The real scandal at the World Bank

Johann Hari

The Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world

Published: 26 April 2007

While the world's press has been fixated on the teeny-weeny scandal over whether the World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz helped to get his girlfriend a $300,000-a-year gig next door, they have been ignoring the rancid stench of a far bigger scandal wafting from Wolfie's Washington offices.

This slo-mo scandal isn't about apparent petty corruption in DC. It's about how Wolfowitz's World Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world, and knowingly worsening our worst crisis - global warming - every day.

Let's start with the victims. Meet Hawa Amadu, 70-something, living in the muddy slums of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and trying to raise her grandkids as best she can. Hawa has a problem - a massive problem - and the World Bank put it there. She can't afford water or electricity any more. Why? The World Bank threatened to refuse to lend any more money to her government, which would effectively make it a leper to governmental donors and international business, unless it stopped subsidising the cost of these necessities. The subsidies stopped. The cost doubled. Now Hawa goes thirsty so her grandchildren can drink, and weeps: "Am I supposed to drink air?"

She is not alone. Half a world away, in Bolivia, Maxima Cari - a mother - is also thirsty. "The World Bank took away my right to clean water," she explains. In 1997 the World Bank demanded the Bolivian government privatise the country's water supply. So Maxima couldn't afford it any more. Now she has to use dirty water from a well her villagers dug. This dirty water is making her children sick, and she is sullen. "I wash my children weekly," Maxima says. "Sometimes there's only enough water to wash their hands and faces, not their whole body ... This is not a nice way to live." The newly elected socialist government of Evo Morales is planning to take the water back - and he is, of course, condemned and threatened by the World Bank.

Meet some more victims. I have met hundreds, from Africa to Latin America to the Middle East. Muracin Claircin is a rice farmer in Haiti - only he can't grow rice any more. In 1995, the World Bank demanded Haiti drop all restrictions on imports. The country was immediately flooded with rice from the US, which has been lavishly subsidised by the US government. The Haitian government barely exists and can't offer rival subsidies anyway: the World Bank forbids it. So now Muracin is jobless and his family are starving.

Some 5,000 miles away, Charles Avaala in Ghana is watching his tomatoes rot. He used to grow them for a government-owned community tomato cannery that provided employment for his entire community. The World Bank ordered his government to close it down, and to open the country's markets to international competition. Now he can't compete with the subsidy-fattened tomatoes from Europe. He, too, is starving.

How would Hawa and Maxima and Muracin and Charles feel if you told them none of this is considered a scandal, but business as usual?

These victims are not merely an anecdote soup; they are an accurate summary of the World Bank's effect on the poor. Don't take my word for it. The World Bank's own Independent Evaluation Group just found that barely one in ten of its borrowers experienced persistent growth between 1995 and 2005 - a much smaller proportion than those who stagnated or slid deeper into poverty. The bank's own former chief economist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, says this approach "has condemned people to death... They don't care if people live or die."

Why? Why would a body that claims to help the poor actually thrash them? Because its mission to end poverty has always been mythical. As George Monbiot explains in his book The Age of Consent, the World Bank was created in the 1940s by US economist Henry Dexter White to be a further projection of US power. The bank's head is invariably American, the bank is based in Washington, and the US has a permanent veto on policies. It does not promote a sensible mix of markets and state action - the real path to development. No: the World Bank pursues the interests of US corporations over the poor, every time.

The bank's staff salve their consciences by pickling themselves in an ideology - neoliberalism - that says there is never a conflict between business rights and human rights. If it's good for Shell, it must be good for poor people - right?

This ideology also backfires on us in the rich world. In 2000, the World Bank was finally forced to undertake a review of its energy policies. It did its best to rig it, putting the former energy minister of the corporation-licking Indonesian dictator General Suharto in charge. Emil Salim was even serving on the board of a coal company at the time he was appointed. But - to everyone's astonishment - Salim concluded by opposing the carbon-pumping oil and gas projects that make up 94 per cent of all the bank's energy projects. He said they should be stopped altogether by 2008.

The bank's response? It ignored its own report and carried on warming. The business climate, it seems, trumps the actual climate. Feel the heat.

While the elites huff and puff about Wolfowitz's alleged small corruption and ignore his organisation's proven immense corruption, there is something we - ordinary citizens - can do. In the summer of 2001, at the global justice protests in Genoa, I met Dennis Brutus, a former inmate of Robben Island prison alongside Nelson Mandela. He had been repelled by the bank's actions in South Africa, and started his protests against them by asking a very basic question: who owns the World Bank? It turns out we do. Ordinary people in the West - through their trade unions, churches, town councils, universities and private investments - own it. The bank raises nearly all its funds by issuing bonds on the private market. They are often held by socially minded institutions, the kind who signed up to Make Poverty History. So, Brutus realised, we have a simple power: to sell the bonds and bankrupt the World Bank. "We need to break the power of the World Bank over developing countries just as the disinvestment movement helped break the power of the apartheid regime in South Africa," he explained.

The campaign to make World Bank bonds as untouchable as apartheid-era investments has already begun. The cities of San Francisco, Boulder, Oakland and Berkeley have sold theirs. Several US unions have also joined. Even this small ripple has caused anxiety within the bank about the threat to its "AAA" bond rating.

In the Genoa sun, as tear gas fired by the Italian police hissed in the background, Brutus told me: "I lived to see the death of political apartheid. Now I want to live to see the end of global financial apartheid."

This is the fight we should join. Not some petty squabble over which Washington technocrat is morally pure enough to lead the forces of subsidy-slashing and starvation.

j.hari@ independent.co.uk

A police state on skid row

The LAPD is again rousting and searching homeless people without cause.

By Ramona Ripston, RAMONA RIPSTON is executive director of the ACLU of Southern California.
March 12, 2007

THE LOS ANGELES Police Department has a message for skid row residents: The 4th Amendment doesn't apply here. That's the constitutional protection from arbitrary searches, and L.A. police officers have been violating it since late last year by detaining, handcuffing and going through people's pockets and possessions on the slimmest pretenses.

Cecil Bledsoe is a 65-year-old African American man who was once homeless and now works as a counselor helping others find housing. He was on his way to the bus in December when a police car rolled up and officers ordered him against a wall, then searched and questioned him. Bledsoe was released because he had done nothing wrong.

Police are also detaining homeless people for minor infractions such as jaywalking or sitting on the sidewalk, then using those pretexts as a basis to search them. Shawn Robertson was packing up his belongings one morning last November when police stood him against a wall and handcuffed him. They searched his stuff, ran his name, then let him go.

Paul Johnson was searched in December by officers who told him that "everybody down here is on probation or parole." Johnson isn't. The police officer who stopped him later admitted that he could not offer a reason for the search.

These aren't the hard-core criminals police promised to round up when the LAPD assigned 50 more officers to skid row last September. They're ordinary people whose only mistake was being homeless in the wrong part of town.

City leaders promised that the new officers would be part of a strategy to solve the homeless problem that included housing and services. Instead, the city has done exactly what everyone said it should not do: send police out as its primary tool. We're seeing the inevitable result.

We've been here before. Twenty years ago, the city and civil rights groups agreed that police were going too far on skid row by trashing residents' belongings in twice-daily sweeps. "It would appear that we have miraculously solved the horrible problem of destitute homelessness in our community by simply declaring it illegal," actor Martin Sheen wrote in The Times that year.

Since then, we've been caught in a disturbing cycle, with police abusing their power and then being challenged in court, only to either back down or be nudged into compliance by the courts.

Three years ago, a federal judge found that police were conducting arbitrary searches in the 50-square-block skid row area of L.A. and stopped them. The ACLU of Southern California and civil rights attorneys have filed a motion to extend that injunction.

The police shouldn't need a judge's order to know that this kind of activity is unlawful. The Bill of Rights has a nearly 220-year-old prohibition against "unreasonable searches."

New York started to reduce homelessness only when it decided that an enforcement-only approach to the problem was inefficient and expensive. A 2004 study on the costs of homeless services in the U.S. shows that jails and prison are twice as expensive as housing and shelter. L.A.'s leaders say the police are stretched too thin, yet they seem to have deep pockets for skid row police and prosecutors while always coming up short for housing.

Some say aggressive policing is working. Today, skid row's streets are strangely empty, as if hundreds of people who just months ago crowded the area's alleys every night have disappeared. Where have they gone? Some are in jail where they belong. A handful are in pretrial diversion programs where they can get the help they need. The vast majority have likely moved — to Hollywood, the Valley or Venice. These places have fewer services that the homeless need. When this crackdown ends, they'll be back.

We know where they haven't gone: into housing that's connected to services such as mental health care and job training, the only solution we know works. Meanwhile, constant police searches have added to the burdens of those who are seeking help for mental illness and addiction in skid row and complicated the efforts of those who would help them.

"The fear and stress people feel from interactions with the police add significantly to their issues," Casey Horan, executive director of Lamp Community, a homeless services provider, said in a statement the ACLU filed with the court. "When people are subject to aggressive policing, it makes outreach more difficult."

New York City to close largest homeless shelter

NYC's largest homeless shelter closing

By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 6 minutes ago

Every day, a bus picks up homeless men off the streets of New York City and takes them 70 miles out into the countryside to a shelter, in a practice that has been going on quietly since the Depression, when homeless people were called Bowery bums and fresh air was the solution to just about all ills.

The 1,001-bed Camp LaGuardia is New York City's biggest homeless shelter — and the only one surrounded by farms and trees — but its very existence is probably a surprise to many lifelong New Yorkers.

Now the city is closing it down.

While 73-year-old Camp LaGuardia was born of good intentions and what was then considered progressive thinking, some activists disapprove of it as an out-of-sight, out-of-mind answer to the city's homeless problem.

City Hall says its decision to shut down the shelter was more practical: It is too far outside New York, and the city wants to move away from temporary shelters to subsidized housing.

The shelter opened in 1934 on the site of a women's prison. It was named for the city's exuberant mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, a year later. The place was expanded greatly in the 1980s with the growth of New York's homeless population.

Old jail cells in the main brick building are still used to house older, frailer men, though most of the men are assigned a cot and a squat locker in dorm-style rooms in other buildings, some of which were built in recent decades. The rooms and halls are careworn, and some of the paint is peeling.

In the camp's early decades, the homeless men could rustle up summer work in the kitchens at the big Catskills-style hotels, grow potatoes on the camp's farm, even relax over beer at the tap room — yes, a tap room — though they were not allowed to get drunk.

Nowadays, some of the men work day jobs at places such as a chicken-plucking plant operated by a community of Hasidic Jews.

Homeless men who seek shelter from the city and are assigned to Camp LaGuardia can refuse, and go back on the streets, or they can seek a transfer. Once they are here, they can come and go from the 300-acre camp, but there are not many places to go. The commercial center of Chester, a town of about 12,000, is more than a mile down the road.

About a third of the men leave on the daily buses to New York City for medical appointments, housing searches or family visits. Some work in the city.

Mohamed Chakdouf, 58, lost his job as a concierge at a big New York City hotel, separated from his wife, became depressed, fell behind in his rent and was evicted. By 2001, the Moroccan immigrant was camping out in a park in Manhattan. Breathing problems made winters tough on the street, and he came here by bus one night in January 2005.

"First day I woke up I'm surrounded by mountains," he recalled. "I say, `OK, I have no problem here, but it's so far away.'"

Isolation is a big complaint among homeless men used to urban hubbub. Richard Berlly said he considered staging a fistfight to get kicked out. Celso Trinidad said the 90-minute bus ride back to the city is tiring, so he stays in his room studying maps of the city, hoping to get another job driving a bus.

"It's not a fun place," he said.

Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York said the big problem with LaGuardia is that it is so far from the city. That makes it difficult for the men to look for jobs and housing or take advantage of other services.

Though LaGuardia was started for the right reason, Markee said city leaders found the shelter especially useful when homelessness soared in the '80s.

"The city expanded Camp Laguardia and made it into the largest homeless shelter in New York in part to sort of keep the homeless out of sight of the general population," Markee said. He commended Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration for "doing the right thing" by closing LaGuardia.

With a homeless population estimated at 35,000, the city wants to spend LaGuardia's $19 million budget on longer-term solutions such as subsidized housing with social services.

Robert Hess, city commissioner of homeless services, said the goal is to reduce the shelter population by at least two-thirds by 2009.

Hess said local opposition to the camp was also a factor in the decision to close the place. For decades, people have complained about LaGuardia men wandering into town, getting drunk, urinating in public and, once, slashing a woman.

Michele Murphy, a mother of two children who lives next to the camp, said: "You're afraid to have them play outside because you're not sure."

Still, some men have turned themselves around at LaGuardia.

Chakdouf has become a full-time liaison between homeless people and caseworkers. Berlly, 60, has come a full-fledged caseworker at LaGuardia.

A year ago, all of Camp LaGuardia's beds were full. The last new arrival came in November, and the camp is now down to about 360 men. The last will leave by May 31.

Orange County is buying the place for $8.5 million, perhaps for a senior-citizen dining center, voting machine storage, an office park or affordable housing for workers in the county, which is undergoing a housing boom.

Remaining staff members like Berlly are looking for other jobs. He is still interested in social work.

"I'm going to miss it," he said. "It's like a family, almost."

___

On the Net:

New York City Department of Homeless Services:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dhs/html/providers/meetadult.shtml

Evidence against Muslim charity appears fabricated

An official summary of an FBI-wiretapped conversation contains anti-Semitic slurs that do not appear in the actual transcript.

By Greg Krikorian, Times Staff Writer

February 25, 2007

When the Bush administration shut down the nation's largest Muslim charity five years ago, officials of the Dallas-based foundation denied allegations it was linked to terrorists and insisted that a number of accusations were fabricated by the government.

Now, attorneys for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development say the government's own documents provide evidence of that claim.

In recent court filings, defense lawyers disclosed striking discrepancies between an official summary and the verbatim transcripts of an FBI-wiretapped conversation in 1996 involving Holy Land officials.

The summary attributes inflammatory, anti-Semitic comments to Holy Land officials that are not found in a 13-page transcript of the recorded conversation. It recently was turned over to the defense by the government in an exchange of evidence.

Citing the unexplained discrepancies, defense lawyers have asked U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish in Dallas to declassify thousands of hours of FBI surveillance recordings, so that full transcripts would replace government summaries as evidence.

The demand could force government prosecutors to either declassify evidence it has fought to keep secret or risk losing a critical portion of evidence in its case.

In December, the judge denied a defense request to declassify the documents so they could be examined by defendants in the case. Seven former foundation officials, six of them U.S. citizens, have been charged with funneling money to overseas charities controlled by Hamas, which the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The defendants have denied the charges.

Though defense attorneys already have government clearances that allow them to review the material, under the federal Classified Information Procedures Act they have been prohibited from sharing it with their clients. And unless the act's rules are declared unconstitutional in the case, defense attorneys argue, the defendants will have no way of proving that the statements attributed to them were misconstrued or never made.

The recently declassified summary of surveillance on April 15, 1996, asserts that during a conversation wiretapped by the FBI, Holy Land's former executive director Shukri Abu Baker told two associates there was no need to worry about the foundation being unfairly targeted because U.S. courts were not under the control of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or its sponsor, "the government of the demons of Israel."

The summary portrays Baker as raging against "the Jews of the world" and as claiming that Jews have no allegiance to anything but "their pockets and to preserving the illegal Zionist state of Israel."

Additional anti-Semitic comments the FBI summary attributed to Baker or Ghassan Elashi, Holy Land's former board chairman, included:

• "Their [Jews'] only purpose here in the U.S. is to purchase as many politicians as possible and to warp the way the American Christians feel and think not just about the Christian religion but mainly about the Palestinian people … and to rob as much money as possible from American taxpayers for the illegitimate excuse of protecting and preserving the chosen people of God."

• "Even Jesus Christ had called the Jews and their high priests … the sons of snakes and scorpions."

• "I am confident that in the end justice, and not the Jews, will prevail. I believe that there is still justice in America."

None of those quotes was contained in a 13-page transcript of the conversation, defense lawyers said in their motion to expand access to classified evidence.

"Throughout the run-up to trial, the government has insisted that the defendants can learn what is contained in the [surveillance] intercepts by reading the so-called 'summaries' of those intercepts," defense attorneys said in their papers.

But the recently disclosed transcript, attorneys said, shows that "not only are the summaries so inaccurate and misleading as to be useless," but that the "author of the attached summary has cynically and maliciously attributed to the defendants racist invective and inculpatory remarks the defendants never uttered."

"It is appalling that such summaries even exist, much less that the government represented that this is all our clients need to know in order to defend themselves."

Defense lawyers declined to comment about their motion. A federal prosecutor said the government would respond with its own filings to the court.

How the summary and transcript could be so different was unclear, though experts in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act arena theorized that its top-secret nature may have led some analysts to believe that the work product would never be publicly disclosed, much less entered into evidence in a trial.

Because the court records are heavily redacted, it could not be determined who provided the summaries of the FBI wiretaps.

Other alleged discrepancies also have dogged the case. Holy Land lawyers challenged the accuracy of an FBI memo, for example, that quoted a foundation office manager as telling Israeli authorities that charitable funds were "channeled to Hamas."

But defense lawyers told the court the translation from Arabic to Hebrew to English distorted the official's original statement, and that he should have been quoted as saying, "We have no connection to Hamas."

The Holy Land Foundation was closed weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The action followed years of efforts by Israel and many pro-Israeli groups in the U.S. to close the foundation on the grounds that it was a fundraising front for Hamas.

The former Holy Land officials facing trial are charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists by sending money, goods and services to Palestinian charities controlled by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group since 1995.

---

greg.krikorian@latimes.com

U.S. economy leaving record numbers in severe poverty

Posted on Thu, Feb. 22, 2007

By Tony Pugh
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975.

The share of poor Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily over the last three decades. But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown "more than any other segment of the population," according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began," said Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, who co-authored the study. "We're not seeing as much moderate poverty as a proportion of the population. What we're seeing is a dramatic growth of severe poverty."

The growth spurt, which leveled off in 2005, in part reflects how hard it is for low-skilled workers to earn their way out of poverty in an unstable job market that favors skilled and educated workers. It also suggests that social programs aren't as effective as they once were at catching those who fall into economic despair.

About one in three severely poor people are under age 17, and nearly two out of three are female. Female-headed families with children account for a large share of the severely poor.

Nearly two out of three people (10.3 million) in severe poverty are white, but blacks (4.3 million) and Hispanics of any race (3.7 million) make up disproportionate shares. Blacks are nearly three times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be in deep poverty, while Hispanics are roughly twice as likely.

Washington, D.C., the nation's capital, has a higher concentration of severely poor people - 10.8 percent in 2005 - than any of the 50 states, topping even hurricane-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana, with 9.3 percent and 8.3 percent, respectively. Nearly six of 10 poor District residents are in extreme poverty.

'I DON'T ASK FOR NOTHING'

A few miles from the Capitol Building, 60-year-old John Treece pondered his life in deep poverty as he left a local food pantry with two bags of free groceries.

Plagued by arthritis, back problems and myriad ailments from years of manual labor, Treece has been unable to work full time for 15 years. He's tried unsuccessfully to get benefits from the Social Security Administration, which he said disputes his injuries and work history.

In 2006, an extremely poor individual earned less than $5,244 a year, according to federal poverty guidelines. Treece said he earned about that much in 2006 doing odd jobs.

Wearing shoes with holes, a tattered plaid jacket and a battered baseball cap, Treece lives hand-to-mouth in a $450-a-month room in a nondescript boarding house in a high-crime neighborhood. Thanks to food stamps, the food pantry and help from relatives, Treece said he never goes hungry. But toothpaste, soap, toilet paper and other items that require cash are tougher to come by.

"Sometimes it makes you want to do the wrong thing, you know," Treece said, referring to crime. "But I ain't a kid no more. I can't do no time. At this point, I ain't got a lotta years left."

Treece remains positive and humble despite his circumstances.

"I don't ask for nothing," he said. "I just thank the Lord for this day and ask that tomorrow be just as blessed."

Like Treece, many who did physical labor during their peak earning years have watched their job prospects dim as their bodies gave out.

David Jones, the president of the Community Service Society of New York City, an advocacy group for the poor, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee last month that he was shocked to discover how pervasive the problem was.

"You have this whole cohort of, particularly African-Americans of limited skills, men, who can't participate in the workforce because they don't have skills to do anything but heavy labor," he said.

'A PERMANENT UNDERCLASS'

Severe poverty is worst near the Mexican border and in some areas of the South, where 6.5 million severely poor residents are struggling to find work as manufacturing jobs in the textile, apparel and furniture-making industries disappear. The Midwestern Rust Belt and areas of the Northeast also have been hard hit as economic restructuring and foreign competition have forced numerous plant closings.

At the same time, low-skilled immigrants with impoverished family members are increasingly drawn to the South and Midwest to work in the meatpacking, food processing and agricultural industries.

These and other factors such as increased fluctuations in family incomes and illegal immigration have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate in at least 32 years.

"What appears to be taking place is that, over the long term, you have a significant permanent underclass that is not being impacted by anti-poverty policies," said Michael Tanner, the director of Health and Welfare Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, disagreed. "It doesn't look like a growing permanent underclass," said Sherman, whose organization has chronicled the growth of deep poverty. "What you see in the data are more and more single moms with children who lose their jobs and who aren't being caught by a safety net anymore."

About 1.1 million such families account for roughly 2.1 million deeply poor children, Sherman said.

After fleeing an abusive marriage in 2002, 42-year-old Marjorie Sant moved with her three children from Arkansas to a seedy boarding house in Raleigh, N.C., where the four shared one bedroom. For most of 2005, they lived off food stamps and the $300 a month in Social Security Disability Income for her son with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Teachers offered clothes to Sant's children. Saturdays meant lunch at the Salvation Army.

"To depend on other people to feed and clothe your kids is horrible," Sant said. "I found myself in a hole and didn't know how to get out."

In the summer of 2005, social workers warned that she'd lose her children if her home situation didn't change. Sant then brought her two youngest children to a temporary housing program at the Raleigh Rescue Mission while her oldest son moved to California to live with an adult daughter from a previous marriage.

So for 10 months, Sant learned basic office skills. She now lives in a rented house, works two jobs and earns about $20,400 a year.

Sant is proud of where she is, but she knows that "if something went wrong, I could well be back to where I was."

'I'M GETTING NOWHERE FAST'

As more poor Americans sink into severe poverty, more individuals and families living within $8,000 above or below the poverty line also have seen their incomes decline. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University attributes this to what he calls a "sinkhole effect" on income.

"Just as a sinkhole causes everything above it to collapse downward, families and individuals in the middle and upper classes appear to be migrating to lower-income tiers that bring them closer to the poverty threshold," Woolf wrote in the study.

Before Hurricane Katrina, Rene Winn of Biloxi, Miss., earned $28,000 a year as an administrator for the Boys and Girls Club. But for 11 months in 2006, she couldn't find steady work and wouldn't take a fast-food job. As her opportunities dwindled, Winn's frustration grew.

"Some days I feel like the world is mine and I can create my own destiny," she said. "Other days I feel a desperate feeling. Like I gotta' hurry up. Like my career is at a stop. Like I'm getting nowhere fast. And that's not me because I've always been a positive person."

After relocating to New Jersey for 10 months after the storm, Winn returned to Biloxi in September because of medical and emotional problems with her son. She and her two youngest children moved into her sister's home along with her mother, who has Alzheimer's. With her sister, brother-in-law and their two children, eight people now share a three-bedroom home.

Winn said she recently took a job as a technician at the state health department. The hourly job pays $16,120 a year. That's enough to bring her out of severe poverty and just $122 shy of the $16,242 needed for a single mother with two children to escape poverty altogether under current federal guidelines.

Winn eventually wants to transfer to a higher-paying job, but she's thankful for her current position.

"I'm very independent and used to taking care of my own, so I don't like the fact that I have to depend on the state. I want to be able to do it myself."

The Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation shows that, in a given month, only 10 percent of severely poor Americans received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in 2003 - the latest year available - and that only 36 percent received food stamps.

Many could have exhausted their eligibility for welfare or decided that the new program requirements were too onerous. But the low participation rates are troubling because the worst byproducts of poverty, such as higher crime and violence rates and poor health, nutrition and educational outcomes, are worse for those in deep poverty.

Over the last two decades, America has had the highest or near-highest poverty rates for children, individual adults and families among 31 developed countries, according to the Luxembourg Income Study, a 23-year project that compares poverty and income data from 31 industrial nations.

"It's shameful," said Timothy Smeeding, the former director of the study and the current head of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University. "We've been the worst performer every year since we've been doing this study."

With the exception of Mexico and Russia, the U.S. devotes the smallest portion of its gross domestic product to federal anti-poverty programs, and those programs are among the least effective at reducing poverty, the study found. Again, only Russia and Mexico do worse jobs.

One in three Americans will experience a full year of extreme poverty at some point in his or her adult life, according to long-term research by Mark Rank, a professor of social welfare at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

An estimated 58 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 75 will spend at least a year in poverty, Rank said. Two of three will use a public assistance program between ages 20 and 65, and 40 percent will do so for five years or more.

These estimates apply only to non-immigrants. If illegal immigrants were factored in, the numbers would be worse, Rank said.

"It would appear that for most Americans the question is no longer if, but rather when, they will experience poverty. In short, poverty has become a routine and unfortunate part of the American life course," Rank wrote in a recent study. "Whether these patterns will continue throughout the first decade of 2000 and beyond is difficult to say ... but there is little reason to think that this trend will reverse itself any time soon."

'SOMETHING REAL AND TROUBLING'

Most researchers and economists say federal poverty estimates are a poor tool to gauge the complexity of poverty. The numbers don't factor in assistance from government anti-poverty programs, such as food stamps, housing subsidies and the Earned Income Tax Credit, all of which increase incomes and help pull people out of poverty.

But federal poverty measures also exclude work-related expenses and necessities such as day care, transportation, housing and health care costs, which eat up large portions of disposable income, particularly for low-income families.

Alternative poverty measures that account for these shortcomings typically inflate or deflate official poverty statistics. But many of those alternative measures show the same kind of long-term trends as the official poverty data.

Robert Rector, a senior researcher with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, questioned the growth of severe poverty, saying that census data become less accurate farther down the income ladder. He said many poor people, particularly single mothers with boyfriends, underreport their income by not including cash gifts and loans. Rector said he's seen no data that suggest increasing deprivation among the very poor.

Arloc Sherman of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argues that the growing number of severely poor is an indisputable fact.

"When we check against more complete government survey data and administrative records from the benefit programs themselves, they confirm that this trend is real," Sherman said. He added that even among the poor, severely poor people have a much tougher time paying their bills. "That's another sign to me that we're seeing something real and troubling," Sherman said.

McClatchy correspondent Barbara Barrett contributed to this report.

BY THE NUMBERS

States with the most people in severe poverty:

California - 1.9 million
Texas - 1.6 million
New York - 1.2 million
Florida - 943,670
Illinois - 681,786
Ohio - 657,415
Pennsylvania - 618,229
Michigan - 576,428
Georgia - 562,014
North Carolina - 523,511

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

London Mayor Signs Oil Deal With Chavez

Wednesday February 21, 2007 1:01 AM

By JENNIFER QUINN
Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) - London's socialist mayor signed an agreement Tuesday with Venezuela's state-owned oil company to provide discounted oil for the city's iconic red buses, praising the idea as the brainstorm of the country's leftist leader, Hugo Chavez.

Ken Livingstone - a committed socialist known locally as ``Red Ken'' - met with Chavez last year at City Hall to discuss the deal to provide cheap oil to London in exchange for advice on urban planning in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital.

Venezuela has signed similar agreements with cities in several other countries, including the United States. Critics call it ``oil diplomacy'' - and say it is designed to embarrass President Bush, whom Chavez has repeatedly mocked.

``This arose out of the suggestion of President Hugo Chavez, and builds on the work he is doing around the world to tackle the problem of poverty,'' Livingstone said.

The savings - which would cut fuel costs by 20 percent for the city and could amount to about $32 million - are to be directed toward cheaper bus travel for up to 250,000 Londoners living on income support. Those who qualify will get a half-price discount on bus fares.

Under the agreement, city officials in Caracas will receive recommendations from British experts for ``the urban reorganization'' of the capital, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicholas Maduro said in an interview broadcast on state-run television.

Conservatives on the London city council said in a statement that London shouldn't be doing business with ``third-rate South American dictators with an appalling human rights and democratic record.''

``Why does London, one of the richest capitals in the world, need to exploit a developing nation?'' asked Richard Barnes, deputy leader of the London Assembly Conservatives. ``This money would be better directed at the poor of Venezuela.''

The U.S. government and Chavez's opponents at home accuse him of undermining Venezuela's democratic institutions since he was first elected in 1998. Chavez, who was widely re-elected to a six-year term in December, says he is trying to remake an unjust system that sidelined the poor majority.

Livingstone, an advocate of green policies, said Venezuela and London were merely exchanging commodities.

Venezuela is the world's eighth-largest oil exporter.

London spends about $195 million a year on fuel for its fleet of 8,000 buses. The savings from the new oil agreement with Venezuela are equivalent to slightly less than 1 percent of the total cost of providing London's bus services, the mayor's office said.

Associated Press Writer Christopher Toothaker in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.

Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World

Related
As U.S. rich-poor gap grows, so does public outcry
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Feb 16, 2007

By Michael Parenti

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.

The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses---much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.

In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.

The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.

U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.

The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.

A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries.

Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country’s financial contribution. As the largest “donor,” the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.

The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF.

But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.

They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.

So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings---which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.

Here then we have explained a “mystery.” It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don’t adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.

There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few.

In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments “do not work”; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect?

No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?

The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development.

In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.

The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!

Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world---and want to own it all---are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.


Michael Parenti's recent books include The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.

If they preach the cause of the poor, they're my people

Aggressive secularism on the left is bizarre given that religious leaders are now among the few ready to speak out against injustice

Neal Lawson
Wednesday January 3, 2007
The Guardian

Where do we get moral leadership from today? As we pick up the pieces of another swiped out festive season it's a fitting question. Is there something more to life than the endless cycle of overconsumption? How can the Iraq war or exorbitant city bonuses be justified? Increasingly it is our religious rather than political leaders who attempt to answer these difficult and pressing questions.

The head of the Catholic church in England, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, said in his Christmas mass: "Our nation is in great need because it is deprived of some of the greatest values of life." He spoke of the emergence of a culture that espoused "individual freedom as the fundamental value to which all others must be subject". This culture, he said, is the cause of a break with the moral traditions of humanity that meant we were no longer able to "respond to the fundamental questions on the sense and direction of our lives".

The Pope also berated "unbridled" consumerism in his address, while the Archbishop of Canterbury said: "The poor deserve the best. They do not deserve what's left over when the more prosperous have had their fill." And they don't just talk. They do. Religious communities are among the increasingly few places that bring people together as citizens rather than as consumers - fighting for a living wage and against poverty.

For me, as an atheist and a full-time politico, this is unsettling. It reveals the moral vacuum at the heart of our politics. Many politicians I know agree with the sentiments of these messages - but they feel trapped in a political system that only adapts itself to the demands of big business. Because it is the economy that now dominates our politics, it is the market that decides our morals - or lack of them. The fact that it is "the economy, stupid" requires a moral recession that then creates its social equivalent.

Whether you want a "K or a big P" becomes the political dilemma of our age. A generation of politicians are morally blighted by their support for the war in Iraq. They stayed silent over the bombing of Lebanon in the summer and the decision to drop the BAE case. Now Trident is being traded for the mistaken belief that committing the country to a new generation of nuclear weapons will help win the next election. Our politicians have forgotten that power and principle are two sides of the same coin. Politics has stopped being a different vision of the good society and is instead a job for technocrats and for self-proclaimed rationalists.

Given all this, it might seem strange that there are signs of an increasingly aggressive secularism that borders on a hatred of religion. This was revealed most starkly through attitudes to the veil. Many of the "liberal" elite were alarmingly hostile in their condemnation of some of society's most vulnerable people. Progressives I've known for 20 years, with whom I had agreed on virtually everything, were to my mind on the wrong side of the argument. It was not just getting religion out of the state they wanted, but out of society. This anti-religious left has found its leader in the shape of Richard Dawkins and his book The God Delusion, which is just a gratuitous tirade against faith.

So why are some on the left so hostile to faith? Perhaps it is an example of classic Freudian displacement activity as some progressives turn their political impotence and ire on religion. If their surrender to the nostrums of neoliberalism denies them moral purpose, then they will attack those who are prepared to stand with the poor and denounce the culture of greed at institutions such as Goldman Sachs. More likely, it is the overly rationalist view of some on the left that fuels their distaste for anything vaguely spiritual. This is the conception of socialism as science that ultimately failed both Lenin and the Fabians.

I am a secularist and believe in the disestablishment of church and state - in particular, I want to see the end of faith schools. And, of course, religion has been the cause of terrible deeds - although none perhaps in recent years as abhorrent as those of atheists. But in words and deeds, in the world I see around me, the positive role faith plays far outweighs the negatives. Religious leaders hold a mirror up to the injustice and immorality of our society and are prepared in their own small way to do something about it. I would rather it was politicians, but too often they decline to stand up and be counted.

The left must be fuelled by the vision of the good society. This has to be about more than just economics, science and rationalism, ending in an angry reaction to one of the few institutions in our society that is saying and doing the right thing.

As the lifeblood of morality drips from our body politic, it leaves a small pumping heart of socially and morally aware religious leaders and institutions. I don't care if they are Muslim, Catholic or Church of England - if they preach the cause of the poor and the needy in our bloated materialistic world, then they are my people.

We live in a society of smug complacency. All too often it is only religious leaders who puncture the anaesthetised contentment of our consumerised lives. Injustice, poverty, corruption, insecurity and disaffection sweep our nation. Technocratic politics has replaced religion as the opiate of the masses.

· Neal Lawson, who chairs the left-of-centre pressure group Compass, is writing a book about turbo-consumerism
www.allconsuming.org.uk

Neal Lawson writes regularly for the Guardian and the New Statesman about equality, democracy and the future of the left. He sometimes appears on TV and radio as a political commentator. He is chair of the fast-growing pressure group Compass, whose goal is a more equal and democratic world. He is author of the pamphlet Dare More Democracy, which was based on interviews with swing voters in London and Birmingham. He is also the managing editor of the quarterly progressive policy journal Renewal. He was formerly an adviser to Gordon Brown and before that a trade union researcher. He co-edited The Progress Century (Palgrave, 2001). At the end of 2004 he gave up his job as a founding director of a public affairs company to focus full time on writing and activism.

Betrayal of the Big Easy

Hurricane Katrina forced out New Orleans's poor residents, and developers don't want them back

Giles Fraser
Tuesday January 2, 2007
The Guardian

It's well over a year since the levees collapsed and billions of gallons of water flooded into New Orleans, trashing the city and displacing several thousand residents, most of them black and poor. Many may not return. For Hurricane Katrina produced acres of empty real estate that are being eyed up as a promising opportunity for corporate developers. Mayor Ray Nagin wants the new New Orleans to be "market driven". The Episcopalian Bishop of Louisiana thinks differently. Once a conservative, he was rebaptised with dirty water. He now speaks for many in condemning the mayor's words as "a blow against the poor and needy", and says developers threaten "the soul of the city".

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Last August two-thirds of New Orleans was under water. In low-lying areas - such as the lower ninth ward, where many of the city's musicians originate - almost no reconstruction work is being done. Insurance companies won't cover new buildings unless the levees are reinforced to withstand another big storm, and the government won't cough up the $30bn-plus the work is expected to cost. So the powers that be are effectively abandoning the lower-lying areas, offering precious little hope of return to the Katrina diaspora spread over the south. A city that had a population of nearly half a million has been reduced by 300,000. Some are whispering that this is a way of rebalancing the city's ethnic mix, which has been majority black for some time.

Dr Courtney Cowart, who runs the Diocese of Louisiana's disaster relief team, escaped from the shadow of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. She cannot help but compare the government's response to both tragedies, noting that nothing like the financial commitment made to New York is being offered to New Orleans. The Big Easy, disliked by conservatives because of its reputation for debauchery, is in danger of being ignored.

Debauched and religious. In this most Christian of cities, the churches are forming powerful alliances with local community groups to spearhead the fight against mammon. For this is a place where the language of the Bible seems to have daily application. Those who experienced the scale of this disaster wouldn't think the Bible's apocalyptic literature fanciful. They have lived it. Outside the shell of an old Baptist church in the lower ninth, a scruffy piece of board is scrawled with the prophecy from Ezekiel in which dead bones are reformed into living human form. "Can these dry bones live?" is the question.

In the increasingly lawless central district, the resurrection is given a hedonistic inflection through the tradition of the second line. The first line is the sombre procession to a funeral. The second line is the exuberant, jazzy, band-led, umbrella-popping return. Most Sunday afternoons, thousands gather to dance their way through the wreckage, reclaiming the streets for music and laughter.

Last month I watched as the second line jigged down Washington Street and came to rest outside one of the city's social housing projects, declared out of bounds by the civic authorities. The music intensified. A huge number of the projects are fenced off, even though many received only superficial damage. It's surely no coincidence that some are in areas of prime real estate. Residents were evicted at gunpoint during the storm and have not been allowed back.

Mark Twain said there were only three cities in the US with any real culture: Boston, San Francisco and New Orleans. What a tragedy if this once-great city is to be saved from the waters only to be destroyed by developers set to rebuild another generic US metropolis, designed for profit and not for people.

· Dr Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney and a lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford giles.fraser@btinternet.com

Hugo Chavez is ‘Black’ Santa Claus for U.S. Poor

Related

Chavez Landslide Tops All In US History
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HOLIDAY ISSUE Dec.20 - Jan. 2

True Solidarity in a Cold World: Hugo Chavez is ‘Black’ Santa Claus for U.S. Poor

by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford

“Hate against me has a lot to do with racism. Because of my big mouth, because of my curly hair. And I’m so proud to have this mouth and this hair, because it’s African.” – Hugo Chavez, Democracy Now, September 20, 2005


For tens of thousands of needy Americans this holiday season, “Saint Nick” arrived in the person of a former paratrooper with straight-from-the-barrio Afro-Indian features, commanding fleets of trucks bearing millions of gallons of heating oil heavily discounted for the poor. Through his year-round policy of international solidarity – which is quite different than seasonal generosity – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the most frequently and fairly elected head of state in the history of the Americas, has revealed the identity of the real Global Grinch: George Bush and the multinational oil companies and fat cats he serves.

It’s a lesson even reality-starved North Americans should comprehend, and one that should find particular resonance among African Americans. Had he been born in Georgia, rather than in the backwater interior of a Spanish-speaking country, Hugo Chavez would certainly have been considered a Black man. The white elites of Venezuela seem to feel the same way – Chavez is routinely referred to as a “monkey” in his homeland’s oligarchic media. Indeed, Chavez’s status as the most popular politician in Latin America has resulted in a kind of perverse North-South hemispheric solidarity among white elites, who collectively tremble at every stirring of Black-brown political power.

--MORE--

America’s Open Wound: BOB HERBERT

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST
America’s Open Wound
By BOB HERBERT
Published: December 21, 2006

The recovery in New Orleans has gone about as well as the war in Iraq.

New Orleans

It's eerie. The air is still. There is no noise. Night is falling.

The five stone steps in front of me once led to a porch, or maybe directly to the front door of a house. There is no way to be sure. The house is completely gone. All that's left are the five steps, one of which is painted with the address, 1630 Reynes St. The steps sit alone, like a piece of minimalist art, at the front of a small vacant lot full of weeds and rubble. Next door is a house that is completely capsized, fallen over on its side like a sunken ship.

Welcome to the Lower Ninth Ward. You won't find much holiday spirit here. In every direction, as far as it is possible to see, is devastation.

On another lot, piled high with the rubble of a ruined house, I saw a middle-aged man standing in the front yard weeping. He wore a dirty white baseball cap and he was sobbing like a child. I walked toward him to ask a question but he waved me away.

Whatever you've heard about New Orleans, the reality is much worse.

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Out of Sight: BOB HERBERT

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times

Out of Sight
By BOB HERBERT
Published: December 18, 2006

The way the poorest and most vulnerable victims of Hurricane Katrina have been treated so far by government officials at every level has been disgraceful.

Baker, La.

There are hundreds of children in the trailer camp that is run by FEMA and known as Renaissance Village, but they won’t be having much of a Christmas. They’re trapped here in a demoralizing, overcrowded environment with adults who are mostly broke, jobless and at the end of their emotional tethers. Many of the kids aren’t even going to school.

“This is a terrible environment for children,” said Anita Gentris, who lost everything in the flood that followed Hurricane Katrina and is living in one of the 200-square-foot travel trailers with her 10-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. “My daughter is having bad dreams. And my son, he’s a very angry child right now. He cries. He throws things.

“I’m desperately trying to find permanent housing.”

The television cameras are mostly gone now, and the many thousands of people from the Gulf Coast whose lives were wrecked by Katrina in the summer of 2005 have slipped from the national consciousness. But like the city of New Orleans itself, most of them have yet to recover.

The enormity of the continuing tragedy is breathtaking. Thousands upon thousands of people are still suffering. And yet the way the poorest and most vulnerable victims have been treated so far by government officials at every level has been disgraceful.

More than a third of the 1,200 people in this sprawling camp are children. Only about half of the school-age youngsters are even registered for school; of those, roughly half actually go to school on any given day. The authorities can’t account for the rest.

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US accused of using aid to sway votes in UN security council

Heather Stewart, economics correspondent
Sunday December 17, 2006
The Observer

The US uses its aid budget to bribe those countries which have a vote in the United Nations security council, giving them 59 per cent more cash in years when they have a seat, according to research by economists.

Kofi Annan, the outgoing UN Secretary-General, expressed his frustration at the power the US wields over the UN in his parting speech last week. In a detailed analysis of 50 years of data, Harvard University's Ilyana Kuziemko and Eric Werker provide the clearest evidence yet that money is used by the council's richest member to grease the wheels of diplomacy.

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Anti-poverty campaigners reacted angrily to the findings. 'Aid should go to the people who need it, not as a political sweetener,' said Duncan Green of Oxfam. 'In recent years most rich countries have been making progress on this, but showering bribes on developing countries just because they sit on the UN security council is clearly a step backwards.'

Charities often complain that the US uses its aid as a political tool, and this new evidence of what the authors call 'vote-buying' will raise fears about whether the surge of aid money that was promised at last year's Gleneagles G8 summit will be fairly spent.

Ten of the 15 seats on the security council are filled for two years at a time, by rotation. Kuziemko and Werker found that, in years when they have a seat, countries get an average of more than £8m extra in foreign aid from the US.

'I don't think it's surprising this goes on; but I wonder whether countries being aware that it goes on might have some salutary effect,' Kuziemko said.

Countries with a security council seat also receive an average of £500m extra from the UN itself, most of it channelled through its children's fund, Unicef, over which the US traditionally has been able to exert control. President George Bush recently provoked controversy by appointing a close political ally, former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, as Unicef's chief.

When there is a controversial vote in prospect, the premium for countries with a security council seat is even higher. US aid surges by as much as 170 per cent, bringing in a £23m windfall, while the UN spends an extra £4m.

'Some countries serve on the security council during relatively calm years, whereas others, by chance, are fortunate enough to serve during a year in which a key resolution is debated and their vote becomes more valuable,' the authors say. They highlight controversial resolutions over issues including the Korean War, Suez, the Falklands and Kosovo - though the period they study does not include the notorious 'second resolution' over the invasion of Iraq, which never came to a vote.

David Woodward, of the New Economics Foundation, who is writing about the paper for a forthcoming edition of the Lancet, said the findings suggest the UN should be radically reformed.

'As long as one country wields such influence, there will always have a degree of control over what goes on, and they will be likely to abuse that.'

'The biggest obstacle, in both the IMF and the World Bank, as well as the UN, is that the countries that now have power can use that power to block reform - and they do.'

Documents
Volcker commission report on UN oil-for-food

Useful links
UN website
Wikipedia: Kofi Annan

Corporate complicity in Israel’s crimes

Bedouin children in Palestine Photo: War on Wan

12/16/2006 4:00:00 PM GMT

“Profiting from the Occupation” is a report released by War on Want last July, in which the campaigning charity based in London examines corporate complicity in Israel's crimes against the Palestinian population.

War is one of the chief causes of poverty. War can completely undermine a country’s development prospects, destroying schools and hospitals and putting agricultural land out of use for years to come. Fully 80% of the world’s 20 poorest countries have suffered a major war in the past 15 years, and the human legacy continues long after. Nine of the 10 countries with the world’s highest child mortality rates have suffered from conflict in recent years.1

Yet not everyone is made poorer by war. Many companies thrive off conflict, whether through supplying military hardware to armed forces or running mercenary armies on behalf of combatant states. Others fuel conflict through their operations in war zones, such as oil companies in volatile countries like Colombia and Iraq, or through their continued trade in goods such as blood diamonds. Others profit from financing the war effort.

This report forms part of War on Want’s new campaign to confront those companies which profit from war. The aim of the campaign is to expose the many different ways in which the corporate sector is involved in conflict, and to suggest public action to call such companies to account.

The campaign complements War on Want’s longstanding support for our partners in conflict zones: some of the world’s bravest men and women, on the front line in the struggle for human rights.

This report examines corporate involvement in the military occupation of Palestine, focusing in particular on the three sectors of construction, retail and transport. As well as providing information on the activities of these companies, the report calls on all readers to take action to bring them to account. This is War on Want’s mission more widely: to support people in developing countries in their struggle for survival, but also to inspire people in rich countries to challenge the root causes of poverty around the world.

Louise Richards Chief Executive, War on Want

Humanitarian crisis, corporate complicity

Palestine is in the grip of a humanitarian catastrophe. The United Nations reports that 70% of Palestinians are now living in poverty, a figure which will rise still further if current conditions continue. The Palestinian economy is collapsing, with GDP set to fall by 27% by the end of 2006.The World Bank is calling 2006 “by a margin, the worst year in the West Bank and Gaza’s dismal recent economic history”.2

This crisis is a direct result of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine and its recent intensification of action against the Palestinian people. As described in this report, Israel is tightening its noose around Palestinians living in the West Bank through the continued expansion of settlements and the construction of the Separation Wall on occupied Palestinian land.

Suspension of EU and U.S. aid to the newly elected Palestinian government and Israel’s refusal to hand over tax revenues owing to the Palestinian Authority have exacerbated the problem, as have the tightened restrictions imposed by Israel on Palestinians’ movement. As the UN warns, “The extent of the collapse should not be underestimated.”

Yet despite this unprecedented crisis, many Western companies actively support Israel’s occupation of Palestine through their business operations. Familiar high street names are directly involved in projects which contribute to the misery of the Palestinian people, and which threaten to prolong their suffering for years to come. This report brings together for the first time a catalogue of corporate support for the occupation of Palestine, in the three sectors of construction, retail and transport.

In the first case, bulldozers supplied by companies such as Caterpillar, Volvo and Daewoo are used by the Israeli army to destroy Palestinian homes, schools, orchards and olive groves. Equipment from these companies and from British construction group JCB is also used in the construction of Israel’s Separation Wall, ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice but being built to completion regardless. The UN has condemned such corporate complicity in the violation of Palestinians’ human rights, but there has been no official action to bring it to an end.

In the retail sector, British supermarkets such as Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s sell produce grown in Israeli settlements within the West Bank and Golan Heights. These settlements are illegal under international law, yet supermarkets sell their produce under the label of ‘Made in Israel’, concealing the fact that they are actually made in territories under military occupation. This report focuses in particular on wine from the settlements sold in British supermarkets, and on the export agency Agrexco, which is responsible for exporting two thirds of all produce from the settlements of the West Bank.

The third case study of corporate support for the Occupation concerns French transport company Connex, once familiar for running trains in and out of London. Connex is a central partner in the light rail system currently under construction in Jerusalem, which aims to link the city to illegal settlements in the West Bank. As a result, the rail system will be built on occupied Palestinian land, in contravention of international law.

In all three of these cases, the companies in question are helping to create ‘facts on the ground’ which will preclude any possibility of a viable Palestinian state. They can be considered complicit in the violation of Palestinians’ human rights as a result of their operations in occupied Palestinian territory. Yet Western governments have failed to take any action to stop corporate involvement in the occupation of Palestine, even though they have an obligation to do so under the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is left up to individuals to take action and call such companies to account.

• Construction, destruction

To Western consumers, Caterpillar is best known for its rugged boots, bags and clothing. Volvo makes sturdy, reliable cars while Daewoo occupies the ‘cheap and cheerful’ end of the auto market. Yet all three companies have one thing in common: their bulldozers are being used by the Israeli army to destroy Palestinian homes, schools, orchards and olive groves, and their machines are building Israel’s illegal Separation Wall.

According to the United Nations, around 4,500 Palestinian homes have been destroyed by the Israeli army since September 2000.The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions calculates that Israel has demolished some 12,000 Palestinian homes since 1967, whether in punitive or military actions or simply because the Israeli authorities decide they do not have the correct permits (so-called ‘administrative’ demolitions). Over 70,000 people have seen their homes destroyed in these operations, while many more have seen their farms, fruit trees and olive trees razed to the ground.

The United Nations has singled out Caterpillar in particular for its complicity in the violation of Palestinian human rights (see box).While Volvo and Daewoo equipment is used by contractors employed by the Israeli state, Caterpillar supplies its bulldozers directly to the Israeli military as weaponry under the USA’s Foreign Military Sales Program.

Caterpillar D9 armoured bulldozers have become an indispensable part of the Israeli army’s arsenal, being used in every major military operation in occupied Palestine. According to one Israeli military commander, Caterpillar bulldozers have become “the key weapon” in urban warfare support.4

In addition to their use in the demolition of Palestinian homes and farms, the bulldozers supplied by Caterpillar, Volvo and Daewoo have been used in Israel’s construction of its Separation Wall. Despite the International Court of Justice ruling in July 2004 that the Wall is illegal under international law, and the UN General Assembly’s subsequent resolution calling on Israel to comply with its legal obligations, the Israeli cabinet approved a new 420-mile route for the Wall in February 2005. To date over 170 miles of the Wall have been completed and a further 100 miles are under construction.5

Fully 75% of the Separation Wall is to be built on Palestinian territory rather than on Israel’s border, the Green Line. This means that the Wall will effectively annex 10% of the West Bank to Israel, including settlements which are home to three quarters of all Israeli settlers.

Despite initial protestations that the Wall was a security measure, Israeli officials have now begun to admit that it will serve a political purpose by including the settlements within Israeli-controlled territory. Israel’s former Justice Minister Tzipi Livni stated publicly in November 2005 that the Wall would serve as “the future border of the state of Israel”, and that High Court rulings on the Wall were “drawing the country’s borders”. The State Prosecutor’s Office confirmed in June 2006 that the route of the Wall will indeed have “political implications” for the future.6

The Separation Wall has already caused immense hardship to the Palestinian people. The Wall has cut through Palestinian towns and villages, severing communities and cutting people off from their relatives, schools and hospitals. Palestinians face increasing difficulty in gaining access to their own lands in the ‘closed zone’ behind the Wall as a result of Israel’s tightening of its closure system. In his May 2006 report to the UN General Assembly, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan confirmed: “The Israeli closure system is a primary cause of poverty and humanitarian crisis in the occupied Palestinian territory, and restricts Palestinian access to health and education services, employment, markets and social and religious networks.”7

The use of machinery supplied by Volvo, Daewoo and Caterpillar in the construction of the Separation Wall and the demolition of Palestinian homes implicates those companies in Israel’s illegal activities. War on Want research in Palestine has confirmed earlier reports that machinery from British construction company JCB is also being used in work around the Separation Wall. In all these cases, the companies concerned must take action to ensure their products are not employed by Israel in war crimes against the Palestinian people.

• From settlement to shelf

Many of Britain’s high street stores stock goods which have been produced in Israeli settlements within occupied Palestinian territory. These settlements represent the physical reality of the Occupation as experienced by Palestinians on a daily basis, and export revenue is important to their economic sustainability. Stores which sell settlement produce are thereby supporting the Occupation.

Israel has built an extensive network of settlements on land which it captured during the 1967 Six Day War. There are currently 135 official settlements in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem, plus a further 100 unofficial settlements, or ‘outposts’. These settlements are now home to over 450,000 Israelis, whose towns and cities are built on occupied Palestinian territory and who farm many thousands of acres of the best Palestinian land.

The UN Security Council has called Israel’s settlements a “flagrant violation” of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids population transfer into territory occupied in war.9

Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, such population transfer is also a war crime. Over the past 40 years the UN has repeatedly called on Israel to comply with international law and dismantle the settlements, but Israel has instead expanded them at an increasing rate. Most recently, Israel has intensified this expansion with the explicit aim of creating ‘facts on the ground’ which will be impossible to reverse in any future negotiations, thereby denying the possibility of a viable Palestinian state.

UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard has called this policy “completely unacceptable to the international community”.

The impact of the settlements on the daily lives of Palestinians goes beyond the confiscation of their land and destruction of their homes. Between them, Israel and its settlements use 83% of the water available from West Bank aquifers, leaving just 17% for the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank itself. The construction of a network of ‘settler only’ roads has severely curtailed Palestinians’ freedom of movement, while the restrictions imposed by military checkpoints have been widely compared to the ‘pass laws’ of apartheid South Africa.11

Settlers are protected by the Israeli military and use this protection to commit acts of violence against Palestinians with impunity. According to the UN, this settler violence is on the increase.12

Originating as it does from illegally occupied land, settlement produce is supposed to be excluded from the preferential treatment which Israeli exports to the UK enjoy under the EU-Israel Association Agreement. In order to overcome the fact that settlement produce has traditionally been labeled ‘made in Israel’, the EU now requires Israeli exporters to indicate the place of origin of their goods so that the correct import duty can be charged on them. However, the arrangement does not extend to labeling to consumers, so that by the time settlement produce is sold in supermarkets it can again be labeled ‘made in Israel’. In the case of fruit and vegetables, settlement produce is often mixed in with Israeli produce, making it impossible to detect.

In some cases, however, high street chains are clearly selling produce which has originated from the settlements and not from Israel itself. The case against Agrexco, the largest exporter of produce from the settlements, is explored in more detail overleaf. Supermarkets such as Tesco and Waitrose openly stock items which are known to come from settlements, such as snacks from Beigel & Beigel, which operates out of the West Bank settlement of Barkan and markets its products as “delicious, nutritious and guilt free”. Selfridges sells the Ahava range of skin and hair care products, which are made in the West Bank settlement of Mitzpe Shalem. Argos, Tesco and Sainsbury’s sell Soda Stream products from the Mishor Adumim settlement outside East Jerusalem.

Wine provides a clear example of supermarkets selling settlement produce, despite repeated calls for them to stop doing so. Tesco, Selfridges and Sainsbury’s sell Barkan wine from the West Bank settlement mentioned above. According to research by Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, the company produces its wine within the Barkan industrial zone in order to benefit from the zone’s status as a ‘development area’ and the incentives this attracts. It then markets the wine from its sales office in Hulda Kibbutz inside Israel, thereby obscuring its place of origin from overseas customers as well as from the growing number of Israeli consumers who do not wish to buy settlement produce.

• Agrexco and the Jordan Valley

Agrexco is Israel’s largest exporter of fresh agricultural produce.

Established in 1956, the company is 50% owned by the Israeli state, with the remaining 50% split equally between the country’s agricultural production board and the Tnuva cooperative, Israel’s largest food company. However, the government announced in June 2006 that it is to privatize Agrexco by selling off its half of the company to producers, although the sale could take years to complete.15

Agrexco is riding the wave of success which Israeli exports of fresh produce have enjoyed over the past few years. In the 12 months to end October 2005, such exports totaled $860 million, a rise of 72% in just three years. Agrexco accounts for around 70% of Israeli fresh produce sold abroad, and the company’s annual sales are expected to reach $750 million in 2006.16

In the UK Agrexco is best known under the brand name Carmel, with products sold in all the main supermarkets. The UK is far and away the most important foreign market for Israeli vegetables, accounting for 60% of all exports (the next most important market, the USA, accounts for just 20% of Israeli vegetable sales).Agrexco exports a wide range of fresh produce to the UK, including peppers, tomatoes, strawberries, herbs, spices, flowers and avocados, and has registered a dramatic increase in British sales over the past few years.17

In addition to being the single largest exporter of Israeli fruit and vegetables, Agrexco is also the largest exporter of settlement produce for sale overseas. During the January 2006 trial of seven activists charged with blockading the Agrexco UK distribution centre in protest at its operations in occupied Palestine, Amos Orr, general manager of Agrexco UK, affirmed that Agrexco handles 60-70% of all produce exported from Israeli settlements. Orr was also required to provide the court with a disclosure of Agrexco UK’s imports from Israel and the Occupied Territories, which listed transactions with the West Bank settlements of Tomer, Mehola, Hamra, Ro’i, Massua, Patzael, Mekhora, Netiv Ha-Gdud and Bet Ha-Arava. The protestors were cleared of all charges.

Agrexco has been particularly active in the Jordan Valley, which has become a key part of Israel’s plan to expand its settlements and deny the Palestinians the possibility of a viable state. In June 2005 the Israeli ministry of agriculture announced a programme to double the number of settlers in the Jordan Valley in the space of two years through the construction of new housing and the provision of grants for agricultural development of up to $22 million. In a television interview in February 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed his government’s intention to annex the Jordan Valley to Israel and thus cut off any future Palestinian state from direct links to any neighbouring country.18

The Jordan Valley is one of the most fertile parts of the West Bank, perfectly suited to the production of fruit, flowers and vegetables. In the first move of Olmert’s annexation plan, house demolitions have been stepped up and restrictions on Palestinians’ movement tightened. Only those Palestinians with Jordan Valley ID cards are granted access through the military checkpoints which have been thrown up around the area, while many who own land there are now prevented from farming it.

According to research on the ground by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Israel has effectively annexed the Jordan Valley already.19

Israel’s actions have caused a humanitarian crisis for Palestinians still living in the Jordan Valley. There is particular concern over Israel’s denial of water to Palestinian residents in order to satisfy the high consumption levels of the settlements and their agricultural operations. Palestinian villages such as Tammun and Jiftlik have been deliberately denied access to running water, while Israel is constructing new reservoirs to provide for the planned expansion of its settler presence. The colonization of the Jordan Valley is illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention and a war crime according to the International Criminal Court, and Agrexco’s operations form part of that colonization.

• Connex and the annexation of East Jerusalem

Connex is a familiar name to commuters in south-east England, having run trains in and out of London for seven years before its franchise was terminated for poor financial management in 2003. Less well known is that Connex is the central partner in a new $500 million light rail system designed to link Jerusalem to the illegal settlements of the occupied West Bank. As such the company is playing a key role in Israel’s attempt to make its annexation of the Palestinian territory of East Jerusalem irreversible.

In 2002 the CityPass consortium consisting of French companies Connex and Alstrom plus two Israeli companies was awarded the $500 million contract to build and operate Jerusalem’s light rail system. The project is planned for completion by 2020; Alstrom is to provide the trains and Connex will be responsible for the operation of the line for the next 30 years. The tramway will run from the west of the city to the major Israeli settlements of French Hill, eve Ya’akov and Pisgat Ze’ev, with further lines to settlements such as Gilo (near Bethlehem) and Ramot. All of these settlements are in East Jerusalem.

Yet as UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard has reaffirmed, “East Jerusalem is not part of Israel. On the contrary, it is occupied territory, subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, Israel’s illegal attempt at annexation of East Jerusalem has obscured this truth.”

More specifically, Israel has pursued an intensive programme of expansion in and around East Jerusalem, constructing settlement blocs which are now home to 200,000 settlers. The Israeli government’s massive E-1 expansion programme plans to link Israeli West Jerusalem to the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim via a corridor which would cut off Palestinian East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. As Professor Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions has written,“Since 40% of the Palestinian economy revolves around Jerusalem and its tourist-based economy, the E-1 plan effectively cuts the economic heart out of any Palestinian state, rendering it nothing more than a set of non-viable Indian reservations.”21

In November 2005 the heads of the EU missions in Jerusalem and Ramallah prepared an internal report on Israel’s operations in East Jerusalem. The report stated: “The EU, along with most of the rest of the international community, does not recognise Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem and regards the East Jerusalem ‘neighbourhoods’ as illegal settlements like any others – but this does not deter Israel from expanding them.” The report concluded that the EU should make a clear statement calling for an immediate halt to this settlement expansion; EU ministers, however, refused to publish the report.22

The Israeli government has openly stated that the Connex light rail system is part of its programme to complete the annexation of East Jerusalem.

Taking part in the ceremony to sign the light rail agreement on 17 July 2005, the then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon praised the “exceptional job” being done by the municipal authorities in taking forward the project, adding: “Anything that can be done to strengthen Jerusalem, construct it, expand it and sustain it for eternity as the capital of the Jewish people and the united capital of the State of Israel, should be done.”

As a result of its role in constructing the tramway to Israel’s settlements in East Jerusalem, Connex is directly implicated in the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Yet the long-term impact of the company’s actions could be even more far-reaching. As the EU heads of mission noted, “Israeli policies are reducing the possibility of reaching a final status agreement on Jerusalem that any Palestinian could accept.” As a willing agent of those policies, Connex is thereby undermining any chance of a just peace for the Palestinian people.

• Take Action

War on Want believes that companies must be brought to account for their complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Ultimately there must be a binding international framework of regulation to ensure corporations’ accountability for their activities around the world. At the moment, however, it is up to individual people to apply pressure both on the companies in question and on the government. Readers are therefore encouraged to take the following actions in order to raise the issue of corporate complicity in the Occupation:

1. Write to the companies

Write to the companies mentioned in this report to express concern at their support for Israel’s military occupation of Palestine. In particular, we suggest writing to the following:

Amos Orr, General Manager, Agrexco, Carmel House, 4F Swallowfield Way, Hayes, Middlesex UB3 1DQ

Tony Helsham, President, Volvo Construction Equipment, Clayton Road, Birchwood, Warrington, Cheshire WA3 6PH

Lee Tae-Yong, Daewoo International, 216 Melton Road, Leicester LE4 7PG
Sir Anthony Bamford, Chairman, JCB, Rocester, Staffordshire ST14 5JP

2. Use your consumer power

As noted in this report, supermarkets do not have to distinguish between produce made in Israel and goods made in Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory – even though the distinction is made at customs for the purposes of taxing imports correctly. Ask your local store manager whether they can confirm that all produce labeled as made in Israel has in fact come from Israel, and not from illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine. If they can’t, ask them to check for you back through the supply chain.

3. Call for proper labeling

Following on from the above, we are also calling for there to be proper labeling to distinguish between produce from Israel and from the occupied Palestinian territory. As the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs states in its guidance on labeling of produce grown in the Occupied Territories, the purpose of EU labeling rules is “to avoid misleading the consumer”. Yet in respect of produce from occupied Palestine, we risk being kept in the dark.

Write to Rt Hon David Miliband MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, Nobel House, 17 Smith Square, London SW1P 3JR asking for action to resolve this issue.

4. Call for government action

The UK is a party to the Fourth Geneva Convention and thereby obliged to ensure respect for the provisions of that Convention. This obligation was reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice in its July 2004 ruling on the Separation Wall. Write to Rt Hon Margaret Beckett MP, Foreign Secretary, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, King Charles Street, London SW1A 2AH asking what action the British government aims to take to comply with its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of companies operating in support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Notes:

1. International cooperation at a crossroads: Aid, trade and security in an unequal world, UNDP Human Development Report, New York, 2005; chapter 5

2. Revised Emergency Appeal, Occupied Palestinian Territory, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Jerusalem, 31 May 2006; The Impending Palestinian Fiscal Crisis, World Bank, 7 May 2006

3. Assessment of the future humanitarian risks in the occupied Palestinian territory, United Nations, 19 April 2006

4. Alon Ben David, ‘Israel – Double Jeopardy’, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 17 November 2004; for more information, see Caterpillar: The Alternative Report, War on Want, 2005

5. Humanitarian Impact of the West Bank Barrier. Crossing the Barrier: Palestinian Access to Agricultural Land. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Jerusalem, January 2006

6. Yuval Yoaz, ‘Justice minister: West Bank fence is Israel’s future border’, Haaretz, 1 December 2005; Donald Macintyre, ‘Sharon “sees wall as Israel’s new border”’, Independent, 2 December 2005; Yuval Yoaz, ‘State to High Court: Fence route has “political implications”’, Haaretz, 14 June 2006

7. Economic and social repercussions of the Israeli occupation on the living conditions of the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan, UN Doc A/61/67-E/2006/13, 3 May 2006

8. ibid.

9. UN Security Council resolution 465 (1980) of 1 March 1980. The illegality of the settlements was reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice in July 2004.

10. Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights, John Dugard, on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, UN Doc E/CN.4/2006/29, 17 January 2006

11. For example, by UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard (himself of South Africa) in his report of 7 December 2004 to the Commission on Human Rights, UN Doc E/CN.4/2005/29.

1- Economic and social repercussions of the Israeli occupation on the living conditions of the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan, UN Doc A/61/67-E/2006/13, 3 May 2006; see also the reports on settler violence from Israeli human rights centre B’Tselem: www.btselem.org

2- Amiram Barkat, ‘Sweden labels Golan wines: Made in occupied Syrian land’, Haaretz, 9 June 2006; Ilya Meyer, ‘Israeli wine labelled as coming from “occupied territory”’, European Jewish Press, 13 June 2006

3- Aluf Benn, ‘Olmert has every reason to be satisfied’, Haaretz, 13 June 2006; Jon Henley, ‘Diary’, Guardian, 15 June 2006

4- ‘Agrexco set for privatisation’, www.freshinfo.com, 9 June 2006

5- ‘Israel racks up record exports’, www.freshinfo.com, 14 August 2005

6- ‘Agrexco turnover soars in UK’, www.freshinfo.com, 8 October 2004

7- ‘Apartheid and Agrexco in the Jordan Valley’, Lena Green, Electronic Intifada, 4 September 2005; Chris McGreal, ‘Israel unveils plan to encircle Palestinian state’, Guardian, 8 February 2006

8- ‘Israel has de facto annexed the Jordan Valley’, B’Tselem, 13 February 2006

9- Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights, John Dugard, on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, UN Doc E/CN.4/2006/29, 17 January 2006

10- Jeff Halper, ‘The End of a Viable Palestinian State’, ICAHD, 29 March 2005

11- Jerusalem and Ramallah Heads of Mission, Report on East Jerusalem, November 2005; available at http://www.waronwant.org/?lid=11418

12- ‘PM Sharon’s Statements at the Ceremony for the Signing of the Light Train Agreement’, Prime Minister’s Office, 17 July 2005