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OVERTIME--February 2004 issue
timeovertimeovertimeovertimeovertime

Dedicated to reflecting the
collective wisdom of enlightened workers.

Linda Featheringill
4651 West 41st Street, Down
Cleveland, OH 44109
(216) 661-0794

lfeatheringill@hotmail.com

February 2004
Volume 4, Number 9

Greetings! This month’s issue is about driving forces: the craziness in the US government, driven by fundamental religious extremism; ecological threats to human habitats, driven by climate change; and three fine essays on economic forces. We also have some fun stuff in between. Enjoy.-- Linda Featheringill

Tom DeLay

In order to understand some of the things that are going on in the US, you need to know the Congressional Representative for the 22nd district of Texas (just south of Houston). His name is Tom (not Thomas) DeLay. Tom DeLay is the Republican leader of the US Congress.

For us, the importance of DeLay is that (1) he is even more rabidly right-wing than the Bushites; (2) he controls what the House of Representatives does and doesn't do; (3) he has cobbled together a shadowy network of money, lobbying, and grass-roots troops that exerts unrelenting right-wing pressure on the entire Republican agenda (and therefore on the country's agenda); and (4) he intends to be there long after [Bush] is gone.

Tom is eaten up with Christian zealotry, recognizing no separation between his rigid fundamentalist extremism and his powerful public position. He openly declares himself sent by Got to "stand up for a biblical worldview in everything I do and everywhere I am." For him, politics is not a battle over policy, but a "battle of souls." He says that he seeks a "God-centered" nation that, among other things would discriminate against homosexuals, curb contraception, outlaw abortion, end the separation of church and state, and post the Ten Commandments in every school (even though he has violated more than a few of the Ten himself).

He’s also the leading political force in the Christian Zionist movement - a wacky evangelical bunch that is way to the right of the Israeli government on imprisoning, occupying, dominating and ultimately eradicating the Palestinian people. For Tom and his bunch, it’s all a matter of Genesis 13:14-18 and the second coming of Christ: They want the American government to help the Israelis crush the Palestinians now so that, in accordance with biblical prophecy, the Christians can then convert the Jews in turn and proceed on to the Rapture.

He takes a nasty view of humankind. "We are, by nature, greedy and lazy and sinful," he says. So he’s doing us all a favor by taking upon his shoulders the heavy burden of making us better than we really are - especially by freeing us from the hellish grasp of the liberal media, unionists, grass-roots progressive meddlers, anti-corporatists, and of course, Democrats.

Regarding all of the above, he proclaims, "Their malignant hold over the intellectual life in this country must be exorcised."
[From an essay by Jim Hightower, in the Hightower Lowdown, November 2003. The Lowdown is an interesting little publication. You might want to check it out at www.jimhightower.com or you can write to him at 1802 West 6th Street, Austin, Texas 78703, USA.]

I usually do not discuss religion in Overtime. I think it is a private issue. But when people try to force me to conform to their religious convictions, it becomes a public issue. When the same people try to use established government institutions to further their agenda, it becomes a political issue.

There are a lot of religious folks who would never try to force their beliefs on others and conservatives who tolerate disagreement. But the people we have come to call "the Religious Right" have little tolerance and try very hard to force us to share their worldview, with or without our consent.

Tom DeLay is one of those people. Unfortunately, he is not a member of the lunatic fringe. His sanity may be fodder for investigation but he is an important player in the Establishment. He IS one of the powers that be. He is an example of the type of people who control things in the US.

DeLay and his colleagues are affecting the lives of US residents and the lives of folks who live in other places. To understand what is going on in the world, we need to understand the active players in the Religious Right.
[L.F.]

ECOLOGY

The only way we can preserve the earth is to grant every living entity what it needs to thrive and take from it only what it can afford to give.

Arctic warming - the British Isles By Bill McGuire
[NOTE: London is situated at about the same latitude as Newfoundland.]

If you can remember back to the bitter winters of the late 1970s and early 1980s, you might also recall that there was much discussion in scientific circles at the time about whether or not the freezing winter conditions were a portent of a new ice age.

Over the past couple of decades such warnings have been drowned out by the great global warming debate and by consideration of how society might cope in future with a sweltering planet rather than an icebound one. Seemingly, the fact that we are still within an interglacial period, during which the ice has largely retreated to its polar fastnesses, has been forgotten - and replaced with the commonly-held view that one good thing you can say about global warming is that it will at least stave off the return of the glaciers.

Is this really true, or could the rapidly accelerating warming that we are experiencing actually hasten the onset of a new ice age? A growing body of evidence suggests that, at least for the UK and Western Europe, there is a serious risk of this happening - and soon.

The problem lies with the ocean current known as the Gulf Stream, which bathes the UK and northwest Europe in warm water carried northwards from the Caribbean. It is the Gulf Stream and associated currents that allow strawberries to thrive along the Norwegian coast, while at comparable latitudes in Greenland glaciers wind their way right down to sea level. The same currents permit palms to flourish in Cornwall and the Hebrides, whereas across the ocean in Labrador, even temperate vegetation struggles to survive. Without the Gulf Stream, temperatures in the UK and north-west Europe would be five degrees centigrade or so cooler, with bitter winters at least as fierce as those of the so-called Little Ice Age in the 17th to 19th centuries.

The Gulf Stream is part of a more complex system of currents known by a number of different names, of which the rather cumbersome North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Namoc) is probably the most apt. This incorporates not only the Gulf Stream but also the cold return currents that convey water southwards again. As it approaches the Arctic, the Gulf Stream loses heat and part of it heads back to warmer climes along the coast of Greenland and eastern Canada in the form of the cold, iceberg-laden current responsible for the loss of the Titanic. Much, however, overturns - cooling and sinking beneath the Nordic seas between Norway and Greenland, before heading south again deep below the surface.

In the past, the slowing of the Gulf Stream has been intimately linked with dramatic regional cooling. Just 10,000 years ago, during a climatic cold snap known as the Younger Dryas, the current was severely weakened, causing northern European temperatures to fall by as much as 10 degrees. Ten thousand years before that, at the height of the last ice age, when most of the UK was reduced to a frozen wasteland, the Gulf Stream had just two-thirds of the strength it has now.

What's worrying is that for some years now, global climate models have been predicting a future weakening of the Gulf Stream as a consequence of global warming. Such models visualise the disruption of the Namoc, including the Gulf Stream, as a result of large-scale melting of Arctic ice and the consequent pouring of huge volumes of fresh water into the North Atlantic, in a century or two. New data suggest, however, that we may not have to wait centuries, and in fact the whole process may be happening already.

So that the warm, saline surface waters of the Gulf Stream can continue to push northwards, there must be a comparable, deep return current of cold, dense water from the Nordic seas. Disturbingly, this return current seems to have been slowing since the middle of the last century. Bogi Hansen at the Faroese fisheries laboratory, and colleagues in Scotland and Norway, have been monitoring the deep outflow of cold water from the Nordic seas as it passes over the submarine Greenland-Scotland ridge that straddles the North Atlantic at this point. Their results show that the outflow has fallen by 20% since 1950, which suggests a comparable reduced inflow from the Gulf Stream.

Although there is as yet no direct substantiation of this, there are reports of the cooling and freshening of the Norwegian Sea and to temperatures that are already falling in parts of the region as possible evidence of contemporary Gulf Stream weakening.

It also seems that it is not only the intensity of the outflow of cold water that is changing. Bob Dickson of the Centre for Environment, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Science at Lowestoft, and colleagues, have reported a sustained and widespread freshening of returning deep waters south of the Greenland-Scotland ridge, which appears to have been going on for the past three or four decades. Already the freshening is extending along the North American eastern seaboard towards the equator, in the so-called Deep Western Boundary current.

One of the scariest aspects of the current dramatic changes occurring in the system of North Atlantic currents is that the deep, southward-flowing limb of the Namoc can be thought of as representing the headwaters of the worldwide system of ocean currents known as the Global Thermohaline Circulation. The possibility exists, therefore, that a disruption of the Atlantic currents might have implications far beyond a colder UK and northwest Europe, perhaps bringing dramatic climatic changes to the entire planet.

Yet again, this highlights the fact that global warming, for which we have only ourselves to thank, is nothing more nor less than a great planetary experiment, many of the outcomes of which we cannot predict.

Wallace Broecker, an ocean circulation researcher at New York's Lamont-Doherty Earth observatory, described the situation perfectly when he pointed out that "climate is an angry beast and we are poking at it with sticks". Let's hope that when it truly turns on us, its teeth don't match its outrage.
[The Guardian (London), November 13, 2003.]

Arctic warming - the Inuit
By Paul Brown

The Inuit people of Canada and Alaska are launching a human rights case against the Bush administration claiming they face extinction because of global warming. By repudiating the Kyoto protocol and refusing to cut US carbon dioxide emissions, which make up 25% of the world's total, Washington is violating their human rights, the Inuit claim. For their campaign they are inviting the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to visit the Arctic Circle to see the devastation being caused by global warming.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which represents all 155,000 of her people inside the Arctic circle, said: "We want to show that we are not powerless victims. These are drastic times for our people and require drastic measures."

The human rights case was announced at the climate talks in Milan, Italy, where 140 countries are trying to put the finishing touches to the Kyoto protocol, the first international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. The backing of Russia, which is hesitating about ratifying the agreement, is required to bring the protocol into force. The US is trying to persuade the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, not to sign the protocol.

The Inuit have no voice at the conference, since they are not a nation state, but Mrs. Watt-Cloutier said: "We are already bearing the brunt of climate change - without our snow and ice our way of life goes. We have lived in harmony with our surroundings for millennia, but that is being taken away from us.

"People worry about the polar bear becoming extinct by 2070 because there will be no ice from which they can hunt seals, but the Inuit face extinction for the same reason and at the same time. This a David and Goliath story. Most people have lost contact with the natural world. They even think global warming has benefits, like wearing a T-shirt in November, but we know the planet is melting and with it our vibrant culture, our way of life. We are an endangered species, too."

Mrs. Watt-Cloutier comes from Pangirtung, north of Iqaluit, in Canada. The entire area should already be ice-bound, and winter hunting would normally have begun, but in Frobisher Bay, the home of both polar bears and Inuit, the water is still clear. "We now have weeks of uncertainty about when the ice will come," she said. "In the spring the ice melts not at the end of June but weeks earlier. Sometimes the ice is so thin hunters fall through. The ocean is too warm. Our elders, who instruct the young on the ways of the winter and what to expect, are at a loss. Last Christmas after the ice had formed the temperature rose to 4C [39F] and it rained. We'd never known it before."

Among the problems the Inuit face is permafrost melting, which has destroyed the foundations of houses, eroded the seashore and forced people to move inland. Airport runways, roads and harbours are also collapsing. The Washington-based commission, which is the Americas' equivalent of the European court of human rights, will be asked to rule against the US government but has no power to enforce any action. However, the Inuit believe the publicity the case will provide, particularly with hearings in Washington, will embarrass George Bush's government and educate US public opinion about the consequences of profligate ways of living.

"Europeans understand this issue but in America the public know little or nothing and politicians are in denial," Mrs. Watt-Cloutier said. "We are hunters and we are trained to go for the heart. The heart of the problem is in Washington."

She hoped that by winning the case Inuit would win a voice at climate talks. "The Inuit people see me as one of the leaders, with the same status as the ministers here. As a nation we are badly affected by climate change, but in these negotiations we have no voice. We intend to get one so our representative can sit round the table with other ministers and demand action to save our people."

Arctic dwellers
By Alan Power

Inuit means "the people" and is the generic name given to indigenous people of the Arctic. Though the word "eskimo", meaning "eaters of raw meat", is still used to described Inuit, it is generally considered derogatory. Inuit populations include Canadian Inuit, Alaska's Inupiat and Yupik people, and the Russian Yupik. They are descendants of the Thule people who arrived in Alaska about AD500 and reached Canada in 1000. Alaskan Inuit now live mainly in the North Slope boroughs and the Bering Straits region.

The Inuit rely heavily on subsistence fishing and hunting whales, walruses and seals. The arrival of Europeans damaged the traditional Inuit way of life and since the 1970s their leaders have been campaigning for greater rights and asserting their territorial claims. In more recent times, they have banded together to fight against environmental damage to their homelands.

[Both articles from The Guardian (London), December 11, 2003. Contributed by P.E.N., Colchester, England, UK.]

This and that

Arab contributions to Western culture

In Granada in the province of Andalucia, Spain, we can see some of the most beautiful architecture in Europe. Arab architecture. And it is not only in Spain that Arab architecture has left a European mark. The pointed arch, so eagerly adopted by medieval builders and known today as gothic, was an idea copied from the east, and brought to the west by the early crusaders. And while those religiously crazed bigots were burning and slaughtering in the holy land, Arab poets, mathematicians, astronomers, philosophers and scientists were advancing human civilisation to unprecedented peaks of sophistication.

The Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, which flourished for half a millennium from about AD750, was arguably the most dazzling of regimes the world had seen up to that date. Arab scholars picked up from where the Greek ancients had stopped centuries earlier, and extended human understanding in virtually every field. As every schoolboy knows, the mathematical concept of zero was discovered by Arabs, when northern Europeans were still wearing horns on their helmets. In fact, as a Guardian reader pointed out this week, every schoolboy is probably wrong: the zero idea almost certainly came from India, but, crucially, it was first written down by an Arab.

Writing is a key part of the Arab nation's bequest to the world. Paper was introduced from China before the end of the first Christian millennium, freeing Arab writers from the costly straitjacket of parchment and papyrus, some 300-400 years before paper reached western Europe. The result was a torrent of poetry and prose, philosophy and scholarship, learning and entertainment. This was the era of The Thousand and One Nights and of vast public libraries. There were astronomical observatories, pharmaceutical laboratories and medical schools. And most of these were flourishing before England's King Alfred was born.

More poetry than prose is published in Arabic today. The visual arts are vibrant. Music, both popular and traditional, is flourishing. Calligraphy, that most elegant of arts, continues to fascinate users of the flowing Arabic scripts. Arab cuisine - Lebanese mainly, but increasingly Egyptian and other north African - is being belatedly discovered in the west.
[From an article by Derek Brown for The Guardian (London), January 15, 2004.]

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
By Neal Wilgus

"Rummy" Rumsfeld is not the only
Bush crony to visit the oil Mecca
of Kirkuk in Iraq recently. In a secret trip to pay homage to
the center of the northern oil fields
Vicemeister Dick ("Markup") Cheney
was seen bathing in a large tub of
crude oil, heated in the old fashioned
way - with a wood fire.
This was nice, "Markup" allowed,
but it was not all that unusual.
He does it all the time back
in Washington, he said, but there
it’s a regular hot tub or sauna.
The Ba’ath Party, he sighed,
still has a lot to learn about life.

Steelworkers in Miami
[During anti-globalization protests in Miami last November.]

That the people were not cowed was evident at the "Gala for Global Justice" on the evening of Wednesday, November 19. "Another World" was the theme of the event, which featured a program of music and speeches from activists from throughout the Americas.

Representing the US labor movement in the program, Leo Girard (president of the United Steelworkers Union) declared, "We will not let them steal our sovereignty. This is not just about trade but also about investment and privileges for greedy investors and financiers. This fight is a fight for our children and grandchildren."

Girard singled out the contribution of student activists against sweatshops and told the following story that took place earlier in the afternoon:

"On the way to Guzman Park to attend the People’s Forum, we saw a group of students surrounded by cops and searched. And guess what, hundreds of steelworkers surrounded the cops and told them to let the students go. And they did."
[Independent Politics News, Winter 2004.]

Alienation

The news indicates that Mad Cow Disease has been found in the US. It’s a funny old world when cattle are fed dead sheep offal [called "byproducts" in the US], which in turn causes such a disease that is transferred to humans via the food chain. But being that this is a competitive business, no law is broken, although sales are affected.

It is also true that pig meat is fed to sheep and that makes them unfit for the cruelty of live export to Moslem countries. People who protest this practice are swiftly arrested and prosecuted.
[Gogglesworth, West Australia.]

. . . [Man] at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life . . .
[Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism, 1844.]

Both sheep and cows are by nature vegetarian. If left to their own devices, they will not eat meat of any sort. The capitalist system of food production has turned these animals into strange, un-cow-like and un-sheep-like objects - something that is totally different from their true natures. That is alienation; it is a perversion.
[L.F.]

Germany’s dead bodies

The old adage of "dust to dust" apparently no longer applies in German cemeteries. At least 40 of its biggest graveyards are no longer usable because they are full with undecayed bodies. Similar problems have been reported in Austria and Switzerland. Scientists have been drafted in to find out what is going wrong.

In Germany, 650,000 people are buried in coffins each year. For centuries, gravediggers have reopened plots to bury new coffins, expecting that previously buried coffins will have crumbled into the soil with the bodies.

It used to take from 8 to 10 years for this decomposition to take place. But now, in about a third of graves in Germany, it is taking longer and bodies buried 30 or 40 years ago still have not decomposed.

"The natural decomposition processes are being slowed down," Rainer Horn, head of the department of soil culture at Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, said. "We believe that it’s due to lack of important bacteria but we do not know why this is."
[The West Australian, November 17, 2003.]

Living in sin?

Spain's Roman Catholic bishops have never been publicly keen on homosexuality, but now they have provoked outrage by accusing gays of threatening not just the nation's morality but its exchequer as well. In a homily delivered in Madrid's Almudena cathedral, the head of the country's powerful bishops' conference, Cardinal Rouco Varela, has claimed gay marriages would help bring the country's social security system to its knees. The problem, Monseñor Rouco suggested, was that gays were incapable of doing the right thing by making babies, whose future social security contributions might help to cover pensions paid to their bereaved partners.

He warned of the "dramatic consequences" of allowing gay marriages, or giving unmarried couples of any kind the same rights as married couples, by referring to what he saw as the social and moral disintegration of other, unnamed, European countries.

The very fabric of society was under attack, he suggested, if gay couples were given such rights. "By pretending to give the same value to all sorts of couples, including those incapable because of their nature of producing children, as is given to the family, one ends up with systematic institutional destruction of the basic unit of society," the cardinal complained.

Spaniards, especially gays and the one in nine Spanish couples who have not tied the knot at their local church or town hall, could have ignored the opinions of a cardinal already famed for his highly conservative views.

But the support he found in the conservative People's party government of the prime minister, José María Aznar, has added insult to injury. The finance minister, Cristóbal Montoro, expressed his agreement with the cardinal, warning that allowing gay marriages and giving wedded and unwedded couples equal rights would simply create extra costs.

"It endangers the current model of economic growth," he said. "This is not a matter of balancing social rights but a way of destroying jobs."

There are, of course, homosexuals in both the Spanish Roman Catholic church and the ruling People's party. One gay activist has even threatened to out three bishops with whom he claims to have had sex when they were seminary college colleagues.

And it was the People's Gay Platform, a group of homosexuals close to the People's party, which announced that it was to sue the cardinal for "inciting discrimination". Monseñor Rouco, meanwhile, insisted that he had been misinterpreted.

Now the People's party has changed its tune. Candidate Mariano Rajoy aims to repeat the absolute majority enjoyed by the soon-to-retire Mr. Aznar, and is, therefore, promising legislation for unmarried couples. The question is: Do Spanish gays believe him?
[From an article by Giles Tremlett for The Guardian (London), January 14, 2004.]

Suicide in the military

U.S. soldiers in Iraq are killing themselves at a high rate despite the work of special teams sent to help troops deal with combat stress, the Pentagon's top doctor said Wednesday [January 14]. Suicide has become such a pressing issue that the Army sent an assessment team to Iraq late last year to see if anything more could be done to prevent troops from killing themselves. The Army also began offering more counseling to returning troops after several soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., killed their wives and themselves after returning from the war.

Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said the military has documented 21 suicides during 2003 among troops involved in the Iraq war. Eighteen of those were Army soldiers. That's a suicide rate for soldiers in Iraq of about 13.5 per 100,000. In 2002, the Army reported an overall suicide rate of 10.9 per 100,000.

The overall suicide rate in the US as a whole during 2001 was 10.7 per 100,000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Army recorded 102 suicides during 1991 for a rate of 14.4 per 100,000. The Army's highest suicide rate in recent years came in 1993, when the rate was 15.7 per 100,000. There was U.S. military action in Somalia and Haiti that year. The Marine Corps has the military's highest suicide rate. Last year the Marines' rate was 12.6 per 100,000. During 1993, the Marines also had a high rate - 20.9 per 100,000.

The military has nine combat stress teams in Iraq to help treat troops' mental health problems and each division has a psychiatrist, psychologist and social worker, Winkenwerder said.

Of more than 10,000 troops medically evacuated from Iraq, between 300 and 400 were sent outside the country for treatment of mental health problems, he said. The military prefers to treat mental health problems such as depression by keeping troops in their regular duties while they get counseling and possibly medication. Winkenwerder added that less than one percent of the troops in Iraq are treated for mental issues during an average week.
[Matt Kelley, Associated Press, January 14, 2004. Thanks to A.J., Alabama for bringing this article to my attention.]

Economic determinism

Single mothers and poverty

It's not being single that causes women to be poor. It's being poor that makes it less likely they'll marry. Poor women generally don't have a bumper crop of marriage-worthy men to choose from. Most men available to them are either unemployed or employed part time, and they earn little when they do work. It's entirely rational for a poor woman to hedge her bets and tell a male companion he's welcome to stay only so long as he pulls in enough money and behaves well.

Poor unmarried women who have babies often have men living with them. In nearly half of all births out of wedlock, the biological father is living in. But the woman has no reason to marry him unless he's a good breadwinner. Studies show that mothers are far more likely to marry the fathers of their children when the father is employed.

There's no doubt that single-parent poverty is a major problem. But lack of marriage isn't the main culprit. The reason mothers are poor has to do with their lack of education and the lousy jobs they have to settle for. Jobs at the bottom of the income ladder don't pay enough to support a workingwoman and her children. They don't pay enough to support a workingman and his family either. So even if the mother is living and sharing expenses with a workingman who's also at the bottom of the income ladder, they're still likely to be poor. If she's married to him and he doesn't have a job, they're often worse off financially than if the mother is living alone.

The best way to stabilize the American family and improve the odds that children won't be impoverished is to help women -- and men -- get better-paying jobs.
[From an article by Robert Reich for the Washington Post, January 22, 2004.]


Debt

The American people are now carrying 2 trillion dollars of debt. The Bush administration tells us that if we want to be patriotic we should buy more in order to bolster the economy.

That brings to mind the old-fashioned hand water pump. When the packing in the piston started to wear, the pump needed to be primed by pouring water down from the top and vigorously pumping at the same time. The more the packing wore out the more priming the pump needed until finally no amount of priming helped. The only solution was to fix the pump.

When the consumers, what is proper to say, when workers, more than 95 per cent of the population, have expended their take-home-pay and have maxed-out their credit cards, the only solution is to fix the pump.

The exchange of commodities is no longer conducted in hard cash but in paper securities. Experts say, "all boats rise in a rising tide." Yes they do, but our economic boats are floating on paper, not a solid medium of exchange.

To fix the pump, real values must be exchanged. That means that the working class must receive credit for the products that it produces. The working class must have direct access to the products not have to borrow on and on until the debt is sky high. If members of the working class must continue to borrow to buy new products, how are they ever going to be able to pay off the old debt?

The working class is already struggling like an athlete running at full gait, losing his step, leaning forward trying to regain it, and stumbling more and more until he finally crashes to the ground. That is the natural result of an excessive and unceasing, buy-now/pay-later culture.

But the economy is also struggling along like this same hypothetical athlete. Corporations must sell and sell and sell - and that cannot happen unless consumer debt continues to rise, because they must sell more than their workers can afford to buy. If everyone would, at this instant, begin to buy only what they could afford and pay for it immediately, the economy would collapse. That is the catch-22 of advanced capitalism.
[Donald Donaker, Real Union of Social Science, Minnesota, USA.]

Coffee

[Most of the coffee we drink comes from three varieties of beans - Arabian, Liberian, and robusta.]

Coffee is the world’s second most widely traded commodity after oil and provides jobs for millions in some of the world’s poorest countries. But for the vast majority of the world’s 25 million coffee growers, particularly those in the poorest countries of Africa and Central America, the outlook is bleak.

In Central America, the World Bank estimates that 600,000 coffee workers recently lost full-time or temporary jobs, prompting a flight of Guatemalans and Hondurans to Mexico and a separate exodus of Mexican farmers into the US. In Columbia, where coffee revenues have declined by 50% over the last 10 years, many growers are switching to more profitable and less benign crops, like coca - which is processed into cocaine.

Large farms in Brazil, the world’s largest producer and where the industry employees 3 million people, have slashed the work force by as much as 90% through mechanization. Several small- and medium-sized cooperatives cannot afford to buy machinery because prices are so depressed and are on the brink of bankruptcy.

Of the $3.50 or so a shopper in the US pays for a tin of coffee, coffee farmers receive an average of $0.35. The laborers, of course, receive even less.

At the root of the problem is oversupply. The 2001-2002 harvest yielded 115 million sacks of coffee, while coffee drinkers worldwide consumed 105 million sacks, according to data from the International Coffee organization. Also, supply is growing by more than 3% but demand is growing by just a little more than 1%.

Many farmers in Latin America blame Vietnam, which planted more than a million acres of robusta (coffee) beans from 1990 to 2000. Vietnam raised its annual production to 950,000 tons from 84,000 tons, overtaking Colombia as the world’s No. 2 producer and flooding the market with cheap beans.

But Latin America has also increased production. In Brazil for instance, coffee farmers were freed from restrictive quotas after the International Coffee Agreement collapsed in 1989 and doubled robusta production over the last decade to almost 11 million bags by last year.

What is the solution? Oxfam studied the problem and recommended destroying much of the coffee held in warehouses so that prices on new crops would rise. So far, however, no one has volunteered to do this - and the outlook remains as bleak as ever.
[From an article by Tony Smith for New York Times, January 18, 2004.]

Religious extremists, again

In regard to your number 8 Overtime, I am not sure what you mean in suggesting we accept the coming changes "calmly and peacefully." ["Another American century?" January 2004]

Would that include enslavement under a fascist theocracy? Under the current lunatic regime of Bush/Ashcroft/Rumsfeld, extinction of all life on earth is a very real possibility. Mix a little Zionism, fundamentalist religion, and corporate mafia capitalism - and you have the catalyst, the driving force behind just about every major conflict in this world.-- C.E.

Dear C.E.,

I was trying to say that we could give up being the "greatest nation on earth," protected by the "greatest military power on earth," and funded by the "greatest capitalist nation on earth." I wanted to propose the idea that we could live very peaceful lives while living in a quite ordinary country, without trying to be better than everyone else.

Most nations don’t have to wage war constantly in order to survive. Consider Canada - when was the last time that country was invaded? 1812? Mexico hasn’t been invaded recently, either.

You are quite justified in fearing that the US might be burdened with a theocracy. But that threat is coming from within the US, from within our present government. I know you realize this, because you are the person who sent me the information on Tom DeLay.

I would never encourage people to calmly submit to enslavement or fascism or theocracy, let alone the combination of those three horrors. In fact, I urge you to complain, agitate, and protest - to "fight against the dying light."

You are involved in the struggle and that is good. Keep it up.-- Linda Featheringill

Next month: We’d love to know what you think. These are our usual classifications:

-- Open - questions, comments, tirades, etc.
-- RSVP. React to previous statements.
-- The ecology.
-- Clippings from newspapers, etc.

On the Web:

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[Socialism Marx DeLeon for a real union]

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