Jenny’s Pennies

This week marked the five year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. So, this week the Friday Food for Thought is dedicated to that subject. As it is Good Friday (in Swedish called Långfredagen, the long Friday), a day which for many people means reflection and silence, it seems fitting to post this today, even though I am in no way religious.

What you should read:

A war of utter folly, by Hans Blix, head of the UN inspections in Iraq 2003 (the Guardian):

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a tragedy - for Iraq, for the US, for the UN, for truth and human dignity. I can only see one gain: the end of Saddam Hussein, a murderous tyrant. Had the war not finished him he would, in all likelihood, have become another Gadafy or Castro; an oppressor of his own people but no longer a threat to the world. Iraq was on its knees after a decade of sanctions.

The elimination of weapons of mass destruction was the declared main aim of the war. It is improbable that the governments of the alliance could have sold the war to their parliaments on any other grounds. That they believed in the weapons’ existence in the autumn of 2002 is understandable. Why had the Iraqis stopped UN inspectors during the 90s if they had nothing to hide? Responsibility for the war must rest, though, on what those launching it knew by March 2003.

By then, Unmovic inspectors had carried out some 700 inspections at 500 sites without finding prohibited weapons. The contract that George Bush held up before Congress to show that Iraq was purchasing uranium oxide was proved to be a forgery. The allied powers were on thin ice, but they preferred to replace question marks with exclamation marks.

‘We live in a nightmare. Death and carnage is everywhere’ Ali, Baghdad resident (the Guardian):

“I stood there in the middle of it all. I saw people picking bodies up and carrying them. A police car arrived and the police started to fire bullets in the air. I ran away and hid at the entrance of a shop. When a woman saw me, she started screaming. There was blood on my arm and on my leg.” A friend of Ali’s stopped a passing ambulance and helped him into it. Inside, he found a man whose face was black from burns and whose shoulder was covered with blood. A younger man was bleeding from his legs. “When he tried to lift one of them it bent not at the knee but from the middle of his thigh,” Ali says. “He was screaming, ‘Fix my leg! Fix my leg!’ ”

At the hospital, Ali and the others sat in a corridor waiting to be treated by the overstretched medical team. “There were children there who were all red,” he remembers. “It looked as if they had no faces, they were so covered with blood.”

After waiting a while he was transferred to another hospital, where a doctor examined him. “The doctor told me I just had two bits of shrapnel in my arm and leg,” Ali says. “He asked me why I was crying. I told him it wasn’t for myself but for all the boys and girls around me.”

Am I a torturer? (Mother Jones)

When I first set off to interview the rank-and-file guards and interrogators tasked with implementing the administration’s torture guidelines, I thought they’d never talk openly. They would be embarrassed, wracked by guilt, living in silent shame in communities that would ostracize them if they knew of their histories. What I found instead were young men hiding their regrets from neighbors who wanted to celebrate them as war heroes. They seemed relieved to talk with me about things no one else wanted to hear—not just about the acts themselves, but also about the guilt, pain, and anger they felt along with pride and righteousness about their service. They struggled with these things, wanted to make sense of them—even as the nation seemed determined to dismiss the whole matter and move on.

This, perhaps, is the real scandal of Abu Ghraib: In survey after survey, as many as two-thirds of Americans say torture is justified when it’s used to get information from terrorists. In an abc/Washington Post poll in the wake of the 2004 scandal, 60 percent of respondents classified what happened at Abu Ghraib as mere abuse, not torture. And as recently as last year, 68 percent of Americans told Pew Research pollsters that they consider torture an acceptable option when dealing with terrorists.

Critics of the administration’s interrogation policies warn that the ramifications will be felt across the globe, including by Americans unlucky enough to be imprisoned abroad. Foreign-policy scholars fear the fallout from Abu Ghraib has already weakened the U.S. military’s anti-terrorism capabilities. Lawyers warn about war-crime tribunals. But hardly anyone is discussing the repercussions already being felt here at home. It’s the soldiers tying the sandbags around Iraqis’ necks and blaring the foghorns through the night who are experiencing the effects most acutely. And the communities they’re returning to are reeling as a result.

Posting will resume on Tuesday - I’m going to my parents for Easter, no internet access.
Have a good Easter. Peace.

Very interesting product which may help solve some of the problems raised in the previous post!

A Swedish company called Peepoople (cute name!) has developed a self-santizing single use biodegradable toilet - the “peepoo bag”. The concept is simple: you do your business in the bag, seal it, and it will be odourless. The contents of the bag are hygienized within a period of 2-4 weeks by a mix of chemicals which inactivates the dangerous pathogens (i.e. the bacteria which spreads stuff like cholera and dysentery). The bag can be thrown away or the contents used as fertilizer, which makes the bag have economic value and opens up the possibility of small business systems to develop. Trials are on their way in Kibera, a giant shanty-town in Nairobi, Kenya. Very cool innovation and a great idea!

Peepoople website (in English).

(Quote in title from Gil Stern)

Tomorrow, March 22nd is World Water Day. Water is one of those things you often don’t reflect over, if you live like me. It’s just there, when you turn on the faucet. You bathe, wash your clothes, do dishes, water your lawn or plants, flush the toilet… it’s just there. But for about one in six people in the world, getting water is not that easy. Water is one of the most pressing issues when it comes to global environment and climate change, and water shortage and water access disparities can lead to mass migration, epidemics and conflicts in the future.

The world market price for water has never been as high as it is now. To collect, clean and distribute water takes a lot of investments. Before, it was taken for granted that the government would handle the water. Water is, after all, a public good and something that everyone should have the right to. But today, water distribution is increasingly privatized by multinational corporations like Suez, Veolia and RWE, although not to the extent that was believed in the 90s. Today, 5-10 percent of the world’s population buy their water from private companies. Some private corporations even own the rights to the rain falling from the sky. As I said above, it is expensive to collect, clean and distribute water. And I don’t trust private corporations, whose foremost goal is to make profit, will build the infrastructure necessary to distribute water in very arid and poor areas - there is not enough money to be made from that. Therefore local, public, democratic solutions are needed.

In El Salvador, privatization of the water distribution has lead to that many poor people doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. The pipes are there, but the water is not on. Therefore, many have to buy their water from tank trucks, without knowing where the water comes from. A woman who works seven days a week selling vegetables at the market lay up to half of their salary on buying water. Of course, some people can’t afford that, so they are stuck with polluted water from rivers and lakes. The child mortality rate in El Salvador is 30 percent, most of those from water related diseases such as diarrhea. It is estimated that by drinking water, a person in El Salvador consumes one cup of human faeces per year (yes, that is gross, but it’s the reality). Last year, many people demonstrated against the water privatizations, but the demonstrations were brutally cracked down and some participants were accused of terrorism.

In China, a 50 year old dream of Mao’s are now being realized - to build a gigantic pipeline system to lead water from the Yangtzee river in the south to the arid areas in the north. Of course, Beijing needs reliable water supply for the Olympics (to give the Olympics to China seems like a worse and worse idea every day), so villages in the south, who themselves doesn’t have enough water to sustain industries like wheat farming and fishing, are forced to send their water up north. One in four people in China are lacking access to clean water.

Two thirds of the world’s population is expected to run short of clean drinking water by the year 2025! And the thing is, there is really is enough water. Mismanagement, waste, pollution and uneven distribution is the problem, not supply. We in the rich countries can’t keep watering our golf courses or waste liter upon liter doing dishes in running water (I confess to being guilty of that). I’ve been for extended periods in countries with water shortages (Venezuela and Israel), and being able to shower in hot, clean, constantly running water when I got home was a delight. I don’t want to loose that, but then we need to find solutions to the world’s escalating water crises and that probably means giving up some of our unreflecting attitudes towards water usage.

To learn more:
Food and Water Watch
Water Partners International
Vattenportalen (Swedish)
UN Water
Stockholm International Water Institute

Outsourcing is normal in today’s globalized economy. But now the global south are not only offering services such as customer support and low skilled assembly work to their wealthier counterparts. From the New York Times:

An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

Yes, it’s wombs for rent. For about 25.000 US dollars, you get payments for the surrogate mother, medical procedures, plus plane tickets and hotel nights for two trips to India, one for the fertilization and one for collecting the baby. The egg donor and the surrogate are different women, as it is said to be less likely for the surrogate to bond with the baby if there is no genetic connection.

The surrogacy business in India has made a sharp upturn in the last years, and people in the business are afraid that less scrupulous providers will smell the money and leave ethics aside.

The Ministry of Women and Child Development said in February that it was weighing recommending legislation to govern surrogacy, but it is not imminent.

An article published in The Times of India in February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by abject poverty,” it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?”

Some people might argue that we should view this as any business transaction, but I’m not at all comfortable with the idea of viewing reproduction as a commodity, especially when there is such huge power differentials in play.

“Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,” Dr. Kadam said. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”

Mr. Gher agreed. “You cannot ignore the discrepancies between Indian poverty and Western wealth,” he said. “We try our best not to abuse this power. Part of our choice to come here was the idea that there was an opportunity to help someone in India.”

In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signature.

This kind of globalization makes me very uncomfortable, and I think the practice should be examined with a critical eye. That does not mean that we should pass judgment on the persons on either side of the transaction - the couple who can’t conceive for whatever reason (Mr. Gher and his partner who are featured in the article are gay), and the woman who by carrying someone else’s baby can make a lot more money than she would on a normal job.

But there are so many issues here: what if the surrogate changes her mind? What if the couple changes their mind? What if the surrogate mother wants out? In India, this is regulated with contracts, but once again we have to look at the wealth and power differential here. As far as I can tell from quickly researching the subject, in the US, while surrogacy may not be illegal, contracts relating to it have been declared unenforceable. In Sweden, surrogacy is illegal, while in neighboring Finland, it’s legal. However, no money is allowed - the surrogate is doing it for altruistic reasons.

One thing which also makes me uncomfortable about the whole thing is that one reason why Indian surrogates are increasingly popular (besides the relatively cheap costs, good medical professionals and favorable legislation) is that Indian women are easier to “police”. As it says in the article:

Dr. Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic, said that even Americans who could afford to hire surrogates at home were coming to her for women “free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs.” She said she gets about 10 e-mailed inquiries a day from couples abroad.

Just how much say should the couple using the surrogate have to say over what the surrogate mother does to her body? You’re using her womb, yes, but the whole body is affected by the pregnancy, and so is the mind. No drinking, smoking or drugs during pregnancy - perfectly fine and reasonable of course, but what else can you compel the surrogate to do? I think with this international reproductive outsourcing there is more potential for abuse and for using the power/money leverage to make unreasonable demands.

I apologize for not doing this yesterday - I had a migraine that threatened to explode my head. So here, one day late, is my Iraq War Blogswarm 2008 contribution. I really want to write something smart, something new, something that sums it all up. But what can I offer? I have never seen war. I type in the comfort of my warm apartment, with snow glistening in the sunshine outside, my breakfast beside me and my loved ones only a simple phone call away. What can I say that isn’t simply platitudes, that isn’t just a reiteration of what so many have said before me, about the lies, the atrocities, the pain and the suffering. My love is coming home tonight, we’re making easter candy. When night falls, we’ll turn on the lights, run water to make tea and then sleep peacefully knowing that nothing bad will happen to us tonight. Half a world away, people are dying, crying, ripped to pieces by shrapnel, humiliated, debilitated. Half a world away, people are lied to, asked to be cannon fodder, asked to lose their lives and limbs for some grand idea, told they are heroes but treated like trash. What can I say?
——————————
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the hunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes of thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Decriminalization, ending demand, and choice: Feministe interviews the Sex Workers Project
- a very interesting post over at Feministe, where Sienna Baskin of the New York City based organization Sex Workers Project is interviewed. The interview deals with the societal response to prostitution, a question which is very much in the focus in the US right now due to the Spitzer scandal. It also discusses the “Swedish model” i.e. the criminalization of the buyer, not the seller.
Go read!

Sorry about the lack of posts lately (to my approximately two readers); here’s a clue to what I’ve been doing.

So, remember this? Now, the investigation is apparently finished and…

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - A bailiff who forgot about a woman locked in a courthouse holding cell and left her there for four days without food, water or access to a bathroom has been suspended for 30 days but will keep his job, officials said Wednesday.

Washington County Cpl. Jarrod Hankins acted without “intentional misconduct” when he left Adriana Torres-Flores in the 9 1/2-by-10 1/2-foot cell, Sheriff Tim Helder said.

Hankins “became busy and simply forgot” about the woman last Thursday, leaving her in the cell with only a jacket until Monday morning. (full story here)

Yep, that’s right. He’s getting off with a slap on the wrist. No criminal charges, no loss of job. For doing something that could have left a person dead.
Oh, no sorry, not a person, an “illegal immigrant from Mexico”. I’ll just second what Vox ex Machina said:

Just because someone has broken the law by crossing a border does not mean that it is okay to deprive them of basic human rights. If Adriana Torres-Flores had been Nancy Worthington, Nice White Lady Born and Raised in Little Rock, that bailiff would be facing charges right now. But immigrants are only people if they have the documents to prove it in today’s America, I guess.

The reason Adriana Torres-Flores appeared in court was because she was charged with selling pirated CDs. Oh yes, the terrible terrible crime of selling pirated CDs. So let’s compare here: Selling pirated CDs plus being an undocumented brown woman = okay to be deprived of basic human rights. “Forgetting” someone in a cell for four days without food, water or access to the bathroom = nah, not so bad, just suspension without pay and then back to business.

Wow. This is appalling.

A woman was locked for four days in a tiny holding cell in a northern Arkansas courthouse, forgotten by the authorities and left without food or water, the local Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday.

The woman, Adriana Torres-Flores, 38, a longtime illegal immigrant from Mexico, slept on the floor with only a shoe for a pillow, and with nothing to drink except her own urine, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. There was no bathroom in the cell.

The chief deputy of the county’s sheriff’s department, Jay Cantrell, says there will be an investigation, but assures that the incident was an “honest mistake” without any malicious intent.

Honest mistake? Well, that may be true, but it’s still a mistake that should get your ass thoroughly fired. But there’s no mention of that idea in the article. Only that there will be an “investigation”. What’s there to investigate? The procedures and policies of the department, yes. But the fact that his gross negligence make the employee in question unfit for his job? That seems pretty clear to me. But of course, the victim was only an undocumented brown woman, so it wasn’t all that serious, right.

While we’re into the immigration issue in the USA:
You really should read this article in the New Yorker about Hutto, a former prison in Texas which is being used to detain immigrants and asylum seekers. Note: immigrants and asylum seekers. Not criminals. About half of the detainees in Hutto are children, many of them born in the USA. Hutto is run by CCA, the Correction Corporation of America, a huge private prison corporation. Their deal with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of Homeland Security pays them approximately $2.8 million dollars monthly for Hutto. There’s good money to be made from keeping unwanted noncriminal brown people locked up. Feministe has more on the subject.

So the Vatican, through Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, has put a new spin on the thou-shalt-not-list and added seven “social sins” to the good old fashioned seven deadly ones. According to Bloomberg the new ones are:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

That list looks quite politically correct to me (with the exception of the first two or maybe three). They also seem to coincide with the original deadly sins quite a bit - wouldn’t contributing to the widening divide between rich and poor, excessive wealth and creating poverty be the same as greed and maybe gluttony? Anyway, I do agree with the Vatican that it is “sinful” to pollute the environment and to create poverty and such, even though I don’t have the need to live in fear for eternal damnation in order to try and be a decent human being. For me it’s more of a common sense of solidarity and responsibility for the planet we live on and for my fellow human beings. But to each their own.

Many blog commenters that I have read sarcastically note that child abuse and pedophelia has not made the list. Of course, Girotti had something to say about the subject too:

Girotti was asked about the many “situations of scandal and sin within the church,” in what appeared to be a reference to allegations in the United States and other countries of sexual abuse by clergy of minors and the coverups by hierarchy.

The monsignor acknowledged the “objective gravity” of the allegations, but contended that the heavy coverage by mass media of the scandals must also be denounced because it “discredits the church.”

Funny, I thought that the child abusers and the people who have protected them and covered up their crimes would be the ones who have discredited the church. Get a grip Girotti.

Saturday, on International Women’s Day, Claes Schmidt/Sara Lund was supposed to give a lecture on diversity and the equal worth on all human beings, in a pentecostal church in southern Sweden. It was not a church event - a women’s association called Zonta had rented the church for the speech, which was titled “Women, men and all the rest of us” (Kvinnor, män och alla vi andra). But when the minister of the church, Magnus Jonegård, heard about the lecture, he stopped the meeting. You see, Claes Schmidt/Sara Lund is not two different persons. Claes Schmidt/Sara Lund is one person - a heterosexual married man, who sometimes dresses as a woman under the name Sara Lund, i.e. a transvestite, and who does lectures and stand up comedy about norms and values, gender and “normality” (website in English here).

The minister said that he had nothing against Claes/Sara in person (they never do - love the sinner, hate the sin, you know), but that the contents of the lecture was against the values and teachings of the church. You know, human dignity, loving thy neighbor as yourself, respect - all very unchristian concepts…

The church was of course under no obligation to rent out its premises to Zonta and Claes/Sara’s lecture. But when the Swedish good templar order IOGT expelled Åke Green (the Swedish minister who compared homosexuals to a cancer growth on the body of society, was tried for this in court and acquitted), because Green’s opinions did not correspond with their values and teachings, then the Swedish Christian right was up in arms about it and said that this was so intolerant and undemocratic.

As Tor of Antigayretorik said then: it would becoming to the right wing Christians if they would think a bit further before they start to scream about “intolerance” and “oppression”.

And over in the States, Dolores Huerta, human rights activist and well-regarded progressive leader, was supposed to give a talk to Catholic school children about her funding role in United Farm Workers and the importance of public service. But she was stopped, because of her views on reproductive choice (which had nothing to do with her talk whatsoever), which makes her an “unfit role model”. Yes, social justice, integrity, non-violence… all very unfitting concepts for the Christian right it seems.
(Via Feministe).