A Foreclosure Conveyor Belt: The Continuing Depopulation of Detroit
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=26945"><span class="small">Laura Gottesdiener, TomDispatch</span></a>
Thursday, 23 April 2015 13:18
Gottesdiener writes: "While everyone loves to hear about legendary industrial Detroit, no one wants to hear about its de-industrialized progeny, and especially not about foreclosures - not again."
(photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
A Foreclosure Conveyor Belt: The Continuing Depopulation of Detroit
By Laura Gottesdiener, TomDispatch
23 April 15
nlike so many industrial innovations, the revolving door was not developed in Detroit. It took its first spin in Philadelphia in 1888, the brainchild of Theophilus Van Kannel, the soon-to-be founder of the Van Kannel Revolving Door Company. Its purpose was twofold: to better insulate buildings from the cold and to allow greater numbers of people easier entry at any given time.
On March 31st at the Wayne Country Treasurer’s Office, that Victorian-era invention was accomplishing neither objective. Then again, no door in the history of architecture -- rotating or otherwise -- could have accommodated the latest perversity Detroit officials were inflicting on city residents: the potential eviction of tens of thousands, possibly as many as 100,000 people, all at precisely the same time.
Little wonder that it seemed as if everyone was getting stuck in the rotating doors of that Wayne County office building on the last day residents could pay their past-due property taxes or enter a payment plan to do so. Those who didn’t, the city warned, would lose their homes to tax foreclosure, the process by which a local government repossesses a house because of unpaid property taxes.
“Oh, my lord,” exclaimed one bundled-up woman when she first spotted the river of people, their documents in envelopes and folders of every sort, pouring out of cars, hunched over walkers, driving electric scooters, being pushed in wheelchairs, or simply attempting to jam their way on foot into the building. The afternoon was gray and unseasonably cold. The following day, in the middle of a snowless meadow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the governor of California would announce the state’s first-ever water restrictions as a result of an unprecedented, climate-change-influenced drought. Here in Michigan, city residents were facing another type of man-made disaster: possibly the largest single tax foreclosure in American history.
“It’s the last day to pay,” one woman heading toward the rotating glass chamber yelled to a pedestrian who had slowed to watch the commotion. Inside, a Wayne County Sheriff’s Department officer-turned-traffic-controller boomed instructions to a snaking line of people. “When you get to the eighth floor, you will get a number. Keep that number! Then go to the fifth floor.’”
The eighth floor, however, turned out to be little more than another human traffic jam, a holding space for thousands of anxious homeowners who faced hours of waiting before reaching the desk of some overworked city representative down on five. Yet, as a post office delivery worker gaping at the fiasco told me, this was less hectic than it had been a only few days earlier, when the treasurer’s office had rented out the Second Baptist Church across the street. There, people waited for the opportunity to enter the revolving doors to take the elevator to the eighth floor before heading for the fifth floor to... you get the gist.
In fact, the whole week had been a god-awful mess. A day earlier, rumors had it, a woman had passed out in the elevator between the eighth and fifth floors en route to “making arrangements,” the euphemism for getting on a payment plan that might save your home.
“What happens if you can’t pay?” a slender man asked me as we dodged a new wave of people surging through the glass cylinder.
“Then they sell your house at auction,” I replied.
“For real?” he asked, amazed.
He was waiting for his sister to make those “arrangements.” He didn’t have to worry about all this, he explained, because ever since he’d lost his job, which had provided him with housing, he’d been staying in motels. The Victory Inn over in Dearborn and the Viking across from the Motor City casino were both reasonable enough places, he assured me, but the Royal Inn on Eight Mile was the cheapest of all -- $35 a night plus a $10 key deposit. That establishment’s single enigmatic Yelp review read: “This is definitely someplace you want to go where totally normal things happen.”
A Blueprint for Civic Hell
Detroit was once famous for creating the largest, most spectacular versions of whatever its residents set their minds to, be they assembly lines, record labels, or revolutionary workers' associations. The city is often credited with inventing and mass-producing the twentieth century, while its workers simultaneously took the lead in revolting against the injustices of the era. Its factories put the world on wheels and labor laws on the books. Its workers and thinkers sparked and fanned a number of this country’s most influential resistance movements.
Detroit: every article about you should include a love letter, a thank-you note, a history lesson, for without you…
Few care to admit, however, that the city that was the arsenal of the twentieth century may also provide the blueprint for a more precarious era. Which brings us to those massive tax foreclosures of the present moment. Just over 60,000 homes, about half of them occupied, are slated for the auction block. As many as 100,000 of the city’s residents -- about a seventh of the total number -- are now on track for what many are calling an eviction “conveyor belt.”
Such an image easily springs to mind in this city whose auto factories were famous for their oh-so-efficient shop floors. These days, sadly enough, it’s all-too-easy to imagine a twenty-first-century version of a classic Detroit assembly line dedicated to processing its own residents, workers, and retirees -- all the ones it claims to no longer need, all those too old, too young, too ill-trained, too inefficient for a post-bankruptcy city. These undesirables, it seems, are to be turned into so many economic refugees on a conveyor belt to nowhere. While everyone loves to hear about legendary industrial Detroit, no one wants to hear about its de-industrialized progeny, and especially not about foreclosures -- not again.
Mike Shane, a Detroit resident and organizer with the anti-foreclosure group Moratorium Now!, knows this better than anyone. “We call the press, and they say, give us anything but foreclosures,” he tells me ruefully.
Connecting the Dots
On March 31st, some people did manage to make the necessary “arrangements” to save their homes. That included one woman with a Hillary Clinton-style hairdo who had lived on Winthrop Street since the 1960s, but like so many in the working-class sections of the city had fallen behind on her taxes. “They asked, ‘Why didn’t you pay your property taxes?’” she explained as she rested on one of the first-floor benches. “And I said, ‘Because I had a heart attack.’”
Last year, she recalled, a neighbor’s home fell into tax foreclosure. A man who lived on the same block noticed the familiar address on the auction list. He bought it back for her, she tells me. “He said to the woman, ‘Pay me back when you can, if you can.’”
Detroit is full of similar stories, filled with a stubborn sense of hope. But there are so many more addresses on the foreclosure list than angelic neighbors. By early afternoon that March day, the building still bursting at its seams with thousands of people, the county office conceded its inability to cope and extended the foreclosure deadline another six weeks.
“I don’t know if it’s because they’re so damn overwhelmed,” wondered Mary Crenshaw, a sunken-eyed woman who was relieved by the announcement, as it gave her time to wait for a lump-sum retirement payout from British Airways, her former employer. She had come to save her family home in Highland Park, a small city enclosed by Detroit whose once occupied homes sported oak floors and beveled glass windows. Now, more than half of them are empty, lawns overgrown, windows boarded up, the former homeowners having already ridden earlier foreclosure conveyor belts out of the neighborhood.
After all, this current tax foreclosure crisis comes right on the heels of the city’s last great displacement: the 2008 housing crash, which descended on Detroit like a tidal wave, sweeping nearly a quarter of a million people out of the city and leaving in its wake tens of thousands of vacant properties.
The fact that the city is now threatening to evict a seventh of its remaining inhabitants in a single year, all because of unpaid property taxes, seems like an absurd proposition until you begin to connect the dots: the mass water shutoffs, the shuttering of dozens of public schools, the neglect of fire hydrants in particular neighborhoods, and now this deluge of foreclosures.
Looking at the pattern that emerges, you can see that Detroit is not only a city in the midst of a “revival,” as enterprising investors and the national media often claim. It’s true that redevelopment is taking place in some neighborhoods, and city officials do claim that big changes are coming, often illustrating them with colorful documents that look like they were formatted by a team of graphic design wizards from the back of San Francisco’s Google Bus.
But that’s just one part of the Detroit story. For the city’s low-income, black, and elderly residents, Detroit isn’t a city on the rise, but one under siege.
An Emergency That Never Ends
On a blustery Saturday afternoon just two weeks before the day of the foreclosure deadline, an Emergency People’s Assembly Against Tax Foreclosures was held at Old Christ Church to address this siege. It was one of a set of “people’s assemblies” called to deal with the latest crisis in a city where, in recent years, crises have never been lacking. Before the tax foreclosure assemblies there had been the Emergency People’s Assemblies Against Bank Foreclosures, the Emergency Pack-The-Court Actions to Defend Homeowners from Eviction, the Emergency Town Halls to Defend City Pensions & Services, the Emergency Meetings Against the Emergency Financial Manager, and so on.
“Emergency” had, in other words, been the word of the moment for years and years. That invasive sense of never-ending urgency could similarly be seen in the literature of such groups -- in the words always screamingly in capital letters, in the typographical equivalents of exclamation points. When I’d first heard about the most recent event, I was in a meeting with Mike Shane and I said to him, “Over the three years I’ve been visiting Detroit, I’ve never arrived at a time you weren’t holding an Emergency People’s Assembly the following Saturday.”
Shane laughed on cue. “Well, yes, that’s right,” he replied. “We’ve been at this since about 2007.”
The Old Christ Church that day was shiveringly cold. From the pew behind me came the sound of rustling coats as two children squirmed. Beside them sat their grandmother and grandfather, Lula and Daryl Burke, who had come to describe how their home had been sold at a tax foreclosure auction last year. With the help of the grassroots community group Detroit Eviction Defense, Lula explained, the Burkes had convinced the home’s buyer to sell it back to the family.
A little bit of gumption on her part helped, too. As she recalled explaining to the investor who had bought her home at auction, he could try to sell the house to someone else. But before he did that, she planned to strip every last thing out of it. “It won’t have a furnace, a toilet, doors, windows, all the way down to the light switch,” she warned him.
On the wall behind the altar three white-robed angels were suspended in mid-frolic, oblivious to the current condition of their once regal city. In front of them stood anti-foreclosure lawyer Jerry Goldberg. “Are we going to allow 62,000 more foreclosures this year?” he thundered, his face growing redder. I later learned that, years ago, Goldberg had sold peanuts down at the old Tigers stadium (now a bulldozed parking lot) and his unrelenting voice had apparently made him very good at it.
“No!” he responded emphatically to his own question. “Are we going to allow them to make our neighborhoods into a bunch of ponds?”
Perhaps I should have led with this information: in some of the city’s latest flashy Adobe InDesign-ed planning documents, certain of Detroit’s more down-and-out neighborhoods have been transformed into ponds. Or, to be more precise, they have been turned into “water retention basins” that planners believe will offer the Detroit of the future superior management of storm water runoff.
Minutes earlier, Alice Jennings, one of the most celebrated social justice lawyers in the city, had explained that, according to Detroit’s planning documents, those retention basins are slated to be built on top of now populated neighborhoods. In other words, ponds are also what we’re talking about when we talk about Detroit’s tax foreclosures.
“No!” Goldberg shouted yet again. “We need to stop these foreclosures with a moratorium, a halt! The idea that this can’t be done is hogwash! The Supreme Court held in 1934 that, during a period of emergency, the people’s need to survive supersedes any financial contract! The governor has a responsibility to declare a state of emergency!”
His sentences all ended in exclamation points, as his torrent of words resounded off the church’s high ceilings. In an upside-down universe, Goldberg would have made a skilled auctioneer rather than a man desperate to save all those homes and their inhabitants.
To be clear, Goldberg isn’t suggesting another of the emergency proclamations that Michigan’s governors have used to impose unelected emergency managers on school districts and municipalities from Detroit to Muskegon Heights. Rather, he’s calling for the governor to declare a state of emergency under Michigan law 10.31, which would allow him to “promulgate reasonable orders, rules, and regulations as he or she considers necessary to protect life and property” -- including, of course, halting the tax foreclosures. In 1933, similar actions allowed Michigan’s legislature to pass the Mortgage Moratorium Act, later upheld by the Supreme Court, mandating a five-year halt on property foreclosures.
Winning that moratorium took, among other things, a well-organized national Communist Party, hundreds of worker councils, thousands of eviction blockades, and -- I’d be willing to bet, although I don’t have the archival evidence -- an incredible number of “emergency meetings.”
Woe to Those Who Plan Iniquities
By late afternoon, Goldberg was resting his vocal chords and about a dozen people from the audience were lining up to take the microphone, including Cheryl West, a tiny, gray-haired woman clutching a thick Bible to her stomach. When it was her turn to speak, she began: “I lost my home of 60 years.” There was no trace of bitterness in her voice, just a touch of awe and disbelief. “It’s been quite a journey. Quite a journey.”
“Let me give you a little background,” she continued. “My entire family is now deceased. My father was the first African American to teach music in Detroit, possibly in the entire state of Michigan. He worked for the school system. He lived in that very house. He lived there through the 1967 riots and we were right at the hub of where the riots started. My sister was a journalist, and during the riots she was one of the people getting the story out to the media, because she was working for UPI at the time. My sister was on the front page of the London Times, that’s how far her news traveled of the city burning down around us.”
Then, after a few more background comments on her life, she opened up her bible. “Since we’re in a church,” she said by way of explanation and began to read from the Book of Micah. She skipped its beginning.
“Woe to those who plan iniquity, to those who plot evil on their beds! At morning’s light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud people of their homes, they rob them of their inheritance...”
Undoubtedly, she assumed that everyone in the church was already familiar with such “iniquities” and the biblical lines that went with them. After all, in the previous few years, they had lived through the 2008 foreclosure crisis, the imposition of an emergency manager on their city, mass water shutoffs, and significant pension cuts for retired city workers, not to speak of all the evils that had come before.
Instead, she read the verses she liked best, the ones that, as she said, God led her to just about the time she lost her home.
“You strip off the rich robe from those who pass by without a care, like men returning from battle. You drive the women of my people from their pleasant homes. You take away my blessing from their children forever."
She paused, then suddenly, in a surprisingly powerful voice, yelled the next line: “Get up! Go away!”
The church reverberated with her admonishment. And then, with a smile at her own audacity, she added, “The end.”
Shortly afterwards, we filed out of the church. And yet it was not the end. It never is.
There is now, for instance, that new deadline -- May 12th -- for residents to get on a payment plan to avoid losing their homes to tax foreclosure. That offers more time for people to navigate the revolving doors of the Wayne County Treasurer’s Office, head up to the eighth floor, then down to the fifth, all in an effort to fight their way off of the city’s conveyor belt to nowhere. And, of course, it gives residents more time to host emergency people’s assemblies aimed at throwing a monkey wrench -- once and for all -- into this assembly line of eviction and displacement.
Even if that happened, however, these gatherings, called for in all capital letters and exclamation points, undoubtedly wouldn’t end. They’ve become as much a fixture of this city as the women and men who organize them, the churches that host them, and the neighborhoods whose survival may depend on them. After all, the worst injustice would not be whatever provokes the next emergency people’s assembly, but the possibility of a future Detroit without such gatherings, one in which all these meetings and people are gone, all the stories have been suppressed. Imagine, then, the worst iniquity of all, the one so many are fighting against: a Detroit where once inhabited streets have been submerged in the silence of water retention ponds, where longtime residents have been scattered and displaced by the foreclosure conveyor belt and no one left in the city knows the history of what’s been drowned.
FOCUS | Sex, Drugs, and Dead Soldiers: What AFRICOM Doesn't Want You to Know
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7517"><span class="small">Nick Turse, TomDispatch</span></a>
Thursday, 23 April 2015 11:30
Turse writes: "As American military operations have ramped up across Africa, reaching a record 674 missions in 2014, reports of excessive drinking, sex with prostitutes, drug use, sexual assaults, and other forms of violence by AFRICOM personnel have escalated, even though many of them have been kept under wraps for weeks or months, sometimes even for years."
U.S. Special Forces train Malian soldiers. (photo: U.S. Air Force)
Sex, Drugs, and Dead Soldiers: What AFRICOM Doesn't Want You to Know
By Nick Turse, TomDispatch
23 April 15
ix people lay lifeless in the filthy brown water.
It was 5:09 a.m. when their Toyota Land Cruiser plunged off a bridge in the West African country of Mali. For about two seconds, the SUV sailed through the air, pirouetting 180 degrees as it plunged 70 feet, crashing into the Niger River.
Three of the dead were American commandos. The driver, a captain nicknamed “Whiskey Dan,” was the leader of a shadowy team of operatives never profiled in the media and rarely mentioned even in government publications. One of the passengers was from an even more secretive unit whose work is often integral to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which conducts clandestine kill-and-capture missions overseas. Three of the others weren’t military personnel at all or even Americans. They were Moroccan women alternately described as barmaids or "prostitutes."
The six deaths followed an April 2012 all-night bar crawl through Mali’s capital, Bamako, according to a formerly classified report by U.S. Army criminal investigators. From dinner and drinks at a bar called Bla-Bla to more drinks at La Terrasse to yet more at Club XS and nightcaps at Club Plaza, it was a rollicking swim through free-flowing vodka. And vodka and Red Bull. And vodka and orange juice. And vanilla pomegranate vodka. And Chivas Regal. And Jack Daniels. And Corona beer. And Castel beer. And don’t forget B-52s, a drink generally made with Kahlúa, Grand Marnier, and Bailey’s Irish Cream. The bar tab at Club Plaza alone was the equivalent of $350 in U.S. dollars.
At about 5 a.m. on April 20th, the six piled into that Land Cruiser, with Captain Dan Utley behind the wheel, to head for another hotspot: Bamako By Night. About eight minutes later, Utley called a woman on his cell phone to ask if she was angry. He said he'd circle back and pick her up, but she told him not to bother. Utley then handed the phone to Maria Laol, one of the Moroccan women. “Don’t be upset. We’ll come back and get you,” she said. The woman on the other end of the call then heard screaming before the line went dead.
A Command With Something to Hide
In the years since, U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM, which is responsible for military operations on that continent, has remained remarkably silent about this shadowy incident in a country that had recently seen its democratically elected president deposed in a coup led by an American-trained officer, a country with which the U.S. had suspended military relations a month earlier. It was, to say the least, strange. But it wasn’t the first time U.S. military personnel died under murky circumstances in Africa, nor the first (or last) time the specter of untoward behavior led to a criminal investigation. In fact, as American military operations have ramped up across Africa, reaching a record 674 missions in 2014, reports of excessive drinking, sex with prostitutes, drug use, sexual assaults, and other forms of violence by AFRICOM personnel have escalated, even though many of them have been kept under wraps for weeks or months, sometimes even for years.
“Our military is built on a reputation of enduring core values that are at the heart of our character,” Major (then Brigadier) General Wayne Grigsby Jr., the former chief of AFRICOM’s subordinate command, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), wrote in an address to troops last year. “Part of belonging to this elite team is living by our core values and professionalism every day. Incorporating those values into everything we do is called our profession of arms.”
But legal documents, Pentagon reports, and criminal investigation files, many of them obtained by TomDispatch through dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and never before revealed, demonstrate that AFRICOM personnel have all too regularly behaved in ways at odds with those “core values.” The squeaky clean image the command projects through news releases, official testimony before Congress, and mainstream media articles -- often by cherry-picked journalists who are granted access to otherwise unavailable personnel and locales -- doesn’t hold up to inspection.
“As a citizen and soldier, I appreciate how important it is to have an informed public that helps to provide accountable governance and is also important in the preservation of the trust between a military and a society and nation it serves,” AFRICOM Commander General David Rodriguez said at a press conference last year. Checking out these revelations of misdeeds with AFRICOM’S media office to determine just how representative they are, however, has proven impossible.
I made several hundred attempts to contact the command for comment and clarification while this article was being researched and written, but was consistently rebuffed. Dozens of phone calls to public affairs personnel went unanswered and scores of email requests were ignored. At one point, I called AFRICOM media chief Benjamin Benson 32 times on a single business day from a phone that identified me by name. It rang and rang. He never picked up. I then placed a call from a different number so my identity would not be apparent. He answered on the second ring. After I identified myself, he claimed the connection was bad and the line went dead. Follow-up calls from the second number followed the same pattern -- a behavior repeated day after day for weeks on end.
This strategy, of course, mirrored the command’s consistent efforts to keep embarrassing incidents quiet, concealing many of them and acknowledging others only with the sparest of reports. The command, for example, issued a five-sentence press release regarding those deaths in Bamako. They provided neither the names of the Americans nor the identities of the “three civilians” who perished with them. They failed to mention that the men were with the Special Operations forces, noting only that the deceased were “U.S. military members.” For months after the crash, the Pentagon kept secret the name of Master Sergeant Trevor Bast, a communications technician with the Intelligence and Security Command (whose personnel often work closely with JSOC) -- until the information was pried out by the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock.
“It must be noted that the activities of U.S. military forces in Mali have been very public,” Colonel Tom Davis of AFRICOM toldTomDispatch in the wake of the deaths, without explaining why the commandos were still in the country a month after the United States had suspended military relations with Mali’s government. In the years since, the command has released no additional information about the episode.
True to form, AFRICOM’s Benjamin Benson failed to respond to requests for comment and clarification, but according to the final report on the incident by Army criminal investigators (obtained by TomDispatch through a FOIA request), the deaths of Utley, Bast, Sergeant First Class Marciano Myrthil, and the three women “were accidental, however [Captain] Utley’s actions were negligent resulting in the passengers' deaths.” A final review by a staff judge advocate from Special Operations Command Africa found that there was probable cause to conclude Utley was guilty of negligent homicide.
AFRICOM’s Sex Crimes
The criminal investigation of the incident in Mali touched upon relationships between U.S. military personnel and African “females.” Indeed, the U.S. military has many regulations regarding romantic attachments and sexual activity. AFRICOM personnel have not always adhered to such strictures and, in the course of my reporting, I asked Benson if the command has had a problem with sexual misconduct. He never responded.
In recent years, allegations of widespread sex crimes have dogged the U.S. military. A Pentagon survey estimated that 26,000 members of the armed forces were sexually assaulted in 2012, though just one in 10 of those victims reported the assaults. In 2013, the number of personnel reporting such incidents jumped by 50% to 5,518 and last year reached nearly 6,000. Given the gross underreporting of sexual assaults, it’s impossible to know how many of these crimes involved AFRICOM personnel, but documents examined by TomDispatch suggests a problem does indeed exist.
In August 2011, for example, a Marine with Joint Enabling Capabilities Command assigned to AFRICOM was staying at a hotel in Germany, the site of the command’s headquarters. He began making random room-to-room calls that were eventually traced. According to court martial documents examined by TomDispatch, the recipient of one of them said the “subject matter of the phone call essentially dealt with a solicitation for a sexual tryst.”
About a week after he began making the calls, the Marine, who had previously been a consultant for the CIA, began chatting up a boy in the hotel lounge. After learning that the youngster was 14 years old, “the conversation turned to oral sex with men and the appellant asked [the teen] if he had ever been interested in oral sex with men. He also told [the teen] that if the appellant or any of his male friends were aroused, they would have oral sex with one another,” according to legal documents. The boy attempted to change the subject, but the Marine moved closer to him, began “rubbing his [own] crotch area through his shorts,” and continued to talk to him “in graphic detail about sexual matters and techniques” before the youngster left the lounge. The Marine was later court-martialed for his actions and convicted of making a false official statement, as well as "engaging in indecent liberty with a child" -- that is, engaging in an act meant to arouse or gratify sexual desire while in a child’s presence.
That same year, according to a Pentagon report, a noncommissioned officer committed a sexual assault on a female subordinate at an unnamed U.S. base in Djibouti (presumably Camp Lemonnier, the headquarters of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa). “Subject grabbed victim's head and forced her to continue having sexual intercourse with him,” the report says. He received a nonjudicial punishment including a reduction in rank, a fine of half-pay for two months, 45 days of restriction, and 45 days of extra duty. The latter two punishments were later suspended and the perpetrator was, at the time the report was prepared, “being processed for administrative separation.”
At an “unknown location” in Djibouti in 2011, an enlisted woman reported being raped by a fellow service member “while on watch.” According to a synopsis prepared by the Department of Defense, that man “was not charged with any criminal violations in reference to the rape allegation against him. Victim pled guilty to failure to obey a lawful order and false official statement.”
In a third case in Djibouti, an enlisted woman reported opening the door to her quarters only to be attacked. An unknown assailant “placed his left hand over her mouth and placed his right hand under her shirt and began to slide it up the side of her body.” All leads were later deemed exhausted and no suspect was identified. According to Air Force documents obtained by TomDispatch, allegations also surfaced concerning an assault with intent to commit rape in Morocco, a forcible sodomy in Ethiopia, and possession of child pornography in Djibouti, all in 2012.
On July 22nd of that year, a group of Americans traveled to a private party in Djibouti attended by U.S. Ambassador Geeta Pasi and Major General Ralph Baker, the commander of a counterterrorism force in the Horn of Africa. Baker drank heavily, according to an AFRICOM senior policy adviser who sat with him in the backseat of a sport utility vehicle on the return trip to Camp Lemonnier. While two military personnel, one of them an agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), sat just a few feet away, Baker “forced his hand between [the adviser’s] legs and attempted to touch her vagina against her will,” according to a classified criminal investigation file obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“I grabbed his hand and held it on the seat to try to prevent him from putting his hand deeper between my legs,” she told an investigator. “He responded by smiling at me and saying, ‘Cat got your tongue?’ I was appalled about what he was doing to me and did not know what to say.” She later reported the offense via the Department of Defense’s Sexual Assault Hotline. According to a report in the Washington Post, “Baker was given an administrative punishment at the time of the incident as well as a letter of reprimand -- usually a career-ending punishment.” Demoted in rank to brigadier general, he was allowed to quietly retire in September 2013.
A Pentagon report on sexual assault lists allegations of three incidents in Djibouti in 2013 -- one act of “abusive sexual contact” and two reports of “wrongful sexual contact.” The report also details a case in which a member of the U.S. military reported that she and a group of friends had been out eating and drinking at a local establishment. Upon returning to her quarters at the base, one of her male companions asked to enter her room and she gave him permission. He then began to kiss her neck and shoulders. When she resisted, according to the report, “he grabbed her shorts and began to kiss and lick her vagina.” That man was later charged with rape, abusive sexual contact, and wrongful sexual contact. He was tried and acquitted.
The Pentagon has yet to issue its 2014 report on sexual assaults and AFRICOM has failed to release any statistics on its own, but given that military personnel fail to report most sexual crimes, whatever numbers may emerge will undoubtedly be drastic undercounts.
Sex, Drugs, and Guns
On the morning of April 10, 2010, a Navy investigator walked through the door of room 3092 at the Sarova Whitesands Beach Resort in Mombasa, Kenya. Two empty wine bottles sat in the trash can. Another was on the floor. There were remnants of feminine hygiene products on the bathroom countertop, Axe body spray in an armoire, unopened condoms on a table, and inside a desk drawer, a tan powder that he took to be “an illicit narcotic,” all of this according to an official report by that NCIS agent obtained by TomDispatch through the Freedom of Information Act.
Three days before, on April 7th, Sergeant Roberto Diaz-Boria of the Puerto Rico Army National Guard had been staying in this room. On leave from Manda Bay, Kenya -- home of Camp Simba, a hush-hush military outpost in Africa -- he had come to Mombasa to kick back. That night, along with a brother-in-arms, he ended up at Causerina, a nearby bar that locals said was a hotspot for drugs and prostitution.Diaz-Boria left Causerina with a “female companion,” according to official documents, paid the requisite fee for such guests at the hotel, and took her to his room. By morning, he was dead.
A news story released soon after by Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa stated that Diaz-Boria had died while “stationed” in Mombasa. The cause of death, the article noted, was “under investigation.” CJTF-HOA failed to respond to a request for additional information about the case, but an Army investigation later determined that the sergeant “accidentally died of multiple drug toxicity after drinking alcohol and using cocaine and heroin.” Where he obtained the drugs was never determined, but according to the summary of an interview with an NCIS agent, a close friend in his infantry unit did say that there were “rumors within the battalion about the easy access to very potent illegal narcotics in Manda Bay, Kenya.”
Kenya is hardly an anomaly. Criminal inquiries regarding illicit drug use also took place in Ethiopia in 2012 and Burkina Faso in 2013, while another investigation into distribution was conducted in Cameroon that same year, according to Air Force records obtained by TomDispatch. AFRICOM did not respond to questions concerning any of these investigations.
In late 2012, when I asked what U.S. personnel were up to in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, AFRICOM spokesman Eric Elliott replied that troops were “supporting humanitarian activities in the area.” Indeed, official documents and other sources indicate U.S. personnel have been carrying out aid activities in the region for years. But that wasn't all they were doing.
The Lonely Planet guide says that the Samrat Hotel provides the best digs in town, with a “classy lobby” and “a good nightclub and restaurant.” The one drawback: “stiff mattresses.” That apparently didn’t affect the activities of at least nine of 19 U.S. military personnel from the 775th Engineer Detachment of the Tennessee Army National Guard. After an unidentified “local national female” was seen emerging from a “secured communications room” in the hotel, a preliminary investigation was launched and found “military members of the unit allegedly routinely solicited prostitutes in the lobby of the hotel and later brought the prostitutes back to their assigned rooms or to the secured communications room,” according to documents obtained via FOIA request. A later report by Army agents determined that personnel from the 775th Engineer Detachment and the 415th Civil Affairs Battalion “individually engaged in sexual acts in exchange for money” at the hotel between July 1 and July 22, 2013. In the room of a staff sergeant, investigators also found what appeared to be khat, a popular local narcotic that offers a hyperactive high marked by aggressiveness that ultimately leaves the user in a glassy-eyed daze.
A sworn statement by a medic who served in Dire Dawa that month -- obtained by TomDispatch in a separate FOIA request -- paints a picture of a debauched atmosphere of partying, local “girlfriends,” and a variety of sex acts. “Originally, before we departed to Ethiopia, I grabbed around 70 condoms. However, I was told that was not going to be enough,” said the medic, noting that it was his job to carry medical supplies. Instead, he brought 200. He confessed to obtaining a prostitute through the bartender at the Samrat Hotel and admitted to engaging in sex acts with another woman who, he said, later revealed herself to be a prostitute. He paid her the equivalent of $60. Another service member showed him pictures of a “local national in his bed in his hotel room,” the medic told the NCIS agent. He continued:
“I know this girl is a prostitute because I pulled her from the club previously. The name of the club was ‘The Pom-Pom’... I had hooked up with this girl before [redacted name] so when he showed me the photo I recognized the girl. [Redacted name] stated how she had a nice booty and was good in bed... I want to say that [redacted name] told me he paid about 1,000 Birr (roughly $30 US dollars), but I can’t recall exactly.”
Army investigation documents obtained by TomDispatch also indicate similar extracurricular activities by members of the 607th Air Control Squadron and the 422nd Communications Squadron in neighboring Djibouti. An inquiry by Army criminal investigators determined that there was probable cause to believe three noncommissioned officers “committed the offense of patronizing a prostitute” at an “off-base residence” in June 2013.
AFRICOM failed to respond to repeated requests for comment on or to provide further information about members of the command engaging in illicit sex. It was similarly nonresponsive when it came to criminal inquests into allegations of arson in South Africa, larceny in Burkina Faso, graft in Algeria, and drunk and disorderly conduct in Nigeria, among other alleged crimes. The command has kept quiet about violent incidents as well.
On April 19, 2013, for instance, something went terribly wrong in Manda Bay, Kenya. A specialist with the Kentucky Army National Guard, deployed at Camp Simba and reportedly upset by a posting he saw on Facebook, got drunk on bourbon whiskey -- more than a fifth of Jim Beam, according to witnesses -- stole a 9mm pistol, and shot a superior officer. He would also point the pistol at a staff sergeant and a master sergeant and then barricade himself in his barracks room. A member of the Army’s Special Forces serving at the base told an NCIS agent what he saw when the soldier emerged from his quarters:
"He had a gun in his hand and he was waving it around with the barrel level. He was saying something to the effect of ‘Fuck you!’ or something like that. I heard the [redacted] say something like ‘put the gun down!’ a couple of times and then the [redacted] shot at the subject 2-3 times with his handgun."
The drunken soldier was hit once in the leg and later surrendered. An investigation determined that the specialist had probably committed a host of offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including wrongful appropriation of government property, failure to obey an order, and aggravated assault, although a charge of attempted murder was deemed “unfounded.” The incident, detailed in previously classified documents, was never made public.
General Malfeasance
AFRICOM has certainly had its troubles, starting at the top, since it began overseeing the U.S. military pivot to Africa. Its first chief, General William “Kip” Ward, who led the fledgling command from 2007 until 2011, was demoted after a 2012 investigation by the Department of Defense Inspector General’s office found he had committed a raft of misdeeds, such as using taxpayer-funded military aircraft for personal travel and spending lavishly on hotels.
During an 11-day trip to Washington, for example, he billed the government $129,000 in expenses for his wife, 13 employees, and himself, but conducted official business on just two of those days. According to the Inspector General’s report, Ward also had AFRICOM personnel ferry his wife around and run errands for the two of them, including shopping for “candy and baby items, picking up flowers and books, delivering snacks, and acquiring tickets to sporting events.” He even accepted “complimentary meals and Broadway show tickets” from a “prohibited source with multiple [Department of Defense] contracts.”
Ward was ordered to repay the government $82,000 and busted down from four stars to three, which will cost him about $30,000 yearly in retirement pay. He’ll now only receive $208,802 annually. An AFRICOM webpage devoted to the highlights of Ward’s career mentions nothing of his transgressions, demotion, or punishment. The only clue to all of this is his official photo. In it, he’s sporting four stars while his bio states that “Ward retired at the rank of Lieutenant General in November 2012.”
Ward’s wasteful ways became major news, but the story of his malfeasance has been the exception. For every SUV that plunged off a bridge or general who was busted down for misbehavior, how many other AFRICOM sexual assaults, shootings, and prostitution scandals remain unknown?
For years, as U.S. military personnel moved into Africa in ever-increasing numbers, AFRICOM has effectively downplayed, disguised, or covered-up almost every aspect of its operations, from the locations of its troop deployments to those of its expanding string of outposts. Not surprisingly, it’s done the same when it comes to misdeeds by members of the command and continues to ignore questions surrounding crimes and alleged misconduct by its personnel, refusing even to answer emails or phone calls about them. With taxpayer money covering the salaries of lawbreakers and the men and women who investigate them, with America’s sons dying after drink and drug binges and its daughters assaulted and sexually abused while deployed, the American people deserve answers when it comes to the conduct of U.S. forces in Africa. Personally, I remain eager to hear AFRICOM’s side of the story, should Benjamin Benson ever be in the mood to return my calls.
FOCUS | Rand Paul: GOP Hawks Are Obama's "Lapdogs"
Thursday, 23 April 2015 10:07
Cole writes: "The philosophical difference between the Libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and the GOP hawks has burst into open name-calling."
Senator Rand Paul. (photo: AP)
Rand Paul: GOP Hawks Are Obama's "Lapdogs"
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
23 April 15
he philosophical difference between the Libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and the GOP hawks has burst into open name-calling. First, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that Paul had been more wrong than right, and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) jumped in, calling him “naive.”
On Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” on Tuesday, Paul hit back, calling Graham and McCain “Obama’s lapdogs,” who wanted to follow his policies abroad but intensify them:
Paul connected Graham and McCain to the Libya intervention backed by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which he called a mistake, and said it had led to the rise of Muslim radicalism in that country. He admitted that he thinks the US needs to intervene against ISIL in Iraq, but said he regretted that ISIL had so many American weapons, which fell into their hands after Graham and McCain voted to invade Iraq, create a new army, and arm it with American weapons.
Paul said he was against bombing the facilities in Syria of President Bashar al-Assad, because that would make ISIL stronger. He also opposes arming Syrian rebels because, apparently, he does not trust them to remain American allies; they could defect to al-Qaeda or Daesh (ISIL or ISIS). (It is true that many former moderate Free Syria Army forces have now joined one or the other extremist group).
It has come out that Hillary Clinton was in favor of arming the Syrian rebels early in the Syrian turmoil, but was blocked by President Obama. McCain supported the same policy, though urged it be even more muscular, and wants a full-blown US intervention in Syria to overthrow the al-Assad regime.
McCain and Graham fired back on Wednesday. McCain called Paul “the worst possible candidate” on foreign policy. Graham said Paul’s approach was “one step behind leading from behind.”
What are the rights and wrongs here?
It is true that McCain and Graham haven’t seen a war they wanted to stay out of. They watered at the mouth at the prospect of invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and only regret we couldn’t just permanently colonize them. They supported the Libya intervention but wanted Obama to do more than provide a no-fly zone, going all the way to directly overthrowing dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
In contrast, Obama opposed the Iraq War and was unenthusiastic about the Libya intervention (one leak said he called it a “turd sandwich.”). He basically gave in to Samantha Powers, Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton because the National Security Council predicted tens of thousands dead in Benghazi if Gaddafi’s murderous sons were allowed to crush it with their tanks.
So Paul’s characterization of McCain and Graham as “Obama’s lapdogs” is inaccurate. It is true that where Obama has intervened, as with bombing raids on ISIL, those two senators approved and wanted him to do more. But they supported many wars and interventions that Obama opposed or felt lukewarm about.
Paul is also being a little disingenuous, insofar as he approves of the bombing of Daesh in Iraq and Syria, so he is not a consistent anti-interventionist. It is a little difficult to see the difference between bombing Iraq to stop Daesh from taking it over and bombing Libya to stop Gaddafi from winning out.
The really big difference to which he points is that he wants to stay out of Syria even more fervently than Obama does. Whatever Obama says, he hasn’t actually created a credible pro-Western rebel force that could take on the Baath regime in Damascus. He has avoided bombing Baath facilities. His main targets have been Daesh and al-Qaeda. So Paul’s proposed Syria policy looks a lot like Obama’s actual Syria policy. It is true that it is non-interventionist and contrasts with the interventionism of H. Clinton and John McCain.
One take-away is that Rand Paul seems a little bit of a defensive realist insofar as he can live with an al-Assad-ruled Syria, even though al-Assad is by now a war criminal.
“HEMMER:… Let’s talk about your campaign because people want to know if you get the nomination how you would govern. Lindsey Graham said this about your world view, “Generally speaking, you have done more wrong than right.” John McCain says, “You don’t understand. You displayed this kind of naivete since you came to the Senate.”
What’s going on there?
PAUL: This comes from a group of people who’ve been wrong about every foreign policy issue over the last two decades. I’ll give you a couple of examples, where they support the President’s foreign policy and I don’t. They supported Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. They supported President Obama’s bombing of Assad. They also support President Obama’s foreign aid to countries that hate us.
So if there’s anyone who is the most opposed to President Obama’s foreign policy, it’s me. And these people who call loudest to criticize me are great proponents of President Obama’s foreign policy. They just want to do it 10 times over. But I’m the only one actually standing up and saying: the war in Libya was a mistake; the bombing of Assad would make ISIS stronger; the arms to the Islamic rebels would make ISIS stronger.
So I’m really the one standing up to President Obama. And these people are essentially the lap dogs for President Obama and I think they’re sensitive about that.
HEMMER: Well, how would you define yourself? I mean, you’re an inventionist or an isolationist? You will be asked that question repeatedly. And you will say what?
PAUL: Yeah, I’m a Reagan Republican. I believe in a strong national defense. I believe in peace through strength. I think that intervention is not always the answer and that some interventions lead to unintended consequences.
So for example, Hillary’s war in Libya has made Libya less table, more chaotic and has allowed the rise of radical Islam. So we are more at risk after that war. It was a mistake for that war to occur and for the U.S. to be involved with toppling Gadhafi.
Realize that these people who criticize me were for giving arms to Gadhafi last year or the year before, they were for toppling Gadhafi. So they’re on both sides of so many wars. Some of these critics are for bombing both sides of the Syrian war. Their foreign policy is so disjointed, confusing and chaotic that really people need to re-examine those who want to be involved in every war. I say we get involved when there’s American interest. I think we do have to militarily stop ISIS. But I am sad that ISIS got a lot of the weapons from interventionists in my party and the President who gave them the weapons indirectly.
HEMMER: The word I got from New Hampshire over the weekend is that you guys are playing nice. Perhaps not?
PAUL: I’ll play nice, if they’ll place nice. But if they’re going to trot around the country, criticizing me, I’m going to make sure that the American public knows that these are precisely the people that support President Obama’s foreign aid, Libyan war and the Syrian war. And they need to explain themselves.
HEMMER: I know you had a big weekend in New Hampshire and you’re back in Iowa later this week. Senator, we will speak again. Thank you for your time today.
PAUL: Thank you.
HEMMER: You bet. Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky.”
Parry writes: "In my life's role as a journalist, I have always believed that ignorance presents the greatest danger for humanity touching off such a cosmic catastrophe."
Earth as seen from space. (photo: NASA)
We Lucky Molecules
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
23 April 15
As American neocons and other war hawks push for endless war in the Mideast and now eastern Europe, the resulting chaos is straining the capacity of civilization to meet basic human needs and raising the risk of nuclear war, what would be a tragic ending to the Universe’s luckiest molecules, writes Robert Parry.
cientists don’t know how many atoms and molecules there are in the Universe, but it’s clear that the vast, vast, vast majority find themselves locked in lifeless form – perhaps consumed by the fire of an exploding nova, or sucked into a black hole going who knows where, or simply frozen in the dark reaches of space.
A tiny, tiny, infinitesimal minority found themselves on Planet Earth and even there, the vast, vast majority remained in inert form – as rocks or water – or may have edged their way into the simplest life forms as amoeba or plankton or made it up to vegetation as a tree or a flower.
Relative to the total number, an extraordinarily few molecules have achieved intelligent life and fewer still formed themselves into human beings with the intellect to comprehend many of the mysteries of the Universe. As far as scientists know, we may be the only beings anywhere capable of this feat. Despite decades of seeking signs of intelligent life across the Universe, none has been found.
So, it may be that we – the seven billion or so of us humans who live on Planet Earth in the Twenty-first Century – represent the luckiest of molecules. We get to appreciate the magnificence of Nature, not only the beauty of budding trees and blossoming flowers, or the stark snow-covered mountains and the pounding ocean waves, but via modern technology like the Hubble Spacecraft, we get to see deeply into space to observe the colorful, surrealistic displays of distant galaxies.
Yet, what those photographs also tell us is that, as awe-inspiring as the Universe is, it is fearsomely hostile to life. Some parts of the Universe are extremely hot amid burning gases of giant stars but most of it is extremely cold, a black and bleak emptiness.
The odds of finding ourselves on a tiny piece of the Universe – with the delicate, almost impossible balance between hot and cold, a sphere spinning at the right speed in the perfect location with a moon to pull at the oceans and a large planet situated as a shield between us and waves of giant asteroids rampaging through space, with an atmosphere to further protect and sustain us, and all the other stunning improbabilities of Planet Earth – those odds are below any imaginable calculation. It’s safe to say the chances of us being here – having advanced enough to know as much as we do – are very close to zero.
We are, indeed, very lucky molecules. But there is, of course, a downside to our luck. As living things, we are also dying things. And our consciousness makes us aware of that inevitability. Plus, there are even more painful aspects of life, watching loved ones suffer with illness or from hunger or as victims of violence.
There can be a sense of senselessness to the human existence. There is wholly unnecessary destruction, driven by greed or fear or ideology or religion. We have seen plenty of that in human history and especially over the past century, a time of world wars, human-caused global pollution and advanced instruments to deliver death, even the potential to exterminate all life on the planet.
Science has not only enabled us to understand our possibly singular place in the Universe; science also has helped us master the capability to make Earth just one more barren rock floating through space.
That risk of ending the extraordinary run of luck experienced by those relatively few molecules that found their way onto Planet Earth and then into the bodies of human beings remains the greatest challenge of our time. Yet it is a challenge that is often treated cavalierly, as something to be ignored or even taunted, as politicians, pundits and pretend patriots push the human race toward endless war, daring the chance that one side or another might take the extra step and unleash nuclear conflagration in some ultimate game of chicken.
Journalism’s Role
In my life’s role as a journalist, I have always believed that ignorance presents the greatest danger for humanity touching off such a cosmic catastrophe. Sometimes the ignorance can be self-imposed by people not wanting to know facts that make them uncomfortable or that contest what they have been trained to believe. Other times, the ignorance is imposed from the outside as propaganda to manipulate a population into a desired response, usually to get in line behind some warmongering leader.
Though there’s not much a journalist can do about the first type of ignorance – besides making reliable information available and hoping that people will open their eyes to it – the most daunting and crucial professional challenge is to pierce through the second kind of ignorance, the intentional twisting of reality to elicit a dangerous response from a population.
But success in countering propaganda has become increasingly difficult as its practitioners have become more sophisticated in their management and control of information and as their methods of disinformation delivery have grown more varied. Now, the false information can come from a dominant news outlet but also from an upstart Web site that has the look of independence but is actually bought and paid for by powerful interests.
Propaganda can come from entities of the Right, the Left or the Center. It is hard, if not impossible, to know who to trust and who is reliable. That is why I have always tried to stay true to the bedrock principles of journalism, precepts as basic as “show, don’t tell,” laying out the information in a way so the reader is enlightened but also can draw his or her own conclusion. Stories should be engaging, not lecturing.
After all, despite journalism’s sometimes lofty goals – empowering the people so they can make democracy work or act to prevent unnecessary killing and suffering – journalism is fundamentally a pedestrian profession. It is the job of assembling facts and applying common sense to those facts. And, there must be no preference for one outcome over another, just a commitment to figure out what happened as best you can. Or, put differently, you might say: “I don’t care what the truth is; I just care what the truth is.”
A journalist also should be humble, recognizing that something as grand as “truth” is rarely revealed. We almost always have to settle for a more limited understanding, though one that can keep expanding as more facts become available. The best we can usually do is give people an honest framework for understanding what is happening around them, even if it’s an imperfect or limited depiction.
But the more people understand about the realities of the world, the less vulnerable they are to the propagandists, those clever folks who disseminate ignorance in the superficial form of information and then use that ignorance to dominate the people. The true calling of a journalist is to give the people as many facts as possible and thus the tools to detect and negate the propaganda.
All this goes to the overriding principle that there is nothing more important to a democracy than an informed electorate and to the counterpoint that the most effective way to defeat democracy is to misinform the people. And, as the world hurtles toward more and more wars and ever worsening crises, there may be nothing more important than exposing the lies, exaggerations and prejudices that undergird most conflicts.
As President John F. Kennedy said in perhaps his finest speech – at American University on June 10, 1963 – “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
In an age of environmental fragility and nuclear dangers, the human race must finally recognize its common interests and cooperate in the common cause of averting unnecessary chaos and conflict. We must in the end realize that we are among the luckiest molecules in the Universe – and act accordingly.
_________
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
Stewart writes: "Imagine how much has changed on this planet since you were born. Just a moment ago in evolutionary time, this planet was paradise for innumerable species."
Still from the movie 'Revolution.' (photo: Revolution)
Ignorance Is Killing Our Earth
By Rob Stewart, The Daily Beast
23 April 15
On Earth Day, the filmmaker behind the powerful environmental documentary Revolution explains just how dire the Earth’s sickness is—and how our generation can help save it.
magine how much has changed on this planet since you were born. Just a moment ago in evolutionary time, this planet was paradise for innumerable species. Life crept and grew in nearly every crack, depth and mountaintop, flourishing and evolving with every change in the environment. Now our presence has so radically altered life on Earth, our very survival as a species is in jeopardy. To tell this story, we set out on a four-year, 15-country adventure to make the film Revolution.
On the island of Madagascar, which has lost 90 percent of its forest, we found a 1,500-year-old Baobab tree. Many are far older, having begun their lives before we counted time—before Christ. To imagine the changes that have occurred on our planet within one tree’s life span is amazing. We built engines, cured diseases, took to the sky, reached the moon and the bottom of the sea, colonized almost every habitable place, celebrated arts, connected billions of people with technology, and increased our population from a few hundred million, to more than seven billion! And this has had a huge impact.
By mid-century, if we continue on our current trajectory, we face a world with no fisheries, no coral reefs, no rainforests, declining oxygen concentrations, and nine billion hungry, thirsty people fighting over what remains. Studies show 90 percent of the big fish are gone, 75 percent of the forests are gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and phytoplankton—plants in the ocean responsible for producing at least half of the oxygen in the air we breathe—are rapidly declining. Fresh water and grain stores have never been lower. In the life span of one tree, we’ve consumed most of our life support system.
I believe we’ve reached this crisis through ignorance and a lack of imagination. The environmental movement thus far has fought againstour problems. This immediately positions the movement as the underdog, environmentalists as radicals, and pits us against the biggest corporations and economies in the world.
From this perspective, a 10 percent or 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions would be celebrated as a huge success! Unfortunately, this might not even buy us 1 percent more time on a hugely degraded world. It’s easy to be apathetic and pessimistic in a world where our ambitions still lead to collapse.
I think we should imagine a world worth fighting for. What if pollution was illegal? What if we focused on ecosystem restoration instead of economic growth? What if the rivers, lakes, and oceans were restored to thriving ecosystems full of life? What if we reforested the land, acquired food locally, captured carbon from the atmosphere by farming intelligently, and harnessed the power of the sun for energy? What if we brought nature back? Could we rise above the fossil fuel vs. environment battle by charting a pathway toward something incredible?
We know what we’ve lost—90 percent of the big fish, 75 percent of the forests, etc. If we put the fish, forests, and life back, we could capture enormous amounts of carbon in that life and regain priceless ecosystem services. Shifting agriculture toward methods that focus on increasing species diversity and capturing carbon in soil could increase food production and pull enough carbon from the atmosphere to halt climate change and ocean acidification. I think imagining what this world could be if we designed it to be beautiful for us, and all species, is a far more exciting prospect that might get people, particularly youth, involved. But first we must understand why change is needed.
Today, a small fraction of the population understands the severity of our environmental predicament. The environmental movement has been seen as protecting species on the other side of the world—saving pandas in China, or stopping sea levels from rising in Bangladesh. We don’t see the severity of our situation nor the power we have as individuals, because the effects are often so far removed. In the oceans, our waste of more than 40 billion pounds of dead fish annually goes unnoticed. The accumulation of our carbon pollution in the seas causing acidification, dissolving the shells and skeletons of most life that lives there and has only recently been discovered by science. Unaware, we continue to engage in destructive behaviors, products, politics, and corporations.
My hope lies in our humanity. Our emotions, our feelings can guide us. Once we’re educated, we feel badly about engaging in activities that are destructive, and feel good about those that support ecosystems and the future. This can starve destruction and feed what’s beneficial.
Every revolution of the past was led by those most directly impacted by the atrocity. It’s the future that’s at stake now, and from what I’ve seen, kids are going to lead this revolution. They have the most to lose, and the most to gain, and they’re engaged and involved.
Youth are finding this crisis an opportunity to live a life of meaning, to become a hero for an ecosystem, species or the future, and to live a life different than their parents did. In a time when society needs meaning, the biggest battle ever fought is calling out for the best in humanity, and pulling it to the height of its potential. This challenge is for all of us, no matter what side of the world we live on. For the first time in history, we have something to unite us, bringing down borders of race, citizenship, and religion.
To bring this message to the public, we made Revolution—a film about life on Earth, and the revolution to save us. I hope that Revolution can be a tool to engage our humanity and enable us to imagine a world worth fighting for. We’re on the brink of something incredible, and with millions of conservation groups and billions of people connected, I am truly excited to see what the next stage of the environmental movement looks like.
THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.
nlike so many industrial innovations, the revolving door was not developed in Detroit. It took its first spin in Philadelphia in 1888, the brainchild of Theophilus Van Kannel, the soon-to-be founder of the Van Kannel Revolving Door Company. Its purpose was twofold: to better insulate buildings from the cold and to allow greater numbers of people easier entry at any given time.
ix people lay lifeless in the filthy brown water.
he philosophical difference between the Libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and the GOP hawks has burst into open name-calling. First, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that Paul had been more wrong than right, and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) jumped in, calling him “naive.”
magine how much has changed on this planet since you were born. Just a moment ago in evolutionary time, this planet was paradise for innumerable species. Life crept and grew in nearly every crack, depth and mountaintop, flourishing and evolving with every change in the environment. Now our presence has so radically altered life on Earth, our very survival as a species is in jeopardy. To tell this story, we set out on a four-year, 15-country adventure to make the film Revolution.
