You can’t formulate a sensible international economic policy without the basics: helicopters, snipers, riot police, attack dogs, tanks and miles of chain link fence. Wherever ministers of finance gather, the essential accessories for crowd control and popular repression are always to be found. But even by the historical levels of unaccountability, profligacy and cowardice set at meetings of the world’s richest economies, this weekend’s Canadian G8/G20 meetings raise the bar. By the time the teeth of the last protester are hosed from the soles of the last Mountie, the security bill will have topped one billion dollars. The six kilometer fence in the middle of Toronto cost $5 million alone but most of the rest of the bill is secret – ‘national security’ provides an alibi for backhanders and white elephants.

So what will Canadians (and the rest of the word) get for their money? Very little. The meeting will produce a tepid ‘big tent’ declaration with language elastic enough to stretch over the bickering interests of thrifty Europeans, improvident Americans, tightrope-walking Chinese, and restive Saudis. All done.

What’ll be worse, though, is what the G20 meeting will fail to do. It will prevent open debate about alternatives, it will let those responsible for the financial crisis maintain their veneer of legitimacy, and it’ll chip away at the institutions that, still, offer an alternative to the G20’s traveling circus. Here, just for the record, are three reasons why the G20 is already a failure.

1. The G20 is illegitimate
On the G20’s website, we read:

“The G-20 … brings together important industrial and emerging-market countries from all regions of the world. Together, member countries represent around 90 per cent of global gross national product, 80 per cent of world trade (including EU intra-trade) as well as two-thirds of the world’s population. The G-20’s economic weight and broad membership gives it a high degree of legitimacy and influence over the management of the global economy and financial system.”

To restate: because the G20 governments are rich and, with India and China among their number, populous, they are the legitimate managers of the global economy and financial system. First, of course, the G20 represents the sum of 46 democratic deficits (the European Union’s 27 members count as one G20 member). China and Saudi Arabia of course, don’t sully themselves with the pretense of democracy at all.

Do we gain much by diluting the club of former colonizing countries (the G8) with the formerly colonized ones? Not really. The Financial Times reports that the number of millionaires in Asia has finally overtaken that in Europe, and there’s no good reason to think that governments in the East are any less craven than governments in the West. At the G20, there will be a chance for ministers to receive advice from businesses – the so called B20. This rather hints at the class orientation of the G20’s leaders.

Of course, there’s one thing worse than having your government at the G20, and that’s not having your government at the G20. The G20, albeit awkwardly, admits that there might be something wrong with the world’s largest economies deciding what’s best for the entire world, particularly the hundred countries who aren’t invited. So the G20 have taken measures to increase the representation of poor countries in their favourite international fora: the IMF and World Bank. They’ve made progress too. Again, they congratulate themselves for

… the World Bank’s voice reform to increase the voting power of developing and transition countries by 3.13%.

It’s true! China, India and Saudi Arabia have more votes. But, in the part of the World Bank that makes so-called concessional loans, eleven African countries have seen a decline in their relative voting power, and Bangladesh has lost more voting power in the shuffle than the UK. And it’s a bit of a stretch to call the loans concessional – technically, the concession is meant to be a low interest rate, it’s always developing countries that have to make concessions in their economic policies in order to qualify for them.

Of course, there is an organization that does include every country in the world – the United Nations. And it’s the one organization that the G20 goes out of its way never to mention. Because the G20 members see themselves as the UN’s replacement.

So, not terribly much legitimacy, even on the metrics that the G20 likes to hold itself to. And by the metric it doesn’t like to hold itself to, there’s even less legitimacy. Which group has been more affected by the recession, after all, than women? The United Nations knows all about this, with a series of investigations, reports and policies on gender and the impact of the financial crisis available here. The G20’s site doesn’t mention gender at all. Not once.

2. The G20 is incompetent

Here’s how the G20 represent themselves:

“To tackle the financial and economic crisis that spread across the globe in 2008, the G20 members were called upon to further strengthen international cooperation.”

As if the G20 were sitting the Batcave when, suddenly, the Batphone rang and Commissioner Gordon was asking them to save the planet. As if their policies hadn’t, in fact, facilitated the problem in the first place.

Despite a few changes of leadership since 2008, this is largely the same crew, armed with the same toolkit and the same instruction manual for the economy. It’s wishful thinking to hope that these governments are going to be able to fix the very problems that they’ve spawned.

Yet there has been, and continues to be, solid thinking about the economy outside the corridors of central banks and ministries of finance. Dean Baker, for instance, notes that:

“The economy thrived in the three decades following World War II with a financial sector that was proportionately one-fourth of its current size. There is no reason that the financial sector should use up a larger share of the economy’s resources today than it did three decades ago. Effective regulation will restore the financial sector to its proper role in the economy.” (Taking Economics Seriously, 2010, p79)

The United Nations has been thinking about the financial crisis for a while – and held a conference last year at which Nobelists like Joseph Stiglitz worked with representatives from every government (legitimate and otherwise) at the Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development to produce a plan of action . It’s one that almost every sane economist would endorse. It’s not terribly revolutionary, though it’ll take a revolution to get it accepted, because it recommends things like fiscal stimulus, strong regulation and investment in a green economy. In the scope and strength of its recommendations, it far outstrips the statement currently circulating for the G20. Yet it’s a vision that’s necessary in order to tackle the issues of sovereign debt, unemployment, climate change, gender inequality, and poverty.

3. The G20 isn’t in control

Perhaps the biggest problem is that the G20’s ministers, awed as they are by financial markets, can’t see their way to respond without capitulating to them. It’s not at all clear whether G20 members govern financial markets, or the other way round. But it’s becoming clearer. Britain under its new Conservative ( and Liberal!) government has decided that, in fact, it’s the financiers who run the country. In order to restore market confidence, the people have been served with the most austere cuts for decades in a recent ‘emergency budget’. The belt tightening has, so far, made the markets happy. The British Pound made some brief gains, and the the OECD pronounced it a ‘courageous budget’.

John Maynard Keynes, as quoted by his biographer in the Financial Times recently, had something to say about budgets like these:

When the Conservative-Liberal coalition that had succeeded the Labour government introduced an emergency budget in September 1931, Keynes again stood out against the chorus of approval. The budget was, he wrote, “replete with folly and injustice”. He explained to an American correspondent that “every person in this country of super-asinine propensities, everyone who hates social progress and loves deflation, feels that his hour has come and triumphantly announces how, by refraining from every form of economic activity, we can all become prosperous again.”

So, how to make those with super-asinine propensities listen? For the longer term, the good folk at places like the US Social Forum will be organising for the future. Over this weekend, though, many good folk in Toronto will be trying hard to make some noise, present some alternatives, and avoid the boots of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

When the World Cup begins in South Africa on Friday, anyone who has ever kicked a ball will be able to follow along–soccer is elegant, straightforward and simple to understand. The Beautiful Game does, however, have a regulation that stops play, reverses the game and routinely baffles neophytes: the off-side rule. To understand it, spectators need only look outside the billion dollar stadiums to the streets of Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, for they are filled with off-side people, those whom the Rainbow Nation has yet to embrace.

The complexities of the off-side rule are almost indescribable on paper – it’s best explained with pepper-pots or, these days, YouTube. But the regulation is essentially this: it’s okay to loiter wherever you want on the football field, but if you find yourself behind your opponent’s lines in the wrong place when a ball is kicked your way , you can watch it fall, but cannot play it. Behind the lines of rivals, seeing events unfold, but unable to join in the game: that happens all the time in South Africa.

In particular, such is the plight of over ten million South Africans without proper housing, many living in legal limbo throughout South Africa’s cities, under bridges, near trash dumps, on slopes and beyond the brows of hills. They’ll be enjoying the World Cup, welcoming their foreign visitors, and the glare of the international media might provide some cover for them to tell their story of twenty years off-side in South Africa.

Under Apartheid, blacks were often violently removed from city centers, expelled to rural areas or forcibly relocated to the townships. When apartheid crumbled, so did the restrictions on movement that had hemmed in a large rural population. On taking power in 1994, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) government demobilized the popular movements that brought them to power, and swapped apartheid economic dogma for neoliberal doctrine.

The government deregulated the economy, shrank the state, and opened local markets to the winds of international competition. The result: jobs left the cities at precisely the time that new people arrived to take them, and social safety nets were cut to tatters. South Africa’s human development ranking fell from 95th in 1995 to 129th out of 158 countries in 2009

Through the 1990s and 2000s, temporary shacks became permanent homes for 1.8 million households. In cities, settlements blossomed in and around the middle class communities where a few residents found work as security guards, domestic workers, and day laborers. Work remains scarce, and formal unemployment rates in settlements routinely top 70%. When elections loom shack communities are generally tolerated by local government officials, because they offer a way to tuck wads of poor black ANC voters into wealthier and more conservative neighborhoods. Patronage pulses through the shacks during South Africa’s electoral seasons, but dries up during incumbent years.

The ANC insists that the worst of apartheid is over, that the ruling party has led a massive construction program to house the homeless, and that development is coming. Under apartheid, though, township houses stretched over approximately 580 square feet. Today’s shackdwellers are lucky to be relocated to homes with an interior space of 390 square feet, many miles from their work, schools and communities. Even then, tenure is insecure. As the World Cup opens, several Cape Town families face eviction because developers increased rents from $38 to $193 per month. Those who haven’t been given housing yet are encouraged to be patient.

Rather than wait another decade, shackdwellers have organized, protested and petitioned. The Abahlali baseMjondolo movement, a group of over 30,000 shackdwellers from across the country (and whose website I manage) recently took the government to South Africa’s highest court, and won. The Constitutional Court struck down a ‘Slums Act’ that would have effectively criminalized being so poor as to need a shack.

As Amnesty International has noted, though, the weight of these legal victories have been undercut by local violence against Abahlali’s leaders. Over the past year, shack settlement leaders in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town have been chased from their homes by gangs, arrested, detained without hearing and assaulted. The police have done little to help, and much to hinder, investigations into these human rights abuses.

As the World Cup begins, Abahlali are mounting an ‘Upside Down World Cup’ campaign to draw attention to Apartheid’s unfinished business. In Cape Town, they will set up tin shacks outside the Green Point Stadium, positioning themselves off-side, to show how they live. Their greatest threat to the South African government is their visibility, and the activists fear violent arrest.

Yet their only demand is the chance to make the rules on the same terms as everyone else. In setting up their shacks in full view, shackdweller activists hope to turn the streams of passing fans not into spectators, but into team players who might, from their home countries, be able to hold the South African government to their rhetoric long after the Cup’s final whistle blows.

Caption: The hedgerow outside Oregon’s oldest Mercedes dealership is augmented to make it a peace sign, planted by Sandy 990
Source: http://www.guerrillagardening.org/members/ggmember990b.jpg

I wrote this review of Richard Reynolds’ On Guerrilla Gardening in 2008 but, for a range of mostly bad reasons, it hasn’t seen the light of day until now. That’s a shame because Reynold’s book is a terrific resource into which to dip for inspiration when you’re looking to mess with the institutions of private property in ways that are constructively anarchic (and I admit that this is something I try to do regularly). More below the fold.

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In 2050, when there are nine billion people living mainly in cities, it’s not entirely clear how we’ll feed everyone. Industrial agriculture, with its dependency on vast tracts of land, deep cheap water and endless fossil fuels, won’t be able to help – we just don’t have the resources to farm for 9 billion people in the future the way we now farm for 7 billion.

A group of 400 scientists who’ve been bending their minds to this question recently announced their findings, and their answer looks very different to the way we eat today. The International Agricultural Assessment on Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, headed by Bob Watson, the former World Bank Chief Science officer and now Chief Scientific Advisor at DEFRA, came up with some surprisingly anti-establishment ideas. They suggested that in order to feed the world, we’ll need local agriculture, ecologies that build soil fertility and maintain ecosystem balances without chemicals, and a much more intimate geographical connection with our food.

It’s a fine manifesto, and important to anyone concerned about the future of food and our planet. But if this is where we need to go, we’re faced with the question of how to get there, and what’s it going to be like along the way. A field of answers to this perennial question is to be found in the delightful On Guerrilla Gardening, by Richard Reynolds (Bloomsbury).

Reynolds is well placed to talk about Guerrilla Gardening, being comrade #001 (in the language of the book, he’s Richard 001) in a movement that now has thousands of regular recruits from California to Cape Town. With actions that range from pranks (see picture) to serious attempts to Feed the People, guerrilla gardeners are a worldwide phenomenon, and one with a serious agenda for social change for which Reynolds’ book is a thoughtful guide.

What all attempts at guerrilla gardening have in common is a deep challenge to relations to property. If the gardening isn’t illicit, if it isn’t on someone else’s land without their permission, then it isn’t guerrilla – it’s just gardening. Reynolds understands the history behind the idea of changing relationships to land. He quotes Che Guevara’s observation that ..“it is tractor and tank at the same time breaking down the walls of the great estate… and creating new social relations in the ownership of land”.

Reynold’s book is salted with aphorisms from Mao and Che, but the real eminence grise is Gerrard Winstanley, the True Leveller or, to use the more appropriate shorthand, Winstanley the Digger, the original guerilla gardener. A Christian radical in the English Civil War, Winstanley held private property in vocal contempt. The 1649-1650 organisation, occupation and cultivation of common land in Surrey with which he is most famously associated was ultimately undone by the authorities, but the spirit of the Diggers lives on, and Reynolds’ coming-to-terms with Winstanley is one of the reasons to read On Guerrilla Gardening.

When I talked to Reynolds a couple of years ago, his main complaint was that “Winstanley made too much noise” and ended up alienating potential allies. Winstanley chose to speechify, rather than to sow. Reynolds sees the need for less political grandstanding, more potted guile. Which is why his book is styled as a manual, full of sensible, practiced advice. If you’re stopped by the authorities, for instance, try saying that the community wants to make the place nicer, and you’re a volunteer. It’s hard for people to stop that unless they’re particularly officious.

In addition to tactical insight, Reynolds also has strategic advice, particularly about which common land to shoot for. In language that, at least half jokingly, summons the authority of a general at war, Reynolds says “my recommendation is to focus your attack on neglected land. This is a tangible enemy, and an adversary against which you are more likely to win support.” Part of the reason for the support is that, on neglected land, improvements will swiftly be noticed. A more beautiful and productive bit of green space is a victory for the movement and, pragmatically, nothing succeeds like success.

Of course, guerrilla gardeners aren’t the only group to be taking on the challenge of reconfiguring our imaginations about public space. Perhaps most spectacularly, London-based Reclaim the Streets did their own bit of guerrilla gardening in July 1996, when they took over the M41, drilled into the concrete, and planted trees while 7,000 danced in the lanes.

Reynolds wasn’t terribly impressed by all this, and gently scolds them, pointing out that the thousands of pounds that it cost to repair the motorway might have better been spent actually promoting more permanent green spaces. I think, here, there’s a trick missed. The purpose of Reclaim the Streets events aren’t to create, in perpetuity, an arboretum on the Westway. They are a radical breed of political art that makes us rethink urban space, and the way we move through it. Yes, the cost of filling in holes on the motorway was high – but, as citizen-driven art, it was a bargain.

It’s tempting to read Reynolds’ response as a little curmudgeonly and, at times, he does seem a little ranty. Take, for instance, his critique of marketing approaches used by certain guerrilla gardeners, some of whom “use grinning, flower-hugging gorillas as a badge for their battalion. Please stop this! Where there is a place for witticism within the guerrilla gardening ranks, let’s leave gorillas out of it.”

This isn’t, however, the sign of a young fogey so much as someone who’s serious about the business of urban politics in the real world. His agenda isn’t to build temporary autonomous zones that rise and burst like bubbles in cola. He’s grappling with the business of how to make subversion sustainable. And in this vision, there are strategic arguments for seriousness.

This isn’t to say that guerrilla gardening is all work and no play. One of the comrades in the book practices her guerrilla skills by pouring Miracle-gro on other peoples’ plants. The result is a riot of greenery quite beyond what the original planters intended. “If it had been weedkiller, it would have been different,” says Reynolds. This robust feeling for radical mischief is one that is to be found in the DNA of pretty much every group that’s trying to get us out of our current environmental and social crisis.

What On Guerilla Gardening provides is just one possible, but eminently practical, roadmap. It’s both manual, manifesto and, unexpectedly, a coffee table book, at least in its production values. The pages are lush with photographs of everything from Severin 888’s cannabis plants in German public gardens to Christopher 1594’s seed bombs (a mush of soil, seed and fertiliser to be lobbed into a chosen territory) moulded in to the shape of 9mm pistols. Yet despite the sometimes annoying language of the military, this is the sort of radical manifesto that you can give your maiden aunt (he dedicates it to “My Mother 008”). And it’s a book that deserves a very audience. What Reynolds offers is the prospect of transforming ourselves from spectators to activists in a daily, sustained, way. He does it by generating an infectious sense of possibility and hope that’ll be indispensible as we try to pull ourselves out of our current agricultural and urban quagmire. We’ll need to dig for victory against capital and environmental crisis, and if you’re wondering how that’ll happen, Reynolds’ got answers in spades.

It was a seminal moment. For the first time, breaking all convention, Ronald turned to the TV cameras and addressed himself to his viewers directly. It had never been done before, and it set off a revolution the consequences of which we still struggle to fight. When Ronald Reagan ended his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in 1979 with “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”, his media savvy changed mass politics forever.

But long before that, another Ronald messed with mass communications no less indelibly, paving the way for today’s politicians and pundits. Appropriately, the first Ronald was a clown. In 1963, sixteen years before Reagan’s fateful piece to camera, Ronald McDonald broke every rule in advertising when he turned to the lens and stunned children by speaking to them directly, saying:

“Here I am kids. Hey, isn’t watching TV fun? Especially when you got delicious McDonald’s hamburgers. I know we’re going to be friends too cause I like to do everything boys and girls like to do. Especially when it comes to eating those delicious McDonald’s hamburgers.”

It’s easy both to wince at how crass this sounds, and to overlook its audacity. With entire TV channels premised on direct marketing to children, it seems impossible that there might have been a time where kids were considered anything other than shorter, louder, more pestering versions of adult consumers. But it wasn’t always thus. It took a canny cabal of admen to tap the pockets of a newly affluent generation of youngsters. They wanted to redefine the frontiers of what advertising in television age could be. And they succeeded.

Today, the McDonald’s corporation boasts that their frontman is more recognizable than Santa Claus. He’s the champion of a $32 billion brand. With a wink and a smile, Ronald has charged into neighbourhoods around and inside schools, targeting children with a range of unhealthy food, plumbing every depth to keep his parent company’s arches golden and bright in the minds of impressionable young eaters.

McDonald’s and other fast food corporations shelter behind the fact that their advertising is ‘free speech,’ as protected by the First Amendment and that, in any case, the corporations clearly declare their commercial intentions. So, for instance, when children go to Ronald.com to play McD-themed games they’ll see in small white letters on a pale background at the top right the words “Hey kids.This is advertising!” This isn’t terribly helpful. Although children may know that something is advertising, they are unlikely to understand what, exactly that means.

Michele Simon, a lawyer and author of Appetite for Profit, tells it straight: “McDonald’s knows that vulnerable children are the perfect advertising audience, since they don’t even know they’re being marketed to.” She suspects that for the group brave enough, and with deep enough pockets, there’s a huge and successful lawsuit to be brought against McDonald’s (and against all advertising against children) for deceptive practices. She’s backed up by the medical profession: the American Academy of Pediatrics says that “advertising directed toward children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under eight years of age.” In other words, the very idea of advertising to children is a fraud. Children are simply unable to generate and entertain rational opinions about goods and services, which cuts away the argument that advertising is just a more entertaining version of truth-telling. When it comes to children, advertising is far closer to brainwashing.

Parents are being hoodwinked too. One of the reasons that kids are permitted by pestered parents to enter a McDonald’s is the possibility that they might choose a healthy meal when they’re there. As Wendi Gosliner, a Researcher at the Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley observes, “not one of the 24 Happy Meal combinations offered contains the foods and nutrients children need to meet the Dietary Guidelines. Now, they’re promoting processed fresh apples dipped in caramel sauce and sweetened milk as ‘healthy’ choices. Well, these meals and these choices are hurting our children’s health.”

There’s a bigger picture story here too. Ronald isn’t just a clown. He’s not just a pioneer in the marketing of food to children: he’s also an architect. Without him, the food system we have today would look very different. Here and around the world, the way food is grown, subsidized, processed and eaten has been fashioned by the needs of the McDonald’s corporation.

More sales for the clown mean bigger returns for Cargill and Tyson’s factory farms, Archer Daniels Midland’s high fructose corn syrup processing plants, and Monsanto’s pesticide production facilities. And it’s our tax dollars that go into everything from the cheap commodities that they depend on, to the small business loans and tax credits that allow fast food franchises to breed in and around our schools. For these subsidies, and for the lax regulations around health and advertising to children, the fast food industry has spent millions in lobbying fees, and aggressively courted political favour. Ronald McDonald may have a big smile, but his shoes are steel-tipped.

Ultimately, McDonald’s cheap food is cheat food. Ronald is more of a Hamburgler, dipping into our pockets with our children’s fingers, and leaving us with bills for long afterward. We pay for it all in the end. The cost of diabetes in the US alone is $700 for every man, woman and child. For people of colour, diet related disease is incredibly important – one in two children of colour born in 2000 will develop diabetes.

There are alternatives, of course. The sustainable agriculture that thrives in farmers markets and cooperatives don’t get the billions in subsidies that industrial agriculture does. Yet from the moment they are exposed to TV, our children are subject to the manipulations of Ronald and his friends. Corporations spend $17 billion a year turning children into consumers. Globally, for every dollar spent promoting food that’s good for you, $500 is spent promoting junk. For a parent wanting their kids to eat well, those are tough odds. Especially for those parents on restricted income.

Times are changing, though. Despite the millions that McDonald’s spends in advertising, and despite most people having a favourable impression of Ronald as a consequence, a new survey shows that most parents who have kids under 18 want Ronald to go. The Corporate Accountability International, an organisation which I advise, has released a terrific report entitled Clowning with Kid’s Health: The Case for Ronald McDonald’s Retirement, in which the survey data on Ronald is presented, and some tight legal and epidemiological arguments against him are made.

This isn’t some curmudgeonly attack on fun. For those who want to watch clowns, there’ll always be circuses and cable news. And it’s certainly the case that there are bigger questions here. Why is it that junk food is cheaper than healthy food? Why is there persistent poverty driving people into the arms of the junk food industry. Why isn’t there real choice in the US diet?

But as a matter of public health, as a way to give parents the chance to get their children eating well, as a way of making it possible to have fun with food without spending scarce cash on unhealthy food, the clown’s gotta go.

There is a precedent: Joe Camel, once more widely recognized than Mickey Mouse, is now a symbol of shame for the cigarette industry. Sure, cigarettes are themselves bad, but worse was the conscious attempt by the industry behind them to hook kids on a lifetime of ill health. We’re at a similar moment in the transformation of our food system. There’s lots to do to transform how we eat, but along the way we all need to recognize that parents need the space to be able to feed their kids well, to give the next generation the freedom to choose to eat healthily, and to build a more sustainable food system. As part of that, and I’m talking to you here, it’s time to Retire Ronald.

#10 Bottled Water – Bottled water sounds like it should be cheaper – it’s 200 to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water. But in the US, the annual energy wasted on bottled water adds the equivalent to 100,000 cars on roads and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And the price we pay for water doesn’t begin to address the longer term issues of global shortage for something that everyone needs to survive. Make a start: stop your local government from wasting your money on bottled water, as we did in San Francisco.

#9 Cellphones – We’ve all got them. The trouble is that one of the minerals inside our high tech toys – coltan – is bought very dear indeed. With around three quarters of the world’s reserves of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo, our demand for gadgets fuels bloody conflict and vast human suffering. The No Blood on My Cellphone campaign shows how we can stop it.

#8 Double cheeseburger – A value meal is a great way to eat if you’ve neither time nor money but this cheap food turns out to be ‘cheat food’. What if we had to pay the full environmental, labour and health costs of a burger? Some researchers think we’d end up paying over $200, and that doesn’t include the modern day slavery in our North American sandwiches.

#7 Fish fingers – The world’s oceans are being emptied. When I was a kid, our fish fingers were made of cod. Now the species is commercially extinct, and we’re within a generation of killing everything in the seas. Yet the price of fish is still just a few dollars a kilo.

#6 A Free Lunch - Rudyard Kipling came across the free lunch in the nineteenth century in San Francisco, where he “paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt.” But the freebie ends up being a way to reel you in to consume more. And, yes, my own book is being sold this way too, with a free chapter and video . There’s no moral high-ground for me – I’m a moral low-ground sort of person. But that doesn’t stop me from encouraging folk to get the book from a library.

#5 Googling – Would it shock you to know that two Google searches produces the equivalent greenhouse gases of making a cup of tea. The London Telegraph reported this last year , and while Google denies it, it’s certainly true that global information technology is responsible for 2% of all greenhouse gases.

#4 Toxic waste – Larry Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, was once a senior economist at the World Bank. When he was there, he wrote in a confidential but since widely cited memo that “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?” He argued that poor people valued a clean environment less than the rich, and so pollution should flow to them. And it has, with rich countries dumping their pollution on poor ones, undervaluing their lives and the damage it causes.

#3 Low income jobs. Part of the reason that food and energy are cheap is so that working peoples’ wage demands are kept in check. In Canada, average real wages have increased by just 1% in two decades – and in the US similar long term trends for working class people (and severe declines in the value of minimum wages.)
But around the world, minimum wages fall far below what families need to survive.

#2 Gas – The way we live to day depends on our not paying the full costs of fossil fuel – with thousands already dying and many billions being lost right now. While figures of $65 trillion a year for the real cost of fossil fuel are almost certainly wrong, with 300 million people affected, it’s already a disaster. We need to bring our governments to heel if we’re to leave a world worth living in to our children.

#1 Women’s work – The world wouldn’t turn without the work of raising children, and caring for family and community. But it’s the work that is most often and quite literally taken for granted. If the work that women did were to be paid, how much would it cost? Researchers put it at $11 trillion in 1995, or half the world’s total output. Movements demanding a basic income grant are laying the foundations for this new way of working and living. Valuing women’s work would, more than any other single thing, transform the way we think about our economy and society.

Update
Here are some other links from groups involved in coltan, toxic waste, and food. Feel free to suggest others in comments.

Another update
David Roberts at Grist has a fine response to this list. I omitted coal from the list simply because energy (coal, nuclear, natural gas, agrofuels,e tc) is hugely underpriced and the entire list might have been filled only with those examples, but David’s quite right to point out the real cost of coal. More here.

Yet another update
Advertising!

For something shorter, there are a couple of pieces at Cooking Up A Story and, tomorrow, I’ll link to an interview on one of my favourite shows, The Hour with George Stromboulopoulous.

Update
And here’s me on The Hour.

Under what rock have you been hiding to miss the movie and ensuing publicity storm around James Cameron’s environmental parable, Avatar? You’ve certainly not been cowering beneath a hunk of Unobtanium: it floats. And in Cameron’s epic, this strange rock is the occasion for a future conflict on a world far away between the organic, indigenous Na’vi who take a stand against the imperial, profit-driven humans, looking to dig the very soul out of the hyper-lush moon of Pandora.

The film is distributed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – the owners of right wing media across the world. They’ve caught flack from conservative critics for peddling an “anti-corporate” message, one that’s hostile to the American way, imputing only malign motives to corporations and only destructive impulses to capitalism. One imagines the film’s billion dollar earnings will go some way to soothing Murdoch’s right-wing conscience.

As for Cameron, it’s clear that he courted these criticisms by consciously producing an “environmental” film. In an earlier ‘scriptment’ – a term that Cameron coined as a hybrid between a script and a more prosaic film treatment– the project that became Avatar had a far richer back story. In it, Cameron’s explained, to use his words, the “basic principles of interstellar imperialism, circa 2100 A.D.”

In the original tale, we see an Earth denuded of life. Half of the planet’s species are extinct. The rich live in Yosemite, an upscale condo park. The poor are left to farm algae on the sea shores, eating the only source of food left to humans. The hero, Josh (not Jake) Sully is never promised his legs back. He’s simply promised the possibility of an avatar that can walk on a world that has greenery, both of which are impossible for him on Earth. All of which was cut from the final script.

Nation-states having been consigned to the dustbin of history, the Avatar that made it to production begins on a colonial mining expedition to a blue-green moon in the Alpha Centauri system. The company behind it all is called the “Resource Development Alliance”, and the resource that RDA wants is unobtanium – a room-temperature semiconductor that only exists on the Na’vi home world of Pandora.

To get the resource, the company is true to its name, and avails itself of two bedrock concepts in empire-building, Development and Alliance. It comforts the public and the shareholders on Earth to know that what they bring to the colonized savages on Pandora involves both partnership and progress.

Indeed, there’s a scene at the beginning of the movie where the company’s representative bemoans the lack of gratitude and cooperation from the indigenous people. “We build them schools and teach them English … give them medicine … roads! But they prefer mud.”

On today’s Earth, in contrast, when oil companies tear through jungle, desert and tundra is search of oil, they don’t trouble themselves with the natives, much less bother to teach them English. Martin John Boorman’s Emerald Forest captured this all too well. The mining companies come in with everything they need to extract the resources from beneath the inconveniently placed communities of indigenous people. So why bother to teach the Na’vi English, when the profit motive demands they be killed or moved elsewhere? It’s tempting to think this a mere plot device, so that hero and his lover can banter without subtitles to an audience suspicious of reading anything on a screen (and with reason: I’m a little gun shy of alien-language subtitles ever since Star Trek: The Motion Picture).

Back on Earth, Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan has the answer to the English language conundrum. In responding to the crisis in US education, Duncan explains why education funding is so urgent: “There’s a real sense of economic imperative. We have to educate our way [to] a better economy.” Perish the thought that education should have a social imperative – these days, the function of education is to get labor to be more responsive and productive. The purpose of education is to make money.

And so it is on Pandora. The reason the Na’vi are being taught English is not because humans are friendly. The Na’vi are being educated so that they can work in the mines for RDA. As Cameron explains in the original scriptment, it’s far too expensive to blast humans four light years across space to a place where they’ll perish quickly without oxygen. When there’s the making of a local workforce right there, the economics speak for themselves. Hence the need to forge an alliance, even if it comes through the barrel of a gun.

So, although analogies have been made with Native conquest, the Avatar that was never made was a far more interesting movie, blending the economics of conquest with the imperatives of the slave trade and the concept of the modern developmental state. Sadly, all we see of this is a thin Pocahantas in Space ably satirized by South Park in the episode Dances With Smurfs.

I wonder, though, whether a clearer exposition of back-story would have left audiences readier for action after recycling their 3D glasses and leaving the theater. Fan forums are overflowing with tales of depression and hopelessness about our planet’s prospects. The movie ends with humans kicked out of paradise to “return to their dying world.” Stumbling out into a bleak parking lot after having been surrounded by so much green, it’s hard not to feel that happiness might be more easily found in space than on Earth.

Certainly, the physical wrench from bluegreen moon to buttery multiplex isn’t easy. The change from a world that shuns capitalism to one that embraces it couldn’t be harsher.We learn in the scriptment that the hunter-gatherer Na’vi have a Commons, a public space where all of The People can talk. There’s no such free speech in a multiplex, and any environmental groups enterprising enough to see potential recruits among Avatar’s abject viewership would be swiftly kicked out of the movie theater for leafleting.

There is, however, always space for resistance. What Avatar provides is a language to explain the voracity of a system we’re currently living in, and a chance to point to resistance that thrives not light years away, but right here on earth. It’s an opportunity to talk to everyday folk about the need for change in ways that use a common language. It is, in short, an opportunity to open one’s mind to how we might live differently.

Like Octavia Butler, I’ve always thought science fiction’s virtues lie not so much in the future it foretells, as in the present it diagnoses, and the prescriptions we might imagine together. So, if you’re feeling blue after watching Avatar and are thinking about what might be taken away that isn’t utterly nihilistic, consider these words, which end Butler’s essay Positive Obsession:

“But still I’m asked, what good is science fiction to Black people?

“What good is any form of literature to Black people?

“What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, of the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing, thinking – whoever “everyone” happens to be this year.

“And what good is all this to Black people?”

So what to do? Please give, as my family has, to these organisations – they’ll be helping people in the disaster, and helping a democratic recovery afterward. [Hat tip: Food First.]

Haiti Action

Haiti’s grassroots movement – including labor unions, women’s groups, educators, human rights activists, support committees for prisoners and agricultural cooperatives – will attempt to funnel needed aid to those most hit by the earthquake. Grassroots organizers are doing what they can with the most limited of funds to make a difference. Please take this opportunity to lend them your support.

http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/1_12_10.html

Partners in Health

Founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, this nonprofit health delivery program has served Haiti’s poor since 1987. To donate for earthquake relief, go to

https://donate.pih.org/page/contribute/haiti_earthquake?source=earthquak…

In an urgent email from Port-au-Prince, Louise Ivers, Partners in Health clinical director in Haiti, appealed for assistance from her colleagues in the Central Plateau: “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS… Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

Doctors Without Borders was working in Haiti prior to the quake with a staff of 800. Here is a report on January 13, 2009 with a link to their donation page.

http://doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=4148&cat=field-news

Grassroots International

Long time Food First partner Grassroots International has a long history of working with organizations on the ground in Haiti. Grassroots has committed to the extent possible to, “provide cash to our partners to make local purchases of the items they most need and to obtain food from farmers not hit by the disaster.”

http://www.grassrootsonline.org/news/blog/all-hands-responding-haiti-eme…

In a house in a leafy Durban suburb, lightly festooned with Christmas decorations, a TV is playing the Adam Sandler movie ‘Bedtime Stories’. Across scenes of gumballs falling from the sky and Roman gladiator races, our hero tries to get ahead through wish fulfilment. Predictably, his dreams don’t come true in quite the way he hoped.

Under other circumstances, the house in which this TV sits might have been someone’s dream come true, too. It has all the mod-cons – running water, flushing toilets, electricity – and the only neighbourly menace is the sirens of hair-triggered home-security systems. But this is only a temporary home, a safe-house hidden in white suburbia, sheltering activists from the Abahlali baseMjondolo shackdwellers movement. The comforts of this house are a reminder of the comforts of a home they’ve lost, and the nightmare they’ve been through over the past few months.

On 26 September 2009, around three dozen armed men chanting ethnic slogans descended on the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban, home to 7,000 people, including many of the movement’s leaders. Members of the Kennedy Road Development Committee were hunted by the mob and, in the attack, over 30 activists’ houses were destroyed and two people were killed. It is increasingly clear that this attack was orchestrated by the ANC (African National Congress) in a deliberate attempt to smash the shackdwellers movement and to reassert their rule over the city’s poorest people. Those leaders who didn’t immediately flee were arrested for the killings and have been in prison waiting for their bail-hearing ever since.

Abahlali had long been a challenge to the ANC, representing the largest autonomous and militant group of poor people in the country, with several successful challenges to the ANC’s treatment of shackdwellers under their belt. After the attack, many activists went into hiding, and the ANC declared the community ‘safe for democracy’. They claimed they’d smashed the movement and, for a while, it seemed as if the ANC’s dreams had come true too.

‘We weren’t surprised that it happened. We were organising for many years’, said S’bu Zikode, one of the movement’s leaders. ‘They were late to crush us.’ His voice is heavier than I remember it.

Abahlali had long been fighting the local government to deliver on the promise of housing made when apartheid ended in 1994. But more recently, the movement had taken on local gangsters and owners of shebeens, informal bars in the shacks which play loud music and serve alcohol late into the night ’stopping the children to sleep, and making those who have to work very tired the next morning’, according to S’bu. The Kennedy Road branch of Abahlali negotiated a 10pm end to drinking. This didn’t go down well with those whose profits were dented, and who were connected to the ANC. Which is how the latest nightmare began. The thugs arrived soon after the community tried to wrest control back from the gangsters.

I ask how the activists are feeling. Zodwa Nsibande said, ‘We survive on hope.’ Her voice, too, is tired. ‘We are scattered. There’s no assurance that nothing will happen. The ANC may catch us. But we aren’t doing anything wrong. Everything we do is within the law. We shouldn’t be scared.’ Then, without skipping a beat, ‘We know we are going to die, but when the time comes, no one can smile. But one thing I believe. If we didn’t have an impact in our work, they wouldn’t attack.’

And yet, as Mazwi Nzimande told me, the feeling toward the ANC isn’t hatred. ‘I was shamed by the ANC. We’re not taking ANC votes – we’re in the process of making life for all – that’s why we did what we did.’ Zodwa agreed, but didn’t think the attack was inevitable: ‘I feel ashamed. I was not expecting this from the custodians of democracy.’

So has the ANC blown a hole in the movement? Mazwi thinks not. ‘There are many people who want to join us. We don’t have a specific place for meetings but we’re still moving. One thing is that I was thinking about was that they were trying to destabilise us, but we are more popular than before. More people want to join Abahlali. There is a new branch in Pinetown, and new people from the transit camps want to join as well.’

S’bu Zikode is upbeat about Abahlali’s prospects too, seeing the absence of leadership in the Kennedy Road shack settlement not as a victory for the ANC, but as an organising and healing moment. It’s a chance to regroup, not for the leaders in exile, but for the community left behind:

‘We know that time is a big doctor, and there are interesting debates that are happening in Kennedy Road. Life without Abahlali is not the same. When we were chased out, the ANC said we [the Kennedy Road Development Committee] were stopping development. So they put in an electricity tower within six days. People were happy there was electricity. But that is all the ANC did. Now, without Abahlali, the Kennedy Road residents are seeing that the ANC isn’t bringing development. The community service centre where we were had pre-school. We took care of that. Those kids are no longer having to attend school. The crèche has been closed. The feeding schemes have stopped, and there is no bread for the hungry. The HIV/AIDS drop-in centre that we ran has closed. There has been an increase in the death of people who had been attended by our volunteers. It is sad that no one was willing to do it. People thought it was not a hard work. Even on the side of our office, the grass has grown tall because no one cares for it, and now it is a toilet.’

‘Now, the people who conducted the attack are no longer in Kennedy Road. And the same community is reflecting. They are asking themselves if attack made things better or worse – it’s a good mirror of reflecting. There is a good debate about how we were chased out.’

It seems almost everything can be turned into an opportunity for reflection and organising. At the moment, when Abahlali goes to court to support those arrested in the attacks, the ANC also sends a busload of the faithful, usually stopping off for beer en route, to jeer at Kennedy residents. ‘They are unruly, yes, but some Abahlali engage them. People think that the attack was a one- or two-days event, but we’re still continuing it.’ Hearts and minds can be won over outside the courtroom or, indeed, at the local constabulary.

For years, the movement has been at the wrong end of the sjamboks of the notorious Sydenham police station, a few minutes’ walk away from two major Abahlali settlements. But after repeated encounters, including many clashes at protests against the police, the Kennedy Road Development Committee established a shack security committee to which the police were invited. The police station (and its superintendent, Glen Nayager) were won over through attrition, integrity and good faith. This led to a meeting where community and police together decided to place a closing time on shebeens. And when the local ANC branch came to the settlement to defend the gangsters, the Sydenham branch were sidelined.

Today, Kennedy Road has a new police force deployed there. S’bu says ‘Now, Kennedy Road is patrolled by the Metro police and the police from Inanda [several miles away]. The crime of the Sydenham police was to have a relationship with us.’ The progress that had been made has been rolled back a little. But, briefly, Abahlali had defanged their most venomous foe. And they’re sure they’ll be able to do it again.’

In the meantime, though, I asked what people outside South Africa might be able to do to help. Zodwa called on the international community to shame the government, as she has been ashamed by it. ‘That’s the only thing our government is able to understand. People must put pressure on them.’ In New York, Auckland and London, groups have already protested outside South African consulates – and as the 2010 soccer World Cup in South Africa comes closer, there’s a window of opportunity to make the South African government squirm, with some very specific demands. Zodwa again: ‘What we need is an independent commission of enquiry. There should be no one from the state who is also involved, and no one from Abahlali, because we are all suspect in this whole issue. It mustn’t be by us – it must be neutral. So that it will cover the facts of what is really going on.’

In the meantime, the movement continues to meet, and plans are underway for a peoples’ 2010 World Cup, an ‘upside-down’ tournament involving poor people from around the world. As Mazwi put it, ‘We are not going to compromise, not going to give up. We will intensify our campaign.’

As the year ends, it seems as if the ANC will try to tell itself its usual bedtime stories, that the party is in charge, that it – and only it – is the harbinger of development, that progress cannot happen without order, and that it will be vindicated by the 2010 World Cup.

Some people will believe the myths. As I left South Africa, I heard that Bill Gates had recently visited Durban to learn how it was a model for social change for the urban poor, and to use it as a template for urban development elsewhere through his foundation. Yet right beneath the feet of the world’s richest man, the world’s poorest people were organising a rude awakening.

The dreams of the powerful seldom work out the way they hope.