Johann Hari2013-06-19T08:53:00-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=johann-hariCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Johann HariGood old fashioned elbow grease.Why Does Mitt Romney Support Violently Overthrowing Democratically Elected Leaders?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19662162012-10-16T15:24:51-04:002012-12-16T05:12:02-05:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/
In his rather bland book No Apologies, Romney doesn't get angry -- except on one occasion. It is about what happened in the small Central American nation of Honduras in 2009. President Manuel Zelaya had been chosen by his people in a wholly free and fair election. He was hardly a radical. As the veteran Latin America expert Richard Gott has written: "A wealthy landowner with timber and cattle interests, he was the candidate of the Liberal party, one of the two traditional parties of the Honduras oligarchy." But in the second poorest country in the hemisphere, he did try to deliver substantial improvements for the majority of the population, as he had promised to during the election campaign. He increased the minimum wage by 60 percent and invested in the kind of Lula-style social programs for the poor that have helped transform Brazil.
This was enough to infuriate the right. They started to denounce him as a demagogue and an incipient dictator -- a new caudillo. When Zelaya proposed to hold a referendum to see if the Honduran people wanted to reform the constitution drawn up by the military in the 1980s, they claimed, absurdly, that this amounted to a coup d'etat. And so Zelaya and his little daughter were woken up in their pyjamas in the Presidential Palace by men with machine guns.
Zelaya later explained to the US news show Democracy Now: "They threatened me, that they were going to shoot. And I said to them: 'If you have orders to shoot, then shoot me. But know that you are shooting the president of the republic.'" They took him to a US military base and then dumped him on the tarmac in Costa Rica and told him never to return. Back home, the radios and cellphones were locked down, and Amnesty International has documented that "human rights abuses spiraled," with "mass arrests, beatings and torture" and "grave human rights violations." There has been a wave of murders of journalists trying to expose this, many with what appear to be signs of summary execution, while the Resistance Front say two hundred of their members have been hunted down and murdered since the coup. The new government held a forum for international businessmen bragging: "Honduras Is Open For Business."
And Mitt Romney is angry. Very angry. The source of his fury is not that a democracy was liquidated. No. It is that the United States government was -- for once -- not initially on the side of throwing out an elected center-left leader in Latin America. He told a press conference with disgust: "When Honduras wanted to toss out their pro-Marxist president, our president stood with him." In his book, he calls Zelaya a "corrupt autocrat... who was lawfully removed from office by the Honduran Supreme Court." He adds: "It is stunning to think that the president of the United States would force Honduras to act contrary to its own laws in order to restore a repressive, anti-American leader to power."
Thanks to WikiLeaks, we know that nobody outside the Honduran far right believed this. The internal memos of the US diplomats on the ground stated that "there is no doubt" that it "constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup", with, at its heart, "an abduction" and "kidnapping" of the elected President.
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Yet this is part of a pattern for Romney of how he thinks foreign policy should work. In the CNN-Heritage Foundation debate last November, Romney held up one historical period in particular as a good example of how US foreign policy should proceed. He said that when it comes to Pakistan and, by implication, the wider world, the US needs to replicate "what happened in Indonesia back in the 1960s, where we helped Indonesia move toward modernity with new leadership."
So what was this policy that Romney admires so much? Indonesia mattered because, as a British Foreign Office memo put it in 1964, it was "a major producer of essential commodities. The region produces nearly 85% of the world's natural rubber, over 45% of the tin, 65% of the copra and 23% of the chromium ore." Through the 1950s and early 1960s, it had a somewhat autocratic leader -- Sukarno -- who rejected both US imperialism and Soviet imperialism and sought an independent path and for the country to control its own resources. This displeased US corporations. Clearly, when Romney praises what happened in Indonesia in the 1960s, he is clearly not talking about Sukarno.
No. He is talking about how the CIA aided the rise of Suharto, a far more autocratic and brutal military general who staged a coup in 1965. He is the "new leadership" Romney is praising. The CIA had been building up and arming the army as a rival source of power for years, and once their preferred institution was in charge, they handed over a list of 5000 names of suspected communists, including members of women's and youth movements. According to Joseph Lazarsky, CIA station chief at the time, this was used as a "shooting list." It was part of a wider mass killing of suspected or supposed communists that slaughtered half a million people, most of them landless peasants. Suharto later went on to invade East Timor and slaughter a third of the population there.
What was it like to live through this? The journalist John Pilger, who reported from there, describes one story from the ground. "As we [Pilger, and one of the survivors, named Roy] sat in an empty classroom, he recalled the day in October 1965 when he watched a gang burst in, drag the headmaster into the playground, and beat him to death. "He was a wonderful man: gentle and kind," Roy said. "He would sing to the class, and read to me. He was the person that I, as a boy, looked up to . . . I can hear his screams now, but for a long time, years in fact, all I could remember was running from the classroom, and running and running through the streets, not stopping. When they found me that evening, I was dumbstruck. For a whole year I couldn't speak." The headmaster was suspected of being a communist, and his murder that day was typical of the systematic executions of teachers, students, civil servants, peasant farmers."
It worked. From Romney's perspective, Indonesia became more free - because now it was cracked open for corporations to be free to use as they please, with the ability of the people to resist crushed at gunpoint. Suharto staged a conference for multinational corporations and handed them the rights to exploit great swathes of the country. It became known as an investors' paradise.
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So what does this reveal about how Romney would rule? It is clear he doesn't only think that corporations are people; he thinks that corporations are the people who deserve to be free above all else -- even if it's the freedom to topple democracies and empower tyrants.
It shouldn't surprise us that Romney sees the world exclusively through the prism of extracting profit, because there is evidence he even sees the most intimate parts of human life in this way. The New York Times has reported that a few years after graduating from Harvard Business School, he returned to give a useful lecture. He told the students "they [as individuals] were like multinational corporations." The Times explains: "He drew a chart called a growth-share matrix with little circles to represent various pursuits: work, family, church. Investing time in work delivered tangible returns like raises and profits. 'Your children don't pay any evidence of achievement for twenty years,' Mr Romney said. But if students failed to invest sufficient time and energy in their spouses and children, their family could become 'dogs' -- consultant-speak for drags on the rest of the company." They later note that the business students were delighted because "Romney had proved the value of family time based not on emotion but on yield."
If you believe that your own children need to be assessed "based not on emotion but on yield," is it any surprise that you would assess backing murderous tyrants in the same way? The half a million peasants killed by Suharto produced no "yield" for the US -- indeed, they may have been "dogs" -- while Suharto did: he handed its companies profit. So it would be illogical, in this value system, to side with the former over the latter. Corporations are structured to do one thing and one thing only: maximize profit. Romney applies this value to all human institutions, from being a parent to being a President. To him, you are a multinational corporation. The US government is a multinational corporation. Corporations are people, my friend.
These same impulses drive Romney's domestic policies. The only time he gets angry about anything at home in 'No Regrets' is when he discusses the tiny waning flicker of power that trade unions still hold in the US -- which he says is far too great. His central complaint is that "some union CEOS" spend their time worrying about "how many of their union's jobs they can protect, how much more they can increase wages, and how they can impose even more favorable work rules" -- a reality that infuriates him. He says in the US today "union CEOs have become the 800 pound gorillas" and "the political power of organized labor has gone beyond the bounds of responsible management."
This is all part of Romney's consistent vision of how freedom works. He wants rich people to be able to band together in organizations called "corporations" to defend their interests -- and if anybody else tries to restrict corporate freedom by banding together to defend their own interests, they must be stopped. That's true whether they are a democratically elected government in Honduras, or a democratically constituted trade union in Wisconsin. They are obstacles to the "freedom" of people like Bain Capital, so they have to be dismantled.
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Far from being ideologically empty, Romney is a hardline ideologue, and like all ideologues, he seems able to screen out the suffering his ideology causes with ease. Just as Stalinists didn't hear the starvation-screams from the Ukraine -- a process they too said was bringing "modernity under new leadership" -- Romney doesn't hear the slash and thud from murdered dissidents in Honduras or headmasters beaten to death in Indonesia.
So when you gaze upon Mitt Romney, don't think Leave It To Beaver. Think Leave It To Business -- at gunpoint if necessary.
This article originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique. You can subscribe to the English language edition here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. You can email the author at johann [at] johannhari.com]]>There's a Global War Against the Right of Gay People to Live and Love. We Need to Fight Backtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9988562011-10-10T12:28:12-04:002011-12-10T05:12:02-05:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/announced: "All efforts are being made to get rid of these people." Imagine a thousand Matthew Shephards, lynched with the approval of the state.
These hunted gay people are asking for our help -- and now, at last, organizations are being built to get it to them. This is the new prong to the fight for gay equality, and perhaps the most crucial.
In every human society ever recorded, some people -- around 3 to 5 percent -- have been sexually drawn to their own gender. It is as universal and as harmless a quirk as left-handedness. Yet somewhere along the way, a whole cluster of fears and paranoias furred around homosexuality. There were myths that gay people were subversives or pedophiles or enemies of an invisible deity. For a long time, these myths killed gay men and women in our societies -- and now they are killing people just like us in swelling numbers abroad.
David Kato was a school headteacher in rural Uganda, described by one of his friends as "a small, thin man, with spare hair and dark skin. It was always the eyes that held you: wild and staring, possessed, passionate. And the voice: high and stubborn, insistent on having his own way." He grew up in a society, Uganda, where he was told there was nobody with his natural urges - and if such a freak did arise, he would be jailed or lynched at once. But gradually he began to realize "I didn't know anyone [gay] but I knew there were people there" -- so he took a step nobody had ever taken before in Uganda. He called a press conference and announced he was forming a group for gay Ugandans, asking to be left alone to live their lives.
Not long after, a newspaper put him and a few other gay people on its front page, claiming they were recruiting children, under the headline: "Hang Them." Somebody took the hint: Kato was beaten to death with a hammer. But even death wasn't a release. At his funeral, the presiding pastor raged that the gays present would "be punished by God" unless they repented.
Among some people, there is an unspoken assumption that gay equality inches forward of its own accord -- but in many countries, the situation is dramatically deteriorating for gay people. In Uganda, to name just one, there has been an attempt to reimpose the death penalty that has not yet been conclusively defeated. Campaigners on the ground warn that if the international pressure lets up, it will be reintroduced into parliament very quickly, and pass.
This doesn't have to happen. None of this is fixed by nature. It's patronizing and false to claim that poor countries are inevitably homophobic: in 2007, Nepal -- a bitterly poor country -- introduced binding legal protections for gay people. It's equally patronizing to think that intensely religious countries are inevitably homophobic. Argentina is highly Catholic, but has legalized gay marriage. In the US and Europe, we have shown in just a few lifetimes how deeply homophobic cultures can be transformed. In the year one of us -- Elton -- was born, it was a crime to be gay in Britain, but I survived through the battles to see the day when I could have a civil partnership and a son and be accepted by all but a small circle of bigoted hold-outs.
It didn't happen by magic. It happened because gay people organized and stood together and appealed to the decency and empathy of the heterosexual majority. People like David Kato are trying to do that -- and they need our support.
But there have been few organizations systematically getting help to them. The big human rights organizations, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have done some incredibly valuable work on individual countries, but nobody is even compiling a list of who across the world is in prison or designated for death just for being gay. What are their names? What are their stories? What support do they want?
Until now. A remarkable group called Kaleidoscope has been set up in London, with global reach and a simple goal. Any gay person running for her life, or any gay group banding together to be treated like a human being, will be given the support they need, in the way they want it. Do they want quiet diplomatic pressure on their governments? Do they want computers? Do they want to be smuggled out? Do they want prominent gays to visit the country and sit in the courtrooms with them? What do they need?
Earlier this year, we were shown how far a little bit of international solidarity can go in preventing homocide. In Malawi, a young gay couple -- a 26-year-old and a 20-year-old -- were sentenced to fourteen years' hard labor, just for having consensual sex. It took a small amount of pressure from gay people in Europe on their governments, and then a small amount of pressure by our governments on Malawi, for them to cave in and release the couple. There is a lever here.
But so far, most of the pressure flowing from the US and Europe has been in the other direction -- supporting the murderous homophobes. A battalion of US evangelicals flooded Uganda prior to the move to reintroduce the death penalty for homosexuality, announcing that homosexuality can be "cured", and gays were determined to recruit African children. For example, the Atlantic Monthly has revealed that one of Michele Bachmann's closest advisors, Peter Waldron, is a close personal friend of the man who most aggressively promoted the bill to hunt down and kill all of Uganda's gays.
His name is Pastor Martin Ssempa. He is fond of convening press conferences where he displays pictures of men covered in feces. He announced: "I want to say homosexuals eat each other's poop. Homosexuals stick their hands into their rectums... This man has just eaten the other person's poo poo and is rubbing it into his mouth." He says "fisting [is] practiced by 65 percent of all homosexuals. It is deviant! As if that is not enough, he [the typical gay man] puts it all the way iiiiiin!" Would Bachmann retain an advisor whose friends talked about, say, Jews in this grotesque way?
Yet Bachmann's advisor has not done anything to distance himself from this crazed hatred. On the contrary: we now know that Michele Bachmann's husband, Marcus, teaches and preaches the central idea behind the movements to hunt down gay people across the world: that homosexuality is a choice, and so gay people who persist with their sexuality are being willfully deviant. Only last week, Herman Cain similarly insisted on The View that homosexuality is a choice -- a fact that is contradicted by overwhelming scientific evidence. These ideas have consequences.
Do the people who put forward this argument realize what they are confessing about their own sexuality? We couldn't be straight, no matter how hard we tried. If Cain or Bachmann or Ssempa are saying they "chose" to be straight, and could have chosen otherwise, they can only be confessing to repressed bisexuality -- and projecting it outwards onto everybody else. If you "chose" your heterosexuality, then you are not entirely heterosexual.
There is a global war going on against the right of an entire group to fall in love. The US hard right is aiding the side of the persecutors and bigots. We need to aid the side of the people who want to live and love. That is the goal of Kaleidoscope. It will carry out its work sensitively, guided by the help gay people in the group want. The murderous homophobes want to claim that homosexuality is an "imperialist" or "alien" import -- so it is crucial that we don't play into their hands. This is a fight that needs to be lead by local people. But we can offer real support and solidarity -- just as the fight against Apartheid was led within South Africa, but supported across the globe.
This doesn't detract for a second from the urgent fight for equality back at home. We can do both. And this isn't just a fight for gay people. One of the most moving aspects of the struggle for gay equality here has been how many heterosexual people have been at its forefront. Indeed, two of the most eloquent enemies of homophobia in the world today are Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an African man, and Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian woman. Tutu says: "If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God."
We know what will happen if we do nothing, and if Kaleidoscope doesn't attract the supporters it needs. It's encapsulated in the story of a young Senegalese man called Bassirou, whose story is told in the Human Rights Watch report 'Fear For Life.' Their team met him as a thirty-year-old man, soon after a local newspaper found out he was gay and concocted a grotesque story that he was a pedophile grooming children. Bassirou ran to his home but his brother came after him with a big stick, and said he would kill him if he ever came back. He ran away to another town and got a job manufacturing plastics, but they found out he was gay and fired him. He said in 2004: "I don't go out. I don't talk to anyone. I don't interact with my neighbors... I go home very, very late at night so that no one will see me... I tell myself, I'll die one day [because of this]. Sometimes I'm very scared." Not long after, he was living on the streets, fell sick, and died.
This doesn't have to happen ever again. On June 28th, 1969, the police famously raided the Stonewall Inn and beat up the people there, just for being gay. Imagine if you had stood in the Stonewall Inn that night and said -- forty-two years from now, on these streets, they will be celebrating the introduction of gay marriage. There will be openly gay cops and politicians and lawyers kissing on the streets across the city, and the people who think you are sick will be the ones regarded as freaks. It would have seemed like the most absurd science fiction -- but it happened. It happened in the lifetime of many of the people who were in the Stonewall Inn that night. They lived to see it. And if Kaleidoscope attracts the support they deserve, we believe we will live to see the day when gay people are able to embrace openly on the streets of Kampala and Kingston and Kandahar. Grab your jacket and your instinct for justice -- the global Stonewall riot has begun.
To find out how you can save lives the lives of persecuted gay people across the world, click here.
Correction: There was an initial misprint in the first line of this story. The first line should not have referred to a "stranglehold on gay politics," but rather "a strange hole in gay politics." The piece above reflects this change.]]>Would You Trust Management Consultants With the World's Rainforests? Our Governments Have -- Disastrouslytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8927652011-07-07T21:19:47-04:002011-09-06T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/Rip Off by David Craig, 170 organizations who used management consultants were studied in the 1990s by the Cranfield School of Management, and it turned out only 36 percent of clients thought they had brought any value. We all know now that management consultants were threaded through the banksters and hedge funders who just crashed the global economy.
But now management consultancy has been taken to a whole new level -- one that, at first glance, will seem almost impossible. Recently, I wrote about how the world is refusing to take simple steps to prevent the imminent destruction of the Ecuadorian Amazon. But since then, I've learned about something even worse, from a startling new study by Greenpeace entitledBad Influence: How McKinsey-insipred plans lead to rainforest destruction. Management consultants have now been, in effect, tasked with setting the future of the world's rainforests -- and they are facing accusations that they are using our money to draw up plans that will result in their more rapid destruction. Instead of stopping the loggers and miners, the report suggests they are aiding them.
To untangle this strange story, you have to go back to the rubble of the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, in which the world's leaders gathered and effectively announced they were going to collectively ignore the increasingly dire warnings of the world's scientists. They agreed only one good thing. It's called REDD -- Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Its purpose is simple. It is to provide financial incentives for countries with tropical rainforests to not hack them down.
It's hard to think of a more urgent cause. Dr Simon Lewis, the distinguished rainforest scientist, tells me: "To highlight the importance of rainforests, imagine if they were lost quickly. This would have catastrophic impacts for all of us, as global climate patterns would be severely disrupted, which would reduce global food production... But perhaps most catastrophic of all, the dead trees would release in excess of 900 billion tones of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is as much as all humans have emitted from fossil fuel use since the industrial revolution." So there would be catastrophic global warming. And, he adds, "nature's store cupboard of medicines would be gone."
The countries of the world agreed to stump up $3.5bn to get us off the track towards this disaster -- which is one thousandth of the sum that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calculated was the long-term cost of the Iraq War.
But at least, you might think, it is something. Except environmental campaigners believe the British and American governments then "recommended" that the plans about how the money should be spent had to be subject to the "advice" of McKinsey -- the management consultancy firm set up in Chicago in the 1920s that has trained the ruling classes of the West, from William Hague to Chelsea Clinton. The journalist Clayton Hirst writes it is "the ultimate old boys' network. Its tentacles reach into the boardrooms of Britain's biggest companies and snake through Westminster's corridors of power." The rainforest countries were, campaigners believe, then "encouraged" to employ them too, to show they were "serious". So the McKinsey climate desk swelled.
The official rationale for this is attractive. It's essential that REDD money is well spent -- and in theory, it's the job of McKinsey to figure out the cheapest possible way to save the largest possible amount of rainforest. Except when Greenpeace looked at what McKinsey actually advising, their study suggested that isn't what is happening at all.
McKinsey has invented something called a "cost curve", which they say figures out how best to save the rainforests. Except you and I -- the funders of this project -- aren't allowed to know anything about it. Nor are the world's scientists. McKinsey says its workings are subject to commercial confidentiality. So we have no information about it about its vital calculations. It is a black box.
We are supposed to take it on trust that McKinsey is acting dispassionately in the public interest on the best information. But BusinessWeek notes their clients have a strange habit of dying in agony -- Enron, Swiss-Air, Kmart, Global Crossing... the list goes on. The organization's bible, In Search of Excellence, written by its consultant Tom Peters, was published in 1982 and named 43 companies as models of excellence. Two thirds of them were dead or defunct within five years. We can't afford that success rate with the rainforests.
But Greenpeace warns that may be what we are getting. Its study claims the plans based on McKinsey's secret calculations almost always conclude it is expensive to stop massive logging and mining corporations from destroying the rainforests. Even though they are the biggest drivers of destruction, we shouldn't try. No. Instead, it would appear all the money should be spent stopping the powerless small farmers and subsistence peoples, who do far less damage.
Greenpeace studied the rainforest plans that have been substantially drawn up by McKinsey for four key rainforest countries -- Papua New Guinea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia and Guyana. They concluded something startling. They write: "McKinsey-inspired plans not only consistently fail to address the major drivers of deforestation, such as mining and logging, they actually reward the industries and interests that cause it."
For example, they drew up a plan for the Democratic Republic of Congo where logging companies will be paid to double existing logging rates. In Guyana, the plan drawn up would increase logging by 20 times its current rate. They note: "McKinsey's advice does not, in any example studied by Greenpeace, lead to a cessation of deforestation or forest degradation. Often it defends destruction by industrial interests." The consultants "repeatedly use tricks of data presentation to protect or promote industrial logging and large-scale agricultural interests at the expense of subsistence farming."
Why? Why would this happen? It's hard to tell, since we're not allowed to see their workings. There seem to be conflicts of interest here. For example, McKinsey has a large mining consultancy division. Mining is one of the biggest drivers of deforestation -- and one that Greenpeace argues is strengthened by these plans. But McKinsey strongly disagree with the report. They said in a statement to me: "We too see preservation of the rainforests as crucial, not only for greenhouse gas abatement, but also because these forests provide a broad range of other community and eco-system benefits. However, we do not agree with Greenpeace's findings and we stand firmly behind our work and our approach. We strongly believe that any REDD+ strategy should combine climate security with economic growth, good governance and social justice. Our work is only one input that sovereign governments consider when consulting with local stakeholders, making difficult policy decisions and building the institutions needed to improve forestry governance." They refused to respond on-the-record to any questions about conflict of interest.
For two decades now, the big-name management consultancies have been the bland, smiling shock troops of market fundamentalism. They have plastered the most rapacious interests -- from the con-men of Enron to the banksters of Wall Street -- in the respectability of pie charts and fancy jargon. We couldn't afford it when the stakes were the economy -- and we can afford it even less now the stakes are the long-term basis for continuing life on earth. These plans hand over to the market the very things on which the market depends for its existence -- a stable ecosystem.
When David Cameron proposed to hand over Britain's forests to multinational corporations, the people here instinctively and immediately rebelled, because we knew they would not survive. Our protests stopped this disaster. Today, something even larger is happening. The world's rainforests are being handed to management consultants. We need to reassemble our rage -- or gawk as the T-Rexes mangle our planet's life support system they way they mangled your workplace.
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
]]>In The Age of Distraction, We Need One Thing More Than Ever: Bookstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8836222011-06-23T21:59:36-04:002011-08-23T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic Apparat -- an even more omnivorous iPhone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn -- and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing.
I have been thinking about this because I recently moved flats, which for me meant boxing and heaving several Everests of books, accumulated obsessively since I was a kid. Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice and insist that I just couldn't bear to part company with it, no matter how unlikely it is I will ever read (say) a 1000-page biography of little-known Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar. As I stacked my books high, and watched my friends get buried in landslides of novels or avalanches of polemics, it struck me that this scene might be incomprehensible a generation from now. Yes, a few specialists still haul their vinyl collections from house to house, but the rest of us have migrated happily to MP3s, and regard them as slightly odd. Does it matter? What was really lost?
The book -- the physical paper book -- is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 percent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books. I think we should start there -- because it shows why we need the physical book to survive, and hints at what we need to do to make sure it does.
In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading -- Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating -- but then, a few years ago, he "became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read." He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. "What I'm struggling with," he writes, "is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there's something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly a series of disconnected riffs, quick takes and fragments, that add up to the anxiety of the age."
I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming at the other side of the room, it can feel like trying to read with a heavy metal band shrieking in front of you. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That's getting harder to find.
No, don't misunderstand me. I adore the web, and they will have to wrench my Twitter feed from my cold dead hands. This isn't going to turn into an antedeluvian rant against the glories of our wired world. But there's a reason why that word -- 'wired' -- means both 'connected to the internet' and 'high, frantic, unable to concentrate.'
So in the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: "The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over the functions from the book it can't afford to lose."
We have now reached that point. And here's the function that the book -- the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once -- does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: "Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise."
A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now. The French writer Jean-Phillipe De Tonnac says "the true function of books is to safeguard the things that forgetfulness constantly threatens to destroy." It's precisely because it is not immediate -- because it doesn't know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen's apartment -- that the book matters.
That's why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don't just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals. The twenty hours it takes to read a book require a sustained concentration it's hard to get anywhere else. Sure, you can do that with a DVD boxset too -- but your relationship to TV will always ultimately be that of a passive spectator. With any book, you are the co-creator, imagining it as you go. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, literature is the only art form in which the audience plays the score.
I'm not against e-books in principle -- I'm tempted by the Kindle -- but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words -- offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person's internal life -- can sing.
So how do we preserve the mental space for the book? We are the first generation to ever use the internet, and when I look at how we are reacting to it, I keep thinking of the Inuit communities I met in the Arctic, who were given alcohol and sugar for the first time a generation ago, and guzzled them so rapidly they were now sunk in obesity and alcoholism. Sugar, alcohol and the web are all amazing pleasures and joys -- but we need to know how to handle them without letting them addle us.
The idea of keeping yourself on a digital diet will, I suspect, become mainstream soon. Just as I've learned not to stock my fridge with tempting carbs, I've learned to limit my exposure to the web -- and to love it in the limited window I allow myself. I have installed the program 'Freedom' on my laptop: it will disconnect you from the web for however long you tell it to. It's the Ritalin I need for my web-induced ADHD. I make sure I activate it so I can dive into the more permanent world of the printed page for at least two hours a day, or I find myself with a sense of endless online connection that leaves you oddly disconnected from yourself.
T.S. Eliot called books "the still point of the turning world." He was right. It turns out, in the age of super-speed broadband we need dead trees to have living minds.
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
]]>Factory Farming Is Manufacturing Superbugs -- and Endangering Us Alltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8788722011-06-17T09:06:44-04:002011-08-17T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/"a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics". It will be a world where transplant surgery is impossible. It will be a world where a simple appendix operation will be as routinely lethal as it was in 1927, before the discovery of penicillin. It will be a world where pneumonia and TB and gonorrhea are far harder to deal with, and claim many more of us. But it's a world that you and I don't have to see - if we act on this warning now.
As the scientists I've interviewed explain it, antibiotics do something simple. They kill, slow down or stall the growth of bacteria. They were one of the great advances of the 20th century, and they have saved millions of us. But they inherently contain a problem -- one that was known about from very early on. They start an arms race. Use an antibiotic against bacteria, and it kills most of it -- but it can also prompt the bacteria to evolve a tougher, stronger, meaner strain that can fight back. The bacteria is constantly mutating and dividing. The stronger the antibiotic, the stronger some bacteria will become to survive. It's Darwin dancing at super-speed.
So the more we use antibiotics, the more we lose them. It's a battle played out on human bodies and in human wounds, with sky-high stakes. In many developed countries today, MRSA kills more people than Aids. The obvious conclusion, then, is that we should use antibiotics sparingly, and only when they are really needed to treat the sick. But in one crucial area we are doing the exact opposite -- for the sake of a few people's profits.
In the United States, Latin America, and Asia, animals being farmed for meat and milk are being automatically given antibiotics in their food all day -- irrespective of whether they are healthy or sick. It's like slathering your child's Cornflakes with antibiotics, all year round. Some 80 per cent of all antibiotics in the US go straight into farm animals. This speeds up the race massively. It's like taking bacteria to the gym and giving them a constant work-out -- and then unleashing them on the rest of us.
You can see how this process makes bacteria stronger and tougher -- and at work on humans -- in a startling study by Professor Barry Levy in the New England Journal of Medicine. His team went to a chicken farm where antibiotics had not been used before, and started to put the antibiotic tetracycline into their feed. Before the start of the experiment, there was no tetracycline-resistant bacteria on the farm. Within two weeks, 90 per cent of the chickens were excreting tetracycline-resistant organisms. Even more strikingly, half of all the humans living on the farm were by then excreting tetracycline-resistant bacteria too.
This process partially explains the evolution and spread of many superbugs. Only a fortnight ago, a new strain of MRSA was found in British milk that could be transmitted to human beings. To some degree this arms race is an inevitable part of nature - but our factory farms are massively artificially accelerating it. They are bringing the day when antibiotics won't work much closer.
Why? Why would factory farms automatically feed antibiotics to healthy animals, given the obvious risk? If you cram animals together, give them little room to move, and make them grow and produce far beyond the level they would in natural circumstances, they will routinely get ill -- and they do. It is cheaper for their owners to simply automatically and preemptively drug them all, than to try to treat their illness individually, or to create an environment where sickness is not standard.
The animals in these factory farms can become reservoirs of stronger superbugs. Sometimes it spreads to us through contamination of raw meat, but more often it filters out through workers who have contact with the animals. Dutch pig farmers are 760 times more likely to be carrying pig-MRSA than the rest of the population. This story ends eventually with the death of antibiotics -- and routine operations becoming deadly once more.
We always knew factory farming was a scar on our conscience, but it turns out it is also an urgent threat to our health. Of course, factory farming is not the only source of growing antibiotic resistance. Doctors have been over-prescribing them, and patients have too often not been taking their full course, enabling tougher bacteria to survive and thrive. But this is the most egregious cause.
A few years ago, it looked like the European Union had taken the lead, by banning the routine use of some types of antibiotics simply to promote the growth of animals. But research published this week by the Soil Association suggests farmers are sidestepping the real issue. The prescription of modern cephalosporins, the antibiotics which are most widely believed to promote stronger variants of MRSA in animals and humans -- has quadrupled in the past decade in Britain. Why? They are advertised to farmers, who are under greater pressure than ever to get more and more out of their herds because supermarkets have ratcheted up the pressure for quick profit. Decent small farmers who want to resist these trends find themselves out of business.
Britain's former chief medical officer Liam Donaldson says this over-prescription is so dangerous to us all it should be banned. Yet David Cameron's Government ignored the official recommendation from its own veterinary advisers to take even the much milder step of banning the advertising of antibiotics to farmers. In the US, all attempts to ban the routine feeding of antibiotics -- led by Representative Louise Slaughter -- are routinely smothered by the farming lobby.
It might seem strange that governments all over the world are taking such a gamble with public health, in the face of the best scientific advice. But Big Agriculture has armies of lobbyists and open checkbooks, while the people trying to protect the public have only the facts and reason and truth on their side. The squandering of life-saving antibiotics is one example of a bigger trend hijacking global politics. Small groups of rich people, determined to maximize profits, are buying or bamboozling politicians into serving their interests and into ignoring the interests of the vast majority of the population. This is the trend that is making it so hard to (say) re-regulate the banks to prevent another global crash, or prevent the unraveling of the climate.
It doesn't have to be this way. The majority of the population can organize and shout louder than these self-interested juntas of profit. There are inspiring examples. In Lincolnshire, there were plans to import the first US-style mega-farm into this country by a group of tycoons who claimed their cows "do not belong in fields". But public pressure forced the Environment Agency to investigate, and the plans to be abandoned. Fighting back on issues like this works - and we need to step it up.
Otherwise, the history books -- written by people far more vulnerably to bacteria than you and I have ever been -- will record something startling. Our demand for cheap meat turned us, in turn, into cheap meat.
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101]]>The Queen's Husband Is Ninety Today. Spare Us the Fawningtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8747772011-06-10T10:38:17-04:002011-08-10T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/
Today, you are being encouraged to celebrate a man who merrily visited a genocidal dictator and used the occasion to sneer at British democracy. A man whose political interventions even prompted complaints from the far-right Enoch Powell. A man who, at the height of mass unemployment, mocked the unemployed, while complaining his own family of multi-millionaires was financially deprived. A man who has shot countless examples of endangered species -- and then sought praise for his protection of wildlife.
But let's start with the myth. Monarchists feel the need to claim that the Windsors are somehow more worthy than the rest of us, but this is difficult, since they consist merely of whoever randomly emerges from a royal womb, and whoever that package of DNA and unearned privilege then chooses to marry. Windsors are thrown up by chance, and must have imaginary merits thrust upon them. You can see how hard this is by reading the moist panegyric written by the conservative commentator Peter Oborne last week. He said Philip is "colossally important" because... um... Well, he said, he represents continuity. That's true. If you gave my father a job for life from which he couldn't be fired and a slew of golden palaces to live in, he'd represent continuity too. So would yours. So would literally anyone in Britain.
The pickings then got even slimmer. Oborne claimed Philip should be lauded because he has "never once caused... embarrassment". And "there has never been the slightest hint of scandal". No, really. He wrote that. So let's look at the things Oborne and the monarchists believe are not embarrassing or scandalous in any way.
Alfredo Stroessner was one of the most vicious dictators of the 20th-century. He seized power in Paraguay in a coup d'état, and set about kidnapping and torturing anybody who objected, ending up facing charges of genocide from the UN. At the height of the terror, Philip visited the country -- paid for by British taxes -- and told the beaming tyrant: "It's a pleasant change to be in a country that isn't ruled by its people." The torture chambers were crammed and screaming less than a mile away. This wasn't seen as a joke by Stroessner. No wonder that -- as Francis Wheen's fascinating history Strange Days Indeed shows -- when far right-wingers and establishment grandees responded to instability in Britain in the 1970s by mooting a military coup, they intended Philip to be the figurehead of their junta. (Nothing is known of his feelings about this.)
Philip has his own taste for killing, although on a thankfully smaller scale. Throughout his life he has taken great pleasure in slaughtering endangered species with highly sophisticated nervous systems and a strong capacity to feel pain, just for fun. For example, on one shooting trip alone in the late 1960s, he personally killed a tiger, a crocodile and a rhinoceros. Before anybody writes in to say that standards were different then, look up the press clippings: people were disgusted at the time. Yet in their list of reasons to admire Philip, monarchists always list his "commitment to protecting wildlife" as symbolic head of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). It's enough to make a rhinocerous laugh -- if only Philip hadn't shot it first.
Philip doesn't have much pity for the sentient beings he shoots, but he does have quite a lot for himself. In an interview in 1970, he complained that the Windsors were suffering unacceptable financial pressures, and warned of catastrophes to come. He might, he warned with a pained expression, have to give up polo. And - the agony only grows -- "We may need to move into smaller premises, who knows?" He didn't say which of the four massive palaces he occupies might have had to be downsized, or whether he might have had to abandon the fully stocked barbers' shop reserved entirely for his personal use.
However Philip has also denied that anybody in Britain is poor. When unemployment surged in the early 1980s to levels not seen since the 1930s, he jeered: "Everyone was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed."
To be fair, in case anybody thinks this is snobbery, Philip extends this callousness to his own children. When Philip and Elizabeth's youngest son was five years old, they abandoned him to nannies so they could tour Australia for six months, and when they returned, the tiny child was forced to wait in line to shake his parents' hand.
But, wait. There is a sympathetic explanation for some of Philip's horrible behavior. There are many good reasons to oppose the idea of monarchy in the 21st-century, and one is that, by stripping them of any ability to make their own choices, it curdles the family at its core.
In 1993, Philip said: "It wasn't my ambition to be President of the Mint Advisory Committee. I didn't want to be President of the WWF. I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When Elizabeth became the Queen, he had to quit his job, and became depressed for months. The "gaffes" that keep being wheeled out suggest a man angry at the position he is trapped in, and at all of us for putting him there. In the Republic of Britain, he could have achieved his real ambition of being an admiral and led a much happier life.
That brings us to the one real reason why Philip deserves our respect and gratitude. Before the Second World War, his sisters all married supporters of the Nazi tyranny, including an SS colonel -- but there's no doubt which side Philip was on. He repeatedly risked his life in the Royal Navy fighting for the Allies, and took a heroic part in the Allied invasion of Sicily. People who glibly insult him today by calling him a "Nazi" are ignorant -- he came close to dying to stop the Nazis. It's much more than they, or I, have ever done.
That should point us, though, to a wider and deeper form of gratitude. All across Britain, there are 90-year-old men who engaged in that incredible act of collective heroism. One was my former neighbor, Elbert Hutton, who died last month. He fought in France and Italy, then returned and worked hard his whole life. But nobody ever gave him a palace to live in, and nobody ever wrote fawning articles about him in the Daily Telegraph. He got a small council house and no garlands. Yet Elbert was much more deserving than Philip. He never fawned over any dictators, or shot any endangered species, or complained about his lot, even though he had unimaginably less. I'd like to see a Britain where we assess Elbert and Philip on their merits -- and don't expect the better man to bow before the fool.
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101]]>It's Not Only Strauss-Kahn Who Should Be on Trial. It's the IMF Itself.tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8706352011-06-03T11:22:35-04:002011-08-03T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/
To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few honorable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured the money and resources of the planet were forever hoovered towards them. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose -- and so the IMF was delivered into the world.
The IMF's official job sounds simple and attractive. It is supposedly there to ensure poor countries don't fall into debt, and if they do, to lift them out with loans and economic expertise. It is presented as the poor world's best friend and guardian. But beyond the rhetoric, the IMF was designed to be dominated by a handful of rich countries -- and, more specifically, by their bankers and financial speculators. The IMF works in their interests, every step of the way.
Let's look at how this plays out on the ground. In the 1990s, the small country of Malawi in Southeastern Africa was facing severe economic problems after enduring one of the worst HIV-AIDS epidemics in the world and surviving a horrific dictatorship. They had to ask the IMF for help. If the IMF acted on its official role, it would have given loans and guided the country to develop in the same way that Britain and the U.S. and every other successful country had developed -- by protecting its infant industries, subsidizing its farmers, and investing in the education and health of its people.
That's what an institution that was concerned with ordinary people -- and accountable to them -- would look like. But the IMF did something very different. They said they would only give assistance if Malawi agreed to the "structural adjustments" the IMF demanded. They ordered Malawi to sell off almost everything the state owned to private companies and speculators, and to slash spending on the population. They demanded they stop subsidizing fertilizer, even though it was the only thing that made it possible for farmers -- most of the population -- to grow anything in the country's feeble and depleted soil. They told them to prioritize giving money to international bankers over giving money to the Malawian people.
So when in 2001 the IMF found out the Malawian government had built up large stockpiles of grain in case there was a crop failure, they ordered them to sell it off to private companies at once. They told Malawi to get their priorities straight by using the proceeds to pay off a loan from a large bank the IMF had told them to take out in the first place, at a 56 percent annual rate of interest. The Malawian president protested and said this was dangerous. But he had little choice. The grain was sold. The banks were paid.
The next year, the crops failed. The Malawian government had almost nothing to hand out. Aid workers who were there watched as the starving population was reduced to eating the bark off the trees, and any rats they could capture. The BBC described it as Malawi's "worst ever famine." There had been a much worse crop failure in 1991-2, but there was no famine because then the government had grain stocks to distribute. So about a thousand innocent people starved to death.
At the height of the starvation, the IMF suspended $47m in aid, because the government had 'slowed' in implementing the marketing 'reforms' that had led to the disaster. ActionAid, the leading provider of help on the ground, conducted an autopsy into the famine. They concluded that the IMF "bears responsibility for the disaster."
Then, in the starved wreckage, Malawi did something poor countries are not supposed to do. They told the IMF to get out. Suddenly free to answer to their own people rather than foreign bankers, Malawi disregarded all the IMF's "advice," and brought back subsidies for the fertilizer, along with a range of other services to ordinary people. Within two years, the country was transformed from being a beggar to being so abundant they were supplying food aid to Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The Malawian famine should have been a distant warning cry for you and me. Subordinating the interests of ordinary people to bankers and speculators caused starvation there. Within a few years, it had crashed the global economy for us all.
In the history of the IMF, this story isn't an exception: it is the rule. The organization takes over poor countries, promising it has medicine that will cure them -- and then pours poison down their throats. Whenever I travel across the poor parts of the world I see the scars from IMF "structural adjustments" everywhere, from Peru to Ethiopia. Whole countries have collapsed after being IMF-ed up -- most famously Argentina and Thailand in the 1990s.
Look at some of the organization's greatest hits. In Kenya, the IMF insisted the government introduce fees to see the doctor -- so the number of women seeking help or advice on STDs fell by 65 percent, in one of the countries worst affected by AIDS in the world. In Ghana, the IMF insisted the government introduce fees for going to school -- and the number of rural families who could afford to send their kids crashed by two-thirds. In Zambia, the IMF insisted they slash health spending -- and the number of babies who died doubled. Amazingly enough, it turns out that shoveling your country's money to foreign bankers, rather than your own people, isn't a great development strategy.
The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz worked closely with the IMF for over a decade, until he quit and became a whistle-blower. He told me a few years ago: "When the IMF arrives in a country, they are interested in only one thing. How do we make sure the banks and financial institutions are paid?... It is the IMF that keeps the [financial] speculators in business. They're not interested in development, or what helps a country to get out of poverty."
Some people call the IMF "inconsistent," because the institution supports huge state-funded bank bailouts in the rich world, while demanding an end to almost all state funding in the poor world. But that's only an inconsistency if you are thinking about the realm of intellectual ideas, rather than raw economic interests. In every situation, the IMF does what will get more money to bankers and speculators. If rich governments will hand banks money for nothing in "bailouts," great. If poor countries can be forced to hand banks money in extortionate "repayments," great. It's absolutely consistent.
Some people claim that Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) was a "reformer" who changed the IMF after he took over in 2009. Certainly, there was a shift in rhetoric -- but a detailed study by Dr. Daniela Gabor of the University of the West of England has shown that the substance is business-as-usual. Look, for example, at Hungary. After the 2008 crash, the IMF lauded them for keeping to their original deficit target by slashing public services. The horrified Hungarian people responded by kicking the government out, and choosing a party that promised to make the banks pay for the crisis they had created. They introduced a 0.7 percent levy on the banks (four times higher than anywhere else). The IMF went crazy. They said this was "highly distortive" for banking activity -- unlike the bailouts, of course -- and shrieked that it would cause the banks to flee from the country. The IMF shut down their entire Hungary program to intimidate them.
But the collapse predicted by the IMF didn't happen. Hungary kept on pursuing sensible moderate measures, instead of punishing the population. They imposed taxes on the hugely profitable sectors of retail, energy and telecoms, and took funds from private pensions to pay the deficit. The IMF shrieked at every step, and demanded cuts for ordinary Hungarians instead. It was the same old agenda, with the same old threats. DSK did the same in almost all the poor countries where the IMF operated, from El Salvador to Pakistan to Ethiopia, where big cuts in subsidies for ordinary people have been imposed. Plenty have been intimidated into harming their own interests. The U.S.-based think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research found 31 of 41 IMF agreements require 'pro-cyclical' macroeconomic policies -- pushing them further into recession.
It is not only DSK who should be on trial. It is the institution he has been running. There's an inane debate in the press about who should be the next head of the IMF, as if we were discussing who should run the local Milk Board. But if we took the idea of human equality seriously, and remembered all the people who have been impoverished, starved and killed by this institution, we would be discussing the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- and how to disband the IMF entirely and start again.
If DSK is guilty, I suspect I know how it happened. He must have mistaken the maid for a poor country in financial trouble. Heads of the IMF have, after all, been allowed to rape them with impunity for years.
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
]]>Larry Flynt -- Freedom Fighter, Pornographer, Monster?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8678152011-05-27T11:42:09-04:002011-07-27T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/Hustler magazine think nothing of clicking on XTube to view a million women splayed a million ways, or downloading their own sex tapes onto the site for everyone to see. He is the founding father of our new pornucopia. His brand of hardcore porn is everywhere, leaking into every email inbox. For him, it's a story of freedom triumphant. But does Flynt's story also show the costs -- and the casualties -- of the Dionysian frenzy he has helped unleash?
He extended our freedom by encouraging people to chuckle and masturbate over scenes of the most horrific unfreedom -- women being gang-raped, young girls being molested, "bitches" being shaved and slaughtered in concentration camps. One of his daughters says he molested her. Another of his daughters reportedly says he asked her to marry him. The cold Puritan morality of the Fifties badly needed to be relaxed -- but in Larry Flynt, did it melt down into a moral Chernobyl?
These are the thoughts that were flickering through my mind as I waited in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco to meet Flynt. I had been scheduled to interview him several times before, but each time it was cancelled at the last minute for mysterious reasons. So when he is suddenly rolled towards me in his $85,000 golden wheelchair, it seems impossible that this man can bear the weight of these questions. In the videos of his from the peak of his fame, he is a red-faced eruption of testosterone, screaming at the camera in long Charlie Sheen-style soliloquies of inspired abuse. Now he is lolling almost lifelessly in a chair. His head is barely able to look up at mine, and his hand is barely able to reach up to shake mine.
He speaks in a very slow, strangulated gargle. "He-ll-o," he says. "You look -- " gasp, long inhalation of breath -- "about nine years old." I smile. He doesn't. He is 69, but looks at once much older and much younger. His face is round and entirely unlined, making him appear to be a gigantic, gnarled baby.
"Mr Flynt will speak to you upstairs, in a conference room," says the huge Italian-American man with a tiny pencil moustache who is pushing his wheelchair. "Not here." I later discover this man -- who looks like one of the minor cops on NYPD Blue -- is called Frank Torres, and describes himself as Flynt's "bodyguard". He wheels Flynt into an elevator, and we stand there in silence. Flynt's head rolls about, as if unsupported. Frank takes out a comb and brushes Flynt's hair, and when he is finished, Frank says: "Thank you, sir."
The book One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies and Their Lovers Changed the Course of American History by Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach is available now, published by Macmillan Books
For updates on Larry Flynt and other issues, you can follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
Johann has a weekly podcast where he brings you the news you too often don't hear in the mainstream media. You can subscribe via the i-Tunes store and searching for The Johann Hari Podcast or by clicking here
]]>The Deal We Dare Not Turn Down: Save This Rainforest, or Trigger Our Destructiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8671832011-05-25T19:49:11-04:002011-07-25T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/
Another of those seemingly small moments with a long echo is happening now. A marginalized voice is offering us a warning, and an inspiring way to save ourselves -- yet this alternative seems to be passing unheard in the night. It is coming from the people of Ecuador, led by their President Rafael Correa, and it would begin to deal with two converging crises.
In the four billion years since life on earth began, there have been five times when there was a sudden mass extinction of life-forms. The last time was 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were killed, probably by a meteor. But now the world's scientists agree that the sixth mass extinction is at hand. Humans have accelerated the rate of species extinction by a factor of at least 100, and the great Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson warns it could reach a factor of 10,000 within the next twenty years. We are doing this, largely by stripping species of their habitat. We are destroying the planet's biodiversity, and so we are making the natural chains that keep us alive much more vulnerable to collapse. This time, we are the meteor.
So where does Ecuador come in? At the tip of this South American country, there lies 4,000 lush square miles of rainforest where the Amazon basin, the Andes mountains and the equator come together. It is the most biodiverse place on earth. When scientists studied a single hectare of it, they found it had more different species of tree than the whole of North America put together. It holds the world records for different species of amphibian, reptiles and bats. And -- more importantly still -- this rainforest is a crucial part of the planet's lungs, inhaling huge amounts of heat-trapping gases and keeping them out of the atmosphere.
Yet almost all the pressure from the outside world today is to saw it down. Why? Because underneath that rainforest, there is almost a billion barrels of untapped oil, containing 400 million tones of planet-cooking gases. We crave it. We howl for it. Unlike biodiversity and a safe climate, it's tradeable for cash. Here is a textbook example of what is driving both the sixth great extinction and global warming. We have been putting short-term profits for a few ahead of the long-term needs of our species. Every rainforest on earth is being reduced to the money that can be stripped from it: yesterday, Brazil's Chamber of Deputies voted to slash the amount of the Amazon that must be preserved by land-owners.
Except this time, for the first time, the people of Ecuador have offered us an alternative -- a way to break this pattern. Alberto Acosta, the former energy minister who drew up the plan, calls it a "punto de ruptura" -- a turning point, one that "questions the logic of extractive development" that drilled us into this species-swallowing hole.
Here's the offer. The oil beneath the rainforest is worth about $7 billion. Everybody knows that a stable climate, biodiversity and functioning lungs are worth far more than that. But until now, nobody has been willing to pay. Ecuador's democratic government says that, if the rest of the world offers just half of what the oil is worth -- $3.5 billion -- they will keep the rainforest standing and alive and working for us all. In a country where 38 percent live in poverty and 13 percent are on the brink of starvation, it's an incredibly generous offer, and one that is popular in the rainforest itself. As one of its residents, Julia Cerda, 45, told New Internationalist magazine: "With oil, the government just sells it to richer countries and we're left with nothing, no birds or animals or trees."
No country with oil has ever considered leaving it in the ground because the consequences of digging it up are too disastrous. This is a startling attempt to reverse one of the greatest dysfunctions in the global economic system. The market considers things like species diversity, the climate and the rainforests to be "externalities" -- factors not affected by the price and profit mechanisms, so irrelevant, and dispensable. It's a system that, as Oscar Wilde put it, "knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." The people of Ecuador are trying to find a way to get us to see the value of some of the most important things on earth.
They first made this offer in 2006. So how has the world responded? Chile has offered $100,000. Spain has offered $1.4 million. Germany initially offered $50 million, then pulled out. Now President Correa is warning they can't wait forever in a country where 13 percent are close to starving. If they don't have $100 million in the pot by the end of this year, he says, they will have no choice but to pursue Plan B -- the digging and destruction of the rainforest.
If one rainforest seems a small matter to you, remember that the head of one deposed French King, the punishment of one broken country and the deposing of one Iranian Prime Minister seemed fairly minor once.
This too could be a moment where history branches into two directions. On the path to the right, we turn down the chance to restrain ourselves, and decide with a shrug to burn all the oil left in the world's soils, and hack down all the remaining rainforests. Professor James Hasen, the NASA climatologist, explains where this ends: "We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with a sea level 75 metres higher. Coastal disasters would occur continually. The only uncertainty is the time it would take for complete ice sheet disintegration."
But there is another path, where we choose to protect humanity's habitat -- and are prepared to pay for it. If our governments won't accept this offer, at this late moment in these ecological crises, what are they saying about themselves -- and about us?
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
]]>David Cameron's Claims to Be a "Green" Prime Minister Go Up in Flamestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8620082011-05-14T13:44:17-04:002011-07-14T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/gazed into the dewy eyes of a husky and promised to lead "the greenest government ever", what did you think that would involve?
And you certainly wouldn't have expected David Cameron's latest plan. He has decided to convert us to a new energy source that seems, in the US, to have released cancer-causing chemicals and radiation into the water supply -- and will unleash even more planet-cooking gases than coal. Trapped under very hard shale rock in Lancashire, there is a large amount of natural gas. But it's impossible to get to unless you use a previously-verboten method called "hydraulic fracturing", or "fracking" for short. It's simple. You blast the rock with one to seven million gallons of water that has been combined with up to 596 rock-dissolving chemicals. This penetrates 800ft into the ground and causes something like a mini-earthquake, breaking the rock into thousands of pieces and allowing the gas out.
Where it's already being used, fracking has been accused of three fatal flaws: contamination of the water supply, contamination of the air, and contamination of the climate. Let's start with the water. When his home in the woods in Pennsylvania was designated as an area perfect for fracking, the film-maker Josh Fox went to meet other people whose land had been used this way.
The result -- the film Gasland -- was nominated for an Oscar. He started in a small town called Dimock, on the border between Pennsylvania and New York state. They had over 40 gas wells that used fracking -- and after it began, the community there started to notice something odd. Their water caught fire. Literally. When it came out of the tap, the water smelled of gas -- and when it got anywhere near a flame, it combusted.
In addition to fizzing and bubbling with gas, the water tasted metallic and looked brown. Pat Farnelli, a local woman, explained: "Everyone was sick, including me. Our stomachs were really playing up -- we couldn't handle anything." Fox's film argues that only half of the waste water that goes into the ground comes back up.
A report by senior Democrats in the House of Representatives last week found that this waste water contains at least 29 chemicals that are known to cause or strongly suspected of causing cancer, including methanol, benzene, sulfuric acid and lead. None of this biodegrades. When the fracking companies came and assured the residents of Dimock the water was perfectly safe, they said they should try drinking a glass -- and the company men refused.
Fracking has also been shown in the US to contaminate the air. Fox's film went to the town of Dish in Texas, where large chemical clouds sometimes form over the gas wells. The town's mayor, Calvin Tillman, said that when the clouds form, "most of the people in this community think they've just taken their last breath". He commissioned an independent scientific analysis of the clouds -- and it found "amazing and very high levels of known and suspected human carcinogens and neurotoxins", including one carcinogen that was at 107 times the safe level. The film-makers asked the companies involved to comment on all these allegations and they declined to do so.
The chemicals that have been found in the fracking waste include glycol ethers. Its known effects on humans include testicular toxicity, malformation of embryos, bone marrow depression, and destruction of red blood cells. Dr Theo Colborn, who has been named Time magazine's environmental hero of the year, warns: "The workmen are inhaling these chemicals round the clock, 24/7."
But this isn't the worst thing about fracking. More than any other popular fuel source, shale gas destabilizes our planet's climate -- driving catastrophic warming, sea-level rise, and increased extreme weather. Until recently, it was thought that this natural gas was "cleaner" than other fossil fuels when it came to global warming.
But a bombshell study by three professors at Cornell University, published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change last month, found that the process of fracking releases so much methane -- one of the most potent warming gases -- that it could be as much as 43 per cent worse than coal. (The US fracking companies are refusing to co-operate, so the authors stress it's hard to be absolutely precise with figures.) The early green champions of shale gas have, in light of this evidence, recanted.
Everybody involved in the study of the downside of fracking stresses that it is at an early stage in its investigations. This is not a totally settled view, in the way that (say) the evidence for man-made global warming is accepted by virtually all scientists. But all this suggests there are very significant environmental risks that should make us think twice before rushing in.
The company engaging in fracking off the coast of Blackpool, Cuadrilla Resources, seems to believe there is no danger at all to the public. Its chief executive Mark Miller told MPs at the Energy and Climate Change Committee: "We're not really using unconventional technology. Shale gas exploration techniques, including hydraulic fracture, are conventional and have been used across the oil and gas industry for many decades. It is the reservoir source in which the gas is found that is unconventional."
He said it would be "near impossible" for any leak to occur, but then added that, if it did happen, it could be fixed within three to five days. Yet even the sober Financial Timesquotes an analyst warning there is a "Toyota-sized reputational risk" associated with potential pollution from shale gas. Two days ago, France announced a ban on fracking, saying it is unacceptably dangerous.
So why is Cameron doing this? The easy, safe sources of fossil fuels have all been burned up by now. The ones that remain are in dangerous places -- whether it's the soil beneath Libya, or rock that has to be dissolved with a potentially carcinogenic cocktail off the coast of Blackpool. The flaws of nuclear power have also been horribly exposed in Japan. That's why the US is expected to depend on shale gas for 45 per cent of its energy needs by 2035, with Britain trailing obediently behind -- a terrifying prospect for the climate.
It doesn't have to be this way. Britain could instead be leading the world in showing how an advanced society can be powered by the awesome force of renewables -- the wind, the waves and the sun. These are job-intensive industries that will dominate the 21st century, as the fossil fuels run out and throttle humanity. We could have the head-start on a better path, and become the global experts. Instead, we are bombing and drilling for the dirtiest fuels.
You might remember that David Cameron added a wind turbine to his house before the election. I warned then that it was a PR gesture -- the Tory leader had dismissed wind turbines as "giant bird-blenders" only a few years before. But I didn't see quite how cynical it was. If Cameron had wanted to alert the public to what he would really do on the environment in office, he should have bombed his house to get cheaper oil -- and then slathered a cocktail of chemical-sludge into the ground in the hope of hitting gas.
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101]]>Can We Now Learn the Real Lesson of Bin Laden's Death?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8583802011-05-05T22:00:50-04:002011-07-05T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/
We know which Osama bin Laden preferred. He wanted to draw the West into endless bloody wars that hemorrhaged billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. He told his supporters: "We conducted a war of attrition against Russia for 10 years until they went bankrupt. We are continuing in the same policy -- to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy." To achieve this, "all we have to do is send two mujahideen [to a remote, irrelevant area] and raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qa'ida' in order to make the [US] generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses." He knew that every ramped-up attack would appear to vindicate his narrative about the "evil" West waging "war on Islam" and swell his army of recruits.
When bin Laden's favorite son, Omar, defected, he told many unflattering stories about his father -- including that he tortured his pets to death. So it's highly unlikely to be a double bluff when he explained that the day George W. Bush was elected, "my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs -- one who will attack and spend money and break [his own] country."
The West reacted to 9/11 by giving bin Laden precisely what he wanted. We tossed aside our best values, making them look like a hollow charade. And every time we did it more, the number of jihadis grew. The detailed studies by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank have found that the invasion of Iraq, and the torture used there, caused a seven-fold increase in jihadism globally.
Yet last weekend, we saw how it might have been. The operation wasn't perfect: I would much rather bin Laden had been taken alive and put on trial, rather than summarily executed. But it was a precise raid. It took real risks to minimize the deaths of civilians. It didn't use torture. Most people in the world can support an action like this. This should have been the primary -- and almost certainly sole -- use of violence in response to 9/11. Instead, over a million people have died in the torrent of aggression. They were just as innocent as the civilians in the World Trade Center, and their families will never get their day dancing in the streets in vengeance over the men who ordered it.
I wish I could say that this is the contrast between Bush and Obama -- but that wouldn't be honest. This raid was an anomalous moment in Obama's foreign policy. Most of the time it has been a clear continuation of Bush's -- and in several crucial areas, a ramping up of it. He has doubled the troops in Afghanistan. He has more than trebled the aerial bombardment of Pakistan and Yemen, even though it kills 50 civilians for every alleged jihadi -- and creates far more jihadis in the process. There is still no end in sight in Iraq -- where 50,000 U.S. troops remain, and Obama has canceled the deadline for bringing them home -- or in Afghanistan, where the war is entering its tenth year. Osama bin Laden is dead, but our foreign policy is still giving him what he wanted. We are still bleeding cash, creating bleeding countries and more enraged people.
Why? Even General David Petraeus, the new head of the CIA, says there are only 100 al Qaeda fighters in the whole of Afghanistan. One senior military official, speaking to the Washington Post, compared their intelligence on them to "Bigfoot sightings." Crunch the numbers, which the conservative writer George Will reported recently, and you find we are spending $1.5bn a year on each al Qaeda fighter in Afghanistan. Is there anyone alive, except the private defense contractors making a fortune, who thinks that is a sensible use of cash?
The angry, fighting people who really are in Afghanistan are -- according to leaked CIA reports -- simply "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power". They have "no goals" beyond Afghanistan's borders. It's not hard to see why they fight. The situation in Afghanistan is now so dire that even the president installed as a puppet by the U.S., former oil-man Hamid Karzai, has been reduced to begging the occupying forces: "Stop bombarding Afghan villages and searching Afghan people!" while publicly threatening to "join the Taliban."
The fear that the country will become a hive of "jihadi training camps" after a withdrawal is based on a basic fallacy. First, they don't need training camps. The 9/11 attacks were plotted in Hamburg and Florida using box-cutters. The 7/7 attacks were plotted in Yorkshire. Bin Laden was living in a mansion. Second, there will always be somewhere in the world to set up training camps -- from Somalia to Yemen to Pakistan. The logic of this position is to invade and indefinitely occupy all the world's most dangerous places -- bin Laden's plan to the letter.
Many people are angrily asking whether the Pakistani authorities knew about bin Laden's presence. But few people are asking how our governments' actions may have made this more likely. For the past three years, the U.S. -- with the support of her allies -- has been sending unmanned robot-planes swooping over the country, incinerating thousands of civilians and increasing jihadism. When the country experienced its worst floods in living memory, it was used as a pretext to increase the bombings. If that was happening in your country, would you be more or less likely to cooperate with the people attacking you?
If we want to be able to dump bin Ladenism at sea, rather than just his corpse, we need to stop pursuing the strategy of expensive aggression he longed for. For the past decade, right-wingers have been chest-thumping about being tough on jihadism, while promoting policies that create far more jihadis. It's like bragging about how much you hate lung cancer while demanding everybody smoke forty cigarettes a day.
If you really hate jihadism -- as I do -- then you need to search for the policies that actually undermine it. The single most important thing we can do to undercut the jihadis is to make a key structural change in our societies -- by breaking our addiction to oil. Today, we need the petrol from the Middle East to keep the wheels of our civilization turning -- and that sets up an inevitably conflict. The people of the Middle East want to control their own oil, and spend the revenues on their own societies. We want to control the oil for ourselves. Only one can prevail. For our governments to win, they have to support the suppression of the Middle Eastern peoples, no matter how inspiring their democratic revolutions, and instead arm and fund their vilest tyrants, like the Saud crime family. This is going to create shards of violent hatred of us for as long as the policy continues.
As soon as the news of bin Laden's death broke, I headed to Times Square here in New York, and witnessed a scene that hinted at these complexities. A 28-year-old man was darting through the cheering crowds and the weeping fire-fighters selling the Stars and Stripes for $25 each. He was an Afghan refugee named Awal. He told me -- in fractured English -- that he had left "because of the war," which was "very bad", but he loved America "because here you are free." A drunk guy who was standing nearby overheard us and yelled with a smirk: "I'm a marine. I probably killed your cousin!" A few people sniggered; more scowled. Later, some of the crowd began to chant about the troops: "Bring them home! Bring them home!"
Who does al Qaeda really fear in this scene? If we follow the marine's course --- of more callousness and aggression and racist contempt -- the remaining scraps of al Qaeda may yet revive with new rage-recruits. If we follow the path of returning to sanity, they will wither. Bin Laden knew that. We know that. Now that he is gone, will we finally stop playing into his cold, dead hands?
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
]]>From the Crack Dens of Miami to the Royal Shakespeare Company: An Interview With Tarell Alvin McCraneytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8578462011-05-05T10:54:46-04:002011-07-05T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/
Most people, when they look at his plays, gawp at the parade of identities that seem to march through McCraney's mind. He's a black gay intellectual from the hood whose plays are a mash-up of everything from Nigerian myth to English social comedy to macho Miami hip-hop to New York drag queens. His latest play, 'American Trade', is, he says, "the story of an American hustler who comes to set up shop in London -- and the hilarity that ensues." He has explained in the past that "my plays are about what people use to build a life on when they don't have many options". Is the hustler at the heart of this play, Pharus, chancing and charming through life from lucky break to lucky break, like him?
When I ask, he smiles, but it's a small smile, looking to the side. The he says carefully: "Pharus is somebody trying to avoid attachments -- to stay naked of all the things in life that accumulate around you. I grew up in a situation where I knew not to hold anything too hard, because nothing is really yours. You have to try to be yourself, your vulnerable self, without making any attachments or any expectations.... The more we attach onto those things the more they disappoint us."
It's not hard to trace why he feels this way. His mother had him when she was very young, and crashed into crack addiction soon after. "I spent so long trying to be a child but not being able to," he says. "I stopped being a child in a way. I spent a great deal of time just banging my head against the wall and, y'know, crying a lot. I used to literally cry at school. I used to literally sit and cover my head and cry."
But when he turned eleven, it stopped. "I really had gone into this much more self-sustaining mode. I wasn't really thinking about things that children think about. Clothes. At 13, never thought 'Oh yeah, I'll wear this and it'll look nice and then I'll go to the movies tonight and it'll be cool'. I didn't think about those things. I just thought -- 'work hard', 'work harder', 'these are the next steps you've got to get to', 'you've got a long way to go, buddy'. You know? Those were the kinds of conversations I was having with myself at the time."
Tarell was thirteen when he found out his mother was HIV positive. "It started a clock in my head," he says. "I think that was the hardest thing about our relationship after that. I always had a clock, going 'Gonna get you. Gonna get you. Any day now'." We talk about his mother for a long time, and it strikes me that there is no anger in anything he says. I ask why, and he says quietly: "No. Why would I be?... Is there a reason I should be?" It sounds like a genuine question. So I say that I have been close to an addict in my life, and while I felt compassion, I also felt rage -- at the futility, at the selfishness.
He looks down. "You really think she was that fully conscious of those choices? When you talk about addicts you've known, even now, that breaks my heart." His eyes well up. "I don't think for a second she thought 'I don't want to take care of my child'. I think she really wanted to. I've seen drug addiction, I've seen people who get addicted to drugs and rarely have I seen a person who was vindictively doing drugs. Very rarely."
He looks straight at me, and smiles again, gently. "It's hard for me to keep that kind of anger because I can see what my mother was wrestling with. I mean -- people can call it excuses. My mother was molested as a child, she could never tell anybody she was molested by someone very close to her own mother. A hurricane came and destroyed our whole entire home. She lost my stepfather, who was shot and killed by drug dealers. Other drug dealers. You know, I can't be angry at that woman for trying to find a semblance of joy. Maybe it wasn't what we think of as the right way. But she was just trying."
He thinks he too would have been on a path to self-destruction, if he hadn't got involved in a street theatre project for the children of drug addicts. They uncovered his startling talent -- and it rocket-fired him through Princeton to working with Peter Brook in Paris and now at the RSC.
There is, he says, some psychological whip-lash: "I have never been into a place where I could be absolutely my whole self all the time. If you know a way to do it, I would love to hear the way to do it. But I don't think that's possible. I don't think there are places where we can be all of our greedy selfish selves at all moments, all the time. It just doesn't work like that."
Tarell looks intently and says: "I love the ability of a person to flip between identities and to play with them. For me, identity isn't a conflict -- it's a range of games for me to play with myself to survive. We all have a voice we would call a double consciousness. There's the way I speak with my friends back home, which isn't the way I speak now. At some point you are told you have to be one or the other. But I just say -- to hell with that."
But sometimes, these identities do collide. He grew up loving hip-hop and reggae, but also being startled at its constant annihilatory rage against "faggots." In 'American Trade,' a congressman launches an investigation into homophobia in this music. I him ask about this, and Tarell instantly remembers when he first heard the reggae hits 'Boom Bah Bah To the Batty Boy' and 'Burn De Chi Chi man.' "That is saying, 'I'm going to shoot a gay man in the head', 'Burn the Chi Chi Man Down.' These were the songs that were ringing down my block. And people were dancing to it and screaming to it and jumping up and down. Those cries, that shouting and celebrating... I mean, the day I heard that song in my neighbourhood, I had to be like 11-years-old. It came on the radio and I stopped where I was and went back in the house. It scared me so much, I almost cried. But I couldn't cry but I thought that maybe someone would know I was gay."
It's unthinkable, he says, that we would passively tolerate music that incited hatred against black people in this way. "I get very angry about this," he says. "Buhu Banton just went to jail. People are going 'Free Buju Banton!' He's such a beautiful, wise man. Yeah, who wants to burn gay people and blow up their heads."
And then he apologizes for getting angry, sweetly, with offers of another of his full smiles. He's like a whirring empathy-machine, constantly trying to soothe and charm and woo the people around him: at the end of the interview, I see him doing it with everybody else in the offices too. Meeting Tarell is like drinking a cool alcoholic drink on hot, stormy day -- it's soothing and intense and anxiety-making all at once, and leaves you feeling a little woozy.
As the interview ends and I am about to leave, he brings up the theatre program that found him on the streets of Miami. "It changed my life, and without that I don't think I'd be here. I might not be alive," he says, delicately. "We talked about my mother. But she found her way, and I found this, I found writing. But, damn, there but for the grace of God..." And he pauses, stares at the bust of Shakespeare, and smiles once more, this time to himself.
To buy tickets for American Trade, click here. This article also appeared in the London Evening Standard. You can read more of Johann's interviews at his website. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
]]>Donald Trump Has Revealed the Truth About the Republican Partytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8552782011-04-28T23:04:33-04:002011-06-28T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" -- but that wasn't enough. So they found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay," and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. A survey suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why.
Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past thirty-five years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The U.S. must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W. Bush.
The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice -- pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally) -- even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."
The Republican primary voters heard the message right -- the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump responded to these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself -- and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Clay Johnson studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he was actually worth -$600m. That is, he owed $600m more than he owned. You and I were worth more than him.
Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 percent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnson studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump -- and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.
How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the House slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this -- he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.
The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world-view either doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the U.S. will have to extend its debt ceiling -- the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow - or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart."
Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show 'The Apprentice', and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.'... It's so easy. It's all about the messenger." It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was told they have some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, OK?"
This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics." It's named after the DC comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence -- and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America -- or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.
Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but it won't be because most Republicans reject his premises. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the underlying whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly.
In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember -- it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s -- and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'
The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition -- but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 percent of Americans much more than he really is.
The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzsheanism, dedicating to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running -- but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.]]>Workers Will Die Without Health and Safety Inspectionstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8543462011-04-27T11:36:38-04:002011-06-27T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/
Mark was a 37-year-old man with two young children who worked all his life, in whatever jobs he could find, no matter how tough. By 2005, he was working in a scrapyard near Chester run by a company called Deeside Metal Company Ltd, clearing through your detritus and mine. But the job was making him anxious. He had to take eight weeks off work with severe breathing difficulties, which he suspected came from inhaling toxic fumes. Then one day, a car that was due to be crushed burst into flames, and he only just dodged the explosion.
A week later, he was ordered to pour 3,500 small air freshener canisters into a mechanical crusher. He was told they were empty - simply because the haulier who handed them over, unmarked and undocumented, had said so. The managing director, Andrew Graham, later said at the inquest - according to those present - that he didn't carry out the written risk assessments required by law because he regarded his staff as "illiterate."
In fact, the canisters weren't empty. They were full of highly combustible propellant. So when Mark put them into the crusher, a massive fireball erupted - and he inhaled burning gases that set fire to 90 per cent of his body. Mark's mother, Dorothy, says she is haunted by "the vision of my son engulfed in flames, the most terrifying and painful of deaths imaginable." His young daughter still sleeps cuddling his T-shirt in her bed every night.
A month later, the police came to visit Mark's family - not to hear their side of the story, but because Deeside Metal had complained that Dorothy was "criminally harassing" them by pinning flowers and cards to the railings where Mark died. Initially, the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to press charges against anyone who had worked at the site. Four years later, it changed its mind after taking a crucial witness statement - but a judge ruled it was too late. The CPS apologized to Mark's family for its incompetence. Eventually, there were fines for causing the death: operations director Robert Roberts had to pay £10,000 - and he's appealing against it. Dorothy was so radicalized by what she feels to be the lack of justice she set up the organization Families Against Corporate Killers.
We know what prevents events like this, and what saves men like Mark. The evidence is plain, and overwhelming. Dr. Courtney Davis at the University of Sussex produced the most detailed study. She found that where you have rigorous, unannounced health and safety inspections, the number of accidents and deaths falls by 22 percent over the next three years.
But David Cameron has decided to do precisely the opposite. He is cutting the budget for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) by 35 percent, and it has been announced that from now on entire sectors of British industry - including some where the HSE admits the dangers are "significant" - will never get an unannounced knock on the door again. There will be no more proactive inspections of agriculture, quarrying, manufacturing, or paper mills, where there is a long history of people being crushed, and even the most high-risk areas will be checked much less.
Virtually every public health expert in Britain says this makes it a certainty more people will be maimed and killed simply doing their job. Professor Rory O'Neill of Stirling University calls Cameron's policies "a recipe for regulatory surrender," and points out that "places where you might be run down by a forklift truck or have your hand sliced off by a cutting machine or a guillotine" will now "never see a Health and Safety inspector. But worse than that, your employer will know they will never see a Health and Safety Inspector." The Government has even canceled the campaigns to inform construction workers about the dangers of being exposed to asbestos.
Why would Cameron do this? There are several reasons. The first is that he is happily responding to a sophisticated and persistent misinformation campaign, where the words "Health and Safety" have been turned into curse-words by the right. Every day, the newspapers feature false claims of practices that are being "banned by Health and Safety." The HSE then quietly and politely explains on their website that no, they are not banning Pin the Tail on the Donkey, or conkers, or candyfloss, or flip flops, or pancake races. Investigate the "outrageous" stories of perfectly reasonable people being "shut down" by "Health and Safety Nazis," and you invariably find they are false. But it's a clever way of turning people against their own protectors and their own interests - of training them to hate the people that will save their lives.
The originator of this media myth is a professional troll called Richard Littlejohn. He is the journalist who pioneered this campaign against Health and Safety based at his mansion in Florida. So it's worth bearing in mind what his alternative vision for British workers is. After a series of horrific deaths in Chinese factories last year, he lamented that in Britain "Elf and Safety would have closed the plant" to "issue hard-hats and hi-viz protective clothing." The Chinese have a better way for us to follow: "They have rigged up giant nets to stop workers jumping to their deaths. Back of the net!"
Cameron and his Republican counterparts in the US claim that it "saves money" to cut Health and Safety. The opposite is the case. When one of us is needlessly injured at work, we - the taxpayer - have to pay for their health care and their benefits, often for the rest of their lives. Even if the wrecked life didn't matter to you, this costs more than the original inspections. A May 2006 UK government study found that the cost of cancer alone acquired through dangerous work practices is £3-12 billion a year - and that leaves out asbestos cancers. The entire annual budget of the HSE, by comparison, is £230 million.
Who pays for the sickness and injury that results from that gap? You do. A recent study for the academic journal Thorax investigated who pays for sicknesses resulting from your job. The ill individual pays 49 per cent, the state pays 48 per cent, and the employer who is actually responsible it pays three per cent. The same applies in the US. The idea we can't afford health and safety is absurd - we can't afford not to do it.
So this isn't a way of saving money. No: it's a way of shifting the cost - from the wealthy businesses who fund David Cameron's election campaigns to individuals like us. He's now adopting the George W. Bush model of silent deregulation: keep the laws on the books, but stop anybody from enforcing them - to please your paymasters, and feed your own ideological opposition to regulation.
The assault on trade unions led by Scott Walker in Wisconsin is an attempt to prevent anybody being left to make this case. It is an attempt to deal a death-blow to the unions.
Of course, businesses claim that any form of regulation dents their profits and so prevents them from creating jobs. This was their argument against every advance in safety that has pulled us out of the Dark Satanic Mills. Their claims rarely stand up. In 1974, the US banned vinyl chloride, whose resins cause liver cancer. Manufacturers howled that it would cost $90 billion and result in giant lay-offs of workers. A decade later, even a report for the Reagan administration admitted it had slashed rates of liver cancer, cost only $300 million to implement, and resulted in no job losses whatsoever.
Far from being zealous, our safety rules in Britain and the US are pretty basic. They're things like - if you're going to be moving five tons of steel on a crane, there needs to be a banksman acting as a lookout, so you don't crush anybody. Is that political correctness gone mad? Yet far fewer people will be checking it happens from here on in.
This hate-campaign against basic safety protections lays bare the fake populism of the right. They are always claiming to be standing up for the ordinary working man, but in truth they only ever "defend" him from powerless "threats," such as benefit recipients, immigrants or gypsies.
Here's a real threat to ordinary working men - and the right in both Britain and the US is cheerleading the moves that will result in many more of them being crippled or killed, for the sake of slightly swollen profits for the already-rich.
Remember the story of Mark Wright. You'll be hearing more like it, and soon.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.]]>Don't Be Fooled, Many Brits Will Cringe at the Royal Wedding Frenzytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8494182011-04-14T17:32:54-04:002011-06-14T05:12:01-04:00Johann Harihttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/
Of course, when two people get married, it's a sweet sight. Nobody objects to that part. On the contrary: republicans are the only people who would let William Windsor and Kate Middleton have the private, personal wedding they clearly crave, instead of turning them into stressed-out, emptied-out marionettes of monarchy that are about to jerk across the stage. We object not to a wedding, but to the orgy of deference, snobbery, and worship for the hereditary principle that will take place before, during and after it.
In most countries in the world, parents can tell their kids that if they work hard and do everything right, they could grow up to be the head of state and the symbol of their nation. Not us. Our head of state is decided by one factor, and one factor alone: did he pass through the womb of one particular aristocratic Windsor woman living in a golden palace? The American head of state grew up with a mother on food stamps. The British head of state grew up with a mother on postage stamps. Is that a contrast that should fill Brits with pride?
No, it's not the biggest problem we have. But it does have a subtly deforming effect on Britain's character that the ultimate symbol of our country -- our sovereign -- is picked on the most snobbish criteria of all: darling, do you know who his father was? Kids in Britain grow up knowing that we all bow and curtsey in front of a person simply because of their unearned, uninteresting bloodline. This snobbery then subtly soaks out through the society, tweaking us to be deferential to unearned and talentless wealth, simply because it's there. And it shapes the way the world sees us, as if we were the ancient lifeless mosquito preserved in aspic at the start of Jurassic Park.
We live with a weird cognitive dissonance in Britain. We are always saying we should be a meritocracy, but we shriek in horror at the idea that we should pick our head of state on the basis of merit. Earlier this month, David Cameron in an interview lamented that too many people in Britain get ahead simply because of who their parents are, and said it was a scandal. A few minutes later, without missing a beat, he praised the monarchy as the best of Britain. Nobody laughed.
Most monarchists try to get around this dissonance by creating -- through sheer force of will -- the illusion that the Windsor family really is steeped in merit, and better than the rest of us. This is a theory that falls apart the moment you actually hear Charles Windsor speak.
They then create a directory of fictitious claims to prop up this semi-religious belief in monarchy. We are told that the Windsor family is great for tourism. In fact, of the top twenty tourist attractions in Britain, only one is related to the monarchy - Windsor Castle, at number seventeen. Ten places ahead is Windsor Lego-Land, so using that logic, we should make a Lego-Man our head of state.
Then we are told the monarchy is a "great defender of democracy." As a logical proposition, this is almost self-refuting: to protect our democracy, we must refuse to democratically choose our head of state. But more importantly, for people who talk a lot about "respecting" our history, this is startlingly historically illiterate. As several distinguished biographers have demonstrated, the last monarch but one -- Edward VIII -- literally conspired with Adolf Hitler to run this country as a Nazi colony. It's only pure luck that he happened to have fallen in love with an American divorcee and had already quit the throne. That's the point about monarchy: you get whatever happens to squelch out of the royal womb. It might be a democrat, or it might -- as it was two monarchs ago -- be a vain and vicious enemy of democracy. To suggest it will dependably and always be one or the other is daft.
We have also invented a strange series of mental tics to protect the monarchy. Mention a republic and lots of people give the Pavlovian snap-back: "Hah! So you want President Thatcher do you? President Blair?" There is an odd assumption behind this. Did the presence of a hereditary monarch stop Thatcher or Blair doing anything they wanted to do? No. Nothing. Did it even stop them acquiring regal airs? No. Obviously not. This is simply an instinctive spasm of deference -- don't trust us with picking the leaders! Make sure there's an aristocrat watching over us, stopping us getting funny ideas! How have these notions lingered in our national DNA for so long?
Deep down, the impulse to choose our head of state trumps our aristo-deference. A YouGov poll last year found that 64 percent of British people want William and Kate to be next in line for the throne, ditching Charles entirely. So, my fellow Brits, let's think about this. By a clear majority, you want to set aside the hereditary principle, and choose our next head of state. I agree. There's a word for that -- republicanism. If you wanted to elect William Windsor as our President, fine. That's a democratic decision, not a monarchical one.
There's going to be an attempt over the next week to paint republicans as the Grinch, trying to ruin the "big day" for William and Kate out of a cocktail of kill-joy curmudgeonry and mean-spiritedness. The opposite is the truth.
The monarchist spin-machine, the tabloids and the tea-towel industry have created a pair of fictitious characters for us to cheer -- while the real people behind them are being tormented by their supposed fans. Think back to the 1981 royal wedding and you realize how little we know about these people we are supposed to get moist and weepy over. While millions of people wept at the "fairytale wedding", Diana was ramming her fingers down her throat, Charles was cursing that he didn't love her, and they both stood at the aisle raging against their situation and everyone around them while the nation cheered.
Similarly, from beneath the spin, the evidence is overwhelming that William and Kate don't want to be there and will be smiling at us through gritted teeth. We now know from several impeccable sources that for a long time as a young man, William raged against the monarchy and wanted no part of it. He once screamed at photographers: "Why won't you just let me be a normal person?" Alistair Campbell's diaries show that William is "consumed by a total hatred of the media", who he believes -- pretty accurately - ruined his mother's life and contributed to her death. This hasn't faded: he jibed in his most recent interview that he always aims to "outfox the media." But he knows the monarchy today a rolling media road-show selling nothing but itself. That's why, in her last interview with the BBC's royal correspondent Jennie Bond, Diana said William had told her longingly that she was "very lucky to be able to give up your HRH" -- her royal status.
Republicans want to set this couple free to have good, happy lives in the Republic of Britain -- which they would clearly take as a blessed relief.
When we republicans object to the hollow pantomime of the next week, we are not being negative or nasty. We are proposing a positive vision. Britain is full of amazing and inspiring people -- so many that if we were to choose a ceremonial President, as they do in Ireland, we would be spoiled for choice. I can't think of anything more patriotic -- and more deserving of a tumult of Union Jacks waving at a thousand street parties -- than the belief that every child in Britain should grow up knowing that one day, they could be our head of state. And I can't think of anything less patriotic than saying that the feudal frenzy of deference and backwardness the world is about to witness is the best that Britain can do.
For updates on this other side of the royal wedding, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.]]>