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CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS Peter Kwong gives us the "New China" without illusions: from the "millionaires' fair" in Shanghai, with $60,000 diamond-studded dog leashes to one of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on the planet. How China's leaders swapped Marx and Mao for Milton Friedman. Alexander Cockburn on What's wrong with the U.S. left. They're sitting in darkened rooms weaving conspiracy fantasies about 9/11; they're blogging; they're confusing a medium with a movement; they're not doing enough to stop the war in Iraq. John Ross takes us along the stormy trail of the Mexican election. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
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Today's Stories July 14 / 15, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Ramzy Baroud July 13, 2006 Rev. William
Alberts Ramzi Kysia Rep. John P. Murtha Radford / Santos Stan Cox Saul Landau José
Pertierra Website of
the Day
July 12, 2006 John Ross John Stauber Robert Boston Wayne S. Smith John Graham Kevin Prosen Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
July 11, 2006 Dave Lindorff Dave Zirin Mokhiber / Weissman Amira Hass Clare Hanrahan Brian Cloughey Felice Pace Raed Jarrar Website of the Day
July 10, 2006 Paul Craig
Roberts Uri Avnery Roger Burbach Ron Jacobs Joshua Frank Missy Comley Beattie Alexander Cockburn
Stephen Green Paul Craig
Roberts Greg Moses Ralph Nader Laura Carlsen Conn Hallinan John Chuckman Fred Gardner Dr. Tod Mikuriya Pierre Tristam Lucinda Marshall David Swanson Heather Gray Dave Zirin
/ John Cox Mark Engler Michael Lettieri Ron Jacobs Jamal Juma' Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement
July 7, 2006 John Ross July 6, 2006 Nick Dearden John Stanton Ralph Nader Laray Polk Saul Landau Joshua Frank William S. Lind Adelman / Lindorff Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
Mike Whitney Saul Landau Ramzy Baroud Missy Comley Beattie Arthur Neslen Vincent Maruffi Paul Cantor Paul D. Johnson David Price
Col. Dan Smith Chris Floyd Marjorie Cohn James Brooks Medea Benjamin Matt Reichel Elisa Salasin Rick Wilhelm Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
July 3, 2006 Robert Bryce Dr. Bouthaina Shaban Julia Olmstead Dave Lindorff Andres Gomez Alan Singer Alexander Cockburn
Paul Craig
Roberts Stephen T.
Banko Daniel Cassidy Fawzia Afzal-Khan Jeff Taylor John Ross Greg Moses Laura Carlsen Justin E.H.
Smith Brian Cloughley Anthony Papa Mike Ferner Jerry Tucker Jane Goodall / Rick Asselta Phyllis Pollack Poets' Basement
June 30, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Heather Williams Burbach / Cantor Nick Dearden Michael J.
Smith Brian Concannon Virginia Tilley
Bill Quigley Ron Jacobs Paul Craig
Roberts June 28, 2006 Jorge Mariscal Greg Moses Mark Weisbrot Ramzy Baroud Dave Lindorff William S.
Lind Mike Ferner Zoltan Grossman
Marjorie Cohn Benjamin /
Jarrar William Hughes Doug Giebel Uri Avnery Alexander Cockburn
June 26, 2006 Don Santina Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Rafael Rodriguez-Cruz Evelyn Pringle Jonathan Cook
June 23, 2006 Youmans / Erakat Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Col. Dan Smith
June 22, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Winslow T.
Wheeler Tanya Reinhart Mike Marqusee William Blum
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Bastille
Day Weekend Edition Slavery and DeforestationIn AmazoniaBy HUGH O'SHAUGHNESSY Santarém, Brazil. For decades now the green movement has been tying itself in knots about this part of the world. The forest which covers Amazonia, 60 per cent of the land area of one of the world largest countries is, we are told a resource for humanity. Indeed the great Amazon itself is a resource for humanity. Doesn't it contain a fifth of all the world's fresh water? After all it is the world's greatest river, twelve times as big as the Mississippi as it flows past what is left of New Orleans and sixteen times as voluminous as the Nile as it flows past the rather more durable Pyramids. If you stand at the mouth of the Amazon, say downstream in Belém or on the great island of Marajó, you will see as much water flowing past you in a day as you would if you stood on Westminster Bridge in London beside Big Ben for a year. As your plane starts its descent into Belém you see a tiny city of a million people perched on the Amazon's muddy banks which is dwarfed by the mass of water flowing around and past it to the horizon. The other day I stood here in Santarém beside the Tapajós River, one of the largest of the Amazon's one thousand tributaries, as it moved to towards its confluence with the Amazon. The Tapajós measures 16 kilometres across and it flows through one of the states of Amazonia, Para, which is larger than Ireland, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg put together. Amazonia contains about a fifth of all plant, animal and insect species on the planet, half the bird species, the largest parrots, rodents and ants, not to speak of the longest snakes. And, greens of the world argue, ignorant Brazilians are allowing the Amazonian forests to be cut down mercilessly while the great Tapajós is polluted by the effluents of mercury which are released from the gold diggings upriver. These must be saved from its feckless inhabitants. Taken into care. Internationalised. Rescued. Saved for future generations the world over. Now. Immediately. There is no time to lose. Yet the argument, so often rehearsed in the Western media and pressure groups, is bizarre. No such international concern for someone else's country is mirrored in a demand for foreign supervision to prevent the sort of disastrous oil pollution as inflicted on US Alaska by the tanker Exxon Valdez. Or for foreign oversight of the exiguous but politically sensitive Israeli-controlled waters of the River Jordan, the centre of a desperate battle for water between the prosperous Israelis growing well irrigated herbs for European supermarkets and the battered Palestinians who just need something for their children to drink. One of the reasons why it is bizarre lies in the fact that the green discourse about Amazonia rarely devotes much time to the human inhabitants of the region as it does to the flora and fauna. A report just published by Venessa Fleischfresser, a leading Brazilian academic at the Federal University of Paraná, shows that a better focus on the human problems of the region who are so often ignored in the green discourse could reverse the ecological damage that is being caused. She has found that those areas of Amazonia where the land is being cleared with the greatest abandon are those where slavery is most in commonly practiced. Now the region has a long and shameful record of slavery. The first Jesuit missionaries, who sought to evangelise the Indians, held out against their being enslaved by the Portuguese conquistadores and landowners. The political pressure on these missionaries was so great in the 17th century that they decided to lift their opposition to the introduction of foreign slaves from Africa if the indigenes were spared the forced labour. Then in the mid-18th century the Jesuits themselves were expelled from Portuguese-controlled lands and the order itself suppressed. Education in Brazil, which was at the time mainly in their hands, suffered a blow from which it is only beginning to recover. There was a massive revolt of Indians, blacks and poor whites in Amazonia in 1835 which was finally put down with the utmost cruelty in 1840. Then the rubber boom brought more slavery to the seringueiros, those who were recruited to tap the rubber trees. The South American rubber barons who worked the seringueiros to death were brought low only after the publication of a damning report written by Roger Casement when he was a British diplomat and before he threw in his lot with Irish revolutionaries and was condemned to hang at Pentonville prison in August 1916. Now there is a new form of slavery as landowners in Amazonia concentrate on clearing the forest in order to plant soya beans. In great demand throughout the world, particularly by those responsible for the fast growing economy of China, soya is the crop of the hour in Brazil. Dr Fleischfresser shows that slavery is widespread in Amazonia with poor unemployed country people being bussed in from North-East Brazil and put to work on clearing the forests. Money for their bus fares is loaned to them. They have to buy their needs at the landowners' stores and their meagre earnings are never sufficient to allow them to be able to pay off a gradually mounting debt. The employers' fraud is the same one which was played on the seringueiros kept in similar bondage by the rubber barons in Casement's time. Though many cases of slavery go undetected, between 1999 and 2001 2,600 people were found and freed from slavery while in 2002 a further 1,149 people were emancipated. This has needed the passing of a law making such abuses a federal crime and taking it out of the often rickety justice system of the individual states. There is a move afoot to set up a much needed witness protection programme to safeguard those who give evidence from the casual and often lethal violence of the landowners. Eight workers, for instance, were murdered on a ranch in a village called São Félix do Xingu in February 2003 and less than a year later three Ministry of Labour inspectors were killed at Unaí, the home of many people owning land in the state of Pará. The pattern of slavery and violence is found principally in areas where illegal clearing of the forest is happening. Corruption connected with illegal clearing is prevalent. In December 2004, for instance, the Federal Police arrested 18 civil servants in the State of Para and accused them of corruptly making over to landowners titles to great swathes of public land which were to be stripped of their trees. International attention was directed to the problems of the area only when a US missionary Dorothy Stang was murdered by landowners' assassins on 12 February last year. Born in Ohio, the 73 year-old nun had been in Brazil since 1966 and taken Brazilian nationality. Since 1982 she had been on the Brazilian bishops' Pastoral Land Commission. Sister Dorothy had been keen on teaching peasants to read: nine out of ten of the slaves are found to be illiterate. She had given evidence to a parliamentary commission of inquiry into illegal logging, naming individuals and companies. She lived though most of the Western-supported military dictatorship which blighted Brazil and its forests. In his marvellous book Big Mouth: the Amazon speaks Stephen Nugent, himself a US citizen, explains, "The structure of the national economy is inseparable from the US hemispheric policies in which Brazil has... functioned as a major market - controlled between 1964 (when a US-backed coup delivered Brazil into the hands of a cabal of generals) and 1985 (when the generals slunk out of office) by a class which did a fantastic job of lining its pockets." On Sister Dorothy's death the government of President Lula jumped into action and created a ministerial task force and helicoptered 2,000 troops to the scene of the crime. Yet violence and slavery have not yet been stamped out here. But President Lula has been building up his record in tackling Amazonian problems. Since he came into office in January 2003 he has put preservation orders on more than 240,000 square kilometres of land, more than three times the area of the twenty-six counties and twice as much as his predecessor decreed in either of his four-year terms. He has introduced a family support system which helps poor families provided they keep their children at school and thus give them the tools to make better lives for themselves. Lula, who is far ahead in the polls and should win a second presidential term of four years in elections to take place on 1 October, knows that the problems of Amazonia lie more with the people than with plants and animals. That's something that foreign ecologists who agitate about Brazil should start learning. Hugh O'Shaughnessy writes, inter alia, for the Dublin
magazine Village.
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                    |
