I never heard the words “accountability” or “high stakes testing” once in a recent educator delegation to Venezuela. As a U.S. professor of teacher education, I seldom have discussions about education policies and realities in my own country without confronting these fraught concepts. But in the schools and educational systems of Venezuela? Not part of the discussion.

The dialogue there is more about education as a human right and what the government is responsible to provide. It’s not about outcomes, as we might say, but more about access and opportunity. What our small group from the U.S. encountered was a wealth of testimonials, not testing.

In Venezuela, by contrast, education reform means inspiring local and diverse approaches that work from the premise of empowering the people working in the schools. It operates through an ethic of internal responsibility and collectivism, increased public funding, and government-sponsored local decision-making. The rationale is to build greater cooperation at the community level. The effect is inclusionary. It is a socialist model, framed in terms of “good living.”

One evening in Venezuela, as a few of us were discussing what we see as the tragic attacks on public education in the United States, one person asked where we could see hope. I answered, “In Venezuela.”

Palestinians in other parts of the occupied territories coveted by Israel – such as villages next to Jerusalem and those in the fertile Jordan Valley, the territorial backbone of any future Palestinian state – are being squeezed too. Firing ranges, closed military zones and national parks are the pretexts for Israel to seize the farmland these rural communities need to survive.

As a result, Palestinian life is withering in the nearly two-thirds of the West Bank Israel was temporarily entrusted with – the so-called Area C – under the Oslo Accords.

Endlessly harassed Palestinians have sought sanctuary in West Bank cities under Palestinian Authority control. Today the remnants in Area C, a population of about 100,000, are outnumbered three to one by Jewish settlers.

A discomfited European Union, normally mealy-mouthed on Israel’s occupation, has started to describe this as “forced transfer”. The term may sound ominous and reproving, but human rights groups say that, from a legal perspective, the terminology obscures rather than illuminates what is taking place.

......It all, in my humble opinion, boils down to this. The entirety of the ruling elite and the journalistic establishment are keen on defending the programs Snowden has exposed; keen on punishing him for his whistle-blowing; determined to vilify him as a punk, narcissist, egoist, attention-hungry ne’er-do-well (anything but a thoughtful man who made a moral choice that has enlightened people about the character of the U.S. government); feverishly working on damage control while anticipating more damning revelations; and determined to get those four laptops with their incriminating content back into the bosom of the national security state.

What sort of state is it, that says to its own people, we can invade a country based on lies, kill a million people, hold nobody accountable but hey, when one of us does something so abominable as to reveal that the state spies constantly on the people of the world, we have to have a “manhunt” for him and punish him for treason?

The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has the audacity to tell NBC News, “It is literally gut-wrenching to see” Snowden’s revelations… because of the “damage” they do to “our intelligence capabilities”! As though there were really an “our” or “us” at this point. As though we were a nation united, including the mindful watchers and the grateful watched.

No, there are us, and there are them. The tiny power elite that controls the mainstream press and cable channels, the corporations that dutifully hand over meta-data to the state (and then deny doing so to allay consumer outrage), the twin political parties, are sick to their stomachs that they’ve been so exposed.

We in our turn should feel, if not terrorized, nauseated.

During the Sixties and ever since, the basic systemic and historical forces and issues that fueled the decade’s uprisings and the real democratic and egalitarian nature of its popular movements have stood beyond the boundaries of legitimate discourse in dominant U.S. media. The underlying problems that drove Sixties movements – soulless corporate rule, imperial war, ubiquitous poverty, oppressive racism, stultifying cultural homogenization, pervasive sexism, environmental pollution, and more – have been thrown down Orwell’s memory hole in that media. They’ve been exiled to the margins of collective memory, along with the democratic hopes of millions who participated in those movements. In transmitting the Sixties, the managers of mass U.S. media have offered an emotionally potent but highly superficial, heavily image- and personality-centered depiction of the decade’s movements and protests as dysfunctional deviance reflecting little more than a rebellion of angry and “sick” youth against authority as such. This great generations Sixties smear relies heavily on sensational visual representations of the protestors themselves and the national degradation and mayhem they allegedly advanced.

Some will question the depth and degree of the great 1960s “democratic awakening” today. Many in the U.S. establishment did not at the time and in the Sixties’ immediate aftermath. In August 1971, for example, top corporate attorney Lewis Powell penned a length and remarkable memorandum to the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Written two months before Richard Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court, the memo detailed what Powell considered a “broadly based” assault on “the American economic system” (capitalism) emanating not just from radical margins but from “perfectly respectable elements of society: the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” By Powell’s reckoning, a dangerous anti-business uprising led by such “charismatic” threats as Ralph Nader and the radical professor Herbert Marcuse meant that corporations should undertake a concerted and many-sided public relations and media counter-offensive – a veritable capitalist cultural counter-revolution. “It is time,” Powell proclaimed, “for American business – which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in history to produce and influence consumer decisions – to apply their great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself” (emphasis added). Powell felt that the struggle to win back hearts and minds for capitalism should target the universities, the publishing world, and the mass media, including an effort to place the television networks “under constant surveillance.” By Morgan’s account, Powell’s “urgent appeal helped set in motion forces that subsequently transformed public discourse in the United States for decades to come.” (165-167).

Two years later, Chase Manhattan Bank chief David Rockefeller, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, convened top figures from business and government in Europe, North America, and Japan to determine how to maintain what he called “the wider international system.” Organized as the Trilateral Commission, the elites gathered by Rockefeller produced a study claiming that “excessive” popular engagement and activism during the 1960s had generated “A Crisis of Democracy” – meaning, by Morgan’s translation, “that capitalism, its constrained, elite version of electoral democracy, and U.S. global hegemony were all endangered” (243). Writing the report’s section on the United States, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington worried that the “democratic surge” had activated “previously passive or unorganized groups in the population,” including “blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women,” who “embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges” (imagine!). This was all, Huntington scolded, part of a an effort towards “reassertion of the primacy of equality as a goal in social, economic, and political life” – a goal that Huntington found dangerous and dysfunctional because it sought a “welfare shift” of government resources from “defense” (the military-industrial complex) to things like education, public health and social security (244).

What really happened to the great many-sided democratic and egalitarian awakening that was the essence of the 1960s? The decade’s great popular movements were of course quite significantly snooped on, infiltrated, manipulated, smeared, bloodied, and otherwise repressed by local, state, and federal government. Just as importantly and of no small relevance for authorities’ ability to repress, however, those movements were defeated in their own time and ever since by a mass media that has distorted and exploited the Sixties for reasons both political and commercial, with terrible results for democratic and human prospects.

In 1971, an American military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg gave a New York Times reporter a copy of “United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense,” a multi-volume work that became known as the Pentagon Papers. The massive, classified study painted a candid and unflattering portrait of the military’s conduct of the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court rejected the government’s request for an injunction against its publication later that year in a 6-3 ruling.

Ellsberg became the first person prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act for releasing classified information to the public. But the case was thrown out after the judge learned that the government had engaged in the illegal wiretapping of Ellsberg and other misconduct.

Today, Ellsberg is one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration’s prosecution of leakers. Under President Obama’s tenure, the government has prosecuted six individuals for releasing classified information to media organizations.

Ellsberg is particularly fierce in his support of Bradley Manning, a young soldier who released a large amount of classified information to WikiLeaks. Manning was arrested in 2010, and his military court-martial began this week. Ellsberg considers Manning a hero, and he argues that there is little difference between what Manning did in 2010 and what Ellsberg did four decades earlier. We spoke by phone on Friday. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

The nervousness and anxiety of the West over the future of the U.S. financial dominance was quite clear from the communique issued after the recent 2013 G8 meeting in Ireland. Most of the points in the communique issued by the White House (the Lough Erne Declaration) dealt with the challenges coming out of Africa and the role of transnational corporations plundering African resources without paying taxes.[8] Prior to the G8 meeting, the 2013 Report of the Africa Progress Panel headed by former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Anan, called on the same G8 leaders to police their corporations. The Panel had called for inter alia:

• The G8 and the G20 to establish common rules requiring full public disclosure of the beneficial ownership of companies, with no exceptions.
• Companies bidding for natural resource concessions to disclose the names of the people who own and control them.[9]

The destructive extraction of resources from Africa is old and has taken new forms, as Patrick Bond reminds us in Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation.[10] For the past six decades the World Bank domination of economic arrangements in Africa has seen the period of dramatic capital flight from Africa.[11] The multi-billion dollar enterprise of looting Africa was at the foundation of an international system that increasingly worked on the basis of speculative capital. The World Bank and the IMF understood that the real foundations of actual resources were to be found in Africa. To conceal the looting and plunder, the West disguised the reality that Africa is a net creditor to the advanced capitalist countries (termed “donors” in neo-liberal parlance). For this reason (and to perpetuate the myths of “spurring economic growth and investment”), the United States government has been caught in a losing battle where new rising forces such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, South Korea and other states offer alternatives to the structural adjustment and austerity packages. Barack Obama is going to Africa to boost the armaments culture of the United States at a moment when details of the massive corporate-government spy operations has exposed the surveillance of citizens in all parts of the world in the name of fighting extremism. Citizens are finding out that the gathering of intelligence ultimately serves the interests of capital equity groups such as the Carlyle group that is involved in armaments, intelligence and the stock market.[12]

That African farming needs investment and support is indisputable. But does it need land grabbing? Yes, according to the deals these countries have signed. Mozambique, where local farmers have already been evicted from large tracts of land, is now obliged to write new laws promoting what its agreement calls “partnerships” of this kind(6). Cote d’Ivoire must “facilitate access to land for smallholder farmers and
private enterprises”(7). Which, in practice, means evicting smallholder farmers for the benefit of private enterprises. Already French, Algerian, Swiss and Singaporean companies have lined up deals across 600,000 hectares or more of this country’s prime arable land. These deals, according to the development group GRAIN, “will displace tens of thousands of peasant rice farmers and destroy the livelihoods of thousands of small traders.”(8) Ethiopia, where land grabbing has been accompanied by appalling human rights abuses, must assist “agriculture investors (domestic and foreign; small, medium and larger enterprises) to … secure access to land”(9).

And how about seed grabbing? Yes, that too is essential to the well-being of Africa’s people. Mozambique is now obliged to “systematically cease distribution of free and unimproved seeds”, while drawing up new laws granting intellectual property rights in seeds which will “promote private sector investment”(10). Similar regulations must also be approved in Ghana, Tanzania and Cote d’Ivoire.

Strangely missing from the New Alliance agreements is any commitment on the part of the G8 nations to change their own domestic policies. These could have included farm subsidies in Europe and the US, which undermine the markets for African produce, or biofuel quotas, which promote world hunger by turning food into fuel. Any constraints on the behaviour of corporate investors in Africa (such as the Committee on World Food Security’s guidelines on land tenure(12)) remain voluntary, while the constraints on their host nations become compulsory. As in 1884, the powerful nations make the rules and the weak ones abide by them. For their own good, of course.

The West, as usual, is able to find leaders in Africa who have more in common with the global elite than they do with their own people. In some of the countries which have joined the New Alliance, there were wide-ranging consultations on land and farming, whose results have been now ignored in the agreements with the G8. The deals between African governments and private companies were facilitated by the World Economic Forum, and took place behind closed doors(13).

(CNN) -- Millions of hectares of land have been acquired in the past few years across Africa by investors who are moving into large-scale agriculture to take advantage of potential windfall gains. Popularly these deals have become known as "land grabbing," but they could just as well have been framed as "water grabs."

All around the world powerful actors (transnational as well as national) are pointing out that the lands in which they invest are "marginal" and "unproductive" lands. This has been shown to be untrue for many cases; either the land is already used by small-scale food producers, or is of prime quality and associated with good (potential) access to water.

Abstract


Global Land And Water Grabbing

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/02/1213163110.abstract

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