[plschwartz]

HE BAND PLAYS ON....Among the 5,000 reservists called up for duty last week are two trumpeters, one trombonist, four clarinetists, three saxophone players, an electric bass player and a euphonium player:

"Is there not a way to do without the euphonium player?" [Representative Vic] Snyder asked Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff. "Do we need to really draft an electric bass player, to pull them back in? Is there not a way that we can't let that kind of thing slide?"

After a laugh in the hearing room, Cody answered with a straight face that the bands have been busy, tending to services and funerals. These days, Cody said, "our bands are being stressed quite a bit."

No comment.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

[bassetman]

Originally Posted by slickoe

but only 57% of Americans read a single book in 2002 according to a study. This explains A LOT.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5389382

Next thing you know, they won't even be willing to watch a movie to learn something!

[LANMaster]

Originally Posted by slickoe

but only 57% of Americans read a single book in 2002 according to a study. This explains A LOT.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5389382

I would have thought that number would actually be even lower.

I read about half a dozen novels a year. My favorites are Sci Fi. I like Peter David's Star Trek novels too.

[Pacalis]

Originally Posted by LANMaster

I would have thought that number would actually be even lower.

I read about half a dozen novels a year. My favorites are Sci Fi. I like Peter David's Star Trek novels too.

I buy books during the year, and read in the Winter. Favs are Robert Ludlum, James Clavell and love historical novels. Just bought a good biography on Ben Franklin, can't wait for snow to fall.

[Al-Firdaus]

U.S. Must Be Wary of Attacks - On Our Liberty
By Dan Gillmor
San Jose Mercury News

Sunday 04 July 2004

On Independence Day, 2004, how fares American liberty?

Brilliantly, if you compare the United States with the tyrannies that still control the lives of countless people.

Not badly, if liberty means the right to seek economic gain in a capitalist system - especially if you're starting with the right connections and a privileged background.

Not as well, when you look at growing pressures on longstanding freedoms. Governments have exploited fears of terrorism to curb many precious liberties, and technology has continued to help snoops of all kinds invade our privacy.

We got some good news last week from the one branch of government that is supposed to be a bulwark against such encroachments. The Bush administration tried to assert essentially unlimited executive power - insisting that the president or his people can choose to jail people, even American citizens, indefinitely and with no access to the legal system. The Supreme Court said no, and drew a line in the sand.

"A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in her majority opinion in the key case, Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld.

The ruling "dodges the question of whether the Executive can hold detainees forever," noted Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor and constitutional scholar, on his Weblog. "It insists that as prisoners of war, detainees must be released when hostilities cease, and says that as of yet, the war in Afghanistan has not ended. What about the war against Al-Qaida? The Court has nothing to say on this point."

Still, there was no doubt that the courts were doing what they must if we are to remain a free society in any form: Restrain the worst impulses of the legislative and executive branches when they bow to the mood of the moment and trample on liberty.

Also last week, the justices ruled that a lower court was right to block enforcement of the latest attempt - endorsed by Congress and the White House - to censor Internet content deemed harmful to children. The government will still get the chance to convince judges that there's no alternative to such Draconian steps. But that's a huge and, I hope, impossible hurdle. Freedom of speech in a networked age may depend on it.

The public airwaves are the venue for the most direct assault on the First Amendment in years. This is a bipartisan shame, with Democrats joining Republicans in cynically banning broadcast "indecency." Increasingly, both sides are calling for similar regulation of cable and satellite television.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration is pushing not just to keep the anti-liberty provisions of the grotesquely named "USA Patriot Act" but to expand them. A law that wipes out key protections against government abuses is anything but patriotic.

A few brave souls in Congress have been asking tough questions about this law, which the lawmakers passed - in many cases without bothering to read it - in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. But the Bush administration and its congressional allies are playing the terrorism card, all but labeling as traitors people who dare to question government actions.

Liberty is not just about what government does or doesn't permit. It's also about how large institutions of all kinds deal with individuals - and how large institutions serve government interests. On this front, the news isn't great.

It's disappointing to watch Silicon Valley's best and brightest race to be the suppliers for surveillance states. Governments around the world are using technology to spy on citizens and track the flow of information. Preventing violence is a handy cover for exerting control.

These are jittery times, likely to get more so. No one should doubt that there will be new terrorist attacks on this nation and on Americans abroad. In an open society - and this one, despite the trends, remains more open than not - we can't have perfect security. What we can do is limit the damage and understand the risks.

We live with risk every day. We might slip in the shower, but we don't force companies to make showers perfectly safe. We might have a serious accident on the freeway, but we don't force industry to make perfectly safe cars. We might be mugged, but we don't throw away basic liberty in an impossible attempt to prevent all crime.

Risk is also about opportunity. A free society is more productive economically. Entrepreneurship is alien to repressive regimes.

The next attacks will test our commitment to freedom. Will we pass that test?

We owe much to Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. He and the other founders took enormous risks to create this nation more than two centuries ago.

But on this Independence Day, we can also remember the words of Ben Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

[Al-Firdaus]

The Editorial
Thursday, July 08, 2004
America’s Self Image
By Wayne Bent — Filed under General@ 1:00 pm

I have been strangely curious at how it is, that America thinks so much of herself. America is not any “freer” than most societies, but believes itself to be more free than any other nation on earth. In some ways, America is far less free than some societies, but that is another topic.

It is true that most Arab countries, and Israel, do not allow Christian evangelism of their people, and that Israel is one of the most closed and racist societies that ever existed. Tariq Aziz, the previous Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, a Muslim state, was a Christian, and was in the highest level of Iraqi affairs, but it will be when hell freezes over that a Christian is ever Deputy Prime Minister of Israel. America picks the strangest bedfellows. America is married to the very one who has vowed to kill her Jesus Christ, yet America thinks so much of herself, she is blinded. She is blinded by her own flag, her own self, which she worships with all her heart.

It is true that in America, one can babble just about anything, and not be imprisoned for it. In contrast with the Semitic states, America does seem much more free. But this freedom has also allowed for America to be the porn capitol of the world. America’s “freedom” has cost America its morality, its integrity and its sanity. America is free to be immoral in most ways, but not so free when it comes to public education.

These things aside, with their positives and negatives, it is of great interest how Americans have no true perception of reality, but base reality purely on their own view of themselves. In most mental health circles this self focus would be akin to some kind of mental illness. I suppose self focus is true of most people, but it is very dangerous to have the perception of a dog, while housing great amounts of Weapons of Mass Destruction. You no doubt have heard of those WMD. When one does not come from moral reasoning, and from the perspective that he should treat others as he would want to be treated, he can invade any country he sets his sights on, because he is following his own glory and honor. Coming from this motive, one can truly win some glorious battles, but he eventually loses the war.

When reality begins to come home, Americans are the first to go into denial because Americans have been hypnotized into thinking that they are great, or good. In 2003, President Bush spent a good deal of time in his State of the Union message to flatter Americans, telling them how good they were, just before they went into Iraq and blew the arms and legs off of children and anyone else who was in their way. There is nothing more dangerous to man as when he begins to believe he is great, or even good.

When the scandal of Abu Ghraib broke, my first impression was, “Well, that seems par for the course. That seems normal for Americans.” But when all of the denial came from Washington, I was surprised and strangely interested at how Americans could possibly call this an aberration. This “aberration” IS America. Look at the movies that come out of Hollywood by the hundreds. Most of them are full of some kind of mayhem. Look at the video games that American children play with, everyday. I can go into any large American mall and the video arcades all look like Abu Ghraib. All I can think is, “Hello, is anyone home?”

Early this year there was an article in Reader’s Digest that gave the European view of America. When I read it I thought, “Well, that is my view of America, and I live here.” I am white, male, and over 60 years of age. I was raised a Republican conservative. I recognize the European view of America as accurately describing what I was raised to be. The article came out in February of 2004. Here are a few excerpts:

Most Americans would be shocked to learn just how ugly their so-called European allies consider them. Read the press over there, and you’ll discover a United States that is thoroughly racist, a place simultaneously defined by greed and riddled with poverty; where the poor (millions upon millions of them) are oppressed for sport. You’ll learn about the American people, a semiliterate horde of culturally impoverished cretins. You’ll see American foreign policy described as a master plan for controlling the world. And those are the relatively friendly descriptions.

In Europe today, almost no hyperbole is considered illegitimate if employed to denounce the United States or its government. In the days before George W. Bush traveled to Britain last fall, Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, described the American President as “the greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve most probably ever seen.” More threatening than Hitler? A greater danger than Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot? That’s right, said Livingstone. “The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction.”

…A recent poll of Europeans conducted for the European Commission asked which countries pose a threat to world peace. The United States tied for second, along with North Korea and Iran (Israel won the prize).

…But no less a member of the European establishment than Michael Meacher, a British member of Parliament who for six years served in Tony Blair’s cabinet, wrote an op-ed last year accusing the United States government of welcoming the attacks of September 11. Meacher charged that the US. military had trained some of the hijackers, and may have deliberately ignored the planes as they approached their targets. It was all a conspiracy, Meacher writes, “an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination” and control the world’s oil supply.

Some of this seems like a conspiracy theory, but everything is some sort of conspiracy. When the World Trade Center went down, there were some who took pictures of Muslims dancing in the streets, but there were also Jews dancing. At the time of the destruction, I was surprised to read that five Jews were arrested for dancing on a rooftop in celebration of the catastrophe. They were arrested because it seemed odd that someone would celebrate such a disaster of catastrophic proportions, unless he had some part to play in it. Truly, the Twin Towers was a bonanza for Zionists, for it was the very catalyst needed to cause the Americans to move into the Middle East in support of Israel. “All things work for good for those who love Zion.”

The Digest article poked fun at how Europeans were accusing the U.S. of fascism while it is Europe that has hosted all of the dictators and fiends. It is true that Europe has had a lot of experience with fascism and dictatorships, but that is all the more reason to respect their view. America has had no experience with anything, but to blindly move ahead in glory, and mow down the imagined enemy of their prosperity, and to press ahead, making the world see how gloriously righteous America is. The Europeans see well, that danger of which most Americans are completely blind.

There are many conspiracies concerning the new world order, and America taking control of the world’s oil supply through aggression. One can dismiss all of the conspiracy theories. Who needs them? Just look at what is happening. One need only to open his eyes. What is happening around the world is not a theory. America has complete control of much of the oil in the Middle East. America has invaded the Middle East. This occurred after the Jews invaded the Middle East in 1948. America tortures prisoners. America mows down its enemies. Hello, anybody home?

I need no conspiracy theory to tell me what is happening. All I need are eyes. America wants the oil pipeline to go through Afghanistan. America attacks Afghanistan and sets up a government there. Now the pipeline will proceed. Why is it that Americans reject the idea that there is a Jewish and American conspiracy in the Middle East, but none of them disbelieve the al-Qaida conspiracy. “Oh,” they say, “But we have good evidence of an al-Qaida conspiracy.” And tell me, don’t we have equally good evidence of an American and Jewish conspiracy? Everyone is conspiring for what they want, on either side of the Atlantic.

The U.N. voted to approve a nation for the Jews. Do you really and actually believe that this vote just popped out of the air one day in the Security Council? Do you actually believe that someone said, “Oh, by the way, I just thought of something. Let us give the Jews a country of their own.” Who else on this old world got the nations of the earth to hand over to them a country? Hello, anyone home? Ding, ding!!

It is the American who is not home. He stands in his own light and says, “Look at me, am I not gloriously bright? Am I not God’s gift to men?” If there was ever a false christ, it is the American. I know of what I speak, for I am an American, and I used to think this way. What a deception I was in. What a cult of religious self-righteous fervor. The American blood cult must sacrifice humans occasionally in its blood lust, its religion of scull and bones, but it cannot see itself for what it is. Its view of itself is as one who is hypnotized. Many Americans need to be de-programmed, but there is no one who knows how.

The current push into world dominance is a religion. It is worshipped by not only Americans, but non-Americans as well. The whole earth seems polarized in its furious agenda. In every country there are those who see the President of the United States as the great Satan, but there are other millions who virtually worship this man Bush, as a Savior, a Christ, coming upon the scene to deliver the world from evil. This is true worldwide, and it does not even exclude some Muslims.

I look out onto the nation and say, “Why can’t they see?” They look back at me and say, “Don’t you see what a wonderful thing Mr. Bush is doing?” I look at the pictures of young children with their arms blown off, the lies and the tortures, and they look at a striped flag waving in the wind. I say, “Hello, look down here at these severed arms.” They say, “Hello, look up here at this pretty flag. We are a righteous nation, ridding the world of evil.” I still cannot put together how ridding the world of evil is blowing the arms off of children or torturing your prisoners of war. I somehow can’t get it, but as a youth, I would have been able to get it. When one worships their country, their flag, or themselves, they cannot be sensitive to human suffering. One thinks that lying for a “good cause” is justified, for “the end justifies the means.” The first lie told is to themselves, that blowing the arms off someone is good and righteous. I was not sensitive to human suffering as a youth, either. I could not understand what all this sensitivity was about until I started feeling people’s hearts.

The nation has swung on the pendulum again. It was liberal, but now it is conservative. The conservative sees himself and his conservatism as righteous. Conservatism is actually self-righteousness, the most dangerous motivation that ever existed. It is the worship of one’s self. This “conservatism” is what is at the root of the destruction of the world. “Conservatism” is the motivating force of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” It was the root of Nazism. It was at the root of the Bolshevik revolution. Conservatism crucified Christ and then went on to destroy Jerusalem. It feels so right and glorious to those caught up in it, but it is so wrong. It is the destroyer, the devil, that is come down in great wrath, for he knows he only has a short time to pull off his agenda.

That word “devil” in Revelation 12:12, comes from the Greek word, “dee-ab´-ol-os” which is precisely translated, “false accuser” and “slanderer.” These two words precisely describe the American spirit in regard to Iraq. The President falsely accused Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction and then grossly slandered its leaders who had put away the development of those weapons. That Bible verse could very well apply to the present situation. “Therefore rejoice, you who dwell in the Spirit but woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the false accuser and slanderer is come upon you, having great indignation and breathing real hard, because he knows that he hath but a short time to pull off his plan.” Rev. 12:12.

So, this Armageddon is being waged, but the enemy that is now going out into the earth, falsely accusing and slandering, thinks he is very bright. He cannot see himself. The “ugly American” thinks he is God’s gift to mankind, but he will prove himself the destroyer, for America has joined forces with the adversary of God and man.

Words of Wisdom

[Al-Firdaus]

Is Occupation A Crime?
Jul 10, 2004
By Albert M. Jabara

Invasion and occupation of other countries does not make any sense in this 21st century. The broad destruction of human lives, heritage and history of sovereign countries is a multiple of 9/11’s, factored by 40 times or more.

Justice is buried with innocent victims; honor is turned into treason; immorality, is fashioned by occupiers and killers who imposed a new world order; an order that was created by minds to murder; it was created by hands that mutilated children, mothers and elders. Aggressors and occupiers may just as well kill in the name of murder and killing. Never mind pretext, terrorism and all other nonsense. Killers kill because they have no regard for human lives. They kill out of thirst for human blood. It is incredible; a majority of educators, scholars and writers hide in closets. Heads of states from around the world, with exception to just a few, cling to their seats, expecting an earth quake to hit a high scale. What is there left to defend humanity? Where is Russia? Where is India? Where is China? Where is Germany, France and the rest of Europe? I cannot look for Arab and Muslim leaders. They hide naked behind U.S. diplomats, afraid of being called terrorists. These leaders have become feral creatures who can only bite their own skin.

Today, invaders and occupiers in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq claim themselves lawmakers because they destroy and murder children, mothers and elders. They tell their people and the rest of the world: They captured and killed terrorists. I cannot accept a humanity defeat. My personal conviction and faith tell me justice will prevail. It will only take one Godly strike to wash, squash, burn and destroy all killers and murderers. God will not stand by and see his creation of human and earth destroyed in the same fashioned prior to His introductions of His religions. George Bush, Toni Blair, Ariel Sharon and their followers will not escape the Mighty Sword of God. Call me a fool! Call me a dreamer! My gut tells me a Godly strike is ticking; humanity will be safe. Decent, honest and responsible people will rejoice at the reappearance of hope and justice. Yes, I am neither a seer nor a scholar. I am just a decent person who refuses to accept any form of death and terrorism against helpless and innocent people. I am against occupation and aggression. I am against falsehood and deceit. Jews, Arabs, Americans, British, and all other colors and races are people with dreams and aspiration. They want to live in peace and respect. I am one of those people. I find myself at my weakest moments when I break in tears, isolated in a room to avoid embarrassment in the present of my family and friends. Shreds of bodies under rubbles in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq are scenes far off the mark of any imaginable comprehension. I am developing a sense to leave my humanity and become a planet, a worm, a creature, or any living thing with no connection or relation to humans.

This does not suggest violence is ever an option to kill innocent people by any individual or groups. Al-Qaeda and all other sprinter groups were never elected by any governments or individuals to wage terror in the name of Islam. Their action is personal and has nothing to do with Arabs, Islam or Muslims. Yes United States and Israel are the genuine motivation tool for all terror groups in the world, including Ariel Sharon and his ilk. My hurt for humanity compels me to just write and try to illustrate facts so I can make some difference towards peace for all people. I am neither an army nor a country. Groups like Al-Qaeda who act on their own are absolutely wrong to give George Bush, Toni Blair and Ariel Sharon reasons to target innocent people in their names. All forms of killing are sins and crimes against humanity when inflicted on innocent citizens. My love to humanity and people of all races is a burden I enjoy and cherish. My pen is wicked and cutting against those who have no fear for God; those who kill and destroy; those who believe their deceits and lies by justifying falsehood is truth. At this juncture, they attract followers through tainted news and tainted facts; they bribe smaller nations to join their camp of killing. They will even use military action against leaders and governments who refuse to support their conspiracies and blackmails.

It is ironic; however, the U.S. justice system will convict American soldiers and journalists returning from Iraq with stolen Iraqi treasures and artifacts. The U.S. administration, in the mean time, ordered its military to invade Iraq with the sole purpose to technically steal the country’s wealth and resources without fearing conviction from the same American justice system. Who is behind ruining America and framing 300 million people? They are preeminent, racist, vampires, cultured into the human race from an evil gene.

The world community’s acceptance of Iraq’s barbaric invasion by U.S. and its allies is a blow below the knees. The community is becoming totally ignorant of humanity and human existence. Why should we bother to go to school and earn an education when we won’t have a civil world to receive our service and knowledge? I won’t be surprised if some far right university opens up tomorrow to teach bullying and oppression techniques. Universal Orders and recognized man-made laws have been made into a deck of cards of wanted heads of states and officials absent of trial or jury. Who would have thought we have the intelligent to discover remote planets and land on the man, yet still have less imagination than a stone man five thousand years ago? They take a blooming humanity and etiolate it to appease a handful of terrorist leaders with armies they raised to kill, not to liberate or protect the oppressed and the weak.

It is now a question, as all have said, to deal with the present situation or, in other words, ‘the reality on the ground’. Now which reality are we talking about? Yes, there are numerous realities on the ground. The only one that really counts is the crime that has been committed in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. Will the United Nations and Arab countries do something about this crime? In an ordinary court, a convicted criminal receives a sentence aimed at fitting the crime committed. U.S. invasion to Afghanistan and Iraq has actually received recognition and support from a lot of nations on reasons of accepting, ‘reality on the ground’. Israel has occupied Gaza and the West bank since the 1967 war. Since then, Israel has been showered with U.S. dollars and stockpiles of advanced weaponry, including atomic, biological and chemicals warheads. United States of America is guilty of inflicting terror on innocent people; guilty for assisting Ariel Sharon who continues to rob more Palestinian homes and confiscate more lands. United States has dethroned Evil to build its empire on earth.

The new world order George W. Bush talks about is an order that is going to drive the world into a living hell. The U.S. will exhaust it financial strength and military might before it could dream a real change in Afghanistan or Iraq. I am baffled by the U.S. ideology that is written and self-published by a handful of Zionist and Right Wing Christians. Who is going to accept an ideology at face or a nickel value that is far less than what the other is willing to accept? U.S. values are great domestic stocks; are not fit for export. A political character of a country is its best selling feature. You simply measure your maturity by the number of jail establishments and how many convicts and criminals you house. U.S. peace activists are clubbed, jailed and accused of treason because they do not agree with George W. Bush and his Zionist Juntas. A massive majority of Americans are good people, trapped inside a system that is fully controlled by a handful of hateful mongers. United States suffers from a malignant cancer ever since the Neo-conservative extremists along with their Zionist partners acquired a majority ownership in U.S. media and financial sectors, including Washington’s political throne.

I do not believe international laws allow invaders any, ‘Right’ legal or otherwise to dominate the affairs of the invaded country; appoint a puppet government; and, or, enter into any domestic or international trade agreements. Arab leaders, without exception have sold Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. A retainer for the remaining Arab countries has already been dispensed by United States; it is only a matter of time before another invasion is accomplished, followed by other invasions down the road.

Israeli jets penetrate the air space of Syria and drop bombs on a deserted old camp to draw Arab countries into a major war. Sharon assassinated SheikhYassin, a wheeled chair spiritual leader. Sharon is openly calling for other assassinations. Israeli agents and military personnel move freely in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Egypt and most other Arab and Muslim countries. The Arab world continues its silence. Is it fear? Do all Arabs believe there are victims, enshrined in permanent slavery?

Arab masses have the right to demand withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. The Israeli/Arab dispute can only be resolved by the parties who are losing lives. There are two methods to resolve disputes: You exhaust every peaceful mean to achieve the desired objectives without exercising military power or threats; or war continues until both sides burry their last dead.

Enough is enough! How long can the world community tremble under the fear and threat of a super power that is lawless and barbaric?

The United States, United Kingdom and Israel are wise to watch their economic position. Military power without an economic strength does not account for much. The former Soviet Union was defeated economically. U.S. will also be defeated economically unless it quickly moves back into the domain and respect of good nations.

Albert M. Jabara is a Canadian poet and author. Copyright © 2004 by A. M. Jabara and published by Jihad Unspun with permission. All rights are reserved.

[plschwartz]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/S...258688,00.html
The Archbishop of Canterbury talks to Roy Hattersley about Tony Blair, war and God

Sunday July 11, 2004
The Observer

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, possesses personal modesty and moral certainty in equal measure. Combined with the scholarly precision of his language and his unqualified belief in the message of the Gospels, those qualities make him reluctant to give glib answers to simplistic questions.

They also enable him to express strong views in gentle language. It is a technique which allowed Downing Street to describe his criticisms of government ('manipulating the media ... habitually repressing criticism') as 'elliptical'. He could hardly have been more direct in his condemnation of the war in Iraq. At a time when mistakes are being admitted and errors of judgment exposed, didn't he think an apology was necessary. He does not.

'Those who took the decision [to go to war] were acting in good faith.' I suggested that 'acting in good faith' understated the conviction of a Prime Minister who 'has no doubt that he is doing God's work'. The Archbishop described the Blair conscience in more theologically acceptable terms. 'He believes that he's answerable for what he does, and I respect that.'

Answerable? Rowan Williams had already spoken of the instigators of the war being 'called to account'. Unsure what that meant, I asked him to explain.

'Two levels. At the simplest level, the public - nations, electorates - watch for the results. Politicians take large risks. I think they know that and the Prime Minister acknowledged it_ Anyone making decisions involving the lives and welfare of other people must answer to God.'

I asked, in the language of the Victorian Church, if the answer would be required 'at the Judgment Seat'. To my astonishment, the Archbishop of Canterbury replied - carefully enunciating each word - 'at the Judgement Seat'. That raised the question of what the penalty would be for an inadequate reply.

I understood that, in life, Tony Blair and George W Bush might have to live with the knowledge that the death and destruction in the Iraq war could not morally be justified. But was the Archbishop talking about punishment after death? The penalty for those 'found wanting' at the Judgment Seat is, or used to be, Eternal Damnation.

The Archbishop of Canterbury worships a more merciful and a more subtle God. 'Not damnation. But you know the scale of the mistakes you've made ...' I interrupted him to make sure I understood that he meant more than the regrets of old age. Was he, I asked, talking about 'the life to be, God's reckoning?' The Archbishop's reply - expanding the general to the particular - could not have been more categoric.

'You only see the clear perspectives of the situation when some of the ordinary muddles and selfishness of what life now involves have somehow slipped away. I'm talking about judgment and punishment. I've always thought that the essence of judgment is simply to be face to face with the truth - and no escape.' Was he really saying George W Bush and Tony Blair - and the rest of us - would, after death, still be able to feel guilt and remorse? Again, there was no doubt about the Archbishop's certainty. In the next life we will all be 'cognisant and conscious' beings, capable of suffering the torment of the truth about ourselves.

Putting aside the implication of that doctrine for the Prime Minister and the President, it seemed - in my atheist ignorance - astonishing that a man of such obvious intellectual sophistication should speak in such fundamentalist language. The time had come to advance into the remote recesses of faith. 'Is it possible,' I asked, 'to be simply an ethical Christian or must I believe in the mysteries and miracles?'

The answer - hedged about with a description of how a moral commitment usually evolves into 'something pretty indistinguishable from those doctrines' - seemed to be 'No'. I moved on to another one of the great intangibles. Are human beings redeemed, that is to say 'saved', by good works or by faith?

The Archbishop answered that 'big classical question' with the explanation that 'neither good works (the way you act) nor faith (a state of mind) can guarantee a place in heaven. What brings you into eternal life is a relationship with God' - an answer which did not help me fumble my way towards my intended inquiry about 'the good life' (pace Thomas Aquinas rather than Tony Bennett). So I just asked, 'Is it the Church's job - your job as its head - to guide the nation's morals?'

'It is the duty of a religious community, part of its job, to say to the rest of society: "This is what matters about human beings, these are non-negotiable things about human beings" ... There are a range of matters where the Church says this far and no further - the image of God requires more than this.'

So how does the Church decide what those issues are? 'There is always a range of possible issues and there is a danger of them becoming issues of the week. I think ecclesiastical spokesmen are prone to this ... A lot depends on being a bit reactive - what comes up at a particular moment.'

It was the Archbishop of Canterbury's misfortune to have the issue of gay clergy - the nomination of Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading - 'come up' at the very start of his archiepiscopate. I wondered if the wounds, endured as a result of his reaction to that proposal, had healed. Is he 'anxious not to be quite as controversial as it was assumed he would be when first appointed?'

'A lot of people helped to build up the picture of the controversial, turbulent priest. I have to be as honest as I can within the framework of the responsibilities I have to a large range of people. I have never thought there is any virtue in being controversial for its own sake.'

Although Rowan Williams is a man whose word it is impossible to doubt, it did seem - during his early months in Lambeth Palace - that he was attracted to trouble. In February 2003, he announced that it was 'perfectly reasonable for those hoping to stay in Britain to be kept in secure accommodation while their cases are considered'. He appears genuinely surprised that his statement was interpreted as a support for imprisoning asylum seekers. That was not his intention. He meant 'security in a wider sense' - a concept difficult to define.

Thirteen months later, he again demonstrated the wisdom of not commenting on the event of the week. He criticised Footballers' Wives for exhibiting 'different sorts of selfish behaviour'. The programme's executive producer said the Archbishop had missed the point. He disagrees. 'I knew it was ironic. I knew it was self-parody. Like a good moral comedy, it drew out an extreme version of human behaviour.'

But it was the peg on which he hung two fundamental criticisms of modern society which television epitomises and encourages. The first is 'emotional voyeurism' - not just observing sex and suffering, but wanting to see 'other people going through extremes of feeling - anger and misery'. Both television drama and reality TV pander to a taste which the Archbishop finds baffling as well as distasteful. That is not, in itself, unworldly, but a surprise that expressing such opinions makes tabloid headlines is.

The question which now hangs over Rowan Williams is whether or not the bruising experience of those early months - the abuse from the homophobic wing of the Church and the threat by the African bishops to break up the Anglican Communion - had driven him back from his own convictions that gay clergy, homosexual in inclination but celibate in life, should not be victimised.

I suggested a preoccupation with unity was the reaction to be expected from a 'Prince of the Church' while the refusal to be driven off principle was the response of a 'Man of God' and that the accusation that he had chosen to occupy the wrong role was a 'very severe criticism'.

He accepted the severity of the criticism but refuted it with the insistence that 'unity is a principle ... it is all to do with a calculation that goes something like this. The decision was one which severely ruptured a whole set of relationships which are not about structural harmony but about mutual learning and mutual giving - relationships, let's say, between churches in the developing world and the Church here or the Church in the States. To rupture those relations would be bad for the Church not as an institution but as a community ... making people feel they have not been taken seriously.' He then added, with admirable humility, 'I recognise the argument of unity versus principle and it stings. It goes deep.'

No one can doubt that it does. But, integrity being beyond question, his decision may have been an error of judgment. I suggested that men and women of every sort are longing for people who speak out, who say 'it is wrong to discriminate against gays and I do not care what the consequences are of my saying so. It is a matter of principle.' Wouldn't it do the Church a world of good if people said that sort of thing?

The Archbishop got very near to agreeing and perilously close to exhibiting regret that the inhibitions which are imposed upon him require discretion. 'I have had it borne in on me - I do not mean by weighty figures but borne in by the office - that, as Archbishop, I have to keep as many voices in play as possible ... The voices in the developing world, people who regularly feel marginal in pretty well every respect, this is another turn of the screw for them. I'm serious about the international dimension here. That is probably what weighs with me most, personally and emotionally.'

Concern for the developing world - in the argument about the acceptability of gay clergy, normally a euphemism for Nigerian obduracy - leaves a palpably principled Archbishop with a dilemma. Some of his brother bishops openly speak of homosexuals in the pure language of prejudice. How does he deal with them?

'When our conference had a discussion in '98 about this, one of the things that the famous resolution said was that we had a commitment to listen to the voices of gay people. When I hear what I do regard as deeply prejudiced voices coming out of the Church I say "look, we have that commitment as well" ... There are some things which should not be said in the Church or anywhere else.'

The hope of renewed harmony lies, the Archbishop believes, in the 'difficult and quite recent principle that orientation and sexual behaviour can be distinguished'. Jeffrey John is celibate.

But that has not prevented the Reverend David Holloway, leader of Reform within the Church of England, excoriating him. That, the Archbishop says, is why the 'discipline making a disjunction between orientation and behaviour is important. The Church is committed to it, whatever any individual cleric may say.'

The Church of England exists on compromise. But Islam seems to flourish on the refusal to yield. If a young Muslim, working in a Birmingham car factory, says that it is absurd that during Ramadan he must not eat between dawn and dusk, he is told by his priest that the Koran brooks no amendment. I wondered if the Archbishop thought people responded more enthusiastically to an absolute view of belief and faith.

'Some clearly do. Some are clearly appalled by it. If you look, second- and third-generation Muslim families have a lot of the same problems with teenagers that other families do.'

My suggestion that they may be just as prone to steal motor cars, but probably still believe that the sky is God's canopy provoked the response that an 'older generation of Muslims would have regarded seeing the sky as God's canopy and not stealing motor cars was a part of the same ethical tradition'.

The Archbishop is all of a piece. He never tries to divide virtue between faith and good works.

Rowan Williams

DoB: 14 June 1950

Family: Married (in 1981) to Hilary Jane Paul (one son, one daughter)

Education: Dynevor School, Swansea; Christ's College, Cambridge (BA 1971, MA 1975); Christ Church and Wadham College, Oxford (DPhil 1975; DD 1989)

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When the push for survival is a full-time job
What is it like to live on less than a dollar a day? Hundreds of millions in sub-Saharan Africa know. Their work is an endless cycle of bartering, hawking and scrounging to get by until tomorrow.


J
By Davan Maharaj, Times Staff Writer


Every day is a fight for pennies.

At sunrise, Adolphe Mulinowa is out hauling 10-gallon cans of sand at a construction site. It takes him an hour to earn 5 cents. Then he hustles to a roadside with a few plastic bottles of pink gasoline, which he hawks alongside dozens of other street vendors.

"Patron! Boss man! Gas! Gas! Gas!" Mulinowa barks as a battered Peugeot shudders past, kicking a spray of loose rocks at his face.

The car does not stop. Mulinowa, a short man in his mid-30s with sad, reddened eyes, squats down again beside his bottles. It is a scene repeated many times in the four hours it takes to sell them. Mulinowa pockets an additional 40 cents. Then, as the sun goes down, he heads to his evening job hawking used shoes and live chickens. A few more pennies.

After a 12-hour day, he returns home to his wife and six children with his earnings: about 70 cents and a bag of cornmeal swinging from his hand.

"We beat the belly pains today," he says in a tired mumble. "Tomorrow, more hard work."

Up and down the teeming streets of Goma, there is no real work as it is known in the West. There is only what everyone here calls se debrouiller — French for getting by, or eking a living out of nothing.

Decades of war and disease, followed by a volcanic eruption that entombed nearly half the city beneath a rough crust of lava, have reduced work to a mishmash of odd jobs and scheming. Civil servants survive on bribes. A lawyer moonlights by making pastries. A single mother of four turns to prostitution in her living room, decorated with pictures of Jesus and Mary.

They are among the poorest people on Earth, surviving on less than a dollar a day.

In the United States, an individual who makes less than $9,310 a year is considered poor. The World Bank sets its poverty line at $730 a year — $2 a day. Half of sub-Saharan Africa's 600 million people live on about 65 cents a day — less than what an American might spend on a cup of coffee.

It is never enough. In Goma, near the heart of Africa, an average family of seven spends about $63 a month, two-thirds of it on food. With every dollar, they make a choice among competing needs — food, rent, clothes, school and medicine.

Sometimes it is a matter of life and death.

Two years ago, Mulinowa's little boy, Dieudonne, or "God's gift," came down with a fever, cold sweats and shakes. Mulinowa knew that it was malaria.

He took the 3-year-old to a muganga — Swahili for traditional healer — who sprinkled him with water, squeezed the pulp from some herbs into his mouth and sent him home. Two days later, the boy was dead. Mulinowa knows that with 20 cents for medicine to fight the fever and chills, he might have saved his son's life. But he didn't have the money.

Neither did the families of three other children in the neighborhood who died about the same time.

"I do not want this to happen to my Annissette," Mulinowa says of his 2-year-old daughter. "That's why we work from dawn to dusk."

In some ways, the Mulinowas are better off than many Congolese. The family's wooden house, resting on an old lava flow, has a tin roof and some wooden furniture. The walls recently were whitewashed with paint from an aid agency. Their neighbors live in mud huts or houses fashioned from rusting galvanized sheets.

In a town of debrouillards, Mulinowa has learned to exploit tiny advantages. He has figured out that, because Goma has dozens of gasoline vendors, his chances are better two miles away at the Rwanda-Congo border. There, drivers have to slow down and are more likely to notice him.

His family also improves its odds by spreading out during the day, hoping that at least one member will earn enough to buy food.

If Mulinowa doesn't sell enough gas, shoes or chickens, then perhaps his son, 18-year-old Ivan, will have better luck making deliveries with his homemade wooden scooter, called a chukudu. For a few cents per trip, Ivan ferries goods through a bazaar of vendors hawking their wares, grilling lake fish on smoky coals and blasting the guitar rhythms of soukous stars such as Kanda Bongo Man. Sometimes the merchants also give him small bags of flour or vegetables.

If Mulinowa and his son fail, then daughter Bernadette, 15, might be able to bring in some money selling used clothes, canned sardines or other goods for neighborhood merchants.

The fallback is Mulinowa's wife, Faith, who struggles to feed her family of eight when a 50-pound sack of manioc flour costs $24; a sack of beans, $17; and a dozen salted fish, $7. Occasionally she receives produce from relatives in outlying villages that she can sell for extra money.

"When you work hard, good things happen to you," Faith Mulinowa says. "That's why we make it."

*

Goma, on the eastern edge of Congo, is controlled by rebels fighting the central government hundreds of miles away in Kinshasa, the capital. One aid group estimates that at least 3.3 million people have died in the country's violence and chaos since 1998.

But even a society living on the edge needs civil servants. Men with government seals, such as Pancrace Rwiyereka, a grandfatherly former schoolteacher who runs Goma's Division of Work, engage in their own version of se debrouiller.

They don't bring home an actual salary, but the majority still show up for work every day. A government job gives them the opportunity to demand money from businesses and members of the public. Their official jobs are a charade.

"Bribes are the answer," said a mid-level government employee in the finance department. "Why do you think we would never give up our jobs or strike to get our salaries?"

Authorities require entrepreneurs importing goods to obtain stamps from at least six agencies: the main customs office, an immigration office, a health agency, a separate health office that certifies goods for consumption, the governor's tax revenue office and a provincial office that collects money from truckers for nonexistent road rehabilitation.

Bureaucrats typically sell the stamps to the businesses at a reduced rate and then pocket the money. If a supervising officer discovers that the appropriate taxes haven't been paid, he too is paid off.

Bribes in Goma range from about $5 for a birth certificate to about $100 for an import license. But workers have to share the take with colleagues and superiors. So on many days they go home with less than $1. The system ensures that a single bribe will feed several families for a day.

Civil servants say they are merely finding a way to get paid for their services. That's the way it is here: Ordinary people always have had to scramble to survive. The only ones who have ever gotten rich are the leaders and those with connections.

In the 19th century, King Leopold of Belgium treated the Congo colony as his personal possession. And the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who took power in 1965 — five years after Congo won independence from Belgium — plundered an estimated $8 billion from the treasury during his three-decade rule. In a famous speech, he openly acknowledged the role of corruption.

"Everything is for sale, everything is bought in our country," he said. "And in this trade, holding any slice of public power constitutes a veritable exchange instrument, convertible into illicit acquisition of money or other goods."

Or, in the words of a government accountant: "Everyone has to look out for themselves. If you fail, you die."

So each workday, 61-year-old Rwiyereka dons a brown jacket over a secondhand Izod shirt, grabs his briefcase and heads for a sparse office at the Division of Work. The beige walls have been stained by tropical rains that pound through the leaky tin ceiling.

Rwiyereka has jammed his desk next to a window so he can catch a narrow shaft of sunlight. Several months ago, looters stripped the electrical cables from the building.

From the window, he sees lush jungle and fertile, black land that once made this area the breadbasket of Central Africa. The hills are rich in fine hardwoods and minerals, including coltan, which is used to make computer chips in Asia and cellular phones in Finland.

Despite this natural wealth, some Goma residents believe that the gods have cast them into hell. When it rains, lava still cooling after the eruption of Mt. Nyiragongo in January 2002 emits clouds of steam that envelope the city. The pungent smell of sulfur sometimes wafts in through Rwiyereka's window. Often, the bowels of the volcano rumble, forcing methane gas to bubble up in nearby Lake Kivu.

At his desk, Rwiyereka points to two stacks of letters from workers. He says that those who want him to investigate grievances have to bring in their own paper so his unpaid secretary can pound out an official response on his manual typewriter.

Rwiyereka chuckles when a visitor asks whether he and the 27 staffers in his office take bribes.

"I try to tell them that is not allowed," he says. "But they have mouths to feed. They and I know that having a job that doesn't pay is better than having no job at all."

*

There was a time when people thought that there was a way out. In a country where the vast majority of the people are illiterate, a college education would put one among the elite.

But Diane Kavuo has learned the hard way that even with a diploma, she needs se debrouiller.

Her father, who owned a small trucking business, poured most of the family's earnings into educating the brightest of his 11 children. It seemed like a ticket out of endless need.

Kavuo, like many people in Goma, speaks five languages — English and French, and three African languages: Swahili, Lingala and Kinande. She also has a law degree. But the chaos of Congo's civil war shattered her plan, and today the 28-year-old lawyer helps the family by selling fritters in the market.

Months go by without Kavuo earning a penny in fees from her legal cases, most of which involve unpaid loans of perhaps $100. Sometimes, lawyers groups pay her way to attend human rights conferences across Africa, where she highlights the plight of child soldiers and of women who have been raped by militiamen.

Kavuo spends her per diem money on handbags, lotions and cosmetics, which she brings back to Goma and gives to hawkers to sell. She uses her profit to buy sugar, flour and baking powder for the fritters.

A $50 investment returns $65. Almost half the fritters are given away to street children. But in Goma, the $15 profit can sustain a large family for several days.

Kavuo says she dreams of a day when Congo is a stable and prosperous country.

"Light is going to come," she says. "It's been dark too long."

Until then, another Goma resident, 37-year-old Mama Rose, also will have to struggle to feed her four young children.

Four years ago, militiamen robbed and killed her husband. Like Adolphe Mulinowa, he did odd jobs. But he had been his family's sole breadwinner.

For several months, Mama Rose worked menial jobs and tried hawking goods on the street. But she found herself relying mainly on neighborhood men who befriended her and brought her small baskets of food.

For that, they expected — and received — some intimacy.

Many women in Goma rely on such relationships to feed their families. But Mama Rose had another idea. Why pretend that she was befriending the men for their company? Why not admit to herself that it had become a job and start charging money?

"Every truth is not good to say," says Mama Rose, her radiant smile exposing her capped gold tooth. "But let us face it. In Goma, everything has a price. And I don't want to sell myself short."

In some months, Mama Rose earns less than $25, mainly in her small living room decked out with pictures of Jesus and Mary. Stuffed toys lie on her single wood-framed bed.

In a good month, when she works the better-off U.N. soldiers who are monitoring the conflict in Congo, she can earn up to $75.

Mama Rose has persuaded other prostitutes to organize. They recently confronted the regional governor, who had declared that 80% of Goma's sex workers were infected with HIV or had AIDS.

Mama Rose acknowledges that AIDS is a big problem, but denies that the infection rate is that high. Yet many of her friends have died of the disease, leaving their young children to fend for themselves and starting a new generation on the cycle of poverty.

"We're not bad people," she says, dusting some breadcrumbs from images of the Virgin Mary printed on her dress. "This is how we have to live. This is how we put some food in our stomachs."


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[LIVING ON PENNIES]
Trading tomorrow to eat today
In shriveled Ethiopia, the search for food is constant. Scraping together one meal often comes at the expense of providing for the next.
By Davan Maharaj
Times Staff Writer

July 12, 2004

Machete in hand, Batire Baramo steps out of her mud hut before dinnertime and begins whacking at the base of a struggling young tree. ¶ A cornfield lies nearby, every stalk stunted and barren. A coffee bush wilts in a patch of earth so dry that each footstep kicks up a puff of gray dust. ¶ Roots and stems from the false banana tree — so named because it never bears fruit — are all there is for dinner today. Batire will pound them into a pulpy mush that offers little real nutrition but at least will quiet the hunger of her husband and seven children. When those parts of the tree are gone, she will boil the bark. When the bark is gone, she will search for something else. ¶ "This place is cursed," Batire says of the family's half-acre plot. ¶ Life on less than a dollar a day, as most Africans live it, is the unending pursuit of sustenance. In the Horn of Africa, it is a search rarely satisfied. ¶ Ethiopia is one of the five poorest countries in the world and the largest per-capita recipient of humanitarian aid. Nearly half the population of 67 million is malnourished. Every year, millions face starvation. For the very young, life often ends in a sad, blue death. ¶ Behind the statistics lies a harsh reality that helps explain why hunger is such an intractable problem in Africa. When life is so consumed with survival, tomorrow is routinely traded away to fill stomachs today.

Foreign aid groups spend so much money feeding the starving that they never have enough left to prevent the next famine. The causes of Africa's hunger — drought, war, disease, corruption, overpopulation — never go away. They fade during the relatively good times, only to return.

Even in the good years, when the rains come to Ethiopia, subsistence farmers barely harvest enough maize, sweet potato and other crops to feed their families. Batire has never had the luxury of allowing her small clumps of false banana trees to fully mature, which would triple her yield. Instead, she shears the trees as soon as her family needs something to eat.

In the cruelest times, people eat sporadically, hoping that a day of searching by whole families can turn up more than morsels.

When everything is gone, the hungry seek handouts from the government or aid groups. But by then, disease often has gripped them. Severe protein deficiency brings on a condition known as kwashiorkor, which condemns its young victims to live their last days marked by telltale blue spots, their faces frozen in mournful expressions.

"If the diseases don't kill us, the drought is coming behind to finish the job," Batire says.





She already has seen half a dozen neighborhood children die this way. And many times, her own children have gone to bed hungry. On those nights, Batire sits trapped in the family's windowless, one-room mud hut — powerless to feed them yet unable to escape their cries for food.

The round hut, or tukul, that Batire and her husband, Ledamo Ataro, built when they were married 20 years ago has a floor of hard-packed dirt flecked with ash. In the fireplace, the false banana porridge simmers in a black pot resting on three clay jars.

Their village in southwestern Ethiopia sprawls amid farmland that in good years produces coffee beans for Starbucks and other high-end labels.

But 2003 was not a good year. It didn't rain in February and March, preventing the family from planting maize, wheat and other crops. The summer rains were sporadic.

Dinner is the only meal of the day. Before eating, the family offers its thanks for whatever food it has. Ledamo — a tall, wiry man who is perhaps 50 — is served first because he needs strength to provide for the family. His wife and children get to eat if anything is left.

Batire, who is about 40, wipes the sweat from her face with the ends of a blue head wrap as she bustles around the family's plot on an endless round of chores. The soles of her feet are cracked and stained with dirt.

The oldest child, 15-year-old Letimo, is a muscular youth. But his siblings' skinny limbs and slightly bloated bellies attest to varying degrees of malnutrition. From oldest to youngest, their limbs gradually become thinner because, in the words of one aid worker, "when you eat from a pot the strongest one eats first."

Each child owns one set of clothes, which means they all sit naked when Batire does the wash. Of the children, Letimo has the only shoes, a pair of red rubber slippers.

The children have never been to school and probably never will go. Ledamo says he can't afford to pay the fees and buy proper school clothes. Besides, he needs the children to search for food and help him grow their crops.

In good years, the Ledamos earn about 30 birr a month (about $4), selling produce in the village market. The family spends about 5 birr each week to buy staples it cannot grow: oil, salt and pepper.

Although they are battling hunger, the Ledamos are among the better-off members of their community. They own an ox, which they use to till their land. They also rent the animal out to the neighbors. The beast is so precious that it shares the family's home, chewing on a bundle of grass on one side of the 15-foot-wide hut. Left outside, the bony animal could become prey for thieves or spotted hyenas.

"We're not poor," Ledamo says proudly. "Many of my neighbors are poorer than me."

Even so, food is so scarce that Ledamo and Batire will soon have to make a crucial decision. They could sell the ox for about $12 to feed themselves and keep their children out of the emergency feeding centers that United Nations aid workers have been setting up in the region. But the money would be enough to feed them for only a few months.

They would be mortgaging the future to fill their stomachs today.

"We have to feed the children [or] these people will have to take them," Batire says, pointing to a convoy of U.N. aid vehicles rolling past her house.

It is a clear sign that the hungry season has arrived.





There have been so many such seasons for Ethiopians that even other Africans have little pity left. Nigeria's Daily Trust newspaper portrayed Ethiopia as an "embarrassment," a land of "no-thinkers" unable to conquer its cycle of drought and hunger.

Aid agencies say that much of Ethiopia's hunger is self-inflicted — the result of armed conflict, a stifling land policy, poor planning and overpopulation. The government spent millions on a lengthy civil war and a border war with Eritrea. A high birthrate compounds the food shortages. By 2015, Ethiopia will have 90 million people — 23 million more than today.

Unlike most Ethiopians, the Ledamos could irrigate their land using Lake Awasa, which lies a few hundred yards from their house. But Ledamo says that if he digs an irrigation ditch, it will only invite hippos to come out of the river reeds and trample or eat his crops.

Elsewhere — in India, China and Latin America — irrigation has enabled food production to soar. But less than 7% of Africa's tillable land is irrigated. In Ethiopia, the figure is 2%, even though its highlands are the source of two-thirds of the water flowing through the Nile downstream in Egypt.

But Ethiopia cannot come up with enough money on its own to pursue large-scale irrigation projects, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said in an interview. Potential lenders fear that if Ethiopia taps its sources of water, Egypt will suffer.

Ethiopia's subsistence farmers do not own their land. It belongs to the state. Aid agencies say putting it in private hands would give farmers an incentive to improve the land and increase efficiency. But Meles said that would only be another way of sacrificing the future: Many farmers would sell their land, providing them with a little money immediately but separating them from any means of feeding themselves later.

Unlike the Ledamos, many people have given up. There is a saying that Ethiopians no longer care whether it rains here, as long as it does in Iowa and other farm states, the source of their food aid.

"Ethiopians know that emergency aid will come, that it's only a matter of time," says Gazahegn Tadele, who heads the local chapter of Oxfam, a British-based aid group. But it's often a case of too little, too late.

Donors also find it easier sometimes to feed the starving than to build dams and roads that could help prevent the next famine.

"People say, 'Oh no, why is this happening in Ethiopia all over again?' " Meles said. "But the truth is that donors prefer to see their money feeding a famine victim — the faces of starving children — rather than spend it on some less visible project that addresses the root cause of poverty."

Those young victims, some of them carried 20 miles on their parents' backs, populate the feeding stations — collections of canvas tents filled with emaciated bodies and reeking of soiled clothes. The Ledamos are hoping to avoid such places.





Batire and Ledamo wake up one morning wondering again whether there will be anything to eat that day. For two nights, the entire family has gone to bed hungry. Earlier in the week, they had their last meal of false banana with bark mixed in. Their daughter Maskal, 7, is getting thinner by the day.

That morning, Batire and Ledamo decide to sell the ox.

But later in the day, Ledamo makes an incredible find. Turning up the roots of some dried maize plants, he discovers two clumps of large sweet potatoes buried like jewels beneath the soil. Ledamo calls out to his wife, telling her that he thinks he has found dinner.

God has smiled on us, he says.

Batire has a different idea. Instead of eating the potatoes, she will sell them. If she makes 60 cents, she can feed the family for a few days. They could even get enough flour to make injera, a foam-like bread that Ethiopians love.

Batire places the produce in tiny heaps in front of her house and waits for customers. Early in the day, some neighbors give her about 15 cents for a quarter of the sweet potatoes.

After that, the hours drag by.

A woman, carrying a hungry child on her back and tugging a bedraggled little girl alongside, begs for food. Batire thinks for a few seconds, then gives her three potatoes.

"When you're a mother, you know about suffering," she says. "You know how tough it is when your babies are hungry."

Batire has begun to give up hope of selling the produce when some men ride up on a donkey cart and buy the remaining potatoes. Beaming, Batire grabs her small fortune and rushes inside to tell Ledamo and the children. In her hand are 5 birr, about 65 cents.

"Today," she says, "we are blessed."

*

About this series: The number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living in dire poverty has nearly doubled in the last two decades. Times staff writer Davan Maharaj and photographer Francine Orr traveled the continent over nearly two years to chronicle the continual struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day. The six articles in the series:

PART 1: Sunday -- Eking out an income.

PART 2: Today -- Staving off hunger.

PART 3: Wednesday -- Settling for castoff clothes.

Coming later:

PART 4: Living in 100 square feet.

PART 5: Locked out of school.

PART 6: Surviving AIDS.

On the Web: More photos, narrated reports by the reporter and photographer, previous articles in the series and information on how to help can be found on The Times website at: http://www.latimes.com/ pennies.




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Front Page

COMMENTARY
In the driver's seat
By Tom Engelhardt

Here we are, just past our Independence Day, past that moment in memory when the United States was, by active example, a "beacon of freedom" to the world, past the moment in memory when, as Barbara Ehrenreich reminded us in the New York Times on July 4, the signers of the Declaration of Independence penned their names to the following line (Their George and Ours): "And for the support of this declaration ... we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."

She adds: "Today, those who believe that the war on terror requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue that 'the constitution is not a suicide pact'. In a sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was precisely that. By signing [Thomas] Jefferson's text, the signers of the Declaration were putting their lives on the line ... If the rebel American militias were beaten on the battlefield, their ringleaders could expect to be hanged as traitors. They signed anyway, thereby stating to the world that there is something worth more than life, and that is liberty."

Now, let's leap a couple of centuries-plus and consider another group of Americans who signed on to what's looking more and more like an inadvertent (political) suicide pact. Our media wash over us like some mind-cleansing drug, so today, in the shambles of Bush administration Iraq policy, in the wake of Abu Ghraib, just beyond the "transition to Iraqi rule", it's difficult to recall what life was like back when the press was simply a lapdog; CBS's Dan Rather was burbling, "George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where"; war was a swift, smiting blow (when was the last time you heard the phrase "shock and awe"?), and we were about to be anointed as the New Rome.

It's hard to remember that we were then ruled by the greatest, and most arrogant, gamblers in our history, men (and a single woman) ready to roll the dice any old time on the fate of the Earth. In the wake of every crumbling pseudo-explanation for the war in Iraq, it's hard to remember just how sweeping their vision actually was or what they had in mind when, not so long after September 11, 2001, they loaded some high-tech Hummer (regular cars being far too retro for them) with explosives and drove out into the world looking for something to blow up. Now that the strategists among them are in decline and the "realists", long left in the lurch, are wheeling and dealing in Iraq and Washington, it's hard to recall the Utopian (or dystopian) fantasies they were so intent on imposing on what turned out to be a surprisingly recalcitrant world.

For the nostalgia buffs among you, the increasingly lonely Vice President Dick Cheney, who not so long ago imagined himself to be the co-ruler of our energy planet, continues to hoof it around the country reiterating charges of al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein ties on a "best of 2001-02" Bush administration top-10 tour. But even the man who prided himself on never cracking, no less cracking a smile, has had his public bad moments and temper squalls - and all without a duck, quail or pheasant in sight to knock out of the skies.
In a bow to the Veep's oldies-but-badies routine, let's try, for a moment, to recall the strategic thinking that lay behind the shock-and-awe campaign seen around the world: from the start, of course, this was an energy administration. After all, how many national security advisers in our history have had an oil tanker named after them? How many vice presidents ran a giant energy company deeply entangled with the US military? The fact is, when it came to energy, like a group of vulgar Marxists with oil on the brain, most of them saw the world quite naturally in terms of energy flows, just the way a doctor might see blood flows as the body's essence.

They identified an "arc of instability" that stretched east-west from the former Yugoslavia to the borders of China and southward into Africa. (It was sometimes also said to include the Andean parts of Latin America.) This "arc", covering significant parts of what once was called the Third World, took in most of the planet's prime, or prospective, oil lands. Even before September 11 in this vast region, some of which had dropped out of the former Soviet empire, the administration of President George W Bush began to plant, or expand, US military bases. The heart of these oil lands lay in the Middle East, a region with - in better times - the world's five leading oil producers.

Post-September 11, the top strategists of this administration followed their president happily into the "war on terror", the wilder among them imagining it as World War IV, the equivalent of, if not World War II, at least the Cold War, and so engendering dreams of another half-century twilit struggle to victory. Endless years of war would release them to act exactly as they pleased. The president (and his speechwriters), dreaming "good war" dreams from his movie-made childhood, then elevated a pathetic "axis of evil" (Iran, Iraq and North Korea, none of which previously knew of their close relationship) to the role of the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan, Italy) in World War II; and so, with an enemy of nation-states in hand, far more worthy of a world at war than Osama bin Laden and small groups of fanatic Islamists, they announced a policy of global supremacy not over terrorists, but over all the other nations of our planet, swearing that no future bloc of powers would be allowed to interfere with our benevolent hegemony over the Earth - and of preventive war. We would reserve the right to take out anybody we even thought might sooner or later in some way or another challenge us. A list of up to 60 states believed to "harbor" terrorists was also drawn up. This was a list for a lifetime. And finally, declaring weapons of mass destruction evil, they made it our job to decide who exactly shouldn't have them and to bolster our own nuclear forces to prepare for a series of what author Jonathan Schell has called "anti-proliferation wars". With this trio of policies in their foreign-policy quiver, they looked around for some action.

Of course, the neo-con strategists of this administration had long been spoiling for, planning for, and dreaming of a second American Gulf War that would take down former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime. (Just a peek at the wonderfully named Project for the New American Century website, where they proudly posted their wares, will give you a sense of this.) Assessing the satanic trio that made up the axis of evil - a fierce and desperate despotism with a sizable air force but no fuel to get pilots aloft to practice flying planes; an increasingly embattled and unpopular but combative semi-theocracy; and a country sitting on the world's second-largest oil reserves, strung out by three failed wars, 12 years of economic sanctions and periodic bombings, and run by a detested, brutal, increasingly out-of-touch regime with a military that was just a ghost of its former self - they naturally chose the third. It was a grudge rematch to begin with; it looked like a snap (there was little question that Saddam's army, crushed in our first Gulf War, wouldn't last long in a second one); and the assaults of September 11, 2001, had made it a far more sellable commodity (hence the endless administration linkages of Iraq and al-Qaeda).

Nothing could be worse than Saddam, so Iraq's crushed people would prove both pliable and grateful for their "liberation". (You remember that "cakewalk", and all those flowers to be strewn in our path by joyous Shi'ites.) In return for a Saddam-less life, they would, of course, let us proceed apace with our plans. In an over-armed region, we would drastically downsize their army so that they would need our protection forever, build a string of permanent bases to the tune of billions of dollars (in part to replace those being mothballed in Saudi Arabia), and install a government run by Ahmad Chalabi, the sweet-talking exile with so much useful intelligence so close at hand, who was so deeply beloved by the neo-cons in the Pentagon and the Veep's office. He would be our satrap in a formally democratic Iraq. It was all so obvious.

And then, of course, there was all that oil. In our desperately over-determined world where the multiple explanation is the only explanation, the point of all this was never simply to take Iraq's oil, though the neo-cons did think it would be most useful in reconstructing and running the country on the cheap, as Pentagon Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made quite clear numerous times and still claims. In a world of rising oil desire and potentially limited oil resources, the point was to find ourselves ensconced militarily at the very heart of the Middle East, controlling the taps to the energy veins of the globe, and to do so before any of those future blocs of irritated countries could form to challenge us.

But Iraq wasn't the end of their plans. Not by a long shot. Seen as the region's soft underbelly, Iraq was to be but a pit stop on a long-imagined armed drive through the Middle East - and implicitly the world. (After all, the third member of the axis of evil was conveniently located on the other side of the planet.) Iraq was to be the motor for regional change. Once we stood triumphant in our Iraqi bases, Syria would find itself between the pincers of a US Army and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's militarized Israel. The Palestinians would find themselves completely isolated and would be forced to make a humiliating peace of the defeated with an expansive Israel. (Remember, this administration was filled with died-in-the-wool Likudniks who saw themselves delivering long-term safety to an Israel triumphant, while making regional use of the Sharonistas and their skills to help establish that New American Century.)

Iran, another of those grudge-match countries, with US encampments on two of its borders - don't forget our war in Afghanistan here - would be ripe for an Iraqi-style regime change, a bring-back-the son-of-the-Shah event filled with Orange County Iranians (already promising the same cakewalks and flowers). The Saudis, that giant oil-well of a state, would, of course, be thoroughly intimidated. With the North Atlantic Treaty Organization well established in the old Eastern Europe preserves of the Soviet Union, US troops flowing into increasingly permanent encampments in its former Central Asian republics as well as into a complex of expanding bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with a strengthened US alliance with a right-wing Hindu government in India (also growing ever closer to Israel), impoverished Russia would finally be "contained" along its many-thousand-mile frontier (in a way the Cold Warriors of the 20th century could only have dreamed of).

Energy-starved China, with its booming economy, seen by many in this administration as our great future competitor and enemy, would be left out in the cold, and the North Koreans would have been safely stowed in the refrigerator, a fit object for mopping up in a second Bush administration. The uppity old Europeans would be put in their place; the new (Eastern) Europeans would be eternally grateful for whatever economic favors and bases we dropped in their laps; the Middle East would be reorganized on a basis favorable to Israel and so to the US; and there would be an American Iraq with, as they so liked to say, "an Iraqi face" and a democratic facade. This was to be a New Rome indeed, not to say an Earth towered over by a single colossus. Pentagon planners talked about our military configuration in the world as our "footprint" as if we were indeed a giant capable of planting only a single vast foot on the planet. (Note that in all this, the war on al-Qaeda played at best a modest role, except as an enemy of convenience that explained everything to a terrified American populace - largely because this vision preceded September 11 and had next to nothing to do with terrorism.)

By the way, if you consider this vision, you immediately grasp one of the great, postwar mysteries of Iraq. Now that Iraq policy has crumbled, it's often asked why, given the Powell Doctrine (and the fact that he was, after all, secretary of state), we never prepared an "exit strategy" for Iraq. Consider, for example, this sentence from a recent Christian Science Monitor piece: "Much of the discussion [about future US military doctrine] revolves around the so-called Powell Doctrine of war (explicit objectives, overwhelming use of force, clear exit strategy) versus the 'Rumsfeld Doctrine' (smaller numbers of highly maneuverable ground forces, emphasis on special operations, and high-tech air power)."

What's the difference between the two military strategies? Rumsfeld's was a no-exit strategy. Remember, administration strategists were setting up in Iraq in order to drive elsewhere. They never imagined leaving, just as they never imagined all sorts of other possibilities that didn't go well with their dreams. In this sense, our president embodied our no-exit administration in his rhetoric. Only one party was going to leave town in this showdown on Main Street - the Saddamist enemy, and they were going to exit stone-cold and feet first.

For such a vision of the world, gaily decorated with much talk about bringing "democracy" to the benighted, they were ready to take any step imaginable: targeted assassinations (a la Israel), the setting up of an offshore mini-gulag, the torture of those from whom information must be extracted - all the dark arts of the world were to be mobilized for that bright dream of benevolent imperial domination. They planned for the worst they could imagine with the worst tools they could dream up. Where they failed was in their inability to imagine the world as it was, not as they wished it to be. In this sense they were both a Feith-based and faith-based administration; and this was why - despite copious prewar planning over at State - the boys from the Pentagon arrived in Iraq largely without Iraqis, Arabic speakers, or much in the way of plans for the country. They had won, hadn't they? They had Chalabi, didn't they? What else could they possibly need?

Starting with Iraqi nationalism, the basics of our planet in the last century, no less the new one, escaped them, but at least one has to grant them the audacity of their vision. It couldn't have been grander - though there was no way for the American public to know much about it, since at no other time in our recent past has the US press been so demobilized. At a time when our leaders were putting together the most expansive of global maps, most of the time you could hardly find a piece of analysis, no less news, in our papers that had two countries in it at the same time.

The administration neo-cons were Utopian fantasists who, if you think of Afghanistan as the first enforced stop on their path to Iraq, and Iraq as the chosen second stop on the way to the larger Middle Eastern region, didn't actually get far along the path they set out for themselves. And here's the almost incomprehensible thing (if you don't consider the history of resistance to imperial power of every sort over the last centuries), they were stopped by a group of ill-armed nobodies, lacking predator drones, tanks, billions in intelligence, access to the globe's e-mails, or even evidently a central command. They were stopped by relatively small groups of brutes and thugs, fanatics and dead-enders backed by the extraordinary power, the overwhelming desire of everyday Iraqis not to be occupied and ruled by a foreign power or its proxies.

And yet the neo-cons weren't completely wrong. They imagined Iraq as the motor for reorganizing first the region, then the world - a kind of wild force for change, a chaos machine that would scramble the previous world order in ways advantageous to them. Their only mistake was to believe that the levers of change in that scrambling would remain in their hands. They loosed - to use a classic phrase - the whirlwind and now it seems to be in the process of sweeping them away.

They weren't, of course, much at predictions. None of us are. It's one of those human failings. We can't help ourselves when it comes to predicting, but we're almost always surprised by reality. Still, they were worse at it than most, insistent as they were on imposing their soaring vision on a stubborn reality (exactly the charge long laid to the left). In a sense, of all their dreams, only the permanent bases in Iraq and the no-exit strategy remain, embedding Washington in the heartland of chaos for years to come. Perhaps the moral of their tale might simply be: Be careful what you wish for.

Of all the things they couldn't imagine, the first and foremost - they would have found the thought laughable only a year ago, as laughable as the idea that George W Bush, our war president, could lose the next election - was that a ragtag Iraqi insurgency would find itself in the driver's seat of some battered sedan, well-packed with munitions, and driving the Bush administration willy-nilly toward disaster in November. (This wasn't actually so hard to imagine. It was something I predicted at least a year ago - and if you were reading on the Internet rather than in our mainstream media, you wouldn't have found me alone.)

Just about everyone who represented respectable opinion in our country knew, only months ago, that Americans didn't really vote foreign policy. The media repeated this truth endlessly. The war simply couldn't, wouldn't be the decisive factor in a US election. Well, think again. Now they know and they still can't quite believe it. Now the administration knows too and can't quite believe it either. Now, they're in a rush to repair the damage and so Chalabi is replaced by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the Pentagon by the State Department and the Central Intelligence, and Bush II's boys by the dealers of the Bush I administration. In Iraq the new crew is settling up some form of martial law backed by US troops, a reconstituted semi-Ba'athist regime, and so on. The realists are back in the saddle and the media have given them a pass and a respite (though only until the next obvious catastrophe in Iraq, which is unlikely to be far down the pike). But what a saddle it's likely to prove to be.

This is the famed getting-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube dilemma and, given Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's insipid imperial suggestions for Iraq, it's likely to be with us next January no matter who wins in November. One of the few things the neo-cons seem to have done successfully is pass on a no-exit catastrophe to whomever. Ending the occupation - I mean the real one - and withdrawing our troops, these are not live thoughts in much of Washington. In this sense, with Americans already at the 40% mark on withdrawal, the public is way ahead of its leaders who, on both sides of the aisle, seem to be opting for a Vietnam-style response: escalation.

But, as Dr Seuss might have said, that is not all, oh, no, that is not all. The administration policies that crystallized in the invasion of and high-handed occupation of Iraq seem to have set off a process that is reorganizing the world in ways we can't yet fully grasp. Some may be hopeful, some frightening indeed. In South Korea and India, the right has already been swept from power. In Italy and possibly Japan, rightist governments totter. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair stands unsteady at the helm, as does Australian Prime Minister John Howard in Australia, and so on. In the Middle East, this administration has created a border-blurring monster and God knows what will follow. All we can say with any degree of certainty is that it will be ugly, and every day we occupy Iraq under whatever "face" will make it worse.

In our country, the president's poll numbers look dreadful indeed. (As sociologist Michael Schwartz writes, "The really bad news for Bush in these polls lies in the voters' evaluations of his leadership, and all three polls concur in recording dramatic declines to his lowest scores since 9/11. To cite just some of this evidence, the WP [Washington Post]-ABC poll registers Bush's overall approval job rating at 47%, below 50% for the first time since 9/11. Only losing incumbents have been below 50% at this point, with the exception of the Truman miracle of 1948. His ratings on specific issues are also at low ebbs.")

Already, for an election victory, a number of things will have to break very right for him - and we're only in the early days of July. There's so much worse to come in Iraq as well as inside the Beltway where a lethal brew of investigations, court cases, commission reports, angry leakers and whistle-blowers, all released by or fallout from this administration's Iraq policies, ensure unending months of messiness. The president may already be political dead meat, even if the opinion poll head-to-heads with Kerry don't yet register it.

And here's an odd little bit of polling info, pointed out by John Nichols of The Nation magazine ("Will the Senate tip?"): "Democratic candidate Inez Tenenbaum, South Carolina's superintendent of education, leads in the polls [for a South Carolina Senate seat in a state Bush won by 57%] - despite the fact that one of her opponents dismisses her as 'an Emily's List liberal'. And Tenenbaum's not alone in showing unexpected strength. Democrats are running even or ahead in four of five races for open Senate seats in the South, and they're also even or ahead in contests for Republican-held seats in Illinois, Oklahoma, Colorado and Alaska." Not so long ago, those southern Senate seats would have been considered throwaways, obvious red-state shoo-ins. No one may say it, but this too is Iraq. Though not yet likely, there is the possibility that, depending on how fast events sink in and how disastrous the news proves, the Democrats might take back Congress, and this might itself prove but part of a larger seismic shift, a global reorganization that, on the one hand, might end the quarter-century, near planetwide reign of the right wing, and on the other hand may bequeath us all a desperately more dangerous world.

The Bush people were audacious; they were visionary (and didn't mind telling you so); the only liberty they truly valued was their liberty to do as they damn pleased; they were focused on unilateral global domination of a sort seen at most only a few times in history; they had the mentality of plunderers and didn't hesitate to use fear to herd Americans in the directions they most desired. In the end, they may find themselves alone and vulnerable in a Baghdad-on-the-Potomac of their own making with no Green Zone in sight and chaos in the driver's seat.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. He is the author of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, and The End of Victory Culture, a history of US triumphalism and the Cold War.

(This article first appeared on tomdispatch)



Jul 13, 2004



All unquiet on the Western front (Jul 9, '04)

US Christian Right's grip on Middle East policy (Jul 8, '04)

Bush and the Muslim predicament (Jul 8, '04)







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[plschwartz]

1954: United Fruit Co. Suit

The Department of Justice filed its anti-trust suit July 2 against the United Fruit Company only after receiving clearance from both the Department of State and the National Security Council, top defense agencies, it was learned tonight [July 12]. In a civil action suit filed in New Orleans, the department charged the $5,000,000,000 company with maintaining a monopoly in the Central and North American banana trade and asked that it be forced to split its business with competitors.http://www.iht.com/inourpages.html

[Ciberblade]

Oh no! Not a banana monopoly What has this world come to?¿?

[plschwartz]

CB
This is what I found of interest :
only after receiving clearance from both the Department of State and the National Security Council...

[Ciberblade]

I'm guessing that the banana's in question are chiquita? And is it really all that bad? I wonder who has the Apple monopoly