Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

Is Colombia any closer to a meaningful peace deal?

  By

The Colombian government and FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia) have been at the negotiation table in Havana since November 2012. While progress has been made – the two sides agree on the need for more economic and social development in rural areas of the country and on the rebels’ political participation if a peace deal is brokered – a permanent peace still appears to be a long way off.

FARC, a leftist group involved in the armed Colombian Conflict since 1964, has been labeled by the United States and other governments as a terrorist organization.  In fact, many Colombians believe that their country’s leaders should not be negotiating with them at all. Colombia’s National Center for Historical Memory reports that 220,000 people have been killed in the armed conflict, 80% of those killed have been civilians. FARC is not responsible for all of the deaths directly, but their presence has led to violence and instability in the country for decades. The National Center for Historical Memory reports that more than half of the deaths are a result of the right-wing forces originally intended to stop FARC.

Still, there might have been a hint of a breakthrough in recent days. FARC has been insisting that the Colombian government enters into a bilateral cease-fire. July 5th Colombian officials indicated for the first time that they are open to the idea of a bilateral ceasefire. 

Lesser measures have not been successful in reaching peace. Last December, FARC entered into a unilateral ceasefire, which lasted until mid-April, when a FARC ambush left 11 dead. Since then 30 rebels have been killed, making peace a more distant dream. FARC’s announcement of another unilateral ceasefire beginning on July 20, independence day, probably won’t go far enough, but maybe it opens the door to new possibility of a bilateral truce.

While violence has declined in Colombia in the past decade (2014 was the most peaceful year in Colombia since 1984) and FARC has not been able to recruit as many rebel soldiers in recent years, there is still a long road ahead for Colombia as they deal with ever-present drug wars and the challenge of helping rebels to reintegrate into their country, should peace even be negotiated.

Flag-of-Colombia

We occupied Afghanistan for years (& all we got was nothing)

  By

For those who have followed the situation even somewhat more closely than the average media outlet — which ignored the war in Afghanistan almost entirely after 2002 — there is (sadly) no surprise whenever another pillar of moral justification for the lengthy war and occupation effort collapses or becomes too tenuously thin to make the case anymore.

The twins of propaganda and profligate budget fraud have been skipping hand in hand for years around the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. We have not made the country better and most “evidence” that we did has been fabricated, exaggerated, or erased immediately by local forces we can’t control (including our own political allies).

We don’t want to talk about that because then we would have to admit that thousands of troops died and three-quarters of a trillion dollars were spent over the course of more than a decade…for nothing. Literally nothing. It was a giant, heartbreaking waste.

Now read the details from BuzzFeed News, which sent journalist Azmat Khan and others all over Afghanistan to check just the $1 billion worth of USAID and DOD funded schools alone. And weep.

Here’s a quick summary of the massive report:

The United States trumpets education as one of its shining successes of the war in Afghanistan. But a BuzzFeed News investigation reveals U.S. claims were often outright lies, as the government peddled numbers it knew to be false and touted schools that have never seen a single student.
[…]
a BuzzFeed News investigation — the first comprehensive journalistic reckoning, based on visits to schools across the country, internal U.S. and Afghan databases and documents, and more than 150 interviews — has found those claims to be massively exaggerated, riddled with ghost schools, teachers, and students that exist only on paper. The American effort to educate Afghanistan’s children was hollowed out by corruption and by short-term political and military goals that, time and again, took precedence over building a viable school system. And the U.S. government has known for years that it has been peddling hype.

BuzzFeed News exclusively acquired the GPS coordinates and contractor information for every school that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) claims to have refurbished or built since 2002, as well as Department of Defense records of school constructions funded by the U.S. military.

BuzzFeed News spot-checked more than 50 American-funded schools across seven Afghan provinces, most of which were battlefield provinces — the places that mattered most to the U.S. effort to win hearts and minds, and into which America poured immense sums of aid money.
[…]
Over the last decade, report after report has chronicled the corruption and waste that squandered taxpayer dollars across many U.S. programs in Afghanistan. But American education efforts — long seen as a shining success — have gone mostly unexamined, a truth acknowledged even by one of the U.S. officials who has investigated corruption in Afghanistan.

 

U.S. Marines in Afghanistan in November 2001. (US Marine Corps Photo)

U.S. Marines in Afghanistan in November 2001. (US Marine Corps Photo)

Good news about … malaria?

  By

Yes, there is good news about malaria: the rate of annual mortality from the disease has reached an all-time low. The United Nations reported on July 6th that deaths due to malaria were projected to be just 20 per 100,000 people in at-risk-populations in 2015, down from 48 per 100,000 people in 2000 – a decrease of 58%, which indicates that more than 6 million lives have been saved in the past 15 years.

malaria-progress-2000-2015-united-nations

Malaria is a parasite spread to humans through mosquito bites. Symptoms of malaria are flu-like and include high-fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and can lead to death if not treated properly. The United Nations and others committed to achieving the Millennium Development Goals have been fighting malaria largely through the distribution of hundreds of millions of insecticide treated mosquito nets, education campaigns of the symptoms of malaria, and improved treatment of malaria-infected patients.

The United Nations also announced that they would need at least another decade to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, which were originally slated to be achieved by this year. The fight against malaria is hardly over, yet it is still serves at as a reminder of what can be achieved when resources and appropriate technology are committed to a problem in the developing world.

Information and chart from the United Nations’ Millennium Goals Report 2015.

8 years late, Congress ready to revisit No Child Left Behind

  By

When the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed into law in 2002, it was intended to last only until 2007, when lawmakers would revisit and improve the law. Instead, our country’s lawmakers allowed the bill to expire, forcing states to continue to abide by it until another law replaces it (or, after 2011, seek a conditional waiver from the Obama Administration).

Finally, with both sides of the aisle dissatisfied with NCLB, Congress has decided to take note of the lessons learned in the past 13 years and begin debates to replace the law. Meaningful changes in the law are far from a slam dunk; those on the left are calling for reforms as progressive as universal pre-kindergarten and those on the right wish to see more decision-making power reside in the states. If an agreement is to be struck, it will surely come at the end of impassioned and tumultuous debate.

The bill that has been brought to the Senate floor is sponsored by Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) — both of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, where the bill passed unanimously in April. The proposed bill calls for the continued use of mandated math and reading tests, but would allow states to decide what to do with their results. Furthermore, in direct response to the debate over Common Core, the bill would prohibit the federal government from requiring, or even encouraging, a nationwide set of academic standards.

The House of Representatives is set to debate their own version of the bill, sponsored by John Kline (R-MN), which includes giving states control over school accountability and a controversial school choice provision. This bill was set to be voted upon in February, but that vote was withdrawn because there was not enough support, even within the Republican majority, for it to pass — and the White House announced that it would be vetoed, should it reach the President.

Here’s a primer on some of the key issues set to unfold during the debate:

Veto Power. The White House has announced that it does not support either the House or Senate bills in their current form due to a lack of accountability. While they haven’t said that they would veto the Senate’s bill, they have made it clear that they hope to see improvements. Namely, they would like to see a plan for failing schools. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, pointed out, “To simply label a school as failing, that doesn’t change a kid’s life.”

It’s a civil rights issue. Although a school and its students are far more than a number, testing has allowed for a quantitative way to highlight the differences in quality of our country’s schools and has been particularly effective in bringing the black/white achievement gap out of the shadows. When the President and his Secretary of Education refer to accountability, they are, in many ways, referring to the federal government’s responsibility to figure out which of its citizens it is failing and fix it.

Testing, testing, and, oh wait, more testing. The country’s largest teacher’s union, The National Education Association, has long been calling for the elimination or severe reduction of standardized tests. Banking on a renewed anti-testing fervor stemming from frustration with the Common Core, their voice is sure to be heard in this debate. While testing is disruptive, wildly unpopular, and known to distract school systems from the true mission of educating children, another viable accountability option would have to be brought forward to see the elimination of testing. In the meantime, there’s a real chance the testing could be limited and the scores used in a different way.

Wish lists. It is impossible to overstate the importance of public education, and everyone wants to leave their mark on the issue. Bob Casey (D-PA) seeks to provide universal pre-kindergarten and believes he can fund it by closing a corporate loophole allowing US companies to move part of their business overseas in order to become foreign corporations for tax purposes. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) will ask for more detailed background checks of all school personnel. Other lawmakers are sure to add their opinions and addendums to the bill.

In the words of John F Kennedy, “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.” Nothing short of the fate of our country rests upon the education we provide to its children. Let us insist that our lawmakers take this opportunity to make sound, effective, and significant improvements to our education system.

Valiant LA Times colonialists reach Black Twitter’s shores

  By

If given a pen and endless amounts of paper and ink (or a computer since I live in 2015), I wouldn’t be able to accurately explain what Black Cool is. It’s ever-changing: a prism that separates into so many different cultures and subcultures. It’s extremely valuable, but the people who make it aren’t considered as valuable. It’s a coveted resource, and it has shaped Pop Culture the world over.

In the age of the internet, Black Cool travels fast. Words that used to take years to become part of the Pop Culture Lexicon now take days. White teenagers and major consumer brands adopt and discard the language like a fad, without regard for its originators or intended use. Black dances, fashion, humor, and much more have all become openly accessible to more than just Black people. That has become both a blessing and a curse.

On the internet, Twitter reigns supreme for disseminating information. The medium is proportionally more popular among People of Color than it is among White people, especially among younger users. Over the past few years more and more attention has been brought to what’s referred to as “Black Twitter.” The way it’s talked about you’d think Black Twitter was one, uniform group, much the way Black people are stereotyped. However Black Twitter itself is a prism, the epicenter of Black Cool on the internet.

And Black Twitter is being stalked.

On July 6th, it was revealed that the L.A. Times hired a reporter to “report on Black Twitter.” The release memo goes on to explain the reporter’s credentials, his schooling and his experience with social media. The memo does not say the exact purpose of having someone report on Black Twitter, other than to “create stories with and pull stories from” the Black Twitter community. Admittedly the L.A. Times could have good intentions, but the way this is being executed is unnerving.

With all of the appropriation that happens on the internet, this seems disingenuous. It almost seems as if the L.A. Times is attempting to mine Black Twitter for headlines. While news media should be looking for stories that affect people of color, and should be hiring people of color to share our stories, hiring one man to cover all of Black Twitter seems sterile. News sites like Buzzfeed — while they too have their issues at times — has multiple Twitter-active Black people on their staff. Those writers organically engage with Black Twitter often and are part of the larger community. Because of this, they have a better idea of when something crosses the line from interesting to exploitative. Also because of this, when they do cross that line or mess up in any way, Black Twitter has an avenue to check them, and many times they listen. It’s not just one person reporting back to a newsroom of disaffected people, it’s genuine, flawed, human interaction.

Black people are people, not animals in a zoo. Black Twitter is not an observatory where you can watch Black people interact in their native habitat, and media needs to stop treating it as such. This attempt to mine Black Cool from Black Twitter, by minimal interaction with it, treats Black people and our culture like a commodity. Black people deserve better representation. We also deserve to have our lives interpreted in as complex a way as our culture is. More than that, we deserve our privacy and the right to keep and protect what we created for ourselves. Our bodies and cultures are not just here for you to study. Sadly, too much of history has involved exactly that. Little wonder that the L.A. Times announcement has been greeted with such skepticism.

"The Colonization of Black Twitter by the Los Angeles Times in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Fifteen" (Credit: Bill Humphrey for Arsenal For Democracy.)

“The Colonization of Black Twitter by the Los Angeles Times in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Fifteen” (Credit: Bill Humphrey for Arsenal For Democracy.)

Lenderocracy

  By

The Greek crisis matters for us in the United States too, not just Europeans.

For all the high-minded rhetoric of the European integration project as an effort to bridge together the peoples of Europe in liberal democratic union, the events of the past week have conclusively ripped off the mask and revealed the underlying reality that it has been little more than a neoliberal economic project the whole time. And a poorly designed one at that. But we now can all see that the preservation of investment banking interests will be placed above all other values and principles whenever they come into conflict. This isn’t just rule by corporations — it’s rule by lenders.

The Greek “crisis” — manufactured by the European Central Bank, the IMF, and the German government — is a financial public execution of an entire developed country to make an example of them for all others.

In my more than 30 years writing about politics and economics, I have never before witnessed such an episode of sustained, self-righteous, ruinous and dissembling incompetence — and I’m not talking about Alexis Tsipras and Syriza. As the damage mounts, the effort to rewrite the history of the European Union’s abject failure over Greece is already underway. Pending a fuller postmortem, a little clarity on the immediate issues is in order.
[…]
There’s no reason, in law or logic, why a Greek default necessitates an exit from the euro. The European Central Bank pulls this trigger by choosing — choosing, please note — to withhold its services as lender of last resort to the Greek banking system. That is what it did this week. That is what shut the banks and, in short order, will force the Greek authorities to start issuing a parallel currency in the form of IOUs.

 
If investors made stupid loans to Greece, these lenders – not the Greek people – should suffer for it. A startling lack of due diligence strikes again.

And just as with the subprime mortgage crisis, the lenders are considered “too big to fail” (but not too big to regulate before the bubble bursts). Instead of bailing out the ordinary people who truly got screwed over by the irresponsible lending and the ensuing crash, the banks are the ones who get bailed out. In this case, Greece keeps receiving “bailouts” that are actually earmarked exclusively for repaying debt obligations to lenders (some of which are by now merely the quasi-governmental institutions holding debt they purchased from irresponsible banks in earlier bank bailout rounds).

We’ve seen this kind of thing happen countless times throughout world history. Lenders pretend to assume risk and then wield tremendous political influence to ensure that they never actually face serious consequences when that risk blows up in their faces. That way, investment recipients (including citizens) always lose, while the investor class is guaranteed a payday, before anyone else finds relief.

Remembering East Africa’s WWI fallen

  By

Did You Know: World War I included battles in East Africa by local conscripts and produced widespread famine in the East African colonial system…

More than one million people died in East Africa during World War One. Some soldiers were forced to fight members of their own families on the battlefield because of the way borders were drawn up by European colonial powers, writes Oswald Masebo.

 
There are still guns and other battlefield artifacts in place since 1916.

John Iliffe’s archival research suggests that Germany had about 15,000 soldiers in south-west Tanzania in 1916 out of whom about 3,000 were Germans and the remaining 12,000 were Tanzanians whose names are not recorded.

The Tanzanian carrier corps also played a central role in sustaining the war. Their story should be recovered.

It is estimated that during the peak of military operations in 1916 the German colonial state conscripted some 45,000 African carrier corps.

 
After the German colonies collapsed or were seized, many who had benefited from German colonization or had been forced to serve it had to hide their identities or change their stories to avoid being branded collaborators by fellow locals and the new British authorities.