Venezuela: A Nation Divided

By Nathalie Malinarich

This was an article I read just yesterday at the BBC News site. There are many interesting things going on right now in Venezuela as I post this, the biggest of them being upcoming elections in Venezueal, where, last I read, Chavez was up by 32 points over his more conservative opponent.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

That Venezuela is a deeply polarised nation is something no-one in the capital, Caracas, seems to dispute.

"You'll find siblings who no longer speak to each other because one supports [President Hugo] Chavez and the other doesn't," says a man in the well-heeled Altamira neighbourhood. Like many others, he would rather not be named or photographed.
The tension ahead of the 3 December presidential elections is palpable everywhere.

Talk to a Chavez supporter (Chavista) in Chacao - a municipality where opposition candidate Manuel Rosales has widespread support - and some nervousness can be detected.

"I've heard of people going crazy when they hear you mention the president. They absolutely hate him in these middle-class places," says one Chavista.

In Las Mercedes, another affluent neighbourhood, traffic - slow at the best of times - comes to a standstill as dozens of Chavistas on motorbikes stage a "spontaneous" demonstration.

"It's those damned marginals again," a driver says. "They're always at it."

Go to one of the many shantytowns, or barrios, which hang from the hillsides and you find Rosales supporters being shouted at by Chavistas.

'Power to the poor'

Caracas is perhaps the physical manifestation of the divisions that wrack this oil-rich nation of 26 million people.


The middle and upper classes tend to live in the flat, lower-lying areas - many of which look as if they have seen better days. The poor live in the barrios they have had to build for themselves on the surrounding slopes.
But while they live apart, both the poor and the middle classes, Chavistas and anti-Chavistas, complain about high levels of crime and a serious housing shortage.

About half of the urban population live in the precarious barrios that have been spreading in Venezuela's cities for half a century.

Here, where the word revolution crops up frequently, many people have benefited from Mr Chavez's missions, or social programmes.

Abraham Aparicio, a student leader and committed Chavista who comes from a barrio, says the polarisation is partly explained by class divisions.

"Before Chavez, the people who lived in the wealthier neighbourhoods made the poor believe they were marginal and excluded them from everything," he says.

"Now the president wants to give more power to the poor, and the old elites don't like it."

'Navel-gazing'

Power to the people is a recurrent theme in the posters and murals plastered around the city to publicise the administration's achievements - they all include phrases such as "Venezuela now belongs to everyone" and "With Chavez we are all government".


Teodoro Petkoff, editor of the evening newspaper Tal Cual and a one-time opposition candidate, agrees that in the 20 years before Mr Chavez, "the parties that governed became navel-gazing electoral machines and no longer noticed the horrible impoverishment of the population".

"In that fertile territory, Chavez flourished," Mr Petkoff, who was a left-wing guerrilla in the 1960s, says.

But, he argues: "It's a mistake to imagine that all the poor in Venezuela are with Chavez.

"At the beginning, there may have been a horizontal divide - but not any more. You'll find rich and poor on both sides.

"Both old and new rich back Chavez. I think that in wealthy neighbourhoods some people who speak publicly against Chavez will vote for him because they are making more money than ever."

Uncertainty

The new rich to whom Mr Petkoff refers are known in Venezuela as the "boli-burguesia", or Bolivarian bourgeoisie, because they have made their fortune during Mr Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution".

As Venezuela benefits from high international oil prices, luxury homes and apartment blocks are shooting up in the capital's wealthier neighbourhoods.

There are waiting lists for new cars, and the demand for private jets has reportedly soared, bringing back memories of the oil bonanza of the 1970s.

But critics say that while the economy is growing fast and there is a lot of extra cash around, medium and long-term investment is scarce.

This, they argue, is because no-one knows what is going to happen after the elections, because next year, according to Mr Chavez's plan, is when the revolution truly starts.

Biometrics

The uncertainty is accompanied in many cases by fear, particularly among the middle classes.


"This is a country in which the opposition and the government do not speak to each other at all - that is very dangerous." Says Petkoff

Chavistas often argue that opposition supporters are just scared their properties will be taken away - something that threats of expropriations do little to assuage - and oppose social equality.
But observers say that the main thing that has prompted many to leave the country is the politicisation of education and the idea that Venezuela may be heading down the Cuban route.

A new biometric voting system is also fuelling fears among some.

The electoral authorities say electronic fingerprinting is necessary to avoid fraud.

The opposition says this will allow the government to see how each person votes and could stop people voting against Mr Chavez for fear of reprisals.

They cite the case of the Tascon list, which identified all those who added their signatures to a call for a 2004 referendum on Mr Chavez's rule and led to them being barred from government jobs and access to some public services.

No dialogue

While opposition supporters - and many privately-owned media outlets - allege fraud and intimidation, Chavistas accuse Mr Rosales and his followers of preparing for violence.

Pro-government media often carry reports of what they say is evidence of plans for a coup or lists of people plotting to assassinate the president, including not only the opposition, but also the Bush administration.

The polarisation in evidence today, according to Mr Petkoff, was created by a government that reacted against its adversaries in "a very brutal, aggressive and intolerant way".

"The first criticisms were received with a very tough and even insulting language which started to generate answers in the same tone," he says.

It was also caused, Mr Petkoff says, by the fact that some sectors did not accept that Mr Chavez had won an election in 1998 and designed undemocratic strategies to get rid of him.

"This, fed by an aggressive president, created a terrifying split.

"This is a country in which the opposition and the government do not speak to each other at all. That is very dangerous," he says.

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Super Unicorn

Remembering W. E. B. Du Bois

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

This was an article in the August 2003 issue of the Monthly Review. It was written in commemoration of Du Bois' death who died in August of 1963 after a long and eventful life. Du Bois tackled issues of imperialism, classism, racism, and socialist issues. Over his long life Du Bois (he was 95 years old when he died) wrote many books, essays, poems, and speeches to support the struggle for human rights and Third World solidarity. While Du Bois made his mistakes, such as supporting Imperial Japan (as Third World liberators) and supporting Stalin his contributions to American society, as well as to the world, far outweighed his mistakes and his writings still resonate with us today despite some of them being written 100 years ago.

Some works by Du Bois:

The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

John Brown (1909)

The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924)

Africa: Its Place in Modern History (1930)

Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935)

Encyclopedia of The Negro: Preparatory Volume with Reference Lists and Reports (1946)

Africa in Battle Against Colonialism, Racialism, Imprialism (1960)

Readers:

David Levering Lewis, editor. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Owl Books, 1995.

Eric J. Sundquist. The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the president of TransAfrica Forum, a Washington, DC-based non-profit organizing and educational center formed to raise awareness in the USA regarding issues facing the nations and peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

“No nation threatens us. We threaten the world.”

—W.E.B. Du Bois (1958) commenting on the role of the United States internationally.

While we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington, we should as well be commemorating another event. On the eve of the 1963 March on Washington, the life of one of the 20th century’s most brilliant individuals came to an end. W.E.B. Du Bois, scholar, Pan Africanist, political leader, champion of the struggle against white supremacy in the United States, died in Ghana, August 27, 1963.

It is easy to forget about Du Bois since an orchestrated effort has been conducted by the larger society to minimize his contributions and, in fact, to expunge him from our collective memory. Beginning with the Cold War in the late 1940s, the government and the right-wing went out of their way to harass Du Bois, restrict his travel and opportunities, and limit his access to those who wanted to or needed to hear his words.

For us at TransAfrica Forum, the work and life of Du Bois was particularly significant because of his commitment to the struggle against racist discrimination at home as well as against imperialism and colonialism abroad. Du Bois saw no inconsistency in taking up both struggles, usually at the same time. Thus, Du Bois is acknowledged as the “father” of the modern Pan African movement. He was directly involved in organizing and helping to lead the first five Pan African Congresses. He was also one of the leaders, along with the great Paul Robeson, of the Council on African Affairs, a U.S.-based advocacy group on Africa which was, in many ways, a political ancestor of TransAfrica Forum. Du Bois was also a founder of the NAACP, editor of the NAACP’s magazine, Crisis, and author of the monumental and definitive study Black Reconstruction in America.

Du Bois would probably have been heralded by the larger US establishment if he had restricted his criticisms to racial matters in the United States. Du Bois refused to be so constrained. Du Bois’s critique of U.S. society expanded over time to examining the economic roots of racial oppression as well as his expansive analysis of Western colonialism and the U.S. role in propping up colonial empires, allegedly in the name of fighting communism.

Following World War II when the United States came to the aid of various European colonial powers, in some cases reinforcing their domination, in other cases attempting to replace them, Du Bois was one of the courageous few who would not be silenced. Du Bois saw that anti-communism and red-baiting were not aimed at stopping the spread of a totalitarian ideology, but rather were aimed at silencing any and all dissent from policies that advanced corporate interests. For his recognition, the forces of repression came down upon him.

Ultimately Du Bois chose to leave the United States and reside in Ghana. Before his death he began work on an encyclopedia of the African world. He did not live to complete it.

It is not enough for us to honor the memory of Du Bois, though that is itself important. Reminding ourselves, and particularly younger activists and scholars of the renown of such a human being has a value in and of itself. Yet for those who work with and support TransAfrica Forum, and other organizations committed to a democratic foreign policy on the part of the United States, the life and work of Du Bois has an additional value. All too often I hear people suggest that international events are too distant from the realities of the everyday person. Du Bois repudiated such notions, suggesting instead that it is inconceivable that we, African Americans, can fight the good fight here in the United States for social justice in isolation from the fight for what we now call global justice. A system that would ignore the plague of HIV/AIDS as it ravages Africa and the Caribbean; a system that would promote the interests of pharmaceutical corporations over those of the individuals living with HIV/AIDS, can never be expected to discover humanity in its treatment of those of African descent living in the United States.

The reverse is also true. As often as we attempt to illustrate our patriotism through volunteering to support United States wars overseas, and other such adventures, we may achieve awards and note, but it brings us no closer to achieving actual freedom, equality and dignity at home. To the extent to which we stand up for what is right rather than what the establishment deems to be popular, we regain our humanity. If there is no other lesson to learn from the work and life of W.E.B. Du Bois, it is that one simple point.

Image:

exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu

The Enchantments of Mammon: Metaphysical Subtleties and Theological Niceties, Towards a Theological History of Capitalism

By Eugene McCarraher

This is a section from an essay by Eugene McCarraher. The essay, McCarraher, Eugene. “The Enchantments of Mammon: Notes Toward a Theological History of Capitalism.” Modern Theology 21, no. 3 (July 2005): 429-461, was one I read while researching for my thesis paper for my Religious Studies Minor at San Francisco State University for my Religious Studies 696 Directed Readings class. It was very intriguing and I’ve decided to take some of the best aspects of this essay, particularly the section titled “'Metaphysical Subtleties and Theological Niceties'”: Commodity Fetishism and the Marxist Tale of Disenchantment.” I plan to post my finished essay on this blog once I finish it, which will be in about two to three weeks.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

Christians assert that we always live beyond our means, because there is no other way to live. (Here, they must contest both modern economics—capitalist or Marxist—which narrates the agonistic production of abundance, and a Bataillean “general economy” which celebrates plenty in nihilistic violence.) Creation is not just abundant, but sacramental as well. Affirming Augustine’s claim that “the invisible realities of God are apprehended through the material things of his creation”, Graham Ward articulates a “doctrine of divine participation in creation” whereby “the corporeal and the incorporeal do not comprise a dualism”. When read theologically, Ward asserts, the visible, material realm “manifests the watermark of its creator”. It would follow that a proper theological critique of Marxist metaphysics would not be that it is “too materialist” but rather that it is not materialist enough—that is, that it does not provide an adequate account of matter itself, of its sacramental and revelatory character. So if Marxist “demystification” of capitalism purports to uncover the material roots of ideology, a theological “demystification” would expose the perversely sacramental and ecclesial roots of injustice.
...
Writing the cultural history of capitalism provides an occasion for such an enterprise, affording an opportunity to write a new tale of accumulation and its discontents. In this tale, capitalism becomes a new form of sacrament, a repression, displacement, and renaming of the sacred, a mobilization of desires for redemption and transfiguration. The cash nexus and the fetishism of commodities pervert the performance of sacrament. The “scarcity of resources” and the “laws of the market” conceal the charity of providence. Economic thought and management theory impersonate creed and doxology. The corporation parodies the ecclesia, and the trinkets of the market ape the delights of the heavenly city. The enchantments of capitalism pervert our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. A fat, greasy, hoarding slob in ancient Babylonian lore, Mammon appears, in capitalist modernity, in a counterfeit angelic raiment.
(pp. 432-433)
...
Yet the sociologist who claimed that he was “religiously unmusical” heard faint notes of enchantment in capitalist culture. Despite the wounds inflicted by disenchantment, the old deities had not simply hobbled off to die. Observing how “many old gods ascend from their graves” to become the laws of nature or the market, he called upon his fellow modern intellectuals to realize that “we live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons” (my italics)—“only we”, he concluded cryptically, “live in a different sense”. Some of Weber’s scholarly descendants locate that “different sense” in the self of modern consumer culture. The sociologist Colin Campbell, for instance, traces the descent of consumer consciousness from what he calls “the Other Protestant Ethic”, a concentration on ecstatic inner experience which marked both evangelical and liberal Protestant religious traditions. When separated from the Protestant churches, this Other Protestant Ethic morphed into a “romantic ethic” which, by affirming the primacy of emotion and sensibility, served as the “secular” prelude to consumer consciousness. Consumerism is the contemplative mysticism of commodity culture. The perpetually unsatisfied desire of consumerism is, in this view, the psychological residue of enchantment. If we look at the matter theologically, however, could we say that consumerism is the contemplative mysticism of commodity culture?
(p. 435)
...
The possibility that capitalist “rationality” bears vestiges of enchantment receives unlikely but auspicious support from none other than the Marxist tradition. As the Communist Manifesto makes very and proudly clear, Marx considered capitalism the most arduous and liberating of modernity’s disillusioning forces. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” The bourgeoisie “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor . . . in the icy water of egotistical calculation”—an image suggesting that capital is consecrated in a murderous baptismal rite of accumulation. Yet while Marx was more exhilarated than Weber by the death of God, he could not, in the end, affirm the secularity of capitalism or reject religion as a source of insight into the capitalist mode of production. If the capitalist is indeed “a sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up with his spells”, then Marx might turn out to be the bearer of an oddly sacramental critique of commodity civilization.

Marx framed his analysis of capitalism in religious terms throughout his career, suggesting that his use of religious language was far more than irony or sarcasm. In the “1844 manuscripts”, Marx reflected on “the divine power of money, its perverse capacity for moral and metaphysical transfiguration. Through its power to conjure an abstract equivalence among distinct and incomparable things, money remade the world in its own empty image and likeness, effecting “the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries”, procuring love for the unpleasant, education for the dull, travel for the indolent or parochial. “Thou visible God!” as he quoted Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Noting later, in the Grundrisse (1857), his massive preliminary study of capitalism, that money was first minted and stored in the temples of antiquity, Marx concluded that it was both “the god among commodities” and “the real community” of capitalist society—a new ontology of enchantment, perhaps? Indeed, Marx considered money “the immanent spirit of commodities”, a restless specter that lingered with material goods only for a while, awaiting release and re-investment in the circuit of accumulation. But Marx quickly defused the possibility of any theological criticism by interpreting both religion and money as epiphenomenal distortions, the effects of a more basic “social” existence misshapen by scarcity, injustice, and alienation. The “fetishistic” character of both religion and money would, Marx thought, be exposed—disenchanted—by historical development and revolutionary practice.

Yet later, in Capital, in one of the most renowned and difficult passages in his work—“the fetishism of commodities, and the secret thereof”—Marx underlined the formal similarities between commodity exchange and religious practice in such a way as to undermine his secular critique of capitalism. The commodity, he wrote, is “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”. These subtleties and niceties take “metaphysical” and “theological” guises, in his view, because modern industry obscures or eclipses the fact that commodities are made by human beings. Since, under conditions of large-scale production and exchange, we see no traces of labor in the things we buy, commodities seem to appear from nowhere, acquire agency, even interact with each other. Thus “the mutual relations of producers” assume the appearance of a “social relation between the products”, both of which are mediated by money. (Note how Marx, against the drift of much high-minded palaver about “consumerism”, locates the roots of commodity fetishism in the relations of production. Talking about consumerism has become a way of not talking about capitalism.) But because, under conditions of alienation, people invest material products with their deepest hopes and fears, they endow—enchant—commodities with hopes of gratification and justice that can really be fulfilled only by a revolutionary transformation of society. So far, so secular; yet Marx then declared that to resolve the enigma of fetishism we must take “recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world”. Just as “God” stands for the unrealized, projected, and distorted powers of humanity, so, too, do the fetishized products of alienated labor. And just as an enlightened humanity will see a piece of bread instead of a Eucharistic host—a sacramental analogy Marx used earlier in Capital—so a classless world of unestranged producers, recognizing their own creations in the wealth of industrial production, will see the full flourishing of their talents and capacities.

So while Marx the revolutionary pamphleteer heralds the rationalization of economic life as a powerful force for disenchantment, Marx the student of political economy sees commodity fetishism as a reservoir of enchantment...
...
Other Marxists have taken the analysis of commodity fetishism to an even higher theological level, explicitly linking the concept of reification to sacramentality and eschatology. Thanks to the universalization of the commodity form under late capitalism, reification—along with commodity fetishism, its specifically capitalist form—must, Fredric Jameson asserts, “come into their own [as] the dominant instruments of analysis and struggle”. As the process whereby the products of labor acquire a “phantom subjectivity”, in Georg Lukacs’ words, an abstract quality that disguises their human origin, reification is for Marxists both a necessary condition and the condition from which revolution will emancipate us. Possessing this dialectical character, art, religion, and commodities offer tantalizing glimpses of a utopian, unreified existence, a future heralded in a Marxism which prefigures “a lucid enchantment of the world”—to use Perry Anderson’s startling and cryptic
phrase.

Rejecting a “secular reason” which participates in a “reified logic of the here and now” and thereby inhibits genuine openness to the unknown, Bewes attempts to chart the analogy, even the homology, between commodity fetishism and sacramental practice. Five pages into Reification (2002)—whose cover features an old nun tending what appears to be a loom of some high-tech sort—Bewes asserts that the Incarnation is a “metaphor or even a synonym for reification: when Christ becomes man—‘historically’ or symbolically in the sacraments of the Holy Communion—the divine is translated into worldly terms”. In the Christian terms of Incarnation and Eucharist, “the moment of reification is pregnant with the moment of liberation from reification”; bread and wine become “physical tokens” of emancipation from the reified world. (Drawing on Flannery O’Connor’s conviction of the “intimacy of creation”, Bewes even suggests that what has been called transubstantiation be renamed intersubstantiation, a word which, in his view, better conveys the quality of a sacrament to reveal the always inherent intermixture of sacred and mundane.) Bewes can then restate, in continuity with classical Marxism, that the end of religion and the end of reification are the same moment. “The disappearance of religion is identical to the realization of its truth, to the manifestation of its objects of devotion, to the erasure of the semiotic disjunction between faith and parousia, an event which religion itself could not survive.”
...
Every atrium, dress shop, and voluptuous advertisement bore the longing for divinity. Department stores, Benjamin wrote, were “temples consecrated” to “the religious intoxication of cities”, the redemptive fantasies of communion and abundance perverted and mobilized by urban commercial culture. If, in Marxist terms, the dispelling of commodity fetishism is a disenchantment, for Benjamin the exposure of the fetish was a prelude to re-enchantment, a discovery of some vaguely utopian and perhaps divine promise inherent in material life.
(pp. 436-341)

“[C]ommodities seem to appear from nowhere, acquire agency, even interact with each other.” The Rev. Dollar’s (a “Prosperity” theologian who I am critiquing in my paper and who has a mega-church in Atlanta, GA) mistake is that he tells people God show’s his mercies and blessings on those through money and commodities. This is a mistake because Dollar does not seem to know where the commodity is from. Of money, Marx writes“the divine power of money, its perverse capacity for moral and metaphysical transfiguration. Through its power to conjure an abstract equivalence among distinct and incomparable things, money remade the world in its own empty image and likeness, effecting the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries.” Dollar worships the god of money, Mammon, without even knowing it, he turns his “flock” away from the true God (the “true God” in what they believe, that is, the Christian God, they are turning away from a God they profess to believe in) and towards the mystical and man-made elements of money, money and commodities which are endowed with the characteristics of a god, the worship of money and commodities is the worship of a false god. One understanding of the 1st commandment is that in ancient Israel gods were considered everywhere, there was a god for commerce, money, and materials, thus the 1st commandment was as much a critique of commodity fetishism and the worship of money and commodities as it was a critique of not worshiping Yhwh (cf. Miller, Patrick D. The God You Have: Politics and the First Commandment. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004., This is a great little book on further study for the 1st commandment and its present day abuses in American society).

...in Life Against Death, [Normon O.] Brown produced what is perhaps the most searching psychoanalytical critique of capitalism ever written, connecting the psychoanalysis of money to an exploration of religious concerns. Noting how the standard psychoanalytic appraisal of money was “anchored in the domain of the secular”, Brown concluded, after a survey of historical and anthropological literature, that money actually derived its power from “the magical, mystical, religious . . . the domain of the sacred”. Besides, he continued, the “flat antinomy” of sacred and secular was misleading in any case. “Secularization”, he asserted, “is only a metamorphosis of the sacred”—an observation made in the course of criticizing the “illusion that modern money is secular”. The secular, Brown contended, is “the negation of the sacred”—negation, that is, in Freud’s and Hegel’s terms, in which the act of negation is in fact an affirmation of its opposite. If the secular is indeed this affirmative negation of the sacred, then “the psychological realities of money”, Brown asserted, were “best grasped in terms of theology”. In Brown’s reading, neither capitalism nor secularism had disenchanted the world. In a chapter entitled “Filthy Lucre” that examined the scatological fixations of Martin Luther, Brown affirmed the reformer’s insight that, with capitalism, “power over this world has passed from God to God’s ape, the Devil”. Like Luther, Brown saw in money “the essence of the secular, and therefore of the demonic”. The “money complex”—what Marx, recall, had considered the animating spirit of commodity fetishism—is, in Brown’s words, “the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things”. Capitalism, we might add, was a new form of enchantment.
(pp. 442-443)
...
If capitalism works like a religion, then we can study and critique it as a religion, a form of enchantment, an ensemble of rituals, symbols, moral codes, and iconography. Yet it is on precisely this score that radical orthodoxy needs revision in order to realize its enormous promise as a reservoir of critical power. Because Milbank and his comrades define modern secularity as the creation of a space of untrammeled human will-to-power, they obscure or even miss the full significance of their own discernment of religious residue in capitalist theory and practice. Milbank, for instance, emphasizes the persistence of providential notions in classical conceptions of the market (the “invisible hand”) and notes the transvaluation of Christian virtue into the skinflint and specious probities of sobriety, punctuality, and self-restraint. D. Stephen Long—whose Divine Economy (2000) is a remarkable fusion of historical theology and intellectual history—rightly asserts that Adam Smith “articulated a metaphysical-moral vision for capitalist economics”, and examines how contemporary Christian intellectuals such as Michael Novak and Max Stackhouse have tried to align the verities of economics with those of theology. But neither Long nor Milbank appears to consider the perdurance of this perverse sacrality a reason to abandon or revise what Jeffrey Stout has called “the secularist theory of secularization” that structures their accounts of capitalism and political economy.
(p. 449)

The author goes on to state in footnote 42 about Michael Novak, a conservative theologian who writes on economy whom I’m also critiquing in my thesis paper:

Michael Novak’s theological economics, it must be noted, is the most forthright and outrageous of all these efforts. The corporation, he writes, is “the best secular analogue to the church”, indeed a “Suffering Servant” representing “a much despised incarnation of God’s presence in the world”.
(p. 460, n. 42)

...Even more provocatively, Cavanaugh argues that the modern nation-state is a “simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ” with “an alternative soteriology to that of the Church”. “It is not enough”, he contends in a highly suggestive but undeveloped passage, “to see what is called ‘secularization’ as the progressive stripping away of the sacred from some profane remainder”. Modern nationalism is “the substitution of one mythos of salvation for another”—“extra respublicam nulla salus”, as he wittily encapsulates it—and this nationalist mythos has succeeded “because it mimics its predecessor”. In other words, there is a sacrality inherent in secularity, and the state is, in short, a perverse form of religio. But if, as Cavanaugh notes, “the power of the state grew in concert with the rise of capitalism”, might not the history of the latter be a similar story of mythic mimicry and substitution? Might not capitalism appropriate “the capital of what it denies” and reinvest it in the liturgy of accumulation?

...A theological critique of “disenchantment” could then avoid the tiresome and flat-footed opposition of secular and sacred, and enable us to suggest that while moderns claim to disenchant and de-sacramentalize matter, they “fetishize” goods by shifting faith in divine power to the transformative properties of commodities. Likewise, the love of accumulation is a corrupted love of God, a private and spoiled Eucharistic banquet. And as the site of poesis deformed into productivity, the corporation is a grotesque of liturgical labor.

Guided by some of the ideas I have sketched, I have become convinced that American cultural history abounds with evidence that enchantment or sacramentality has persisted throughout the evolution of capitalism. Even before the advent of corporate capitalism in the late nineteenth-century, American economic culture had featured an ongoing tension between a Cartesian-Calvinist worldview that disenchanted material life and a more fluid, enchanted sensibility that bore Campbell’s “other Protestant ethic”...
(p. 450)
...
...Over the course of the twentieth-century, an array of writers in the reform, academic, and corporate intelligentsia—from Progressives to advertising moguls, from pragmatist philosophers at Harvard to business journalists at Fortune—attributed moral and sacral significance to the capitalist corporation and its commodity culture. Josiah Royce, for instance, considered the corporation a prefigurement of the “Beloved Community” he augured as the modern solution to The Problem of Christianity (1913). In War and Insurance (1914), Royce marveled at the corporation’s fusion of mortal material assets with an identity, legally conferred but nonetheless forceful, which constituted an immortal selfhood, an “essentially intangible soul”. Herbert Croly, one of the founders of the New Republic, identified Progressive Democracy (1914) with the “holy city”, built with the hands of corporate workers. Modern sanctity, he believed, depended on the “fund of virtue” or “spiritual heritage” invested by a modern clerisy of “learned or holy men”—especially the “democratic administrators” and “scientific managers” who possessed the discursive capital of social science.

Corporate intellectuals closer to the daily activities of business shared these enchanted and expansive hopes. Eager to counter charges that corporate business was a soulless and avaricious leviathan, members of the business community increasingly argued that corporate labor, when properly managed, bore a religious import. J. George Frederick, managing editor of Printer’s Ink (then the advertising industry’s leading trade magazine) called upon corporate leaders to spread “the ideality of the human spirit” throughout “our vast mechanism of production”. Bruce Barton, perhaps the most famous (or infamous) advertising man of the twentieth-century, came even closer to articulating an ecclesial, liturgical conception of the corporation. In his best-selling The Man Nobody Knows (1925), Barton (son of a Congregationalist minister) asserted that Jesus “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world”. Easily derided as a mite of kitsch, Barton’s remark should be noted for its implicit identification of the church with the corporation. Moreover, Barton explicitly anointed corporate work in language which, if placed in a very different political and discursive context, would have merited the applause of Weil or Gill. “All work is worship; all useful service prayer”, are the words with which he concluded his book. “Whoever works wholeheartedly at any worthy calling is a co-worker with the Almighty in the great enterprise which He has initiated.” Yet if Barton the liberal Protestant still retained some sense that the church and the corporation were indeed distinct communities, other corporate ideologues presaged a form of corporate cultural hegemony less tightly bound to Christian religiosity. Declaring in Business the Civilizer (1928) that Americans were already living in a “business millennium”, the advertising executive Earnest Elmo Calkins argued that corporate business was both the most auspicious modern venue for romantic adventure—“our Field of the Cloth of Gold”, he rhapsodized, where men could earn “the glory [once] given to the crusader, the solider, the courtier, the explorer, the martyr”—and the site of moral and sacral authority. “That eternal job of administering this planet must be turned over to the business man”, Calkins wrote. “The work that religion and government have failed in must be done by business.”
(pp. 452-453)
...
...As any student of contemporary business culture knows, and as any casual observer of ubiquitous advertising can see, our corporate-manufactured symbolic universe is bathed in the luminosity of the sublime. In this respect (as in many others) they resemble and arguably merge with figures in what has come to be called “New Age” religious culture. Indeed, writers as diverse as Slavoj Zizek and Paul Heelas have noted the harmonic convergence of New Age “spirituality” with the accumulative and cultural dynamics of global capitalism, a fusion that releases an abundance of spiritual treasure for investment in corporate hegemony. As Naomi Klein observed in No Logo (1999), “the corporate world has always had a deep New Age streak”, with branding as the most advanced form of “corporate transcendence”. (Might brands be best considered in Durkheimian fashion as the latest version of totems, objects that bear the spirit of a clan?)
(p. 454)
...
While the silicon chip plays a eucharistic role in Gilder’s cyber-theology, the greatest irony of Gilder’s digitalized enchantment lies in its ultimately gnostic repudiation of matter itself. Wealth becomes curiously immaterial in Gilder’s world, wherein the “metaphysical capital of ideas” constitutes “the true substance of economic growth”. Gilder’s incessant references to “mind”,
“idea”, and “consciousness” disclose the growing immateriality of life in late capitalism, a development celebrated by none other than Michael Novak when he announces that in democratic capitalism “materialism” is “more and more left behind”. The investment of hope in money and commodities—in the sacraments and graces of capitalism—fuels a gnostic rage to accumulate and to disembody in pursuit of what Marx rightly called “the immanent spirit of commodities”.
...
While I doubt that the “distributism” of G. K. Chesterton possesses much in the way of useful analysis or practical politics, his “meditation in Broadway”, penned in the wake of his visit to the United States shortly after World War I, still speaks to our ambivalent delight in the enchanted capitalist paradise...

Yet because he embraced and refused to despise this beguiling mortal splendor, Chesterton ended his meditation with “a rather dark sympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far up in the divine vacuum of the night”. Just as Chesterton knew that the ads in the
skies were the tokens of a counterfeit paradise, we must see, in the history of capitalism, a celestial aspiration, and in the hunger for riches, a sacramental longing. Even in the fretful dreamlands of late capitalism, the world remains, as Gerard Manley Hopkins knew, charged with the grandeur of God, even as “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil”. Any renewal of political hope must rest in the sacraments of the triune God, in what Hopkins, the poet of sacrament, called “the dearest freshness deep down things”.
(p. 455-456)

The Lakota Ghost Dance: Ritualized Rebellion Against Colonial Rule

This is an essay I just completed this semester for my Dance 430, Dance History class at San Francisco State University.

Image from Walden3d

I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!
I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!
I’yehe’! we have rendered them desolate — Eye’ăe’yuhe’yu!
I’yehe’! we have rendered them desolate — Eye’ăe’yuhe’yu!
The whites are crazy — Ahe’yuhe’yu!(1)

—

It was mid-day and Wovoka, the son of Tävibo, lies sick on his bed in his wickiup. Wovoka is considered a great weather man by his people (whom are apart of the Paiute tribe in Mason Valley, in western Nevada), just like his father, who had also been a prophet. As he is laying ill in his bed from a fever the sun is becoming darkened due to a solar eclipse. All over his tribal camp people became distressed and began shooting their guns at the object which was blocking the sun. As the sun darkened Wovoka slipped more and more from consciousness until, all of a sudden, he found himself being taken up into heaven where he spoke with God, who commanded him to preach a gospel of peace, to live justly in the world, and to bring a new dance to his people. The year was 1889 and the day was January 1st (this day would latter be called by the Paiute people “the day the sun died”(2)), this was the day that the Ghost Dance was born and the day that Wovoka stated that he became God’s prophet to the Native American peoples. Soon Native Americans (and whites) from all over the United States began to come to Mason Valley to hear Wovoka speak,(3) word also got out to the Dakotas, the tribal lands of the Lakota, and the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation decided to send an elder, Good Thunder, as well as four or five others, to see this Wovoka themselves and to here his message. After being satisfied and returning to their reservation the Lakota decided to send more delegates, this time from three agencies instead of just Pine Ridge, back to western Nevada, among them was Good Thunder, Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and others.(4)

The simple message of Wovoka intrigued the Lakota (as it had others) especially because of their present day situation which was very much looking bleak (to say the least). The medicine man Short Bull, during a trip between Valentine in Nebraska and the Rosebud Reservation (east of the Pine Ridge Reservation), heard the words of Wovoka through the reading of a letter that Wovoka had wrote:

I, Jack Wilson [Wovoka’s white name], love you all...When you get home you must make a dance to continue for five days...You must all dance in the same way...Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again. I do not know when they will be here; maybe this fall or in the spring...Do not refuse to work for the whites, and do not make any trouble with them until you leave them.(5)

Soon, Short Bull would became one of the Lakota leaders of the new religion preached by Wovoka.(6)

The Ghost Dance religion’s underlying principles (with beliefs varying from tribe to tribe) was that one day every single Native American, living and dead, would become reunited with a regenerated earth and would live a life without disease, death, and sorrow.(7) Short Bull and Kicking Bear emerged as charismatic leaders of the new religion for the Lakota and spoke prophecies, based on the prophecies of Wovoka, that by the spring of 1891 the Native American messiah would come down and destroy the white man and bring the buffalo back to the earth. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Jack C. Knight state that, “This would happen, it was believed, because whites had proven themselves a faithless race causing God to turn his wrath against them.” Due to the coming apocalypse (hastened by large dances, that would go on for days, as commanded by Wovoka) the Lakota decided to remove all of the trappings of white culture that had been thrust upon them by the white colonial powers (the government and the settlers), to be civil (even towards whites) and practice a life of good will (which Wovoka commanded), and to perform the dances, which would demonstrate their faith in their own inviolability.(8)

The dance in question was called “dance in a circle” by the Paiute, the Kiowa called it the “dance with clasped hands,” and the Lakota called it the “spirit dance.”(9) For the Lakota (and others) the Ghost Dance was danced in a circle by either small or very large groups of people for days. Ethnologist Warren K. Moorehead, who visited the Pine Ridge Reservation during the peak of the Ghost Dance “fever,” described one encounter with the dance:

The largest camp of dancers was located upon Wounded Knee Creek under the charge of Chiefs No Water, Short Bull and Little Wound...A pole or sapling some thirty-five feet in height was erected...built near the dance ground were several...sweat houses, separate structures being provided for women...A priest...called aloud to those who wished to participate...several hundred men and women crowed up and, grasping hands, formed a circle fully two hundred feet in diameter...the priests began a prayer to the Great Spirit...”Great Wakan Tanka: We are ready to begin the dance as you have commanded us...we beg that you give us back our old hinting grounds, and our game...transport such of the dancers...to the Spirit Land far away and let them see their dead relatives...the priests began a doleful chang, which is taken up by the assembled multitude and loudly sung over and over again. The circle moves toward the left. For the first half hour the motion is short step...After the space of half an hour...“Weep for your sins” commands the high priest. They moan and cry, rolling upon the ground, apparently in great agony. Some of the more desperate ones crowd up to the sapling...Others cut their arms...The scene is most impressive. Surely the [Lakota] are serious in their grief...A new song is struck up...the dancing becomes fast and furious. The men and women leap backward and forward. They seem possessed of the spirit of demons...the priests are extremely active. They run from one excited dancer to another, gently compelling them to lie prone upon the earth...The scene of a Ghost Dance at night makes a vivid impression upon the mind. The music in its strange wild key rings in the ears for days, while one can never forget the reeling figures, the earnest, expressive faces.(10)

Why had the Ghost Dance caught on in such as big way? In November of 1890 around 40% of the Lakota at Pine Ridge Reservation and 30% at the Rosebud Reservation had taken up the religion of the Ghost Dance.(11) The answer lies in the colonial policies of the United States government and the history of repression that had fallen upon the Lakota in the decades culminating before the Ghost Dance revival. Essentially what the Ghost Dance was, was a “ritualized resistance as a means of repelling colonial rule” taken up by the Lakota to protest and fight back against the U. S. government and the white settlers who were legally (by U. S. standards), and illegally (even by U. S. standards), encroaching on their reservation lands.(12)

In 1868, leaders of the Lakota agreed to sign the Ft. Laramie Treaty which forfeited most of their hunting grounds in exchange to never be disturbed in by any outsider while they live on the “Great Sioux Reservation.” Yet this treaty had taken away hunting, as well as sacred, grounds that originally had been theirs according to the original reservation treaty of 1858 (which gave them their entire western half of South Dakota). Yet once gold was found in the sacred Black Hills the U. S. government moved quickly to take it away from them. Again, their lands were encroached upon and the Lakota were forced to sign a treaty breaking up the “Great Sioux Reservation” into six smaller reservations divided into three distinct land masses, all separate from each other (classic divide and conquer), further humiliating the Lakota and subjugating them to further colonial rule.(13) Instead of living like they had, as hunter-gatherings with the freedom to move about the land, they were forced, like prisoners of war, to stay in one area which further lead them to take up crop growing (in an area unsuitable to grow crops), cattle ranging, and as well as receiving ration handouts from the government.(14) In 1887 the Dawes Act also allowed the purchase of Lakota lands. Senator Henry L. Dawes, from Massachusetts, argued in 1890 for the cutting of further rations to the Lakota, this despite food shortages resulting in the near extinction of the buffalo by white settlers (which lead to massive starvation in the winter of 1889). Dawes stated that “the best way to treat the Indian was to starve him into self-support. ‘Root, hog, or die...Next year you are only to have so much, and you must supplement it by the labor of your own hands.’”(15)

The Ghost Dance was born out of this misery, the Lakota, a once proud warrior society that roamed free on the Great Plains, were now reduced to obeying the whim of the U. S. government and the white settlers; they also faced starvation and loss of land (one of the greatest blows of this was the loss of the sacred Black Hills). The Ghost Dance was a repudiation of everything the white man and the U. S. government stood for and was the basis for the resistance to the colonial powers. The hope of the Ghost Dance for the Lakota was that the white man would be destroyed and that the buffalo (and the hunting grounds) would return to the earth for the Lakota and other Native Americans to enjoy. In response to the ever looming and encroaching presence of white culture, participants in Ghost Dance circles (in the Lakota reservations) were forbidden to bring anything associated with white culture into the dance, only traditional Lakota clothing and artifacts were allowed (this despite the fact that Wovoka would wear white man’s clothing). Capeci and Knight state that “[t]he antiwhite bias of the Ghost Dance was important. The reservation spectacle of once-proud [Lakota] warriors humbling themselves before officials by wearing store-bought” white clothing was seared into the minds of the Lakota and “the act of shedding these cloths” was a “liberating gesture. For some, western dress also foretold the violent end to be suffered by the white race, as the Messiah would” use western dress to distinguish between who to kill and who to allow to survive.(16)

While violence and rebellion against the white settlers and the government was not preached in the Ghost Dance (all though it had been used before by the Lakota, as the Battle of Little Big Horn has shown us) the Lakota were willing to use force to protect their dances from reservation police, government agents and military, as well as white settlers. Violent resistance to protect their sacred traditions had been uncommon during reservation period (in fact, some of their traditions had been banned by the government).(17) Yet for the Ghost Dance, the Lakota were willing to die, and indeed, go to war. Although the Lakota were still tempered by the fact of past defeats and constantly having their land being encroached by white settlers.

Despite the promise for renewal, and re-energizing the Lakota in their fight against their oppressors, the Ghost Dance ended in tragedy at the Massacre of Wounded Knee where over 150 men, women, and children were killed (fleeing) by the Seventh Calvary. Not even this non-violent (though potentially violent in certain aspects) religion was allowed by the colonial masters. Where the Lakota saw hope in the Ghost Dance whites saw a threat. The actions at Wounded Knee, states Scott L. Pratt, were seen by whites and the government as “a necessary, even humanitarian, response because it brought a quick end to a ‘craze’ that was good for neither whites nor” Native Americans.(18)

Due to the "theological eclecticism" of the Lakota and the fact that the Lakota were a traditional warrior society their “interpretation of the Ghost Dance was more militant than Wovoka’s teachings.”(19) The Lakota believed that their ritualized rebellion against the government and white settlers would evolved into a military victory and restore the Lakota and other Natives back to their original state in a new world. It gave the Lakota a source of pride and revitalized their spirits as a nation as well as meeting the needs of the Lakota warriors, who had been feeling the sting of defeat by the white man for years. The Lakota “adapted traditional rituals to redress the wrongs done to them. In this way they waged war long before any bullets had been fired or lives lost.”(20) The Lakota wouldn’t have a revolt this large (ritualized or armed) until February of 1973, when around 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) took over Wounded Knee by force and declared it the “Independent Oglala Sioux Nation” and told the government they would not leave until they had addressed the grievances of tribal leaders, an investigation into the treatment of Native Americans in America, and a review of all treaties signed by the government.

—
The whole world is coming,
A nation is coming, a nation is coming,
The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.
The father says so, the father says so.
Over the whole earth they are coming.
The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming,
The Crow has brought the message to the tribe,
The father says so, the father says so.(22)
—

Endnotes

1. James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965), 221. This is a Ghost Dance song of the Arapaho tribe, Mooney (who wrote this in 1892-1893) states that, “In this song the father tells his children of the desolation, in consequence of their folly and injustice, that would come upon the whites when they will be left alone upon the old world, while the Indians will be taken up to the new earth to live in happiness forever.” (Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 222).
2. William S. E. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 2.
3. Alice Beck Kehoe, The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization (Fort Worth, Chicago,
San Francisco, Philadelphia: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1989), 5, 35.
4. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 6, 9-10.
5. Ibid., 9.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 19.
8. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Jack C. Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism: The North American
Ghost Dance and East African Maji-Maji Rebellions,” Historian 52, no. 4 (Aug. 1990): 584-602,
Academic Search Premier, http://0-web.ebscohost.com.
9. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 8.
10. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 36-39.
11. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
12. Ibid.
13. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 15-16; Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 11.
14. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 16.
15. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 18.
16. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
17. Ibid.
18. Pratt, Scott L. “Wounded Knee and the Prospect of Pluralism.” Journal of Speculative
Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2005): 154.
Endnotes
19. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
20. Ibid.
21. Encyclopedia Britannica (2006), “Wounded Knee,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online,
http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9077525 (accessed November 16, 2006).
22. Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 307. This is a Ghost Dance song of the Lakota. Mooney sums up the aspect of this song quite nicely by stating, “This fine song summarizes the whole hope of the Ghost dance—the return of the buffalo and the departed dead, the message being brought to the people by the sacred birds, the Eagle and the Crow. The eagle known as wañ’bali is the war eagle, from which feathers are procured for war bonnets.” (Mooney, ibid., 307).

A U. S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy

By David Phinney

This was an article that appeared on Oct. 17, 2006 on CorpWatch. David Phinney is a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington D.C. whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and on ABC and PBS.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

John Owen didn’t realize how different his job would be from his last 27 years in construction until he signed on with First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting in November 2005. Working as general foreman, he would be overseeing an army of workers building the largest, most expensive and heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Scheduled to open in 2007, the sprawling complex near the Tigris River will equal Vatican City in size.

Then seven months into the job, he quit.

Not one of the five different US embassy sites he had worked on around the world compared to the mess he describes. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption, but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional, he says. The Kuwait-based company building the $592-million Baghdad project is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken.”

In the resignation letter last June, Owen told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers beat their construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security.

And it was all happening smack in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone -- right under the nose of the State Department that had quietly awarded the controversial embassy contract in July 2005.

He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in the labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers lived. Those workers, recruited on the global labor market from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and other poor south Asian countries, earned as little as $10 to $30 a day.

As with many US-funded contractors, First Kuwaiti prefers importing labor because it views Iraqi workers as a security headache not worth the trouble.

No Questions Asked

By March 2005, First Kuwaiti’s operation began looking even sketchier to Owen as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Baghdad following some R&R in Kuwait city. He remembers being surrounded by about 50 First Kuwaiti laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai – not to Baghdad.

“I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane,” says the 48-year-old Floridian who once worked as a fisherman with his father before moving into the construction business.

He buttonholed a First Kuwaiti manager standing near by and asked what was going on. The manager waved his hand, looked around the terminal and whispered to keep quiet.

“‘If anyone hears we are going to Baghdad, they won’t let us on the plane,’” Owen recalls the manager saying.

The secrecy struck Owen as a little odd, but he grabbed his luggage and moved on. Everyone filed out to the private jet and flew directly to Baghdad. “I figured that they had visas for Kuwait and not Iraq,” Owen offers.

The deception had the appearance of smuggling workers into Iraq, but Owen didn’t know at the time that the Philippines, India, and other countries had banned or restricted their citizens from working in Iraq because of safety concerns and fading support for the war. After 2004, many passports were stamped “Not valid for Iraq.”

Nor did Owen know that both the US State Department and the Pentagon were quietly investigating contractors such as First Kuwaiti for labor trafficking and worker abuse. In fact, the international news media had accused First Kuwaiti repeatedly of coercing workers to take jobs in battle-torn Iraq once they had been lured with safer offers to Kuwait. The company has billed several billion dollars on US contracts since the war began in March 2003 and now has an estimated 7,500 laborers in the theater of war.

Despite numerous emails and phone calls about such allegations, neither First Kuwaiti general manager Wadih Al Absi nor his lawyer Angela Styles, the former top White House contract policy advisor, have responded. After a year of requests, State Department officials involved with the project also have ignored or rejected opportunities for comment.

Your Passports Please

That same March Owen returned to work in Baghdad, Rory Mayberry would witness similar events after he flew to Kuwait from his home in Myrtle Creek, Oregon.

The gravely voiced, easy-going Army veteran had previously worked in Iraq for Halliburton and the private security company, Danubia. Missing the action and the big paychecks US contractors draw Iraq, he snagged a $10,000 a month job with MSDS consulting Company.

MSDS is a two-person minority-owned consulting company that assists US State Department managers in Washington with procurement programming. Never before had the firm offered medical services or worked in Iraq, but First Kuwaiti hired MSDS on the recommendation of Jim Golden, the State Department contract official overseeing the embassy project. Within days, an agreement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical care was signed.

The 45-year-old Mayberry, a former emergency medical technician in the Army who worked as a funeral director in Oregon, responded to a help wanted ad placed by MSDS. The plan was that he would work as a medic attending to the construction crews on the work site in Baghdad.

Mayberry sensed things weren’t right when he boarded a First Kuwaiti flight on March 15 to Baghdad – a different flight from Owen’s.

At the airport in Kuwait City, Mayberry said, he saw a person behind a counter hand First Kuwaiti managers a passenger manifest, an envelope of money and a stack of boarding passes to Dubai. The managers then handed out the boarding passes to Mayberry and 50 or so new First Kuwaiti laborers, mostly Filipinos.

"Everyone was told to tell customs and security that they were flying to Dubai," Mayberry explains. Once the group passed the guards, they went upstairs and waited by the McDonald's for First Kuwaiti staff to unlock a door -- Gate 26 -- that led to an unmarked, white 52-seat jet. It was "an antique piece of shit" Mayberry offers in a casual, blunt manner.

“All the workers had their passports taken away by First Kuwaiti,” Mayberry claims, and while he knew the plane was bound for Baghdad, he’s not so sure the others were aware of their destination. The Asian laborers began asking questions about why they were flying north and the jet wasn't flying east over the ocean, he says. "I think they thought they were going to work in Dubai."

One former First Kuwaiti supervisor acknowledges that the company holds passports of many workers in Iraq – a violation of US contracting.

“All of the passports are kept in the offices,” said one company insider who requested anonymity in fear of financial and personal retribution. As for distributing Dubai boarding passes for Baghdad flights, “It’s because of the travel bans,” he explained.

Mayberry believes that migrant workers from the Philippines, India and Nepal are especially vulnerable to employers like First Kuwaiti because their countries have little or no diplomatic presence in Iraq.

“If you don’t have your passport or an embassy to go to, what you do to get out of a bad situation?” he asks. “How can they go to the US State Department for help if First Kuwaiti is building their embassy?”

Deadly ‘Candy Store’ Medicine

Owen had already been working at the embassy site since late November when Mayberry arrived. The two never crossed paths, but both share similar complaints about management of the project and brutal treatment of the laborers that, at times, numbered as many as 2,500. Most are from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. Others are from Egypt and Turkey.

The number of workers with injuries and ailments stunned Mayberry. He went to work immediately after and stayed busy around the clock for days.

Four days later, First Kuwaiti pulled him off the job after he requested an investigation of two patients who had died before he arrived from what he suspected was medical malpractice. Mayberry also recommended that the health clinics be shut down because of unsanitary conditions and mismanagement.

“There hadn’t been any follow up on medical care. People were walking around intoxicated on pain relievers with unwrapped wounds and there were a lot of infections,” he recalls. “The idea that there was any hygiene seemed ridiculous. I’m not sure they were even bathing.”

In reports made available to the US State Department, the US Army and First Kuwaiti, Mayberry listed dozens of concerns about the clinics, which he found lacking in hot water, disinfectant, hand washing stations, properly supplied ambulances, and communication equipment. Mayberry also complained that workers’ medical records were in total disarray or nonexistent, the beds were dirty, and the support staff hired by First Kuwaiti was poorly trained.

The handling of prescription drugs especially bothered him. Many of the drugs that originated from Iraq and Kuwait were unsecured, disorganized and unintelligibly labeled, he said in one memo. He found that the medical staff frequently misdiagnosed patients. Prescription pain killers were being handed out "like a candy store ... and then people were sent back to work.”

Mayberry warned that the practice could cause addiction and safety hazards. “Some were on the construction site climbing scaffolding 30 feet off the ground. I told First Kuwaiti that you don’t give painkillers to people who are running machinery and working on heavy construction and they said 'that's how we do it.’”

The sloppy handling of drugs may have led to the two deaths, Mayberry speculates. One worker, age 25, died in his room. The second, in his mid-30s, died at the clinic because of heart failure. Both deaths may be “medical homicide,” Mayberry says -- because the patients may have been negligently prescribed improper drug treatment.

If the State Department investigated, Mayberry knows nothing of the outcome. Two State Department officials with project oversight responsibilities did not return phone calls or emails inquiring about Mayberry's allegations. The reports may have been ignored, not because of his complaints, but because Mayberry is a terrible speller, a problem compounded by an Arabic translation program loaded on his computer, he says.

Accidents Happen

Owen’s account of his seven months on the job paints a similar picture to Mayberry’s. Health and safety measures were essentially non-existent, he says. Not once did he witness a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. “The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness.”

Owen also says that managers regularly beat workers and that laborers were issued only one work uniform, making it difficult to go to the laundry. “You could never have it washed. Clothing got really bad – full of sweat and dirt.”

And while he often smuggled water to the work crews, medical care was a different issue. When he urged laborers to get medical treatment for rashes and sores, First Kuwaiti managers accused him of spoiling the laborers and allowing them simply to avoid work, he says.

State Department officials supervising the project are aware of many such events, but apparently do nothing, he said. Once when 17 workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in “virtual lockdown,” Owen said.

Just before he resigned, hundreds of Pakistani workers went on strike in June and beat up a Lebanese manager who they accused of harassing them. Owen estimates that 375 were then sent home.

‘Treated Like Animals’

Recent First Kuwaiti employees agree that the accounts shared by Owen and Mayberry are accurate. One longtime supervisor claims that 50 to 60 percent of the laborers regularly complain that First Kuwaiti “treats them like animals,” and routinely reduces their promised pay with confusing and unexplained deductions.

Another former First Kuwaiti manager, who declines to be named because of possible adverse consequences, says that Owen’s and Mayberry’s complaints only begin “to scratch the surface.”

But scratching the surface is the only view yet available of what may be the most lasting monument to the US liberation and occupation of Iraq. As of now only a handful of authorized State Department managers and contractors, along with First Kuwaiti workers and contractors, are officially allowed inside the project’s walls. No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site with towering construction cranes raising their necks along the skyline.

Even this tight security is a charade, says on former high-level First Kuwaiti manager. First Kuwaiti managers living at the construction site regularly smuggle prostitutes in from the streets of Baghdad outside the Green Zone, he says.

Prostitutes, he explains are viewed as possible spies. “They are a big security risk.”

But the exposure that the US occupation forces and First Kuwaiti may fear most could begin with the contractor itself and the conditions workers are forced to endure at this most obvious symbol of the American democracy project in Iraq.

Rumsfeld Resigns

After the Democrats swept the House by an overwhelming majority and took control of the Senate (49 Democrats plus 2 independents who will caucus with them) Secretary of Defense Donal H. Rumsfeld resigned. His resignation I believe has much to do with the Democratic victory, the Army Times editorial calling for his resignation, and increasing pressure from the military within the Pentagon and from retried generals without, plus the immense hatred towards him by many within the armed forces of the United States. How this will effect the policy in Iraq and the so called "War on Terror" is beyond me, most likely it won't effect much in the long term scheme of things. Below is an article from the New York Times, the editorial from the Army Times, and links to other articles from around the world on Rumsfeld's resignation.

The New York Times
News Analysis
Nov. 9, 2006
By Michael R. Gordon

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 — From the day he took control at the Pentagon, Donald H. Rumsfeld was determined to reassert civilian control of the defense establishment and create a leaner, more lethal American military.

With President Bush’s endorsement, he pursued his goals with a vengeance, emerging as the most powerful secretary of defense since Robert S. McNamara more than three decades earlier.

Like his predecessor, Mr. Rumsfeld was undone by policies that resulted in a quagmire in a distant land. The defense secretary’s resistance to deploying a large number of troops in Iraq, his skepticism of nation-building and his reluctance to acknowledge a potent insurgency made an already challenging situation all the more difficult. As the turmoil grew in Iraq, the defense secretary who once described himself as “genetically impatient” and a force for change was slow to adapt.

“The ironic thing is that he may end up being criticized for not being more on top of Iraq,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a military historian and professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. “Blame needs to be shared all around on Iraq, but he bears his share of responsibility by not being willing to make the kinds of corrections early on that were necessary.”

Mr. Rumsfeld did not acknowledge missteps on Iraq in his appearance with President Bush on Wednesday, but obliquely accepted that he had become a lightning rod for criticism of the war. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, he said, “I have benefited greatly from criticism, and at no time have I suffered a lack thereof.”

Mr. Rumsfeld came to the Pentagon as a consummate insider. Among an array of important government posts, he had been defense secretary under President Ford, developing a reputation as a ruthlessly effective bureaucratic infighter.

After a career as a corporate chief executive, he returned to the Pentagon after George W. Bush was elected president. Mr. Bush had vowed during his campaign to appoint a powerful defense secretary with a mandate to overhaul the American military. Mr. Rumsfeld was to be that man.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld’s program was called “transformation,” and it acquired the status of an official ideology. Mr. Rumsfeld was enamored of missile defense and space-based systems, issues he had worked on during his years out of office. Like many conservatives, he was wary about the Army leadership, which he considered to be too wedded to heavy forces and too slow to change.

In his trademark blunt style, Mr. Rumsfeld convened a Pentagon “town hall” meeting on Sept. 10, 2001. “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America,” he pronounced. “It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.”

After the terror attacks in Washington and New York the next day, Mr. Rumsfeld focused on the new war on terrorism. The defense secretary was a solid ally of Vice President Dick Cheney, who worked for Mr. Rumsfeld during the Nixon and Ford years. And he soon emerged as a spokesman for the administration’s national security policies, presiding over news conferences at which he issued pithy observations about the need to be prepared for the “unknown unknowns.”

Within the military establishment, however, the defense secretary quickly became a contentious figure as his penchant for hands-on management and his theories on military transformation were given a field test. Mr. Rumsfeld did not decide how many troops would be deployed for the war in Iraq, but he helped pick the generals who did. He never hesitated to push, prod and ask questions to shape their recommendations.

It was Mr. Rumsfeld who complained that the plan for invading and securing Iraq that had been left behind by Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, Tommy Franks’s predecessor at the United States Central Command, called for more troops. As many as 500,000 troops would be sent to secure Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed it as old thinking, according to retired Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold.

According to General Franks, Mr. Rumsfeld was the impetus behind one of the most contentious decisions of the war: canceling the deployment of the First Cavalry Division, which was to reinforce the initial invasion force. That left the American military with fewer troops as the insurgency was beginning to develop.

It was also Mr. Rumsfeld who insisted that the Pentagon take the lead in overseeing postwar planning and the administration of Iraq in the first critical months of the occupation after the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power. When Baghdad was gripped by looting in April 2003, the defense secretary dismissed the disorder as little more than the pent-up frustrations of an oppressed people: “Stuff happens.”

According to L. Paul Bremer III, the American civilian administrator in Iraq, and his aides, Mr. Rumsfeld was consulted on the controversial decision to formally disband the Iraqi Army.

Iraq, of course, is just part of Mr. Rumsfeld’s legacy. In terms of his management style, he clearly succeeded in consolidating his authority as defense secretary. More than any of his predecessors, Mr. Rumsfeld influenced the appointment of three- and four-star officers, installing military leaders whom he could count on to carry out his agenda. But senior officers complained that his insistence on loyalty came at a cost: a dearth of senior officers willing to offer independent advice.

In terms of his transformation agenda, Mr. Rumsfeld enjoyed, at best, mixed success. He overhauled the cold-war-era system of military bases around the world, a decision that has led to the reduction in American forces in Europe and Korea. He also insisted on greater cooperation among the military services.

“On the positive side he brought the armed forces to a much higher degree of joint thinking and integration,” said Barry M. Blechman, a member of the Defense Policy Board, which advises Mr. Rumsfeld, and the president of DFI International, a consulting firm.

Still, despite Mr. Rumsfeld’s avowed intention to challenge orthodox Pentagon thinking, few major weapons programs were canceled and the military’s force structure and spending patterns were not radically altered.

“At the end of the day you would have to say that for Rumsfeld, transformation was more promise than reality,” said Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., the executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “He made a start, but these things take time, and it is clear now that Iraq has denied him that time.”

Army Times
Editorial
Nov. 4, 2006

“So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion ... it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth.”

That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.

But until recently, the “hard bruising” truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington.

One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “mission accomplished,” the insurgency is “in its last throes,” and “back off,” we know what we’re doing, are a few choice examples.

Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines, inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors.

Now, however, a new chorus of criticism is beginning to resonate. Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the war’s planning, execution and dimming prospects for success.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee in September: “I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it ... and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war.”

Last week, someone leaked to The New York Times a Central Command briefing slide showing an assessment that the civil conflict in Iraq now borders on “critical” and has been sliding toward “chaos” for most of the past year. The strategy in Iraq has been to train an Iraqi army and police force that could gradually take over for U.S. troops in providing for the security of their new government and their nation.

But despite the best efforts of American trainers, the problem of molding a viciously sectarian population into anything resembling a force for national unity has become a losing proposition.

For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don’t show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.

Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.

And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.

Now, the president says he’ll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.

This is a mistake. It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation’s current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.

These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.

And although that tradition, and the officers’ deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.

This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:

Donald Rumsfeld must go.

Below is the response to the Army Times editorial by the Department of Defense.

United States Department of Defense For The Record Nov. 5, 2006

The editorial included a number of inaccurate and misleading statements.

HERE ARE THE FACTS:

THE ADMINISTRATION HAS PROVIDED A BALANCED PICTURE: Despite what the editorial claims, the Department has always attempted to clearly and accurately describe the challenges our forces face in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Secretary above all has always been very measured in describing the progress U.S forces are making in what will undoubtedly be a long struggle in the War on Terror...(Read More)

Globe and Mail (Canada)
Nov. 9, 2006
By Associated Press

Washington — U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged Thursday progress in the Iraq war has not been going “well enough or fast enough” in his first extended remarks since announcing his resignation under political pressure.

Mr. Rumsfeld said little about his impending departure when speaking to a friendly audience of students, teachers and military personnel at Kansas State University...(Read More)

Buenos Aires Herald
Herald Staff with AP and Reuters
Nov. 9, 2006

"Look, this is a close election. If you look at race by race, it was close. The cumulative effect, however, was not too close. It was a thumping," he said.
He quickly announced the resignation of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose removal had long been demanded by Democrats, while insisting the decision for him to leave had been made before Election Day...(Read More)

The Hindu (India)
By Atul Aneja

DUBAI: A large section of Iraqis have welcomed the resignation of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the key architects of the war in Iraq.

Mohammed Dayini, a spokesman for the Sunni National Dialogue Council, said Mr. Rumsfeld should have resigned much earlier. "He is the one responsible for the criminal acts at Abu Ghraib and the thousands of innocent Iraqis who have died at the hands of the US," he said...(Read More)

Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
Nov. 10, 2006

Reacting to the sudden resignation of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Japan made clear Thursday it is committed to assisting in Iraq's reconstruction and implementing the planned U.S. military realignment here.

While Rumsfeld's departure prompted officials in Tokyo to ponder the ramifications, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki touched on concerns Thursday over a plan to relocate the functions of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, to Nago in another part of the prefecture...(Read More)

Daily Nation (Kenya)
Nov. 11, 2006
By Reuters

Robert Gates, President Bush’s new nominee as US Secretary of Defence, is no stranger to controversy on Capitol Hill. His last nomination, for CIA chief in 1991, produced a gruelling though ultimately successful confirmation battle.

But some who voted against him before – in part to protest against what they said was his selective memory about past scandal – said yesterday they were willing to consider his qualifications to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon...(Read More)

Mail & Guardian (South Africa)
Nov. 8, 2006
By Stephen Collinson

United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned on Wednesday, paying the price for the Democrat surge to power in Congress driven by a wave of public anger over the Iraq war.

President George Bush announced the veteran power broker's departure, sending shockwaves though Washington, in a move that could possibly pave the way to a major change of US strategy in the strife-torn nation...(Read More)

The Independent (United Kingdom)
Nov. 9, 2006
By Rupert Cornwell

Donald Rumsfeld, the beleaguered US Defence Secretary, resigned yesterday, hours after a sweeping Democratic victory in midterm elections that redraw the balance of political power in Washington and could presage major changes in policy over Iraq.

The electoral defeat had made Mr Rumsfeld's position all but untenable, given the criticism raining upon him not only from the resurgent Democrats but also from senior members of the Republican Party. But its timing was a shock - only days after Mr Bush had vowed to keep the Pentagon chief in place until the end of his term in January 2009...(Read More)

Der Spiegel (Germany)
Nov. 9, 2006
By Matthias Gebauer

Donald Rumsfeld was the oldest and the most controversial member of the Bush administration. Now he's being made a scapegoat for the Iraq disaster and has to go. His mission to radically reorganize the US armed forces has failed. His huge mistakes will continue to haunt Bush.

Donald Rumsfeld liked to cultivate the legend of himself as a tough warrior. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 -- a plane had just crashed into the Pentagon -- the defense secretary ignored the warnings of his anxious security advisors and ordered his staff to remain in their offices until the end. He only allowed people to leave when the smoke had become too thick to breathe. The message of this often-told anecdote: The captain is the last to leave the ship...(Read More)

Jerusalem Post
Nov. 9, 2006
By Matthew E. Berger

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigned Wednesday, a day after an American electorate, frustrated with the progress of the war in Iraq, elected a Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives and at least a half-share of the Senate.

President George W. Bush announced Rumsfeld's resignation at a press conference Wednesday, and said he had asked Robert Gates, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to replace him...(Read More)

Al Jazeera (Qatar)
Nov. 9, 2006
By Al Jazeera and Agencies

Speaking at a White House press conference on Wednesday, George Bush, the president, said Rumsfeld was a patriot who had "served his country with honour and distinction" but recognised that a change was needed at the Pentagon.

"After a series of thoughtful conversations, secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed that the timing is right for new leadership," Bush said...(Read More)