Hi there, back again. I will now make a turn in my blog posting and make it much more focused, regular and in-depth as I am beginning my new long-term project on migration in Europe. In about a week’s time I will be making a first research trip southern Spain, where I will visit the provinces of Cadíz –on the Strait of Gibraltar– and Almería where I will be briefly reuniting with Simca, who is doing some undoubtably great work on an organic farm there, and Lucas with whom I am making plans for collaborations in Spain and beyond. I am also looking forward to cook up a storm with Simca from her organic produce. But first of all the excursion is for seeking out places and people and getting some more direction on this project. This also means I will be writing a lot more in the near future, but also will be shifting focus to developing a project site, which currently sits at thomaselsted.net. Alongside an exhibition I am having in May-June, this site will be the site of investigation of migration across and around the external border of the European Union, with a geographic focus on migrants from North Africa into Spain via the Mediterranean. More on that soon.

Still from We Feed The World (2005)

On the subject, I just watched the really terrific documentary We Feed The World on global vs. local food production and the internal logics of global foodstuffs corporations. The movie can be watched online for free here. It features a vital interview with Jean Ziegler, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and some frank statements by the CEO of Nestlé. Here’s Ziegler:

“The absurdity of the situation in the agricultural markets today is the following: The rich countries, that is, the EU and the United States, give subsidies to their farmers for the production and export of their produce, last year to the tune of 349 billion dollars, [almost] a billion dollars a day. And the consequences of that is dumping, the destruction of agriculture in the southern hemisphere where there’s almost nothing else apart from peasant agriculture. To take an example, the capital of the republic of Senegal in West Africa, is Dakar. This city has the largest agricultural market in West Africa, the Sandagar Market. If you go to Sandagar Market, you can buy European vegetables, European fruit, European potatoes and so on, for a third of the local prices. So to the Senegalese peasant, even if he works himself into the ground for 18 hours a day under the burning sun, he hasn’t got a chance of being able to survive by working his own land.
So what can he do? If he’s still got the energy he risks his life as an illegal immigrant via the Strait of Gibraltar and has to hire himself out somewhere or other in Southern Spain or work as a street sweeper in Paris in inhumane conditions.”

“Free trade has nothing at all to do with freedom, that’s an enormous lie. It’s the freedom of the predatory animal in the jungle when Nestlé, for example, takes on an African farmers’ syndicate. That’s like Mike Tyson going into the ring against an unemployed and undernourished Bengali.
And the corporations, the power of the corporations in today’s world is expressed in a figure published last year by the World Bank: Last year, 52% of the gross world product, that means all the wealth produced in the world in a year, was controlled by 500 global corporations. And these global corporations are run purely with the aim of maximizing profits. The largest food product corporation in the world, with almost 300.000 employees, operating on five continents, and controlling over 8.000 brands, is Nestlé.
Nestlé is currently headed by a likable, suntanned Austrian. But he obeys the internal logic of the corporation, that is, value-free profit maximization. And if he doesn’t every year produce new, astronomical profits for his shareholders, then he’ll be out on his ear. The huge power he has today, over hundreds of millions of people in the world, won’t help him one bit. Profit maximization is the murderous strategy of global corporation hierarchies.”

– Jean Ziegler, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

The suntanned Austrian CEO of Nestlé is named Peter Brabeck. From his office in Switzerland, he says:

“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a matter of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter.
The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that you as a human being should have a right to water. That is the one, extreme solution.
And the other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other it should have a market value. Personally I think it’s better to give foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware that it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.
I’m still of the opinion that the biggest social responsibility of any CEO is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise. For only if we can ensure our continued long-term existence will we be able to actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world.”

“We’ve got to create a positive image of the world for people, and I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be positive about the future. We’ve never had it so good, we’ve never had so much money, we’ve never been so healthy, we’ve never lived as long as we do today. We have everything we want and still we go around as if we were mourning for something.”

Chair of the world’s largest producer–exporter of bottled drinking water, perhaps that’s a hint to what solutions he in having in mind, and his salary of $11 million annually, may help to explain why he’s never had it so good. The reality for the small farmers and hungry people around the globe, those millions of people which he goes on to say depend on his company, is a bit different, and less favourable: As Karl Otrok, the production director in Romania for Pioneer, one of the world’s largest producers of hybrid (GM) seeds for agriculture, says to a traditional Romanian farmer:

“I hope that the people here, the small farmers, will not have enough money to buy our seeds, that you will stay with your good seeds (…) We came here long time ago and we fucked all the West. And now we came to Romania, and we will fuck all the agriculture here.”

Yuri Kozyrev / dispatches © Copyright 2008 dispatches magazine

Soldiers from the first amored division celebrate American Independence Day at a palace that belonged to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. Baghdad, July 4, 2003.

For the Beyond Iraq issue at the dispatches website, Yuri Kozyrev has published the photo essay ирак, documenting post-invasion Iraq, what struck me the most was the above photo. Besides from making me think of the iconic scene of surfing soldiers after napalming a vietnamese fishing town in Apocalypse Now, it kind of sums up a great deal of what I’ve been learning for the past five months; about a war that has obviously failed, and while bringing about a deepening segregation between cultures, has cultivated ideological blowback and left a culture as old as civilization in rubble. The soldiers on the image celebrate their Independence Day amid the wreckage of a country that has not only been robbed of its promise of own national independence, but also looted of its cultural heritage, its infrastructure, and history – literally loaded onto trucks and disappeared. And while the soldiers were high on a sense of victory and, I suppose, of liberation, the country was in flames while the priority of the Bush administration was to fling open the borders for foreign multinational investment, privatize all institutions, industries and social services to non-Iraqi companies, and creating the widest of free-market zones anywhere in the world; an Iraq open for business, a shopping mall for disaster production and relief industries. According to Michael Ledeen, adviser to the Bush administration, invading Iraq was an attempt at “a war to remake the world” – and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times proclaimed that “we are not doing nation-building in Iraq. We are doing nation-creating,” as if there was nothing there to begin with.

Back in the seventies in military governments throughout Latin America, it was decided that in order to build and maintain stable societies and economies, “whole categories of people and their cultures would have to pulled up “from the root”" (quotes so far from Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine), including their cultural heritage, more often than not in order to make way for economic policies beneficial to investors. Full circle back to Guatemala, where the recent trend of United States sponsored military interventions had its kickoff. In these parts, little over fifty years ago, business had its buddying introduction into transnational politics when a banana company managed to have the U.S. overthrow the democratically elected government and install the first military dictatorship in a long row that went on until the nineties. They also witnessed the worst genocide in 20th century Latin America; the attempt to pull up from the roots the indigenous Mayan population, another culture as old as civilization, one of the richest and most beautiful I’ve encountered.

Now I’m back in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. I hope to be able to address these things more, in the very least understand it and the context around me, and in the meanwhile keep looking for a voice and a medium. The policies and politics of these events of the past continue today, in other parts of the world, and continues to reverberate right here where it started; the Mayans are still targeted, now by static and insufficient social policies and discrimination and a still corrupt government. One of the better (or worse) examples is that of Efrain Rios Montt, the man responsible for ordering the destruction of some 400 Mayan villages during his presidency thirty years ago, who to this day retains a seat in the Guatemalan parliament.

By the way I’m violating the copyright acknowledged above as the image is reproduced without permission. If anyone has a problem with it contact me and I’ll remove the photograph from here right away. It’s taken from the photo essay by Yuri Kozyrev linked to in the first paragraph (and here).

Sad news from consumer culture:

On Black Friday, the day of the beginning of the holiday shopping season following Thanksgiving, Jdimytai Damour, a 34-year-old temporary employee of Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York, was trampled to death by a mob of 200 customers as they rushed into the store in search of good deals:

Jdimytai Damour [...] was crushed underfoot as thousands of shoppers, chanting “push in the doors,” did just that — ripping the doors right off their hinges, these desperate-for-a-deal maniacs stampeded into the store, massacring Damour under their heavy, relentless feet, which I guess were so caught up in marching to the capitalistic tune of consumerism that they just couldn’t register the life they were squeezing out of the man beneath them.

There are no reports of any shopper attempting to help Damour.  On the contrary, Damour’s co-workers, as well as paramedics and police officers at the scene, all tell of hostile shoppers who impeded assistance to Damour and who became angry when the announcement came over the PA that the store would be closing because of Damour’s death.

CommonDreams.org: Blood in the Machine, Tani Bellestri

and,

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since Friday morning!’” [witness Kimberly Cribbs] said. “They kept shopping.”

Items on sale at the Wal-Mart store included a $798 Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV, a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for $28 and Men’s Wrangler Tough Jeans for $8.

NYDailyNews.com: Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede

I don’t really have any bright thoughts here, just thought I’d forward the news. I guess those Wrangler’s is a pretty sweet deal.

Actually, just a side note before that.

So just a few words on the election (you know, THE election). I was very excited when I searched out an internet café two days ago to get the news, and admit that I felt not only a big wave of relief, but yes – a big hope for the future. Some of my friends in radical circles in the U.S. (Jen Angel, for one, like here) have been warning me about Obamanian rapture obscuring the real politics and challenges at hand, as have various other commentaries I’ve read. Indeed they are right, and indeed, from most European points of view, Obama is far more conservative than radical. In a znet commentary, Cynthia Peters arguments that popular movements are were we ought to be putting our hopes and efforts, because not only are there still plenty of cracks in the edifice for Obama’s policies, but there’ll be further pressure from corporate power and financial organizations to push through their policies in Obama’s presidency. The democratic base for change lies in continued pressure from beneath towards the site of power to push through the will and policies of the people.

That said I for one find me inspired to hope for a better future with this presidency. At least the election have shown us that the U.S. is capable of change, after all.

I remember seeing Howard Zinn speak to an audience in Cambridge some months before the Iraq war started. An audience member asked, “What do we do if Bush invades Iraq?”

“That’s not the question to ask,” Zinn pointed out. “The question to ask is: what are we going to do to make sure he doesn’t invade Iraq?” ¹

Oh, and on that note, here’s a link to a video about the military industrial complex: Why We Fight, Eugene Jarecki, dir., on YouTube. I haven’t seen the film itself, but would like to. I did read a book by Chalmers Johnson, featured here in the clip, called Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, and he’s got his numbers right. The documentary is about the United States’ relationship with war as business, the development of the military-industrial complex in the United States and, following 9/11, the privatization of war.

But let’s talk about something else…

¹ Cynthia Peters