin victory speech. This brought attacks from Karl Rove and others, placing him on the 'far left'; it's not likely we'll see much more of this irresponsible stuff from Obama as November approaches.) And despite the grand claims of enthusiasts, he doesn't really have a movement behind him-he's got a fan club. How does a fan club hold a candidate accountable? It's not like he'll take the phone calls of all those 27-year-olds who gave him $100 on the web as quickly as he'd answer a summons from Paul Tudor Jones.



Obama's appeal is a strange thing. Though he's added to it as his political momentum builds, his original base consisted of blacks and upper-status whites. The black support is out of racial pride, but the initial white support was driven by his post-partisan, post-racial appeal. Well-off whites love to hear a black man say that racism has largely receded as a toxic force, though it's really hard to figure out what the hell he's talking about in a world where black households earn about 60% as much as whites, and where black men are incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white men. And what of this post-partisan business? Politics is about conflicts over resources and priorities, and over the state's power to coerce; how ever could comity prevail in a world where interests and preferences diverge so widely?



As Adolph Reed told LBO, an Obama presidency



"could give us the worst of all possible of worlds: one in which race is completely repackaged as a discourse of celebration and, to the extent that that had already become the only metaphor through which American politics could accommodate critical discussion of inequality, the language of ‘disparity,' it will no longer be possible for critiques of inequality to be heard as an appropriate topic for political discussion. Obama already when he talks 'black' (e.g., with his 'Cousin Pookie' riffs, which are the exact equivalent of Shelby Steele's rantings about underclass, shiftless 'Sam') opts for the Bookerite/Cosbyite metaphor of victim-blaming in the phony first-person plural, and he has always played the Immigrant Success Story Up From Slavery Ain't America Great and Don't I Show It angle. And, moreover, what many of his white supporters like about him is that he doesn't have the ‘chip on the shoulder' that so many indigenous blacks do. Add all this to his commitment to appealing to the right and to the investor class, and the upshot is that inequality could lose whatever vestigial connotations it has as a species of injustice and be fully consolidated as the marker, on the bottom end that is, of those losers who failed to do what the market requires of them or a sign of their essential inferiority."



Turn to cheer



Enough critique; the dialectic demands something constructive to induce some forward motion. There's no doubt that Obamalust does embody some phantasmic longing for a better world-more peaceful, egalitarian, and humane. He'll deliver little of that-but there's evidence of some admirable popular desires behind the crush. And they will inevitably be disappointed.



As this newsletter has argued for years, there's great political potential in popular disillusionment with Democrats. The phenomenon was first diagnosed by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. As Wills explained it, throughout the 1950s, left-liberals intellectuals thought that the national malaise was the fault of Eisenhower, and a Democrat would cure it. Well, they got JFK and everything still pretty much sucked, which is what gave rise to the rebellions of the 1960s (and all that excess that Obama wants to junk any remnant of). You could argue that the movements of the 1990s that culminated in Seattle were a minor rerun of this. The sense of malaise and alienation is probably stronger now than it was 50 years ago, and includes a lot more of the working class, whom Stanley Greenberg's focus groups find to be really pissed off about the cost of living and the way the rich are lording it over the rest of us.



Never did the possibility of disappointment offer so much hope. That's not what the candidate means by that word, but history can be a great ironist.

India: Disappearing The Poor

By Jeremy Seabrook

10 April, 2008
The Guardian


As if to demonstrate that poverty is now a residual issue in the world, the poor are being slowly eliminated from the imagery of the busy global media. “Nowhere in Bollywood films do you see a poor person,” says Pandurang Hegde, activist in the forests of northern Karnataka. “There is no place in the iconography of the new India for anything that suggests impoverishment and loss.”

Nor on the majority of TV stations which have flooded India with their unblinking radiance. The poor have become peripheral figures, with scarcely walk-on parts in the great drama of liberalisation. All that is known is that those living below the fanciful economic latitudes designated by “the poverty line” are being reduced. Poverty is clearly a mop-up operation, and will eventually be abolished by the rising tide which, as everyone knows, lifts all boats. This is an automatic consequence of economic growth. If the poor scarcely appear in the media, is this because their destiny is to become, if not rich, at least no-longer-poor?

If they have not yet been completely eclipsed, at least their wellbeing is now entrusted to NGOs, charities and international institutions, far more dependable custodians of their welfare than any self-help, or organisation on their own behalf. “The poor” have become an object of piety in a secular world. Who does not strive to raise them out of their misery? Is that after all not the purpose of wealth-creation?

Window-dressing is perhaps the highest art in the culture of globalism. In spite of appearances, poverty exhibits a disagreeable tenacity in the world. Since its removal would be an arduous process, it is, perhaps, easier to obliterate the representation of the poor in the world’s media than to wipe out poverty.

It may also be that the media vanishing trick prefigures something far more sinister, preparatory, perhaps, to more material disappearances. For their persistent presence remains a spectre at the global feast. What an agreeable place the world is - or would be - without them: nothing to mar the smiling imagery of plenty, the abundance of the display window and the publicity machine, the shopping mall and the showroom, the wall-to-wall entertainment and TV channels of endless music and laughter.

There are daily intimations of a more brutal dematerialisation of the poor. Wholesale clearances of city slums intensify whenever some spectacular event is to be staged - Beijing has unceremoniously removed its urban poor for the Olympics. Delhi has been cleansing its slums in readiness for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Bengaluru is to become “slum-less” as a result of its “slum clearance with a mission” programme. On almost every map of the world’s major cities, the areas occupied by the urban poor appear as blank spaces, emblem of their future erasure.

Their embarrassing presence evokes an archaic world, in which humanity creates its own shelter out of industrial debris, scrapes a living off the garbage heaps of abundance, recycles the discarded goods of others, lives a pinched and frugal existence. In other words, the poor offer a ghastly example of meagre resource-use and compulsory austerity in a context where excess and extravagance are now the norm. No wonder they are increasingly intrusive: they embody our worst nightmare - this could also be our fate when the oil is exhausted, the taps run dry, the world overheats, the seas rise and the deserts encroach …

Some poor people have also internalised a sense of their own redundancy; and, only too eager to comply with this assessment of their worth, have obligingly rid the world of their presence. At least 140,000 farmers in India committed suicide between 1997 and 2007, almost certainly an underestimate, because the social shame of this cause of death impels many families to conceal it. These suicides are generally attributed to indebtedness: that people can be made to take responsibility for what are clearly socially-induced traumas suggests that the poor have become less capable of resisting personal culpability for the effects of economic forces over which they have no control.

Dr Sanjeev Jain is a psychiatrist at the Nimhans hospital in Bengaluru. He says every night the city hospitals deal with two or three dozen cases of suicide or attempted suicide. These he calls “accidents of modernity”, people for whom nothing has replaced decaying structures of meaning. Even the lowest castes - the sweepers and cleaners, removers of waste, tenders of animals and conservers of the environment - have seen many of their functions vanish, as much of their labour has been replaced by machines.

And where the poor do resist, how easy it is to label them outlaws, dacoits, criminals, Naxalites, terrorists. The prime minister of India has said that “the single largest internal security threat comes from Maoists”. This, too, is a form of fundamentalism, an ideology of radical nostalgia, a reaction of despair. How simple for the state to shoot them down, and write off their no-account lives as an “encounter” with militants, ultras, extremists, and all the other inventive taxonomies devised to justify the elimination of those they have impoverished to the point of hopelessness.

Arundhati Roy sees preparations for a “genocide” against the poor; although the word is not quite right in the context, since the poor are not a race. Povericide is an inelegant but more accurate word for what Arundhati Roy sees as a corollary of “the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India - the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own”.

As if to support this grim scenario, the ghost of hunger is presently being invoked by the global information machines. The cost of staple foods continues to rise - thanks, we are told, to changing appetites of (some of) the people of India and China, the diversion of agricultural land to jatropha, soya or sugar-cane for biofuel, the using up of fertile farmland for infrastructural projects (India lost over a million hectares of agricultural land between 1990 and 2005), erratic harvests which may or may not be an early symptom of climate change. The Malthusian insight, that no place is set at nature’s banquet for the poor, has been revised: no longer nature’s banquet, it is now a feast crafted by a global food manufacturing industry.

The poor are scattered and divided. While some will doubtless obligingly efface themselves by consuming pesticide, jumping on to the railway track or hanging themselves from a ceiling fan, others will join the doomed ranks of armed resistance, while yet others will almost certainly be drawn into spectacular acts of violence and terror.

In the perpetual artificial sunshine of the technosphere, within the global gated community in which all the inhabitants are rich, the poor have already ceased to exist. But it is one thing to banish them from the enchanted islands of plenty, that virtual reality of the fantasists of wealth, but quite another to erase them from a material world in which they remain an obdurate majority. Their refusal to go quietly into the oblivion for which they are apparently destined is likely to take unpredictable and malignant forms; since they are the footsoldiers of the militias, Maoists, mafiosi and militants who have flooded the spaces evacuated by governments for whom the poor no longer count.

Jeremy Seabrook is the author of over forty books.