We want to believe, in our hearts, that ill health is fundamentally a function of individual will, that, if we can just solve a purely functional problem of how to connect people to doctors and then leave it up to them, all will be well. Of course, we do need to ensure the optimal functionality of our health care system. But, we need, in the first instance, to make it a system, which means endowing it with a clear, coherent and comprehensive purpose: to ensure that everyone, regardless of social status or income, has access to quality health care. (Notice, by the way, that I don’t say “affordable health care.” When you create a universal system, as in Britain, you shouldn’t need to say “affordable,” as a way of ensuring universal availability. That’s just how it works: everyone can see a doctor, can obtain necessary treatment from a physician, a specialist or a hospital, without cost to the individual even being a consideration. Affordability only needs to be considered in terms of how the country as a whole pays for the system –in the same way that it considers how it will pay for the national defense.)

But, no national health system, however exquisitely it functions, can be a part of a larger capitalist economy without having to deal, on a regular basis, with the chronic consequences of poverty, which will contribute disproportionately to the total costs of the system until social policy addresses them, above and beyond the question of access to medical practitioners. It makes no sense, morally or financially, to address the human costs of cardio-vascular disease brought about by poor diets if people cannot afford to eat well; or to address the long-term costs of diseases produced by work-place hazards, if we make no effort to ensure health and safety standards where people work. A real national health system will strive to overcome the health disadvantages that result from poor housing, low wages and poor education. It will run the gamut from providing first-rate peri-natal care for all women to enforcing occupational risk assessment for all workers to ensuring effective and respectful management of chronic illness for all the elderly. Neither personal initiative nor corporate interest can do this. It requires a comprehensive societal approach to medicine that goes far beyond what is reducible to the issue of individual health insurance and that can realistically only come from an integrated system of local, state and national political strategies.

But, it means that, by the time the debate began last year over how to provide health insurance, it was already, as the British government acknowledged a dozen years ago, out of step with reality.

What would it be like to take a walk prior to the cellphone?
To hear music without headphones, without even knowing
what headphones looked, felt, and sounded like? To view
the city without having your eyes already accustomed to
the image frame of the TV? Time is fragmented. We

experience only tiny portions of the present and the
other parts are locked in the past or bolted to the future.
Every day is forever yesterday and the future of
never. We wanted to unfold the future like a red carpet.
Instead we tied it in a knot around itself.

But, as the discussion about health care has shifted from coverage for all citizens to a system that will force people to purchase private health insurance–without the controversial “public option” that would offer some kind of government-run health plan for those who wanted it–pockets of unlikely activists are mobilizing. Health-care practitioners are expressing their opinions via old-fashioned civil disobedience. Many of these protestors say the solution to the nation’s health-care dilemma is in what’s known as single-payer health-care–a government-funded medical system, much like Medicare, that would cover all citizens from birth to death. So far, the notion of single-payer health care has not gotten much serious play in the current discussion. But this new breed of professionals-turned-activists feels strongly enough about the topic that some of them are putting themselves on the line to draw attention to it.
On May 5, 2009, eight representatives of several activist groups, including Physicians for a National Health Program, Healthcare-Now of Maryland, and Single Payer Action–three of whom were doctors, two of them from Maryland–sat in on a Senate Finance Committee roundtable discussion chaired by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana). They observed that no representatives at the roundtable supported single-payer health care, and repeatedly requested that they be permitted to speak at the hearing. Baucus had all of them arrested.

On May 12, at a second roundtable sponsored by Baucus’ committee, five more health-care practitioners who were not given a seat at the table crashed the hearing, spoke out in favor of single-payer health care, and were arrested.

And in a series of actions that took place across the country this fall, more than 150 people–many of them working health-care providers–were arrested for staging sit-ins at the offices of health-insurance companies and Congressional representatives, such as senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). One such action took place in Baltimore on Oct. 29, 2009, resulting in the arrest of two doctors, a retired psychologist, and a schoolteacher.

Baltimore City Paper asked some of these individuals to tell us what made them feel so strongly about health-care reform that they were willing to go to jail for it.

Dr. Carol Paris is a practicing psychiatrist from Leonardtown. She was arrested during the May 5 incident at Sen. Max Baucus’ Finance Committee meeting, one of eight people locked up. Paris was charged with unlawful conduct on Capitol grounds. She received six months’ probation, though the charges were diverted in January. She is a member of Physicians for a National Health Care Program.

Prior to last year, I was working, via volunteer time primarily, with the [physicians' group] Maryland State Medical Society. I did some work for about three years on their legislative committees, and I did a lot of work on pieces of legislation that were designed to try to get the [insurance] industry to play fairly. And what I realized…is that it doesn’t matter what you get passed in the law. What matters is what the regulations are, and who writes the regulations and enforces the regulations. In the state of Maryland, the regulations were written in large part by the insurance lobby themselves…And the Maryland Insurance Administration is tapped with enforcement of the regulations. And what I’ve come to realize is that the Maryland Insurance Administration is ineffective…The only trigger for the Maryland Insurance Administration to enforce a law is a complaint. They are not even monitoring, and they don’t even enforce unless somebody complains.

We had this bill that was passed in the Maryland Legislature called the Clean Claims Act. It said if you as a physician submit a claim to an insurance company, and you’ve dotted your “I’s and crossed your “T’s, your forms are all filled out correctly, they have either 30 or 45 days to pay the claim. And if they don’t pay in that amount of time, they have to give you interest on the money…I had a case where, the [patient] had two insurers, Medicare and a private insurer. I submit the claim to Medicare, they pay what they are going to pay, then they send the paperwork to the private insurance company, and they are supposed to pay me the rest. I sent $3,000 worth of claims to Medicare. Medicare sent them to CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. CareFirst put in the wrong provider number [on the forms] and sent my money to a doctor in Fredericksburg, Va. My staff identified the problem within a month, and it took two years to fix it. I kept a list of every interaction with CareFirst over those two years, and I determined that at a rate of $13 an hour, it cost me $13,000 to collect the $3,000 owed to me. I didn’t even get interest on the money.

All of this is to paint the picture of the frame of mind I was in last January, when I met Margaret Flowers and realized there were organizations out there that were advocating for a single-payer plan. I was a case in point as a physician of how bureaucratic and wasteful the private insurance industry is in so many ways. It just resonated with me all over the place, and that’s why I joined.

It was a combination of that and of being a practicing physician and just seeing day after day after day how the system is abusing doctors and abusing my patients. That reinforces my determination every single day…I jokingly have come up with a new psychiatric diagnosis called PIISD–private insurance-induced stress disorder. When Margaret called me and said, “Do you want to protest at the Senate Finance Committee hearing?” I didn’t have to think about it. I said yes.

We decided we weren’t going to disrupt in the middle of the proceedings…So as soon as Sen. Baucus pounded his gavel, Russell Mokhiber [of Single Payer Action] got up and said basically, “You have repeatedly refused to allow a single-payer spokesperson to address the committee…We have three doctors here, any one of whom could speak to this issue. Will you give them a seat at the table?” And Baucus said that proceedings would adjourn until order can be restored and had Russell arrested. As soon as order was restored, Margaret Flowers got up and spoke for a minute or so, and she was arrested. As soon as order was restored . . . someone else got up and spoke and was arrested, same thing. I was number four. And there were eight of us total. [Activist] Katie Robbins got up and said “We need single payer in this country,” and Baucus’ reply was “We need more police.”

[They] put us in a paddy wagon and we spent five hours sitting on a bench handcuffed to a wall in jail. While we were sitting there talking to the Capitol police, they were telling us their stories of health-insurance woes with their families. They completely got it, what we were doing and why we were doing it. In fact, there was a sign in the jail that said if you are having a medical problem, let us know and we’ll get you medical care. In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that its cruel and unusual punishment to deny a prisoner health care. In Baltimore, you get medically cleared before they will even put you in the general population [at] the jail. So think about it: You have more rights to health care as a prisoner in this country than you do as a law-abiding citizen.

Charles Loubert is a retired counseling psychologist who lives in Southwest Baltimore. Loubert, who is 81 years old, was arrested on Oct. 29, 2009, when he and a group of 30 supporters of single-payer health care held a rally outside the offices of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield in Canton. Loubert was one of four people arrested that day. He was charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct. Despite the fact that his case was nolle prosequi–not prosecuted–by the State’s Attorney’s Office, a warrant was issued for Loubert’s arrest in December 2009. Officers showed up on his doorstep early one morning, handcuffed him, and hauled him down to Central Booking again, where he was held until a court commissioner determined that the warrant was issued in error. Loubert is a member of Veterans for Peace, as well as Healthcare-Now of Maryland
.
I’m a retired psychological counselor. I was a school counselor and I worked with adults, as well, in the community and at a health clinic.

I can do this because I pretty much have my time as my own. And that’s not heroic, that’s just convenience. There are many people that I know who feel the same way I do, but they’ve got jobs, they’ve got families. I’m a little bit of a rabble-rouser, you know, and at my age what do I have to lose?

We went to CareFirst, to their office is at the 1st Mariner Tower [in Canton]. About 30 of us went there. We were protesting at the front door, and they had the doors locked because they didn’t want us to come in.

We were protesting and so on, and then Margaret Flowers and Eric Naumburg, two doctors, and Kevin Zeese and Del. Jill Carter [D-41st District] went to the back door and talked to a representative of CareFirst and asked them to stop denying doctor-ordered procedures, and said they wanted to speak with the CEO of the company. And the representative said, “Well, we’ll put it in writing and we’ll consider it.” Fat chance was my silent answer when they came back.

So anyway the four of us decided, including Margaret and Eric and another lady who is a teacher, we decided we’re going to risk arrest if necessary to get the point across. The plan was we were going to go into the lobby, all 30 of us, and then when they asked us to leave, four of us would not leave. Well, what they had done is, apparently, they had notified the police. So as soon as we rounded the corner to go to the door, the 30 of us were surrounded. Out of the blue came about 40, I think–there were more of them than there were of us–Baltimore police. They came racing to the door to keep us out.

The other three got in because they were quicker [than me], but my old bones beat this one younger cop to the door, and we got in and we sat on the floor, and the manager o the building asked us to leave, the police asked us, and we said no. They handcuffed us and took us out into the paddy wagon, and they took us off to Central Booking.

I hate to say it, but I was a little ashamed of our country. We do so many good things, and we are a haven for people from all over the world to come here to be citizens of this country, and yet we do this kind of thing.

Eric Naumburg is a retired pediatrician from Columbia. Today, he says he sees more and more doctors in the Howard County area getting out of traditional medical practices and setting up “concierge” practices, where individuals pay a large membership fee each year for guaranteed access to the physicians of their choice–a luxury for those who can afford it, an impossibly expensive proposition for most. Naumburg was arrested at the Oct. 29 protest in the lobby of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield’s offices in Canton. He was charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct. The charges were eventually nolle prossed. Naumburg is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program and Healthcare-Now of Maryland.

Most people don’t understand what the term single-payer means, because it’s a technical term, but it’s a one-payer system, like Medicare used to be, that pays for the care, but the care is provided privately…Since this debate has gone on, single-payer has been systematically taken off the table. It’s not included at all. When the Baucus [Senate Finance] committee had hearings on health reform back in May, the room was filled with lobbyists, health insurers, pharmacies, all the people you would expect. But there was not one person representing patients’ interests in the room. Nor was there anybody there representing doctors’ interests.

The people who were struggling, in my practice, were the ones who didn’t qualify for Medicaid. They had jobs and they were doing what they should be doing. And they were the people you had to go back and look in the sample closet to see if you could find antibiotics for a child who was sick, that kind of thing. A lot of them would just stop coming because they just couldn’t afford it.

We have a very expensive, very poorly run health system. And there’s no system to it–it’s a mishmash. And the biggest waste in the system is all this administrative stuff. It makes practicing medicine very unpleasant because at every turn you have to worry about, Well what does this person’s insurance cover? What forms am I going to have to fill out to make the insurance company happy, so they’ll pay? To make the pharmaceutical plan happy so they’ll give out the drug that I think the patient needs? You’re fighting with the private insurers to get care for people…fighting with people who don’t really understand.

One of my last cases was a real frustration for me. I had a 3-month-old who had noisy breathing and his mother was working and she had private insurance, Aetna. I wanted to get this child seen by two or three specialists, and they had the family going to–instead of the people that I know and know were good–they had them going to a cardiologist that I’d never heard of at one place and a pulmonary clinic at another, then finally they ended up at an ENT [ear, nose, throat specialist] down in Washington. They had them going all over the place…And the bottom line is I didn’t know he ended up in Washington, I never got a chance to talk to the ENT doctors down there. They ended up doing a tonsillectomy, which on a 3-month-old is pretty unusual. I wanted them to just look for an underlying cause, and I never got a chance to tell them what I was thinking about. When I got a chance to talk to the surgeon three days later, I told them “I was hoping you guys happened to get a biopsy,” and he said “No, if you’d told us that we would have done it, that’s a good idea.”…It’s that kind of thing. That’s just an example, but it happens all the time.

When we were doing the protest at the CareFirst building, there were a lot of police around. We started talking to them about their medical coverage, and they have issues, they have gaps in their coverage. The people arrested in Washington had the same experience with the guards. When I was in Central Booking in Baltimore, there were two of us in the cell, we were wearing our T-shirts, and…minute they found out what we were doing, they were very supportive of us. It’s all levels of society who know that their health insurance is not working for them. It’s universal.

[Physicians] are leaving primary care in droves. It’s a real problem here. The health commissioner in Howard County has been having meetings about the lack of primary-care providers. Howard County is the richest county in the richest state in the nation, and they’re having trouble finding enough primary-care providers. People aren’t going into primary care anymore–they want to become specialists because it’s very hard to make a go of it as a primary care provider, because of the insurance reimbursement issues. Doctors want to be able to practice medicine without feeling like being in a mill, which is what it’s like. You have to churn out so many patients just to get enough reimbursements.

In a wealthy country like this, everybody should have access to health care without having to worry about how to pay for it.

Dr. Margaret Flowers is a pediatrician from Sparks. She stopped practicing medicine two years ago to devote herself full-time to advocating for single-payer health care. She serves as co-chair for Physicians for a National Health Program, and is also a member of Healthcare-Now of Maryland. Flowers was arrested twice in her effort to push for health-care reform: She was one of the so-called Baucus Eight who were arrested at the May Senate Finance Committee hearing, and she violated her probation on that arrest to participate in the CareFirst protest in Baltimore, where she was again hauled off in handcuffs. Flowers was charged with unlawful conduct on Capitol grounds for her Baucus committee arrest, for which she received six months’ probation, and with trespassing and disorderly conduct for her arrest at CareFirst. Those charges were eventually nolle prossed.

I went into the practice of medicine thinking it was the doctors and patients who made the decisions about what was the best care for patients, and that there would be a certain amount of respect for the knowledge that physicians gained after many years of studying and training. But, instead, what I found is the insurance companies that you bump into at every level–in the hospital, in your practice, in the pharmacy–are not making decisions based on sound medical practice. Initially, I was surprised by it, and then I started to get curious about why it was that way. One thing led to another, and it’s been about five or six years now that I’ve been trying to educate myself and others about health-care reform and fighting for it.

One of the things we learned this year is that the regular physician’s voice is not heard in Congress. They hear from special-interest groups, and many of those have somewhat corporate affiliations. And many of the people that were involved in devising the numbers about health policies didn’t really understand health policy. So we brought doctors and nurses and other health providers into Congress and we met with members of Congress and we presented them with packets of information about health policy and we also spoke to them about our real experiences with real patients, about what the reality is, why we are losing primary-care doctors, why our health outcomes are bad, just a voice they haven’t heard before.

We spoke to everybody, we didn’t limit it to any kind of affiliation. People who believe in a free-market [health-care] model would say, “Well, we think that there should be competition.” So we would say, “Well, explain to us how that would work, how does competition improve health care?” And they couldn’t. Then, we would say, “This is what it actually does to health care, and this is why the real competition we want to have is between doctors and hospitals. If everybody can come to see you, then you are competing based on who’s the best [provider], not which insurance company covers you.”

The first committee to take up health care was Sen. Baucus’ Finance Committee, and so the Leadership Conference [for Guaranteed Healthcare] sent a letter and requested that one of our representatives be present. They had 41 people testifying over three days at these roundtables. It became very clear that they did not want our voice to be included. [But] if you talk about universality, single-payer wins, if you talk about cost saving, single-payer wins. They didn’t want to hear that.

We were actually prepared to testify that day if need be, and as the roundtable was opening, the first member stood up and he said, “Why aren’t you allowing single-payer on the table? We have three doctors here, will you let one of them testify?” And he was arrested. I stood up next and said, “I’m Dr. Margaret Flowers, and I speak on behalf of the true stakeholders,” because they kept calling the people at the table the stakeholders, and we’re going, “The pharmacy [representatives] are not the stakeholders.” So I said, “It’s the patients and the providers who want a national health program.” And they arrested me.

We knew we were risking arrest. It was a public hearing, but they weren’t allowing the public to speak. They gave us unlawful conduct and disruption of Congress. That actually caries a six-month sentence, it was a little more than we expected. We just had our probation hearing last week. But the effect was actually rather positive. Sen. [Ted] Kennedy [D.-Mass.] was still alive at that point, and his office reached out to us, and I was the first person to testify at his committee hearing when they brought up health care.

The more you learn about what is going on and why we don’t have real reform, and what health-insurance companies are able to get away with, I came to a point where I felt like if I was going to make a difference, I was going to have to do this full-time. So many of my friends were leaving their practices and just giving up. I now do this full-time.

This is a matter of life or death for people. My outrage is at the fact that our government is not acting in the best interests of the people, and they are getting away with it. It’s just unacceptable. You can work a job, you can pay your premiums, you can do all the things you are supposed to do, and then you get sick, and you lose everything. And it can happen to any one of us.

Part of the reason I became a doctor is because I care about people. So I can’t see this happening and not do something about it.

it were possible to (divide) the world, like
the air we breathe won’t continue to be the same
and the blood running through our veins will
cease pulsing with the identical
components. the wall

proposed to make of humanity a right brain and a left
brain, such that one-can-only-be-this or one-can-only-
be-that (choose! choose Freedom! choose

solidarity! one chooses nothing (. one is imposed upon by the in-
quisition. one converts and proves dedication. I
(confess I have sinned)
is
one is
loyal
one is
(I)

two. halves do not make a whole, indeed
they are (w)hol(e)y fictive as entities
at all. The East Never Existed! Neither Did The
West (ward-ho!). The Palestine

wall is like a very long
it’s a very, very wide
very tall, it’s a
like a

(stop. (don’t talk about it. the halves
are one. And yet they are None. the Palestine

(let’s try again wall does not provide a choice. one
wields a gun (bomb) or one lives behind a veil. of
state secrets and death
squads (God is holy God is one) state is
two (halves are) the wall the wailing wall the sinful
wall, I confess I have
been divided in
two. make me whole again please I

choose wholeness, I choose

holiness, I

The old order and the new are locked in a struggle for the future of Bolivia. “The social movements are critical for presidents to be able to create a new alternative,” declared Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca in the tropical city of Cochabamba in October at a summit of leftist Latin American presidents, including Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. At the parallel Social Movements Summit comprised of 700 delegates from 40 countries, Isaac Ávalos, leader of the Bolivian Peasants Federation promised to help “bury the opposition” in the election.

The dialogue between these parallel summits is emblematic of the close association between social movements and the new left governments of Latin America. In Bolivia, a broad-based coalition of movements—with peasants, workers and indigenous groups at the forefront—was instrumental in defining Morales’ platform even before he was first elected to the presidency in 2005. With the support of the social movements, the administration succeeded in meeting three key goals in its first term: government control over the nation’s oil and gas resources, the creation of a new constitution to re-found the Bolivian state, and the advance of agrarian reform.

The right-wing opposition, rooted in its control of large landed estates and petro-carbon resources in the eastern lowlands, constitutes the main challenge to transforming property relations and creating a more equitable, democratic society in Bolivia. The deepening of “21st Century Socialism” during Morales’ next five years in office will depend on the sustained strength of the social movements, the government’s continued responsiveness to their evolving agenda, and the ability of both to overcome the opposition of the entrenched elites while maintaining democratic legitimacy.

A report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) shows that despite the global recession and destabilizing threats from the right, the government was able to minimize the impact of the economic crisis and increase foreign exchange reserves. Morales has also expanded social services for the poorest Bolivians through the creation of health and literacy programs and financial support for the elderly, school-aged children and pregnant women. These achievements were made possible by the government takeover of the oil and natural gas industries, which increased government revenue by an impressive 20% of GDP since 2004.

The deepening of government involvement in the economy—one of Morales’ key campaign planks—is a remarkable achievement, and one that was unthinkable just a few years ago. It was, of course, built on the blood and sweat of the social movements, which called for an end to the privatization of public corporations, land and natural resources; the restoration of social protections and government regulation of private capital; and the reassertion of state sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States and the dominant international financial institutions.

In a long turbulent process, the administration succeeded in creating a new constitution—approved in a popular referendum in February 2009—that seeks to re-found the nation to be more reflective of, and accountable to the country’s indigenous majority. The constitution provides indigenous peoples with greater territorial autonomy and recognizes Bolivia’s 36 indigenous languages as “official.” The new charter also grants the state greater control over natural resources, establishes access to water as a human right and requires the government to protect biodiversity.

In a country with one of the most unequal land tenure systems in Latin America, deepening the land reform program is a central challenge facing this administration. Since large landholdings are the basis for elite power, land reform is an overtly, sometimes violently, contested issue. Under the changes introduced to the land reform law in 2006 and approved by congress, land must fulfill a “social and economic function”—regardless of property tax payment—in order to avoid expropriation and re-distribution to poor peasant families. The land reform process, which according to government figures has titled 26 million hectares and distributed 958,454 hectares since 2006, was further bolstered by a measure approved by voters in 2009 limiting private landholdings to 5,000 hectares (about 12,400 acres) rather than the 10,000 hectares demanded by the landed elite.

As a result of pressure from conservative landowners in the process of drafting the new constitution, however, these reforms will not be retroactive to include currently owned properties. This compromise greatly defuses the radical potential of the legislation. In another capitulation to the right, language that prohibited the use and production of genetically modified organisms was removed in the final text, a large blow to the peasant movements and environmental NGOs that fought for its inclusion. The more radical leaders of the social movements are advocating new decrees and legislation to overcome these limitations and deepen the agrarian reform.

Changes in the international context are promising for the Morales government’s ability to implement its agenda. The rise of South-South cooperation provides opportunities for greater independence from and negotiating power with the North, especially the United States. ALBA—the Venezuelan-led Bolivarian Alternative for the People—is an important iteration of this phenomenon. Relations with the United States remain estranged ever since the expulsion of the U.S. ambassador in September 2008 for meddling in Bolivian affairs. Though Bolivia has long been dependent on U.S. foreign aid, ALBA’s support — and particularly support coming directly from Venezuela — has allowed it to escape Washington’s political and economic stranglehold. Venezuela also helped Bolivia cushion the blow of its suspension from the U.S. Andean Trade Preference agreement, a suspension initiated by President Bush in 2008 and extended by President Obama last June.

Negotiations for the normalization of relations took place at the State Department in Washington last month, but with no final resolution. Morales has expressed his disappointment with the policies of the Obama administration, particularly its decision to establish seven military bases in nearby Colombia. He declared that Latin America is no longer “in the time of kings” and that “we cannot be in the time of American military bases.”

One of the poorest countries in Latin America, Bolivia under Evo Morales is in a strong position to transform its economy and to break the historic hegemony of the United States. The strength and character of this transformation will largely hinge on continued dialogue between the government and the social movements that have been at the vanguard of progressive change.

[This article was first published on the Website of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), www.nacla.org]

I am Ayman Talal Quader, a Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip, whose people have been besieged for almost 4 years. I was born in July, 1986. I received my education in the UNRWA schools since my childhood. Then, I finished my studies in the Engish Department of the Islamic University of Gaza in 2008.

As a Palestinian, I have been looking forward to helping my needy people in the cruel condition they are passing through in the present time. Since August 2008, I have been dedicating my life to helping them by joining one of the international humanitarian organizations that is based in the Gaza Strip. Additionally, I have launched a blog peaceforgaza, through which I have been trying to make my people’s suffering visible internationally.

I have recently been accepted to an academic scholarship program at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) in Castellón, Spain, for the International Masters in Peace, Conflict and Development Studies. I have been successfully granted a Spanish student visa in order to complete my academic program that begins in February, 2010, and runs all the way through to May of 2012.

As the Gaza strip brutally lives under a total siege, I have been worried ever since the first day of my acceptance at the university, about how to leave Gaza. All I aspire to is my fundamental rights to learn and study; rights that are supposed to be guaranteed by international resolutions and the United Nations. I am not asking for a miracle, just my rights. I have all my necessary documents, visa, and acceptance letter from my university and supporting papers. So, why I am being prevented from leaving Gaza and going to Spain? I am actually paralyzed about whom to ask and consult in regard to my exit from Gaza. I have been knocking at all the doors, asking for help and advice to let me out so I can receive my education in Spain.

The conditions of the borders have become extremely complex, making it almost impossible for Palestinians living in Gaza to leave under any circumstances, including for medical treatment, to visit relatives or on academic scholarship to study abroad. The borders, including the Rafah border - the only way between Gaza and Egypt - are all controlled by Israeli Security Forces, although Israel’s control of the Rafah border is more indirect than those leading out of Gaza and into “Israel Proper” (as defined by the 1967 armistice lines; see UN Resolution 242). The Israeli government practices a collective punishment of a civilian population, contrary to article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Conventions (1949), by preventing much needed humanitarian aid and building supplies from entering into the Strip, pre- and post-Operation Cast Lead. The result is thousands of homeless and starving Gazans left with nowhere to turn but the international community.

I am growing increasingly worried as my studies are due to begin at the beginning of February and my flight is booked for February 1.

I am appealing to and calling lawyers, politicians, journalists and all activists for human rights to join the fight for me to obtain the education that I have always dreamed of.

At the time that Columbus established foreign dominion over the lush island that would eventually be divided between French-speaking Haiti in the west and Spanish-speaking Santo Domingo in the east, back in Europe entrepreneurship and individual wealth accumulation were rapidly taking precedence over collective human need. So, in due course, setting aside any presumption of humanity in their victims, European colonists devised myriad creative ways to systematically extract wealth from their colonies. Marx put it very well: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” It was the wealth of colonies, based on plantation crops and mines, slavery and genocide, that impoverished them and, in so doing, provided the trigger for the rise of modern capitalism—though we persist in believing that it was the other way around, that it was capitalism that first gave the hope of “progress” to what is now called The Third World.

Haiti was the product of that era of capitalist globalization. Initially conquered by the Spanish, who wiped out its indigenous inhabitants within a century, by 1700 legal control of western Hispaniola had been ceded to the French who called their colony Sainte-Dominigue (it was subsequently changed to Haiti, after its aboriginal name, “Ayiti”) and turned it into one of the most lucrative colonies the world would ever know. Before the end of the 18th century, Sainte Domingue contained almost half of the Caribbean’s many African slaves who, as Eric Williams (historian and once prime minister of Trinidad) brilliantly described in his classic, Capitalism and Slavery, were the human basis of an economic system that produced three-quarters of the world’s sugar.

Haiti itself became the indispensable ingredient of the prosperity of pre-revolutionary France. As Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, of the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), has noted:

“Haitian wealth helped maintain the ostentatious living conditions of the French aristocracy and bourgeoisie, as well as the financing of French industrial might…This massive transfer of wealth toward France, and away from local investments, is at the basis of Haitian underdevelopment (1984).”

It is amazing that, with such a past, so many people in recent times have discounted the country’s plight as the singular fault of the Haitians themselves. This “blaming the victim” approach takes many forms, the most recent of which was declaimed only last week by right-wing evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, speaking on his television show on the Christian Broadcasting network. He claimed that the Haitian earthquake was simply the most recent tragedy that had afflicted Haiti because, in the late 18th century, the Haitians “swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French…But, ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.” Presumably, in Robertson’s mind, the people of Bolivia, Malawi, Mozambique and West Virginia –and anywhere else that people suffer from extreme poverty– must have made similar pacts.

Of course, the Haitians might as well have made a pact with the devil, for all the good that independence did them. For the fact is that real independence never happened. After Haiti, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, won political autonomy from France in 1804, showing that ex-slaves could effect real political change, their former rulers refused to let go –Haiti was too good for that– and continued to appropriate most of the country’s wealth, which increasingly came, not from colonial sugar plantations, but from free small-holder coffee production. As Paul Farmer, anthropologist and doctor, has written:

“Napoleon kept troops in neighboring Santo Domingo until 1808. After the fall of Napoleon, France continued to refuse to recognize Haiti until the former plantation-owners had been indemnified for their losses…Charles X, the King of France, demanded of Haitian president Boyer 150 million francs and the halving of customs charges for the French trade. These conditions, accepted in 1825, led to decades of French domination of Haitian commerce. Payments to France had a catastrophic effect on the new nation’s tottering economy.”

These are established facts. Yet, even many people who acknowledge that Haiti was once a source of great wealth, typically ignore the realities that independent Haiti faced and describe how it became poor in a way that ascribes almost everything to its people’s intrinsic failings. It is as if, having been the first example of a colony of former slaves liberating itself, the country could never be allowed to stand as a model, so Haiti’s poverty has variously been blamed on the irrationality of Haitians (of which Hollywood’s portrayal of voodoo is taken as evidence), on a propensity for violence (supreme evidence for which, the era of Papa Doc Duvalier, is never seen in terms of U.S. support for his repressive regime) and, above all, on an unchecked tendency to reproduce beyond their means, that is, the classic Malthusian myth of underdevelopment, which, of course, is not only applied to Haiti.

Thus, in Famine–1975!, published in 1967, the brothers William and Paul Paddock described Haiti as an exemplary case of a country in the throes of an insoluble Malthusian crisis, suffering extensive and perhaps irremediable environmental degradation which they, like others, attributed to high fertility. “Its population,” they wrote,

“long ago exploded beyond the level of what the nation’s resources can provide for a viable economy. There is nothing whatever in sight that can lift up the nation, that can alter the course of anarchy already in force for a century. At one time Haiti was one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world, but now its fecundity has out-stripped the country’s resources…Now it is too late for an energetic, nationwide birth control program…It is too late for intensive agricultural research efforts. The people are sunk in ignorance and indifference, and the government is entrapped in the tradition of violence.”

The Paddocks never offered any empirical or historical evidence for their argument. But, Haiti’s principal problem has never been demographic. All of the problems –poverty, environmental degradation, violence– that have been variously blamed, in some way, on overpopulation can be readily understood in terms of the island’s history, during which its descent from rich colony to one of the poorest countries in the world cannot simply be ascribed to vague traditions that are somehow uniquely Haitian. On the contrary, it occurred as a result of changing circumstances that successively defined Haiti’s role in a larger world economy. But, why try to understand that?

The huge debt that independent Haiti built up and owed North America and Europe drained the newly independent country of most of its national revenue and was only reduced when the U.S. took over and, for the first time, took command of the island’s fate. During all this time, against extraordinary odds, Haiti’s peasant cultivators remained, unique for Latin America, independent, and have even been described by Bellegarde-Smith as having “the highest standard of living of any peasant society in Latin America.” But, the conditions under which they toiled worsened as the 20th century advanced, not least because of increasing U.S. influence. The U.S. had already intervened militarily in the country some 19 times since 1857, to back up the commercial interests there. But, in 1915, under Woodrow Wilson, erstwhile defender of the “self-determination” of nations (but who had also sent U.S. troops into the new Soviet Union, to attempt to stifle the revolution), the US marines actually occupied the island. They remained for almost two decades.

During the years of American control, the economy of Haiti was wholly subordinated to that of U.S. business interests, with dramatic consequences for the distribution and use of land resources. Where, previously, unlike so much of Latin America, Haiti’s rural economy had been characterized by small peasant cultivators, with the occupation, a new constitution was imposed, in 1918, which lifted previous restrictions on foreign ownership of property. As a result, North American companies soon acquired several hundred thousand hectare of Haitian land on which to produce sugar, bananas, sisal, etc.

As Patrick Bellegarde-Smith wrote:

The Haitian-American Sugar Company (HASCO), the United Fruit Company, and the Haitian-American Development Corporation established a monopoly in their respective fields, sugar, bananas and sisal, helped by the Haitian government which appropriated 120,000 hectares for such use. Seven years after the occupation had ended, the Societe haitiano-americaine de developpement agricole (SHADA) received 133,400 hectares of prime land, nearly 22% of the country’s cultivated area for the monopoly planting of rubber and the exploitation of timber…The immediate impact upon the peasantry, predictably was scarcity of land and food, leading to a breakdown of the land tenure system, the diversion of members of this class into cheap labor power for the new corporate landowners, and an idle surplus population in urban centers.

When the marines finally left in 1934, the Haitian peasantry was even more dependent on coffee production than at the turn of the century and many U.S. companies had established industrial operations in the country, to profit from the huge reserve of cheap labor, as around 70% of the population was now unemployed. This was one of the chief legacies of Washington’s rule.

Clearly, declining access to land was more than a simple function of overpopulation. In light of Haitian history, it would be more reasonable to suggest that it was the systematic removal from the peasant sector of prime arable land that compelled peasants to cultivate more marginal lands that were inherently susceptible to degradation. In the absence of capital resources, peasant households were compelled to rely increasingly on their own domestic labor capacity, which could only be enhanced through increased fertility.

There is no doubt that, over time, peasants were compelled to overuse their increasingly limited supply of certain essential resources, such as firewood. But, this does not mean that the massive deforestation of Haiti is a symptom of population pressure in a Malthusian sense. Long before there was any significant population growth in Haiti, the sugar plantations of the colonial economy had begun the destruction of the country’s once lush forests. As Moreno Fraginals has shown in his classic account of the Cuban sugar industry, El Ingenio (The Sugarmill, 1964), sugar manufacture has an insatiable need for great supplies of fuel wood. If he could write of Cuba, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, that “Large-scale manufacture [of sugar] rang the forest’s death knell,” how much truer was this for Haiti when it was producing three-quarters of the world’s sugar?

But, forest destruction didn’t end with independence, as French planters moved from to Cuba’s late in the eighteenth century. Now, large numbers of trees began to be felled to provide lumber for export to the United States. As Swedish economist Mats Lundahl, has noted, “By 1780, the forest reserves had been substantially reduced to some isolated areas.” Lumbering continued, however, and, in the 1830s and ’40s, between four and eight million board feet of mahogany are estimated to have been exported yearly, dropping to 3 million annually by 1859 as supplies began dwindling. Yet, even in the period, 1887/88 to 1891/92, according to Lundahl, logwood exports generally amounted to 419,300 metric tons and remained high until the early 1920s. This hardly makes the Haitian peasant uniquely responsible for the island’s deforestation.

Still, Haiti continued to be described, in the words of journalist Paul Harrison, in his book, Inside the Third World (1979) as “overcrowded, under-resourced.” But, foreign landowners and North American sugar companies who occupied prime valley lands, certainly didn’t complain that Haiti lacked resources. Nor has the Dominican Republic, which, since World War II, has exploited cheap Haitian workers to harvest its sugar cane. So, the more dismal the state of the Haitian economy, the more rich it was seen in terms of at least one resource –-labor– on which the Dominican sugar industry had become dependent. This was another major result of U.S. military occupation, when Haitian workers began to be regularly imported. Indeed, as foreign investment in Haiti increased during the twenties, as companies such as HASCO accumulated land at the expense of small Haitian farmers, the latter were increasingly compelled to seek off-farm work. As the competitiveness of the relatively backward, low productivity, under-capitalized Dominican sugar industry primarily depended on cheap labor, the marginalization and displacement of rural Haitian workers was just what it required. (Indeed, so long as it had access to Haitian workers, there was little incentive to modernize.) But, as one might expect, the companies that dominated the Republic’s sugar sector were not even Dominican. In 1967, the Gulf & Western bought the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company (it sold it 17 years later), most of whose operations were in the Dominican Republic, where it owned 300,000 acres of land, of which almost half grew sugar cane and depended on Haitian labor for its harvest. A truly vicious circle was complete.

Despite all it has suffered, Haiti is a remarkable country where most people are peasants who actually have managed to retain some access to land. Much has been written about the circumstances that have made this possible. But, still, plots of land are small — 70% of all farms are less than one hectare– and often highly dispersed, so that people cannot realistically engage in productive and sustainable land-use practices. The situation is compounded by the fact that large landowners (grandons) continually fight against any effective land redistribution. As a result, there has been a steady drift of the poor from the countryside into Port-au-Prince, making it the over-stretched city we’ve seen in rubble

After the immediate crisis is addressed –-after lives are saved, basic services restored– the chronic conditions and structural causes of Haiti’s poverty need to be addressed. The solution lies in some process of reconsolidation of holdings that brings large tracts of land back into popular use. But, this will depend on major changes in the shape of the Haitian economy. It will require debt cancellation and massive infusions of international aid, to develop the rural infrastructure, including irrigation works and roads.

But, finally, let me put things in perspective, to define the magnitude of the problem that really needs to be systematically addressed. According to the World Bank, Haiti’s GDP in 2008 (in current U.S. dollars, not adjusted for inflation) was only $6.95 billion. It will certainly be far less now. But, compare it to reports that Goldman Sachs alone –just one of a small number of financial giants that brought the world economy to the edge of melt-down– is expected to announce executive bonuses for 2009 that will total more than $20 billion (most of which, incidentally, will comes out of federal subsidies to the company). Haiti, in contrast, has never hurt anyone. Far from it, it has enriched others over the years, while its own people descended into abject poverty. The pay-out at Goldman Sachs is simply another symptom of the callous injustice of the way our world economic system is organized.

It is inherently unjust. Even before the earthquake, the average Haitian worked harder just to stay alive than, by any stretch of the imagination, a Goldman Sachs executive does to live in a New York penthouse apartment. What that tells you is, not that Haitians are doing anything wrong, but that the world system, dominated by capitalist logic, routinely smashes human dignity, defines a large proportion of our fellow humans as undeserving of basic justice, while, at the same time, it provides inflated remuneration to those who actually profit by killing other people’s dreams. It’s time to look at the world in a way that doesn’t regard the mandarins of Wall Street as deserving of such rewards.

When the great German philosopher Walter Benjamin died in 1940, fleeing with other refugees from France into neutral Spain, he left behind his last work, which was posthumously published as Theses on the Philosophy of History. The ninth thesis, “The Angel of History,” is about precisely how differently events over the past centuries may be viewed by the occupants of New York penthouses and of the devastated homes of Port-au-Prince. It is so brief that it was incorporated into a song, “The Dream Before,” by the brilliant Laurie Anderson. I quote it here in its entirety:

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

If any place on earth got caught in that storm it was Haiti. So, let me propose a small nod in the direction of retributive justice: The president is having trouble managing to impose any limits or penalties on Wall Street avarice. But, if Goldman Sachs executives, the people –Pat Robertson take note– who really made a pact with the devil, want to retain their obscene bonuses, make them do what the Angel of History wanted–to help make something whole. They should give at least half their bonuses to Haiti and do three months’ community service there.

By then, it was increasingly clear what we were doing in Vietnam, if one wanted to know, and protest slowly grew. But, for the most part, it really had little effect, so that, by the end of 1966, American forces in Vietnam had reached 385,000 men (not counting an additional 60,000 sailors offshore).  It was in October, 1967, that we finally marched on Washington, surrounded the Pentagon, in a demonstration that Norman Mailer wrote about in Armies of the Night, for which he would win the Pulitzer.  But, the war, the deaths, the destruction, continued for many more years.

If I try to remember what turned me against it, before almost anything else, I think it was a song by Simon and Garfunkel, on their album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, released in October, 1966.  It was called “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night.”

We, at The Porcupine, offer it to you this Christmas season, over 40 years later, as our president commits more troops to a senseless war in Afghanistan.  Put aside the politicians’ platitudes about the nobility and devotion of our soldiers, many of whom will tell you that they want the war there to end.  And, as you sit down to dinner on Christmas day and the days that follow, as the snow spreads an agonizing beauty over the bloody mountains of that distant and wretched country, listen to a song by Simon and Garfunkel that, unfortunately, is as meaningful today as it was in 1966.  But, know that, if we listen and if we act, there is no reason it has to be.

And, then, send it to the White House.

So, welcome to the wonderful world of Republican creationists, the believers in non-science who want to be in charge of government, who would confront our myriad economic and social problems, not with reason and empirical evidence, but through faith and “common sense.”

In her new memoirs, Sarah Palin, once Republican governor of Alaska and former vice-presidential candidate, says that she’s a creationist. But, to be fair, she thinks that schools should give equal time to creationism and evolution, letting the kids decide on their respective merits. The way responsible parents let their kids decide about the risks of crossing the street without looking. Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, recent Republican presidential contender (and possible future candidate) and an ordained Baptist minister, firmly denies the reality of evolution. Michelle Bachmann, Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota, with a J.D. from fundamentalist Oral Roberts University, believes in what is called “intelligent design,” a euphemism for creationism. Bobby Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana and often spoken of as a potential presidential candidate, has endorsed the teaching of intelligent design/creationism in Louisiana schools, as part of their science curriculum. And Rush Limbaugh, right-wing radio personality and one of the so-called ideological leaders of the Republican Party, calls the science of evolution “BS.” Misunderstanding the whole theory of evolution, he has said: “If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?”

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the leadership is a mass of evangelical-minded voters. In June, 2007, a Gallup poll reported that Republicans disbelieve in evolution by more than 2-to-1. According to CBS, “Republicans saying they don’t believe in evolution outnumbered those who do by 68 percent to 30 percent in the survey. Democrats believe in evolution by 57 percent to 40 percent, as do independents by a 61 percent to 37 percent margin.” I can’t say that those figures give me much confidence in any party –there is obviously much wrong with the way we teach science in the United States– but, certainly, Republicans are least likely to comprehend the intellectual challenges of the modern world.

If there is any reasonable consideration for not voting for such people, it is this: If they don’t understand that a vast body of evidence overwhelmingly tends to confirm the idea of evolution, then, of course they don’t comprehend the evidence for the nature of global warming. Or of the structural causes of global poverty. Or of the need to restrain corporate greed. And they certainly don’t appreciate the evident need for profound, urgent health care reform.