Seeds of discontent: the ‘miracle’ crop that has failed to deliver
A new ‘ethical’ biofuel is damaging the impoverished people it was supposed to help
By Cahal Milmo and Andrew Wasley | The Independent | 15 February 2010
A “miracle” plant, once thought to be the answer to producing renewable biofuels on a vast scale, is driving thousands of farmers in the developing world into food poverty, a damning report concludes today.
Five years ago jatropha was hailed by investors and scientists as a breakthrough in the battle to find a biofuel alternative to fossil fuels that would not further impoverish developing countries by diverting resources away from food production.
Jatropha was said to be resistant to drought and pests and able could grow on land that was unsuitable for food production. But researchers have found that it has increased poverty in countries including India and Tanzania.
Millions of the plants have been grown in anticipation of rich returns, only for growers to be hit by poor yields, conflict over land and a lack of infrastructure to process the oil-rich seeds.
Oil giant BP, which planned to spend almost £32m on a joint venture to set up jatropha plantations, has now pulled out and the charity ActionAid today warns that jatropha needs to be cultivated on prime food-growing land to produce significant yields.
According to one estimate, up to one million hectares of jatropha – an area equivalent to Devon and Cornwall combined – are being cultivated around the globe, despite little evidence that it can produce enough oil to make the crop commercially sustainable.
Meredith Alexander, head of trade at Actionaid and co-author of its “Meals per Gallon” report, said: “Jatropha is a real gold-rush crop, and the same amount of common sense that applies in a gold rush has been applied to the jatropha rush.
“Jatropha was the subject of an explosion of fabulous propaganda. But this was an untried crop at commercial levels and the many thousands of marginal farmers who have gone into production have been experimented on with disastrous results. They are simply not getting the income they were promised and now cannot afford food for their families,” she said.
A native of central America, Jatropha curcus was brought to Europe in the 16th century and subsequently spread across Africa and Asia. Until recently, its few uses included a malaria treatment and an indigestion remedy.
But despite jatropha’s much-lauded ability to grow where food crops cannot flourish, campaigners say there is evidence that commercially viable yields can only be obtained in fertile soil.
In India, forecasted annual yields of three to five tonnes of seeds per hectare have been scaled back to 1.8 to two tonnes. The Overseas Development Institute, a leading international development think-tank, has stated that “as the mainstay of people’s livelihoods, jatropha looks distinctly marginal”.
ActionAid said its researchers found repeated cases of farmers being left with jatropha crops they could not sell and land previously used to grow food crops being taken over by sub-contractors who then employed locals on wages that could not compete with rises in the price of foodstuffs partially caused by biofuel production.
Raju Sona, a farmer in north-east India who gave up land that usually produces vegetables to grow jatropha, said: “No one will buy jatropha. People said if you have a plantation then surely you have a good market. But we didn’t see such a market. I threw the seeds away.”
A number of British companies are continuing to market jatropha as a “highly ethical and green” investment. One fund offers investors three packages for prices ranging from £7,500 to £15,600 in a brochure entitled “Money really does grow on trees”. That company says it has funded the planting of 32 million jatropha shrubs worldwide through a London-based provider called Carbon Credited Farming (CCF) Plc.
Jeff Reeves, head of global operations for CCF, which estimates it will have 300 million jatropha shrubs planted on 120,000 acres worldwide by the end of 2010, admitted that there had been problems establishing the crop.
He told The Ecologist magazine: “In many cases it is government policy and people that are to blame, rather than jatropha itself. Well-managed, jatropha … can work. But there have been countries where poor management has meant this is not the case.”
D1 Oils, a London-based biofuels company which has invested heavily in jatropha, insisted it was too early to write off the crop as a long-term biofuel source. But its former co-investor, BP, disagreed. A spokesman said: “As other [renewable fuel] technologies came up, we looked again at whether jatropha was going to be the best biofuel source that could be scaled up. There were problems with it. We have decided to look elsewhere.”
* Some of this research appeared in the Ecologist
Children as young as 12 arrested in night raids in Silwan, East Jerusalem
B’Tselem | February 16, 2010
B’Tselem recently uncovered a number of cases in which minors aged 12-15 from Silwan, in East Jerusalem, were arrested in the middle of the night by police officers and Israel Security Agency agents accompanied by armed border policemen. In four cases documented by B’Tselem, the minors were taken from their beds and homes and brought, their hands cuffed, to interrogation at the police station in the Russian Compound, in West Jerusalem. The parents of the children were not allowed to accompany them. The minors were then interrogated on suspicion of stone throwing. Testimonies given to B’Tselem indicate that, during the questioning, the interrogators beat and threatened them. The detention of one of them, a 14-year-old, was extended for seven days. The rest were released. There are indications that several other minors were similarly arrested and interrogated.
The ongoing friction between residents of Silwan and the settlers in nearby Beit Yehonatan and security personnel guarding it, in which context Palestinian children in the neighborhood throw stones at the building, is apparently the reason for the arrests.
The authorities’ treatment of the minors completely contravenes the Youth Law, as amended in 2008 (Amendment No. 14). Under the Law, a minor who is suspected of committing a criminal offense may consult as a rule, with a parent or other relative prior to being questioned, and the parent or relative may be present during the questioning. The Law also prohibits, other than in exceptional cases, questioning a minor at night, and states that, if the objective can be achieved in a less harmful way, the minor should not be arrested. In the present case, some of the parents were willing to undertake to bring the minors in the morning for questioning, and there was no need for the night operation.
The actions by the authorities severely violated the human rights of the minors, all of whom are Israeli permanent residents. A military-style operation conducted in the middle of the night, with the aim of detaining for interrogation minors aged 12-15 suspected of stone throwing is illogical and unjustifiable on any grounds. It is hard to believe that the security forces would have acted similarly with Jewish minors.
B’Tselem has sent urgent letters to the Jerusalem police commander, Maj. Gen. Ilan Franco, and to the head of the Department of the Investigation of Police, Herzl Shviro, calling for an end to police, ISA, and Border Police operations to detain minors in Silwan. If any child from the neighborhood is suspected of having committed a criminal offense, he can be summoned for questioning in the presence of an adult on his behalf. Also, the questioning must be conducted by youth interrogators.
Non-Violent Resistance
“Non-Violence is a powerful weapon that can and will weaken the iron fist of the Occupation”
By Sami Awad, Director of the Holy Land Trust | 15 Feb 2010
What is Non-Violent Resistance?
Non-Violence is an alternative to either armed resistance or passive acceptance of the status quo. It is both a strategy and a philosophy which rejects violence as a means to promote change, and instead aims to change power relations through assertive acts of omission (refusal to do something) or commission (actively challenging the status quo). It is a method by which to change the minds of both the oppressor and oppressed so that a new reality can be built upon different perceptions of the ‘other’.
The many tactics of non-violence can be broken down into three broad categories:
1) Civil Disobedience: when individuals or a group refuse to obey rules and laws, therefore undermining the power of the oppressor. For example refusing to respect laws prohibiting the gathering of people, or the waving of a flag as has been the case in Palestine.
2) Reverse Strike: Involves community building and the creation of alternatives, in order to make a people less dependent on the facilities of their oppressor. This can involve boycotts of the oppressor’s goods and services and the development of alternatives.
3) Direct Action: These are symbolic actions which are specifically directed to gain broad sympathy or express personal grief, opinions and commitment to a just cause. Direct action can take many forms along the spectrum between assertiveness and aggressiveness. For example a peaceful protest versus a group of individuals actively removing a roadblock or earth mound.
Successful non-violent campaigns are able to effectively utilize all three of these methods simultaneously.
Non-Violence in Palestine – Past and Present
Despite the common mischaracterization of Palestinian resistance as wholly violent or radical, there is a long and rich history non-violent actions and campaigns, as well as a large number of contemporary ones. For instance:
In 1902, the inhabitants of three Palestinian villages – al-Shajara, Misha and Melhamiyya – held a collective peaceful protest against the takeover of 70,000 dunums (7,000 hectares) of agricultural land by the first European Zionist settlers.
In 1936 Palestinians held a six-month non-violent industrial strike against the British Mandate’s refusal to grant self determination to Palestine. The ultimate aim of the strike was to make Palestine ungovernable by anyone but the Palestinians themselves.
Fifty years later, in 1986, Hannah Siniora, then editor of the East Jerusalem Arabic Daily, called for Pales-tinian civic disobedience by boycotting Israel-made cigarettes. This led to a full-scale Palestinian boycott of Israeli soap, food, water, clothes and other consumer goods.
The 1987-1993 First Intifada was largely conducted non-violently. Palestinians held mass public demonstra-tions, refused to pay taxes, and sought out local alternatives to Israeli facilities. Community leader Mubarak Awad initiated olive tree planting on Palestinian land about to be confiscated by Israeli settlers. Israeli law prohibited any construction on land dedicated to growing fruit. Awad used non-violent resistance, and Israel’s own laws, to challenge the encroaching settlements.
Currently, and especially since construction of the separation Wall began on June 16th 2002, Palestinian villages across the West Bank have cooperated in non-violent resistance. The communities of Jayyous, Budrus, Bil’in, Ni’lin and Umm Salamonah have all non-violently resisted the Wall being built around them. Weekly non-violent demonstrations against the Wall are held in the cities of Bil’in and Nihlin (north of Ramallah) which bring together Palestinians and Israelis, as well international activists.
The Logic of Non-Violent Resistance
The logic of a non-violent strategy to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simple. Turning this knowledge into a practical campaign effective in achieveing Palestinian goals is much more difficult. Practically, a non-violent strategy allows for a broader and therefore larger participation among the citizenry than armed conflict does. This was true in the First Intifada – largely credited with empowering civil society, women, as well as the young and old. The players in the Second Intifada, on the other hand, were restricted to their ability and willingness to fight violently.
Secondly, by unilaterally removing violence from one side of the equation, there is the possibility of transforming the perception of victimhood within Israel and the international community, which could in turn affect policy. Looking back through this book, it is clear that Palestinians and Israelis live in a rather assymmetric world, and that this conflict disproportionately affects Palestinians. Yet in the minds of Western Europeans and Americans especially, the perception of Palestinians has been shaped more by the sporadic acts of terror, rather than by the accumulation of suffering wrought by occupation.
Israel’s Response to Non-Violence
Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organizations routinely catalogue, and often film, Israel’s response to non-violent actions. The response usually consists of using overwhelming force to disburse crowds.
Most typically, Israel employs tear gas, concussion grenades and rubber bullets to do so, but on many documented occasions they have employed live ammunition, and most recently have begun showering protesters with a mixture of sewage water and chemicals from nearby settlements. The saddest part of this response is the effect that it has upon the non-violence movement in general. The fact that protesters have been literally showered in sewage, beaten and sometimes killed in the daily or weekly events, reaffirms the notion amongst those most skeptical of a peaceful strategy that ‘Israel only responds to violence’.
This perception is further strengthened by the lack of accountability laid upon those soldiers and their commanders who routinely sidestep the law in their use of force. Rarely, if ever, has anyone been punished; and never have these punishments made their way up the ranks or into the realm of those who design policies. This lack of accountability has endowed soldiers with a sense of immunity from their actions; a perception which no doubt adds to their willingness to utilize force – even when unneccessary.
This last summer the small village of Ni’lin north of Ramallah began to organize weekly, and sometimes daily demonstations against the encroaching wall. On July 29th, the ten year old unarmed Ahmed Hassan Yusef Musa was struck in the head by a rubber bullet and killed at one such demonstration. The following day, at Ahmed’s funeral – turned demonstration, 19 year old Yusuf Ahmad Amira was shot dead by the IDF. Neither case has resulted in punishment.
This is the same village where a 17 year old girl Salaam Kanan was able to capture video footage of a bound and blindfolded Palestinian man being shot at point blank range by a soldier a few feet from his commanding officer. This particular case received alot of attention; however, Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organizations insist that many more incidents like this take place when no cameras are present.
E-book on Jewish National Fund’s role in colonization of Palestine released
Press release, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, 16 February 2010
The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has published an e-book on the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that meets a need for an affordable introduction to the activities of the JNF, an organization supported financially by the British taxpayer but whose activities in Israel/ Palestine are politically-driven, and whose politics are nakedly racist. This little book reveals how a British charity works openly for the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs and the establishment of fully segregated Jewish-only communities and areas that exclude Arabs.
The book explains why, when the JNF Committee sought legal advice from England in 1905 as to the possibility of registering as a charity, their legal advisors were unanimous that it would be impossible:
“We therefore conclude that the purpose of the Fund will be a political rather than a charitable one and that limiting the Fund’s use to strictly charitable purposes would run counter to the main purpose of the Fund …”
The JNF initially failed to secure charitable status, being refused by the House of Lords in 1932, but it now enjoys charitable status for activities that would be illegal if carried out in the countries where it raises the funds, including the UK where the JNF enjoys the patronage of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the leaders of the other two main political parties.
Edited by Mortaza Sahibzada, JNF: Colonising Palestine since 1901 is available for download from the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Ilan Pappe’s introduction reveals through the open commitment of the JNF’s founders to the expulsion, what is today termed “ethnic cleansing,” of the native Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish immigrants. Pappe discusses the JNF’s success in obtaining much of the land pillaged from the Palestinians by the Zionist militias through murder and violence in 1948 and its effective control of much more through its role as an agent of the State of Israel in keeping almost all the land surface of Israel for exclusively Jewish ownership at the expense of Israel’s one million Palestinian citizens. The author shows the JNF’s audacity in presenting itself as a “green” movement as it plants trees with the express aim of obliterating all traces of ethnically cleansed and destroyed Palestinian communities.
Abe Hayeem of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine analyses the intense politicization of Israeli architects and their complicity in Zionist war crimes. While the JNF was intimately involved in the racially-driven confiscation of Palestinian lands, architects also worked easily in the nightmare world of legally-designated “Present Absentees,” i.e. Palestinians still inside Israel after 1948 but whose land was slated for transfer to exclusively Jewish ownership. Bringing the story up to date, Hayeem notes the JNF’s involvement in illegal confiscation operation on behalf of the Israeli state, in collusion with illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank, the intimidation of Palestinian land-owners by Jewish authorities, and the complicity of the country’s architects in racist schemes to oppress and dispossess Palestinians.
Uri Davis examines the British Park, proclaimed in a sign there as “a gift of the Jewish National Fund of Great Britain.” The British Park is built on the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages of Ajjur and Zakariyya, making the UK JNF complicit in war crimes and unfit for charitable status on grounds of multiple violations of international humanitarian law. Astonishingly, Prof. Davis alleges that the British Park is used to store some of Israel’s nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
Susannah Tarbush looks at Gordon Brown’s decision to become a Patron of the JNF on his arrival in 10 Downing St, shortly after the Israeli Knesset passed a racist law confirming the apartheid nature of JNF-controlled lands in Israel, forbidding their transfer to any non-Jew. She deals with the petition from Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine and the inevitable accusation from Israelis that the British architects who criticized the JNF’s involvement in human rights violations as “anti-Semitic.”
Sonia Karkar criticizes Australian PM John Howard for allowing a JNF park to be named after him in the Negev, where the Israeli system of apartheid takes the form of forcing the local Bedouin Arabs off their land and into villages that the government they are citizens of refuses to recognize or supply with basic services. The John Howard Park shares the Negev with Government crop-spraying aircraft which destroy the Bedouin’s crops.
Ben White, author of Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, tackles the Kafka-esque mind-game of an Israeli park being dedicated to Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, the non-Jewish property owners being categorized as “present absentees,” and the fruits of Zionist ethnic cleansing supposedly “perpetuating the message of equality and peace.” White shows how the attempt to associate the Zionist colonial venture with the US civil rights movement comes up against the harsh reality of Israeli ethnic cleansing with the JNF center stage.
In similar vein, Raheli Mizrahi argues that the Venezuelan and Bolivian governments should take action against their local JNF bodies and deny the Israelis the ideological cover provided by their appropriation of the symbols of the anti-colonial struggle in South America. She touches on the sometimes cruel treatment of Arab, notably Yemeni, Jews in Israel.
The authors of the closing remarks section report on the intra-Zionist discussions at a London JNF fundraiser before their vocal protest at the JNF’s ongoing land theft and racism.
Seven appendices contain important documents relating to the struggle to end the impunity the JNF derives from official support in many countries.
Download the full report [PDF]
Tom Friedman’s Peak Confusion
Twisted Energy Politics
By ROBERT BRYCE | February 16, 2010
When it comes to energy issues, Thomas Friedman simply doesn’t care about the facts.
That reality was made apparent, once again, in Friedman’s column in the February 10 issue of the New York Times. In an otherwise mostly sensible article, written from Yemen, where Friedman was talking about the need for proper educational opportunity in the Arabic and Islamic worlds, Friedman concluded that the US will have to maintain a strong military presence in the region in order to counter al-Qaeda. But he continues, we also must “help build schools and fund scholarships to America wherever we can. And please, please, let’s end our addiction to oil, which is what gives the Saudi religious ministry and charities the money to spread anti-modernist thinking across this region.”
Friedman has been bashing the Saudis for so long, it’s hardly worth recounting the many instances where he does so. But the fact that Friedman once again trots out the tired cliché of our “addiction to oil” and that he then immediately ties that issue to the Saudis shows that he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Rather than stick to the facts, he retreats to a mindless slogan that contributes nothing to the need for a broader discussion of energy policy and the reality of the global marketplace.
The US could quit buying oil tomorrow, all oil, and it won’t put the Saudis out of business. According to the EIA, in 2008, the Saudis exported an average of 8.4 million barrels of oil per day. Of that quantity, the US accounted for about 1.5 million barrels per day.
Thus, even if the US somehow managed to segregate Saudi crude from its other oil imports, and also prevented the Saudis from selling that 1.5 million barrels per day somewhere else, Saudi Arabia would still be selling about 7 million barrels of oil on the global market. Needless to say, that 7 million barrels per day will bring the kingdom a fair bit of revenue.
Of course, Wednesday’s column isn’t the first time Friedman has shown that he cares more about polemics than facts. In August 2008, he held up Denmark as an energy model that should be copied by the US. In the wake of the 1973 Oil Embargo, Friedman claims that Denmark “responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent.” Friedman went on to lament America’s situation, writing that if “only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Friedman clearly loves the idea of energy independence, but the data shows that Denmark is not energy independent – it’s not even close. The Danes import all of their coal. I repeat, Denmark imports all of its coal. Furthermore, those coal imports – and coal consumption – show little sign of declining even though Denmark’s wind power production capacity has increased rapidly over the past few years. And Denmark is even more dependent on coal than the US! (1)
Nor did Friedman bother to mention that thanks to the Danish government’s exorbitant taxes, the Danes now have some of the world’s most expensive electricity and most expensive motor fuel.
In 2006, the Energy Information Administration looked at residential electricity rates in 65 countries and found that Denmark’s rates were the highest, by far, at some $0.32 per kilowatt-hour. That was about 25% higher than the electricity costs in the Netherlands, which had the next-highest rates in the survey, at $0.25 per kilowatt-hour. And that’s not a new phenomenon. From 1999 through 2006, Denmark had either the highest – or the next-highest – electricity rates of the countries surveyed by the EIA. (In 1999 and 2000, Japan’s electricity rates were slightly higher than those in Denmark.) Furthermore, Denmark electricity rates are the highest in Europe – and no other country comes close. (2)
In 2008, electricity rates were even higher, with Danish residential customers were paying $0.38 per kilowatt-hour – or nearly four times as much as US residential customers who were paying about $0.10 per kilowatt-hour. And the Danes were paying more than twice as much as their counterparts in nuclear-heavy France, where residential electricity costs were $0.17 per kilowatt-hour.
While Danish homeowners are getting spanked by expensive electricity, Danish motorists are getting absolutely mugged at the service station. In late 2008, Danish drivers were paying $1.54 per liter for gasoline, while drivers in the U.K. were paying $1.44 and US motorists were paying $0.56. According to GTZ, an agency of the German government, only a handful of countries have more expensive fuel than Denmark, a list that includes Italy, Norway, Turkey and Germany.
Unfortunately, Friedman’s polemics on energy are nothing new. Back in 2006, Friedman published a column in the Times saying that the U.S. should build a wall around itself. “Build a virtual wall. End our oil addiction.” Getting rid of our need for oil will, he wrote, “protect us from the worst in the Arab-Muslim world….These regimes will never reform as long as they enjoy windfall oil profits.” The solution, he declared is for America to build “a wall of energy independence” around itself. Doing so, “will enable us to continue to engage honestly with the most progressive Arabs and Muslims on a reform agenda.”
Remember that this is the same Friedman, who, in his 2005 best-selling book, The World is Flat, declared that the world was increasingly globalized and the implications of that were obvious. In this new “flat” world, money, jobs, and opportunity, Friedman said, will “go to the countries with the best infrastructure, the best education system that produces the most educated work force, the most investor-friendly laws, and the best environment. (3)
Hmmm. So doesn’t that also mean that in our new “flat” world, that energy will be exported by the countries that have the best infrastructure for providing that energy to the world market?
Friedman’s problem is that he wants it both ways: he espouses the merits and potential of the new flat world, while also insisting that the US should withdraw into energy isolationism, and thereby surrender any participation in the world’s single biggest industry, the global energy sector. The irreconcilable contradictions in Friedman’s arguments are easily seen in the penultimate paragraph in The World is Flat where he claims that the “two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of protectionism – excessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal security – and excessive fears of competing in a world…that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in search of economic security. Both would be a disaster for us and for the world.”
So, to summarize Friedman’s world view, he wants a “wall of energy independence” around America while simultaneously warning Americans that the two greatest dangers are a) walling “ourselves in” and b) walling “ourselves off.”
Friedman sees a flat world where walls are dangerous because they will isolate the US from other countries. But when it comes to energy, walls are good because they isolate the US from other countries. Oh, and along the way, we need to bankrupt the Saudis, because, well, they might give money to people who don’t think like we do.
Is anyone else here confused?
Robert Bryce’s fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, will be published in April.
Notes.
(1) BP Statistical Review of World Energy. In 2007, Denmark got 26% of its primary energy from coal while the US got 24.3%.
(2) Eurostat data. Available: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-QA-08-045/EN/KS-QA-08-045-EN.PDF.
Also: http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/industrie-energie/publicaties/artikelen/archief/2007/2007-2187-wm.htm
(3) Yale Global Online, “’Wake Up and Face the Flat Earth’ – Thomas L. Friedman,” April 18, 2005. Available: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=5581
Some thoughts on Ethan Bronner at the New York Times
By Jonathan Cook | 12 February 2010
The revelation that the son of Ethan Bronner, the New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, is serving in the Israeli military has highlighted an issue that should have been in the spotlight long ago. Ali Abunimah makes some important points about the NYT’s coverage of the Middle East on the Mondoweiss site. Although the paper has a Palestinian reporter in Gaza, Abunimah notes:
“[Taghreed] Khodary is allowed to report only on Palestinians. Neither she nor any other Arab reporter is allowed to report on Israeli Jews. While Jews/Americans may report on Palestinians, the converse is not true. Why is this? It must be – I assume – because there is an inherent, perhaps unacknowledged assumption that an Arab/Palestinian is or will be automatically biased against Israelis/Jews. Whereas, we are supposed to accept that in no case is a Jewish reporter who identifies with Israel biased even when his son has joined an occupation army that is raiding Palestinian refugee camps and communities dozens of times per week.”
Abunimah is right: there is a very strong assumption among editors in the Western media about who should be allowed to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in what ways. But actually the bias in the Western media runs much deeper than Abunimah allows.
Those who seek to defend Bronner’s continued posting in Jerusalem, despite the obvious – some might say, ultimate – conflict of interest, argue that there are at least as many, if not more, Palestinian journalists covering the region for the Western media as there are Jews and Israelis. That may be true in a literal sense but, because the argument implies that Palestinian journalists are the ones shaping the news agenda, it is entirely misleading. It ignores the reality of how Western news organisations operate in places such as the Middle East. Inadvertently, Abunimah risks creating much the same impression with his reference to Taghreed Khodary’s reporting from Gaza — a posting that can be credited not to the NYT’s policy of diversity among its reporting staff but to the simple fact that Israel’s severe restriction on journalists entering the Strip has left the paper with little choice but to hire one of the “natives”.
What needs emphasising is that Palestinians working for the Western media do not have anywhere near the same standing, or influence, as reporters like Bronner or his Jewish-Israeli colleague in Jerusalem, Isabel Kershner. The vast majority are essentially gofers, even if there is a discernible hierarchy: some are known as “fixers” because they speak the local language, have good contacts, and can set up meetings and translate for the star reporter; others, working for the wire agencies, are fact-collectors (often known as “stringers”), sending information from their localities that is then processed in the bureau’s head office in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv; and finally there are a tiny number of very lucky Palestinians, called “super-stringers”, like Khodary, who get a mention in the byline.
In all these examples the Palestinian reporters have no meaningful control over the news agenda of the media outlet that employs them. That agenda is set either by the imported star reporter or by the editors far away in head offices in New York, Washington, London, and so on. That relationship of master-servent is clearest in the case of the fixer, whose job is to arrange whatever it is that the star reporter wants.
Similarly, the wire agencies rely on dozens of Palestinian fact-collectors, or stringers, dotted all over the West Bank and Gaza to supply them with a constant flow of local stories. A stringer might send a tip-off to his editors that a tank has just fired at a building in his village, killing a family of five. He will get the victims’ names and ages, and maybe provide a brief description of what happened, and phone it in to the head office. Often there will be little or no interest, or it will be run as small news item (a brief) offering nothing more than the bare facts. If there is more interest, it will probably be written, or “packaged”, by a reporter or editor in the head office, in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, usually heavily staffed with Israelis and / or Jews. The editors, for example, decide if the firing of the tank shell is to be described as an act of “provocation” or “retaliation”. We know from experience which description they usually prefer.
The story reaches the pages of the NYT only if it fits its news agenda or if it is related to something the star reporter is covering. Again, how these facts are presented to the outside world is almost entirely outside the control of the fact-collector.
Similarly, super-stringers like Khodary have limited influence over the news process in which they take part. To have reached the status of super-stringer, they must have shown that they understand very precisely what is expected of them, what language is used (eg. “fence” or “wall”; “illegal settlement” or “disputed neighbourhood”), what stories are covered and which angles are preferred. In most cases, they will be told what story the editors want from them rather than initiate the story. Their job is often to retell a report from the wire agency, using their own contacts and knowledge to give “added value”. In the main, this is quite unlike Bronner’s role: usually he will advise his editors which topics are important and select his own angles. The difference of status between the “star reporter” and the “super-stringer” is similar to that between a tenured professor and a supply teacher.
A further point worth noting is that Abunimah’s list of recent Jewish / Israeli reporters covering the conflict for the NYT is, as far I know, not exhaustive. My impression is that most of the NYT’s senior reporters over the past two decades have been Jewish or Israeli. Like Abunimah, I am uncomfortable judging a journalist’s record of reporting based on his or her ethnic identification. But these scruples should not blind us to the danger that the apparent long-term structural bias in the NYT’s selection processes may have contributed significantly to distorting Western understanding of what is going on in the conflict. The consistent favouring of Jewish reporters for the Israeli-Palestinian beat needs explaining by the editors of the NYT. This is especially true given my first point about the lack of Palestinian, or Arab, reporters who have any real input into the news-gathering processes of the Western media.
Should there not be concerns about balance, or the appearance of balance, in simple quantitative terms in the NYT’s selection of reporters dealing with such a contested subject? If there are two senior reporting posts at the NYT’s Jerusalem bureau, is it defensible to have them both occupied by Jews and / or Israeli Jews? If Jews are better able to use their connections to cover Israeli and Jewish issues (one argument being put forward), is not the converse true? Would Palestinians not be able to cover some issues in the conflict more authentically and convincingly than Jewish reporters? Should Jews be restricted to covering Israeli stories, and Palestinian to covering Palestinian stories? And if we recoil from that thought, what does that tell us about the current reality in which only Israelis and Jews get to set the news agenda at the NYT (and many other media) for both sides of the conflict?
It is about time we saw a little more transparency and self-reflection from the editors of the New York Times.
EU biofuels significantly harming food production in developing countries
EU biofuels 10% targets cause millions of peope to go hungry and increase food prices and landlessness, says report
John Vidal | The Guardian | February 15, 2010
EU companies have taken millions of acres of land out of food production in Africa, central America and Asia to grow biofuels for transport, according to development campaigners. The consequences of European biofuel targets, said the report by ActionAid, could be up to 100 million more hungry people, increased food prices and landlessness.
The report says the 2008 decision by EU countries to obtain 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020 is proving disastrous for poor countries. Developing countries are expected to grow nearly two-thirds of the jatropha, sugar cane and palm oil crops that are mostly used for biofuels.
“To meet the EU 10% target, the total land area directly required to grow industrial biofuels in developing countries could reach 17.5m hectares, over half the size of Italy. Additional land will also be required in developed nations, displacing food and animal feed crops onto land in new areas, often in developing countries,” says the report.
Biofuels are estimated by the IMF to have been responsible for 20-30% of the global food price spike in 2008 when 125m tonnes of cereals were diverted into biofuel production. The amount of biofuels in Europe’s car fuels is expected to quadruple in the next decade.
The report attributes the massive growth in biofuel production to generous subsidies. It estimates that the EU biofuel industry has already received €4.4bn (£3.82bn) in incentives, subsidies and tax relief and that this could triple to over €13.7bn if the EU meets its 2020 target.
The greatest support to the industry is exemption from excise duties. Duty at the pump is 20 pence less per litre compared to conventional fuels although this exemption due to end in 2010, a change which supermarket Morrisons cited last week as the reason for dropping one of its biodiesel blends. In 2009, the duty on low- sulphur petrol and diesel in the UK was 54.19 pence per litre; for biodiesel and ethanol it was 34.19 pence per litre.
“Biofuels are driving a global human tragedy. Local food prices have already risen massively. As biofuel production gains pace, this can only accelerate,” said report author Tim Rice. He added that biofuels are not even an answer to climate change: “Most biofuels are worse than the fossil fuels they are supposed to replace.” . Large scale biofuel plantations can increase carbon dioxide emissions, either directly by cutting down forests or ploughing up other carbon rich habitats, or indirectly by forcing farmers to move into these areas. Separately, the UK Nuffield Council on Bioethics is currently consulting on the ethics of biofuels – how to ensure a new generation of biofuels don’t increase greenhouse gas emissions and take food from the poor to fuel cars.
The ActionAid report says Europe is just one region now greatly increasing the amount of biofuels in transport fuel. Analysis of US farm data last month by the Earth Policy Institute in Washington showed that one-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars. The grain grown to produce the fuel in the US in 2009 was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels.
If all global biofuel government targets are met, says ActionAid, food prices could rise by up to an additional 76% by 2020 with an extra 600 million extra people going hungry – six times as much as European policies alone.
Goldman Goes Rogue – Special European Audit To Follow
The Baseline Scenario | February 14, 2010
At 9:30pm on Sunday, September 21, 2008, Goldman Sachs was saved from imminent collapse by the announcement that the Federal Reserve would allow it to become a bank holding company – implying unfettered access to borrowing from the Fed and other forms of implicit government support, all of which subsequently proved most beneficial. Officials allowed Goldman to make such an unprecedented conversion in the name of global financial stability. (The blow-by-blow account is in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail; this is confirmed in all substantial detail by Hank Paulson’s memoir.)
We now learn – from Der Spiegel last week and today’s NYT – that Goldman Sachs has not only helped or encouraged some European governments to hide a large part of their debts, but it also endeavored to do so for Greece as recently as last November. These actions are fundamentally destabilizing to the global financial system, as they undermine: the eurozone area; all attempts to bring greater transparency to government accounting; and the most basic principles that underlie well-functioning markets. When the data are all lies, the outcomes are all bad – see the subprime mortgage crisis for further detail.
A single rogue trader can bring down a bank – remember the case of Barings. But a single rogue bank can bring down the world’s financial system.
Goldman will dismiss this as “business as usual” and, to be sure, a few phone calls around Washington will help ensure that Goldman’s primary supervisor – now the Fed – looks the other way.
But the affair is now out of Ben Bernanke’s hands, and quite far from people who are easily swayed by the White House. It goes immediately to the European Commission, which has jurisdiction over eurozone budget issues. Faced with enormous pressure from those eurozone countries now on the hook for saving Greece, the Commission will surely launch a special audit of Goldman and all its European clients.
This audit should focus on ten sets of questions.
- Which eurozone governments have worked with Goldman, and on what basis, over the past decade? All actions prior to and after the introduction of the euro need to be thoroughly reexamined.
- What transactions has Goldman facilitated and how has that affected the reporting of European government debt? (Under the Maastricht Treaty, eurozone government debt is not supposed to exceed 60 percent of GDP.)
- In the case of Greece, the accusation is that Goldman deliberately and in a premeditated manner conspired to hide the true degree of government debt. Is this true, and to what extent has Goldman helped other countries engage in similar transactions, e.g., countries now seeking entry to the eurozone?
- What is the full extent of Greek and other government liabilities, if these are accounted for properly? Without this reckoning, it is impossible to design a proper level of European Union (or any other) support for weaker eurozone countries.
- Are there non-eurozone countries that have also been aided and abetted by Goldman in this fashion? For example, are the UK and Switzerland implicated – and thus endangered?
- Has Goldman extolled the virtues of government debt in Greece, or other countries, while at the same time helping to deceive investors on the true risks inherent in those debts? What were Goldman’s own holdings of these securities?
- Is there evidence that Goldman has structured similar transactions for the private sector – enabling companies to conceal the level of their true indebtedness? Have securities issued by such firms also been endorsed by Goldman to the buying public?
- Were Goldman’s US-based supervisors aware of Goldman’s activities in Greece and other eurozone countries? Did they condone activities that undermine the integrity of the European Union?
- Where was the European Central Bank while all of this was happening? Has the ECB become dangerously enraptured with the new Wall Street and its “techniques”?
- Did any responsible official really think that what Goldman was constructing was really some sort of productivity-enhancing financial innovation – as opposed to a sophisticated form of scam?
The Federal Reserve must cooperate fully with this investigation. Ordinarily, the Fed might be tempted to sit on useful information, but they can now feel themselves in Senator Bob Corker’s crosshairs. Republican Senator Corker is willing to cooperate with Senator Dodd on financial sector reform, opening up the possibility of legislation that will pass the Senate, but he wants the Fed to lose its supervisory powers. If the Fed refuses to help – willingly and fully – the European Commission with bringing Goldman to account, that will just strengthen the hand of Senator Corker and his allies.
If the Federal Reserve were an effective supervisor, it would have the political will sufficient to determine that Goldman Sachs has not been acting in accordance with its banking license. But any meaningful action from this direction seems unlikely.
Instead, Goldman will probably be blacklisted from working with eurozone governments for the foreseeable future; as was the case with Salomon Brothers 20 years ago, Goldman may be on its way to be banned from some government securities markets altogether. If it is to be allowed back into this arena, it will have to address the inherent conflicts of interest between advising a government on how to put (deceptive levels of) lipstick on a pig and cajoling investors into buying livestock at inflated prices.
And the US government, at the highest levels, has to ask a fundamental question: For how long does it wish to be intimately associated with Goldman Sachs and this kind of destabilizing action? What is the priority here – a sustainable recovery and a viable financial system, or one particular set of investment bankers?
To preserve Goldman, on incredibly generous terms, in the name of saving the financial system was and is hard to defend – but that is where we are. To allow the current government-backed (massive) Goldman to behave recklessly and with complete disregard to the basic tenets of international financial stability is utterly indefensible.
The credibility of the Federal Reserve, already at an all-time low, has just suffered another crippling blow; the ECB is also now in the line of fire. Goldman Sachs has a lot to answer for.
By Simon Johnson
Gaza Photo Expo Threatened with Closure
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East | February 16th, 2010
Montreal – On Monday, Feb. 15th, the critically acclaimed Human Drama in Gaza Photo Exposition in Montreal was threatened with closure by Gestion Redbourne PDP Inc., the real estate management firm owning the property housing the Exposition. A legal representative of Redbourne, Lieba Shell, sent an email late in the day to the exposition host, Cinema du Parc, ordering the removal of the exposition and threatening legal action if the exposition were not taken down by evening. Cinema du Parc and Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) – the producer of the exposition – asserted through their legal advisor, Mark H. Arnold, that such threats from Redbourne were not lawful.
Human Drama in Gaza was launched in mid-January, and received very positive reviews in several media. Redbourne, however, demanded the removal of the exposition based on a paragraph in the lease that Cinema du Parc has with Redbourne relating to “purely cinemagraphic use” of the premises. Arnold, however, asserted that the cinema’s hosting of a photo exposition would very much constitute cinemagraphic use of the premises. Officials with Cinema du Parc also pointed out that the cinema has hosted dozens of photo expositions in the past several years, and has never had a complaint from Redbourne, the landlord.
“This move on the part of Redbourne is clearly political,” declared Thomas Woodley, President of CJPME. “Cinema du Parc is known for its ongoing expositions which touch on important issues of social concern, and Redbourne never had an issue in the past.” Last week, both Cinema du Parc and Place du Parc (the shopping mall housing the cinema and owned by Redbourne) received emails and calls from individuals unhappy with the Human Drama in Gaza exposition. The complaints accused the exposition of being anti-Israel, but stopped short of questioning the credibility of the exposition content. “The suffering of the 1.5 million people of Gaza is an important social issue like any other,” asserted Woodley. “The fact that certain people wish to stifle open discussion on Gaza is even more a reason to bring the debate out into the open.”
According to CJPME, the exposition itself seeks to put a human face to the misery of the people of Gaza, and the poignant resilience of a people facing severe adversity. The captions accompanying the photos cite statistics and legal analyses of Israel’s 22-day assault on Gaza of last winter. The legal advisor to CJPME pointed out that if security forces from Redbourne were to attempt to forcibly remove the exposition, they would be considered trespassers. As such, Arnold concluded, the “Cinema staff have been advised to immediately call the police.”
About CJPME – Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is a non-profit and secular organization bringing together men and women of all backgrounds who labour to see justice and peace take root again in the Middle East. Its mission is to empower decision-makers to view all sides with fairness and to promote the equitable and sustainable development of the region.
For more information, please contact Grace Batchoun at 514-745-8491or grace.batchoun@cjpme.org.
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
http://www.cjpme.org
Jews-Only Homes for Ajami
By Jonathan Cook in Jaffa | Palestine Chronicle | February 16, 2010
Over the past few days graffiti scrawled on walls around the mixed Jewish and Arab town of Jaffa in central Israel exclaims: “Settlers, keep out” and “Jaffa is not Hebron”.
Although Jaffa is only a stone’s throw from the bustling coastal metropolis of Tel Aviv, Arab residents say their neighbourhood has become the unlikely battleground for an attempted takeover by extremist Jews more familiar from West Bank settlements.
Small numbers of nationalist religious Jews, distinctive for wearing knitted skullcaps, have begun moving into Jaffa’s deprived main Arab district, Ajami, over recent months.
Tensions have been simmering since a special seminary was established last year in the heart of Ajami for young Jewish men who combine study of the Bible with serving in the Israeli army. Many such seminaries, known as “hesder yeshivas”, are located in the occupied territories and have earnt a reputation for turning out extremists.
Last week Ajami’s residents were dealt a further blow when an Israeli court approved the sale of one of the district’s few remaining building plots to B’Emuna (Hebrew for “with faith”), a construction company that specialises in building subsidised homes for religious families, many of them in West Bank settlements.
The Association of Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s largest human rights law
centre, which petitioned the courts on the Arab residents’ behalf, called the company’s policy “racist”.
B’Emuna, which is expected to complete 20 apartments in the next few months, is applying for approval for a further 180, as well as a second seminary and a synagogue.
“We have no problem living peacefully with Jewish neighbours,” said Omar Siksik, an Arab councillor representing Jaffa in Tel Aviv’s municipality. “But these Jews are coming here as settlers.
“Like in Hebron, their policy is to weaken us as a population and eventually push us out of our homes,” he said, referring to a West Bank city where an enclave of a few dozen settlers has severely disrupted life for tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Jaffa’s fortunes have changed dramatically since early last century when it was the commercial hub of Palestine, famously exporting its orange crop around the world. During Israel’s founding in 1948, most of the town’s Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee, with the few remaining inhabitants confined to Ajami.
Today, Jaffa’s 18,000 Arab inhabitants are outnumbered two to one by Jews, after waves of immigrants were settled in empty homes during the 1950s.
Arab residents have long complained of being neglected by a municipality controlled from Tel Aviv. Ajami’s crumbling homes, ramshackle infrastructure and crime-ridden streets were on show in this year’s much-feted eponymous movie, nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language film.
But the latest arrivals in Ajami are causing considerable anxiety, even from officials in Tel Aviv. Gilad Peleg, head of the Jaffa Development Authority, said he was “deeply concerned” at the trend of extremist organisations arriving “to shake up the local community”.
Nasmi Jabali, 56, lives in a modest single-storey home close to the olive grove where the new apartments will be built. “We’ve seen on TV how these settlers behave in the occupied territories, and don’t want them living next to us,” she said. “They’ll come here with the same attitudes.”
But despite widespread opposition, the Tel Aviv District Court last week rejected a petition from 27 residents who argued that the Israel Lands Authority had discriminated against them by awarding the land to B’Emuna, even though its policy is to build apartments only for Jews.
Yehuda Zefet, the judge, accused the residents of “bad faith” in arguing for equality when they wanted the interests of the local Arab community to take precedence over the interests of Jews.
Mr Siksik said the judge had failed to take into account the historical injustice
perpetrated on Ajami’s population. “For six decades the authorities have not built one new house for the Arab population, and in fact they have demolished many Arab homes, while building social housing for Jews.”
Fadi Shabita, a member of the local Popular Committee for the Defence of Jaffa’s Lands, said the plots in Ajami being sold by the government originally belonged to Palestinian families, some of whom were still in the district but had been forced to rent their properties from the state.
“The land was forcibly nationalised many years ago and the local owners were
dispossessed,” he said. “Now the same land is being privatised, but Ajami’s residents are being ignored in the development plans.
“For the settlers, the lesson of the disengagement [from Gaza in 2005] was that they need to begin a dialogue with Jews inside Israel to persuade them that a settlement in the West Bank is no less legitimate than one in Jaffa.”
B’Emuna told Israel National News, a settler website, that it was developing Jewish-only homes in several of the half dozen “mixed cities” in Israel to stem the flow of Jewish residents leaving because of poverty and falling property values caused by the presence of an Arab population.
B’Emuna has said it is looking to buy more land in Jaffa.
A short distance from the olive grove that is about to be developed is the Jewish
seminary established last year. An Israeli flag is draped from the front of the building and stars of David adorn the gate at its entrance.
The manager, Ariel Elimelech, who was overseeing two dozen young men on Sunday as they pored over the Torah, said he commuted daily to Ajami from his home in Eli, an illegal settlement deep in the West Bank south of the Palestinian city of Nablus.
Mr Elimelech said he favoured coexistence in Jaffa but added that the seminary’s goal was to strengthen Jewish identity in the area. “We don’t call this place Ajami; it’s known as Givat Aliyah,” he said, using a Hebrew name that refers to the immigration of Jews to Israel.
He said the students performed a vital service by visiting schools to help in the
education of Jewish children before performing 18 months of military service.
Kemal Agbaria, who chairs the Ajami neighbourhood council, said residents would launch an appeal to the Supreme Court and were planning large-scale demonstrations to draw attention to their plight.
– Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Car seizures at DUI checkpoints prove profitable for cities, raise legal questions
February 13, 2010 | California Watch | Ryan Gabrielson
Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunken drivers.
An investigation by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley with California Watch has found that impounds at checkpoints in 2009 generated an estimated $40 million in towing fees and police fines – revenue that cities divide with towing firms.
Additionally, police officers received about $30 million in overtime pay for the DUI crackdowns, funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety.
In dozens of interviews over the past three months, law enforcement officials and tow truck operators say that vehicles are predominantly taken from minority motorists – often illegal immigrants.
In the course of its examination, the Investigative Reporting Program reviewed hundreds of pages of city financial records and police reports, and analyzed data documenting the results from every checkpoint that received state funding during the past two years. Among the findings:
Sobriety checkpoints frequently screen traffic within, or near, Hispanic neighborhoods. Cities where Hispanics represent a majority of the population are seizing cars at three times the rate of cities with small minority populations. In South Gate, a Los Angeles County city where Hispanics make up 92 percent of the population, police confiscated an average of 86 vehicles per operation last fiscal year.
The seizures appear to defy a 2005 federal appellate court ruling that determined police cannot impound cars solely because the driver is unlicensed. In fact, police across the state have ratcheted up vehicle seizures. Last year, officers impounded more than 24,000 cars and trucks at checkpoints. That total is roughly seven times higher than the 3,200 drunken driving arrests at roadway operations. The percentage of vehicle seizures has increased 53 percent statewide compared to 2007.
Departments frequently overstaff checkpoints with officers, all earning overtime. The Moreno Valley Police Department in Riverside County averaged 38 officers at each operation last year, six times more than federal guidelines say is required. Nearly 50 other local police and sheriff’s departments averaged 20 or more officers per checkpoint – operations that averaged three DUI arrests a night.
Law enforcement officials say demographics play no role in determining where police establish checkpoints.
Indeed, the Investigative Reporting Program’s analysis did not find evidence that police departments set up checkpoints to specifically target Hispanic neighborhoods. The operations typically take place on major thoroughfares near highways, and minority motorists are often caught in the checkpoints’ net.
“All we’re looking for is to screen for sobriety and if you have a licensed driver,” said Capt. Ralph Newcomb of the Montebello Police Department. “Where you’re from, what your status is, that never comes up.”
Additionally, the 2005 appellate court ruling includes exceptions, allowing police to seize a vehicle driven by an unlicensed motorist when abandoning it might put the public at risk. Examples include vehicles parked on a narrow shoulder or obstructing fire lanes.
But reporters attending checkpoints in Sacramento, Hayward and Los Angeles observed officers impounding cars that appeared to pose no danger.
Reporters also noted that many of the drivers who lost their cars at these checkpoints were illegal immigrants, based on interviews with the drivers and police. They rarely challenge vehicle seizures or have the cash to recover their cars, studies and interviews show.
Some tow truck company officials relayed stories of immigrant mothers arriving at impound lots to remove baby car seats and children’s toys before leaving the vehicle to the tow firm.
“I have to stand here for days and watch them take their whole life out of their vehicles,” said Mattea Ezgar, an office manager at Terra Linda Towing in San Rafael.
This wasn’t what lawmakers intended when they passed an impound law 15 years ago – the same law that the federal court has since questioned, said David Roberti, former president of the state Senate.
“When something is that successful, then maybe it’s too easy to obtain an impoundment, which should usually be way more toward the exception than the rule,” Roberti said.
The impound law granted police the authority to seize unlicensed drivers’ cars for 30 days. The California Attorney General’s Office said in a written statement that the state law is murky in terms of whether vehicles driven by unlicensed motorists can be taken at all.
Police do not typically seize the cars of motorists arrested for drunken driving, meaning the owners can retrieve their vehicles the next day, according to law enforcement officials.
To be sure, DUI checkpoints have saved countless lives on the nation’s roadways and have brought thousands of drunken drivers to justice. And by inspecting driver’s licenses, police catch motorists driving unlawfully, typically without insurance, and temporarily remove them from the road.
With support from groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, California more than doubled its use of sobriety checkpoints the past three years.
State officials have declared that 2010 will be the “year of the checkpoint.” Police are scheduling 2,500 of the operations in every region of California. Some departments have begun to broaden the definition of sobriety checkpoints to include checking for unlicensed drivers.
Checkpoint impact not limited to drunken drivers
The checkpoints have rocked lives of sober motorists such as Luis Gomez.
In the early evening of Jan. 2 of this year, Gomez was driving his Chevy truck through downtown Los Angeles when traffic slowed to a stop.
A couple blocks from the Staples Center, orange cones narrowed Olympic Boulevard’s three westbound lanes to two. Los Angeles Police Department officers, stationed beneath a freeway overpass, began questioning drivers as part of a DUI checkpoint.
Gomez, a 42-year-old construction worker, said the roadblock didn’t concern him. He said he doesn’t drink alcohol.
But the illegal immigrant was driving without a license. Gomez received a traffic citation.
A tow truck operator took his truck.
Owners who do recover their vehicles pay between $1,000 and $4,000 in tow and storage charges and fines assessed by local governments, municipal finance records show.
Officers do not inquire about the drivers’ residency status. Nor do they contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement when they suspect unlicensed motorists are in the country illegally.
Gomez said he’d try to save whatever money he could to get back his truck. The Chevy is critical for him to continue finding work at construction sites, jobs that have supported him for two decades in the United States.
“It’s going to be hard, because times are hard,” Gomez said.
Impounds aid cash-strapped local governments
Cities have their own money problems.
Since 2007, the sales tax revenues of California municipalities have shrunk by $471 million, figures from the California State Board of Equalization show.
Property values have withered, too, causing financial woes at every level of government.
“If a city wants to try to raise revenue, in mostly all cases you have to go to the voters,” said Daniel Carrigg, legislative director for the League of California Cities. Local governments, instead, are adding to fees for services and fines for an assortment of violations.
Local governments often charge unlicensed drivers a fine to get their vehicles released from impound – on average more than $150, finance records show. Cities, increasingly, also get a cut of the fees that tow operators charge vehicle owners, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Some local governments ensure they get a larger share as their police departments seize more and more cars.
In Los Angeles County, the city of Montebello requires its tow operator to increase its cut of impound revenue when the police department seizes a higher volume of cars.
Tow company Helms and Hill Inc. pays Montebello $200 per tow when officers order more than 151 cars hauled away each month, the city’s finance records show.
Montebello’s DUI checkpoints rank among California’s least effective at getting drunks off the road.
Last year, officers there failed to conduct a single field sobriety test at three of the city’s five roadway operations, state records show.
Montebello collected upward of $95,000 during the last fiscal year from checkpoints, including grant money for police overtime.
The California Office of Traffic Safety, which is administered in part by officials at UC Berkeley, continues to fund Montebello’s operations, providing a fresh $37,000 grant for this year.
Checkpoint location may influence impounds
Most of the state’s 3,200 roadblocks over the past two years occurred in or near Hispanic neighborhoods, the Investigative Reporting Program’s analysis shows. Sixty-one percent of the checkpoints took place in locations with at least 31 percent Hispanic population. About 17 percent of the state’s checkpoints occurred in areas with the lowest Hispanic population – under 18 percent.
Further, police impound the most cars per checkpoint in cities where Hispanics are a majority of the population, according to state traffic safety statistics and U.S. Census data.
For 12 years, Francisco Ruiz has run El Potro, a Latin music nightclub, at the northeast corner of A Street and Hesperian Boulevard in Hayward. Not once had he seen a DUI checkpoint. Then, in 2009, the city’s police department conducted four operations just outside his front door.
“They’re not taking drunk drivers,” Ruiz said as he watched cars crawl through a Dec. 18 checkpoint at the intersection. “They’re taking people without a license.”
An hour into the operation that evening, officers had yet to make a DUI arrest, reporters observed.
But about a half dozen cars were impounded, leaving drivers stranded. Only one of the drivers could show he was a legal U.S. resident.
The state does not consistently collect data on where local police departments set up checkpoints. A majority of California law enforcement agencies declined to release records showing which intersections they target, or what transpired at checkpoints, making it difficult to perform a statistical analysis of seizures in heavily minority communities.
But cities across the state operate checkpoints in high-minority communities, the Investigative Reporting Program found through demographic data and more than three dozen interviews with law enforcement officials at DUI crackdowns.
In the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate, Hispanics make up 92 percent of the population. The police department averaged 86 impounds each time officers shut down a road last year for a sobriety checkpoint. By comparison, they averaged a little more than four drunken driving arrests.
Checkpoints in cities where Hispanics are the largest share of the population seized 34 cars per operation, a rate three times higher than cities with the smallest Hispanic populations, the Investigative Reporting Program’s analysis shows.
The checkpoint data tells a similar story in two-dozen other cities. A majority of these communities are crowded together east of Los Angeles within the Inland Empire.
The disparity between vehicles impounds and DUI arrests exist in virtually every region of California.
Marin County checkpoints raise questions
San Rafael sits at the entrance to the northern Bay Area, crisscrossed by freeways from San Francisco and East Bay cities.
Hispanics comprise only a quarter of the city’s residents, according to demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau. San Rafael’s Hispanic neighborhoods cluster along the freeways, near the water in what is called the Canal District.
During the past two years, 10 of the city’s 12 sobriety checkpoints took place on streets surrounding these neighborhoods. Those operations resulted in four DUI arrests and 121 impounded cars for driver’s license violations.
“We do not put checkpoints right there in the Canal District,” said Lt. Glenn McElderry, head of San Rafael police’s traffic unit.
While police have not staged operations directly inside the Canal District, the department’s records show San Rafael officers repeatedly conducted checkpoints right outside the neighborhood.
During the past two years, police sobriety checkpoints halted traffic on the Canal District’s two primary feeder streets – Francisco and Bellam boulevards.
McElderry said San Rafael police start their checkpoints in the southern part of the city, near the Canal District, and then move to intersections further north after 10 p.m. when traffic slows.
San Rafael’s data on drunken driving arrests, made independent of checkpoints during the past three months, show police made 20 DUI arrests, only three of which took place in the Canal District.
Impounds at DUI checkpoints are incidental, not intentional, law enforcement officials argue. And the operations do not target Hispanic communities, they say.
“Our checkpoints are sobriety and driver’s license, but one thing we always emphasize: The reason why we’re out here are drunk drivers,” said Officer Don Inman, grant administrator for the Los Angeles Police Department’s traffic division. “The driver’s license, that’s just a side issue that we deal with. We always try to make sure we pick in locations where we’re going to get drunk drivers.”
LAPD averaged six DUI arrests per checkpoint in 2009, state data shows, more than most California departments.
The state traffic safety agency requires that police wait until 6 p.m. to begin screening cars, though a few start earlier. The checkpoints typically last six hours over a single night.
Even still, the LAPD’s driver’s license impounds doubled the past two years. One operation in December netted 64 vehicle seizures and four drunken driving arrests.
One police agency, the California Highway Patrol, has far different results at its checkpoints. In 2008, state records show, the CHP arrested four intoxicated motorists for every one car that deputies seized.
The highway patrol does not charge a fee to release impounded vehicles and collects no revenue from seizures, said Sgt. Kevin Davis, who oversees checkpoints in CHP’s research and planning division.
Police say they consider a number of factors when setting up a checkpoint.
Sgt. Dennis Demerjian, of the El Monte Police Department, said he typically consults his agencies’ internal data to find intersections where clusters of alcohol-involved collisions have taken place.
Riverside County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Jarod Howe said roadways must have heavy traffic to justify placing officers there.
A street needs to be wide enough to allow cars to pull off safely. Officers also need space to conduct field sobriety tests and question motorists without licenses.
And the area needs to accommodate the tow trucks to remove seized vehicles, Howe acknowledged.
Police and state traffic safety officials contend that impounding the cars of unlicensed drivers is, like catching drunken drivers, a critical part of making California’s roads less dangerous.
“It’s well known that drivers driving without licenses are frequently involved in accidents,” said Sgt. Jeff Lutzinger, the head of Hayward’s traffic safety division.
Research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has shown that motorists driving with a suspended or revoked license cause collisions at a higher rate. These drivers are also typically uninsured.
The state’s traffic safety office has declared vehicle seizures an effective way to remove risky, uninsured drivers.
“Law enforcement agencies have stated that these tools have helped decrease the number of unsafe drivers on public roads as well as reduce the number of hit-and-run traffic collisions,” a 2005 report from the state agency said.
Funding for DUI crackdowns plays major role
The federal government provides the California Office of Traffic Safety about $100 million each year to promote responsible driving that reduces roadway deaths. Of that, $30 million goes into programs that fund drunken driving crackdowns, particularly checkpoints.
Police officer overtime accounts for more than 90 percent of the expense of sobriety checkpoints. Departments do not assign officers to work checkpoints during their regular shifts.
Law enforcement agencies tend to use more officers than a checkpoint requires, according to guidelines established by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Statewide, police departments on average deployed 18 officers at each checkpoint, according to state data. The federal traffic safety agency advises that police can set up DUI checkpoints with as few as six officers.
The additional dozen officers typical at a California roadway operation cost state and federal taxpayers an extra $5.5 million during the 2008-09 fiscal year, according to the Investigative Reporting Program’s analysis.
The LAPD sent 35 officers, on average, to every sobriety crackdown.
At least a dozen officers spent hours sitting and chatting at an operation in early January in downtown Los Angeles. A couple of officers smoked cigars as they watched cars go through the screening.
Officers seized 22 cars that evening and made one DUI arrest.
The state data shows that last fiscal year LAPD spent $16,200 per checkpoint, all of it on officer overtime.
Impounds a lucrative business for cities, towing companies
Cities and private towing operators make tens of millions of dollars a year from checkpoints. This cash comes from tow fees and daily storage charges, finance records at a half dozen cities show.
If the car’s owner cannot afford to recover the vehicle, then after 45 days, the tow operator can sell it to pay the bill.
Cities are also increasingly charging franchise fees to tow operators.
The fees give cities a cut of the more lucrative side of towing, the long-term storage costs from 30-day impounds.
In early 2007, El Monte’s top officials went shopping for new tow contracts.
The suburb, east of Los Angeles, had called on tow operators to remove almost 5,000 cars a year from its streets, El Monte Police Chief Ken Weldon explained in a memo to the city manager.
The operators hauled the cars at no cost to El Monte; however the chief found the city was denying itself a source of cash.
“A survey of surrounding agencies revealed that many agencies are recovering costs by collecting a ‘franchise fee’ from the tow company,” Weldon, now retired, wrote.
On average, nearby cities charged tow operators $50 for every car the police department ordered towed or impounded. Weldon calculated the fee would provide El Monte $241,600 a year.
The city wrote the fees into its new contracts with Albert’s Towing and Freddie Mac’s Towing.
During holiday checkpoints last fiscal year, El Monte police seized 680 cars for driver’s license violations, state data shows.
Each of the impounds was worth at least $2,035 in tow charges and fees, according to city financial records. El Monte received at least $164,000 from the vehicle seizures.
The city’s tow operators likely collected about $1.2 million from the seizures. That figure might have been higher or lower, depending on how many car owners retrieved their vehicles and what price the companies got for the remaining impounded cars.
Owners abandon their cars at tow lots roughly 70 percent of the time, said Perry Shusta, owner of Arrowhead Towing in Antioch and vice president of the California Tow Truck Association.
Tow operators provide communities a kind of garbage service, removing junk cars that don’t operate and are worth only the value of their metal frame.
DUI checkpoints catch a higher quality of vehicle, Shusta said. “The good cars are how we afford to get rid of all the cities’ junk.”
Impounds spur search and seizure concerns
The Fourth Amendment specifically restricts law enforcement’s authority to seize private property without a court order.
“It is assumed under the law that the taking of personal property without a warrant is unconstitutional,” said Martin J. Mayer, a founding partner in the Fullerton law firm Jones & Mayer, which represents numerous police agencies.
The law protects everyone within the United States, regardless of whether they are in the country illegally.
California police have seized the cars of unlicensed drivers for 15 years under the state law that allows such vehicles to be impounded for 30 days.
But in 2005, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in an Oregon case that law enforcement can’t impound a vehicle if the only offense is unlicensed driving.
One exception is called the “community caretaker” doctrine, which permits police to impound a car if it poses a threat to public safety, is parked illegally or would be vandalized imminently if left in place.
The ruling dramatically altered the law regarding vehicle impounds. In response, the Legislative Counsel of California in 2007 called into question the legality of the state’s impound procedures.
“If a peace officer lawfully stops a motor vehicle on the highway and the driver of the motor vehicle is an unlicensed driver, that alone is not sufficient justification for the peace officer to cause the impoundment of the motor vehicle,” Legislative Counsel Diane F. Boyer-Vine, who advises state lawmakers, wrote in a response to Sen. Gilbert A. Cedillo, D-Los Angeles. The legislative counsel has no authority over police departments.
A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of California’s 30-day impound law is awaiting oral arguments before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals later this year. The state and several cities that are defendants in the case argue that impounds are penalties for a criminal offense, and therefore car owners are not subject to Fourth Amendment protection.
Most California law enforcement agencies continue to seize vehicles based on driver’s license violations alone.
Reporters with the Investigative Reporting Program observed police at checkpoints in three different cities impound cars after the vehicles had been moved out of harm’s way and parked legally.
Mayer represents the California Peace Officers Association and also alerted law enforcement that the federal ruling prohibited the state’s police from seizing cars solely on the charge of unlicensed driving.
The attorney said he was startled by his clients’ angry response to his memo explaining the appeals court case.
“I never expected the volume of e-mails, phone calls and death threats all from law enforcement, especially motor officers,” Mayer said. “I’m being flippant you understand. They wanted to kill me though because I’m interfering with a process they’ve been doing for years.”
Former state Sen. Roberti, then chairman of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, said he and his fellow lawmakers did not consider how the 1995 impound law might impact unlicensed drivers.
“It’s turned out to be a far more vigorous enforcement than any of us would have dreamed of at the time,” he said.
Ryan Gabrielson, the winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, is a reporter and fellow at UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program directed by Lowell Bergman, one of the founders of the Center for Investigative Reporting.
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The US: The Century of Lost Wars
By James Petras | Global Research | September 12, 2018
Introduction
Despite having the biggest military budget in the world, five times larger than the next six countries, the largest number of military bases – over 180 – in the world and the most expensive military industrial complex, the US has failed to win a single war in the 21st century.
In this paper we will enumerate the wars and proceed to analyze why, despite the powerful material basis for wars, it has led to failures. … continue
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