The Distant Ocean

A horror so unimaginable...

I recently realized something truly appalling: by January 20th, 2009, we will have had either a Bush or a Clinton as president for 20 years.  Two entire decades.

And if Hillary is successful it'll be 24 years...or possibly even 28.

I'm going to go weep quietly to myself now.

Call Chevron on Tuesday!

There's information here on a simple action you can take on Tuesday to let Chevron know that you don't think they should be handing over millions of dollars to the Burmese military junta.  The key bits:

We will be holding the CHEVRON PROTEST through FAX and PHONE calls on TUESDAY October 9th.  We will be calling the California Headquarters office from 8pm-10pm GMT -- 1-3pm US Pacific Time.

Chevron Corp.
6001 Bollinger Canyon Road
San Ramon, CA 94583
United States

Phone: +1 925-842-1000 (Ask for investor relations)

Please email us at chevronprotester@gmail.com to let us know you will be participating so that we get a count on how many people are calling in.

When you call, ask for investor relations, wait through the recording, and then leave a message; if you tip your hand that you're calling them about Burma,they'll just fob you off on the comment@chevron.com mailbox (though it's worthwhile to send email there as well).  My recommendation would be to tell them you won't buy any more gas from them until they divest from Burma.  And if you're looking for a better place to spend your money, try Citgo.

UPDATE: Chevron Vice Chairman Peter Robertson expressed their main talking point--which you may well hear if you call them--when he said, "I'm convinced that hundreds of thousands of people in Burma have benefited" from Chevron's presence (though he let the truth slip by adding, "It's pretty clear that this is a very attractive asset, and other people would be interested" if Chevron left).  Here's the best rebuttal to Chevron's engagement-is-good-for-the-people spin, straight from a call for sanctions by the Burmese exile government:

[T]he impact of sanctions on the population is minimal because foreign investments in Burma concentrate on natural resource extraction, which has very little trickle-down effects in terms of creating employment and small business opportunities within the overall economy.

More completely unrelated excerpts about Burma

I thought Buddhist monks were all about peace and enlightenment, but maybe I was wrong:

Myanmar's military leaders said weapons had been seized from Buddhist monasteries and announced dozens of new arrests today, defying global outrage over its violent repression of protestors who sought an end to 45 years of dictatorship.

Recent raids on monasteries turned up guns, knives and ammunition, though it was not yet clear to whom they belonged, according to The New Light of Myanmar, a mouthpiece of the junta. The government threatened to punish any monks that violate the law, stepping up pressure on clerics who led the protests.

Of course,  it might be a good idea to consider the junta's claims in light of this:

Burma Campaign UK sources in Rangoon have reported that soldiers have been ordered to shave their heads, in possible preparation for infiltrating peaceful demonstrations. They would start rioting or attacking police, providing the regime with a pretext for a brutal crackdown on protestors.

Sources indicate that soldiers from Light Battalion 77 in Rangoon have been given the order. Sources also report that the regime has ordered 3,000 monks’ robes from a factory in Rangoon.

It is a tactic the regime has used in the past, including at the Depayin massacre in 2003, during which Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested. Regime militia dressed as monks were involved in the ambush which left up to 100 democracy activists dead.

Just another example of the fact that authoritarian minds everywhere think the same way (video here).

Great news for Lee Bollinger!

From Pakistan:

General Musharraf won 98% of the votes cast by an electoral college of both houses of parliament and provincial assemblies on Saturday, thanks to a boycott by opposition parties. The prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, termed it a "great victory for democracy".

But Gen Musharraf's second term is not guaranteed. First he must await the outcome of a supreme court legal challenge by a rival candidate that could overturn his victory. The hearing resumes on October 17 and a decision may take several weeks. Gen Musharraf has refused to rule out emergency rule if the verdict goes against him. "Let them come to their decision, then we will decide," he told reporters.

98%?  Now that's a mandate!  Yay, democracy!  Yay yay!  Let's hear the State Department pick up the cheer:

Musharraf's key international backer, the United States, gave an upbeat response on the conduct of the election, although the State Department stressed that the results were unofficial until the court verdict.

"Pakistan is an important partner and ally to the United States and we congratulate them for today's election. We look forward to the electoral commission's announcement and to working with all of Pakistan's leaders on important bilateral, regional and counterterrorism issues," Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, said in Washington.

Of course, a few bitter, spiteful cynics might point out that 98% is the kind of "mandate" that Saddam Hussein regularly received in Iraq's "elections".  And they might even say that the threat of "emergency rule"--aka martial law--if Musharraf's candidacy is invalidated, coupled with his ongoing refusal to relinquish his role as army chief, ever so slightly undermines the democratic legitimacy of the process; "heads I win, tails you lose" isn't exactly synonomous with "fair and free" when it comes to elections.

But screw them!  They can carp all they want--it won't stop Lee Bollinger from taking his Pervez Musharraf plush toy to bed and stroking it lovingly as he nods off at nap time.

(More here on elections, fair and not.)

ALSO: Cynical adages apparently don't translate well from Urdu to English:

The ruling party celebrated Saturday's vote with fireworks and said it looked forward to parliamentary elections due by January, but their enthusiasm was not shared by a public cynical of Pakistan's elitist politics and the military's long domination of the country.

"We have a saying that 'He who owns the stick, owns the buffalo,'" said Ijaz Shah, a grocer relaxing on the lawns in front of the federal Parliament. "If the government really had support, there would have been thousands of people here to cheer it."

Tutu non grata

This one goes squarely in the oh-my-freakin'-god-you-must-be-kidding file:

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the [Nobel peace] prize for his nonviolent opposition to South Africa’s apartheid regime, was deemed unworthy of appearing at [the University of] St. Thomas because of comments he made criticizing Israel — comments the university says were “hurtful” to some Jewish people. Further, the university demoted the director of the program that invited Tutu after she wrote a letter to him and others complaining about the revocation of the invitation. (She retains a tenured faculty job.) ...

Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations at St. Thomas, said that when administrators were informed of the invitation, they did some research about Tutu, and found that some of his comments had been controversial. Then, the university consulted with some Jewish leaders, and concluded that Tutu had made remarks that had been “hurtful” to Jewish leaders.

“We had heard some criticism of him in the past that he had said things some people judged to be anti-Semitic. We talked to the Jewish Community Relations Council. We know a number of other people in the Jewish community, and they said that some of the things he said had been hurtful and there was a feeling — and this isn’t among all Jews — that he had said things that were hurtful to them,” Hennes said.

I particularly like the bit about doing some research about Tutu, since he is, of course, a somewhat obscure figure known only to a tiny number of people.  "Hey, have you ever heard of this so-called Desmond Tutu guy?  What kind of name is that?  It sounds made up to me.  Let's go ask the Jewish Community Relations Council what they think about it--they always have an unbiased opinion for us!"

Apparently the crux of the beef against Tutu is a speech he gave in Boston in 2002.  It's worth reading in full to truly get the context, but this is the part that drove the usual suspects over the edge:

People are scared in this country [the U.S.] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful – very powerful. Well, so what? This is God’s world. For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosovic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: What is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.

We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible.

The Zionist Organization of America, in their typically impartial, fair-minded way, characterized this section of the speech as "compar[ing] Israel to Hitler."  Perhaps someone should alert them about the IDF officer who said that Israeli commanders should "analyze and internalize the lessons of earlier battles - even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto."

I was in the West Bank in 2002, just a week after the Israelis pulled out of the Jenin refugee camp.  I saw exactly how the Israelis internalized the lessons taught by the Germans in the Warsaw ghetto: as they swept through the camp, they had spray-painted the Star of David on the walls of many of the houses on one street, and elsewhere throughout the camp.  In the mosque in the center of Jenin--which the Israelis had taken over and used as a sniper tower--we found an empty can of spray paint they'd left behind.  There was smashed glass everywhere I went, in Jenin, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron.  As I listened to it crunching beneath my shoes and surveyed the destroyed homes, shops, and offices, and the cars crushed like tin cans by Israeli Merkavas and bulldozers, I couldn't help but think of it as a Palestinian Kristallnacht.

This speech of Tutu's was from 2002 as well, and he refers specifically to Israel's murderous rampage through the West Bank, so I know exactly what kinds of images must have been in his mind.  If you read the entire speech, you'll see that if anything his words were extremely mild (especially given the timing and context)--an attempt to bring good friends who've gone astray back to their senses.

But none of that matters, and neither does the fact that Tutu is as close to a living saint (religious and secular) as you can find on this planet.  For the University of  St. Thomas, it boils down to one thing: he pissed off the Israel cultists by refusing to genuflect sufficiently to prevailing political orthodoxy.  And so in a world-class display of courage, integrity, and academic independence, they told him to get stuffed.

No more good news is still not good news

I wrote last month about the fact that there are no surprises on the horizon in Democratic politics, and it's only getting worse:

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton announced this week that she had topped chief rival Barack Obama in third quarter donations and now the New York senator is leading the Democratic field by a whopping 33 points in the latest national poll.

The detailed poll results are here.  I'd guess that the increase in Hillary's popularity is related to the fact that more Democrats now think Hillary is "electable" in 2008, by 57% to Edwards' 20% and Obama's 16%.  Just as in 2004, Democrats will flock to the person they think is most likely to win, and toss any other considerations in the trash.

There's also this:

Regarding Iraq, 52 percent of those surveyed trust her most — that's compared to 22 percent who trust Obama on the war and 17 percent who trust Edwards.

These numbers almost exactly match the numbers for overall popularity, which likely means that people are just answering this question based on their overall preference--they aren't paying much (if any) attention to what Hillary is actually saying about Iraq.  Not that there's ultimately much difference between her position and that of Obama and Edwards, as FAIR notes.

Despite appearances to the contrary, I don't really care about horse race politics and I'm not paying much attention to the Democratic nominating process; I gave up on the Democrats long ago, and I can't imagine that they'll ever do anything that would make me consider changing my mind.  The only question for me, as in 2004, is what progressives as a group are going to do in response to the near-certain nomination of this mainstream, conservative, pro-war Democrat.  I can fantasize that they'll desert the Democrats en masse but I know it's just a fantasy; once 2008 rolls around and the prospect of yet another Republican president looms, I have no doubt that fear will take over and the vast majority of progressives will fold yet again.  And they'll not only be voting for Hillary, they'll be canvassing, phone banking, monitoring polls--doing everything they can to put a Democrat in the White House (and keep a Republican out).  And when it's all over, no matter what the result, the progressive movement in this country will only be that much weaker.

I'd really love to be wrong on this one, but I'd also love to see the sky open up and rain chocolate chip cookies, and that's not going to happen either.

Completely unrelated excerpts about Burma

From the Cato Institute:

[U.S. trade and investment sanctions] policy has harmed American economic interests and done nothing to improve the living conditions or human rights of the people of Burma.

Sanctions have denied Burmese citizens the benefits of increased investment by American multinational companies--investment that brings technoloygy [sic], better working conditions, and Western ideas. ...

As an alternative to the failed policy of sanctions, the United States should allow U.S. companies to freely trade with and investment [sic] in Burma. A pro-business approach to engagement would more effectively promote political, civil, and economic freedom around the world.

From All Headline News:

[Burma]'s natural gas reserves are the single largest source of revenue to the military government, accounting for over half of Burmese exports last year. ...

A series of villages were forcibly removed in the 1990s after as the military junta attempted to make way for a similar project, headed by Total and UNOCAL (later acquired by Chevron). UNOCAL and Total were later sued in their home countries for complicity in atrocities and ultimately settled the lawsuits.

This week, Nicole Hodgson, Chevron's corporate media adviser for Asia, defended their operations in Burma, telling the Associated Press that their interest is "a long-term commitment that helps meet the critical energy needs of millions in people in the region."

And from the London Daily Mail:

About 4,000 monks have been rounded up in the past week as the military government has tried to stamp out pro-democracy protests. ...

The reports follow claims from a former intelligence officer in Burma's ruling junta that thousands of protesters have been killed and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle. ...

The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win, said: "Many more people have been killed in recent days than you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand."

Mr Win said he fled when he was ordered to take part in a massacre of holy men.

Yes, I have no doubt that the tens of thousands of Burmese who briefly took to the streets before being beaten, shot, put under martial law, cut off from the outside world, rounded up for removal to prisons in the far north, and quite possibly massacred in large numbers are thinking, "Just imagine the political, civil, and economic freedoms we would enjoy if only Western nations would increase trade and investment with the military dictatorship!"

There's much more from Human Rights Watch here on the foolish belief that taking money away from the Burmese junta would be a good idea.