The Farm

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.

2011-05-03T00:51:00.007+08:00

Recent statistics of Wealth Distribution in The United States

The recent essay by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz’s that appeared in the April/MayVanity Fair, the acidly titled “Of the 1%, By the 1%, for the 1%”, encapsulates the most grim reality facing the United States. It is the exact same reality that my parents took me aside to explain one night so long ago: that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer every year in America. This social ill has simply gone on for too long and has now reached a crisis point for which there must be a reckoning, and this reckoning must come and come soon in America. I am gratified to know that no less a figure than Stiglitz shares my view. In his essay he quickly unfolds the case that the relentless co-opting of the U.S. government by the wealthiest 1%, who have vacuumed up 40 % of the nation’s wealth at the expense of the vast majority, will lead to a day that “even the wealthy will come to regret”. Mark those words. If Stiglitz is bold enough to say them from his outlook, I feel safer than ever saying them from mine.

It strikes me as extremely poignant that a man of Stiglitz’s position would valiantly trumpet this opinion. Stiglitz, as recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics, resides at a high altitude within his priestly field and is no stranger to the recondite workings of the financial top 1%. He received his first major government position in ’93 during the Clinton Administration, where he eventually rose to be the chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (1995 – 1997). His next position at the World Bank saw him serve as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist (1997 – 2000). These positions, plus his Nobel, endow him with no small amount of prestige and credibility on the subject of economic management and forecasting.

His stay at the World Bank was, however, short circuited. He was fired in 2000 for expressing dissent with its policies. He is a strong opponent of free-market philosophy, much preferring a system where government intervention is a system norm. Thus, he holds some views that might, dare I say it, be called "socialistic". Since then he has come to be regarded as the “rebel within”, a reputation that the title of his most recent book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy(2010), would seem to justify. In scanning a few of his most recent essays it strikes me that Stiglitz has grown increasingly rebellious and dissatisfied with things since the time of his firing. Now he seems to actually have a foreboding of revolution.

It’s more than a little telling that the opening sentence to his latest essay is, “Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few”. That he chose this as his embarcation point strikes me as a dire alert to those “1 percent of the people (who) take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income”. Cassandra warned of the Trojan Horse. Stiglitz warns of the enemy within the gates too. Will they wake up in time to recognize their mistake and make restitution for it? It's still not too late for the elite to respect their duty to the rest of us. However, I doubt they will and I sense Stiglitz doubts it too. That's why he speaks of actual revolution. This would be the death of Agamemnon, indeed.

We well know now that those first protests evolved into actual revolutions and to date have successfully brought down two Middle Eastern dictatorships and are working on at least three others as I write, amidst great bloodshed. With this as his chosen backdrop, Stiglitz, though he doesn’t come out and directly say it, the echo inside the seashell of this essay is this: the wealth concentrated in the hands of the top 1% needs to be redistributed and revolution is always the ultimate recourse for an angry populace to do so. Revolution is always an option. Revolution is always a possibility. Revolution is always, always a high risk matter, one that common folk would much prefer to avoid, but if their hands are forced to the extent that they have been in the Middle East and to the extent that are being forced in America, then its probability greatly rises. And if full-blown armed revolution in the streets can occur in a place as highly repressive as the Middle East, where much of the policing had been culturally internalized, it can occur elsewhere, even America.

The gross economic inequality that led to the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions exists at or is rapidly approaching the same level in America, and it is no stretch to imagine tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of protesters out in the streets of America if the working class continues to be pummeled by the upper stratum of society. America got its first eyeful of this last March in Madison. Granted that Americans aren’t living in the same magnitude of poverty as the Egyptians, who were estimated recently to have more than 50% of their population living on two dollars a day or less, but at the same time you have a situation in America where most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75. Currently, 1 out of every 7 Americans is living in poverty with another one very close by and a couple more just a paycheck or so away from that abyss. In short, at least 4 out of every 7 Americans are getting squeezed and squeezed hard. That constitutes a tipping point, I would say. Add to this the current attacks on labor and entitlements and you have the ingredients for foment. If you add working class blood to it you get more marching, chanting bodies in the street and more blood. This is the curdle of revolution. Blood reifies it.

Since the night that my parents first informed me as a little boy of this spreading gap between rich and poor, economic inequality has risen by no less than 8%, wherein now1% of the population owns as much as 45% of the nation’s wealth. When I asked at the age of 8, “but why?”, my parents just shook their heads and said they didn’t know why. However, Stiglitz has an answer: “one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way”.

But that’s not the way you and I want it. During the last 30 years I have seen all of the ills that Stiglitz recites: decreased opportunities and a decline in income for the majority of the population with a concomitant increase in monopolization of wealth and power in the hands of the few, which has generated the innumerable waves of social distortion that Stiglitz variously mentions. The only things that have kept that social distortion even remotely in check are the government social programs that have assisted the middle and lower classes. But now these programs are in a fight for their lives and the shills for the top 1%, the Republican Party, most of whom are members of that top 1%, or close, are more and more aggressively coming out and saying what they’ve wanted to do all along—rollback these New Deal social programs. Paul Ryan’s budget was the first shot

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said, very bluntly, on Fox two Sundays ago "We're going to have to come to grips with the fact that these programs cannot exist if we want America to be what we want America to be.” Destitute? The thing is, America isn't really broke as the Repugnicants and too many of their Demeanocrat fellows would lead us to believe with all the false choices that they present us that all lead to austerity. What the current Republican leadership really wants America to be is one not only where the rich dominate. They also want an America where there is no support or protection for the rest of us. They don’t believe government ought to “promote the general welfare” -- only the specific welfare of the top 1 percent. No one else matters. However, it is greatly in their self-interest, that vaunted principle of Capitalism, for them to care otherwise. As Stiglitz concludes:

In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.

As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.

Indeed, it has and I tremble.

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JAL

Smoking gun: The convenient death of Ibn al-sheikh al-Libi

2009-05-20T05:51:00.000+08:00

The English language edition of the Libyan newspaper Ennahar reported on May 10, 2009, that Ibn al-sheikh al-Libi, a high ranking Al Qaeda operative was found dead in his Libyan jail cell on the 10th of this month. Libyan prison authorities claim that his death was suicide. The Libyan government, however, has not confirmed the death, and the Libyan Embassy in Washington said it had no information. The CIA has also declined to comment. Yet the death of Al-Libi is extremely suspect. It raises the immediate and compelling question of whether, driven by human desperation, he actually took his own life or whether he was murdered for very covert political reasons. Given that committing suicide in a prison cell, though not impossible, is problematical and that further, Al Libi was a former imam and a devout Muslim for whom suicide would have been a grievous sin, and that moreover, his friends are said to doubt his suicide, murder is most likely the cause of his death.

Yet, the final compelling question is who was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, and why would someone want him dead? The background available on him states that al-Libi, whose real name was Ali Mohamed Al-Fakheri, was 46 years old and had led the Al Khaldan training camp (one of more than a hundred such Al Qaeda camps) in Afghanistan. This camp just so happened to be the one where several notable Al-Qaeda figures, including three of the 9-11 hijackers, had trained. Al-Libi was also an associate of Abu Zubaydah (regarded as second in command of Al Qaeda) and had been placed on the September 26, 2002 list of terrorists released by the U.S. government following September 11th, at which time any personal assets he may have had were frozen. He was captured by Pakistani officials at the end of 2001 or beginning of 2002, along with hundreds of other Al Qaeda suspects, as he attempted to flee Afghanistan following the collapse of the Taliban ensuing from the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Shortly thereafter, he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration. He was perhaps the most famous of the “disappeared” U.S. prisoners seized in the “War on Terror,” who were rendered not to Guantánamo but to secret prisons run by the CIA or “extraordinarily rendered” to the custody of governments in third countries where, it was presumed, they would never be seen or heard from again. In his case, he had been secretly transferred by the Bush administration to a prison in Libya after having been held by the CIA both in secret “black hole prisons” probably in Afghanistan, and later in Egypt.

It was during this detainment that he was tortured utilizing the “enhanced interrogation methods” ordered by the Bush administration, and it is at this juncture in which al-Libi becomes a major historical figure. Waterboarding and mock burial methods were used to tune him up and with a few skilled touches he produced a very sweet sound to his captors’ ears, singing just the song that they wanted to hear. In exchange for an end to the torture, he agreed to tell them whatever they wanted. And what he sang is now part of the central history of our times: Al-Libi has been identified as the primary source of faulty prewar intelligence regarding chemical weapons training between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it was this confession drawn forth from counter-productive interrogation methods that was used by the Bush Administration as one of its main justifications for the invasion of Iraq. But it was all a lie.

On February 5, 2003, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, utilizing this lie that came straight from Al-Libi, claimed in his notorious speech to the UN Security Council, “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to Al Qaeda,” In Cincinnati in October 2002, Bush informed the public: "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases”. It was, of course, all a smoke screen that the Bush administration used to cover its real reasons for its invasion of Iraq; oil and New World Order totalitarianism.

Further, Powell's speech came less than a month after a then-classified CIA report had concluded that the information provided by al-Libi was unreliable and about a year after a Defense Intelligence Agency report concluded the same thing. The DIA concluded in February 2002 that Al Libi deliberately misled interrogators. In September of 2006, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released "Phase II" of its report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. Conclusion 3 of the report states the following:

Postwar findings support the DIA February 2002 assessment that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was likely intentionally misleading his debriefers when he said that Iraq provided two al-Qa'ida associates with chemical and biological weapons (CBW) training in 2000… Postwar findings do not support the CIA's assessment that his reporting was credible… No postwar information has been found that indicates CBW training occurred and the detainee who provided the key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war… CIA's January 2003 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism described al-Libi's reporting for CBW training "credible", but noted that the individuals who traveled to Iraq for CBW training had not returned, so al-Libi was not in position to know if the training had taken place… In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his allegations about CBW training and many of his other claims about Iraq's links to al Qa'ida. He told debriefers that, to the best of his knowledge, al-Qa'ida never sent any individuals into Iraq for any kind of support in chemical or biological weapons. Al-libi told debriefers that he fabricated information while in U.S. custody to receive better treatment and in response to threats of being transferred to a foreign intelligence service, which he believed would torture him… He said that later, while he was being debriefed by a (REDACTED) foreign intelligence service, he fabricated more information in response to physical abuse and threats of torture. The foreign government service denies using any pressure during al-Libi's interrogation. In February 2004, the CIA reissued the debriefing reports from al-Libi to note that he had recanted information. A CIA officer explained that while CIA believes al-Libi fabricated information, the CIA cannot determine whether, or what portions of, the original statements or the later recants are true of false.[15]

Some speculate that his reason for giving disinformation was in order to draw the U.S. into an attack on Iraq, which al Qaeda hoped would lead to a global jihad. According to a book written in November 2006, “a Moroccan using the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, having infiltrated al-Qaeda in the 1990s, authored the book, "Inside the Jihad: My Life with al Qaeda, a Spy's story". In the book, Nasiri claims that al-Libi deliberately planted information to encourage the U.S. to invade Iraq. Nasiri said Libi "needed the conflict in Iraq because months before I heard him telling us when a question was asked in the mosque after the prayer in the evening, where is the best country to fight the jihad?" Libi said Iraq was chosen because it was the "weakest" Muslim country, according to Nasiri. Nasiri suggested in an interview with a British television station that al-Libi wanted to overthrow Saddam and use Iraq as a jihadist base. In the book, Nasiri describes al-Libi as one of the leaders at the Afghan camp, and characterizes him as "brilliant in every way." Nasiri explains that learning how to withstand interrogations and supply false information once captured was a key part of the training in the camps. Nasiri claims that al-Libi "knew what his interrogators wanted, and he was happy to give it to them. He wanted to see Saddam toppled even more than the Americans did." (wikipedia entry on Ibn al-sheikh al-Libi).

So, Al-Libi knowingly provided the CIA and DIA with a red herring in the hope that it would result in exactly the manner in which it did: the invasion of Iraq. After this ruse succeeded, he recanted his story upon being returned to CIA custody in 2004. But what is worse, everyone in the Bush administration knew it was a red herring. The invasion went forth anyway. Hmm?

Ibn al-sheikh al-Libi’s whereabouts had been a mystery for several years. However, the first independent confirmation of Libi's whereabouts came just two weeks prior to his death. Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said she and a colleague met him briefly in a courtyard at the Abu Salim prison on April 27. The two were there to examine the treatment of prisoners in Libya, including other detainees once held by the United States. Libi angrily rejected speaking to the researchers, saying, "Where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons?" according to Morayef, who described the encounter in a phone interview. Human rights groups had long suspected that Al Libi had been transferred to Libya, but the CIA had never confirmed where he was sent.

Oddly, his rediscovery coincided with the release of the Torture Memos. Personally, I find it strange that his location would be once more publicly determined and then shortly thereafter, amidst the uproar surrounding the release of the memos, he would be found suddenly dead in a Tripoli jail cell due to “suicide”. Given what this fellow knew, his death seems much too convenient.

Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into his death. They pointed out that the closed nature of prisons means that all prisoner deaths warrant investigation, but that given the special nature of al-Libi’s case, his death merits special scrutiny. “The Libyan authorities should authorize an investigation into al-Libi’s death that is transparent, thorough, and impartial,” a spokesperson said. The head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski, recently said, "I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration. He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war."

Now that Exhibit A has been permanently removed, it seems certain that this is because he was bound to show up before a court or commission charged with the investigation of the Bush administration’s use of torture, either in Spain or America. One deeply wonders what song he would have sung had he been given the chance. His testimony would have unquestionably been the smoking gun that would have revealed that the torture regime was not for “national security” but for the personal political aims of Bush and Cheney and the rest of the neo-con New World Order. That is why he is now dead.

And so, the entire pretense of the Bush administration’s “national security” agenda is washed away. Cheney, who has recently presented himself publicly in the last few weeks probably more than at any time during his eight years in office, which seems very strange, has been spewing on any American talk show that will have him bullshit about how certain he is that the interrogation methods that were ordered by his office were effective (it’s becoming clear that his office, not Bush’s, was the epicenter for the torture program). He recently said on Face the Nation, “two memos that I personally know of, written by the CIA, that lay out the successes of those policies and point out in considerable detail all of -- all that we were able to achieve by virtue of those policies, …should be released, be made public”.

First of all, the "two memos... that lay out the successes of those policies," couldn't possibly discount that torturing detainees enhanced the ability of terrorists to recruit new supporters nor, needless to say, the obtaining of false information a la Al Libi. So, even if the memos in question reveal productive results, those results were, at best, a push when considering the policy's impact on US national security.

Second, and more importantly, how can two memos vindicate policies that were in clear violation of prescriptions within the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture? This is a matter of law and US obligations to its international treaties, which the Constitution explicitly states the US will respect and enforce. The memos, even if they support what Cheney suggests, are illustrative of a policy that was blatantly illegal.

What has become crystal clear for me, more than ever, is the illegality of the Bush regime, and as I consider the extent which its still entrenched New World Order forces will go to maintain power, evidenced now with the murder of Al Libi, I am getting angrier and angrier.

Listen clearly as I tell you that the foremost basis for the “War on Terror”, the 9/11 attacks, were Made to Happen on Purpose. It was inside job manufactured and carried out by sinister forces within the American government, of which the Bush regime was the spearhead at the time, in order to spread New World Order totalitarianism. Proof of this is voluminous and easily accessible. All those who deny it are either staked to the neo-con New World Order or are not able to handle the truth. "'Go, go', said the bird. Human kind can't bear much reality".

Further, though much harder to prove, the current international economic crisis has also been Made to Happen on Purpose. It also was an inside job manufactured and carried out by sinister forces within the American government, namely by the Federal Reserve and the shadow cabal of international Banker elites that it serves, and its aim is to destroy the middle class, particularly in America; a program that has been successfully running for several decades now, but elsewhere too. Its purpose is to drive the world into poverty, making everyone equally as poor as a Chinese peasant, and thus so much easier to control.

My whole interest in seeing the Bush regime taken to court is not because I feel that torture was its most abhorrent crime, but that all of its crimes, particularly the 9/ll conspiracy and the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of U.S. service members either killed or badly wounded in a war that was based on lies, lies and more lies and fortified and promoted by the most sadistic torture, needs to be punished - severely. This matter with torture just happens to be the most solid case that we have against them. May it be prosecuted successfully and to the fullest.

Dusted off and ready to ride: Judge Baltasar Garzon's decision to prosecute the Bush Administration

2009-05-09T11:29:00.000+08:00

The Farm applauds the office of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon for courageously opening an investigation regarding the Bush administration’s torture of alleged terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Graib, and elsewhere. His noble decision to forge ahead last week (April 29th) with the high calling of this international legal mission is truly exemplary. It is good to see that quixotice chivalry still exists in this world. The significance of Garzon suiting up for this joust and single-handedly taking on the black magicians of the Bush administration through the power of universal jurisdiction is profound: it places on notice the entire modus operandi of the American New World Order and all its neo-con hawks, and presents before the world the powerful notion that no one, no one, is above the law, including a notorious American presidency or any further to come. The citizens of this world supremely deserve that the Bush administration be tried in an international court of law for its crimes against humanity and this decision to do so by Judge Garzon marks an extraordinarily positive and extremely encouraging direction, if not an altogether inspiring one.

What I find most striking is that Garzon is acting on his own initiative in this affair. Spanish prosecutors said on April 17 that any such probe should be carried out by the U.S. and recommended against it being launched in Spain, an opinion that had been endorsed by the Spanish Attorney General. Garzon, however, due to the fact that Spanish law recognizes the principle of universal jurisdiction, is able to personally undertake this matter simply by holding the magistrate seat of Juzgado Central de Instrucción, Numero 5. A law passed in Spain in 1985 established that Spanish courts have jurisdiction over crimes outside Spain when those crimes can be typified as genocide and terrorism, as well as any other crime that violates international treaties or conventions. Several other countries, such as Canada and France, also possess constitutional provisions that enable their courts to enforce the U.N. Convention against Torture, but none of them have stepped up to do so. Thus, Garzon, as one of six Spanish judges empowered to investigate such crimes, has made an enormously gutsy decision to take this on.

In a 10-page writ, Garzon said documents and various memos on Bush-era treatment of prisoners "reveal what had been just an intuition: an authorized and systematic plan of torture and mistreatment of persons denied freedom without any charge whatsoever and without the rights enjoyed by any detainee” and suggest "the existence of a concerted plan to carry out a multiplicity of crimes of torture." He said this plan took on "almost an official nature and therefore entails criminal liability in the different structures of execution, command, design and authorization of this systematic plan of torture." He said he also is acting on the basis of accounts by four former Guantanamo inmates who have alleged in Spanish courts that they were tortured at that U.S. prison in eastern Cuba. All four were once accused of belonging to a Spanish al-Qaida cell but eventually cleared of the accusations. One is a Spanish citizen, another is a Moroccan citizen who has lived in Spain for more than a decade, and the other two are residents of Britain. This latter fact greatly legitimizes Spain’s involvement in opening its court to the prosecution of Bush era defendants.

As I had mentioned in a previous post, it is my strong feeling that an international prosecution of those individuals behind this systemic plan of torture would possess much more bite than any result that a U.S. investigation might produce because, all things considered, American internal politics would darkly cloud the light that needs to be objectively shined on this matter. I'll provide some clear examples.

First, it is highly likely that what is called a “special prosecutor” would be assigned to proceed with this investigation, in which case it would immediately become clear that a special prosecutor, while digging up facts, does so only in order to prosecute a possible crime. As revealed in a recent article in Mother Jones magazine, author David Corn related the pathetic weaknesses of such an investigation: "a special prosecutor’s mission is not to shine light on misdeeds, unless it is part of a prosecution. In many cases, a prosecutor's investigation does not produce any prosecutions. Sometimes, it leads only to a limited prosecution". In short, a special prosecutor is ultimately a criminal detective and much less of a litigating attorney.

The most recently assigned special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, spent months upon years investigating the CIA leak case trying to determine who in the Bush administration had done what relating to the disclosure of the agent’s classified CIA identity. “He investigated forcefully and thoroughly, and he ultimately prosecuted Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, for having lied to the FBI and a grand jury about his actions in this affair. Fitzgerald mounted a strong case against Libby and won a conviction and a tough prison sentence--which President George W. Bush subsequently commuted”. Further, “he could not share with the public all that he had discovered about the involvement of Bush, Cheney, Karl Rove, and other officials in the CIA leak case. Under the rules governing federal criminal investigations, he was permitted to disclose only information and evidence that was directly related and needed for the indictment and prosecution of Libby. Everything else he had unearthed via subpoenas and grand jury interviews had to remain secret. Repeatedly, Fitzgerald said that his hands were tied on this point”. Clearly, there’s little point in this. In fact, there’s no point in this.

The article, however, goes on to say that other vehicles for a U.S. government investigation exist, mainly, Congress and/or an independent commission. The Senate intelligence committee, under the leadership of Senator Dianne Feinstein, is already conducting a probe. “But there is no telling what information it will make public via hearings or a final report. Traditionally, the congressional intelligence committees have been overly sensitive--or far too deferential--to the secrecy demands of the intelligence agencies they are supposed to oversee. And congressional investigations of hot-button topics, as Obama has recently noted, do tend to become political mud-wrestling matches. (The Senate intelligence committee's examination of the Bush administration's use of the prewar intelligence about WMDs in Iraq turned into a mess.)”. He concludes, “a well-managed and thorough congressional investigation that placed a premium on public disclosure could (my italics) serve the public need for accountability. So could an independent commission. Several human rights groups--including Amnesty International, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, and the Center for Victims of Torture--have asked Obama to establish an independent nonpartisan commission that would examine the torture and abuse of detainees and issue a public report”.

Yet, the President is not keen on this for eminently practical reasons: the White House has enough problems and crises right in front of it without needing to look for any behind it. As regards Obama's involvement in this matter I am willing to concede that he has contributed enough already by releasing the memos and rolling back Guantanamo. Though it is true that he has kept his hands off of this political hot potato as much as he can, it's not like he doesn't have anything better to worry about.

Lastly, there is yesterday’s article in the New York Times about a just concluded internal Justice Department inquiry by the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit within the Justice Department, that further spells out the inefficacy of any punishment that could be meted out to these miscreant lawyers who authorized the “enhanced interrogation methods”. It found that “Bush administration lawyers committed serious lapses of judgment in writing secret memorandums authorizing brutal interrogations, but that they should not be prosecuted”. In summation of the article, it is likely that the ethics unit will ask state bar associations to consider possible disciplinary action, which could include reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions. Yet, the Washington Post said in a related article that according to the queried opinions of experts on legal ethics “efforts to impose professional sanctions on Bush administration lawyers who drafted memos supporting harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects face steep hurdles. Law professors and legal practitioners who have handled such cases said the difficulty of gathering witnesses and evidence could present ‘nearly insurmountable challenges’ for state investigators who may wish to pursue a case against the lawyers, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee. The core question, one such expert said, is whether state lawyers could prove that Yoo and Bybee ran afoul of professional rules. ‘The only theory on which [a case] could proceed would be if lawyers violated their duty to a client . . . by giving the White House an opinion in which they did not actually believe’. Veterans of state bar offices said the organizations tend to move slowly because they are strapped for resources and are overwhelmed by cases in which lawyers failed to appear in court or absconded with clients' funds.” So the ethics unit determines that they should not be prosecuted, experts say it couldn't be done anyway. End of the day: not only will these guys not do criminal time, they won’t even lose their professional credentials as lawyers, thus allowing them to continue on their merry, little criminal way as lawyers.

My point in discussing the above is to show just how necessary Garzon’s investigation is -- regardless of critics who claim, such as former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton did in a Washington Post editorial yesterday, being the good neo-con hawk that he is, that “President Obama's passivity before the threatened foreign prosecution of Bush administration officials achieves by inaction what he fears doing directly” and that by allowing the Spanish to take care of this matter for America “by proxy” that “it risks grave long-term damage to the United States…that could also come back to bite future Obama administration alumni, including the president, for their current policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere”. What Bolton is really complaining about is that it would set the political precedent for placing an American administration smack dab in the middle of an international court were it to behave in the same benighted way as the very recent neo-con hawk New World Nightmare regime had for the last eight years, which is the whole reason for Judge Garzon’s investigation in the first place.

The evidence that exists in the body of declassified memos between the CIA and the U.S Department of Justice that were released by the Obama administration, plus the International Red Cross’ interviews with those detained and tortured at Guantanamo will almost certainly prove sufficient to bring a guilty verdict against those charged. The only question is how far up the ladder the prosecution will successfully scale. It is my guess that the honorable judge ultimately has his sights set on the Oval Office, where "the existence of a concerted plan to carry out a multiplicity of crimes of torture...in the different structures of execution, command, design and authorization"began. The truth is, justice won’t be served in any other way. I’ll be waiting.

They might have been giants: Spain's apparent retirement from indicting the Bush Six

2009-04-23T17:56:00.000+08:00

It appears at this time that the Spanish Court is going to retire from its pursuit of indictments against the Bush Six as a result of the Obama Administration’s tentative steps towards clearing the way for a congressional investigation. So much for knight errantry. It is lamentable that Spain is dismounting and leaving this investigation up to the United States because American political soft-pedaling is bound to taint the affair, and there is the great likelihood that it will not deliver a decisive verdict containing substantial punishments for all of those responsible. The results of an American investigation are highly predictable: a lengthy period of congressional hearings culminating in a massive report that will find the Department of Justice heads who authorized the torture culpable, based on already damning evidence. In the course of the investigation it will also uncover evidence clearly implicating Bush and Cheney, but will stop quite short of delivering a sentence of any magnitude upon the latter for breaking international treaty law. That Bush and Cheney will receive their walking papers in the form of a symbolic condemnation and exit history with merely poor citizenship grades on their report card is a foregone conclusion. The Spanish court’s action would, undoubtedly, have had a great deal more bite.

However, it needs to be made very clear that it is not Spain’s responsibility to hold America’s leaders accountable either to their constitutional vows or America’s commitments to international treaties that it has ratified. That is something Americans need to perform for themselves, and at this point, is just a matter of time before they do. Nonetheless, something tells me that the results coming from a Spanish court would be a lot more satisfying than anything that an American commission will render. The Spanish court’s inevitable guilty verdicts would exact a severe penalty upon the defendants. At the very least, they would never be able to travel abroad - and that is not a small punishment. Further, they would suffer a great deal of international humiliation. The precedent would also energize the international community toward inhibiting future shady American foreign policy, a prospect that the neo-con American right would choke on. Given that all an American commission will conclude is that Bush and Cheney, et al., are guilty qua guilty, and that the verdict itself will be serving as the punishment renders the whole affair virtually pointless. Yet, now that Spain has spurred the Obama Administration to take an action that it clearly would prefer not to have to perform, I’m afraid that this is the best that we can look forward to.

A hot air ballon: China's National Human Rghts Action Plan

2009-04-18T21:52:00.000+08:00

On Monday the Chinese State Council, chaired by Premier Wen Jibao, released what it termed "a human rights action plan". The lengthy 27 page document, as posted on China Daily and reported in the NYT, was announced as the government's "first working plan on human rights protection". The document pledges, in less than two years, to correct just about every conceivable wrong in China.

The National Human Rights Action Plan, 2009-10 comes less than two months before the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen, and as I see it, that's its sole raisson d'etre: to preemptively take the steam out of any disturbances that are bound to arise at that time. However, it's just an emergency valve that the Party has placed on the machine of the Party State for what's bound to be a hot summer in a few places in China, but it's a facade knob. It's something straight out of Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory. However, I give Wen Jibao and gang a hand for their hurry up attitude in drafting the Party's "first working plan on human rights protection". (That in itself reveals the sad condition of human rights in the PRC). And all of this accomplished in less than two years! Bravo! I'm rolling. Who do these clowns think they are fooling?

This rights paper is only the latest in a long series of white papers and policy pronouncements dating back to '49 that have all been intended to show that Party orficials take human rights seriously in China. However, it's the first "action plan". None of the previous ones were. Here is the list of all the wonderful things they say they are going to do for the nice, downtrodden people of China, finally. Read at your pleasure...

Introduction
I. Guarantee of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
(1) Right to work
(2) Right to basic living conditions
(3) Right to social security
(4) Right to health
(5) Right to education
(6) Cultural rights
(7) Environmental rights
(8) Safeguarding farmers' rights and interests
(9) Guarantee of human rights in the reconstruction of areas hit by the devastating earthquake in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province
II. Guarantee of Civil and Political Rights
(1) Rights of the person
(2) Rights of detainees
(3) The right to a fair trial
(4) Freedom of religious belief
(5) The right to be informed
(6) The right to participate
(7) The right to be heard
(8) The right to oversee
III. Guarantee of the Rights and Interests of Ethnic Minorities, Women, Children, Elderly People and the Disabled
(1) The rights of ethnic minorities
(2) Women's rights
(3) Children's rights
(4) Senior citizens' rights
(5) The rights of the disabled
IV. Education in Human Rights
V. Performing International Human Rights Duties, and Conducting Exchanges and Cooperation in the Field of International Human Rights
(1) Fulfillment of international human rights obligations
(2) Exchanges and cooperation in the field of international human rights

Whew! Got all that? The Ant has heard that they were going to add a 28th page to the document, but they decided that they didn't want to waste any more paper. One wonders what the point is of all of the above if, as legal experts say, the civil liberties mentioned in the action plan are already guaranteed by Chinese laws or the Constitution? However, international human rights advocates, trying to look on the bright side, say that "it focuses on trying to advance respect for human rights within the existing bureaucracies and that the release of the action plan could help abused citizens by providing clearer guidance to local and provincial governments of the long-term direction of national policy". (One suspects that they intend to bring in the foreign experts of Stuart Smalley Seminars, Inc. to provide them with the "sensitivity training" to enable all of this). Further, "they cautioned that any implementation would require many years of work by local, provincial and national government agencies, many of which have shown little interest in initiatives that may limit their power." I guess that rules out getting all of this done in less than two years. Bummer...

As the NYT writer stated, this is "a lengthy document promising to improve the protection of civil liberties, which are often neglected and sometimes systematically violated in China". The abysmal history of civil rights in "modern China" (there's nothing really modern about China in terms of its internal dynamics) is a long story about how Chinese citizens are systematically and routinely violated by the authorities, leaving citizens who find themselves jacked up by the Party without any practicable grounds for appeal through the Communist Party-controlled courts. Further, the document "does not propose any fundamental reforms of the country’s one-party system, such as making the courts independent of party control or allowing other parties or political groups to hold power. Nor does it propose phasing out the system of administrative detention, which gives broad powers to local law enforcement officials, including the ability to send people to prison camps for “re-education through labor” without a trial. There is also no promise to close the unregistered jails that municipal and provincial governments have set up in Beijing and elsewhere to detain petitioners who want to present their grievances". (NYT). Until the Chinese get a clearer sense of what habeas corpus means and put an end to local PSB officials acting like a regional militia in their own private fiefdom, not much is going to change in China. But that's why those things aren't slated in the document. There is no good faith here, nor could there ever be.

This whole document is a bogus hot air balloon. Simply reading the very first pledge of the document immediately reveals how massively suspect it is. "By the year 2010, the registered urban unemployment rate will be kept below 5 percent. In 2009 and 2010, an additional 18 million urban workers will be employed and 18 million rural laborers will move to cities or towns and find jobs there, and the state will take proactive and effective measures to offset the negative impacts of international financial crisis, and ensure the economic, social and cultural rights of all members of society." It doesn't take a genius to realize that this very specific promise, without question, depends more on the health of the global economy than on the efforts of the government by itself. It reads more like a sorcery than a practicable plan, from beginning to end. Again, I presume the aforementioned foreign experts intend to provide training in positive thinking technologies to assist the Chinese with making this probable delusion a reality. "China, just say, 'I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!' (and will buy the things I make that I can't afford to buy myself), and we'll all be a 'harmonious society!'". Dream on.

The official Xinhua news agency cleared its throat and in conclusion said, “The government admitted that ‘China has a long road ahead in its efforts to improve its human rights situation.’ ”

Spanish Indictments of Bush Cabal : Ariba!

2009-04-15T23:31:00.000+08:00

The Spanish Supreme Court appears imminently set to indict former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith. All are accused of having sanctioned the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.” The latest news is that indictments could be handed down in the next 24 hours. A brief but comprehensive account of the matter is reported here. Of particular interest is the background on the investigating judge and the status of recent U.S. and Spanish relations.

Once the Spanish central criminal court in Madrid, the Audencia Nacional, issues warrants for their arrests, Spain will be known in America for more than just its windmills. What is of great value to understand is that this is not a question of "if". Madrid is clearly set to do this, and once done, 24 countries in Europe are obligated to enforce them. Dinner, I mean justice, is just inches away from being served. I'd especially like to see Addington's arrogant head on a platter. In my mind, he is the evil genius behind much of what went on in Cheney's office. Gonzales, the porky little pig that he is, the one who uttered the phrase, "ehbedeeb, ehbedeeb, ehdeebeh, I don't remember" approximately once every five minutes (64 times in 3 hours) in one of his most important testimonies before congress, would look great with an apple in his mouth. The rest of them can be raped into sangria. Of course, this banquet won't be complete with out El Jefe Bush flambeed and served for desert, some sort of good ol' Texas strawberry shortcake with his kidneys in the place of berries would be good. And let's not forget his good amigo, Dick Cheney. (Cheney strikes me as an after dinner cigar one would like smoke slowly and savoringly). Once court proceedings are under way, the popular wave of support for indictment of Bush officials will inevitably lead to Bush himself. I'm salivating already.

Lest I appear a tad bit bloodthirsty, I only want to say that I am hungry for justice and redemption and have been since Bush won a rigged Presidential election in 2000. I was eager to see Bush and cabal impeached for constitutional crimes, and followed that movement closely for over 2 years. The aforementioned having fallen through, I am now eager to see them tried in an international court of law. Bush is a war criminal responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of lives. He is responsible for the vast devastation of both the Iraqi and American societies in the name of a bogus war on terror. But this trial is potentially more than just about an international criminal verdict of the Bush administration. It is also places on high notice the entire American right wing that marched like good Germans in lock-step with him, either wittingly or unwittingly. And what has now become clear to almost everyone is a matter that I and my friends and family have known for years: the American right wing is comprised in its base of uneducated, rural rednecks who couldn't spell Afghanistan even if you spotted them all the vowels or Iraq if you left out the Q. It's surburban/urban support comes from meek, little technocrats who only want a nice, safe, hygenic and conservative world in which they can drive from a gated community to a glass tower everyday in order that they might be able to take a cruise ship every once in a while so they can think that they are alive. Their game is weak. Those in positions of power within the American right, the so-called "masters of the universe", have taken advantage of these poor, unwitting slobs for years. We've seen how they've run Wall St and the Fortune 500. It's time to end the Bush "legacy" and all those that have been complicit with it. Ariba!

Enough is enough, PRC goons.

2009-04-09T09:24:00.000+08:00

The New York times reported on the 7th of April that Sun Wenguang, a 75-year-old retired professor from the University of Shandong, while observing Qing Ming Jie (tomb sweeping day) on April 4th was attacked by a group of four to five men and beaten severely. This beating resulted in three broken ribs and injuries to his spine, head, back, arms and legs. He is now in a Jinan hospital, the capitol of Shandong province.

What brought about this sudden ill fate, you ask? Are there roaming bands of brigands in China's cemeteries? No, there aren't. But there are plain-clothes cops who will pound on you if you chose the wrong tomb to sweep. Sun came to remember Zhao Ziyang, a former prime minister and Communist Party general secretary who lost his party position and his freedom after sympathizing with student-led, pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Mr. Zhao, who died in 2005, is a martyr to some democracy advocates.

The attack on Prof. Sun was part of a concerted effort by the Chinese government to head off any efforts to memorialize the deaths of hundreds of Tiananmen Square protesters on June 4, the 20th anniversary of the government’s crackdown. China Human Rights Defenders, a Hong Kong-based group that has publicized this matter stated, “Chinese authorities are staging a campaign of terror to intimidate and suppress expressions of commemoration for the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.” The attack on Mr. Sun “is part of the overall campaign,” it said. Public security officials in Jinan referred calls about the attack to the propaganda office of the city’s Communist Party. No one answered phone calls to that office on Tuesday night, the NYT reported. (How curious).

The article goes on to say, "Mr. Sun said he had previously visited the cemetery on Qingming Day to honor Mr. Zhao’s death without serious incident. But this year, he said, he announced his forthcoming visit on the Internet. As he left the teacher’s dormitory at Shandong University, a public security officer and about 20(!) plainclothes officers tried to stop him. Quoting the former professor from a telephone interview from his hospital bed, “they said, ‘don’t go there today. So many people are going there. It is dangerous". When he got into a taxi, a car followed him. He said he had started down a cemetery path, carrying a banner that read “Condolences for the heroes who died for freedom,” when four or five men jumped him from behind, threw him into a ditch and beat him for more than 10 minutes. "It is important for China to restore the memory of its history. Zhao Ziyang is such an important person in Chinese history, and students today have no idea who he is. That is outrageous.”

Uh, that would be an understatement. To put in perspective Zhao's fall from grace one needs to understand that the General Secretary is the highest ranking official of the party and heads the Politburo Standing Committee. The General Secretary is usually the Paramount leader in China. Previous party worthies who have held this post, and whose names are better known than Zhou's, would be Deng Xioping, Jiang Zemin, and its current holder, Hu Jintao. Zhao's purgation was a watershed event in China. Since being removed from that post after having sided with the students and the intellectuals for the enactment of democratic reforms, his name has all but been erased from the history books in today's China. There has been no further nonsense talk amongst high rankers that economic progress is inextricably linked to democratization since his purge.

In the four days he has been in the hospital, the police have not shown up to investigate. (That's curious, too). Prof. Sun said, “I still feel very weak. And I think probably my days are numbered. But I don’t feel regret. I am 75 years old and I would be very happy to sacrifice my life for my ideals." Mr. Sun has a long history of activism. He was imprisoned for seven years in the 1970s for criticizing Mao and his successor, Hua Guofeng, and was among the first to sign Charter 08, a manifesto issued in December that calls for democratic reforms. Still, he said: “I didn’t expect this. I was not trying to organize any group of people. It was just a personal visit to a cemetery. In order to fight for democracy, we need to make personal efforts.”

The writer of this blog has to admit that in the course of the last 6 months that he has been stupefied by the events that have unfolded. The sheer volume of information and opinions regarding our current straits has left The Ant panting inside a tiny little air bubble, trying to intellectually dig out of this collapse, not to mention financially, and find some light. No doubt, this is the case for many at this time. However, for this type of villainy that just occurred in Shandong, I don't need a PhD in Economics in order to understand. This blog has existed from its beginning to speak up about this manner of thing in China. Beating a 75-year-old man in a cemetery for carrying out a religious observance is just pathetic and cowardly. Once again, PRC, you don't fail to arouse disgust with your gross human rights abuse.

On Reagan; an open letter to Don Rickles, by M.McCulloh

2008-12-13T23:11:00.001+08:00

If you had asked me, Don Rickles,

I would have said that Ronald Reagan had absolutely no “charisma” at all. Perhaps he excited dead little boring froggy-fat nobodies like you because he wasn’t quite exactly as pathetic as you were, but that never made him anything but a dull mind swaying among a dull populace.

He never meant anything to the real people, barring a few who were badly damaged at the time. Perhaps Neil Young or Dennis Hopper saw something in him with their last remaining brain cells, but the real Neil Young and the real Dennis Hopper never would have.

Has your disgusting little body every even felt the slightest exertion of thought? I wouldn’t expect any physical undertaking, but perhaps a little attempt to… pay attention? Did you notice the untold tortures and murders taking place just south of the border? Did you notice the selling off of public land to the polluters for pennies per acre? Did you notice the gross wastage of the national treasury on fraudulent “star wars” weapons systems? Did you, in the end, even notice the actual TREASON? No, Little Fat Froggie just felt all excited about Mr. B Movie Star, who otherwise excited tremors of disgust in most sentient people….

He never had the slightest “charisma.” He was a boring, tedious, phony old moron. And millions and millions of genuine non-froggy-fat-phonies across America despised him. Almost as much as they now despise this unelected Dubya thing, if that is possible!

People may tolerate you because you forgot to die. But that doesn’t mean you’re clever. And even if you manage to be clever, you are NEVER, NEVER wise. So forget it, Don Rickles! Ronald Reagan was an UTTERLY anti-charismatic phony twit custom designed for froggy-fat nobodies like you. But not for much of anybody else.

Get a life, Don Rickles, if there’s still time…

"He's Not Black": Commentary upon Washington Post OpEd

2008-12-02T06:00:00.000+08:00

I was inspired by an extremely insightful opinion piece entitled "He's Not Black" by author Marie Arana that ran in the Sunday, November 30, 2008 edition of the Washington Post. It was the first time that I had encountered such a fully annuciated opinion that so strongly mirrored my own views, ones that were restive within me because I had not been quite able to coherently break past the labels myself, although I realized they were greatly inaccurate. Like Arana, I too had keenly sensed that our language was not keeping pace with reality.

I excerpt her words here. Although her original piece is twice as long, it is in the first eight paragraphs that I feel that she is right on the mark.

"He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black. We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

Even Obama himself seems to have bought into the nomenclature. In his memoir "Dreams from My Father," he writes, 'I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.' You can almost feel the youth struggling with his identity, reaching for the right words to describe it and finally accepting the label that others impose.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.

Of course there is much to celebrate in seeing Obama's victory as a victory for African Americans. The long, arduous battles that were fought and won in the name of civil rights redeemed our Constitution and brought a new sense of possibility to all minorities in this country. We Hispanic Americans, very likely the most mixed-race people in the world, credit our gains to the great African American pioneers of yesterday: Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr.

But Obama's ascent to the presidency is more than a triumph for blacks. It is the signal of a broad change with broad ramifications. The world has become too fused, too interdependent to ignore this emerging reality: Just as banks, earthly resources and human disease form an intricate global web, so do racial ties".

In the remainder of the article Arana outlines her own amazing multi-racial identity. She says of a recent DNA ancestry exam that she had performed, "when I got my results from the lab I thought I was a simple hemispheric split -- half South American, half North. But as it turns out, I am a descendant of all the world's major races: Indo-European, black African, East Asian, Native American. The news came as something of a surprise. But it shouldn't have. Mutts are seldom divisible by two".

I started thinking that as a "white American" (a term I rather abhor because it is so vague and so strongly neglects my own sense of my European ethnicity as being Scottish/English, but also Swiss and Russian) that were we all to be required by law or custom to have our DNA examined, that countless of us would be amazed at the diversity of chromosomal soup inside of us. I think that it is safe to say we would remark, as Arana did, "There have been hundreds of intercultural marriages in my bloodline".

I celebrate the broad ramifications of Barack Obama's election as I celebrate the broad ramifications of the genes that have always found a way to bypass societal boundaries.

Obama = Socialism?

2008-11-11T02:27:00.000+08:00

The election of Obama means the end of socialism:

When the next administration and congress take office, the most “socialist” event will probably be the eventual expiration of the Dubya tax cuts for snuffletroughs. We aren’t likely to see national health insurance like they have in all of the other communist countries the pink-leaning voters clearly aspire to emulate.

Hell, we probably won’t even see a continuation of the socialist subsidies to the polluting dinosaur energy industries like coal and oil. Nuclear power plants may even have to start paying for their own insurance. Geez, talk about not getting what you voted for.

If things get really bad, the river of tax money going to unaccountable military contractors might dry up, and the central pillar of our socialist empire will crumble.

Not that our current socialist practices don’t leave a lot to be desired: A proper “socialist” response would have been to attach pre-conditions to the money given to the banks and investment firms. That’s what they did in “socialist” Britain (where Marx’s original vision has been playing out like clockwork according to plan for the last century.)

M. McCulloh

Obama's Victory: The Future is Now

2008-11-06T00:17:00.000+08:00

As an American I am so relieved. Tears welled in my eyes as I listened to Barack Obama's victory speech. Like so many Americans who came to believe in his Presidency and voted for him and for the greater purpose that he represents, I too say, "yes, we can".

There is a great wind of change now rising up across the desert of America. I sense that this is just the beginning of something much larger that will transform the landscape of America forever. As I said in my previous post, Obama is just it's first emissary. For all the years spent in a cultural and spiritual sandtrap over the continuous defeats at the hands of the political and social Right, The Ant had seen the way out, a hand-hold, but just beyond reach, that was comprised of the highest ideals of the American Progressive Left, and now it seems we have finally extricated ourselves.

Those on the Right who hijacked the country and subverted the higher calling of America to their own selfish ends in the name of things like "American foreign interests" and at home the disparagement of a "welfare state", can now find their way out of the hole they have dug for themselves - an abyss. Let them reside there for the Legion they are for an eternity.

Obama has transformed the political culture of the United States and created the possibility not only for a post-Bush cleanup, but a cleanup of the last 60 years of American right-wing political dementia.

Let it be so.

A Letter from a Friend.

2008-11-03T02:21:00.000+08:00

I have been in a struggle with a post about America due to the welter of information regarding the econonmy and the election. I am not a professional jouranalist and don't get paid for this other than by my advertisements and donations. Who can blame me for being speechless?

Though I procrastinate, The Ant is working on it. It's just slow, back-bending labor. That's all. There are major transitions going on here. This blog is now entitled The Farm in an evocation of Orwell's Animal Farm. The Dans Macabre of the Authoritarian State is before our eyes, and lest you not think that America is not an Authoritarian State consider well how impossible it was to thwart the take-over of that country by Rightests who for decades drove it into the ground, and did so by the powers invested in the State while millions of "decent", small town, socially conservative, crypto-facist Americans walked in lock-step with it... now to their own humiliation

Obama is just a tip of the iceberg of the changes that are coming in America, I feel. Given the startling fact that America is on the threshold of electing a "black man" as President, you haven't seen anything yet. There has been a massive counter-swell to the Fascist Tide building for years now in America. It is about to unleash itself. I count myself and my dearest family and friends as mighty particles of this wave, and this body politic is about to bring forth some major political, social, and cultural enlightenment onto this planet. This is a paradigm shift that has just had the the curtain to the stage of history finally drawn for it. Entre the "Internal Revolution: the children of the American Transcendental tradition ".

I sense a huge change coming, and it's not just about Obama. He will be merely its first emissary.

I will attempt to prophesy what is ahead of him in a later post, but those of you who have been reading me know that my posts come but every ten days, if that. Forgive me. In the meantime, I pass along a thoughtful letter from a friend that does find a mirror image with me.

"The evils of China are now fully integrated into the evils of the capitalist system, an extension of the point made by Orwell. The only difference is that there is no duality, no mirror image. Just a slightly more horrible set of rulers doing the filthy work so that the shitheads and scumbags elsewhere can go about their dirty work...

That said, I am optimistic that a genuine popular revolution is taking place over here. Obama is not the second coming (or the first coming) of anyone. He's just a good candidate for the first time since Kennedy or before. And he has very good leadership in the House to help keep him on track. Some of the worst trends of the last 30 years can be rolled backwards. That may have profound repercussions for the Chinese - Capitalist Shithead Entente. Let us hope they are devastating...

There are three magic bullets to look for right now. The first is a general withdrawal of American military activity. The second is the full scale pursuit of alternative energy solutions. The third, and more ahead of its time (about where alternative energy was 20 years ago) is the legalization of drugs. The latter would staunch the huge expenditure of funds for a hopeless law enforcement and prison maintenance enterprise and in conjunction with the first two (more obvious and politically feasible,) would generate a virtually miraculous renaissance of the American economy. With these measures in place, a system of rewards and incentives directed towards China and employed by a progressive American government (dare I hope) might shift conditions toward decency".

Michael Bruce McCulloh.
Brooklyn, New York. USA

All three of his mentioned Magic Bullets are what is coming over the horizon, and they can't be stopped.

Ant Farm's 2008 My Dripping Wet Pussy Award

2008-10-15T05:12:00.000+08:00

This year’s winner of Ant Farm’s vaunted Dripping Wet Pussy Award is Chinese Labor Watch. Operating out of a New York headquarters, but maintaining an “information bureau” in Beijing that somehow has been allowed past the gates of the city and rolled within the midst of the sleeping and unsuspecting legions of Party bureaucrats’; CLW has remained secreted within, breaking out in a mighty host of lawyers, and letting more in. Not even the crafty Ulysses could perform such a feat, but Ilium was sacked and so have they sacked Beijing, not once but several times in court! Amazing! No, Breathtaking! Homerical! The very stuff of myth and dream! One needs to rub one’s eyes.

Other mere mortals have routinely ended up in Dis for attempting such hubristic political stunts as these in Communist China. Yet, they have marched with Myrmidon force (go ants!) all the way from New York (that’s in America, right?) to meddle in the affairs of the Communist Party, and show them who is the laoban. For this I applaud so hard I fall down from a cerebral stroke as if my skull were stove by the mighty Ajax himself. But come Read for yourself this heroic verse inscribed on their website.

Perhaps their Trojan horse is the fact that they attack foreign companies and not the CCP. How else could they have been let in? But being the legal nemesis of the Communist Party doesn’t come cheap. Where do they get the money for this? Only Tiresias amongst the Dead could say.

I severely doubt that donations from your average Zhou amongst the Chinese diaspora could provide them with the cash that would be needed to mount such an invasion. Could they be CIA backed, as the Ant suspects every prominent Chinese dissident (group) in exile is?

Let me be as Helen to Agamemnon, and provide for you, reader, a viewing from the fortress walls of the heroes before us. The CLW team consists of three Chinese, one of them from Taiwan. Western educated at elite secondary institutions, blah, blah, blah, while reaping the fruits of residing on Western shores and dodging the misery of real day to day life in China and Taiwan, yet all the time playing a charade that is down right manipulative. The Ant has decided to call them on it.

As a strong-minded liberal I know liberal-pabulum-puking-brats when I see them (they must’ve got some of that melamine laced formula recently, and I’m really sorry about that). They play the liberal fiddle to suit their own little dance, and their sonata is called Travesty.

If I am wrong about China Labor Watch, then so be it. They’re receiving one of the highest awards that AF can afford, aren’t they? A wet pussy is nothing to sniff at.

Congratulations, you three clowns. You correctly bathed this dirty cat, but then you didn’t dry it properly. It’s only gotten dirtier.

Part II. China Labor Watch: A Dilemma, but Ultimately a Travesty. Conclusion.

2008-10-09T09:23:00.000+08:00

But the dilemma unfolds once more. It is not quite done yet. I question along with CLW, in all fairness to them, just how culpable the multinationals are for all of this. The profits that are being made by them off of cheap labor in China are enormous. The big question for me is just how much are they paying to have their products manufactured in China?. Is it an outrageously low price that the multinationals are demanding? And getting?

One would have to be privy to those contracts, which is definitely proprietary. Most companies operating in China don't make public disclosure of their books. Undoubtedly, the buyers have a clear advantage, and have leveled it from Day One of the opening of China. The multinationals are sure to always bring a razor-sharp pencil to China, but it is the Chinese themselves who maliciously use it to cut their own. In the end, there is not much real transparency about the money on either side of the equation.

Yet, CLW states that this entire problem is as "a result of multinationals' single-minded pursuit of ever-lower prices and neglect of other considerations”, and that the big international firms need to take steps to “pay supplier factories a reasonable price for their products, help the factories correct violations and take responsibility for suppliers' legal infractions”. Further, "Corporate codes of conduct and checklist-auditing are not enough by themselves to strengthen workers' rights if corporations are unwilling to pay the real price it costs to produce a product according to the standards in their codes."

My sense is that the multinationals are paying a “fair” market price, whatever that really is. Yet, I have this terrible hunch that the money that is allotted in the contract is not seeing its way down to the killing floor of the factory because it's getting scooped up at the top of the food chain by party bureaucrats and their cronies in the factory executive suites. I conjecture that it is even possible that the multinationals are actually “getting taken for a ride”. In China, that is a distinct possibility. I will say this, whatever the multi-corps are paying their suppliers, it could be a lot “fairer”. That goes also for what they are paying workers back in their home countries. Big time.

As for CLW’s charge that the multinationals have to “help the factories correct violations and take responsibility for suppliers' legal infractions”; they have responded to these yearly allegations of exploitation coming from CLW and a handful of other watchdog groups.

The multinationals have been regularly dispatching human resources teams to their supplier factories in order to assess practices and conditions, yet, only to find that after a major heads-up predicting their arrival nothing is particularly amiss. What they meet upon arrival are employees who have been coached on how to answer questions during these inspections, and the “second set” of books. I suspect that these cookbooks portray a much more benign level of payment to the workers. Also, the books contain fake contracts for the workers; the real contracts are said to be kept by the factory and not given to the workers, this despite the fact that a contract for each worker is required by law. Further, industry experts say that some manufacturers show off clean, inspection-passing facilities to international clients when they visit, but secretly subcontract some of the work to hidden, substandard production lines that are cheaper to run so as to fool the auditors.

Thence, the auditors return home, report to H.R. that everything is fine in the state of Denmark, and a handsome brochure celebrating the occasion is printed and distributed floridly praising Happy-Happy Corp. for its “corporately responsible behavior”. But it’s all disinformation and propaganda.

What goes on before and after is a human, capitalist nightmare. Given the stupid, little human, capitalist shell game that we are playing here, in which the Chinese management (PRC heads) needs to pawn itself off as being decent (despite signs posted on the killing floors that actually say things as snide and cynical as “Be thankful you have a job. If you’re not, consider the alternative of trying to find another. Someone else would be glad to take your place”), let alone their chincy weiguoren buyer’s needs for the same decent reputation, everyone is left the stupider. The pea, a handsome little lump ultimately amounting to multi-millions of dollars, is subsequently divided up in secret amongst the buyers and sellers

Returning to CLW’s notion that the multi-corps must “take responsibility for suppliers' legal infractions”I have to say, fills me with ambivalence. Though each has a tremendous and abiding responsibility to make certain that exploitation is not occurring in these factories, all the same, another part of me responds that this is absurd. Why should a western company manufacturing out of China have to go so far out of its way to make sure that Chinese companies are acting like big boys and girls, and treating their employees nicely? Why should it need to do this? This is, first and foremost, a Chinese responsibility. Chinese management has to oversee company ethics, not a foreign company that is merely contracting the manufacturer. These aren’t “their factories”. They’re Chinese factories. Or are foreign companies the Great White Father in China that have to carry the white man's burden for the yellow race? I'm not sure I want to know the answer to this question because I have a sense that the answer is a resounding, "yes": the Chinese are too corrupt, incompetent and humanly negligent to attend to it otherwise, and have no qualms about exploiting their own because this is the "Chinese way".

Never in my life could I ever imagine that I would find myself defending the affairs of the multi-nationals, but I just think CLW is way out of line here and out of integrity with the real truth. And please accept my reference to the “white man’s burden” with the sense of its intended irony.

Finally, consider this: the only thing that companies like Adidas and Foxx Conn can do is to complain to the officials of the Chinese factories, and insist that they mend their ways or otherwise they will find another supplier: this approach may be successful and beneficial, it may not. The option of finding a different supplier only places them in a position of entering into a new agreement with an equally exploitive Chinese manufacturing firm. This is clear. Really, what can the international corporations actually do to change this? Given that many foreign companies and experts in Chinese manufacturing say it can be "hard" to verify whether or not a supplier is living up to "commitments", one gathers that certain ethical obligations are placed upon the Chinese in contractual terms to uphold. If so, they're not. So what are the multicorps supposed to do then? Sue? Bring in gunboats? What? And if they pay more to the suppliers, is this money actually going to reach the workers? Ha ha ha.

I want to make clear that I am not an apologist for the multinationals nor Capitalism. I despise both, actually. The entire global Capitalist system is rotten in the teeth and has fed on human exploitation forever. It looks lousier with every new day. But in summation, this is, ultimately, pure and simply a "Chinese problem", and only penultimately a Western multinational one. The abominable worker conditions that exist at the aforesaid factories are ones orchestrated by an exploitation class in China, not so much the West, although one would be horribly naive to not understand that both are laughing all the way to the bank.

The final step of my vast dilemma is that global Capitalism is venal, which raises the question of what, ultimately, is to be done to end worker exploitation, both in China and globally. Yet, and I’ll say it one last time, in this case the Chinese themselves, and only off-handedly the multi-nationals, perpetrate this major effrontery to human dignity. The workers are carrion, the multinationals carrion-eaters, but the Chinese “orficials” the killers. Have no doubt about that.

China Labor Watch is a travesty.

Part I: Chinese Labor Watch; A Dilemma, but ultimately a travesty

2008-10-07T10:54:00.000+08:00

I have been a member of a Yahoo newsgroup letter from China Labor Watch for a few weeks now. During that time I’ve received two emails detailing evidence of massive worker exploitation occurring in factories contracted by Adidas Corp. and Foxconn Corp. to manufacture their products. These and other accounts contained on the CLW site need to be read in order to fully understand the severity of the situation, but to summarize the conditions for you, gentle reader, universally throughout the sweatshops of China, of which the above are but a drop in the bucket, are to be found huge factories that employ thousands of workers, often as many as 15,000 at a time. They are sheltered in crude, cold-water dormitories on the campuses of the factories, and cramped by dozens into rooms that are often theft-ridden as a consequence of low-morale and alienation. The company makes them pay for a meager, lousy breakfast, along with all of their meals. That’s how the day begins.

Work is routinely deleterious and poisonous, and workers are, at best, poorly protected. Toxic fumes are a constant of production. Hands and arms are lost everyday to the factories of China. Pay is dingier than the dormitories, and the normative rate of 750 rmb per month, if he or she is so lucky (about a hundred and ten bucks a month) comes only after toiling up to 14 hours a day, almost every day. Many are allowed just one day off a month. Overtime is virtually mandatory and is compensated at an average of less than 5 rmb per hour (< $0.75), if at all. Production quotas are strict and are to be met unless one should suffer unpaid overtime or a fine. Fines are rampant for a long list of petty indiscretions, both on the line and in the dorms, and the shadow of infraction is essentially inescapable. It is the praxis of the management of these factories to psychologically intimidate and humiliate their workers at every turn. Workers are run ragged and are completely exploited. Of all of this occurs in breach of Chinese law and International Labor Organization rules. Dickens wouldn’t have known where to begin. These workers barely make $3.50 per day. That’s optimistic.

Given that the vast majority of these workers migrate from villages where they were going to make but a dollar a day, they hold these jobs as best they can. This is China for hundreds of millions of Chinese, really.

Yet, all of this said, in the course of scouring the CLW web page I have been confronted by an enormous dilemma: on one hand, the facts revealed about the sweatshops utilized by these corps are infuriating and elicit intense indignation, but very significantly on the other, CLW prefers to place the onus for their existence on the international corporations rather than where it rightfully belongs; squarely on the shoulders of the CCP bureaucrats and their cronies in the executive suites of these Chinese manufacturing firms. Coming more to the point, directly in the lap of the Chinese mentality and reality responsible for instituting and enforcing these conditions. That is where the real problem resides, and only secondarily with the Western Multinationals taking advantage of it.

The dilemma unfolds in a second direction. Again, on one hand CLW are noble tribunes for performing this hard-ball investigative work that dearly needs to be done, and yeoman journalists for the manner in which they provide clearly presented and thorough details of the conditions on the killing floors of these factories. On the other they are guilty, guilty, damn guilty of playing the Chinese victim of foreign oppression.

Yet, I take a step back. The dilemma unfolds in a third direction: CLW, in naming names (Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Disney, Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, Hasbro, et al.) and chronicling a litany abuses carried out in these contracted factories spewing out goods on the cheap for the above, in a very definite sense has no real choice but to go after these Big Names and bring to the attention of its Western readership the injustices carried out on behalf of the aforesaid corporations. On the other, they take the easy road of an adopted and nauseous Western liberal slant that allows them to view the multinational corporations as the first and foremost sponsors of this Capitalist venality, which is, for once, simply not the case here. However, do not think for a moment, reader, that I applaud the multi-corps complicity in this. I want nothing to do with this. In my heart, I only pray for its relent.

Behind all of this is a Chinese exploitation class, and one exceedingly important point needs to be added to this. This exploitation of Chinese workers has Taiwan’s name written all over it. Foxconn is a Taiwanese corp. , though they have apparently moved HQ to Yantai, Shandong - a hot development zone. So is Pou Chen Corp (Chinese name: BaoCheng Group). It has 150,000 Chinese workers in its shoe industry producing shoes for Nike, Adidas, and New Balance. (see CLW report). Stella International is based in Hong Kong, but has connections with Taiwan. (See CLW report). In fact, a very significant portion of the sweatshops operating in the Main land and cited by CLW are the result of Taiwanese FDI companies that take their orders from HQ’s in the R.O.C., or Raked Over the Coals, as I like to call it. It makes you wonder who won the war. One thing is quite certain: no one in the executive suites of these Taiwanese firms is suffering financially or emotionally because of their involvement with the Western multinationals.

The disconcerting fact is, you don’t hear a single word about this on the CLW website. It seems CLW feels it’s a lot sexier to go after the western multinationals, but doesn't have any bullets to fire at the Chinese management. It's absurd. It's a travesty.

Keep one last thing clearly in mind; if these workers aren’t being bled to death by the Taiwanese, they are definitely being bled to death by the management of the S.O.E.s (state owned enterprises) who contract out to the multi-corps. The party bureaucrats and the factory execs are reaping enormous profits from all of this, such that they can no doubt drive to work in a BMW from their new Western-style gated villa and back to it each day without a whisper of guilt on their conscience. Ah, China’s new exploit…, ehem, I mean prosperity class. Recent figures indicate that the top executive to worker pay disparity in China is higher by about 20% or more than their American counterparts, who make 265 times more than the average American worker.

Yet, CLW says little or nothing about this.

To be continued...

A note to my "faithful readers"

2008-09-23T02:44:00.000+08:00

The Ant has been dormant for a variety of reasons recently, some of them "logistical". A major factor in this is that the premier blog lister of China blogs, http://www.chinablogs.com/, has still not provided Ant Farm with a slot on its site, thus leaving me a mere voice in the wilderness. (I satisfied their listing criteria some time ago; a blog over a month in existence consisting of at least 20 postings, but for some reason they have not seen fit to enroll me as of yet). Consequently, after a little over two months of running this blog, the lack of traffic that has come Ant Farm's way has been less than overwhelming. I intend to gut it out.

All the same, I have to admit, it's taken a little steam away from my initiative. Nevertheless, I am willing to be patient and slog through the tunnels of the Farm with this blog. One more item should be added to this, and that is that Blogspot.com is a victim of Operation Golden Shield: the CPC firewalls Blogspot. I am looking into finding a different blog provider that can get me into the Middle Kingdom (preferably for free). In light of that, I will change the URL to simply Ant Farm(something I have been wanting to do for a while); no longer will it be known as Chinese Ant Farm. I am going to tone down the rhetoric here in order to be a fair and decent sort, like I really would like to be someday. Further, I will also being taking aim, as promised, at America. It's hard, and always has been, to be self-righteous toward China when my own country is hell-bent.

The second reason I have been laying back is that things are generally going slowly in China. Of course, the tainted baby formula fiasco has been an international issue, but things like that are pretty much par for the course with China. Seemingly, the only "internal innovation" that they can acheive is to have a couple of bonehead factory owners determine that it's possible to beef up the protein content of baby formula by adding melamine. Rather apparently, the same was true of pet food. You gotta tap your forehead and say, "smart, real smart that". Sincere condolences to all the families in China that have suffered from this unconsciounable stupidity.

Lastly, the U.S. finacial crisis and the election is simply front and center on the world stage at this time. Although the above is somewhat out of the purview of this blog, I am going to be weighing in on it in my next posting.

Forward Ant, March!

Let a hundred blossoms take the scythe: The Hundred Flowers campaign revisited and the aftermath of the 2008 Beijing Olympics

2008-08-25T14:34:00.001+08:00

Without question, the biggest story of the Beijing Olympics was not the stellar athletic performance of Michael Phelps nor those of a legion of other great international competitors and champions, but the behavior of the CPC itself - particularly its manner of censorship and management of dissent, and any number of other falsehoods- from a lack of integrity with the sacred Opening ceremony, to empty seats and empty streets, to spurious birth dates for the pre-pubescent wunderbats, to just how ramped up China’s prisoner-operated sports factory is, and more. In many ways, these were the Potemkin Games, not the “greatest games ever”- just an effort by the CPC to continue to promote itself as the esse of China, and to show to the people of China, and the world, what a majestic country slash government it is.

Have no doubt; the real human contest of the 2008 games was played in the periphery of the sporting arenas. When the Chinese government announced in late July that there would be specially designated public protest zones around Beijing, and that all that was required in order to stage a public protest was to fill out a form at the local, friendly Public Security Bureau office, most of the international press and much of its audience, and more than a few Chinese activists, looked askance at these three parks: Purple Bamboo, Ritan, and World (The last a pirated piece of kitsch that Disney Corp. should litigate over). Countless more were stunned by the Party’s generous impulse. Many effused what a step forward this was for the Party, and the Party cynically went about its business. It never had any intention of these protest zones being utilized.

It was just a Chinese insult delivered via the Chinese way, in Chinese boxes: open one box to find another box, to find another box, and so on until the Closing ceremony, when the international community finally reached the last little box, and there inside was a little note that snidely said, “So sorry, but we are your Chinese moral superiors and can’t presume to help that. Now go, and leave us, we whom you shall never understand because you haven’t the refined mandarin sense to, and never again affect that you can enter our affairs. We do sincerely feel so badly for you for not being able to understand our ways. Sardonically yours, the eternal Chinese”

Anyone who ever thought that the Chinese would be straightforward and wholesome about this needs a serious education about the Chinese. Thankfully, they just got it. Pleasant, wasn’t it, finally getting down to that last box? It only took seven years to learn that what looked plausible was always implausible. The Chinese never had any intention of honoring the promises that brought them the Games. Dallying with the truth in such a lingering and meretricious manner is the way in which they deal with all inconvenient and unpleasant business. I’ve been spun out many times by the Chinese, and I’m afraid that it’s always done in ever-enclosing boxes- emptiness surrounding emptiness. However, one is always given ample time to figure that out so the Chinese don’t have to trouble themselves with telling you. If they have any leverage (and once they had the Games they had plenty), they expect that you’ll take it, and like them, not say anything about it. Superiority and servility are such a silent understanding. It’s kind of them. If you were in anyway upset by this duplicity and what it veiled, perhaps you’ll forgive me for dilating so on this very unpleasant matter.

It was most definitely naïve on the I.O.C’s part to think it would be any different. But that corrupt organization was a perfect, complicit fit for the Chinese, and I don’t actually think that they ever entertained any real illusions that it would be any different than it was, they just pretended they did. Their only concern, like all good upper bourgeoisies, is about money and the semblance of respectability, already having plenty of both.

If it looked too good to be true, my friend, of course, it was. Just ask those activists who showed up at the police station and were seized by the PSB orficials. Of the 77 applicants who took the government up on their offer to rock ‘n’ roll, (none of whom -as we now well know - were actually allowed to stage a protest), many are currently in detention or under house arrest, and at least one of them is said to be being held in a mental asylum. [1] Yet, it is two dear old grannies, together in their late 70’s - one blind in an eye, both on a cane - who the NYT reported about on 08-08-21* - that are the most astounding examples of victimization by a dystopic PRC. They share, however, the Gold medal for courageously putting the soft, white underbelly of the CPC beast to the knife of their dissent, and allowing us all to realize what a cowardly and absurd villain it really is.

These two feisty old dolls, Wang Xiuying and Wu Dianyuan, were actually given an extra judicial term of “re-education through labor” this week by the Beijing police, who simply handed down the sentence on their own without reference to the time consuming mechanism of a jury of one’s peers. (For the crime of public disorder disturbance sentences are always extra-judicial and earn an all-expense paid trip to the laogai). Way to go China! Jia you! Nothing says, “The people are the masters of the nation” like sending two female geriatrics, minus habeas corpus, to a laogai (re-education labor camp) for persisting in their seven-year determination to receive compensation for having their Beijing homes bulldozed! Clearly, the Party wanted to send a little message to anyone with a bit more gas in their tank that they might not really want to take on the state after all.

This cynical ruse to lure Chinese activists into the hands of the Public Security Bureau like big sucking fish is despicable and hearkens back to the same type of entrapment employed by the Party in ’56-57, during the Hundred Flowers campaign. The fallout of the summer of ’57 resulted in over 550,000 people being identified as "rightists" who were then subsequently humiliated, imprisoned, demoted or fired from their positions or sent to labor and re-education camps, where they were tortured or killed.[2] This type of rubbish, however, actually last occurred in the lead up to Tian’anmen during the Democracy Wall snare.

One wonders where this is going to lead. Though there is no whiff in the air of major foment, many in China are restive despite the stalwart ultra-nationalist “shit-youth” (fenqing; shit and angry are homophones in Chinese) and their revolting “la-la-la, we don’t see anything wrong, we don’t hear anything wrong, you don’t understand the Great and Mighty China, la-la-la” routine. The hyper-sensitive and reactionary fenqing whose free-floating anger is channeled by the government ala Orwell's Pigs and Dogs are loathsome, just visit any English China blog such as John Pomfret’s Washington Post blog, “Pomfret’s China” (that's flame central. He's infested with fenqing trolls) or Global Voices Online-China, and listen to them squall and mewl their inflammatory rhetoric, a lot of it racist, and all of it definitely ultra-nationalist. What delusion beyond delusion theirs is. They’re another subject, though, one that I’ll be getting to soon. Nonetheless, the other foot is going to fall in China now that the Games are over. The Party is not going to be able to use them any longer as a shield to justify its day to day abuses of power. Don't expect the fenqing to come to that dance, though. They are part of, or on the fringes of, the mere 5% of the population that possesses Party membership.

Yet, after these Games there may very well be a serious spike in “mass incidents” in China. The Ministry of Public Security says last year there were more than 58,000 mass incidents involving three million people (That's 160 per day. 51 people each, average! Even if you divide that by 3.5 to arrive at a commensurate ratio between America and China, you still get a head-shaking figure). The Ministry reported that this was an increase of almost 15% over the year before. Yet, as protests increase, Chinese police are trying different strategies to contain them, sometimes even making economic concessions to demonstrators, a move that in all likelihood will probably encourage more protests - the last thing the CPC wants. That’s why the 77 protests never occurred in the “designated protest zones”. They knew they’d have loud, howling hell on their hands if even one were to have occurred during the Olympics: it would have chain-reacted and quickly juggernauted out of control. I’d like to suggest that one of the different strategies that the PRC is trying out is the same old, tried and true strategy that has been used throughout Chinese history: encouraging dissent, and then exterminating it once the snakes in the grass slithered forth to get the bait. However, I think that those who did apply already reckoned the consequences, but simply and truly had nothing more to lose than what they’d already lost. 3 Perhaps some genuinely thought that the time and place were inviolable, and that the government orficials would play hands off, at least for a short while. It's impossible to say.

One thing is for certain. What the Ministry of Public Security terms "mass incidents" are strongly on the rise, and have been so since 1993. From 1998 to 2005, there has been, on average, a 25% increase in these incidents every year, and that they are said to being growing more and more violent. 4 (see graph at bottom of the page of this link) Arriving at 2005 there was a 360% compounding of them from the starting date which was a watershed year that saw a 60% increase in incidents from the prior year, '97. 1998 is the beginning of what I am terming "The Violent Wind" in contemporary China. This seminal year followed on the heels of the Communist Party's 15th Congress in late '97, which pressed for factory firings in the name of "efficiency", leaving many workers in the lurch.

It must also be pointed out that guaging statistics from the Ministry of Public Security is a somewhat tenuous endeavor. 5 For one, it almost goes without saying that there is a certain degree of under-reporting on the part of the government. How much, of course, is unacertainable. Secondly, there is apparently some bleeding together of "mass incidents" and "cases of public disorder disturbances", the latter of which can be perpetrated by a single individual and need not be part of a gathering. Also, there are those occassions where a community gathers spontaneously and without permission to actually applaud the police for a job well-done, as in the example cited here. 6 (2nd para). Nonetheless, these incidents and cases don't bode well for the government and never have.

So, the Collapse of China Theory. I can hear you asking, "does Ant Farm subscribe to and promote it?" That's a darn good question. The verdict is still out. All the same, given these government produced figures coupled with an environment that is rapidly deteriorating, and which could lead to what I have termed "ecological barbarism" anytime in next 2 to 5 years, it's not out of the question, particularly in light of other considerations such as overpopulation and the massive array of problems in engenders, provincial fragmentation due to economic and historic cultural divisions, a west-east economic dichotomy, etc. Yeah, it could definitely happen given the proper catalyst and could only be a matter of time, if this world has any time left.

What I see glowing on the horizon for this world, and not only China, isn't especially a pleasant picture. The next two years will be absolutely critical. How quickly the West can green its economies, and crucially, how quickly China and Asia can do the same, will determine everything. How forgiving a mistress Mother Nature is the major question. Will she allow us a bit more time to remedy our ways before she cracks? The Ant doesn't know, only prays so for he loves Mother Earth. I am afraid most of the healing, if it occurs, will have to be spiritual, though. Not merely physical and material.

I am not of the opinion that the Chinese's little charade this last two weeks or so has done anything to improve the chances of the just aforementioned. I believe that despite many wonderful and good intentions of the Chinese people, the overarching duplicity and bad faith of the PRC/CPC significantly undermined those things, and ultimately, you can't separate any government from its people.

I sense that, for China, what is in its near future is this: it is going to find itself being pulled away from, internationally. I think that around the world that people from Argentina to Zimbabwe had an a very good opportunity to look close at the Chinese, into their soul, and very probably very many let out a big, collective "ewww". Indeed, somethings are very cute and gentle, but there is something else there that is also extremely unappealing, if not nearly subhuman. I've spent a good deal of time with the Chinese. Finding a middle way to arrive at a higher ground is easier said than done. But as Zen Master Pogo once said, "we have seen the enemy, and he is us."

Nonetheless, after the betrayal of promises regarding human rights, democracy, and freedom of information, which are very important to the West, if only because we say so, and everyone agrees, though themselves are ne'er do wells, that it is going to be a long time, beginning now, before the I.O.C. or any international body grants the PRC Jack's shirt. The upcoming 2010 International Expo in Shanghai will be, I predict, their last little frolic on the world stage.

As for the corrupt, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, and pussy-llanimous I.O.C, it took a huge moral bruising at the hands of the PRC/CPC, and any notion that Shanghai might be the next city in China to host the games is more than a stretch. As they say in Little Italy, "feggeddaboutit", meaning this time, don't even consider it a possibility. Yet, the moral of the story for the I.O.C. is this: as long as its ulteriority is money and the semblance of respectibility, and all the nice bourgeois things that come with them, but not a real integrity with the spiritual principles of the Games, they are going to continue to reflect the defects of the Western soul in a very unappetizing way. But, in their defense, China was definitely standing in a place where it had to be entrusted with the sacred Games. It had to be given a chance to host them. It had earned that much. I only know that I wouldn't have voted for them.

Coming from my bias against China, I have a strong sense that their betrayal is actually going to be a serendipitous affair. I feel very strongly that the West, particularly America, needs to distance itself from China. I think that that is going to be a whole lot easier to do now, and will begin to happen somewhat organically and automatically. America needs to learn that it doesn't need China, it needs America. Not a false nationalism though, but its real soul. It needs to recapture that so badly, and its attachments to China have been hindering that. As for China, maybe it needs to be more isolated. There're things it definitely needs to work on. Both countries have a lot of work to do on themselves. Some distance would be ameliorative.

Recycled Condoms

2008-08-15T20:19:00.000+08:00

Ant Farm acknowledges that this news is a bit dated, but given that this blog wasn’t in existence at the time this recycled condom story first “broke”, it’s still topical here. My justification for broaching this sticky subject is that here at the Farm we don’t cease flagella-ting China for its stupidity, and just because it happened 9 months ago doesn’t mean that it or something just like it is not still happening, or could happen tomorrow, because this is exactly the kind of rubbish that happens in China - used condoms get recycled and used again for things like women’s hair ties.

This matter first appeared in the venerable pages of the China Daily on 2007-11-13. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-11/13/content_6251535.htm. The international communities response was a resounding, “ewwwww." However, one young Chinese fellow gushed in a paroxysm of shame on the paper’s blog, “As a fellow countryman I feel really sad while reading negative reports on Chinese products. And I feel worse when the report is exaggerated by China's own media and is quoted by others. I hope this news report can be corrected immediately, though the damage is already done.”

Yes, indeed, it is. And his doubts expressed within this response, not quoted here, regarding the factualness of this story came prematurely because Ant Farm, in an effort to get a grip on this meaty piece dispatched our ace roving reporter, Jimmy Milk, who peeled off the cover of this story to get more sensation.

Traveling all the way from Beijing to the bazaars of Dongguan, Guandong, Milk poured through the stalls until he came upon an old woman selling dusty hair accessories and discovered that she indeed had the contraband rubber bands, and with the promise that he would buy the entire contents of her tray for 200 rmb she revealed to him what had to that point been strictly proprietary information; details of her supplier, including a factory address. Milk gathered the rubber bands into a puddle and carefully deposited them into a plastic bag, and with the address set off to find the factory, determined to discharge his duties as the Ant Farm’s only reporter currently working in China behind the scenes. He filed this report.

I lubed auntie’s palm with a couple Smirking Maos and she handed me a slip with a number on it. I made sure to keep it away from the rubber bands. I asked her one last time if she read the New York Times and if she realized the extent of the international scrutiny she was under, but again she said no. I sniffed that I’d be back, but with a TV camera the next time. She just scratched herself. I found a taxi driver nearby and pulled him away from a game of “Beat the Landlord” in the gutter with a group of unemployed, migrant villagers and gave him the address. As he settled in behind the wheel, casually pocketing their money, he glanced at the scrap, knowingly nodded and brayed a little “hmmph, Jade Tower Karaoke Palace”. I asked him what he knew about the place and he told me, “this is hot action joint for local rich kids and big party businessman. Also, have condom factory in basement”. I knew I was onto something. We drove on in silence toward the edge of town, me busy behind a cigarette, him the wheel. I sat in the back understanding how Mao must have felt on his way into Tianjin.

After several minutes of careful, vulturine circling we finally reached the destination. I paid him off the meter, the only way he’d take any foreigner anywhere, for the scabrous price of a hundred yuan. He sped off leaving me to find my balance in the middle of nowhere. I shot a rubber band at him. As I glanced around the immediate street I noticed there wasn’t a soul in sight. “What hit this place?” I thought, but then bore in mind that 90 percent of China looked this bad, or worse. And then before me, looming 5 stories high, was the newly built Jade Tower Karaoke Palace- a kitsch pagoda façade done in gold leaf with something sinisterly phallic about it, and a couple of gruesome looking temple dogs eternally yapping at the entrance. I made note of the fact that it was the only building in the area that had been built in the last decade or three. The rest of the area looked like someone had poured concrete and tar down an incline and gamely called it a street, the buildings looking shot up like the location of where a fire fight between rival Red Guard factions had gone down, but nobody had found the time to patch it up in the forty years since. Only the nearby karaoke palace held out the promise of “modern China”. As I glanced further up its walls I noticed an odd bonnet-like structure, very phallic looking, with a dimple at the very top capping it off, but thought, “nah, couldn’t be”. Things were getting more surreal by the second.

Preparing myself to play the “aggressive reporter” role, I took one last drag off my smoke and headed toward the door, ready to pull off some serious ambush journalism that would make my hero, Geraldo Rivera, proud. I strode up the red carpet leading in, past the temple dogs and through two big red columns that somehow resembled oversized dildos, but stopped just short of being obvious. The mirrored glass doors bedecked with a Santa Claus year-round were locked. It was then that I became aware of a thick, black resinous cloud of smoke emanating from behind the building. Having no choice but to cradle my head between my forearms I rushed through the nightmarish sea of smoke that stretched for half a block, rounded the corner of the building and burst up the shipping dock steps and into the factory in the back of the “Palace”, panting madly and covered in soot. Above the dock was a sign that read, “Guangzhou Research Institute for the Utilization of Unreusable Resources”. To my amazement, hanging everywhere, were rack upon rack of dripping condoms for as far as the eye could see, or my name isn’t Jimmy Milk. There in the middle was a huge vulcanizing vat toxically blasting away. Along the walls was a mountain of boxes that read “Ji Zee Rubber Bands”, and others that read “Princess Snowy Mountain Hair Ties”.

Out of nowhere, an old man appeared. Taking the offensive, I blurted out my standard “I’m with the New York Times, here to do stories about China during the Games”. In his arms was a waste basket emblazoned with the name of the Palace on it, and as I stepped toward him I looked into it and saw it was half-full of the “emperor’s socks”, and that the emperor had trodden through many a Jade Gate that day. He looked like the Monkey King that had just stolen the Peach of Immortality, but been caught. He had the most angelic simper on his face that I’ve ever seen. It was simply celestial.

My job was easy now. I asked him his name. He replied, “my precious family name is Whang, but everyone just calls me Old Whang. I am the chief janitor upstairs”. I asked him where the rest of the workers were. He said, “I think they just finally quit”. I asked Old Whang if he knew what the Guangzhou Research Institute for the Utilization of Unreusable Resources was up to, and what it’s connection to the Jade Tower Karaoke Palace was. He said he didn’t, but he could guess as he finally put down the wastebasket. He looked toward the vulcanizer, then the boxes of rubber bands and hair ties. And then he looked at me and said, “things are bad here. Workers pass out from exhaustion, putting in 15-hour days and 13 in the slow season. These workers are making only 28 Yuan per day and receive only 3.9 Yuan per hour for overtime -- well below the legal minimum. No insurance, no pensions, no maternity leave, no marital leave and no leave to bury family members. Pregnant women who cannot keep up with the pace are forced to take time off -- unpaid. Not to mention that there are no safety precautions for any of the workers. And they haven’t been paid in half a year”. A tear twinkled in the corner of his eye.

Just then a shiny, new black BMW sedan drove up. It was the big man. Out he stepped in a cheap suit, the Son of Heaven, descendant and representative of Heaven on Earth, holder of absolute power over all matters, great and small, charged with a divine and predestined mandate to rule. Angrily, the sole and supreme overlord of the entire civilized world came up the steps toward me, along with two scrawny, little genetic mishaps who were his lieutenants. He shouted, “who are you? What are you doing here? Are you the reason everybody think they can quit? Answer me!, foreign devil!”. I looked at Old Whang, gave him a wink, and just clocked the bastard. His lieutenants scattered like mice. I gave Old Whang about 500 rmb and told him to split.

Making my way swiftly back to the main street, a cab came fortuitously that moment and I hopped in. “The airport”, I said. I lit up and thought, “this brand of cigarettes that Mao smoked really suck”.

Jimmy Milk is the bastard son of the missionary, John Birch, O.S.S. His Chinese mother died giving birth to him, and his father who was killed by PLA soldiers at the end of WWII never knew of the result of his indiscretion. Milk was taken by his grandmother to Inner Mongolia, where she left him to die in the wilderness. He was, however, raised by wolves. In time, the ageless Milk would travel through every province of China, learn each of its dialect perfectly, and with his lupine survival skills, make it through every political and economic upheaval that China could throw at him. Milk is also a foremost authority on the World Communist Conspiracy. Don't get him started. He now proudly reports for us. Thank you, Jimmy.

Sasha Gong (fifth of five bios of dissidents who met with Bush).

2008-08-09T20:18:00.000+08:00

Sasha Gong, 52 - scholar, writer, journalist and a lifelong political activist - would have to be considered a major “brain”. Considering that despite not having finished elementary school as a result of having been sent down to the country side in the very early 70’s, then from 1972 to 1978 being compelled to stultifying work as a mechanic in a factory, and then in ’79, spending a year in prison, Sasha still managed to achieve the highest score among 200,000 competitors in her province when she sat for the national university entrance exam just before her 23rd birthday. Unsurprisingly, she was subsequently admitted to Peking University, China's top postsecondary academy, where in eight years she earned a B.A. and an M.A. in history. In 1988, she began graduate studies with a fellowship to Harvard University and earned a Ph.D. in sociology in 1995.

In the late 70s she formed an underground dissident group. Through their writings, they urged people to consider democracy and rule of law as an alternative to communist dictatorship. Apprehended and convicted of anti-state crimes, during her imprisonment she was subjected to intense interrogation, and public humiliation upon release. Throughout the ordeal, she never stopped her pursuit of freedom through learning and thinking. Sasha Gong was born a rebel.

Gong arrived in the United States around ’87-’88. In her memoir, “Born American: A Chinese Woman’s stories of Inadequacy, Rebellion and Redemption”, she relates that something inside of her had suddenly clicked, and for the first time in her life she felt at home; She had been born an American- it had just taken her 31 years to get there. A press release for her memoir reads, “This book depicts China's baby-boomer generation through the author's personal anecdotes of the 1960s and 1970s: how they grew up, what they believed, what they feared and what they desired. While a cursory examination would conclude that nothing about the China of 1967 suggested the China of 2007, the stories show that the seeds of the great transformation were actually planted during those years. The author explores how the political system penetrated and perverted family relationships and did much damage to individuals and social groups. The stories are written from the perspective of becoming an American. Embracing American culture, and speaking as one of a handful of scholars who can travel back and forth intellectually between Eastern and Western culture, Gong provides readers with comprehensible narratives about the human factors behind the phenomenon of China’s rise, and the people behind its quantum leap from communism to capitalism”. (The Ant says, “I need to read this book”).

In her recent meeting with Bush she urged him to press for greater American media access to China. She suggested that he propose a free information exchange agreement with China. She reminded him that the Chinese government is already educating the American public about China, but without much reciprocity.

For several years now CCTV has been available in America via cable subscription, and dozens of Chinese channels are available by satellite. Chinese newspapers are also available with a subscription. Additionally, Chinese web sites are free and are always available. China has developed plenty of ways, backed by massive government funding, to explain itself to U.S. citizens.

When she informed the president that her blog about America has attracted millions of Chinese readers, he responded, "If you have millions of readers, what are you complaining for?" "I am complaining that I am a one-man band," she replied. Given that broadcasting into China by the American equivalent of CCTV, Voice of America, is often jammed, and its Web site is frequently blocked, the impact of U.S. government-sponsored programs is negligible. Nothing anywhere near the wave saturation of China International Radio, which can be heard on AM WUST, Baltimore, and WNWR, Philadelphia, even remotely exists for American governmental broadcasting in China.

She claims that the lack of good information has created an image problem for the United States with the Chinese people. (America, an image problem? Nah, impossible. Especially these days. Our President has seen to that. Any rate, I personally nominate NPR as a good choice of broadcasting material to beam into the Dragon’s ear).

Sasha Gong has taught sociology at UCLA and George Washington University, worked as director of the Cantonese Service at Radio Free Asia, and served as senior program officer at the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, AFL-CIO. She has published a few books and numerous articles in the Chinese-language press. She is one of the most-read magazine column writers in China. Her blog, http://gongxiaoxia.blog.tianya.cn/, which discusses American politics, culture and economics, attracted 640,000 visits in its first eight months, and has received that many in the last four months or so, and is now up to 1.3 million hits.

Books and Publications:

Born American: A Chinese Woman’s stories of Inadequacy, Rebellion and Redemption

www.maxwell.syr.edu/moynihan/programs/EastAsia/file/US-China%20Conference.pdf

Credit to www.publishersmarketplace.com/rights/display.cgi?no=5620 - 20k -

Bob Fu

2008-08-07T01:29:00.000+08:00

Born and raised in Shandong province, Xiqiu “Bob” Fu was a leader of the student democracy movement that ended in the Tian'anmen Square Massacre of June 4, 1989. At that time he was attending People’s University in Beijing. Fu was converted to Christianity by an American English professor, and by 1992, was the pastor of a house church of 30 students. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife, Cai Bochun (Heidi), started an illegal bible school in a shuttered factory. In May of 1996, secret police discovered the school, and they were imprisoned.

They were released two months later, whereupon Fu was fired from his job as an English teacher at the Beijing School for the Communist Party, and Heidi lost her acceptance to study for her master’s degree. Heidi was pregnant at the time, but apparently had not received approval from her work unit for pregnancy. Without said approval, she could receive no medical help and would be forced to abort her baby, even at full term.

These circumstances drew them to Hong Kong at the end of 1996, where they posed as tourists. Abandoning their group, they applied repeatedly for visas to America. Their case became publicized, and President Clinton directly intervened on their behalf with the Chinese authorities. They finally arrived on U.S. soil just a few days before the British turned over Hong Kong to Beijing.

Bob Fu’s focus is religious persecution of Christians in China, and in 2002, he founded China Aid Association to draw international attention to China’s gross human rights violations against "house-church Christians", those worshiping in non-governmentally sanctioned settings. “In addition to collecting documents and materials related to Chinese law and government policy toward religion in China, CAA issues press releases on cases of religious persecution in China and carries out other advocacy on behalf of persecuted religious believers in China. It also provides humanitarian relief to persecuted members of underground Protestant churches in China. Although CAA’s connections inside China are primarily with Christians, the organization supports the broad principle of freedom of religion for all believers in China and aspires to conduct activities which protect the civil rights of believers from all religions”. Nearly 80 percent of the CAA’s annual budget goes directly to China to help the persecuted believers.

His organization is well-organized and is able to respond to persecution crises inside of China rapidly. “China Aid investigators are dispatched on short notice to the scenes of persecution to conduct direct interviews with victims and family members. With collaboration from local church leaders and members, these monitors gather information including photos, video and audio interviews. All information is verified by secondary sources before being transmitted to CAA headquarters”. How CAA is able to respond so expediently is not clear, but once on the scene the organization is then able to “deliver emergency funds, and in time, contact appropriate media sources, notify Western governments and NGOs, and if necessary, initiate direct letter-writing campaigns, urging release of the prisoner(s)”. Clearly, this requires some risk on the part of the investigators, and how they are able to avoid persecution themselves is uncertain to Ant Farm at this time.

CAA’s main focus is with unregistered Protestant churches in China, those not part of the governmentally sanctioned TSPM. (Ant Farm provides this historical background on the subject of TSPM selectively culled for the reader from Wikipedia).

The Three-Self Patriotic Movement, or the Three-Self Church consists of three principles, which are: self-governance, self-support (i.e., financial independence from foreigners) and self-propagation (i.e., indigenous missionary work). The origins of this movement were begun by Western missionaries in the mid 1800’s who recognized that only through this approach could Christianity be propagated successfully in China. They were drafted formally during an 1892 conference in Shanghai of Protestant Christian missions. In 1951, in the wake of the revolution, a Cantonese Christian named Y.T. Wu (1893–1979) re-initiated the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which promoted the same strategy of “self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation”, but was updated in order to completely remove foreign influences from the Chinese churches, and to assure the communist government that the churches would be patriotic to the newly-established People's Republic of China. The movement began formally in 1954 and allowed the government to infiltrate, subvert, and control much of organized Christianity.

From 1966 to 1976, during the Cultural Revolution, the expression of religious life in China was effectively banned, including even the TSPM. The growth of the Chinese House Church movement during this period was a result of all Chinese Christian worship being driven underground for fear of persecution. To counter this growing trend of "unregistered meetings", in 1979 the government officially restored the TSPM after thirteen years of non-existence, and in 1980 the CCC (China Christian Council)was formed. The TSPM is not a denomination, and denominational distinctions do not exist within the organization. Pastors are trained at one of only thirteen officially sanctioned seminaries which are Marxist-oriented and teach liberal theology.

The attempt to bring house-church Christians into the fold of "registered" meeting places has met with mixed results. One area of disagreement has been the restriction that the government places on preaching and teaching certain doctrines which are deemed to be inappropriate. Some examples of teaching that are not offered at the TSPM meetings include: references to the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. However, restrictions are not always harshly enforced, and many pastors within the TSPM have the freedom to exposit Christian teachings more fully.

The TSPM and CCC are viewed with suspicion and distrust by some Christians both within and outside China. Some claim the TSPM to be a tool of the CCP to control and regulate the expression of Christianity. As a result, there are groups that refuse to deal with the TSPM or CCC, and there exists a large unregistered House Church movement in China with some claiming that it serves the large majority of Protestant Christians in China.There has also been allegations of regular and systematic persecution against Christians associated with the House Church movement and other unregistered Christian organizations in China. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Self_Patriotic_Movement).

Fu’s group states that as of 1993, there were 7 million members of the TSPM with 11 million affiliated, as opposed to an estimated 18 million and 47 million "unregistered" Protestant Christians respectively.

Ant Farm will be detailing the subject of religious persecution in China in later postings. Bob Fu's Chinaaid.org is probably the premier site on the web for understanding and keeping abreast of this subject.

Bob Fu has testified before many organizations, including the House International Relations Committee, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Bob Fu is a PhD candidate of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also visiting professor at Oklahoma Wesleyan University and editor-in-chief of Chinese Law and Religion Monitor Journal. Bob and Heidi have three children, Daniel, Tracy and Melissa.

Credit to http://chinaaid.org/ for biographical material on Bob Fu.

Rabiya Kadeer

2008-08-04T00:26:00.000+08:00

Rabiya Kadeer's story is an extremely interesting one. A Uyghur, the 61-year-old Kadeer is the foremost human rights advocate and leader of the Uyghur cause. She is the “Mother of the Uyghur nation”, in addition to being the mother of eleven children of her own. A former laundress turned millionaire, Kadeer established a joint multi-million dollar trading company and department store empire, and was at one time ranked as the seventh wealthiest person in China. Mrs. Kadeer was, in fact, the richest and most powerful woman in all of the PRC, and things were exceptionally fine for her until she pissed off the Chinese. Put in perspective, imagine if Oprah Winfrey were given an 8-year sentence by the U.S. government for criticizing it.

Such was her success that following a story about her business excellence that had appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 1994, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet personally flew to meet her from out of respect for her enormous achievement as a woman and as a Uyghur in China. Kadeer utilized her wealth to aid downtrodden Uyghurs, especially women and children, and opened free classes in her department store to educate Uyghur children from poor families. She also developed a foundation in 1997, called the “Thousand Mothers Movement”, to empower Uyghur women to start their own businesses.

Ms. Kadeer’s philanthropic efforts were at first praised by the Chinese government. She was subsequently appointed to the National People’s Congress, as well as the Political Consultative Congress in 1992. In 1995, she attended the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women as a member of the Chinese delegation.

During this time she strove to improve the situation of the Uyghur people by working within the Chinese system. Her efforts to persuade high-ranking Chinese officials to change their hard-line, repressive policies against the Uyghurs, including direct talks with Jiang Zhemin, had little effect though. In a speech given during a National People’s Congress session in March 1997, she criticized China’s treatment of her people and demanded that the Chinese government honor the autonomy conferred on the Uyghur people and respect their human rights. She strongly criticized China’s harsh crackdown of a Uyghur student demonstration, which had taken place a month earlier in Ghulja City, Xinjiang, on February 5, 1997. (Less a "crackdown" than a massacre. See 4th web link at bottom). In doing so, Beijing’s attitude toward Ms. Kadeer vehemently curdled.

To punish her for her disloyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, she was stripped of her membership in both the National People’s Congress and the Political Consultative Conference, and forbidden to travel abroad. Beijing also pressured her to divorce her dissident husband, Sidik Rouzi, who had fled to the US in 1996.

In 1999 while on her way to meet a U.S. congressional delegation in Urumqi, the capital, Xinjiang, in the far northwest of China, she was arrested. Newspaper clippings she had sent to her husband containing accounts of recent events in Xinjiang were interpreted as “state secrets” and used to convict her. Kadeer was sentenced to eight years in prison for having stolen the above “secrets.”

Ms. Kadeer’s case became an international embarrassment for the Chinese government after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch publicized her case and aggressively pursued her freedom. While in prison she received Human Rights Watch highest human rights award and was honored by Norway’s Rafto Foundation with its Rafto Award in 2004. On March 17, 2005, three days before an official visit to Beijing by US Secretary of State, Condaleeza Rice, she was released from prison on medical grounds after having completed six years of her punishment by the state. China would now exile her and the U.S. would adopt her. In 2006 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, further fueling China's embarrassment.

Since her release Rabiya Kadeer has been actively campaigning for the human rights of the Uyghur people, despite Chinese government efforts to discredit and harass her. In the meantime, Uyghur women continue to be sterilized or forced to have abortions because the Chinese government says they are too poor to afford to have families. Uighur mosques are closed, their imams jailed, and parents are forbidden to teach religion to their children. It is estimated that there are thousands of Uighur political prisoners, and Xinjiang has the dubious distinction of being the only place in China where executions still take place for political crimes. Beijing calls this “harmonizing the state”.

As regards the efforts of Beijing to harass her, in 2006 The Washington post reported that Chinese government agents had secretly videotaped Kadeer at her home outside of Washington D.C. It has been verified by the F.B.I. that the suspects were indeed Chinese government agents. Also in 2006, a U.S. congressional delegation had requested to meet her family during their visit to Urumqi. On May 29, Chinese authorities responded by warning her three adult children living in the city to decline any such invitation. Three days later, police took more drastic steps to prevent a meeting.

The three children were driven out of the city, where two of her sons were badly beaten by police along a back road. In a further effort to intimidate the family, one of the officers conducting the beatings handed a cell phone to her daughter, Rushangul, and demanded that she call her mother so that she could hear them screaming. Mrs. Kadeer was subjected to sounds of her sons being beaten and tortured over the phone. One of the two sons, Ablikim, was so badly beaten that he lost consciousness and had to be hospitalized before being taken to a detention center. Five of her eleven children are still in China, held by the government in indemnity against any political damage she might do abroad while in exile.

On June 13, Ablikim, together with Alim, the other son who was beaten, were charged with "plotting to split the state", a death penalty crime. Together with a third son, Kahar, aged 42, they were charged with tax evasion, this in keeping with Beijing's usual strategy of using ostensibly nonpolitical offences as an additional way of targeting their political opponents. As part of their "investigation" into these charges, Chinese authorities confiscated all of the financial records of her family companies, making it nearly impossible for her sons to prepare a defense against these charges. It was reported that Alim Abdureyim, the youngest son, ‘confessed’ on or around July 1 to criminal and political charges against him as a direct consequence of being tortured. With these actions, the government had definitely made good on threats to her before she left Beijing in 2005, warning that if she spoke out about the plight of the Uighurs, that her children and her businesses would be "finished."

During the meeting at the White House 5 days ago, Bush specifically expressed concern about the situation of Ms. Kadeer’s sons, Alim and Ablikim Abdureyim, who are currently serving lengthy prison sentences in the PRC. He indicated that he would raise their cases with Chinese leaders during his visit to Beijing. Ms. Kadeer expressed her concerns over the Beijing regime’s recent harsh campaign of repression on peaceful Uyghur dissent in the name of anti-terrorism.

Because Beijing fears that Xinjiang province might go renegade, strict measures are inflicted upon it, ones even greater than those inflicted upon Tibet. Yet, little is known of East Turkistan, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in this world. My guess is hardly anyone on the streets of the West could tell you where it is at, if they had even heard of it before. "From its conquest by the Qing Empire in the mid-eighteenth century until its incorporation in the PRC in 1949, there have been several efforts to wrest all or part of Xinjiang from Beijing's control. Though this restiveness is often portrayed as an enduring "clash of civilizations" between Chinese and Muslim realms, both the participants and the causes of these episodes have been more diverse than this simplistic formula allows. Indeed, Turkic or Uyghur nationalism has been a far more salient ideological feature than religious zeal. After 1949, despite some Islamic-colored unrest in southern Xinjiang, disturbances in the region corresponded with the political and economic disruptions of the Great Leap Forward (1959-61) and Cultural Revolution (1966-76)". (James Millward, Policy Studies, No. 6. East-West Center Washington, D.C. Publication Date: http://www.eastwestcenter.org/publications/search-for-publications/browse-alphabetic-list-of-titles/?class_call=view&pub_ID=1479).

Most of the CCP's interest in the region stems from the fact that there are large resources of oil and natural gas in the province. Also, the Chinese are fond of testing their nuclear weapons there. The Chinese have very good reasons to maintain a grip on Xinjiang. Yet, the Uyghurs remain as they have for centuries upon centuries; completely different from mainstream Chinese in religion, language and culture.

Books:

The Stormer of the Sky, with Alexandra Cavelius (2007).

Awards:

Human Rights Watch Award (2004)
Rafto Foundation's Rafto Award i 2004
Nominated for 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

Profession: President of the Uyghur American Association.

Websites of interest:
http://www.uyghuramerican.org/
http://china.notspecial.org/
http://uk.youtube.com/results?search_query=rabiya+kadeer&search_type=&aq=f
http://www.rafto.no/DesktopModules/ViewAnnouncement.aspx?ItemID=344&Mid=42

Credit to Uyghur American Assoc. http://www.uyghuramerican.org/

Wei Jingsheng

2008-08-03T00:44:00.000+08:00

Often referred to as the “father of Chinese democracy”, Wei was born in Beijing in 1950 to a family of loyal Maoists. His father held a high-ranking position in the prestigious Foreign Ministry, and the family possessed connections to many of the top party leaders. Wei was educated in elite Communist Party schools and indoctrinated to be a committed Maoist.

He joined the Red Guards as a sixteen year old student at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. After massive personal trauma of that long event and in light of Deng Xiaoping's repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, Wei, then a twenty-eight year old electrician in Beijing, wrote a seminal essay, “The Fifth Modernisation: Democracy and Other Issues” (http://www.echonyc.com/~wei/Fifth.html)
that was posted by a friend on the Democracy Wall. In it he attacked the dictatorship of the Communist Party of China, denouncing Deng and his will to maintain a dictatorship in China. The essay argued that Deng's economic reform program, known as 'The Four Modernisations', would not result in a real transformation of Chinese society without a fifth modernisation - democracy. The essay attracted both worldwide attention and the notice of the Chinese Government, which became increasingly suspicious of Wei's developing relationships with foreign journalists based in Beijing.

In January of ’79 Wei and a group of other activists began to publish an underground magazine called 'Exploration' which pledged to discuss social problems "without any restrictions". The notorious Qincheng Prison – “the Bastille of China” - located on the outskirts of Beijing and China's principal prison for high-ranking political prisoners became a subject of their focus. Wei was arrested in March of 1979. Although the authorities could not bring any formal charges against him for his attacks on the Communist system, the government exaggerated Wei's correspondence with foreigners about the Sino-Vietnamese War and charged him with treason and of engaging in "counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement". He was condemned to 15 years of prison and hard labor and deprived of direct communication with his family and friends. His guards were forbidden to speak to him and he was not allowed a pen.

He spent 3 years in solitary confinement at Beijing No. 1 Prison where he was not allowed to leave his cell, and in which no fresh air or direct sunlight was obtained. During this period, his health steadily deteriorated. He lost teeth, developed a heart condition, and contracted hepatitis. He was also constantly pressured to denounce his political beliefs, but would not recant. Eventually he was transferred to two more prisons, one in Tibet and one in Nanpu on the Bo Hai Gulf of north-east China, where conditions were less severe.

In January of ’89, nearly ten years into his prison term, Chinese astrophysicist and democracy advocate Fang Lizhi wrote an open letter calling on Deng to release Wei. Over 110 prominent intellectuals in China subsequently lent their names to the call. During this time dissatisfaction with the slow pace of political reform was developing in China into a large-scale protest movement, culminating in the Tiananmen Square riots of June, 1989.

He was released on probation on 14 September of 1993, 6½ months before his 15 year sentence was due to end. His early release was a political gesture designed to sway the International Olympic Committee's vote on China's bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. However, the gesture had no effect and China lost its bid to Sydney. Upon release, despite warnings from the authorities and his continuing ill-health, Wei resumed his campaign for democracy and human rights, and established contacts with other Chinese activists and the Western media. An opinion piece was published in 'The New York Times' on 18 November.

Six months later, soon after a meeting with United States assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, Wei vanished into police custody. Over seven months later Wei was formally arrested for trying to "overthrow the government". He escaped the death penalty that comes with the charge but was sentenced to another 14 years imprisonment and stripped of his political rights for three years. Four years into this period of incarceration Chinese President Jiang Zemin made a historic trip to America. At the time it is reported that Jiang Zemin and Clinton agreed on a deal to secure Wei’s release during their talks, and on November 16th of 1997 Wei was released. Wei later maintains that he was not freed, but sent into exile as a further punishment.

Books:

"Courage to Stand Alone -- letters from Prison and Other Writings", which compiles his articles written initially on toilet paper in jail.
He has weekly commentary on Radio Free Asia, and many other news media.

Awards:

The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. (1996)
The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award(1996).
The National Endowment for Democracy Award (1997) · The Olof Palme Memorial Prize (1994)

Profession: Chairman of the OCDC (The Overseas Chinese Democracy Coalition) and president of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, a non-profit organisation registered in New York.

Education: Junior middle school in Beijing. Higher education aborted by the Cultural Revolution.

Websites of interest: http://www.echonyc.com/~wei/

http://www.brasscheck.com/wei/

http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=ola_EJf8TzE&feature=user

Harry Wu

2008-08-03T00:27:00.000+08:00

Probably the widest known of all the dissidents due to his extensive media exposure, from a "6o Minutes" segment that he made back '92 with Ed Bradley, where they posed as businessmen looking to purchase prison-made goods, to a BBC documentary that detailed the illicit trade in executed prisoners' organs, where he posed as a wealthy Amercian business man looking to purchase an organ for his ailing uncle, to an appearance of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where Leno praised him as an "American hero". Wu is a natural-born journalist with a relentless mission: to uncover China's human rights abuses, particularly those of its prison system.

Born into a bourgeois family from Shanghai, he was entrapped and arrested in 1956 at the age of 23 for criticizing the Communist Party during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. In 1960 he was sent to the laogai ("re-education through labor"), the Chinese labor camp system, as “a counter-revolutionary rightest” for attempting to escape China due to his miserable prospects there as a consequence of his tainted political background.

He was imprisoned for 19 years in 12 different camps mining coal, building roads, clearing land, and planting and harvesting crops. According to his own accounts, he was beaten, tortured and nearly starved to death, at one point living on only ground corn husks. He recounts in his autobiography, "Bitter Winds", how he would chase rats through the fields in order to "steal" the grains in their nests, or eat snakes. He witnessed the deaths of many other prisoners from brutality, starvation, and suicide. All of this because his university had been given a quota of counter-revolutionaries to purge.

Released in 1979 in the wake of the liberalization which followed the death of Mao, Wu left China and went to the United States, where he became an unpaid visiting professor of geology at the University of California, Berkeley. (He took the position so hastily that UCB wasn't able to provide funding for him. He arrived in America with $40 and lectured while homeless). Eventually, he founded the Laogai Research Foundation, a non-profit research and public education organization. The work of the foundation is recognized as a leading source of information on China's labor camps, and was instrumental in proving that organs of executed criminals are used for organ transplants, and addtionally that the camps are used to manufacture export goods with slave labor.

The Laogai Research Foundation estimates that there have been fifty million people incarcerated in the laogai since 1950, and that there are eight million people in forced labor today. Harry Wu’s self-proclaimed goal is to put the word laogai in every dictionary in the world, and to that end, works eighteen-hour days criss-crossing the country and the globe speaking with student groups and heads of state to make this present-day horror become a past memory. Wu has on several occassions presented testimony as an expert before various United States Congressional committees, as well as the Parliments of the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, the European Parliment, and the United Nations.

This last Wednesday, he spoke, along with Wei Jingsheng, Rabiya Kadeer, and several U.S. lawmakers at a joint press conference of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom and the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

Books:

Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (1991), the first full account of the Chinese labor camp system.
Bitter Winds (1994), a memoir of his time in the camps.
Troublemaker (1996), an account of Wu's clandestine trips to China and his detention in 1995.
New Ghosts, Old Ghosts, Prisons and Labor Reform Camps in China (1999), by James Seymour and Richard Anderson

Awards:

Freedom Award from the Hungarian Freedom Fighters' Federation (1991).
Martin Ennels Award for Human Rights Defenders. ( Its first recipient, 1994)
The Medal of Freedom from the Dutch World War II Resistance Foundation. (1991).
Honorary degrees: St. Louis University and the American University of Paris

Profession: Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation and the China Information Center. He is also a member of the International Council of the Human Rights Foundation.
Education: Geology Institute in Beijing.

Web links of interest:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=22295 (He was a homeless vagabound during his first semester or so at Berkeley! A somewhat "humorous" account of this time provided here along with a more serious Q & A with NYWND).

http://www.laogai.org/news/index.php

http://www.speaktruth.org/defend/profiles/profile_49.asp

http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/95/5/wu.asp

Bush meets with five Chinese dissidents

2008-08-03T00:02:00.000+08:00

Nine days before the Beijing Olympics are to begin George Bush (a known member of the notorious Bush Crime Family)…

“held private talks with five prominent Chinese dissidents on Tuesday, and urged China’s foreign minister to relax restrictions on human rights, as part of an intensifying White House effort to put pressure on Beijing before Mr. Bush travels there in a little over a week for the summer Olympic Games. Mr. Bush received the dissidents — Harry Wu, Wei Jingsheng, Sasha Gong, Rabiya Kadeer, and Bob Fu — in the White House residence, where he “assured them that he will carry the message of freedom as he travels to Beijing,” said his press secretary Dana Perino. Earlier, Mr. Bush dropped in on a meeting between his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi. Said Michael Green, an Asia expert and former adviser to Mr. Bush, “These are very high profile people. These are people designed to get the Chinese’s attention. It was not just a political move to provide cover at home. It was an important move to let Chinese leaders know that he’s not satisfied with the progress”. (New York Times, July 30th, 2008. edited). http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/sports/olympics/30prexy.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=bush%20meets%20dissidents&st=cse&oref=slogin

The White House issued this release. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/07/20080729-4.html

“Today in The White House Residence, President Bush met with five Chinese freedom activists to discuss his concerns about human rights in China. The President assured them that he will carry the message of freedom as he travels to Beijing for the games, just as he has regularly made this a priority in all of his meetings with Chinese officials. He told the activists that engagement with Chinese leaders gives him an opportunity to make the United States' position clear - human rights and religious freedom should not be denied to anyone”.

The release further states:

“The President asked them about their personal experiences in their peaceful efforts to press for more freedom in China. The group welcomed the President's strong commitment to human rights and religious freedom and urged him to continue to deliver that message not only to the Chinese leadership but also to all the people of China”.

I’m sure George was charming, but who are these five dissidents? For certain, each has paid a heavy price in their lives for having spoken up and acted out against the CCP. They are but five of roughly 70 highly conscientious Chinese intellectuals known of in the West for their pro-democracy activities. Of these 70, 10 are currently in prison or under house arrest, the remainder have at one time been incarcerated and are either currently exiled and living in the West, mostly in America, or closely watched by the authorities who have urged them to cease and desist - or else. They represent the crème de la crème of Chinese society. Intellectuals all, they came from prominent families, attended China’s most prestigious academies, and held or now hold eminent positions in society as doctors, lawyers, scholars, writers or entrepreneurs.

According to Amnesty International tens of thousands of innocent people are arrested every year in China for peacefully exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religious beliefs. Hundreds of thousands currently languish in Chinese 'reeducation camps' for such 'crimes'. Harry Wu's organization, Laogai Research Foundation, contains a database on 3,682 of them ( http://www.laogai.org/dissent/index.php). They may not come from as prominent of backgrounds as the five who recently met the President of the United States, but all have taken on the Chinese state. Their official crime? The authorities repeatedly call it “treason” or “revealing of state secrets”. An amazing title for such a crime. The irony is nearly ineffable. On the highest order the Chinese government regards its human rights abuses as a state secret, and anyone who makes the difficult decision not to preserve it is deemed treasonous. Posted separately and to follow are brief background sketches of the five heroic individuals who recently met at the White House.

On Alternative Political Parties in China

2008-07-27T06:27:00.000+08:00

First, before we can discuss this topic, we have to briefly understand how officeholders are elected in the PRC. The PRC political system is composed of a series of indirect elections in which one People's Congress appoints the members of the next higher congress. In this voting system voters dirctly elect an assembly based on popular vote, which in turn elects the major officeholders from amongst themselves. The PRC is, of course, not alone in the use of this system. The Parliamentary Assemblies of the Council of Europe and NATO also employ this method, and so does the U.S. Presidential election, with the indirect vote from the Electoral college the sole determinant of the victor. Of all elective methods it is the most dissatisfying, of course. It's only marginally representitive and is, in broad scale elections, highly suppressive of popular will.

There are five central and local levels of people's congresses in China: 1) the National People's Congress, 2) the people's congresses of provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government, 3) the people's congresses of cities divided into districts, and autonomous prefectures, 4) the people's congresses of cities not divided into districts, municipal districts, counties and autonomous counties, and 5) the people's congresses of townships, ethnic minority townships and towns. "The people's congresses at all levels are constituted through democratic elections" says News Guandong, an official newsbody from where I gathered the above sawdust. But as Bao Tong points out (during his most recent comments read on RFA, 2008-07-08), “It is a pack of bureaucrats nominated by the Communist Party, whose names have been picked out of a mechanical ‘election’ process, who have been given a franchise on state power, with no competition.”

In China only the lowest People's Congresses are subject to direct popular vote. This means that although independent members can theoretically get elected to the lowest level of congress (and occasionally in practice do), it is impossible for them to organize to the point where they can elect members to the next higher people's congress without the approval of the CCP. Therefore, they are not able to exercise oversight over executive positions at the lowest level in the hierarchy. This lack of effective power also discourages outsiders from contesting the people's congress elections even at the lowest level.

Thus, only one political party, the CCP, holds effective power at the national level, though eight minor parties also participate in a token fashion within the political system under the leadership of the dominant party. The PRC political system allows for the participation of some non-party members and those affiliated with minor parties in the NPC, but they are vetted by the CCP. In almost all cases those individuals do not satisfy the Party's criteria for "suitability".

A further damper to the ambitions of an outside party is that there is no provision in the PRC constitution which would give non-CCP political parties any corporate status. This means that a hypothetical opposition party would have no legal means to collect funds or own property in the name of a party. More importantly, PRC law also has a wide range of offenses which can and have been used against the leaders of efforts to form an opposition party such as the China Democracy Party, and against members of organizations that the CCP sees as threatening its power. These include the crimes of subversion, sedition and releasing "state secrets" (a buzz word that the Party uses a lot for anything it finds incriminating of itself). Moreover, the control that the Party has over the legislative and judicial processes means that the Party can author legislation that targets a particular group it doesn't find "suitable".

The argument that the CCP uses to defend single party rule is fallacy of necessity for the ages: without it in power the country would fall apart. A different party in power would ensure that the country had, indeed, fallen apart, ergo; no other party can rule because the country would fall apart. There is also the bare assertion that this is true because the Party says it's true. Consequently, by suppressing a free media and other political organisations, finding alternatives to governing the nation more pluralistically become, well, let's just say, exceedingly difficult. The Chinese are brilliant logicians.

Credit to Wikipedia Authors: "Alternative Political Parties in China"

Introduction, part III

2008-07-20T08:48:00.000+08:00

This page has a higher aim then merely arbitrary Panda mugging of the precious and deeply sensitive Chinese. It is a loud beckon for a world beyond the industrial Capitalist/Communist ethos; a program of exploitation run on behalf of mega-industrialists, financiers, and Party officials who diabolically bend society to meet the ends of business and state in both China and the West.

Behind both is modern state authoritarianism, be it the bold, reckless and clearly visible manifestation of it in China or the more subtle and sinister manifestation of it in the West. In calling for a move beyond what is clearly in our day an absurd conjunction between Capitalist and Communist agendas, where one hand has provided the much needed capitol, know-how, and markets and the other the much needed cheap and tractable labor, there is a clear realization that both systems hold their citizens in line through a hegemonic education system and establismentarian media (not to mention an array of police mechanisms) that conditions them to become docile workers and consumers, and that this system is mostly indiscernible to those it bends into obedient and subordinate shape.

Together they form a total institution, one with the characteristics of a contemporary cruise line; Chinese workers way below deck tending the engines of production and living just above the bilges, and layers of Western workers and consumers in higher cabins, unaware of the extent to which they are really and actually being controlled, even constrained, within an environment of “luxury and security” designed to subtly manipulate their behavior in accordance with the wishes that the “Captains of Industry” that were carefully formulated back in the days of the American robber barons. Docile and complacent, crew and patron alike are being transported on this neurotic voyage into an ice floe by the sociopaths who pilot this titanic mess. Blithely the violins play a swan song on this sinking ship.

This is the boat we are all in. This page hopes to somehow point to global prospects that transcend “business as usual”; in short, to an entirely new paradigm that could exist if the industrial Capitalist/Communist ethos were ever to be tossed in the historical recycling bin. I will admit, an ambitious - and for now ill-defined project - but one very good start on this long road toward a positive global shift would be an immediate end to any further foreign investment in China, and the definite halt in the production of any further foreign sponsored factories in China. The West needs to somehow put distance between itself and China. I confess, how this could be done and whether this could be done given the enormous scale of current investment I can't say. There shall be later meditations on this matter.

Introduction, continued.

2008-07-14T02:54:00.000+08:00

All web logs are dialectical in kind, only varying in degree. This page will have, en suite, a thesis/antithesis approach to the matter of China, or rather, a synthesis will be drawn out of paralleling America and China, at their worst, on a regular basis. This page, which could have as easily been called “Bilateral Cemeteries” as “Chinese Ant Farm”, will quite often have a feature entry under that former rubric that will just as scathingly rip America to shreds for each and every of its ill-deeds as it will China’s. There will always be an overarching understanding of the American government's international, eh-hmm, "foibles", and further, an awareness of certain Western attitudes and actions that are at the heart of many of this world’s problems. I don't want to be accused of "the pot calling the kettle black". They're both black, and I will often criticize them in the same post. China, however, will receive the major share of the criticism due to its bleaker socio-political existence. Partisan though as I am against China, I will still strive to deal with it as fairly and objectively as I can, but I warn you, there is venom in my pen for this country. It will be my main personal responsibility to keep it from leaking too profusely onto the page.

Thus, the fair tactic of this page will have no need of begging pardon from anyone who holds a pro-China stance, particularly be they a rustic Chinese “intellectual” from Beijing working on his Master’s in Industrial Groupthink who has never received the slightest bit of training in genuine critical thinking (and will babble the protective mantra from all foreign evil, “you don’t understand China”…as if there were something arcane and unfathomable to understand about it beyond the dark, pervasive mystery of its gross ineptitude itself) or from a Western ex-pat from some unremarkable place on the soft, squishy side of liberalism who’s intellectual processes have been permanently adulterated by the ‘80’s PC movement (heaven forbid I encounter one steeped in "cultural neutrality" who will probably babble similar nonsense as his Chinese counterpart)- or even, but perhaps unlikely - from one of the Western business elite who walk a tight line on their own business blogs and elsewhere, never uttering more than a brief sentence of highly dissembled criticism of the Chinese for fear that it might ruin their business prospects if it ever got out what they really think. They will definitely question my position that China needs to cease being invested in and enriched in anyway.

But my hard line stance is this: no apology is needed because the more one truly understands the benighted legacy of China's ancient feudal value system and its continuance into its present day authoritarian police state, its impending environmental collapse due to ineptitude and greed (be it from having over-produced factories or having mindlessly over-reproduced children), and its increasingly questionable actions on the world stage, particularly in Africa, the more one realizes how greatly suspect an entity China is - and that this message needs to be pronounced loud and clear on the internet - whether some, such as the above, will like it or not. I assure you, I understand China just fine.

All the same, each and all are invited, should they ever find this address, to respond to this and subsequent postings. I will aim my best to rejoin every rebuttal accordingly, if only that I might assist each out of their delusion, being the Bodhisattva of Wrath that I am.

Introduction

2008-07-11T03:55:00.000+08:00

This, the debut essay of Chinese Ant Farm, initiates an unapologetic, hard line anti-China stance on the China blogosphere. It will be decisive, unhesitating, and virtually relentless in its condemnation of China, but will come from what will have to be realized in time as a progressive position, though no doubt there will be some who will refute that.

Its advent is born from five years of expatriate experience. With it I have finally decided to pronounce a verdict on what I have discerned after residing in all of Greater China, save Macao, at one length of time or another. Very early on in my expatriation, which began in Taiwan back in '91, I arrived at the conclusion that the Chinese, as denizens of the “modern industrial world”, had created a complete human fiasco on nearly countless levels, one simply unmatched in scope, in my opinion, by anywhere else in the world.

This conclusion has only increased in magnitude and certainty over time, and despite much introspection that has sought to arrive at a more wholesome disposition toward this corner of the globe, still find that what my reason reports regarding it to be unimpeachable- and that this antipathy will not be departing any time soon.

Nevertheless, I will strive to approach the subject of China with as much dignity and compassion as I may. Given the name of this blog and its predominant bias, that may not always be clear or evident.
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