In recent issues of the New Statesman, Martin Bright, our political editor, criticised the Mayor of London and his administration. Here (http://www.newstatesmancom/200801310013) Ken Livingstone responds
Martin Bright, the political editor of the New Statesman, has argued in this magazine that I am unfit for office. And in the London Evening Standard, Bright told his readers, of my candidacy, that "writing as the political editor of Britain's leading left-leaning magazine, I believe the time has come for the Labour Party to drop him as its candidate". Whether the NS endorses this view of course is a matter for the magazine.
Four days after his Dispatches programme aired on Channel 4 on 21 January there was a gratifying response - a poll showed an increase in my lead in the mayoral election contest. What was the connection between the two? Voters cast their ballot in any election in the light of their overall judgement of a candidate. I doubt anyone agrees with everything any candidate does.
I stand on my record of running a popular left-wing, reforming administration that has pursued groundbreaking policies in major areas such as equalities, the congestion charge, aiding the less well-off with cheap transport, climate change and other important matters. My overriding principle has been to do the right thing for London.
The policy differences with the only electoral alternative, the Tory candidate for London Boris Johnson, are striking and self-evident.
My first key policy is large-scale investment to continue London's economic success. London has overtaken New York as the world's leading international economic centre and its booming economy requires the biggest investment programme in the city for half a century to ensure it stays that way. A large part will be private, but I am in no way embarrassed to state explicitly that a large part of this big infrastructural investment requires the public sector - Crossrail, buses, police, the congestion charge, Tube upgrades, affordable housing.
Johnson didn't vote in parliament when Crossrail was debated; he opposes my policies for affordable housing; he opposed the congestion charge; and, in general, he doesn't understand the economic requirements of a modern, large city.
I have zero confidence in the Tory myth of "automatic trickle-down" to ensure that all Londoners share in the benefits of that success, and I have therefore pursued active measures to ensure they do. Most of these measures, logically, have therefore been strongly opposed by my Tory opponents - free bus travel for under-18s, that half of new housing must be affordable, the extension of the Freedom Pass for older and disabled Londoners to a 24-hour concession, and the extension of travel discounts for students.
I believe London's success must be sustainable in the long term. This means protecting the en vironment and tackling climate change. London chairs the international C40 group of cities fighting climate change and its Climate Change Action Plan is one of the most advanced of any city in the world - something that has now been recognised by Forum for the Future.
A key issue at the election is my proposal for a £25-a-day charge for the most CO2-emitting vehicles entering the congestion-charging zone and, after consultation, I will be able to take a decision on this in the coming month. On the environment, the choice is even starker. Johnson is one of the few politicians who supported George W Bush in opposing the Kyoto treaty.
Race achievements
Finally, as London is the most multi-ethnic city on earth, good community relations are of paramount importance to it. One of my proudest achievements is a nearly 60 per cent reduction in racist attacks in London since I have been in office. London is a thriving multicultural city. Johnson, in contrast, has sought to justify referring to black people as "piccaninnies" and expressed the view that South Africa under Nelson Mandela was the tyranny of black majority rule.
All of which explains my lead in the recent poll and why a choice for the New Statesman is rather clear. Instead of dealing with these central issues, Bright's Dispatches programme chose to deal with matters such as subjecting a glass from which I had drunk at a People's Questions when I had a bad throat to chemical analysis to find out whether it contained whisky - an investigation which, I am pleased to note, has invited some ridicule.
Londoners will rightly vote on the most important issues confronting the capital. London at the beginning of the 21st century is regularly rated the most successful city in the world. Huge numbers of people have contributed to that and I suffer from no illusions that this is all due to my policies. But it is equally improbable that the fact I have been mayor for the past eight years, pursuing policies that have been widely reported and in a number of cases internationally copied, has contributed nothing whatever to this.
In short, I have been able to run an administration which has shown that reforming left-wing politics can be extremely popular - something that should therefore be supported for its own sake, and even more so given the graphic character of the Tory alternative.
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Friday, 25 January 2008
Labour movement figures defend Mayor
Let Livingstone be judged on his record
Letter, Friday January 25, 2008, The Guardian
Your leader (January 22) is right to suggest that the real issues in the London mayoral election should be Ken Livingstone's record after eight years in office and whether London should continue on the course he has set it on.
London's success is shown by the fact that the capital has displaced New York as the world's leading international city.
Ken has delivered on transport, the environment and the Olympics. London has record police numbers, a beat police team in every neighbourhood and falling crime. The good relations between London's communities is shown by the sharp decline, by a third, in racist attacks. Ken has introduced a living wage as a minimum for staff employed by him, and campaigned for it to be taken up by the private sector. Under the policy that half of all new homes should be affordable, the number of new homes is increasing.
These and other achievements are an outstanding record. Ken is building on these with new policies such as his commitment to extend the operating hours of older Londoners' free travel passes.
Boris Johnson would abolish the 50% affordable housing policy. He opposed the minimum wage, backed section 28 and has called for big cuts to London's transport and policing budgets.
The choice could not be clearer.
Diane Abbott MP, Karen Buck MP, Dawn Butler MP, Jon Cruddas MP, Andrew Dismore MP, Billy Hayes, general secretary, CWU, Alan Keen MP, Paul Kenny, general secretary, GMB, Sadiq Khan MP, Michael Leahy, general secretary, Community, Andy Slaughter MP, Virenda Sharma MP, Emily Thornberry MP
Letter, Friday January 25, 2008, The Guardian
Your leader (January 22) is right to suggest that the real issues in the London mayoral election should be Ken Livingstone's record after eight years in office and whether London should continue on the course he has set it on.
London's success is shown by the fact that the capital has displaced New York as the world's leading international city.
Ken has delivered on transport, the environment and the Olympics. London has record police numbers, a beat police team in every neighbourhood and falling crime. The good relations between London's communities is shown by the sharp decline, by a third, in racist attacks. Ken has introduced a living wage as a minimum for staff employed by him, and campaigned for it to be taken up by the private sector. Under the policy that half of all new homes should be affordable, the number of new homes is increasing.
These and other achievements are an outstanding record. Ken is building on these with new policies such as his commitment to extend the operating hours of older Londoners' free travel passes.
Boris Johnson would abolish the 50% affordable housing policy. He opposed the minimum wage, backed section 28 and has called for big cuts to London's transport and policing budgets.
The choice could not be clearer.
Diane Abbott MP, Karen Buck MP, Dawn Butler MP, Jon Cruddas MP, Andrew Dismore MP, Billy Hayes, general secretary, CWU, Alan Keen MP, Paul Kenny, general secretary, GMB, Sadiq Khan MP, Michael Leahy, general secretary, Community, Andy Slaughter MP, Virenda Sharma MP, Emily Thornberry MP
Friday, 11 January 2008
From the Back Ken Campaign
I reproduce below fyi, the latest e-mail from Steve Hart, Unite London Region Secretary, on behalf of the important campaign to re-elect Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London. - Ed
Dear *****,
Did you see the first Mayoral debate on ITV last night? The candidates were all grilled on the key issues - but Ken came out on top.
Now it's your turn.
If you want to ask the questions not raised during last night's debate, send them in, and Ken's campaign will put them to Ken to be posted online early next week.
He may have answered his opponents last night, but the person Ken really wants to hear from is you. From improving London's transport system to becoming a more sustainable city, any question goes - and we'll select the best over the next few days:
http://www.kenlivingstone.com/page/s/debatequestions
As the regional secretary of one of London's trade unions - Unite - I was asked to take part as a member of the studio audience.
Ken was right to say that London has seen real improvements over the last few years and that these should continue. Ken's campaign asked him to give us all a quick review of how he thought it went. Click here to see Ken's response: http://www.kenlivingstone.com/page/m/593009ef0543f016/tkjqri/
If you saw the debate, you'll know how angry and rattled Boris Johnson looked. He shouted over the questions of audience members and interrupted anyone whose views he didn't like.
But it's not just his bad manners that Londoners have to fear from Boris Johnson - it's bad policies. Even though he did his best to dodge the issues the differences between the main candidates were clear enough. Johnson called for the pressure to build more affordable homes to be relaxed, even attempted to argue that the Crossrail project wasn't really happening, and was floored when he was pressed on his real record over crime.
There's a reason for these differences. Another member of the audience told me on the way out, "The only person who looked like they could be a Mayor, was the Mayor!"
Make sure you send your thoughts and follow-up questions to us:
http://www.kenlivingstone.com/page/s/debatequestions
Thanks for all your support for Ken's campaign.
Best wishes,
Steve Hart
PS - Ken supporters in the audience last night took a few moments to record their views on the debate. Click here to see it on YouTube:
http://www.kenlivingstone.com/page/m/593009ef0543f016/tkjqri/
Dear *****,
Did you see the first Mayoral debate on ITV last night? The candidates were all grilled on the key issues - but Ken came out on top.
Now it's your turn.
If you want to ask the questions not raised during last night's debate, send them in, and Ken's campaign will put them to Ken to be posted online early next week.
He may have answered his opponents last night, but the person Ken really wants to hear from is you. From improving London's transport system to becoming a more sustainable city, any question goes - and we'll select the best over the next few days:
http://www.kenlivingstone.com/page/s/debatequestions
As the regional secretary of one of London's trade unions - Unite - I was asked to take part as a member of the studio audience.
Ken was right to say that London has seen real improvements over the last few years and that these should continue. Ken's campaign asked him to give us all a quick review of how he thought it went. Click here to see Ken's response: http://www.kenlivingstone.com/page/m/593009ef0543f016/tkjqri/
If you saw the debate, you'll know how angry and rattled Boris Johnson looked. He shouted over the questions of audience members and interrupted anyone whose views he didn't like.
But it's not just his bad manners that Londoners have to fear from Boris Johnson - it's bad policies. Even though he did his best to dodge the issues the differences between the main candidates were clear enough. Johnson called for the pressure to build more affordable homes to be relaxed, even attempted to argue that the Crossrail project wasn't really happening, and was floored when he was pressed on his real record over crime.
There's a reason for these differences. Another member of the audience told me on the way out, "The only person who looked like they could be a Mayor, was the Mayor!"
Make sure you send your thoughts and follow-up questions to us:
http://www.kenlivingstone.com/page/s/debatequestions
Thanks for all your support for Ken's campaign.
Best wishes,
Steve Hart
PS - Ken supporters in the audience last night took a few moments to record their views on the debate. Click here to see it on YouTube:
http://www.kenlivingstone.com/page/m/593009ef0543f016/tkjqri/
Defend the Right to Strike - POA press release
PRISON OFFICER’S ASSOCIATION (POA)
press release January 7th 2008
Leaders of the POA have reacted angrily to the statement made by the Rt. Hon. Minister for State Jack Straw to reintroduce legislation that will criminalise its members for taking industrial action.
Mr Straw said that he was reluctantly putting in place safeguards to ensure the safety of prisons and the public following the decision of the POA to withdraw from the JIRPA in May this year, an agreement which prevented Prison Officers from disrupting the Prison Service.
In effect New Labour are reintroducing anti trades union legislation, legislation they vehemently opposed when in opposition and legislation they PROMISED to repeal to the POA leadership.
Colin Moses National Chairman of the POA said,
“This is a sad day for the Trades Union movement. Workers are being blackmailed to sign away their rights by a Labour Government. A Government which has broken promise after promise to this union and a Government that has forgotten its roots. This union has had two agreements and both have failed not because of the workers or this union but because of the mismanagement of those agreements by the employer supported by the Government. When this anti trade union legislation was introduced, compensatory measures had to be put in place. Unfortunately, those measures have failed the workers of the Prison Service and we now need to have our rights as workers restored. Jack said, what new money is available for 2009, what about 2007 and 2008. Are we as public sector workers to be treated as second class citizens, used as bargaining chips to manage the economy and of course used as punch bags by those we look after. This union is owed 6 million pounds in TOIL, it is owed pay from 2001 and 2007 and it deserves to be treated fairly and decently. Promises and Platitudes do nothing for the workers of this Country and nothing for my members”.
Brian Caton General Secretary of the POA said,
“Nothing surprises me with the New Labour party. The Government may believe that they can bully and threaten my members but they cannot. If they believe that threatening POA members with imprisonment is a step forward for industrial relations they are sadly wrong. This union like every union should be treated with respect and trust. The POA only react when no one listens, when the employer and government resort to the Courts to manage the Service and of course when promises are broken. We will be calling all public sector workers to unite against this reserved legislation, maybe the Government have underestimated the support of the worker and fallout that will arise if they continue to attack the Trades Union movement”.
press release January 7th 2008
Leaders of the POA have reacted angrily to the statement made by the Rt. Hon. Minister for State Jack Straw to reintroduce legislation that will criminalise its members for taking industrial action.
Mr Straw said that he was reluctantly putting in place safeguards to ensure the safety of prisons and the public following the decision of the POA to withdraw from the JIRPA in May this year, an agreement which prevented Prison Officers from disrupting the Prison Service.
In effect New Labour are reintroducing anti trades union legislation, legislation they vehemently opposed when in opposition and legislation they PROMISED to repeal to the POA leadership.
Colin Moses National Chairman of the POA said,
“This is a sad day for the Trades Union movement. Workers are being blackmailed to sign away their rights by a Labour Government. A Government which has broken promise after promise to this union and a Government that has forgotten its roots. This union has had two agreements and both have failed not because of the workers or this union but because of the mismanagement of those agreements by the employer supported by the Government. When this anti trade union legislation was introduced, compensatory measures had to be put in place. Unfortunately, those measures have failed the workers of the Prison Service and we now need to have our rights as workers restored. Jack said, what new money is available for 2009, what about 2007 and 2008. Are we as public sector workers to be treated as second class citizens, used as bargaining chips to manage the economy and of course used as punch bags by those we look after. This union is owed 6 million pounds in TOIL, it is owed pay from 2001 and 2007 and it deserves to be treated fairly and decently. Promises and Platitudes do nothing for the workers of this Country and nothing for my members”.
Brian Caton General Secretary of the POA said,
“Nothing surprises me with the New Labour party. The Government may believe that they can bully and threaten my members but they cannot. If they believe that threatening POA members with imprisonment is a step forward for industrial relations they are sadly wrong. This union like every union should be treated with respect and trust. The POA only react when no one listens, when the employer and government resort to the Courts to manage the Service and of course when promises are broken. We will be calling all public sector workers to unite against this reserved legislation, maybe the Government have underestimated the support of the worker and fallout that will arise if they continue to attack the Trades Union movement”.
Excellent piece by Greg Palast on Correa/Ecuador
David v Goliath (Tuesday 08 January 2008)
Top US investigative journalist GREG PALAST comes face to face with the president of Ecuador.
I DON'T know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, I asked him about his father.
It's not the kind of question I ask.
He hesitated. Then said: "My father was unemployed."
He paused. Then added: "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mule. He passed four years in the States - in a jail."
He continued: "I'd never talked about my father before."
Apparently, he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.
Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a 10th of the entire adult population, fled to the US any way that they could.
"My mother told us he was working in the States," he says.
On his release from prison, Correa's father was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor and broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.
At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note that he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.
"We are writing to remind you that, in Ecuador, there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night."
It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.
Or maybe there was something else to it.
Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, he is one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.
Dr Correa, I should say, with a PhD in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called, a man who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.
And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character.
He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don't shine.
He told the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which held Ecuador's finances by the throat, to go to hell.
He ripped up the "agreements" which his predecessors had signed at financial gunpoint. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest to eat their bonds. "We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people." Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.It was a stunning performance.
I'd met his predecessor two years ago. President Alfredo Palacio was a man of good heart who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements that I showed him, "We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are dead. And if we are dead, how can we pay?"
Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, which was then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand.
They didn't. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.
But Ecuador didn't fall to the floor. Correa, who was then economics minister, went secretly to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived. And thrived. But Correa was not done.
Once elected president, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in the US to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity.
There were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.But Correa still wasn't done.
I'd returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon, where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners.
I met the Cofan's chief. His three-year-old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water, then came out vomiting blood and died.
Correa had gone there, too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that had left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.
But it's not just any company that he was challenging. Chevron's largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its board of directors, the Condoleezza. The US secretary of state.
The Cofan have sued Condi's corporation demanding that the oil company clean up the crap that it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly £6 billion. Correa won't comment on the suit itself, which is a private legal action. But, if the verdict goes in favour of Ecuador's citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure that Chevron pays up.
Is he kidding? No-one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the US, the Exxon Valdez case is dragging on into its 18th year. Yet Correa is not deterred.
He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.
This is hard core. No-one has made such a threat to Bush and big oil and lived to carry it out.
And, in an office tower looking down on Ecuador's capital Quito, Chevron's lawyers were not amused. I met them.
"And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?"
Rodrigo Perez, Texaco's top lawyer in Ecuador, was chuckling over the legal difficulties that the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco had caused their kids' deaths.
"If there is somebody with cancer there," the parents must prove the deaths were "caused by crude or by the petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is our crude - which is absolutely impossible." He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.
The oil company lawyer added: "No-one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil." Really? You could swim in the stuff and you'd be just fine.
The Cofan had heard this before.
When Chevron's Texaco unit came to their land, the the oil men said that they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now, Condi's men had told me that crude oil doesn't cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I'm no expert. So I called one.
Pace University environmental law professor Robert F Kennedy Jr told me that elements of crude oil production such as benzene, toluene and xylene "are well-known carcinogens."
Kennedy told me that he's seen Chevron-Texaco's ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this kind of toxic dumping would mean jail time in the US.
But it wasn't as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way that they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle
The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy called Jaime Varela with a blonde bouffant hairdo wearing in the kind of yellow chinos you'd see on country club golf course, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles that the Cofan would face.
Especially this one - Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn't get a dime. "What about the chairs in this office?" I asked. Couldn't the Cofan at least get those? "No," they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.
Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa's threat to use the power of his presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No-one could have expected that. And Correa, who is no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush administration. But to Ecuador's president, it's all about justice, fairness.
"You wouldn't do this to your own people," he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska's Native Americans.Correa's not unique. He's the latest of a new breed in Latin America.
Brazilian President Lula, Evo Morales, who was the first Indian ever elected president of Bolivia, Chavez of Venezuela. All "leftists," as the press tells us. But all have something else in common - they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blondes.
When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as "the monkey." Chavez told me proudly: "I am negro e indio" - black and Indian, like most Venezuelans.
Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blonde-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of "monkey." Now, all over Latin America, the "monkeys" are in charge.
And they are unlocking the economic cages.
Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blonde oil company executive.
He never made much in oil, but, every time that he lost his money or his investors' money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.
I know that this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.
But maybe it's just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is good and evil.
Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who's been good and who's been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up one Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan's drinking water. Or maybe we'll have to figure it out ourselves.
When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native American village of Chenega.
I was investigating the damage done by Exxon's oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega's beaches. It was March 1991 and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island's shore watching CNN. We stared in silence as "smart" bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.
Then, Kompkoff said to me, in that slow, quiet way that he had, "Well, I guess we're all Natives now."
Well, maybe we are. But we don't have to be, do we?
Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the centre of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn't have to worry that her dad would forget about "the poor children who are cold" on the streets of Quito.
Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.
Top US investigative journalist GREG PALAST comes face to face with the president of Ecuador.
I DON'T know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, I asked him about his father.
It's not the kind of question I ask.
He hesitated. Then said: "My father was unemployed."
He paused. Then added: "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mule. He passed four years in the States - in a jail."
He continued: "I'd never talked about my father before."
Apparently, he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.
Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a 10th of the entire adult population, fled to the US any way that they could.
"My mother told us he was working in the States," he says.
On his release from prison, Correa's father was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor and broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.
At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note that he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.
"We are writing to remind you that, in Ecuador, there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night."
It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.
Or maybe there was something else to it.
Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, he is one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.
Dr Correa, I should say, with a PhD in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called, a man who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.
And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character.
He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don't shine.
He told the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which held Ecuador's finances by the throat, to go to hell.
He ripped up the "agreements" which his predecessors had signed at financial gunpoint. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest to eat their bonds. "We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people." Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.It was a stunning performance.
I'd met his predecessor two years ago. President Alfredo Palacio was a man of good heart who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements that I showed him, "We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are dead. And if we are dead, how can we pay?"
Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, which was then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand.
They didn't. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.
But Ecuador didn't fall to the floor. Correa, who was then economics minister, went secretly to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived. And thrived. But Correa was not done.
Once elected president, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in the US to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity.
There were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.But Correa still wasn't done.
I'd returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon, where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners.
I met the Cofan's chief. His three-year-old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water, then came out vomiting blood and died.
Correa had gone there, too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that had left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.
But it's not just any company that he was challenging. Chevron's largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its board of directors, the Condoleezza. The US secretary of state.
The Cofan have sued Condi's corporation demanding that the oil company clean up the crap that it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly £6 billion. Correa won't comment on the suit itself, which is a private legal action. But, if the verdict goes in favour of Ecuador's citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure that Chevron pays up.
Is he kidding? No-one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the US, the Exxon Valdez case is dragging on into its 18th year. Yet Correa is not deterred.
He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.
This is hard core. No-one has made such a threat to Bush and big oil and lived to carry it out.
And, in an office tower looking down on Ecuador's capital Quito, Chevron's lawyers were not amused. I met them.
"And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?"
Rodrigo Perez, Texaco's top lawyer in Ecuador, was chuckling over the legal difficulties that the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco had caused their kids' deaths.
"If there is somebody with cancer there," the parents must prove the deaths were "caused by crude or by the petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is our crude - which is absolutely impossible." He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.
The oil company lawyer added: "No-one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil." Really? You could swim in the stuff and you'd be just fine.
The Cofan had heard this before.
When Chevron's Texaco unit came to their land, the the oil men said that they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now, Condi's men had told me that crude oil doesn't cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I'm no expert. So I called one.
Pace University environmental law professor Robert F Kennedy Jr told me that elements of crude oil production such as benzene, toluene and xylene "are well-known carcinogens."
Kennedy told me that he's seen Chevron-Texaco's ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this kind of toxic dumping would mean jail time in the US.
But it wasn't as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way that they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle
The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy called Jaime Varela with a blonde bouffant hairdo wearing in the kind of yellow chinos you'd see on country club golf course, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles that the Cofan would face.
Especially this one - Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn't get a dime. "What about the chairs in this office?" I asked. Couldn't the Cofan at least get those? "No," they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.
Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa's threat to use the power of his presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No-one could have expected that. And Correa, who is no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush administration. But to Ecuador's president, it's all about justice, fairness.
"You wouldn't do this to your own people," he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska's Native Americans.Correa's not unique. He's the latest of a new breed in Latin America.
Brazilian President Lula, Evo Morales, who was the first Indian ever elected president of Bolivia, Chavez of Venezuela. All "leftists," as the press tells us. But all have something else in common - they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blondes.
When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as "the monkey." Chavez told me proudly: "I am negro e indio" - black and Indian, like most Venezuelans.
Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blonde-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of "monkey." Now, all over Latin America, the "monkeys" are in charge.
And they are unlocking the economic cages.
Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blonde oil company executive.
He never made much in oil, but, every time that he lost his money or his investors' money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.
I know that this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.
But maybe it's just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is good and evil.
Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who's been good and who's been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up one Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan's drinking water. Or maybe we'll have to figure it out ourselves.
When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native American village of Chenega.
I was investigating the damage done by Exxon's oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega's beaches. It was March 1991 and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island's shore watching CNN. We stared in silence as "smart" bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.
Then, Kompkoff said to me, in that slow, quiet way that he had, "Well, I guess we're all Natives now."
Well, maybe we are. But we don't have to be, do we?
Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the centre of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn't have to worry that her dad would forget about "the poor children who are cold" on the streets of Quito.
Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.
Tuesday, 18 December 2007
Damsels in Distress?
The west should stop using the liberalisation of Muslim women to justify its strategy of dominance writes Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian
It seems that Muslim women - particularly those living in western capitals- are destined to remain besieged by two debilitating discourses, which though different in appearance, are one in essence.
The first of these is conservative and exclusionist, sentencing Muslim women to a life of childbearing and rearing, lived out in the narrow confines of their homes at the mercy of fathers, brothers, and husbands. Revolving around notions of sexual purity and family honour, it appeals to religion for justification and legitimisation.
The other is a "liberation" discourse that vows to break Muslim woman's bondage and free her of the oppressive yoke of an aggressive, patriarchical, and backward society. She is a mass of powerlessness and enslavement; the embodiment of seclusion, silence, and invisibility. Her only hope of deliverance from the cave of veiling and isolation lies in the benevolent intervention of this force of emancipation. It will save her from her hellishly miserable and bleak existence, to the promised heaven of enlightenment and progress.
It is a game of binaries that pits one stereotype against another: the wretched caged female Muslim victim and her ruthless jailer society against an idealised "west" that is the epitome of enlightenment, rationalism, and freedom. Those escapees who leave the herd are held up as living testimonies to the arduousness of transition from the twilights of tribe, religion and tradition, to the dawn of reason, individualism, and liberation. There is no denying the manifold injustices that cripple the lives of many Muslim women and stunt their potential. But these appear in this condescending liberation narrative as representative of the condition of the millions of Muslim women around the world and exclusive to them. There are no colours, tones, or shades here. There are no living real women, urban or rural, educated or illiterate, affluent or poor, Turkish, Malaysian, or Egyptian - differences so crucial in defining women's life chances and shaping their situations. All we know about this ghostly creature is her Muslim identity, as though she was entirely shaped and affected by religion and theology irrespective of social background, economic circumstances, political reality, or regional and local cultural traditions. Important as it is, legal and theological reform will on its own do little to improve the lot of impoverished, uneducated, or insecure women in Somalia, Iraq, or rural Bangladesh. The narrative revolves around a dehistoricised, universal "Muslim woman"; a crushing model that oppresses flesh and blood Muslim women, denies them subjectivity and singularity, and claims to sum up their lives with all their vicissitudes and details from cradle to coffin. It reserves for itself the right to speak for them exclusively, whether they like it or not.Representations of the Muslim woman serve a dual legitimising function, at once confirming and justifying the west's narrative of itself, and of the Muslim other. The victimised Muslim woman is the lens through which Islam and Muslim society are seen. In medieval times she was cast as an intimidating powerful queen or termagant (like Bramimonde in the Chanson de Roland, or Belacane in Parzival) reflecting an intimidating powerful Muslim civilisation. And when the power balance began to shift in Europe's favour in the 17th and 18th centuries, she was made to mirror her society's fallen fortunes. She turned into a harem slave, leading little more than a dumb animal existence, subjugated, inert, abject, powerless, and invisible. She is the quintessential embodiment of a despotic, deformed, and backward Islam.
It is Europe, later the west, that must penetrate her iron cage and break her shackles. It must save the victim and civilise her oppressors. The more victimised "the Muslim woman", the greater the need for the liberated west to liberate her. The noble intervention is for her and in her interest, not for the west, or its interests. It was indeed no coincidence that a great many colonial officers and archivists devotedly recorded instances of barbarity among the colonised, practices like sati, the ban on widow marriage, or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and genital mutilation in Africa. Although these atrocities were not inventions, their chronicling had and still has a purpose: It provides the moral framework for intervention.As a couplet by Torquato Tasso puts it,And when her city and her state was lost,Then her person lov'd and honor'd most.But "love" and "honour" haven't exactly been the experience of Iraqi women when their cities fell under American occupation. Rights which took decades to secure have crumbled away in the space of months. From doctors, scientists, engineers or businesswomen, today they find themselves incarcerated in their homes unable to move around for fear of being kidnapped, raped, or assassinated. Those who escape the bombs and bullets of the occupying army, die at the hands of the Iraqi security forces and out of control extremist and sectarian militias which flourished since 2003, as Maggie O'Kane demonstrated in her moving piece on Cif yesterday. In the past three months 45 innocent women were murdered in cold blood in Basra. The truth is that just as there is a military machine of hegemony, there is a discursive machine of hegemony. When armies move on the ground to conquer and subjugate, they need moral and ideological cover. It is this that gives the dominant narrative of the "Muslim woman" its raison d'etre. No wonder then that the "Muslim woman" liberation warriors, the likes of Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens, and Pascal Bruckner, were the same people who cheered American/ British troops as they blasted their way through Kabul and Baghdad, and who will no doubt cheer and dance once more should Iran or Syria be bombed next. Soldiers shoot with their guns; they with their pens. They are hegemony's apologists. Without them the emperor stands naked.
It seems that Muslim women - particularly those living in western capitals- are destined to remain besieged by two debilitating discourses, which though different in appearance, are one in essence.
The first of these is conservative and exclusionist, sentencing Muslim women to a life of childbearing and rearing, lived out in the narrow confines of their homes at the mercy of fathers, brothers, and husbands. Revolving around notions of sexual purity and family honour, it appeals to religion for justification and legitimisation.
The other is a "liberation" discourse that vows to break Muslim woman's bondage and free her of the oppressive yoke of an aggressive, patriarchical, and backward society. She is a mass of powerlessness and enslavement; the embodiment of seclusion, silence, and invisibility. Her only hope of deliverance from the cave of veiling and isolation lies in the benevolent intervention of this force of emancipation. It will save her from her hellishly miserable and bleak existence, to the promised heaven of enlightenment and progress.
It is a game of binaries that pits one stereotype against another: the wretched caged female Muslim victim and her ruthless jailer society against an idealised "west" that is the epitome of enlightenment, rationalism, and freedom. Those escapees who leave the herd are held up as living testimonies to the arduousness of transition from the twilights of tribe, religion and tradition, to the dawn of reason, individualism, and liberation. There is no denying the manifold injustices that cripple the lives of many Muslim women and stunt their potential. But these appear in this condescending liberation narrative as representative of the condition of the millions of Muslim women around the world and exclusive to them. There are no colours, tones, or shades here. There are no living real women, urban or rural, educated or illiterate, affluent or poor, Turkish, Malaysian, or Egyptian - differences so crucial in defining women's life chances and shaping their situations. All we know about this ghostly creature is her Muslim identity, as though she was entirely shaped and affected by religion and theology irrespective of social background, economic circumstances, political reality, or regional and local cultural traditions. Important as it is, legal and theological reform will on its own do little to improve the lot of impoverished, uneducated, or insecure women in Somalia, Iraq, or rural Bangladesh. The narrative revolves around a dehistoricised, universal "Muslim woman"; a crushing model that oppresses flesh and blood Muslim women, denies them subjectivity and singularity, and claims to sum up their lives with all their vicissitudes and details from cradle to coffin. It reserves for itself the right to speak for them exclusively, whether they like it or not.Representations of the Muslim woman serve a dual legitimising function, at once confirming and justifying the west's narrative of itself, and of the Muslim other. The victimised Muslim woman is the lens through which Islam and Muslim society are seen. In medieval times she was cast as an intimidating powerful queen or termagant (like Bramimonde in the Chanson de Roland, or Belacane in Parzival) reflecting an intimidating powerful Muslim civilisation. And when the power balance began to shift in Europe's favour in the 17th and 18th centuries, she was made to mirror her society's fallen fortunes. She turned into a harem slave, leading little more than a dumb animal existence, subjugated, inert, abject, powerless, and invisible. She is the quintessential embodiment of a despotic, deformed, and backward Islam.
It is Europe, later the west, that must penetrate her iron cage and break her shackles. It must save the victim and civilise her oppressors. The more victimised "the Muslim woman", the greater the need for the liberated west to liberate her. The noble intervention is for her and in her interest, not for the west, or its interests. It was indeed no coincidence that a great many colonial officers and archivists devotedly recorded instances of barbarity among the colonised, practices like sati, the ban on widow marriage, or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and genital mutilation in Africa. Although these atrocities were not inventions, their chronicling had and still has a purpose: It provides the moral framework for intervention.As a couplet by Torquato Tasso puts it,And when her city and her state was lost,Then her person lov'd and honor'd most.But "love" and "honour" haven't exactly been the experience of Iraqi women when their cities fell under American occupation. Rights which took decades to secure have crumbled away in the space of months. From doctors, scientists, engineers or businesswomen, today they find themselves incarcerated in their homes unable to move around for fear of being kidnapped, raped, or assassinated. Those who escape the bombs and bullets of the occupying army, die at the hands of the Iraqi security forces and out of control extremist and sectarian militias which flourished since 2003, as Maggie O'Kane demonstrated in her moving piece on Cif yesterday. In the past three months 45 innocent women were murdered in cold blood in Basra. The truth is that just as there is a military machine of hegemony, there is a discursive machine of hegemony. When armies move on the ground to conquer and subjugate, they need moral and ideological cover. It is this that gives the dominant narrative of the "Muslim woman" its raison d'etre. No wonder then that the "Muslim woman" liberation warriors, the likes of Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens, and Pascal Bruckner, were the same people who cheered American/ British troops as they blasted their way through Kabul and Baghdad, and who will no doubt cheer and dance once more should Iran or Syria be bombed next. Soldiers shoot with their guns; they with their pens. They are hegemony's apologists. Without them the emperor stands naked.
Thursday, 13 December 2007
Unite Challenges M&S on Migrant Workers
This organisation and defence of migrant workers is a great example of progressive leadership, taclking racism and pushing forward labour organisation. - Ed.
· Retailer investigating conditions at meat plant
· Unite says Poles given 'zero hours' contracts
News Story by Matthew Taylor, Thursday December 13, The Guardian
Migrant workers at a factory which supplies meat to Marks & Spencer are suffering exploitation in a drive to maximise profits, a union report claims today.
M&S, which yesterday announced that sales of its organic turkeys are likely to top the £1m mark this Christmas, is considered to be one of the most ethical of leading high street retailers. However, a study published by the union Unite says that Polish staff at a factory in south Wales which supplies M&S with red meat are employed on a "zero hours" contract with no guaranteed number of hours, and suffer "harsh and divisive" conditions.Last night, an M&S spokeswoman said it had launched an investigation and was taking the allegations seriously.
The report, which focuses on the Dawn Pac meat factory near Llanelli, says staff employed by a local agency claimed that shifts were regularly abandoned at short notice, leaving workers stranded at the factory, sometimes in the middle of the night, because transport was only provided at the normal end of a shift. Some workers had to walk up to 15 miles to get home after being told by supervisors they were no longer needed halfway through a shift. In addition, those who opted out of agency accommodation and transport had their hours cut, it was claimed.
"We are creating a situation in local communities where work has become so insecure and casualised it evokes images of the casualisation of the docks before they were unionised," said Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of Unite. "M&S prides itself on its image as an ethical retailer. We want them to practise what they preach."
When the Guardian visited the south Wales site, five Polish workers said they had turned up that day and had been told they were not needed after an hour's work. "I came to work at 8am this morning and I was sent home at 9am," said Maria. "There was no car, no transport back, so I was stuck there and I have now been told that I have three days off this week."
Staff, who receive £5.52 an hour, said their hours were cut when they stopped using agency accommodation or the minibus to and from the factory, which costs £7 a day. Jeff Hopkins, chair of the Welsh-Polish Association in Llanelli, said that when workers stopped using the full range of services laid on by local employment agency CSA Recruitment they became "less productive economic units...so they knock their hours down". According to Unite, CSA Recruitment charges around £250 to bring Poles to the UK. They sign a zero-hours deal when they arrive in the UK after a 36-hour coach journey.
Woodley said: "This is not just about one site or one agency. Our campaign is about the prevalence of agency working, and the consequences for workers and communities." Yesterday both Dawn Pac and CSA Recruitment declined to comment on the report's allegations.
· Retailer investigating conditions at meat plant
· Unite says Poles given 'zero hours' contracts
News Story by Matthew Taylor, Thursday December 13, The Guardian
Migrant workers at a factory which supplies meat to Marks & Spencer are suffering exploitation in a drive to maximise profits, a union report claims today.
M&S, which yesterday announced that sales of its organic turkeys are likely to top the £1m mark this Christmas, is considered to be one of the most ethical of leading high street retailers. However, a study published by the union Unite says that Polish staff at a factory in south Wales which supplies M&S with red meat are employed on a "zero hours" contract with no guaranteed number of hours, and suffer "harsh and divisive" conditions.Last night, an M&S spokeswoman said it had launched an investigation and was taking the allegations seriously.
The report, which focuses on the Dawn Pac meat factory near Llanelli, says staff employed by a local agency claimed that shifts were regularly abandoned at short notice, leaving workers stranded at the factory, sometimes in the middle of the night, because transport was only provided at the normal end of a shift. Some workers had to walk up to 15 miles to get home after being told by supervisors they were no longer needed halfway through a shift. In addition, those who opted out of agency accommodation and transport had their hours cut, it was claimed.
"We are creating a situation in local communities where work has become so insecure and casualised it evokes images of the casualisation of the docks before they were unionised," said Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of Unite. "M&S prides itself on its image as an ethical retailer. We want them to practise what they preach."
When the Guardian visited the south Wales site, five Polish workers said they had turned up that day and had been told they were not needed after an hour's work. "I came to work at 8am this morning and I was sent home at 9am," said Maria. "There was no car, no transport back, so I was stuck there and I have now been told that I have three days off this week."
Staff, who receive £5.52 an hour, said their hours were cut when they stopped using agency accommodation or the minibus to and from the factory, which costs £7 a day. Jeff Hopkins, chair of the Welsh-Polish Association in Llanelli, said that when workers stopped using the full range of services laid on by local employment agency CSA Recruitment they became "less productive economic units...so they knock their hours down". According to Unite, CSA Recruitment charges around £250 to bring Poles to the UK. They sign a zero-hours deal when they arrive in the UK after a 36-hour coach journey.
Woodley said: "This is not just about one site or one agency. Our campaign is about the prevalence of agency working, and the consequences for workers and communities." Yesterday both Dawn Pac and CSA Recruitment declined to comment on the report's allegations.
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