Benita was up before dawn. She had to start work early to avoid the baking heat and the oppressive humidity of the Papua New Guinea climate. Her job was to scoop up fertiliser with an empty fish can and spread the chemicals around the base of thousands of palm trees growing on a huge plantation in the Milne Bay province on the island’s south-eastern tip.
Oil from these palm trees is used as an ingredient in hundreds of Western foodstuffs including chocolate, margarine and crisps. For a gruelling 10-hour day, Benita was paid less than £3. But this was to be her last day of toil. At the end of her shift, she collapsed and died after a cardiac arrest.

Benita’s name is fictional, but her case is real. She died on 14 April, 2003. Her death was recorded in a confidential internal company document obtained by The Observer – her real identity was not revealed nor who, if anyone, was to blame. It simply states: ‘The post mortem cited severe chest and abdominal injuries.’ While there are many young people who die while working for corporations across the developing world, Benita’s case has particular resonance for the British authorities.

The company Benita worked for, Pacific Rim Palm Oil Ltd, is managed by an arm of British government known as CDC, an abbreviation for its former name – the Commonwealth Development Corporation. CDC controls more than £1 billion of public money and its aim is to invest in developing countries to help the poor. The organisation has one shareholder – Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for International Development.

The people who run CDC certainly do not want for much. Richard Laing, its chief executive, earned £380,000 last year, of which more than £200,000 was paid in bonuses. Other executives at the quango earned hundreds of thousands of pounds in salary and bonuses.

An Observer investigation into CDC’s activities reveals that Benita’s death was just one of 13 ‘fatal accidents’ at its main projects in 2003. Others include two separate incidents where children were killed at Songas power project in Tanzania. In one case a two-year-old was crushed by a company tractor and in another a small girl was hit by another company vehicle and died in hospital three days later. In Swaziland a contractor’s truck killed a child on his way to school. The firm’s internal report, ‘CDC fatal accidents and injuries’, dated 10 March, 2004, reveals that there have been 62 such deaths in nine years, many of them involving company vehicles killing individuals in road accidents. It concluded that, though it believed its accident rate was relatively low, ‘it is clear from the investigations into the 2003 fatalities that there were many instances where management could have done more’.

But it is not just the number of fatal accidents that are causing concern to campaign groups and politicians. CDC has been accused of environmental damage, misjudging investments that do little to help the poor and paying large bonuses to its British bosses.
guardian.co.uk

An extraordinary appeal to Americans from the Bush administration for money to help pay for the reconstruction of Iraq has raised only $600 (£337), The Observer has learnt. Yet since the appeal was launched earlier this month, donations to rebuild New Orleans have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars.
The public’s reluctance to contribute much more than the cost of two iPods to the administration’s attempt to offer citizens ‘a further stake in building a free and prosperous Iraq’ has been seized on by critics as evidence of growing ambivalence over that country.

This coincides with concern over the increasing cost of the war. More than $30 billion has been appropriated for the reconstruction. Initially, America’s overseas aid agency, USaid, expected it to cost taxpayers no more than $1.7bn, but it is now asking the public if they want to contribute even more.

It is understood to be the first time that a US government has made an appeal to taxpayers for foreign aid money. Contributors have no way of knowing who will receive their donations or even where they may go, after officials said details had be kept secret for security reasons.

USaid’s Heather Layman denied it was disappointed with the meagre sum raised after a fortnight. ‘Every little helps,’ she said.
guardian.co.uk

“If we can help liberate the energies of the African people and unleash the potential of the private sector to create jobs, Africa will not only become a continent of hope but a continent of accomplishment,” Wolfowitz will say.

Wolfowitz also called for more political accountability.

“Effective leaders also recognize that they are accountable to their people,” he said. “Effective leaders listen. Institutions of accountability like civil society and a free press help leaders listen, hold them accountable for results and are key to controlling corruption.”

He called for more action to combat corruption.

“Corruption drains resources and discourages investments,” Wolfowitz said. “It benefits the privileged and deprives the poor.”
news.yahoo.com

This is the astonishing arrogance of imperialist discourse. Liberating the energies of the African people…he’s talking really about privatization, about liberating African people of their resources under the empty rhetoric of democracy. They want to invest the African people right out of existence.

My name is Hart Viges. September 11 happened. Next day I was in the recruiting office. I thought that was the way I could make a difference in the world for the better.

So I went to infantry school and jump school and I arrived with my unit of the 82nd Airborne Division. I was deployed to Kuwait in February 2003. We drove into Iraq because Third Infantry Division was ahead of schedule, and so I didn’t need to jump into Baghdad airport.

As we drove into Samawa to secure their supplies my mortar platoon dropped numerous rounds on this town. I watched Kiowa attack helicopters fire Hellfire missile after Hellfire missile. I saw a C130 Spectre gunship … it will level a town. It had belt-fed artillery rounds pounding with these super-Gatling guns.

I don’t know how many innocents I killed with my mortar rounds. I have my imagination to pick at for that one. But I clearly remember the call-out over the radio saying “Green light on all taxi-cabs. The enemy is using them for transportation”.

One of our snipers called back on the radio saying “Excuse me but did I hear that order correctly? Green light on all taxi cabs?” “Roger that soldier. You’d better start buckling up.” All of a sudden the city just blew up. Didn’t matter if there was an innocent in the taxi-cab – we laid a mortar round on it, snipers opened up.

Next was Fallujah. We went in without a shot. But Charlie Company decided they were going to take over a school for the area of operations. Protesters would come saying “Please get out of our school. Our children need this school. We need education”.

They turned them down. They came back, about 40 to 50 people. Some have the bright idea of shooting AK-47s up in the air. Well a couple of rounds fell into the school … They laid waste to that group of people.

Then we went to Baghdad. And I had days that I don’t want to remember. I try to forget. Days where we’d take contractors out to a water treatment plant outside of Baghdad.

We’d catched word that this is a kind of a scary place but when I arrive there’s grass and palm trees, a river. It’s the first beautiful place that seemed untouched by the war in Iraq. As we leave, RPGs come flying at us. Two men with RPGs ran up in front of us from across the road.

“Drop your weapons”. “Irmie salahak.” They’re grabbing on to women and kids so [we] don’t fire. I can’t take any more and swing my [gun] over. My sight’s on his chest, my finger’s on the trigger. And I’m trained to kill but this is no bogey man, this is no enemy. This is a human being. With the same fears and doubts and worries. The same messed-up situation.

don’t pull the trigger this time … it throws me off. It’s like they didn’t tell me about this emotional attachment to killing. They tried to numb me, they tried to strip my humanity. They tried to tell me that’s not a human being – that’s a soft target.

So now, my imagination is running … What if he pulled his trigger? How many American soldiers or Iraqi police, how many families destroyed because I didn’t pull my trigger. After we leave this little village we get attack helicopters, Apaches, two Bradley fighting vehicles, and we go back. And we start asking questions. Where are they? Eventually they lead us to this hut where this family is living, and myself and [another soldier] started searching for AK-47s, for explosives, for RPGs, you know … evidence. And all I can find is a tiny little pistol, probably to scare off thieves

Well because of that pistol we took their two young men … Their mother is at my feet trying to kiss my feet like I deserve my feet to be kissed. Screaming, pleading. I don’t need to speak Arabic to know love and concern and fear. I had my attack helicopter behind me, my Bradley fighting vehicle, my armour, my M4 [semi-automatic] with laser sight. I’m an 82nd Airborne killer. But I was powerless … to ease this woman’s pain.

After I came home I applied for conscientious objector [status]. I’m a Christian, what was I doing holding a gun to another human being? Love thy neighbour. Pray for those who persecute you, don’t shoot them.

I get my conscientious objector packet approved. I’m free. It’s all gone now, right? No! I still swerve at trash bags … fireworks … I can’t express anything. All my relationships are falling apart because they can’t fucking understand me. How do they know the pain I’ve gone through or the sights I’ve seen? The innocence gone, stripped, dead? I couldn’t stand the pain. People were leaving me.

I couldn’t cut my wrists. So I called the police. They come stomping through my door. I have my knife in my hand. “Shoot me.” All of a sudden I was the man with the RPG, with all the guns pointed at him, thinking “Yes, we can solve the world’s problems by killing each other”. How insane is that? Lucky I lived through that episode. See, you can’t wash your hands when they’re covered in blood. The wounds carry on. This is what war does to your soul, to your humanity, to your family.
independent.co.uk

WASHINGTON – Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said Thursday that he had been warning the Bush administration in recent days that Iraq was hurtling toward disintegration, a development that he said could drag the region into war.
“There is no dynamic now pulling the nation together,” he said in a meeting with reporters at the Saudi Embassy here. “All the dynamics are pulling the country apart.” He said he was so concerned that he was carrying this message “to everyone who will listen” in the Bush administration.

Prince Saud’s statements, some of the most pessimistic public comments on Iraq by a Middle Eastern leader in recent months, were in stark contrast to the generally upbeat assessments that the White House and the Pentagon have been offering.

But in an appearance at the Pentagon on Thursday, President Bush, while once again expressing long-term optimism, warned that the bloodshed in Iraq was likely to increase in the coming weeks.
commndreams.org

Mission accomplished!

Outside the 2,000-bed temporary shelter in Baton Rouge’s River Center, a Church of Scientology band is performing a version of Bill Withers’s classic “Use Me”–a refreshingly honest choice. “If it feels this good getting used,” the Scientology singer belts out, “just keep on using me until you use me up.”

Ten-year-old Nyler, lying face down on a massage table, has pretty much the same attitude. She is not quite sure why the nice lady in the yellow SCIENTOLOGY VOLUNTEER MINISTER T-shirt wants to rub her back, but “it feels so good,” she tells me, so who really cares? I ask Nyler if this is her first massage. “Assist!” hisses the volunteer minister, correcting my Scientology lingo. Nyler shakes her head no; since fleeing New Orleans after a tree fell on her house, she has visited this tent many times, becoming something of an assist-aholic. “I have nerves,” she explains in a blissed-out massage voice. “I have what you call nervousness.”

Wearing a donated pink T-shirt with an age-inappropriate slogan (“It’s the hidden little Tiki spot where the island boys are hot, hot, hot”), Nyler tells me what she is nervous about. “I think New Orleans might not ever get fixed back.” “Why not?” I ask, a little surprised to be discussing reconstruction politics with a preteen in pigtails. “Because the people who know how to fix broken houses are all gone.”

I don’t have the heart to tell Nyler that I suspect she is on to something; that many of the African-American workers from her neighborhood may never be welcomed back to rebuild their city. An hour earlier I had interviewed New Orleans’ top corporate lobbyist, Mark Drennen. As president and CEO of Greater New Orleans Inc., Drennen was in an expansive mood, pumped up by signs from Washington that the corporations he represents–everything from Chevron to Liberty Bank to Coca-Cola–were about to receive a package of tax breaks, subsidies and relaxed regulations so generous it would make the job of a lobbyist virtually obsolete.

Listening to Drennen enthuse about the opportunities opened up by the storm, I was struck by his reference to African-Americans in New Orleans as “the minority community.” At 67 percent of the population, they are in fact the clear majority, while whites like Drennen make up just 27 percent. It was no doubt a simple verbal slip, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was also a glimpse into the desired demographics of the new-and-improved city being imagined by its white elite, one that won’t have much room for Nyler or her neighbors who know how to fix houses. “I honestly don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows how they are going to fit in,” Drennen said of the city’s unemployed.

New Orleans is already displaying signs of a demographic shift so dramatic that some evacuees describe it as “ethnic cleansing.” Before Mayor Ray Nagin called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to are overwhelmingly black. This, we are assured, is not a conspiracy; it’s simple geography–a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude. That means that the driest areas are the whitest (the French Quarter is 90 percent white; the Garden District, 89 percent; Audubon, 86 percent; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65 percent). Some dry areas, like Algiers, did have large low-income African-American populations before the storm, but in all the billions for reconstruction, there is no budget for transportation back from the far-flung shelters where those residents ended up. So even when resettlement is permitted, many may not be able to return.

As for the hundreds of thousands of residents whose low-lying homes and housing projects were destroyed by the flood, Drennen points out that many of those neighborhoods were dysfunctional to begin with. He says the city now has an opportunity for “twenty-first-century thinking”: Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with “mixed income” housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side.

What Drennen doesn’t say is that this kind of urban integration could happen tomorrow, on a massive scale. Roughly 70,000 of New Orleans’ poorest homeless evacuees could move back to the city alongside returning white homeowners, without a single new structure being built. Take the Lower Garden District, where Drennen himself lives. It has a surprisingly high vacancy rate–17.4 percent, according to the 2000 Census. At that time 702 housing units stood vacant, and since the market hasn’t improved and the district was barely flooded, they are presumably still there and still vacant. It’s much the same in the other dry areas: With landlords preferring to board up apartments rather than lower rents, the French Quarter has been half-empty for years, with a vacancy rate of 37 percent.

The citywide numbers are staggering: In the areas that sustained only minor damage and are on the mayor’s repopulation list, there are at least 11,600 empty apartments and houses. If Jefferson Parish is included, that number soars to 23,270. With three people in each unit, that means homes could be found for roughly 70,000 evacuees. With the number of permanently homeless city residents estimated at 200,000, that’s a significant dent in the housing crisis. And it’s doable. Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, says there are ways to convert vacant apartments into affordable or free housing. After passing an ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent until evacuees find jobs. Jackson Lee says she plans to introduce legislation that will call for federal funds to be spent on precisely such rental vouchers. “If opportunity exists to create viable housing options,” she says, “they should be explored.”

Malcolm Suber, a longtime New Orleans community activist, was shocked to learn that thousands of livable homes were sitting empty. “If there are empty houses in the city,” he says, “then working-class and poor people should be able to live in them.” According to Suber, taking over vacant units would do more than provide much-needed immediate shelter: It would move the poor back into the city, preventing the key decisions about its future–like whether to turn the Ninth Ward into marshland or how to rebuild Charity Hospital–from being made exclusively by those who can afford land on high ground. “We have the right to fully participate in the reconstruction of our city,” Suber says. “And that can only happen if we are back inside.” But he concedes that it will be a fight: The old-line families in Audubon and the Garden District may pay lip service to “mixed income” housing, “but the Bourbons uptown would have a conniption if a Section 8 tenant moved in next door. It will certainly be interesting.”

Equally interesting will be the response from the Bush Administration. So far, the only plan for homeless residents to move back to New Orleans is Bush’s bizarre Urban Homesteading Act. In his speech from the French Quarter, Bush made no mention of the neighborhood’s roughly 1,700 unrented apartments and instead proposed holding a lottery to hand out plots of federal land to flood victims, who could build homes on them. But it will take months (at least) before new houses are built, and many of the poorest residents won’t be able to carry the mortgage, no matter how subsidized. Besides, it barely touches the need: The Administration estimates that in New Orleans there is land for only 1,000 “homesteaders.”

The truth is that the White House’s determination to turn renters into mortgage payers is less about solving Louisiana’s housing crisis than indulging an ideological obsession with building a radically privatized “ownership society.” It’s an obsession that has already come to grip the entire disaster zone, with emergency relief provided by the Red Cross and Wal-Mart and reconstruction contracts handed out to Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton and Shaw–the same gang that spent the past three years getting paid billions while failing to bring Iraq’s essential services to prewar levels [see Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” May 2]. “Reconstruction,” whether in Baghdad or New Orleans, has become shorthand for a massive uninterrupted transfer of wealth from public to private hands, whether in the form of direct “cost plus” government contracts or by auctioning off new sectors of the state to corporations.

This vision was laid out in uniquely undisguised form during a meeting at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington headquarters on September 13. Present were members of the House Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 100 conservative lawmakers headed by Indiana Congressman Mike Pence. The group compiled a list of thirty-two “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices,” including school vouchers, repealing environmental regulations and “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Admittedly, it seems farfetched that these would be adopted as relief for the needy victims of an eviscerated public sector. Until you read the first three items: “Automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas”; “Make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone”; and “Make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations).” All are poised to become law or have already been adopted by presidential decree.

In their own way the list-makers at Heritage are not unlike the 500 Scientology volunteer ministers currently deployed to shelters across Louisiana. “We literally followed the hurricane,” David Holt, a church supervisor, told me. When I asked him why, he pointed to a yellow banner that read, SOMETHING CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT. I asked him what “it” was and he said “everything.”

So it is with the neocon true believers: Their “Katrina relief” policies are the same ones trotted out for every problem, but nothing energizes them like a good disaster. As Bush says, lands swept clean are “opportunity zones,” a chance to do some recruiting, advance the faith, even rewrite the rules from scratch. But that, of course, will take some massaging–I mean assisting.
commondreams.org

PARIS, Sept. 20 – The French news media were captivated by Hurricane Katrina, pointing out how the American government’s faltering response brought into plain view the sad lot of black Americans. But this time the French, who have long criticized America’s racism, could not overlook the parallels at home.

“It is true that the devastations of Katrina have cruelly shed light on the wounds of America, ghettoization, poverty, criminality, racial and territorial tensions,” Le Figaro, the conservative daily, said in an editorial on Sept. 8. “In France, those in disagreement ran to pelt the ‘American model’ and the neoconservative president. But have they just looked at the state of their own country?”

Only four days before, a fire had swept an apartment in south Paris, killing 12 people, most of them black. And just days before that, 17 black people died in a single blaze. Since April, 48 people, most of them children and all of them black, have died in four separate fires in Paris.

In neighborhoods like Château Rouge, filled with the hundreds of thousands of nonwhite immigrants, some Arabs but mainly blacks, whom France has absorbed over the years from former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, you feel the anger.
nytimes.com

NEW YORK – Gold is hovering near 17-year-highs. What that means depends on who’s doing the interpreting.

According to one school, demand from China and India is pushing the price higher, but another school insists gold is up because Western investors are convinced inflation is much higher than their governments admit.

Gold has always been the investment of choice for bomb-shelter-building doom-and-gloomers, those accumulators of canned goods whom everyone avoids at family gatherings. As an asset, gold usually behaves according to its own set of rules. Gold rises with oil prices, falls when the dollar rises and increases when inflation fears intensify.

It’s considered a “safe haven investment” — should your currency become worthless, your gold will retain value.
news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON – As a military jury in Texas considers the fate of Lynndie England, the low-ranking reservist pictured in the notorious photos of the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in late 2003, two sergeants and a captain in one of the U.S. Army’s most decorated combat units have come forward with accounts of routine, systematic and often severe beatings committed against detainees at a base near Fallujah from 2003 through 2004.

According to their testimony, featured in a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), beatings and other forms of torture were often either ordered or approved by superior officers and took place on virtually a daily basis. The soldiers, all of whom had also been deployed to Afghanistan before coming to Iraq, testified that the same techniques were used in both countries.

The beatings were so severe that they resulted in broken bones “every other week” at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mercury, where detainees would ordinarily be held for three or four days before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. In one case, an Army cook broke the leg of a detainee with a metal baseball bat, according to one of the sergeants quoted in the report, entitled “Leadership Failure”.

Residents of Fallujah, an insurgent stronghold since the 2003 invasion, referred to the unit as “The Murderous Maniacs”, because of their treatment of detainees, according to the report.
Full: commondrams.org

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) – Israel ordered ground forces to the Gaza border Saturday and threatened a “crushing” response after Israeli towns were hit by the first major Hamas rocket barrage from the coastal territory since Israel’s pullout two weeks earlier.
Israel also resumed airstrikes against Hamas targets, hitting several suspected weapons workshops, and imposed a blanket closure that bars all Palestinians from its territory.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called his Security Cabinet for a meeting later Saturday to approve the military’s response, expected to last several days. A large-scale operation appeared unlikely but the timing of the Cabinet meeting suggested a sense of urgency.
The Cabinet session comes as Sharon faces a major leadership challenge in his Likud Party this week over the Gaza pullout. Sharon’s challenger, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned the withdrawal will endanger Israel. The barrage of 39 rockets, with five Israelis hurt, could give him a boost against Sharon.
apnews.myway.com

Gosh kids, ya think Hamas might be working for Netanyahu?