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Commentary:
Mass Destruction
Feminism and environmentalism in a time of war. Happening People: Karl Sorg COALITION
CONDEMNS WAR "To kill thousands or tens of thousands of innocent people, mostly children, to drive millions of people from their homes, and to risk a grave humanitarian crisis in a nation already widely dependent on food aid is unconscionable. "The Bush administration has failed to make a convincing case for war. It has stooped to the use of bribery, spying, threats, and manufactured evidence. In spite of all of this, it has failed to gain the support of nine members of the U.N. Security Council. World opinion remains strongly in opposition to the Bush war." The statement goes on to say the war is illegal because it bypasses the U.N. Security Council, Iraq has not attacked the U.S, nor is there a threat of imminent attack. "Bush suggests that the U.N. risks irrelevance," says the statement. "The Supreme Court did not appoint Bush to the post of ruler of the world."
RESISTING
WAR TAXES According to the national War Tax Resisters — a branch of the War Resisters League (WRL) — military spending has been the single largest portion of the Federal Funds budget, with "current military" spending ($437 billion for 2003) and "past military" spending ($339 billion for 2003) totaling 46 percent of your tax dollar. It is also the chief cause of inflation. Because there is no tax that goes only to the military, war taxes generally mean individual federal income taxes and excise taxes (the 3 percent federal telephone tax, alcohol/ tobacco tax), which are labeled Federal Funds. Critics say that resisting paying taxes is detrimental to social services programs, but Morton says, "You should redirect the amount of your unused tax money to escrow funds and social services of your own choice." Morton says her Axis of Peace Campaign suggests taxpayers redirect $9.11 or $91.10 of their taxes to life-saving causes. The campaign donates the money to Voices in the Wilderness and FOOD for Lane County on April 15. Critics also argue that military spending creates jobs, but the WRL contends, "Dollar for dollar the same amount of money creates twice as many jobs in education or health care." It suggests, "Engineers and scientists refining our methods of destruction could be developing products that improve the quality of life." The most popular (but still illegal) war tax protest is refusing to pay telephone taxes. The WRL says "the federal telephone tax has historically been the most clearly related to the ups and downs of military spending because there are so many resisters and so little tax owed per person that the IRS loses money every time they make a collection. Even the simplest IRS paperwork is simply too expensive to be worth it." To refuse, subtract the amount from your monthly telephone bill and include a note of explanation to the telephone company each time you pay your bill. FCC regulations require the phone company to credit your bill and report this amount to the IRS, but not cut off your service. Another way is to file your 1040 and refuse to pay all or some of money due, and include a letter of explanation. Other methods include filing a blank 1040 with a note of explanation, or not filing federal income tax returns at all. Direct action entails unpredictable risks, but the WRL says "Criminal prosecution and jail are virtually unknown for war tax resisters" and "since the modern war tax resistance movement began during World War II only one person (in the '40s) has been jailed." The IRS will impose tax due notices, adding on civil penalties in the range of 5 to 25 percent plus a compound interest rate of 10 percent. Nonfilers may go undetected, but they face stiffer penalties if caught. Seizures of wages, bank accounts, cars and houses have happened although the IRS will give numerous chances for the resisters to pay. So then why resist in the first place? Morton says it is still an efficient and enlightening form of protest and "a lot of resisted federal income tax money will not get into the federal budget after it has been withheld." For more information, call Morton at 342-2914. — John Husby
UNSAFE
SPRAWL — Alan Pittman
UNDERCOVERED
#31 Tripling flights to 500 a day, U.S. and British warplanes have been bombing targets such as ground missiles and rocket launchers that do not threaten allied aircraft but would defend Iraq against invading ground troops. Several thousand U.S., British, and Australian special forces are inside Iraq, locating Iraqi troop positions and verifying targets chosen from satellite photos (Scotsman). Great web sites for news/commentary:
www.iraqpeaceteam.org,www.antiwar.com,
www.counterpunch.org,www.truthout.org.
Peacework: www.unitedforpeace.org,www.moveon.org,
www.designaction.org/morelinks.html.Comfort/inspiration:
www.joannamacy.net,photos
at www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad«
Things to do: Invite the Pope to Iraq: When the U.S. attacks Iraq without Security Council approval, the U.N. General Assembly can call an emergency meeting to vote for "Uniting for Peace," a sometimes-invoked resolution to demand, as one world, immediate ceasefire and withdrawal. U.N. mission addresses at www.unitingforpeace.com— Kate Rogers Gessert
COPS
TO WAR
PLANT
A SEED Garden plots this year are offered at: Amazon at 27th and High, Mathews at 15th and Hayes, Whiteaker at the end of North Polk, River House at 301 North Adams, and Alton Baker at the east end of the Alton Baker Park parking lot. A whole or half plot can be rented. The average size of a plot is 20 by 30 feet. Rent is $52 per year for a full plot and $42 per year for a half plot and includes access to tools, water, and a garden site manager. Eugene's Community Gardens Program has been offering residents the opportunity to cultivate a plot of land since 1978. Community gardeners can provide food for family and friends, enjoy the beauty of a garden in bloom, learn about gardening, share information with other gardening enthusiasts, and work the land and harvest the fruits of their labor. According to program coordinator Chris Girard, Eugene's Community Gardens Program is "a place where people and plants can grow."
HOUR
POWER Program coordinator Christina Calkins says, "We had a community meeting a year ago with about 50 people, and there was really positive interest." The program began with a newsletter/directory listing participant skills and needs. Each participant earns three HOURS for joining the directory. One HOUR is equivalent to $10 U.S. and can be traded in 1/8, 1/2 and whole units of labor, exchangeable as notes printed by Hour Trader. So for example, acupuncturists needs garden work. They would earn three HOURS by listing their acupuncture skills in the directory, and they could trade acupuncture work as HOURS with a gardener in the listings. The Corvallis Hour Trader has grown this past year to more than 100 participants. While Calkins says that "progressives are the backbone of the program," participants have been amazed by the range of people involved in the trading system. Calkins says, "What we're doing is creating a community. We've issued 429 HOUR notes, which is equal to $4,290 that will be in the community forever" in the form of labor and skills exchanged. She envisions success like that in Ithaca, where community currency pays for things such as food, rent and even health care. "It just shows," she says, "the potential for a local, sustainable, bioregional trade system." — Bobbie Willis
Mass
Destruction EDITOR'S NOTE: Noël Sturgeon, professor of women's studies at Washington State University, gave this keynote address at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference at UO March 8. Her talk has been edited for length. When I was invited to speak at this conference, I didn't realize at first that I would be speaking on March 8th, International Women's Day. This day has been celebrated around the world since 1910, and the excitement of its political potential has always been that it promoted a vision of connection between women's groups across the globe, not yet, of course, fully realized, but closer than it ever has been before.
But peace, as has been said, is not just the absence of war, and war, of course, is not just being prepared for tomorrow or next week or next month, but is already happening, is ongoing as we gather here. It is easy to despair, when we see the suffering in the world, the starvation, the poverty, the loss of natural environment, the violence, the disease, the exploitation of human bodies, the repression of human creativity. It is easy to despair, but we should also be heartened by the huge amount of opposition to this war, and the way it has resulted from the previous mobilization of a global justice movement. When eight million people come out into the streets on the same day throughout the world, when 13,000 anti-war poems are delivered to the White House, when the city of Los Alamos (the home of the nuclear bomb) seriously discusses and narrowly defeats an anti-war resolution, that's pretty amazing. This anti-war movement is the biggest ever seen, the most globally connected, displaying the broadest coalitions. Even though I find myself daily swamped by fear and anger at what my government is perpetrating both inside and outside of our country, I think we need to look to the future, and not get bogged down in the present scary moment. What do we want from this unprecedented outpouring of anti-war activism around the world? We want, first and foremost, to prevent the slaughter of more innocent people. But we also want, I think, to produce from this mobilization a sustainable politics, a social change process that finally puts in place the kind of policies and practices that will create a world of real peace, social justice, and ecological well-being. And what I want to concentrate on today is: What kind of feminism and what kind of environmentalism should we be fostering in order to create that sustainable, effective politics for the future? In particular, the war has huge negative consequences for the environment: The first is direct damage to the environment from war (bombing, oil fires, oil spills in the Gulf, depleted uranium shells, land mines, disruption of sanitary and water distribution systems, destruction of animal habitat, etc.) The second is the strong official turn away from alternative energy policies, a rejection of energy conservation, and a renewed emphasis on nonrenewable and environmentally destructive sources of energy: oil and nuclear power, which now drives the rationale for war supported by the present energy regime in this country. Oil drilling, oil spills, increased global warming, and the continued pollution of Native people's lands with nuclear waste will be the result. And the third is what might be called broad indirect costs to an environmental agenda: the contempt shown by the U.S. for international law, the U.S. refusal to cooperate with international treaties to deal with global warming and other environmental problems, as well as the public relations cover the war will provide the Bush administration's outright attack on environmental efforts in this country. From declaring environmental protesters "ecoterrorists," to gutting the Clean Air Act, to diluting the organic label, to easing restrictions on toxic waste siting, to shrinking budgets for Superfund clean-up, the Bush administration is involved in the greatest environmental roll-back we have ever witnessed. How do environmentalists deal with this attack in the context of a war polity and a war economy? I think that what we need is to offer a clear alternative, a pragmatic political vision, integrated with other social justice issues that can connect the dots for the general public, that uses the public's distaste for war and its economic insecurity to educate people on the interrelationships between this attack on the environment and the Bush administration's simultaneous attack on working poor people, on women, on people of color in its quest for, as Dr. Evil would say, "world domination." The negative consequences of environmental pollution, over-exploitation of natural resources, and commodification of seeds and foodstuffs is overwhelmingly borne by those in the world who are less powerful; conversely, environmental catastrophe is overwhelmingly caused by dependence on an economic system built upon inequality and oppression. Environmentalists have a particular role to play in connecting the human and natural costs of war, and in researching and promoting alternative, decentralized energy and agricultural technologies. Environment-alist activism must be embedded in the broader alternative vision of the anti-war mobilization, and eco-activists must think carefully about what strategies — direct action strategies, electoral strategies, community strategies, media strategies — are more likely to foster the broadest connections and coalitions, and which strategies are more likely to break us up and set us back. We need to act in every area of public life open to us. One of the most important connections that I will argue needs to be made, and indeed already has been made, is between the politics of environmentalism, feminism, and antimilitarism. But that linkage, I will argue, must be forged in the spirit of nonviolence, and in the context of a critique of global corporate capitalism. As we gather here today, thousands of women (and men) are also gathering around the world to register their opposition to war, and to focus our attention on the relation between women's issues and anti-war issues. Participating in CODE PINK and other actions are a host of women's anti-war organizations, some with very long histories of this work, such as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and some with newer pedigrees, such as the Lysistrata Project. Another, and hopefully related, set of women's actions today is the Global Women's Strike. Every year since 2000, the London-based group Women's International Network for Wages for Caring Work (or WinWages), has called for a global strike by women doing any kind of work, including, importantly, unpaid "caring" work such as childcare, cooking, housecleaning, etc. This year the Global Women's Strike has the theme of "Invest in Caring Not Killing," and its demands are the following: payment (or reparations) for all caring work, in wages, pensions, food security, land and other resources; food security for breastfeeding mothers; paid maternity leave; forgiveness of Third World debt; accessible clean water, health care, housing, literacy, and non-polluting technology; protection and asylum from all violence; and freedom of movement. Women are likely to experience excruciating suffering as a result of war. The recent 2002 report by UNIFEM, Women, War and Peace, details the kind of impact war has on women. This is not to say that war does not have an impact on men — most of the direct casualties in a war are male, and men are subject to torture and imprisonment at greater rates than women. As the UNIFEM report shows, women are killed in wars, as combatants, and, along with children and older men, as "collateral damage." And in our wars today, as opposed to the past, a majority of the casualties can be non-combatants, so the toll on women's lives has been growing. But women are also more subject to gender-specific forms of violence. To quote from the UNIFEM report: "Violence against women during conflict has reached epidemic proportions … [women's] bodies become a battleground over which opposing forces struggle. Women are raped as a way to humiliate the men they are related to, who are often forced to watch the assault. In societies where ethnicity is inherited through the male line, 'enemy' women are raped and forced to bear children. Women who are already pregnant are forced to miscarry through violent attacks. Women are kidnapped and used as sexual slaves to service troops, as well as to cook for them and carry their loads from camp to camp. They are purposely infected with HIV/AIDS, a slow, painful murder." War and militarism also causes the displacement of people on a massive scale. UNIFEM estimates that 40 million people are presently displaced because of armed conflict and human rights violations, and 80 percent of these are women and children. Refugees need to find food, shelter, and health care, and women bear the brunt of this work because of their traditional responsibilities of childcare, cooking, and caring for the ill. Women who are displaced and desperate to care for their families are frequently forced to choose sex work, or they are actually enticed and sold into sexual slavery. After conflicts are supposedly over, women have to contend with a heavily militarized society, in which many men have guns and intra-male and domestic violence is rampant. In addition, the cost of a military economy, as it sucks away money for social services, falls heavily on women. In this country, women are the majority of those on public assistance, because they are more often the ones taking care of children. For instance, the budget of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, or TANF, already pitifully reduced by the Clinton administration's Personal Responsibility Act of 1996, is up for renewal right now in Congress; and the Bush administration has suggested a further reduction, including punitive measures for those who are not married. State budget crises, affecting health care, public education, and other programs desperately needed by the poor, are further exacerbating the situation of poor women and children. And yet, billions of dollars can be found to spend on killing people in Iraq. Despite what Bush wants me to believe, I don't feel threatened by Saddam Hussein! I feel threatened by a political decision to abandon the poorest people, most of them women and children, in our society. That, I think is a weapon of mass destruction and an evil, immoral act.
Watered
Down The first President Bush promised "no net loss of wetlands." But his son is now working to fulfill that pledge by narrowly redefining exactly what constitutes a "wetland." At risk is 20 percent of the nation's protected wetlands, including perhaps hundreds of acres in west Eugene. "His [George W. Bush's] commitment is to redefine them so there will be no net loss because there will be no wetlands," says Charlie Tebbutt, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center who spoke on the subject at the UO's Public Interest Environ-mental Law Conference (PIELC) March 8. Tebbutt says the Bush administration is stealthily "trying to rewrite the statutes to let them get away with whatever they want to get away with." In January, the administration proposed a rewrite of Clean Water Act rules that would open 20 million acres of wetlands to development without federal regulation. The new rules could also eliminate federal regulations protecting large numbers of small streams, ponds and other water bodies from pollution. The administration said the regulatory retreat was required by their broad interpretation of a 2001 Supreme Court decision, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. Army Corps of Engineers (also known as the SWANCC decision). But the Clinton administration did not interpret the decision to have great impact, and environmental groups accuse the administration of using SWANCC as cover for allowing developers and polluters to evade the Clean Water Act (CWA).
But the Bush administration has moved to re-interpret the CWA narrowly. Last year, the administration sent out a guidance memo requiring federal regulators to get special permission from political employees before they protect waters that aren't "navigable" or don't quickly connect to navigable waters, according to Tebbutt. "That's pretty scary," he says. Tebbutt says the legislative history of the CWA shows Congress intended the statute to be applied as broadly as possible. "That's what Congress wanted." But developers and conservatives are pushing to closely interpret language in the CWA that they say limits the law to protecting only "navigable" waters. The word "navigable" was inserted to assert federal jurisdiction over clean water based on the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, which allows Congress to regulate interstate commerce. Brent Foster, a Portland environmental lawyer who also spoke at PIELC, says the "navigable" clause in the act does present a problem for environmentalists. Foster says the problem "is not going to be solved by a legal thing." Some members of Congress are pushing a bill to clarify the CWA to clearly extend protections to small bodies of water. "Focusing on legislative changes is the key to this," Foster says. State laws too often don't provide the protections of the federal CWA, according to Tebbutt. Many states, like Idaho, have inadequate environment laws. The federal CWA also includes provisions that allow public interest lawyers to more easily sue to protect the environment. But if developers can rely on a close interpretation of the CWA, so can environmentalists. Foster says he's had success "applying the plain language of the Clean Water Act" to expand regulation into areas the federal government has neglected. For example, Foster says he recently won a 9th Circuit decision that the Forest Service needed a pollution permit for aerial spraying of insecticides. The agency planned to spray an area the size of Rhode Island including direct releases to 400 miles of salmon spawning grounds. Foster says he's researching how to build on that success by attacking a regulatory tradition of allowing huge "mixing zones" for toxic pollution dumping into a river. The zones allow industry to release pollution at thousands of times safe levels for fish if several hundred feet downstream the pollution is sufficiently mixed and diluted to non-toxic levels. But the CWA doesn't specifically allow mixing zones and "Congress is pretty damned clear" in the act that it didn't want toxic levels of pollution dumped in the nations waterways, Foster says. The mixed pollution can accumulate again into toxic levels in tissues and sediments, he says. If the mixing rules were successfully challenged, "it's difficult for me to imagine a single case that would help water quality more." Instead of requiring corporations to use available, less toxic chemicals, EPA has "set up a numbers game that industry plays and we'll always lose," Tebbutt says. In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, decreeing, "thou shall not pollute our waters by 1983," says Tebbutt. "All this happy horse shit is all rationalizations about why we haven't gotten there yet."
KARL
SORG — Paul Neevel Know anyone whose good work deserves attention in this space? Call the editor at 484-0519 or editor@eugeneweekly.com |
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But
this particular International Women's Day is taking place during a
critical moment, a global crisis, a harrowing sliver of time poised
between destruction and creativity, between devastation and growth,
between the ugly clamor of fascism at home and the joyous noise of
participatory democratic movements globally, between fundamentalist
violence and multi-issue, multi-peopled nonviolent opposition, between,
of course, war and peace.
The
CWA protects "waters of the United States" from pollution and filling.
In the past, regulators and the courts have interpreted "waters" broadly
to include disconnected wetlands, seasonal streams, mudflats and wet
prairies. A 1997 9th Circuit decision applied CWA protections to irrigation
canals, ruling that an irrigator near Ashland violated the law when
it applied an herbicide to a canal and caused a downstream fish kill
where the canal emptied into a creek.
