World Hunger Spiralling Out of Control Because of Capitalist Profit System

Copyright: WFP/Rein Skullerud.
UN reports 1 billion of the world’s people going hungry
By Jerry White / September 18, 2009

For the first time in history, more than one billion people, or nearly one in every 6 inhabitants of the planet, are going hungry this year, according to a new report from the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP). Chronic poverty, still high food prices and the impact of the world economic crisis have led to a sharp increase in the number of hungry people, now larger than the combined populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union.

The total number of hungry people has shot up by nearly 200 million over the last decade. After a small decline between 2007 and 2008, world hunger rose sharply as the impact of the economic crisis hit, rising from 915 million in 2008 to an estimated 1.02 billion this year. [See graph]

While disasters, such as floods or droughts, cause temporary food shortages, these emergencies accounted for only 8 percent of the world’s hungry population, the WFP said. Nor is the problem caused by a shortage of food production, which at current levels is sufficient to feed the world’s population.

The source of the catastrophe is the capitalist profit system and, in particular, the continued oppression of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Sixty-five percent of the world’s hungry people live in just six countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.

The various IMF-dictated “development” programs imposed on these countries have chiefly benefited the banks in London, New York and Tokyo—which have sucked out hundreds of billions in interest payments—as well as the native ruling elites. Falling commodity prices for raw materials have also reduced revenues, while speculation on food has also driven up costs.

According to an article on the WFP report on Livescience.com, aid programs had made certain inroads in fighting hunger at the end of the 20th century. However, rising food prices have all but negated those efforts, causing the number of hungry to rise again everywhere except in Latin America and the Caribbean. The rising cost of food caused the number of hungry to jump by 75 million in 2007 and 40 million in 2008.

“The double whammy of the financial crisis and the still record high food prices around the world is delivering a devastating blow to the world’s most vulnerable,” WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran told a London press conference Wednesday. “They have been squeezed so much that many have lost what few assets they owned, further exposing them to hunger. Now, it only takes a drought or storm to provoke a disaster.”

The present crisis also underscores the criminal misallocation of financial resources by governments around the world. Sheeren noted that the $3 billion the agency needed to cover its budget shortfall and continue providing food to 108 million people around the world was less than 0.01 percent—or one-hundredth of one percent—the amount spent by world governments on the bailout of the banks and other financial institutions.

While hunger has reached record levels, she said, food aid has fallen to a 20-year low. The WFP said it would have to drastically cut food aid by October because it had only raised less than half of its $6.7 billion budget.

In Kenya, where drought and high food prices have pushed nearly 4 million people into hunger, the WFP said it was preparing to reduce rations.

In Guatemala, its program to provide food supplements to 100,000 children and 50,000 pregnant and lactating women was “hanging by a thread.” Almost half of the children in the Central American country are chronically malnourished—the sixth highest level in the world—and the government has recently declared a “State of National Calamity” due to a shortage of food to feed hungry rural communities.

The WFP reported these stark statistics:

• An estimated 146 million children in developing countries are underweight
• Every six seconds a child dies because of hunger and related causes
• More than 60 percent of chronically hungry people are women

A host of irreversible physical ailments can be caused by undernourishment—the insufficient intake of calories to meet minimum physiological needs—and malnutrition—the lack of sufficient levels of proteins, vitamins and other nutrients.

The most common form of malnutrition is iron deficiency, Livescience.com noted, which affects billions worldwide and can impede brain development. Vitamin A deficiency affects 140 million preschool children in 118 countries and is the leading cause of child blindness. It also kills one million infants a year, according to UNICEF.

Iodine deficiency affects 780 million people worldwide. Babies born to iodine deficient mothers can have mental impairments, the web site noted. Zinc deficiency results in the deaths of about 800,000 children each year and weakens the immune system of young children.

The desperation facing millions produced tragedy Monday when a stampede of people seeking free food in the southern Pakistan port city of Karachi left up to 20 impoverished women and children dead. Officials said they were crushed in a stairwell and alley, as hundreds lined up to get free flour from charity workers.

Police and other witnesses told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) that a private security guard in charge of making sure the women stayed in line charged them with a baton when they became impatient with the long wait. An injured woman, Salma Qadir, 40, said the women wanted to get their rations quickly but were beaten by the guard. “The women got scared and tried to turn back, which scared others and resulted in a stampede,” she told the AFP.

The narrow streets of the market area were reportedly teeming with hundreds of poor people seeking scarce wheat and sugar. Poverty levels in the city of 14 million people have been on the rise along with food prices, which government officials blame on hoarding by mills and large wholesalers. The BBC reported that Pakistan’s government had recently ordered a crackdown against such hoarding, “[b]ut this failed to materialize thus far due to the lobby’s massive influence in Pakistan’s parliament.”

According to the World Food Program, 85 percent of the South Asian country’s 173 million people live on less than US$2 a day. Hunger in the country has been exacerbated by world financial breakdown, skyrocketing food prices and the US-backed war in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province and tribal areas, which has driven millions from their homes. Currently the WFP is trying to provide daily food rations to 100,000 displaced people in the war-torn area.

Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site

Source / World Socialist Web Site

Thanks to Deva Wood / The Rag Blog

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Cynthia McKinney : Letter From an Israeli Jail

Former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney is now imprisoned in an Israeli jail after the Israeli stopped a boat with humanitarian supplies bound for Gaza.
Letter from an Israeli jail

I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza’s children could color and paint, that Gaza’s wounded could be healed, and that Gaza’s bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

By Cynthia McKinney / July 4, 2009

This is Cynthia McKinney and I’m speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies -- and even crayons for children; I had a suitcase full of crayons for children.

While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis hijacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.

At the outbreak of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day’s notice and tried, as the U.S. representative in a multinational delegation, to deliver three tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.

During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16s rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full-scale, outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs -- new weapons [created] injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel’s onslaught that Gaza had become Israel’s veritable weapons-testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.

The world saw Israel’s despicable violence thanks to Al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water[s]... It’s a miracle that I’m even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.

The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime... I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons [for] kids?

Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else’s children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza’s children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.

I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza’s children could color and paint, that Gaza’s wounded could be healed, and that Gaza’s bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

The aid ship Spirit of Humanity as it left for Gaza, before being seized by the Israelis.
But I’ve learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it’s incredibly black, populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream... like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their 20s. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better... The once proud, never-colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.

My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn’t cheap. Many of them represent their family’s best collective efforts for self-fulfillment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel, only after they arrived Israel told them, "There is no UN in Israel."

The police here have license to pick them up and suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world’s first Jews and Christians. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.

The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle’s detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for six months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and "yes we can" were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfillment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in...

It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel’s marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.

We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr Martin Luther King, Jr's letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to [write one]. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the US have a lot to atone for, for what they’ve done to others around the world.

The Israeli navy is shown stopping "The Spirit of Humanity," the activists' boat, off the coast of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday. Photo from AFP.
What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people’s children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I’m experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I’m lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?

Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] What are you willing to do?

Let’s change the world together and reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State’s Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.

I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I’ve met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.

[Cynthia McKinney is a former Democratic US congresswoman, Green Party presidential candidate, and an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice. The first African-American woman to represent the state of Georgia, McKinney served six terms in the US House of Representatives, from 1993-2003, and from 2005-2007. McKinney's remarks were transcribed here from a telephone call received and broadcasted by WBAIX.org.]

Source / Ma'an News Agency

Thanks to Mike Klonsky / The Rag Blog

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U2 Drummer : 'Bono's Friendship With War Criminals Makes Me Cringe'

British PM Tony Blair hobs with Bono during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2007.
'The normally reserved musician has launched a stinging attack on his frontman for his involvement with the two world leaders in an interview with music magazine Q.'
By Anne-Marie Walsh

U2 drummer Larry Mullen has admitted he "cringes" when he sees Bono associating with "war criminals" George W Bush and Tony Blair.

The normally reserved musician has launched a stinging attack on his frontman for his involvement with the two world leaders in an interview with music magazine Q.

It is not the first time Mullen has criticised Bono for his campaign work, but this is his most scathing criticism to date. From his appearance at Live Aid and Band Aid in the 1980s, Bono has been involved in numerous charities to raise awareness of crises in Africa, including AIDs.

He praised Mr Bush for increasing aid to Africa and most recently appeared with him during the G8 summit last year. In 2007, he also saluted outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair for "doing the things he believed in", despite the "accusations of a slick PR machine, spin doctoring and the like".

But his work outside the band has caused a deep rift between Bono and at least one other fellow band member.

In his interview, Mullen suggests the singer's campaigns have taken their toll on his family life. He admitted that Bono is "prepared to use his weight as a celebrity at great cost to himself and his family, to help other people", adding: "but, as an outsider looking in, I cringe."

He brands Mr Blair and Mr Bush "war criminals".

"Tony Blair is a war criminal and I think he should be tried as a war criminal.

"Then I see Bono and him as pals and I'm going, 'I don't like that'. Do I think George Bush is a war criminal? Probably -- but the difference between him and Tony Blair is that Blair is intelligent. So, he has no excuse."

Six years ago, in an interview on American TV, Mullen said he believed Bono's political crusades were unsettling the band. He told the '60 Minutes' programme that the lead singer's absence was felt each time he took a break to campaign on issues.

"It does interfere with the band," he said. "It's a four-legged table, and with one leg missing, even for short periods of time, the thing becomes a little unstable."

Bono has also come under attack from critics less close to home, including writer Paul Theroux.

Mr Theroux described Bono, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as "mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth."

He said he was not complaining about humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs.

"Instead, I am speaking of the 'more money' platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labour and debt relief."

The U2 singer responded by calling his critics "cranks carping from the sidelines".

"A lot of them wouldn't know what to do if they were on the field," he said.

Source / independent.ie / Posted Dec. 29, 2008

Thanks to Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog

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Don't Escalate Afghan War; Send in the Peace Corps

Taliban troops in Afghanistan. Photo from AFP.

'The basic ingredients of further Afghan disasters are in place,' warns Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute For Public Accuracy, 'including, pivotally, a dire lack of wide-ranging debate over Washington’s options.'

By Sherwood Ross / December 17, 2008

President-elect Obama should drop his plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan, a country that never attacked America, out of pity for a helpless civilian population that will only suffer increasing misery from an expanded fight against the Taliban and its allies.

Recall military intervention was used to capture Panamanian military dictator Manuel Noriega for a drug charge in December 20, 1989. That illegal assault, ordered by President George H.W. Bush, killed 500 Panamanian civilians, wounded 3,000 more, and pushed 15,000 people out of their homes, an incredible price innocent people were made to pay to enable the U.S. to nail one drug-runner.

In Afghanistan, the civilian population has already paid a much higher price.
“We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority,” Senator Barack Obama pledged during the televised presidential debate of last October 7.

Yes, and in so doing, thousands of additional Afghan civilians are liable to perish, likely far more of them then the 3,000 Americans massacred on 9/11 in New York and Washington.

In just the first two years after 9/11, the U.S. had already killed between 3,000 and 5,000 Afghan civilians, David Krieger noted in Counterpunch. And Jay Shaft, of the Coalition For Free Thought in Media, points to a United Nations estimate that up to 500 Afghan civilians are dying monthly from U.S. cluster bombs, most of them children and teenage boys.

“The president (Obama) is going to inherit the problem the Soviets had roughly 15 years ago during the Soviet jihad. You cannot tame the people in the North-West Frontier Province and on the border in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Dalton Fury, the commander of special operations at Tora Bora, recently told Cable News Network.

By its illegal invasion of Iraq, the Bush regime allowed the Taliban in Afghanistan and its allies to regain control of the nation. Anand Gopal, of the Christian Science Monitor, writes that just a 20-minute drive outside the capital Kabul, “the American-backed government of Afghanistan no longer exits.” He states, “Violence has reached record levels this year and Afghanistan is now considered a deadlier battlefield than Iraq.”

This is not to say bin Laden should not be brought to trial or that Americans are not entitled to closure on the 9/11 attacks.

But a leading U.S. international law authority says (1) there is no sufficient proof that bin Laden even masterminded the 9/11 attacks and (2) diplomacy to secure justice would be the more rational and humane approach than armed force.

Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois professor, writes in “Destroying World Order”(Clarity Press): “There is not and may never be conclusive proof as to who was behind the terrible bombings..on Sept. 11… Suffice it to say that the accounts provided by the United States government simply do not add up.”

There is no evidence bin Laden ordered the attack or even that Al Qaeda or the Taliban was involved, Boyle said. Recall that former Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged the U.S. would produce a “White Paper” to document the case against bin Laden, but that he never produced one. Instead, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, hardly an American official, issued a report the British press ridiculed for its lack of proof.

Boyle also points out the so-called bin Laden video that the Central Intelligence Agency “miraculously discovered” in a bombed out house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, was “disjointed” and “non-sequential.”

The videotape is suspect because the Pentagon’s translated version was not word for word but an “information flow” paraphrase created at The Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies where Paul Wolfowitz, the war hawk and deputy defense secretary, had just been dean. In case you didn’t know, Johns Hopkins is no impartial academic institution but one of the very biggest Pentagon contractors in terms of the boodle it siphons off from the military-industrial complex.

“The bin Laden video provided no evidence that implicated the Taliban government of Afghanistan in the 11 September 2001 attacks (and)…no justification for the United States to wage war against Afghanistan, a U.N. Member State, in gross violation of the United Nations Charter,” Boyle writes.

Little known to most Americans is that Afghanistan likely was invaded because its Taliban government refused to okay pipelines sought by Union Oil Co. of California(UNOCAL).

“Since Central Asia is landlocked, the United States government wanted to find a way to get the oil and natural gas out, while avoiding Iran, Russia, and China,” Boyle said. “The easiest way to do that was to construct a pipeline south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL had been negotiating with the Taliban government of Afghanistan for quite some time, still with the full support of the U.S. government into the summer of 2001, but their negotiations had failed. The U.S….then rendered a proverbial offer that could not be refused to the Taliban government.”

A “major consideration” for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was to put in office a regime favoring the oil and gas pipelines the U.S. sought running from Turkmenistan south through Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea coast of Pakistan, writes Chalmers Johnson in “The Sorrows of Empire”(Owl Books).

Oil “has been a constant motive” driving “the vast expansion of (U.S.) bases in the Persian Gulf” in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAR, Johnson says. Because Afghanistan’s Taliban regime opposed the U.S.-backed venture, its overthrow became the secret reason behind “the war on terrorism,” Johnson claims.

To build the proposed $2-billion, 918-mile natural gas pipeline and a $4-billion 1,005-mile oil pipeline UNOCAL “needed a government in Kabul it could deal with in obtaining transit rights.”

Thus, Johnson writes, “A remarkable group of Washington insiders came together to promote the Unocal project”:

* UNOCAL hired former President Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger to negotiate with Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

* Kissinger worked with Turkmenistan’s top consultant, none other than his own former White House aide Gen. Alexander Haig, later President Regan’s Secretary of State.

* UNOCAL also employed two well-connected Afghans to influence the Taliban in its favor, naturalized U.S. citizen Zalmay Khalilzad, and Hamid Karzai, both linked to former Afghan king Zahir Shah, then living in Pakistan. The pair later became U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and U.S.-backed President of Afghanistan, respectively.

* President Bush first appointed Khalilzad to his National Security Council(NSC) staff, under Condoleezza Rice, and on December 31, 2001, named him “special envoy” to Afghanistan, only nine days after the Karzai government took office in Kabul.

“It should be recalled,” Johnson writes, Khalilzad joined NSC on May 23, 2001, “just in time to work on an operational order for an attack on Afghanistan.”

Johnson writes “it would appear that the attacks of September 11 provided an opportunity for the United States to act unilaterally to remove the Taliban, without assistance from Russia, India, or any other country.”

According to Boyle, even before 9/11 the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan had made “repeated offers to negotiate a solution” over “the disposition of bin Laden—as well as over the UNOCAL oil pipeline.”

Boyle said the Taliban offered to have bin Laden tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the laws of Sharia; then they modified this to have him tried before some type of neutral court, which would exclude handing him over to the U.S; and finally, “even offered to try bin Laden themselves provided the United States gave them some credible evidence of his involvement in the ll September attacks, which was never done.”

Bush responded in his September 20, 2001, address “by ruling out any type of negotiations and instead issuing the Taliban government an impossible ultimatum,” Boyle said.

As President Bush put it, “tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban: Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land. (Applause.) Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens, you have unjustly imprisoned… Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, and hand over every terrorist, and every person in their support structure, to appropriate authorities. (Applause.) Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating.” Bush emphasized: “These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. (Applause.) The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.”

Boyle said that by giving an impossible ultimatum to Afghanistan that ruled out negotiations and chose the military path, Bush ignored “12 or so multilateral conventions already on the books that deal with…international terrorism,” “many of which could have been used…to handle this matter in a lawful, effective, and peaceful manner.”

“So a decision was made remarkably early in the process to ignore and abandon the entire framework of international treaties that had been established under the auspices of the UN Organization for the past 25 years,” Boyle summarized, “in order to deal with acts of international terrorism and instead go to war against Afghanistan, a U.N. member state.”

Surely, the hour has come for the U.S. to reverse the failed Bush military approach and negotiate an equitable solution to stop the killing and bring bin Laden to justice. If you think the U.S. cannot negotiate with the Taliban, recall during the 1980s it was the CIA that funneled literally billions of dollars directly into Taliban pockets to overthrow Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government, increasing the prospect of an invasion by the Red Army, which is exactly what happened.

Hasn’t Afghanistan suffered enough? The U.S. would be far better off if instead of pouring tens of thousands of troops into Afghanistan it sent in a like number of unarmed Peace Corps volunteers with a comparable budget. Time to give non-violence a chance. C’mon, guys, show a little imagination, huh?

[Sherwood Ross is a veteran reporter and public relations consultant. He formerly worked for the City News Bureau of Chicago, the Chicago Daily News, and as a columnist for wire services.]

Source / LA Progressive

Thanks to Dorinda Moreno / The Rag Blog

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