By Suzanne Baroud 10 January, 2009 Palestine Chronicle
Ironically, it was in Palestine, 20 years ago, that I concluded that there is no God. For how could a God, who claims to love all and treat all with impartiality, allow such horrors like those in Palestine to happen?
This unbelief grew stronger with each curfew, with each strike that mourned the death of yet one more martyr, with a decapitation induced by gunfire in the main square on a sunny Ramallah afternoon so many years ago. But it was cemented the day I had to tell one of my fifth grade students that his brother had just been taken away by the Israeli army. His expression, his body going limp, the shuddering of his shoulders as he wept with his classmates…that’s what finally did it. Nearly 20 years have passed since that day, and I have now married into a Gazan family. I am a wife and mother, the sister and aunt of so many kids living the horror of what Gaza has become. As we watch the footage of Israel’s onslaught, I hear myself, whispering as I see one more martyred child, “Run to the angels….run.” After so many years, this living nightmare is fostering a burning desire to believe once again in the afterlife.
Caged, starved, sniped, suffocated. They are slaughtered like sheep, but the leaders of the free world just cannot seem to find a moment to comment. Golfing, vacationing, Obama, Bush, even the EU, they just aren’t important enough. My mutterings have become a like a canter. I call out to these stricken and shattered little bodies, who frankly never experienced life to lose it. The only consolation to offer is the respite found in death.
A crowd gathers, shrouded in gas, smoke and dust. In the front stand eight young fathers, each holding a white swaddled bundle of what used to be a son, a daughter. For a few moments there is no screaming, no chanting or crying, but a moment of quiet and stillness that presses one to wonder just whom has been granted the greater mercy, the toddler who caught the snipers bullet, or the young father, who will have to find some way to live beyond this moment?
A young boy sits on the sidewalk beside his mother. She is propped up against the wall of a collapsed building and her life is bleeding out all over the sidewalk. It is spattered on his face and smeared on his shirt. She uses the last of her strength to lift her arm and clutch his cheek in her palm and then she is gone. He rests his head in his hands and cries. He is all alone.
The camera zooms in on the scene of a freshly detonated building, a civilian home. A little girls brown curly hair covered in dust and eyes wide open is all that can be found of her. Her mother wails and pulls her hair while her father frantically searches among the rubble for the rest of his daughter, where could she be? I whisper again, “you will be made whole again in Paradise. Run to the angels”. What amazing faith. What strong devotion that a father loses his mother, father, wife and eight children, that this man before anything can assert, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”. He holds his child, now still and ashen, he smothers him with kisses and then gently pulls back the sheet to expose two bullet holes in his chest. He then tenderly places the child beside his brother and again, pulls the sheet back of his youngest son to reveal a single snipers bullet to the chest. He can barely compose himself and he moans to the sympathizing camera man, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”.
An old and wrinkled Imam so lovingly cradles a little girl’s lifeless body, as if mishandling her now could inflict more pain, he mumbles a benediction and gently lies her beside her sisters and her brothers in the mass grave. I try to comfort her, saying, “Finally, a place of safety. Rest beside your sister. Your brother. Put your fears to rest and meet your beloved Prophet and the many of your little friends who have fallen before you.”
Hospitals, schools, mosques, civilian homes, UN shelters, all worthy targets. Doctors, medicines, food and water, truckloads of relief from all corners of the world line up for miles at the Egyptian border but they are refused entry. Security is high, food is scarce, water is completely gone.
Faith seems to spring forth in the strangest of moments. For me, it seems to be coming full circle out of desperation and in agony, for the sake of the snow-white souls of the many bloodied and dismembered innocents of Gaza.
UN workers coordinate with Israelis to get civilians to safety inside a UN school. Hundreds are tucked inside the mutually agreed safe haven. Soon after, the school comes under Israeli fire. Bruised and battered refugees stare Satan in the face, clad in his fatigues. Hundreds wounded, scores dead, many lost and unaccounted for. Governments negotiate a cease-fire. Rumors buzz of conspiracies. The US President-elect is forever silent. Parents search beneath the collapsed walls for what remains of their children. Shattered concrete, random arms and legs, broken glass, tossed together in a bloody hodge-podge. But, in my mind, I see them whole, their little bodies swiftly being swept up into Paradise and I call out to them, “Run!”
- Suzanne Baroud is the Managing Editor of PalestineChronicle.com.
CAPITALISM AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL LIFE
Part1: The Killing Horizon
By Juan Santos
The bottom line is profit. Profit and the lust for it is capitalism’s event horizon. Much like what happens at the boundary of a black hole (“boundary of a black hole” is roughly what the term “event horizon” means in the theory of general relativity) any energy, information or meaning that passes the threshold of a consciousness driven by profit disappears into the super-gravitational field of the black hole itself – never to be seen or heard of again.
Nothing can be seen once it enters this realm, and nothing, having entered, ever escapes. No light, no sign, no dawn of understanding can re-emerge. Anything, any light, any object, any thought, any meaning, purpose, or any human feeling is swallowed and for all practical purposes, obliterated there.
No communication can transpire between inside and outside.
The event horizon of profit-consciousness functions as an inviolate barrier between what appear to be mutually exclusive worlds. Those of us on this side of the event horizon can only guess, but never really know, what happens on the other side. What we know of what is inside the black hole of the capitalist consciousness can only be inferred from what seems to happen at its horizon. We are left to assume that what happens there is annihilation, or its equivalent. It seems that the only thing that can enter that realm is money- life stripped of all meaning except a numerical designation, like a concentration camp inmate with a serial number tattooed on her forearm.
There are things we can infer from this side of the horizon about what happens on the other side, in the black hole of the capitalist mentality – things that show up outside that tell us something about what happens within it. Things like the concentration camp victim, like the mass graves in Guatemala, the unearthed Mayan corpses left by death squads… they seem to emerge from the black hole and give us a glimpse of what is inside: and, beyond that, sometimes we almost get real glimpses in. We get glimpses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, of someone’s recollection of headless frogs spewing blood after the psychopathic child, George W. Bush, has lit a firecracker he’s inserted in their mouths and hurled them through the air. We know these things – we glimpse them, those of us who are paying the strictest kind of attention. But, mostly, nothing escapes, or that which seems to escape the pull of the black hole for a moment is immediately sucked back into the realm of oblivion as if it never happened.
But, as often as not, we can tell what matters to those in the center of civilization’s
black gravity – its centers of “power”, by what doesn’t happen out here in the real world – on this edge of the horizon -as much as by what does happen.
Notice. Notice what is taken “seriously” by the denizens of the dark center of “power” – if anything beyond the next quarterly profit and loss statement can be said to be taken seriously at all.
Notice where the $700 billion in “bailout” money is going. The black hole that some people feared would swallow the Earth when the CERN particle accelerator was launched in Europe didn’t appear there. It appeared thousands of miles away – on Wall Street – and $700 billion in “bail out” money is going into that black hole, never to be seen again.
It’s going to fix problems that have no real existence, that are tied to values that have no real existence. It’s going down the rabbit hole, the black hole, into the land of illusion, the land of swindles, the land of lies, of the selling of the negation of values, of mirrors upon mirrors, into the unreal land of black magic, where it will impact nothing but the “faith” of capitalist financiers and wizards in their ability to live on – and to sustain themselves with – lies and illusion in a system that is fundamentally not sustainable. They call this psychic trick- this denial – “faith” in the markets, liquidity and credit (and to give credit, of course, means nothing but to put faith or belief in something or someone) – even as the credit markets are drying up. They are drying up because no one who is sane can any longer believe the lie. The whole thing is incredible, unbelievable. Unworthy of credit, trust, belief. One might say it this way. The system itself is “subprime.”
Such faith- faith in the unsustainable – is nothing more or less than faith in a lie. The whole thing is based on what Ayn Rand – the late high priestess of capitalism, cruelty, arrogance, free markets and the “virtue” of selfishness, called, ironically enough, given the context, the “blank out.”
All it takes is one stroll down Wall Street to get that Wall Street is “America’s” temple district – the sense of being on “holy” ground is palpable – and all it takes is one glance to get that none of the financial wizards really knows what’s going on… they know not what they have wrought, they know not whom they have robbed; they have invented a house of lies so complex that they themselves can no longer follow the plot or the floor plan. What we know – and what they know, and what Bush knows and Obama and McCain – what they all know- is that the $700 billion the US government has earmarked for the swindlers and deniers is going to cover the lie, is going to keep their asses out of prison, is going to prevent revolt against their system, which profits at the expense of all of us.
It’s not going to so-called “Main Street,” and – even if it did – who’s on Main Street if not merely the junior, local and regional versions of the players on Wall Street – the ones getting their hands dirty – the ones that exploit us face to face, rather than from the remote heights of the now-obliterated World Trade Center?
Yes, who’s on Wall Street, who’s on Main Street, who’s on ghetto streets and barrio streets, and who, after all is on Skid Row, or on a dirt street in a third world village, living, not $700 billion – not even $200 billion, not even $200 or a twenty dollar bill. Living on 2 dollars a day. Or less.
Of course, outside the black hole, outside the house of mirrors, it’s plain to see. All profit comes at someone else’s expense. They have robbed the poor blind – that’s why they are poor. They have gutted the Earth of its soil, plant life, energy, forests and water tables: we are left with deserts and a $700 billion black hole. That’s why the Earth is dying. They profit, as the traditional Hopi elders told us, at the expense of all life. That’s where the limos, and the mansions (whether its one mansion like Obama’s or 13 of them like McCain’s) come from: at the expense of all life. That’s what happens. And they want to maintain their “faith” in it.
Now, notice what doesn’t happen.
Humanity faces a real crisis – one that threatens not only Wall Street, but all life on Earth. Call it Global Warming, call it Peak Oil, call it running out of water on a global scale, call it the collapse of industrial agriculture. Call it fisheries collapsing, call it mass extinction. Call it the potential of planetary death. Call it what is inside the Black Hole made visible, palpable in its meaning. Call it the real event horizon. Call it the Killing horizon. It’s every bit as complex in all of its intersections as the financial “crisis,” but, unlike the financial “crisis,” it’s real.
And what happens?
Nothing. No significant action. At all.
There’s no $700 billion plan to save the Earth – which sustains us all.
The only thing that has ever mattered to the rulers of this empire – and of every other empire- is profit; and profit, we will recall, always comes at someone’s expense – ours, the indigenous peoples in every corner of the planet whose lands and lives have been usurped; at the expense of the enslaved, from Babylon to the USA, at the expense of Polar Bears, Wolves, Buffalo, Dolphins, Bears – and now even the Chimpanzee faces extinction, along with Whales, and as much as 50% of all living species before this century – and this system – is finished with them.
Profit. At the expense. Of all life.
The capitalists can’t look at the meaning of it. They can’t bear to see the meaning and impact of their lives and how they live them. Blank out. They don’t know and can’t know, any more than George W. Bush can really afford to know what was happening when he stuck firecrackers in frog’s mouths and sent them sailing through the air with the fuse sparkling (that, after all, is why he drinks – not to know.) Maybe he imagined as a boy that the frogs were B24 bombers in WW2, and that when the firecracker exploded, it was flak hitting the nose of the plane, right where the navigator sat, and that the blood was the navigator’s blood. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to look at the shattered skulls, the exposed spines, the blood, and know what he had done. Or maybe he looked, and delighted in what he saw. We’ll never know. It’s lost in the black hole.
Maybe the financial wizards think of derivatives and scam mortgages like Bush thought of frogs. The thrill, the drama of making a kill, of scamming, lying, getting over on others less powerful – the nobodies – the frog people – like you and me, the frog people who live on Elm Street, on ghetto and barrio streets, on Skid Row, on dirt streets, on Reservations, and along trails in the Amazon jungle and paths in the high Andes of Bolivia. We are all, each in our own way, the frog people. One can readily infer, from what happens at the event horizon, that the financiers see us just that way.
But, maybe we’ll never know. It seems to have disappeared in the black hole of denied memory, impossibility, evasions, and lies, just as Bush’s childhood memories lay hidden in the dense black hole of unresolved alcoholism. But we know this; for them, regular people – and animals, forests, polar bears, wolves and glaciers – are invisible. We’re on the other side of their event horizon, and they don’t care what happens to us. They are pulling us all inexorably into the gravity well from which no light escapes. They call the collapse of their house of financial lies a “crisis.” In the U.S., people like the Republican vice presidential candidate call the Killing horizon – the potential of planetary death – a “hoax.”
But, on a planetary scale, as everything unravels and is thrown into increasingly radical imbalance, people are starting to understand that what we see is what we get. And they are starting to see what has remained hidden in the realms of dark gravity and power. The event horizon, the Killing horizon, is drawing ever nearer.
And people are starting to decide for themselves what constitutes a hoax and what is, in fact, an actual crisis. We are deciding what and who needs and deserves a rescue –a “bailing out” – It’s not the wizards and merchants of death; it’s the frogs, lizards, plants, forests, beavers, bears, and human children.
You decide who and what nurtures us all and who and what destroys us. You decide. Is it saner to hug a tree, a cold stone building on Wall Street, or a stock certificate? Look at it. You decide. Everything that matters to you depends on the nature of your decision.
CAPITALISM AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL LIFE
Part 2: Burning Down the House
“...That’s part of the fundamental problem; that people do not even understand that
the real world is what is real; without a real physical world you don’t have any kind of economic system. The real world is primary; that’s the first thing we need to do; is to recognize that the real world is primary.” – Derrick Jensen –
It is upon us now to confront the greatest crisis in the lifespan of humankind.
Civilization – the destructive way of the City – has carried us to a climax of radical imbalances, a global eco-crisis, a state the traditional Hopi elders called Koyaanisqatsi:
koy.aa.nis.qat.si (Hopi) [n] 1. crazy life 2. life out of balance 3. life disintegrating 4. life in turmoil 5. a way of life that calls for another way of living.
Two intersecting realities face us; the two faces of eco-crisis. “Eco” means “home.” It is the root meaning of the terms “ecology” and “economy.” We face collapse in both arenas – arenas which are regarded as “separate” by virtue of a semantic, psycho-cultural sleight of hand, but which are, in reality, profoundly interdependent. In this essay, we will explore three premises, in the hopes that their exploration will help enable us to maintain our balance, to see clearly what is unfolding – collapsing – around us and within us; and so that we might act in accordance with the forces of Life, and thus sustain ourselves for this generation and the generations of our children’s children’s children. We live in a culture and under an economic system that is killing the world, and it is crucial that as it collapses we are able to deconstruct it, to dismantle the illusions that we have been steeped in since birth, that we become sane enough, so that – at a minimum – those of us who survive might never again reproduce a way of “life” that holds the potential to destroy all life; that we might not repeat or replicate a way of death.
All of us have been raised in a global capitalist civilization; all of us, even the most radical and astute among us, the most indigenous among us, have internalized much of its values, its premises; its lenses. The lenses are tinted. Their color is death. We don’t see clearly the relationship between ecology and economy. We are cutting off our own left hands, blow by blow, with an axe at the wrist, and call it “Making a Living.” The elitists see it more clearly: They call it “Making a Killing.”
The first thing we need to understand, in order to grasp the relationship between the economic and ecological crises, is this:
Production = Destruction, and Capitalist Production = Unbridled Destruction
Production of food, for example, for most species, means destruction of members of other plant or animal species. This is the case for humans as well, no matter how society and production is organized, and it is the case for every form of life except those involved in photosynthesis, which destroy no other forms of life, but which, rather, transform sunlight and minerals dissolved in water into life. All other forms of life, from the herbivores to the carnivores, destroy individual members of other species of life in order to survive.
Maintaining the balances between production, reproduction and destruction is utterly essential for the continuance of life on this planet. Such balance depends on reciprocity. In every ecosystem there are untold examples of such reciprocity; for a very simple example, an animal that eats a plant is also likely to play an essential role in that plant species’ propagation by spreading its seed or pollen, either through external bodily contact and transport, or through its digestive system, often providing key nutrients for the growth of new plants.
There is nothing in the nature of industrial capitalism that alters the centrality of this principle or that escapes its implications – the karmic results of willfully ignoring it. But, as I wrote in Apocalypse No! part3: The Law of Life and the Law of Death:
“Modern production is a wedding of opposites, a two faced god: its other face is destruction. Consumption for one is starvation for the Other. Production for one is destruction for the Other, and like a cancer, production has grown beyond all limits: the industrial system lives by destroying without limit, by ignoring the limits to growth.”
Far from entering into a reciprocal relationship with the rest of life, industrial capitalism simply consumes the other, reducing life to the level of a “resource,” without respect or regard for the balances of living systems or the ability of other forms of life to reproduce themselves at the species level – or, often, even at the level of the herd. Short term, short- sighted profit is the all-but universal standard for capitalist production. And profit, as noted in part one of this essay, always comes at someone else’s expense. In a recent interview, Derrick Jensen spoke directly to the essential nature of the process:
“Production, at base, is the conversion of the living to the dead…GNP is a measure of how quickly the world, the real physical world, is turned into economic products.”
At root, profit means the destruction of life and living systems for short term gain – that is its most fundamental relationship to the Earth and to all species – including human beings. Beyond that, in order to survive the competition in the interim before the final bell, every capitalist project must grow in relationship to its competitors or be driven out of business; it must convert more and more of what is living into what is dead, and do so ever more cheaply. As with cancer, the process only stops when the host expires. Capitalism as such, then, is a prescription for global suicide, one that follows its own internal logic, burning down its own house with ruthless, self-reinforcing discipline – like any other death cult. The system is producing exactly what it is designed to produce; Global Death. When the parasitism of profit can no longer expand, due to ecological or political and military limits, or due to its own inherent systemic contradictions, economic growth flips into its opposite, economic contraction – economic depression, it’s called. The disease goes into a temporary period of remission, and reorganizes itself for a new assault on the body of its host.
The next thing we need to grasp to understand the intersecting realities of ecological and economic crisis has already been clearly implied:
Profit = Theft
Profit, by definition, is imbalance, robbery and theft. It can arise only from the long term degradation of life and of the ability of ecosystems to reproduce themselves in balance. Where there is profit, something must become unbalanced, the scales must shift to take from one and add to the other without return.
Of necessity, natural economies, which are local and regional, rely strictly on what is called the solar budget, and they do not involve profit – they involve equitable trade – give and take reciprocal relationships that foster the long term well being of all of life’s communities, and in this they resemble the relationships of all other forms of life to one another; they exist in cooperation and symbiosis, and cannot take more than their “fair share,” lest they diminish or destroy the species and ecosystems upon whose existence and flourishing the natural culture and natural economy immediately depend. If we depend on Buffalo for food, we can’t kill too many of the Buffalo; we can’t destroy or diminish the prairie for our own short term “profit”; to do so would harm the Buffalo, and thus harm ourselves.
Natural cultures understand that the relationship is a tight-knit, close one, a relationship between relatives. They are the Buffalo: The Buffalo people. To destroy the Buffalo would be suicide. For a mountain dwelling people to destroy the mountaintop in order to get at the coal within it would be to, likewise, destroy the minerals, plants, waters and animals on which they directly and immediately depend for their own sustenance. They are the Mountain People. No natural culture or economy is bent on suicide. They are sustainable- which means life-sustaining.
No animal wantonly or systematically destroys other species. In just the same way, no animal wantonly reduces or destroys its own kind: to do so might be called sub-“bestial.” Perhaps “viral” would be the only term, although I know of no virus that attacks itself. Only in the case of the deadliest of conditions – AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and cancer, is there anything remotely approaching such a phenomenon.
But profit is theft. It requires not only the robbery, destruction and diminishment of other forms of life, but it also requires the robbery, destruction and diminishment of humans by humans. No one is immune.
One of the fundamental necessities or laws of capitalism – its whole point – is the generation of profit. But, nowhere in the context of the system in its “normal” operation is a word spoken about where capitalist profit comes from. There’s a reason for that.
Profit comes, in its most immediate, social sense, from the exploitation – the robbery, the diminishment – of “labor” – of human beings who work. In the simplest terms, since it is not the intent to turn this into a lecture on Marxist economic theory, profit is the result of the value added to “raw materials” or “resources” by people’s labor. The value added to the “raw materials” is produced by laborers working together in a social process, but the fruit of the process, the added value embodied in the final product, goes not to those whose labor collectively created it (they are paid a “wage” whose value is less than the value of what they produce with their labor during the time they work) – but, rather, the new value they create goes into the pocket of the capitalist, in the form of profit. Once the machinery (fixed capital) and non-human energy involved in production has been paid for by what it has produced, there is no other source for the extra value that comprises profit, except the human labor that has gone into it. The capitalist, operating at a level of function matched in its baseness by no animal on Earth, wantonly and systematically debases, reduces and even destroys its own kind in order to rob them of their energy. The capitalist functions as a parasite on the Earth and on other life forms, and also stands in the same relationship to its own species.
The subprime mortgage scam that threatens to collapse capitalist finance today is not a fluke: it’s an expression of the most fundamental nature of the capitalist system, a system based in deception, exploitation and robbery. The whole thing is a scam. The whole thing is theft. This brings us to the final understanding we need to grasp in order to put the concurrent appearance of global ecological and economic crisis into the beginnings, at least, of a coherent context. Here it is:
Money is Worthless
Not even parasites feed off of other parasites, but capitalists do. And, sometimes the most shopworn and obvious of truths are among the most profound; like this one: You can’t plant or eat money. For that matter, you can’t plant or eat gold or silver, either.
In the subprime mortgage crisis we see the same principle of rip–off that the capitalist applies to the worker, only in reverse. Rather than paying the worker less than the value of what she has produced, in this case the capitalists lured the workers into buying into what they couldn’t afford, a standard of living beyond what they were (under) paid for their labor. “Get ‘em comin’ and goin’” was the idea. After all, it always seemed to work before – the whole principle behind profit is cheating – getting something for nothing.
And, besides, that’s exactly what money is worth – nothing. Its value is invented, then sustained by faith or belief- by widespread cultural agreement. It has no substantive value in and of itself. The same is essentially true of gold and silver. They are essentially glittering metals of little practical use or value in comparison, to say, iron ore, copper or diamonds. When money was tied to the gold or silver standards, its value was just as much a convention – a matter of suspended thought, belief and common agreement, as the value of unbacked currencies – floating paper money – is today. You can’t eat a treasure chest of gold bullion, and you can’t plant it and grow it. There is hardly a rational way to assess its life-value, in the way that one can decide whether this bushel of corn is worth more to you, for your purposes, tastes and dietary needs, in the context of your natural, local ecology and economy, than that bushel of potatoes. Beyond the aesthetic value of their color, pliability and gleam, gold and silver have little tangible, intrinsic or organic value in any ecosystem or natural economy. And, as relatively rare, soft metals, they have historically had little widespread practical use. But, like the “almighty” paper dollar, they are considered “precious.” It’s a matter of sheer invention, sheer faith, sheer abstraction. It’s sheer invented nonsense – worth little more than the paper a sub-prime mortgage agreement is printed on; worth little more than the electrical energy that encodes a numeric value in a computer.
So, having shipped production of all kinds overseas, where workers produce a greater profit margin with their labor than they can in countries with relatively higher standards and costs of living, U.S. bankers and other capitalists began to scam each other, selling one another the debt owed by workers on mortgages they could not – by design – afford. Really, they were selling one another faith, based on the blank belief that the bill would never really come due – the same lie they sold to the workers who bought the mortgages in the first place. They were selling one another electronically configured squiggles in a computer data base, each preceded by a mathematical minus sign. But, the bill came due, the ripped off worker couldn’t afford it, the debt that had been sold could not be paid, and the whole game began to collapse, just like it does in the last days of any gangster. Like the last, desperate days of Bonnie and Clyde as the law closed in on them, karma is closing in on the banksters. In the meantime, someone else equally desperate ripped the copper (not gold) pipes out of the place, and the mortgaged house of cards could no longer be re-sold – except to you, as worker in the role of taxpayer. The end result is that billions, if not trillions of increasingly worthless dollars are being re- transferred, in a massive, unprecedented re-distribution of wealth, to the very thieves and killers who stole it in the first place, then “lost” it in a maze of lies and fraud.
The most important end result, however, is that socially produced wealth that might have gone toward creating a more Earth centered economy – or to halt, at least, the very worst ravages of the capitalist cancer on the body of the Earth and on all of the millions of species who will be driven to, or over, the edge of extinction -including, quite possibly, our own, will instead be funneled, as unearned profit (there is no other kind of profit), into the hands of the very forces that are destroying us all, to enable them to continue destroying us all, if possible.
That’s the logic. Capitalist civilization is a suicide pact. It’s a suicide cult – one that “profits,” however temporarily, at the expense of all life. Thank the Creator it’s falling apart at the seams, and that its smokestacks – its virtual death camps and crematoria – may fall right along with its financial racket. As Richard Heinberg wrote in an essay entitled The End of Growth that hit my mailbox only moments ago, “The worldwide financial crisis, and the decline in available energy, mean that we may also have seen the final year of aggregate world economic growth.” Let us pray that he’s correct; such a collapse may be the only chance we all have to survive.
Heinberg summed it up this way, “Growth is dead. Let’s make the most of it. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
Talking Heads – Burning Down the House
Watch out
You might get what you’re after
Cool babies
Strange but not a stranger
I’m an ordinary guy
Burning down the house
Hold tight wait till the party’s over
Hold tight we’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house
Here’s your ticket pack your bag: time for jumpin’ overboard
The transportation is here
Close enough but not too far, maybe you know where you are
Fightin fire with fire
All wet
Hey you might need a raincoat
Shakedown
Dreams walking in broad daylight
Three hun-dred six-ty five de-grees
Burning down the house
It was once upon a place sometimes I listen to myself
Gonna come in first place
People on their way to work baby what did you expect
Gonna burst into flame
My house
’s out of the ordinary
That’s right
Don’t want to hurt nobody
Some things sure can sweep me off my feet
Burning down the house
No visible means of support and you have not seen nuthin yet
Everything’s stuck together
I don’t know what you expect staring into the tv set
Fighting fire with fire
CAPITALISM AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL LIFE
Part 3: For the Earth to Live, Capitalism Must Die
This is the Day of Reckoning. This is the Time of Purification. This is the end of the “world”, the end of the city-state, the end of city life, of “Civilization.” The early Christians called it the “apocalypse,” the unveiling. Now, at last, the truth of what we have been presents itself unclothed. There is nowhere to hide. It is upon us. Like a cancer, capitalism, industrialism- truly the most advanced stage of civilization – “advanced” the way that a cancer is called “advanced” – has ravaged the body of the Earth. Life on Earth is disappearing. Nothing that can be done- or that will be done – under the system of global death called capitalism will save Life on Earth. The capitalist, as Karl Marx rightly noted, is “the soul of capital personified.” – a soul unable to see beyond the limits of its own immediate perception of “gain.” The capitalists as a whole – as a white imperial world-ruling class – understand the depth of the emerging crisis as well as we do. But they advance nothing more than schemes to sustain markets and profits, while life itself is allowed to perish in a holocaust in the making, one whose end is as certain as a nuclear winter.
There are no words to convey the depth of criminal horror and illness of the rulers of a system that would create the conditions not only for genocide on an unimaginable, all but limitless scale, but that would commit the murder of all life – ecocide, biocide and geocide – in order to shield themselves from change and protect and maintain their ability to produce “profit.”
But the holocaust we are entering is not made of a single criminal act – it is not the pushing of a button by a lone madman in a fit of religious mania or suicidal despair, it is, rather, the accumulation of a billion little deaths, the reaching of a critical threshold of death, until death itself boils over, the way that water, when it reaches its threshold of heat, roils over the edges of a pot, waging war on the fire that feeds it. It is the final explosion, the river of blood from the slaughterhouse spilling over its banks, no longer to be contained. It is the millions of children beaten, molested, raped, enslaved and “schooled.” It is the billions who live on less than a dollar a day. It is the slow soul murder of television and of going to “work.” It is a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is the homeless and the mad left hungry and frozen in the street. In the US, it is the millions of red, black and brown men locked behind prison bars, the mass terror of a racist system whose aim is to brutally reduce whole peoples to a state of utter subjugation, degradation isolation and immobility. Like the Nazi holocaust or the conquest of the Americas and Africa, it is not a single event, it is an historical process and an all – permeating “way of ‘life.’” It is the “supreme” way of life; the “non-negotiable” way, as GW Bush put it; the “American Way.” The capitalist way.
Marx and Engels had this much wrong. Civilization, slavery-based economies and more efficient forms of production like industrialist capitalism and socialism have not led to “progress,” unless “progress” can be counted as progress toward mass death and destruction, toward the enslavement and grave endangerment of human beings – all of us- and of every living plant, animal, fish and insect. Fundamentally, Marx and Engels believed in “profit” at the expense of the living Earth as much as any industrial capitalist – they just wanted to share the profit more broadly in a different money-system. The fundamental alienation of people from their connection with all life – and the most fundamental exploitation of life – would ultimately remain intact.
The Marxist project has failed, just as capitalism has failed. The state didn’t gradually “wither away” over a protracted period of change called “socialism.” Under the conditions prescribed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, the state can’t wither away. The state and the city are a single dialectical identity, a unity of opposites – they’re two faces of a single process, and the state can’t “wither away” unless the fundamental process of domination, control, exploitation, ecocide and genocide called the city – “civilization” – also withers away. The city necessitated the state and the state enabled the city. The city and the state arose together and they will die together. No one has remained free anywhere the city-state has arisen or in any area it’s conquered. No one has been free. Not the rulers. Not the ruled.
But that’s all over.
There’s a capitalist maxim: “Grow or die.” The maxim holds true within the limited sphere of the circulation of money and the accumulation of capital in a particular economic system; each individual capitalist project must compete – grow – or be swallowed by other capitalist ventures; in other words, it must “die.”
The system’s true believers never thought they’d reach the limits of growth, but that is just what has happened. They’ve reached the limits of their “resource” base – the ecological and geological limits of what can be destroyed to produce more profit. The game is over. They broke the bank. They were warned. They didn’t listen. They’re still not listening. For them, and for most of us who’ve not shaken our entrainment in the ways of seeing the world they stewed us in as children, we have come to an unimaginable passage. Call it the end of the world as we know it. That’s the deal. The inescapable deal. It’s over. One way or another. Either this
“non-negotiable” way of “life” ends, or the capacity of Earth to sustain life ends. This is not to say that some solutions can’t be found. It is, rather, to say that any “solution” that doesn’t undo the fundamental theft and imbalance inherent in the system of profit is not really a solution at all. The problem is global – total. The magnitude of the solution must equate with the magnitude of the problem. The system of theft and imbalance called profit is simply not sustainable, not on the whole, not in part. Life that can’t be sustained dies. The capitalist equation is now turned right-side up: “Stop ‘growth’ or die.” And it’s not just the capitalist mode of exploitation that must end. We’ve got to eradicate the cancer at its root, and, of course, capitalism, and modern industrialism more broadly, are built on the foundations of earlier, less “efficient” systems of exploitation and destruction. That’s where the roots of modern industrial systems of death lie.
While the psychological and biological functions or dysfunctions – the emotional splits and repressions that lie at the very core of the origins of our cultural dysfunction – have yet to be fully articulated and formulated into a coherent picture that explains their intersections with cultural suppression, economic exploitation, and political oppression, this much is clear. The first and fundamental practical expression of these dynamics in terms of their impact on the life of the Earth lies in this: The acquisition of land title by force and the enshrinement of “property” as social law.
That’s how “civilization” started: a city cannot exist without seizing the land around it. A city is all-but by definition a concentration of people too large to be supported by the land within its own boundaries – it must seize control of nearby lands or its population will starve.
The seizure of land by force – both for agricultural and herding purposes and for mineral extraction – continues as a key link in the survival and expansion of a global human population whose numbers are rapidly outstripping the capacities of the territories it already dominates to sustain any further population increase. The result is the rapidly escalating destruction of the world’s forests (and the concomitant eradication of a huge and increasing number of plant and animal species), along with the bottom trawling of the oceans for fish to feed the spiraling human numbers, with the concomitant eradication of 90% of the world’s large fish populations. Other clear examples include the seizure of the territory of the nation of Iraq for its oil and the seizure of a significant portion of Navajo Nation land and the forced removal of its population for access to the 18 billion tons of coal that lie beneath its surface – basically the same thing that is happening to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region as their land is seized for farming, ranching and oil interests. “Growth” means an increase in exploitable “resources,” whether those resources are oil, coal, the fertility of the soil itself, or the “resources” for a “green” economy, like the ores to make the steel to build “environmentally friendly” hybrid cars (auto production creates, to cite just one example, 7 billion pounds of un-recycled scrap and waste annually.) The end result of this orientation toward economic “growth” is death for the land base, for the indigenous cultures that care for it, and for the life the land and native peoples support. It is a cancerous growth. Same as it ever was.
A capitalist – or socialist – “green” economy is little more than another step in the evolution of a millennia long series of more “efficient” systems of exploitation and destruction. The fundamental premise behind the concept of a “green” economy and “green” growth is that the exploitation and destruction of life is somehow ultimately sustainable. “He is blind,” as one Hopi elder put it, “So he destroys himself when he tries to save himself.”
“Green” Growth is a mutually exclusive contradiction in terms.
No matter what we call the mode of production and destruction, and no matter how we distribute the “profit” – the “wealth” extorted from life and living systems – continued growth in production and destruction for the sake of human consumption can lead to only one end. Sooner or later – really sooner than later – we are going to crash full bore into the limits of growth – into the absolute limits of the “carrying capacity” of the Earth – the end of its ability to feed one more human, the end of the capacity of ecosystems to endure the disappearance of one more species without a complete and perhaps irreversible collapse.
There is, if we are honest with ourselves about it, only one possible result that offers hope. It’s not, I am sorry to say, social revolution. Nor is it the process of “bringing down civilization” advocated by some anarchist greens and anarcho-primitivists. The simple fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever that revolutionary movements aimed at an overthrow of the state or at the literal, immediate, physical dismantling of the machinery of death can be developed on a sufficient scale with a sufficient understanding to undo what must be undone – nor could the seizure and wielding of state power do the trick. Not only is the state itself based on the seizure and maintenance of land title by force, but the existence of the state requires the existence of the city – it requires that the fundamental dynamics of empire, “resource” exploitation and “profit” remain intact.
Marx’s postulation notwithstanding, for the state to “wither away” the City must also “wither away”.
It is only the accumulation of wealth at the expense of other forms of life that makes the concentration of power in a state apparatus possible. Only an increasingly radical imbalance in the energy flows of the planet, an imbalance skewed toward humans at the expense of all life, makes for such an accumulation, and the imbalance must grow in concert with the human population’s growth until it reaches the very crossroads we have reached today. The seizing of state power in no way changes the fundamental equation. An ecologist might say that the equations of the solar budget are the only equations – the only bottom lines – that count.
The only way out – which is to say the natural way out – is a population crash. No human-invented scheme can overrule the way – the natural consequences or “laws” – of nature. And what happens to any and every population in overshoot in nature is a population crash. It’s nature’s way.
It can’t be improved upon. It can’t be subverted. It can’t be avoided, although, perhaps, the severity of the collapse can be softened. Blame is irrelevant, except to the extent that in identifying causes, we are able to learn and avoid their repetition. But, a human population crash will do nothing more than delay even worse results – like utter extinction – unless it is accompanied by a profound process of identifying and learning from what went awry in what has gone before.
Under the best of circumstances the global economy and the global system of dominance that rests on it will run into limits it cannot transform – so that it cannot continue until the point that the global ecosystem – life itself – collapses all around us and within us. In the best case scenario, peak oil will prove just such a limit, a limit that sinks the system of production and destruction to such a degree that it prevents it from resurrecting itself.
This formulation can, of course, be denounced as Malthusian. It can also be denounced by revolutionaries of all kinds. But here’s the simple fact. All we can do is hope, and to the best of our ability, align ourselves spiritually and strategically with the forces of life. Yes, as Derrick Jensen suggests, hope is what you do when you have no agency, no power, no control. But then, it is precisely our drive to control and reorder nature that has brought us to this point, and it is that drive for control, and the pain that drives it, that must be healed, transformed and left behind. But, while we may not be able to control outcomes, make a revolution or “bring down” civilization, we can align ourselves spiritually and strategically with the forces of Life.
By the same token and the same logic, the key tasks before us lie not in saving the global economy, not in creating a “green” economy, not in inventing new ways to exploit new energies in order to continue to mine the life of the Earth, nor in any other activity that would seek to preserve this system in any form whatsoever.
The key task before conscious people today is the forging of a profound understanding of what has gone wrong – a sweeping and utter re-evaluation of all values that will be tantamount to a new renaissance, a conscious re-creation and co-creation of culture. Much of that work began to be undertaken in the 1960s, and has borne important fruit, like William Kotke’s work, The Final Empire. It is ours to forge an authentically sustainable culture, even in the midst of this civilization’s fast approaching end – by relying on and integrating the deepest, clearest and most coherent teachings of traditional indigenous cultures, of students of the ecology, and of the multivalent healing practices of both indigenous cultures and of the new therapies that have arisen in the last 50 years. Such a movement – one that is intent on restoring the Earth and fostering social justice and renewing our cultures by incorporating the values and vision of indigenous peoples – is already underway on a global scale. Paul Hawkens, in his important book Blessed Unrest, calls it an “unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another.” His research shows that it is the largest movement in human history, involving some 2-3 million organizations worldwide and some 200 – 300 million people whose cultural, ethical, political and ecological creativity are already impacting billions. That the processes of renewal – of healing, rectifying and relearning – will best be fostered among those in living in direct contact with, and in a caretaking relationship with the Earth and other, non- human living beings should, I hope, be self evident.
Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/. He can be reached at: JuanSantos@Mexica.net.
To many, it looked like the struggle to save the world's largest urban garden -the South Central Farm in Los Angeles - was defeated, a dream buried beneath the treads of the bulldozers that plowed the Farm under following the brutal invasion of an army of L.A. County Sheriffs that crushed the resistor's encampment, turning the land from a liberated zone into an oppressive, occupied one. But now, two years later, all that could change. Here's why, and how you can help make it change.
By Juan Santos and Leslie Radford
“The secret of storytelling amongst the poor is the conviction that stories are told so that they may be listened to elsewhere, where somebody, or perhaps a legion of people, know better than the storyteller or the story’s protagonists, what life means. The powerful can’t tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story however mild has to be fearless and the powerful today live nervously.
“A story refers life to an alternative and more final judge who is far away. Maybe the judge is located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill, where the day’s luck has changed (the poor have to refer often to bad or good luck) so that the last have become first.
“Story-time (the time within a story) is not linear. The living and the dead meet as listeners and judges within this time, and the greater the number of listeners felt to be there, the more intimate the story becomes to each listener. Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.”
From John Berger's That have not been asked: ten dispatches about endurance in the face of walls
It’s not always a matter of justice; there are simply too many of us who know not to expect justice from this system that profits at the expense of all life: Sometimes it’s not a matter of justice, but as John Berger says above, it’s a matter of “luck.” Good luck or bad. Good Karma and bad, who’s in synch with the flow of change and the Times, and who stands foolishly against the tide. It’s like that this time. It’s a matter of luck, of grace, of Karma, of what is necessary as the times change. This time, we are determined: the last shall be first, life will come before profit, the poor before the wealthy, the natural will supercede the artificial. This time, if we have something to say about it- and we do – all of us – the Conquest is over.
No one could have predicted it, and frankly, no one did. There were those of us who had nothing to go on but this: we listened to the land, and the land spoke to us. We listened; we listened to what might be possible but seemed impossible; We refused to surrender dreaming; we refused to forget what had been born, the ancient, magical connection of land and a newly arising culture that touched so many of us here in LA: a connection that touched a nerve so deep in us that its resonance spread in a web of connection – and yes, we will say it – hope – across the world. Mayan Indians in a Zapatista community prayed for the land and for the life unfolding there. Native elders came and shared the lessons of their peoples. Red tailed hawks visited the trees.
The place is this one: The South Central Farm. More than any struggle in the history of this city, the forbidden ones, those with no face, no history, no role in the formal or informal myths that comprise the “image” that is Los Angeles, simple farmers and gardeners – campesinos, the indigenous and their descendants - broke through all barriers, uniting people from every racial and cultural group, and every strata and class in a deeply felt unity that spoke to the world entire. They never backed down, although, to all appearances, they went down along with the fences, trees and plants that were bulldozed when the land was seized by an army of Los Angeles Sheriffs. Even then one of the first bulldozers was stopped cold by the resistors who had liberated and occupied the land during a drawn out siege. Imagine. A bulldozer. Stopped. Cold. By a zucchini!
A zucchini sent down its exhaust pipe. No one could have made it up. No one would have believed it.
Just like no one might have imagined that the Farm could be reborn. Given the stranglehold of the myth of private property that has weighed on the land like an invading and occupying army for two years now, since the Farm was seized by the state on behalf of its alleged “owner” - developer Ralph Horowitz – it has seemed impossible that the stranglehold might be broken.
But, as luck would have it, there is a zucchini at hand. Sometimes it’s a matter of luck. Sometimes luck, and just a little imagination applied just so. Sometimes Karma catches up with the bad guys. Just so. That’s how it is this time. And so, there is hope where it seemed all hope had been slain or carried, deeply wounded, from the field.
Here’s the deal. Ralph Horowitz and his partner in crime, City Councilwoman Jan Perry, played it cool. They waited two years for things to cool off after their brutal take down of the Farm. They thought it was all forgotten. They didn’t raise a stir or a peep. Horowitz worked quietly, overseeing the design of a new, giant warehouse distribution center on the land the City Council had all –but given him, selling it at a loss of millions of taxpayer dollars. The man had a deal, and he knew it. So, he laid low, waited for the turmoil and the questions to blow over, for the Farm’s organization to unravel and dissipate, and laid his plans. He wanted something. He was going to prove to the world who he was and what he was. He was going to obliterate the last vestige of what had been the world’s largest urban garden, and replace it with a warehouse shaped like a giant “h.”
“h” for Horowitz, obvious as the “S” on Superman’s chest. He’d show us. He’d show us all.
Perhaps, as one writer suggested, the giant “h” really stands for “hubris.” Be that as it may, Horowitz is no rank amateur. It takes a pro to corner the City into giving you a free gift of $11 million dollars worth of land. It takes a pro to spin the tale into one about “the victimized capitalist” whose “property rights” have been violated. It takes a lot of pure nerve to take a gift of $11 Million dollars, then accuse those who worked the land you’ve been given of “expecting something for nothing.” He did it with a straight face. The man is a pro. And he’s got the title to the land, after all. Never discount a man like that.
The thing is, a long time ago, Horowitz did own the land, if such a thing can be called legitimate by any standard. But, the City of Los Angeles exercised eminent domain, stripping Horowitz of the title so it could build a trash incinerator - the Lancer project, it was called - there in the heart of South Central. But, the neighborhood, in one of the first major mobilizations around environmental justice for peoples of color, forced the city to capitulate on its plan. There’d be no incinerator. And Horowitz, showing the long range determination for which he’s known, made a bid to have the land returned his way. It didn’t happen.
To make a long story short, after the LA rebellion of ’92, the City sold the land to the semi-independent Port of Los Angeles in 1994 for $13M, and the Harbor let the food bank across the street from the site use it for a community garden. It blossomed into the largest urban farm in the world - the South Central Farm - feeding over 350 families and many in the neighborhood. Then, eleven years after it was first purchased for the Lancer Project incinerator, in backroom dealings that have yet to be explained, the City sold the land back to Horowitz for just $400,000 more than the price they originally paid him for it years before – very roughly speaking the City charged Horowitz about a third of the land’s market value – and considerably less than the price the Harbor had paid for it. Given spiraling land prices, it was a de facto gift of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to Horowitz – a fact that can not have escaped anyone, least of all Horowitz, who would soon attempt to market the 14 acre plot for over $16 million, all the while complaining about the “free ride” he was giving the Farmers.
In fact, when asked why he wanted the records of the City Council meeting in which he was granted the land to remain sealed to public scrutiny, Horowitz testified under oath this way:
Horowitz: " I don't want it public record."
Interviewer: "And why is that?"
Horowitz: "Why should I make whatever real estate purchase I make public record?"
Interviewer: "Even with a public entity?"
Horowitz: " With anybody." Well, if I purchase a property for five thousand dollars and two weeks later I want to sell it for fifty thousand dollars I don't want the buyer to know that I paid five for it. If you got a gift from your father, is the fact that you got if for nothing have any bearing on the purchase price?
Interviewer: What if you get a gift from the City of Los Angeles?"
Horowitz "If you get - "
Horowitz Counsel: "Objection! Hypothetical. You don't need to answer that question."
For two years, the Farmers took time from their jobs and their farming to make twice-weekly trips to City Council meetings to implore the City to return the land to them, but by 2006 Horowitz had lined up the support of the Ninth District's councilmember, Jan Perry, who iconic US representative Maxine Waters would soon characterize as Horowitz’s business “partner.” The Council wasn’t listening. Often, some of its members literally turned their backs as the Farmers spoke, an open insult.
As an eminent eviction approached, the Farmers occupied the land, supporters encamped there, with 24 hour patrols, tree sitters, blockades. Indigenous ceremonies, rock, hip hop and Son Jarocho concerts, and press conferences with an array of celebrities from Hollywood, the music industry, and the realm of people- powered politics. Support poured in not only from Los Angeles or the US Left, but from around the world. Even the L.A. Times called the Farm “Magic.” They were right. It was a kind of Earth magic blossoming, to the amazement of millions, in what is arguably the most alienated city in the most alienated country in the world. But, the Times editors pretended to lament, property rights trump “magic” – no matter how captivating. And so it seemed. The whole thing has been bulldozed, the encampment smashed. What remains, to the naked “rational” eye, is a giant field of dried stubble.
And all this time, Horowitz has been waiting. And, he’s been dealing. Like we said, the man is a pro. His next slight of hand was almost as stunning as his last. This time, he got the City planning Department to waive an Environmental Impact Report normally required for major developments under California law.
Now, it’s quite a feat to get people responsible for even a modicum of environmental oversight to ignore reality so blatantly – to pretend that a warehouse distribution center that will pull over 2,500 diesel truck trips a day into a small residential area will have no appreciable negative environmental impacts. The feat is doubly stunning when you consider that there is not an environmental regulator walking who is unaware that diesel emissions, and, especially, what’s called diesel particulate matter, causes cancer, asthma and other severe respiratory problems, and that children, the ill, and the elderly are particularly vulnerable to it. It might seem like rocket science to some, but you can find the truth in your first online search under “diesel emissions.” It’s terribly common knowledge. But, whatever the string, Horowitz, or perhaps his buddy Jan Perry, found it – and pulled it. And even though the site is near a middle school, Horowitz got his waiver. Not only were no significant conditions imposed on his project – but the City planners claimed the risks were so negligible that Horowitz didn’t even need to file an Environmental Impact Report – the potential problems didn’t even warrant an investigation, so to speak. The California State Legislature might disagree. It recently passed a bill, SB 974, sponsored by Sen. Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach that will generate $400 million a year, specifically to reduce diesel emissions associated with California ports in areas like the Alameda Corridor, (where the Farm land is located) in order to protect children from harm.
But, it looked like Horowitz was batting a thousand. Laughing on his way to the bank, like they say.
The Farmers had little notice, and almost no chance to act. Well, they had one chance, which is right next to no chance. That chance came on July 2nd. Tezozomoc, who, along with Rufina Juarez, the Farmers had elected to lead them, swore to himself that he would be at the one scheduled public hearing on the waiver of the Environmental impact report all by himself if need be.
As luck would have it, though, in three short weeks, Farm activists scoured the neighborhood, generated 140 original, mostly hand-written letters opposing the waiver from nearby residents, got hundreds of petition signatures from across the city, lined up support from major environmental groups – one group with a million members or more – the NRDC - filed their own report -a 21 page analysis objecting to the waiver – and the Farmers brought over 100 people out to the hearing to insist on protection for the lives and health of area residents. They ultimately overflowed the hearing chambers while the media flocked to the Farmer’s press conference and rally on the City Hall lawn. The demonstrators chanted, Azteca danzantes danced, musicians strummed vihuelas, and car horns gleefully pierced the din of downtown traffic– all on a weekday morning during the work week.
The Deputy Advisory Board of L.A.'s Planning Department relented even before the first resident spoke, announcing that the Board would reconsider the waiver of the Environmental Impact Report. The matter had already been cinched, just by the volume of letters the Department had received, even before the hearing opened. The period for filing comments by the public was extended for three more weeks.
Like luck. Like magic. Like the Lakota and Cheyenne – the ones who made it Custer’s last stand - where Custer ran out of luck.
It began to look like Horowitz’s luck was running out, too.
CAUGHT RED- HANDED
“No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said, history would catch up with you: it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the changing, were inevitable.
The old people had stories that said much the same, that it was only a matter of time and things European would gradually fade from the American continents. History would catch up with the White man whether the Indian did anything or not. History was the sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force.” - Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead
Someone thought – wrongly – that the ploy to waive an Environmental Impact Report for the Horowitz warehouse distribution center would slip right under the radar. Reports from inside Jan Perry’s staff indicate that Perry and Horowitz had assumed the South Central Farmers had evaporated as a political force to be reckoned with in L.A., and that they were shocked and angered on the 2nd of July to discover the Farmers and area residents in the streets –and once again in their faces – demanding justice. But the vitality, cohesion and determination of the Farmers and their support network wasn’t the only thing Perry missed – she also missed the last meeting of board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD – the air pollution agency mainly responsible for regulating and licensing stationary sources of air pollution for most of L.A., San Bernadino, Orange and Riverside Counties.) And, it seems, she never saw a devastating new critique of the Horowitz project coming from within her own domain as a SCAQMD board member. While she wasn’t looking, it seems someone made a move to cut Jan Perry’s political throat – at least as far as her infamous alliance with Ralph Horowitz goes.
On the same day the Farmers filled the chambers of the advisory board of the Department of City Planning to overflowing, the staff of the SCAQMD filed a report that not only served as a brutal calling to accounts on the waiver of an Environmental Impact Report for Horowitz, but that recommended in the strongest possible terms that any project that produces the kind of harms that the warehouse distribution center portends for the area be expressly “prohibited” by the City Planning Department.
The report faults the Planning Dept. on numerous counts, from elements as simple as using a skewed map of the area, to its failure to adequately assess the environmental impacts of the construction process and its failure to accurately assess the actual diesel emissions the warehouse will concentrate in the area (especially of cancer-causing diesel particulate matter) or to make meaningful recommendations for mitigating these dangers. Even beneath the bureaucratic language of the report, it is hard to miss the almost palpable sense of disgust, even outrage, that underlies the message.
The report insists that the Planning Dept. re-examine its recommendations on a number of fronts, and strongly suggests stringent guidelines for mitigating potential environmental and health impacts of the project – while noting for example that certain mitigations the Department takes almost for granted could result only from the use of equipment that, in one case, does not even yet exist. The SCAQMD insists that if City Planning is going to claim such mitigations as a given, that it also show how it is going to access such non-existent equipment to ensure them.
And, while City Planning has suggested that any environmental or health impacts would be so minimal as to not even require an Environmental Impact Report, the SCAQMD insists that, were the Department to approve such a project over the SCAQMD’s objections, that necessary mitigations might include, for example, the construction of new freeway off-ramps that lead directly to or near the Horowitz facility (at the cost, no doubt, of millions of taxpayer’s dollars, millions beyond the millions Horowitz has already pocketed.)
Dust in the Wind
Ralph Horowitz has tried to destroy every root of every plant that was the South Central Farm. Like a killer driving a knife into his target over and over, he’s plowed the land over and over in an attempt to dismember the last remnants of an identity he seems to want to erase from the face of the Earth. He’s planned to erase what was, and replace it with his giant warehouse - which is to be designed in the shape of a giant “h”. The soil remains rich with the organic remains that have been plowed under time and again, although, with the destruction of the many of the root networks that permeated it, much the soil has become silty, loose and windblown, shifting to fill and slightly flatten the crevices between the mounds of the plowed furrows, and lifting with the winds to leave fine layers of dust on the windows of houses and of cars parked nearby. The planned construction would kick up immense amounts of dust into the air, as 57,00 cubic yards of soil are excavated and exported by truck from the 14 acre site.
Air Quality regulators call such airborne particulate matter “fugitive dust,” and they’re calling out City planners for calculating the amount of such dust based on an assessment that only five of the site’s 14 acres will be involved in the excavation. Beyond that, they note, planners focused only on the excavation of the soil itself, and failed to make clear whether their calculations included the impacts of trucks hauling out the tons of soil. They insist that the “fugitive dust analysis” be revised, that the City guarantee that the excavation will be limited to five acres, and that construction emissions do not exceed the phony claims made by City planners.
Further, the City planners claimed that all of the equipment used during construction will be fitted with a special diesel oxidation catalyst to lower the impacts of diesel emissions by 40% in the area during construction. The SCAQMD, however, notes that such specialized equipment is only available for a total of 3 engine types, and that it is all-but unavailable for off-road construction equipment.
In effect the SCAQMD challenges the City planners to prove that such equipment will be available and used on the Horowitz construction, or to demonstrate exactly by what method the City plans to ensure the 40% reductions they are claiming will be achieved. They are flatly calling the City planner’s bluff.
Alongside seven other recommendations on the construction phase of the warehouse complex alone, the Air Quality people also insist that watering or other non-toxic means be used to reduce the “fugitive dust” – a method proven to reduce airborne particulate matter by some 60%. According to sources with industry experience, however, watering 3 times per day, as recommended by the Air Quality staff, would likely turn the slowly expanding mini - dust bowl that was the South Central Farm into a bowl of heavy mud and water, greatly increasing the difficulty of excavating the underground parking facility Horowitz wants to serve the giant “h” shaped warehouse. Ralph Horowitz has a new problem he can’t just plow under, this time.
The Free Ride is Over
City planners can’t dart under the radar on this one, either. The SCAQMD is demanding written responses on all of the issues it raises, as per the law (public resources code, section21092.5), and they want these responses in writing before a final Environmental Impact Report is issued. The problem for City planners is obvious. They hadn’t planned to require an environmental report from Horowitz at all. That’s what the so-called “neg dec” they issued was all about in the first place - another free ride for Jan Perry’s favorite developer. Like children darting under turnstiles, they somehow weren’t counting on conductors checking for tickets.
But as the report progresses, it looks even worse for Horowitz and the giant “h”. It seems they not only lack tickets, but they may not be able to cover the fare, even if they were to admit that the free ride is over.
To excuse (or cover-up) their complicity in the harms of the Horowitz plan, City planners apparently tried other slight of hand maneuvers to evade detection of the reality behind the waiver they offered the developer. The Air Quality District called them out for one scam, in particular. The City planners estimated diesel emissions for the Horowitz project using a supposedly “similar” facility and its emissions as a measure for the probable impacts on South Central residents in this case.
But the warehouse used in the comparison served “substantially fewer” trucks than the 2, 581 trips a day reported for the Horowitz facility, thus, the District notes that diesel emissions (and, consequently, cancer risks) were “substantially underestimated” by City planners. The District calls on the City to “correct or explain this apparent discrepancy.” The report also accuses City planners of underestimating the amount of time trucks will stand, engines idling at the facility, by as much as one third. Air quality regulators insist on a mitigation plan that prohibits trucks from idling for more than the ten minutes City planners claim is realistic, and they demand the City show an enforcement mechanism that will make such a prohibition credible.
But it doesn’t stop there. The SCAQMD lists an additional 16 measures that would be warranted to mitigate the impact of diesel exhaust and particulate matter – including the multimillion dollar construction of one or more additional freeway exits that would bypass the community or limit the amount of time any given truck is on the surface roads in the immediate area.
The bottom line, however, is this. The SCAQMD recommends that the City “specifically prohibit” land uses at the site that would, in an area already full of warehouses, “further expose” nearby schools, health facilities, the aged and the ill to “additional cancer risks from diesel particulate matter.”
In other words, the SCAQMD is telling the City “Shut this project down.” “Prohibit its construction and operation.” The struggle for environmental justice is full of situations like this one, and lawsuits are a constant and predictable part of the terrain. The air quality regulators cannot be unaware that any effort on the part of the City to ignore or bypass these recommendations opens the door to a strongly based lawsuit to force the City to comply.
Force the City to comply… With the law… No more free rides… Conductors... Sometimes your luck just runs out. Sometimes you stand too long, too strong, against the wrong tide, and do so with the wrong ethics. Sometimes, one might notice, for things to go right in the end, you have to be right: for things to be sustained, one might notice, they have to be sustainable, they have to be grounded in the real. Sometimes, as Leslie Marmon Silko notes, history catches up with you. It’s inevitable. Relentless, she says. Every house of cards, like every empire, falls when the right wind blows. Sometimes, all it takes is a quick puff of air from the lips; or a zucchini dropped just so in the exhaust pipe of a bulldozer clanking over the land the way that tanks clank over people’s lives. The way a sophisticated developer in the second largest city in the Empire falls before the onslaught of a few Indian campesinos from Mexico and their backers with a few cell phones, a copier, and almost no money at all. Like magic. Like karma, Like luck. Like someone, somewhere, “located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill” islistening.
The way we’ve been listening to the land…
Like that.
And it’s a good thing. With all the changes coming, we’re gonna need that land. We’re gonna need that food, those skills, these Farmers. All of us. Together.
If you’re paying attention, it’s obvious.
Someone’s listening.
Right now.
We’re certain of it.
-30-
Update: South Central Farm. Yes! Warehouse? No!
As a result of the July 2 hearing, there is a 21 day extension (till July 23rd, 2008) on comments that can be submitted to the Advisory Agency of the Planning Commission. They will render a decision in 5-6 weeks.
Please consider what YOU can commit to doing to help this effort. Then email the SCFs (southcentralfarmers@southcentralfarmers.com) and let others know.
We need to get 1,000 more petition signatures prior to the July 23rd deadline date. Please get some forms and help with this effort! We need volunteers for this effort. Please contact Rufina Juarez if you wish to volunteer (juarezrufina@yahoo.com). I have included a link to the petition form. We need to get them in before July 23rd 2008. Use can still use the ONLINE PETITION (http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index2.php?option=com_philaform&form_id=7&Itemid=0 ) or PAPERCOPY version. They can be mailed here:
Los AngelesCity Hall Expedited Processing Section
200 N. Spring Street, 7th Floor
Los Angeles, Calif.90012
Why haven't the park and rec commissioners not weighed in on the recreation site with sensitive receptors to contamination next to the diesel warehouse? They will be impacted in the future.
Commissioners:
Barry A. Sanders, President Luis A. Sánchez, Vice President Maria Casillas, Member Candy Spelling, Member Johnathan Williams, Member
Mailing Address: Los Angeles City Recreation and Parks Department
Office of Board of Commissioners
1200 W. 7th Street, Suite 762
Los Angeles, CA 90017
Our vision for the land and our own discourse. Re-uniting the people and the land. Hybrid farm/park. Here is the original proposal.
Join us Monday Night @ 7:00 pm at the SCFCenter located 1702 e. 41st St, Los Angeles, CA90058 (800) 249-5240 for a meeting to discuss shutting down the warehouse.
koy.aa.nis.qat.si (Hopi) [n] 1. crazy life 2. life out of balance 3. life disintegrating 4. life in turmoil 5. a way of life that calls for another way of living.
ko.yan.nis.qatsi(de la lengua Hopi),1.vida loca 2.vida en tumulto 3.vida en desintegración 4.vida desequilibrada 5.una condición de vida que clama por otra manera de vivir.
Juan Santos is a member of the Aztlan Mexica Nation Harmony Keepers/American Indian Movement.
His work has appeared in:
Alternative Press Review, Arts and Opinion, AtlanticFreePress, NaomiKlein.org, ZNet, Zmag.org, PalestineChronicle.com, GlobalResearch.ca, Speaking Truth to Power, Countercurrents, Counterpunch, CENSORED, Black Commentator, DissidentVoice, ThomasPaine'sCorner, Mexika.org, Consafos.com, The Final Call, Aztlan Rising, Americas.org, Axis of Logic, Insurreccion.org DismantleCivilization, FutureFastForward, HistoryNewsNetwork WorldNewsTrust, World Prout Assembly, Aztlan Electronic News, deletetheborder, Infoshop, Chicano.org, MayanMajix, LatinoLA, Iran Solidarity, AutonomyandSolidarity, Reclaimthemedia, ClimateIMC, NetworkAztlan, Guerrilla News Network, Interactivist, Rense.com and on an array of blogs and other independent media sites. He can be contacted at Juan_Santos@Mexica.net
The stories of the people or their "histories" had always been sacred, the source of their entire existence. If the people had not retold their stories, or if the stories had somehow been lost, then the people were lost: the ancestor spirits were summoned by the stories. This man Marx had understood that the stories or "history" are sacred, that within history reside relentless forces, powerful spirits, vengeful, relentlessly seeking justice.
No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said, history would catch up with you: it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the changing, were inevitable.
The old people had stories that said much the same, that it was only a matter of time and things European would gradually fade from the American continents. History would catch up with the White man whether the Indian did anything or not. History was the sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force. - Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead
“The secret of storytelling amongst the poor is the conviction that stories are told so that they may be listened to elsewhere, where somebody, or perhaps a legion of people, know better than the storyteller or the story’s protagonists, what life means. The powerful can’t tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story however mild has to be fearless and the powerful today live nervously.
“A story refers life to an alternative and more final judge who is far away. Maybe the judge is located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill, where the day’s luck has changed (the poor have to refer often to bad or good luck) so that the last have become first.
“Story-time (the time within a story) is not linear. The living and the dead meet as listeners and judges within this time, and the greater the number of listeners felt to be there, the more intimate the story becomes to each listener. Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.”
From John Berger's That have not been asked: ten dispatches about endurance in the face of walls
"I was told that after the battle, two Cheyenne women came across Custer's body. They knew him, because he had attacked their peaceful village on the Washita. These women said, "You smoked the peace pipe with us. Our chiefs told you that you would be killed if you ever made war on us again. But you would not listen. This will make you hear better." The women each took an awl from their beaded cases and stuck them deep into Custer's ears.
Somebody who saw this told me about it...Hundreds of books have been written about this battle by people who weren't there. I was there, but all I remember is one big cloud of dust.
