Tuesday, December 8, 2020

¡Fuera Yanquí

 

        


        


CUBA REJECTS YANKEE INTERFERENCE

by Pedro Martínez Pírez


The most recent US provocation against Cuba, in the final days of Donald Trump,uses the name of a saint, San Isidro, a neighborhood in the municipality of Old Havana, but instead had a massive and overwhelming response in the centennial Trillo Park of the municipality Centro Habana, where thousands of young revolutionaries denounced the interference of the United States government.


And there was the Cuban president, engineer Miguel Díaz-Canel, who asked theyoung organizers of the event, to reaffirm the decision of the Cuban government to reject the imperialist pretension to overthrow the Cuban Revolution.


The act of revolutionary reaffirmation was preceded by extensive information disclosed by the Cuban television that demonstrated the fallacy of the group that calls itself the San Isidro Movement, funded by the United States government, with proven participation of the Yankee Chargé d'Affaires in Havana, as well as statements by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the highly discredited OAS.


The subversive action financed by Washington was also denounced these days by Minister Bruno Rodriguez and other high officials of the Cuban Foreign Ministry. In his improvised words at the Trillo Park event, Díaz-Canel said that Trump's government and the anti-Cuban mafia in Miami that supports him dreamed of the overthrow of the Revolution before the end of his term, but they could not overthrow dignity and resistance of the Cuban people.


Diaz-Canel's presence on the spot, in the midst of the provocation that seeks to divide the Cuban society, recalled one of the actions of Commander Fidel Castro, who on the 5th of August 1994 dissolved with his presence and his word, a counterrevolutionarydemonstration in front of the Deauville Hotel in Havana, also encouraged by the United States government.


And searching in José Martí's work for a thought that would reflect the Yankee manipulation through social networks and money to certain young and antisocial Cubans who are have lent themselves to disavowing the patriotic symbols, they do wrong -the Cuban Apostle said- the young men who entertain themselves by biting into the virgin breast with the poisoned teeth of the Fatherland".


This is how the final days of a Yankee administration that refuses to recognize his defeat and to cease his interference in the internal affairs of his southern neighbor are spent.


Havana, November 30, 2020.

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Our military is up to something in South America

 




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With withering poll numbers and a flip of control of the Senate ever more likely, Donald Trump may be preparing to end Radical Republican rule with one last big bang—a war in South America.

For over a year now, our country has been quietly building forces near Venezuela, a nation with a leftist regime that this country has long sought to upend. Just last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a whirlwind three-day tour of Venezuela’s neighboring countries:

Pompeo’s apparent objective: Get them to agree to an even greater U.S. military presence on their land and sea.

“The Trump administration and its Venezuelan and international allies have set the stage for an October surprise, a possible attack by the United States or one of its proxies designed to boost President Trump’s reelection,” wrote Leonardo Flores, a U.S. based anti-war activist from Venezuela, in September.

With less than a week before Election Day, there may not be time now for Trump to attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. But that doesn’t mean Trump wouldn’t make an effort post-election.

Guyana is thought to be the key to whatever plans the United States has for the area. Venezuela and Guyana have a long-standing border dispute over oil-rich lands.

Pompeo, who headed the CIA before assuming his current post, is a strong supporter of Guyana’s new president, Mohamed Irfaan Ali, a former cabinet minister who took office in August while under 19 indictments for fraud. The cases were dropped when he assumed the top government post.

There has been relatively little reporting in our country on developments in the region, although some U.S. organizations and the press in Venezuela, Guyana and elsewhere have provided plenty of dots to be connected:

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Monday, September 28, 2020

Unfounded U.N. Report on Venezuela Used as an Instrument of Regime Change

 

U.S. Peace Council Statement

September 28, 2020

The United Nations Human Rights Council issued a report* by the Independent Mission to Determine the Facts in Venezuela (Independent Mission), which accuses Venezuela of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment committed since 2014.” The veracity, timing, and political intent of this report is best understood in the context of a campaign led by the U.S. to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected government of President Nicolás Maduro and before him of Hugo Chávez.

Venezuela is a historically petroleum exporting nation and has consequently suffered from the crash in the international oil prices starting in 2014. Since this spring, Venezuela along with the rest of humanity has been hit by the additional stressor of the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking advantage of these externally induced vulnerabilities, the campaign by the U.S. and its allies of low-intensity war has only intensified under U.S. President Trump’s “maximum pressure” hybrid war operation.

The Independent Mission, which published the critical report, was approved by the U.S. and other states opposed to the Bolivarian government of Venezuela. This special Independent Mission circumvented the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which has an office in Venezuela and is working with the legitimate Venezuelan government. In contrast, the Independent Mission does not have a presence in Venezuela and based its investigation on interviews with people living abroad and mainly in opposition to the government.

The Independent Mission report is being used to delegitimize the Venezuelan government. Issued on September 16, the timing comes when Venezuela is planning parliamentary elections on December 6. The European Union (EU) had been invited to observe the elections by the Venezuelan government but has used the report to refuse the offer. Instead, the EU along with the U.S. has called for a boycott of the elections in direct interference with the internal affairs of a sovereign country. Likewise, Secretary General of the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, used the report as an excuse to deny the legitimacy of the elections even before they are held.

All this is concert with the U.S. government’s long-term effort at regime change in Venezuela, which has set bounties on the heads of top elected Venezuelan officials while selecting Juan Guaidó as the unelected president of the country. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pompeo recently toured Latin America to discuss military intervention in Venezuela by hostile countries. New U.S. troops have been sent to Colombia on Venezuela’s western border. On the eastern border, the U.S. is conducting joint military patrols with Guyana.

Inside Venezuela, mercenaries based in Colombia staged an incursion of the Venezuelan coast in May. More recently, heavily armed U.S. mercenary Matthew John Heath was captured before he could sabotage Venezuelan power facilities.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Fourth Fleet patrols Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, and the US has permanent land military bases surrounding Venezuela in Colombia, Aruba, and Curacao. This is in addition to a multi-national U.S.-led naval armada deployed this spring under the ruse of interdicting drugs.

Over-arching all this are punishing U.S. and EU sanctions – unilateral coercive measures, illegal under U.S., OAS, and international law – causing great suffering in Venezuela. There is a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. But it is not due to human rights violations by the elected government. The Independent Mission human rights report blames the victim for the intended consequences of U.S. imperialist blockade and other forms of warfare against the people of Venezuela.

The U.S. Peace Council strongly condemns the politically biased and motivated Independent Mission report and calls for ending of all unilateral coercive measures by the U.S. and its allies, ceasing the US blockade, and respecting the sovereignty of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

______________

*See this analysis by Mision Verdad for a detailed deconstruction of the Independent Mission report.

* * *

U.S. Peace Council • P.O. Box 3105, New Haven, CT 06515 • (203) 387-0370 • USPC@USPeaceCouncil.org
• https://uspeacecouncil.org • https://www.facebook.com/USPeaceCouncil/ • @USPeaceCouncil

Friday, August 21, 2020

The cry of creation echoes the call for a nuclear weapon-free world

 by Joseph Nangle, OFM

Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace


It is providential that one of our first – and perhaps the most important – reflections on the cry of creation called for by Pope Francis comes on this week when we mark 75 years since that most dreadful of all events: the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States of America.

Appropriately and thankfully, these two dates are receiving enormous attention all over the world. Eloquent and effective words and actions are calling attention to the horror our country inflicted on Japan, and the world, on August 6th and again on August 9th, 1945. There is also clearly a general agreement that after those fateful days, the world has never been the same. We know this monstrous crime against humanity hangs over us and the possibility of another attack is absolutely unthinkable.

I have felt almost at a loss about trying to add something useful to the global outpouring of commentary during this “Hiroshima/Nagasaki Week”. However, these events 75 years ago, and the subsequent threats of similar catastrophes, produce a desperate cry from creation. In these lines, I hope to spell that out as a crucial part of Pope Francis’s Seven Year Laudato Si’ Plan.

The principle point to make in this regard is something which I am not sure has received sufficient attention over the past three-quarters of a century, or even now as we mark that anniversary. It is the fact that the very existence of planet Earth is being threatened by growing nuclear arsenals and their ever more potent power. 

In a short phrase in the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ 1983 Peace Pastoral, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, we find this fearful statement: “There exists the capacity to do something no other age could imagine: we can threaten the entire planet” (No. 123).

While speaking on his pilgrimage to Japan last year, Pope Francis said, “Today the destructive potential of the nuclear powers threatens the human person, the civilization we have slowly constructed, and even the created order itself.”

If these are not cries of creation, what are?

And yet, the countries which possess these diabolical nuclear weapons, particularly the United States, seem determined not only to keep them but to upgrade their potential. One estimate of the current power of a U.S. nuclear bomb puts it at eighty times that of the atomic bombs which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an instant. Incredibly, the United States is well into the process of a thirty-year program to upgrade our nuclear capabilities. The estimated cost of this program is $2.2 trillion.

Pope Francis has made the crucial point in these times that the very possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. This call for humanity to hear the cry of creation strikes one as a despairing and almost unheard voice in the desert of discussions and policies, which take for granted the need to protect ourselves by what is senselessly called “mutually assured destruction” (aptly called MAD in shorthand).

If there is any ray of hope in this dire scenario, it might be paradoxically in the global experience of a deadly virus from which no human being is exempt and which no military weaponry can destroy. Coronavirus just might turn humanity to an entirely new way of living on Earth. Could the virus demonstrate the madness of humans killing each other in large and small wars when all of us are being equally attacked? Could we act universally on the truth that science and cooperation with science, not guns, is the only hope against the horrors of Coronavirus? And in light of these reflections, could we face up to the fact that our world is headed inexorably toward that which Pope Francis calls “the end of the created order itself?”

Out of the depths we call to you, Lord; Lord hear our cry (Psalm 130).

____________

Joe Nangle OFM is a Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace. As a member of the Assisi Community in Washington, D.C., he is dedicated to simple living and social change. Joe also serves as the Pastoral Associate for the Latino community at Our Lady Queen of Peace, Arlington, Virginia.

Monday, August 17, 2020

Perspective on the Recent Protests in Bolivia

 

By Jeannette Graulau – Aug 11, 2020

The recent protests and road blockades started when the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) postponed the general elections (scheduled for September 6th) for October 18th in a resolution dated July, 23, 2020 (Resolución TSE-RSP-ADM-No 0187/2020). TSE argued that the increment in COVID cases, as well as available ‘scientific projections’ about the development of Bolivia’s pandemic curve, were sufficient reasons for postponing the September elections. The text of the TSE resolution states that the decision was based on data compiled from the following sources: 

  • A report submitted by Comité Científico Nacional (a committee currently advising the Ministry of Health on COVID-19 situation) to TSE 
  • Data gathered by Pan-American Health Organization 
  • Data gathered by World Health Organization 

The TSE Resolution states that the above organizations conclude that Bolivia would reach the peak of its pandemic curve in or around the first week of September 2020. It has no data, and it states that the scientific evidence comes from documentos que forman parte de la resolución, sin necesidad de ser transcritos en ella (TSE Resolución, p. 8). I have searched everywhere, unsuccessfully, for the report by Bolivia’s Comité Científico Nacional. It si not clear if TSE commissioned the Report, or who authored such report either. 

In response to the TSE decision, many labor unions, organizations and groups supporting MAS delegates made a wide call for demanding the restitution of the original, 09/06 election date. The Pacto Unidad, a coalition of groups supported by MAS delegates and headed by Luis Arce, argued that the TSE Resolution was a provocation aimed at weakining MAS. It called for mobilizations to demand that the TSE retracted the Resolution. Mobilization took the form of road blockades, aimed at interrupting commercial traffic and arteries in urban, mining and agrarian provinces. The Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) joined Pacto Unidad, supporting elections on 09/06. It called for peaceful resistance against the TSE decision. The cocaleras federations, or Seis Federaciones del Trópico de Cochabamba, also joined the mobilizations, organizing road blockades in key routes of Cochabamba. The Seis Federaciones organization has a very active, influential, and vocal vice-president, Andrónico Rodríguez (very young, too!), 

RELATED CONTENT: As Bolivian Regime Delays Elections a Third Time, Media Continue to Ignore Coup

who unconditionally supports MAS and Evo Morales. As of yesterday, many roads were effectively blocked, including sections of Bolivia’s Ruta Interoceánica, roads in Cochabamba, sections of Oururo-Potosí route, El Alto-Copacabana route, and several roads around La Paz. Other groups have joined the mobilizations and road blockades, demanding Áñez destitution (in exchange of their accepting the TSE October election day). 

The press has been quite hostile to road blockades, blaming MAS delegates and Pacto Unidad for the surge of violence in some regions. The government has exploited the situation by building public opinion against Pacto Unidad and MAS, seeking to gain electoral momentum. This is the case of Juntos, the fierce anti-MAS, right-wing coalition by Jeanine Áñez, Carlos Mesa (from the Comunidad Ciudadana party) and Luis Fernando Camacho (from Creemos party). The Juntos coalition is dangerous as it can win the first round of elections. Bolivian 

electoral law allows for a second round of votes (or balotaje). Áñez, exploiting the protests against the TSE decision, proposed to other anti-MAS parties to run as part of the Juntos coalition, with an aggressive anti-MAS platform. Juntos’ goal is to win the first round and sort out candidacies (and Ministries heads and seats) in the second round. This anticipates to benefit only the strongest right-wing candidates: Jeanine Áñez (& Samuel Doria Medina, her VP candidate), and Carlos Mesa (with Gustavo Pedraza, as VP candidate). 

Moreover, Juntos has taken advantage of two situations: 

  • First, the discontent of a sector of the middle class, especially the discontent of the Indian low middle class. This sector links its ‘aspirational identity’ to rejection of socialism. The term ‘aspirational identity’ was coined by Bolivian sociologist Fernando Molina, to identify the rise of a political sentiment in the lower stratum of the middle class that links ‘upward social mobility’ to an anti-MAS, anti-socliast stance. There are other elements of this political sentiment, such as rejection of caudillo politics (which many see as intrinsic to Evo Morales’ years), and rejection of bureaucratization of ‘Indian politics.’ And ll, of course, yielding much political capital to the Juntos coalition. 
  • Second, the anti-MAS sentiment in northwest and southeast Bolivia, which has emerged in groups of autoconvocados breaking protests and road blockades. This explains why Cochabamba has become in the last week a volatile region, where pro- and anti-MAS groups incessantly clash. The anti-MA groups in Cochabamba have no direct ideological affinity with the right-wing party of Áñez, although they are clearly against Pacto Unidad. This is the case of Resistencia Juvenil Cochala (RJC), a group very active in breaking the road blockades in Samiapata, Tiquipaya, and Santa Cruz. The RJC has claimed that embodies ‘citizens’ right’ to break road blockades, acting in ‘the name of democracy and against tyranny.’ A group with similar tendencies is Cascos Amarillos, with a fierce anti-MAS and anti-Evo Morales rhetoric, appointing itself to ‘restore order’ in Sucre. 
  • RELATED CONTENT: “Dialogue” Called by Añez in Bolivia Failed – New Election Date

There are other anti-MAS parties, blaming MAS for the recent surge in violence, such as right-wing Partido Demócrata Cristiano, with Chi Hyun Chung (born in S. Korea) as presidential candidate. Chung is a polemical candidate on many levels: he is President of the Presbyterian Church of Bolivia; accused of medical malpractice; fiercely against agrarian reform, and Indian communities. The Acción Democrática Nacionalista, with María De La Cruz Bayá Claros, fiercely against socialism and the road blockades, has a weak base of support. The PAN-BOL, or Partido de Acción Nacional Boliviano, is more intriguing. It is a new party, founded in 2016, officially registered in 2019. The presidential candidate is Feliciano Mamani, leader of National Federation of Mining Cooperatives. One would expect PAN-BOL to be supporting MAS; however, the party has stated that it is no replica of MAS. Its policies seem a bit against Evo Morales, as PAN-BOL rejects the plurinational identity of the Bolivian State. It advocates for 

Sincretismo Nacional, which can be summarized as follows: accepting the ‘syncretic idiosyncrasy’ of the Bolivian Society; plurality of political views; assuming Bolivian responsibility, blaming ‘no one of the mistakes of the Bolivian society’. It advocates for legal protection to private capital (national and foreign) and property, and a new mining law attracting necessary ‘resources’ (capital) for modernizing the mining sector. 

Where does the government and the anti-MAS campaign leave Pacto Unidad? A couple of days ago, Pacto Unidad conditioned its support to the TSE Resolution to a national dialogue and a transparent electoral process guaranteed by international organizations. This move coincides with comments by Evo Morales to Radio Kawsachun Coca, supporting the TSE 10/18 election date. Morales also called for the country to be vigilant against a potential coup by a sector of the military highly loyal to Áñez’s government. 

Pacto Unidad, however, has three general problems moving forward in the 2020 elections, as follows: 

  • First, there is much controversy within the left about the merits of Luis Arce vis-à-vis David Choquehuanca (vice presidential candidate). Many argue that Luis Arce was the candidate imposed by Evo Morales from exile, against David Choquehuanca, an influential leader and activist in the Aymara-speaking region of La Paz and Oruro (northwest Bolivia), where Evo Morales had unconditional support. David Choquehuanca was sent to Venezuela in an official diplomatic post, after his removal from the Ministry of External Affairs (2018) under Morales. In Venezuela, he was the Executive Secretary of ALBA. David Choquehuanca has a strong grassroots base in Aymara-speaking regions, as opposed to Luis Arce, viewed more as a mainstream, ‘cultural symbol’ of Indian politics. 
  • Second, large union federations opposed the road blockades, suggesting that Pacto Unidad has problems with coalition building. This is the case of the mining cooperatives grouped under FEDECOMIN (Federación de Cooperativas Mineras de Potosí), which did not join the road blockades, supported the TSE October- election decision, and are currently in open confrontation with other community-based groups of Potosí. 
  • Third, the most difficult problem that Pacto Unidad has is the ‘middle-class problem’ of Bolivia: what to do with a class generally resentful of the erosion of its historical gains and depletion of its ‘genealogical capital’ (its anti-Indian, anti- cholo racial identity) under MAS. Álvaro García Linera has written several essays on how this contradiction and how it imploded within MAS. 

In the meantime, road blockades continue, and clashes with anti-MAS government-sponsored groups, and autoconvocados shape the current electoral climate of the country. This is, in a nutshell, some of the most relevant aspects of the Bolivian situation. I will update this lengthy note as new developments emerge. 

 

Featured image: Photo: Kawsachun News

Jeannette Graulau is a Faculty and Union Member at City University of New York 

 

Saturday, August 8, 2020

With survival at stake, can weapons makers change course?

 

by Kathy Kelly
Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace

Today, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the atomic attack on Hiroshima, should be a day for quiet introspection. I recall a summer morning following the U.S. 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq when the segment of the Chicago River flowing past the headquarters of the world’s second largest defense contractor, Boeing, turned the rich, red color of blood. At the water’s edge, Chicago activists, long accustomed to the river being dyed green on St. Patrick’s Day turned the river red to symbolize the bloodshed caused by Boeing products. On the bridge outside of Boeing’s entrance, activists held placards urging Boeing to stop making weapons.

This summer, orders for Boeing’s commercial jets have cratered during the pandemic, but the company’s revenue from weapon-making contracts remains steady. David Calhoun, Boeing’s CEO, recently expressed confidence the U.S. government will support defense industries no matter who occupies the Oval Office. Both presidential candidates appear “globally oriented,” he said, “and interested in the defense of our country.”

Investors should ask how Boeing’s contract to deliver 1,000 SLAM- ER weapons (Standoff Land Attack Missiles-Expanded Response) to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia “defends” the United States.

Here are excerpts from Jeffrey Stern’s account of a missile’s impact on the town of Arhab in a remote area of Yemen. In this case, the missile was manufactured by Raytheon:

Now, as Fahd walked into the hut, a weapon about the length of a compact car was wobbling gracelessly down through the air toward him, losing altitude and unspooling an arming wire that connected it to the jet until, once it had extended a few feet, the wire ran out and ripped from the bomb.

Then it was as if the weapon woke up. A thermal battery was activated. Three fins on the rear extended all the way and locked in place. The bomb stabilized in the air. A guidance-control unit on the nose locked onto a laser reflection — invisible to the naked eye but meaningful to the bomb — sparkling on the rocks Fahd walked over.

At the well, at the moment of impact, a series of events happened almost instantaneously. The nose of the weapon hit rock, tripping a fuse in its tail section that detonated the equivalent of 200 pounds of TNT. When a bomb like this explodes, the shell fractures into several thousand pieces, becoming a jigsaw puzzle of steel shards flying through the air at up to eight times the speed of sound. Steel moving that fast doesn’t just kill people; it rearranges them. It removes appendages from torsos; it disassembles bodies and redistributes their parts.

Fahd had just stepped into the stone shelter and registered only a sudden brightness. He heard nothing. He was picked up, pierced with shrapnel, spun around and then slammed into the back wall, both of his arms shattering — the explosion so forceful that it excised seconds from his memory. Metal had bit into leg, trunk, jaw, eye; one piece entered his back and exited his chest, leaving a hole that air and liquid began to fill, collapsing his lungs. By the time he woke up, crumpled against stone, he was suffocating. Somehow he had survived, but he was killing himself with every breath, and he was bleeding badly. But he wasn’t even aware of any of these things, because his brain had been taken over by pain that seemed to come from another world.

In 2019, the UN Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen observed “the continued supply of weapons to parties involved in Yemen perpetuates the conflict and the suffering of the population.”

These experts say “the conduct of hostilities by the parties to the conflict, including by airstrikes and shelling, may amount to serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

A year and a half ago, were it not for a presidential veto, both houses of the U.S. Congress would have enacted a law banning weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

Another end-user of Boeing’s weapons is the Israeli Defense Force.

The company has provided Israel with AH-64 Apache helicopters, F-15 fighter jetsHellfire missiles (produced with Lockheed Martin), MK-84 2000-lb bombs, MK-82 500-lb bombs, and Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) kits that turn bombs into “smart” GPS-equipped guided bombs. Boeing’s Harpoon sea-to-sea missile system is installed on the upgraded 4.5 Sa’ar missile ships of the Israeli Navy.

Apache helicopters, Hellfire and Harpoon missiles, JDAM guiding systems, and Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) munitions have been used repeatedly in Israeli attacks on densely populated civilian areas, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. The human rights community, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and United Nations commissions, ruled these attacks to be human rights violations and at times war crimes.

I lived with a family, in Gaza, during the final days of the 2009 “Operation Cast Lead” bombing. Abu Yusuf, Umm Yusuf, and their two small children, Yusuf and Shahid, welcomed Audrey Stewart and me to stay with them. Once every 11 minutes from 11 p.m. – 1:00 a.m. and again from 3:00 a.m. – 6:00 a.m., we heard an ear-splitting blast. Normally, I wouldn’t have known the difference between the sound of a Hellfire Missile exploding and that of a 500 lb. bomb dropped from an F-15, but soon I could tell the difference. Little Yusuf and Shahid taught us to distinguish one gut-wrenching sound from the other. They had been cringing under the bombs for 18 days and nights.

I don’t see how the sale of weapons to governments which use them against civilian populations, against people like Fahad, in Arhab or Abu Yusuf and his family in Gaza, defends people in the U.S.

Boeing’s vast resources for scientific know-how, skillful engineering, and creative innovation could, however, help defend the U.S. against the greatest threat we  now face, environmental climate catastrophe. Writing for The New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben predicts “a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through right now.” The main question, he says, is whether human beings can hold the alarming rise in temperature “to a point where we can at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization.”

“A rise of one degree doesn’t sound like an extraordinary change,” McKibben writes, “but it is: each second, the carbon and methane we’ve emitted trap heat equivalent to the explosion of three Hiroshima-sized bombs.”

Boeing’s engineers, scientists, designers and marketers could help turn  the tide of human actions destroying our earth. Their expertise could truly “defend” people.

There’s a lesson to be learned from the river flowing outside of Boeing’s headquarters. It actually flows backwards. Long ago, brilliant engineers designed a way for the river to reverse its course. In doing so, they saved Chicago from sewage contamination of its drinking water supply – Lake Michigan. This action was hailed as one of the great engineering wonders of the world.

The City’s sewers discharged human and industrial wastes directly to its rivers, which in turn flowed into the lake. A particularly heavy rainstorm in 1885 caused sewage to be flushed into the lake beyond the clean water intakes. The resulting typhoid, cholera, and dysentery epidemics killed an estimated 12 percent of Chicago’s 750,000 residents, and raised a public outcry to find a permanent solution to the city’s water supply and sewage disposal crisis.”

The Sanitary and Ship Canal was constructed at an estimated cost of over $70,000,000. After its completion, in 1900, waterborne disease rates quickly and dramatically improved, and its water supply system was soon regarded as being one of the safest in the world. With its water source made safe and dependable by the canals, Chicago and the region grew and prospered rapidly.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to dye the Chicago River, red or green. We need to protect the river and all wildlife dependent on it. But, we must continually confront Boeing and other weapon manufacturers, and insist they not destroy lives, homes and infrastructures in other lands. We must urge Boeing, like the river, to reverse course and participate, with dignity and humility, in the pursuit of human survival.

____________

POSTER CREDIT: ANOTHER MOTHER FOR PEACE, LORRAINE SCHNEIDER, 1966