Monday, October 10, 2022

The Niger Delta: A People and Their Environment

Europe's plunder of the Niger Delta dates back to 1444.

Royal Canoe of the Kingdom of Bonny, 
painted by Edouard Auguste Nousveaux, 1890. via Wikimedia Commons.

Oronto Douglas
Ike Okonta
10 March 2018

Written in 2001 and published by Verso in 2003, Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas's Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil documents four decades of violence committed against against the people and the ecosystem of the Niger Delta by Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world's largest oil companies. "Royal Dutch/Shell is more than a colonial force in Nigeria," Okonta and Douglas write. "A colonial power exhibits some measure of concern for the territory over which it lords. This is not the case with this mogul, which goes for crude oil in the most crude manner possible."

Below we present the book's first chapter, which surveys the longer history of European plunder of the region.

And finally, on the immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation, and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions men. — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The Niger has the third-largest drainage area of Africa's rivers. The delta into which it drains is a huge floodplain in southeastern Nigeria consisting of sedimentary deposits flowing down from the Niger and the Benue rivers and covering 25,640 square kilometers of the country's total land area. This floodplain is home to some seven million people, grouped into several nations and ethnic groups: the Ijo, Urhobo, Itsekiri, Isoko, Efik, Etche, Ibibio, Igbo, Andoni, Ikwere, Ogoni, Isoko, Edo, and Kwale-Igbo. Some of the ethnic groups are further divided into clans with their own distinctive languages. 1

Before the arrival of European traders in what is now modern Nigeria, the Niger Delta was inhabited mainly by the Ijo peoples, who lived in small creekside fishing villages ranging from two hundred to about a thousand inhabitants. The head of the village was the Amanyanabo (or Amakasowei), who in turn was elected by the heads of the various wards or patrilineages. With the advent of the slave trade, however, there was a rapid expansion of the population of the Delta. The hitherto small and idyllic Ijo fishing villages grew into powerful trading states like Bonny, Owome (New Calabar), Okrika, and Brass (Nembe), some of whose origins can be traced to the early sixteenth century. The Efik trading state of Old Calabar at the entrance of the Cross River, and the Itsekiri kingdom of Warri in the western Delta, also emerged at this time. 2

The slave trade brought with it great social and economic upheavals in the Niger Delta. 3 Before the arrival of the European slave traders, the Ijo and the other peoples of the Delta traded with the peoples of the hinterland — mainly the Igbo and Ibibio. The former exported dried fish and salt to their neighbors in exchange for fruit and iron tools. The trade in slaves brought an abrupt stop to this flourishing commerce, however. The slave traders brought with them salt, dried fish, and new consumer goods such as cloth and metal utensils. The consumer goods were often cheap and not necessarily well made, but since the slave traders also brought salt along with them, the Ijo and the other inhabitants of the Delta gave up the trade in fish, salt, and iron tools with the Igbo and Ibibio altogether and concentrated on the lucrative slave trade.

It is generally assumed that the exploitation of the peoples of the Niger Delta and the devastation of their environment began when crude oil was discovered in the area by Royal Dutch Shell in 1956. The truth is that Europe's plunder of the Delta, and indeed the entire continent, dates much further back, to 1444, when the Portuguese adventurer and former tax collector, Lancarote de Freitas, sailed to the West African coast and stole 235 men and women whom he later sold as slaves. 4 De Freitas's trip was to trigger the Atlantic slave trade, which, before it was displaced by the trade in palm oil in the 1840s, saw several million able-bodied young men and women taken from the Delta and its hinterland and shipped to the plantations of North America, South America, and the West Indies.

The slave plantations of the West Indies were the basis of much British wealth. The Barclay brothers, David and Alexander, actively engaged in the slave trade in the 1750s and later used the proceeds to set up Barclays Bank. William Gladstone's political career was funded by family wealth generated by his father's Liverpool trade and West Indies sugar plantations. In 1833, John Gladstone's assets included £296,000 (£15 million today) and £40,000 (£2 million) — or about $24 million and $3 million today — in Demerara and Jamaica respectively. William Gladstone's first speech in the House of Commons on June 3, 1834, was in opposition to the Slavery Abolition Bill, speaking as a West Indian representative. The staggering economic cost aside, slavery abruptly and catastrophically disrupted life in the Niger Delta and its hinterland, triggered interethnic wars, and led to the displacement of whole communities.

With the abolition of slavery in the first decades of the nineteenth century, there was a switch to the so-called “legitimate” trade in palm oil. But the pattern of trade remained unchanged — from the Niger Delta to Europe and back. Europe was at the height of its industrial revolution at this time, and the demand for palm oil, which was used to lubricate the machines of the factories and as raw material for soap and margarine, was high. The Delta traders played the role of middlemen between Liverpool merchants who anchored their ships on the coast and the cultivators of the palm oil in the hinterland.

At first this arrangement was satisfactory to all parties. Trade boomed. By 1850, British trading interests were concentrated mainly in Lagos, which provided access to the wealth of the forests of Yorubaland, farther west, and the Delta ports, which were the gateway to the interior of eastern Nigeria. Palm oil was now the chief export, as the European traders no longer found the trade in slaves profitable following the advent of the industrial revolution. Bonny, an Ijo town strategically located on the coast, gradually grew into the richest port in the Niger Delta, and by 1856 the port and its hinterland was exporting over 25,000 tons of palm oil a year, over half of the total quantity exported from Africa. 5

Consuls and Gunboats

While the European slave merchants were content to ply their ignominious trade mainly from their ships using the kings and chiefs on the coast as go-betweens, the Liverpool palm oil barons began to actively interfere in the politics of the Niger Delta, beginning in 1850, with the sole purpose of displacing the local middlemen and appropriating the enormous profits for themselves. The argument of the Liverpool traders was that the middlemen of Bonny, New Calabar, Brass, and Old Calabar, the main Delta ports at the time, were not hardworking enough, and that the rich palm oil farms of the hinterland were not being exploited to the maximum as a result. They also complained about the high prices of the middlemen and increasingly began to urge the British government to intervene. 6

Yet, as several chroniclers of trade and politics in the Niger Delta at the time have shown, it was actually the Liverpool merchants who were ripping off the coastal middlemen. They had a monopoly of the palm oil trade, and since there was not a standardized medium of exchange on the coast, they sold second-rate and sometimes worthless goods to the Africans. The historian K. O. Dike described trade practices at the time: “White supercargoes had managed to convince Africans that articles of clothing such as old soldiers' jackets and cocked hats bought at little cost at Monmouth Street, were a fair exchange for their raw materials.” 7 Moreover, some of the British merchants were in reality ruffians and thieves and would actually seize barrels of palm oil from the Delta middlemen without payment.

It was to curb the activities of these rogue traders that the king of Bonny instituted a Court of Equity in 1854 run by a joint committee of the British traders and coastal middlemen under his supervision. Erring traders were fined, and those who refused to pay up were cut off from the palm oil trade by the Delta middlemen, who, obeying the king's directives, refused to sell palm oil to them. The Court of Equity brought order to the hitherto chaotic trade and was so successful that it was introduced in such other places as Akassa, Benin River (Itsekiri), Brass, and later Opobo.

The British merchants (or supercargoes) were, however, not satisfied. The palm oil trade was becoming even more lucrative as the pace of industrialization accelerated in Europe, requiring greater quantities of palm oil to lubricate machine parts and to manufacture soap and margarine for the millions of industrial workers who flocked to the cities. The supercargoes wanted a direct access to the hinterland so they could get the palm oil virtually for free. They began by using the British-appointed local consuls on the coast to force unfavorable terms of trade on the Delta middlemen. Indeed, the activities of the British consuls between 1850 and 1856 was to lead to the breakdown of the monopoly of coastal trade held by the supercargoes and the African middlemen between them. This, in turn, led to a crisis in Niger Delta politics.

John Beecroft, who was appointed Her Brittanic Majesty's Consul for the Bights of Benin and Biafra in 1849, laid the foundation of British power in Nigeria and initiated the politics that was to characterize the consular period in Nigerian history. 8 Beecroft saw himself not as an administrator but as a pathfinder of sorts, expanding British trade in the Niger Delta. It is instructive that the new consul's first intervention in the politics of the Delta was in palm-oil-rich Bonny, against King William Dappa Pepple, whom the supercargoes bitterly resented because they saw him as the main obstacle to their designs to get at the palm oil fields in the hinterland.

King Dappa Pepple had signed a treaty with Consul Beecroft in October 1850, regulating conditions of trade on the coast. In return, the British government had promised to pay the king an annual subsidy to enable him to develop the palm oil trade even further. But an increasingly powerful and ambitious Beecroft ignored the treaty to which he himself was a signatory, and even refused to pay the king the promised subsidy. 9 In 1851, Beecroft took the decisive first step — in what was to become his open intervention in Niger Delta politics — when he deposed Kosoko, the king of Lagos, and installed Akitoye in his place. Beecroft's excuse was that Kosoko was a slave trader, a practice the British government had decreed illegal. There was, however, ample evidence at that time to show that Akitoye was himself financed by a well-known slave trader, Domingo Jose, and certainly would have indulged in slave trading were it economically and politically expedient for him to do so. What Beecroft really wanted was a friendly king in Lagos who would help British merchants get a secure foothold in the area, and he conveniently used the “slave trader” tag to get rid of the independent-minded Kosoko. 10

Beecroft employed similar tactics to do away with King Dappa Pepple of Bonny. He accused the king of sponsoring attacks on the ships of British traders on the New Calabar River, and, cleverly exploiting a trade dispute between Dappa Pepple and one of the royal lineages in Bonny, used the Court of Equity to deport him to Fernando Po in 1852. 11 After the removal of King Dappa Pepple, the British traders, in concert with the local consuls, accelerated the displacement of the Delta middlemen in the palm oil trade.

In 1855 some freed slaves from Sierra Leone who had converted to Christianity and settled in Calabar tried to help the local middlemen ship their palm oil directly to England, pointing out that the prices they got from the British supercargoes were ridiculous. The consul, Hutchinson, intervened, however, stopping the King, Eyo Honesty, when he tried to export a shipment directly to Liverpool. The consul claimed that the king owed £18,000 (about $30,000) to an English firm and so could not trade directly with the Liverpool commercial houses until he had paid it off.

A Commission of Inquiry later set up by the Foreign Office in London discovered that Hutchinson was corruptly enriching himself at the expense of the Niger Delta middlemen, and that he was in fact a commission agent in the employ of the English firm Hearn and Cuthbertson, to which he claimed the king of Calabar owed money. But this was after Hutchinson's predecessor, Consul Lynslager, had ransacked and destroyed the town of Old Calabar, claiming that he did so because the people practiced human sacrifice. Church of Scotland missionaries stationed in the town contradicted Lynslager, pointing out that the consul destroyed the town at the behest of British traders who wanted to teach the local middlemen a lesson for daring to trade directly with Liverpool. 12

The enormous riches to be derived from the Niger Delta and the other coastal towns opened the eyes of the British traders and, subsequently, of the government itself, to the possibilities of taking over the area entirely, by force if necessary. Thus, in 1861, the Foreign Office instructed the consul to annex Lagos, “to protect and develop the important trade of which their town is the seat; and to exercise an influence on the surrounding tribes ... " 13 Trade was growing by the day. The Niger provided an excellent highway for the British traders, who began to penetrate into the interior. They saw virgin forests brimming with agricultural produce. Fired by greed, they sent urgent dispatches to London. The Foreign Office, after ensuring that the area would not prove a financial liability to the government, but indeed the opposite, proclaimed the Niger Delta and its hinterland a British Protectorate in 1865, thus laying the foundations of what turned out to be modern Nigeria.

King Jaja and the Robber Barons

The story of King Jaja of Opobo and his epic struggle against the British merchants in the closing decades of the nineteenth century best illustrates the long-standing struggle of the peoples of the Niger Delta to protect their environment and its natural resources from the grasping hands of European mercantilists and their patrons in London, Paris, Hamburg, and Amsterdam. 14

Jaja, who dominated the politics of the Niger Delta for twenty years, was an Igbo ex-slave in Bonny. Through hard work and a display of business acumen, he rapidly rose through the ranks and became head of the Anna Pepple royal house. Following a kingship tussle in the town, which escalated into civil war in 1869, Jaja and his followers retreated into Andoni country in the hinterland, named their new town Opobo, and declared it independent of the rulers of Bonny. Opobo, strategically located near the oil markets of the hinterland, quickly grew into the chief port in the Niger Delta, attracting European traders from all over the coast and even surpassing Bonny in wealth and political importance.

The British traders on the coast were, however, not happy with King Jaja. He had made it clear from the onset that he would not allow them direct access to the oil markets in the Opobo hinterland and that they could buy palm oil only from his agents. Jaja explained that since the British traders had a virtual monopoly over trade with the Liverpool commercial houses, he and his people should control the trade with the producers of the palm oil in the Delta hinterland. 15 New developments on the coast also favored King Jaja. In 1852 the British government had subsidized a fleet of steamers owned by Macgregor Laird, a merchant who began to operate a regular service between Liverpool and West Africa. This dealt a death blow to the great Liverpool houses and their monopoly of the Niger Delta oil trade. The Liverpool merchants began to face increasing competition, and by 1856 there were over two hundred European firms operating in the Niger Delta. Consul Lynslager's destruction of Old Calabar was a last-ditch attempt to prevent the local people from joining their European counterparts in turning this new development in shipping to commercial advantage. However, a few brave African middlemen began to export their oil directly to Europe, using Macgregor Laird's steamers. King Jaja, expectedly, was in the forefront.

This did not go down well with the British supercargoes, and they began to plot Jaja's downfall and to also devise means to evade his agents and buy palm oil directly from the hinterland. Jaja retaliated by increasing the volume of his shipments to England. Following a series of skirmishes with the supercargoes on the coast, King Jaja signed a treaty with the local consul in 1884 that effectively placed his town under British protection. But he made sure that a clause was inserted in the agreement that explicitly stated that his people would control the oil markets in the hinterland, his contention being that the supercargoes on the coast still controlled the bulk of shipments to England and took all the profits. Oil prices had, however, risen in Europe at this time, and the British supercargoes were getting increasingly impatient with Jaja. There were enormous profits to be made in the hinterland, and Jaja was in the way. They urged the local consul, H. H. Johnston, to intervene, and in 1887 King Jaja was deported to the West Indies. When he was eventually allowed to return to Opobo in 1891, he died on the way, a lonely, broken man. 16

A similar fate was to befall Nana Olomu, a merchant prince and leader of the Itsekiri, who controlled the oil trade on the Benin River in the western Delta. Although Nana had signed a treaty with Consul Hewett in 1884, placing the Benin River, Warri, and some parts of western Ijo under British protection, he rebuffed attempts by the British to extend the powers of the new Oil Rivers Protectorate, which had been proclaimed in 1887, over his country. Nana correctly saw the new protectorate for what it really was: an attempt by the British traders on the coast to edge him out and take over the oil markets in his territory for themselves. But the supercargoes would brook no opposition. British gunboats were now in absolute control of the coast, the Niger River, and its tributaries. In September 1894, under the command of the acting consul, General Ralph Moor, they bombarded Nana's headquarters in Ebrohimie, ransacked the town, and carted away his goods. 17 Nana gave himself up a few months later. Thus was the last formidable obstacle to British imperialist designs in the Niger Delta removed.

Afterward, it was open season for the British merchants, most notably George Goldie Taubman, the “founder of modern Nigeria." 18 The scramble for Africa was going full steam when Goldie Taubman arrived in the Niger Delta. The French had set their eyes on the area, and Taubman decided that the only way to keep them out and secure the rich lands of the Niger basin for Britain was to wield the several British firms competing against one another in the Delta into a powerful trading bloc with total monopoly over the palm oil trade. The new firm that emerged from the merger was called the Niger Company. Taubman followed this up with a spate of “treaties” with the coastal kings, which he obtained literally at gunpoint. By 1884 he had obtained thirty-seven such “treaties.” Towns that demurred, like Brass, Patani, and Asaba, farther inland, were bombarded into submission. 19

When the conference of the European powers to divide Africa among themselves opened in Berlin in 1885, Taubman was the British government's official delegate. London was so pleased with his performance that his new company was granted a Royal Charter. In addition to the monopoly of the oil trade in the Niger districts that it already enjoyed, the company was given political authority over the area as well. Rechristened the Royal Niger Company, it set up its headquarters in Asaba.

The Birth of Nigeria

There is no doubt that George Goldie Taubman and the Royal Niger Company which he founded played a key role in bringing together the otherwise disparate nations and ethnic groups in the Niger Basin into what is now known as Nigeria. It must be pointed out, however, that Goldie Taubman's career as a monopoly trader in the Niger Delta and its hinterland was marked by looting, murder, and the mass sacking of whole towns and communities. 20 He was more a soldier than a trader — he came to the Niger Delta as a conqueror.

The palm oil wealth of the area provided Taubman the financial muscle with which the company now began to push forward into the hinterland, navigating the Niger up to Bussa in the north and opening new trading centers on its banks. Taubman, however, was not content with merely draining the Delta of its natural resources. He also embarked on trading practices that cut off the once flourishing Delta ports from the outside world, which plunged the populace into unprecedented penury from which it has never been able to recover. Indeed, it can be said that the basis of the underdevelopment of the Niger Delta, following the forcible integration of the area into the world of international finance capital in the nineteenth century, was laid by Goldie Taubman and the Royal Niger Company in the 1890s. 21

Following the granting of a Royal Charter to the company in 1886, Taubman decreed that such towns as Brass, the chief port of the Nembe Ijo, which were outside the Royal Niger Company's territory, were “foreigners.” The people of Brass were therefore forced to pay fifty pounds (about eighty dollars) a year for a trading license and another ten pounds for each company station they traded in. Trade in alcoholic spirits had also grown in importance, and Taubman imposed an extra hundred pounds (equivalent to about $8,000 today) tax on any Brass merchant who desired to trade in the commodity. 22 In the 1880s this was a lot of money. Perhaps the people of Brass might have endured this hardship in silence if the Royal Niger Company had not taken its monopoly practices further by preventing them from shipping their palm oil directly to England, insisting that all such exports be routed through Akassa, the company's port. The company also undercut the Brass traders by journeying into the hinterland to buy palm oil directly from the producers.

Faced with increasing poverty and hardship, the Brassmen revolted. In 1895 they attacked the company's port at Akassa and took sixty-seven men hostage, insisting that they would not be released until the company gave them access to their old markets in the hinterland. The Consul General of the newly established Niger Coast Protectorate sent a naval force to Nembe Creek, attacked the town, and razed it to the ground. 23 Two thousand unarmed people, mostly women and children, were murdered. The ancient kingdom of Benin farther west was to be subdued and brought under British rule two years later.

In 1894, Captain Frederick Lugard, a veteran of the East African campaign, arrived to help extend the British empire on the Niger coast, accelerating the pace of the “pacification” of the peoples of the Niger basin. The French were pushing aggressively from the Borgu area north of the Benue River, grabbing whatever territory they could lay hands on. In April 1898, London was sufficiently worried to ask Lugard to set up an armed unit to protect all the territory then under the control of the Royal Niger Company. Thus was born the West African Frontier Force, a battalion of soldiers that Frederick Lugard used to bring the vast Sokoto Caliphate under British control a few years later. 24

In 1898, London withdrew the charter from the Royal Niger Company and set up structures to administer direct imperial control on her new domain. The palm oil trade alone was worth almost £3.4 million a year to Britain (£175 million today, or $280 million), and it was felt that the Niger basin was too valuable to be left to a commercial firm to manage. West of the Niger, Sir Gilbert Carter, the governor of Lagos, had by now brought the Yoruba states and kingdoms, which had been at war with one another for a hundred years, under British suzerainty. During his trek of 1893, Carter had used a mix of diplomatic cunning and force of arms to subdue the states and kingdoms.

On January 1, 1900, Britain's new domain was restructured under three administrative zones: the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria; the Lagos Colony; and the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. The name “Nigeria” was chosen for it. It was left to Lugard to bring the Sokoto Caliphate to heel, and this he achieved between 1900 and 1906. The Aro, the only remaining obstacle to British colonialism in the Igbo heartland in the east, was conquered in 1901, but it took a little longer-well into the 1920s-before the entire area was “pacified" and brought under British rule. In 1914 the southern and northern protectorates were amalgamated under a single administrative unit and a new country was born. 25

One Country, Many Nations

Nigeria, it must be remembered, began life as a loose collection of nations, ethnic groups, clans, and villages brought together under one roof by British force of arms. As the late politician Obafemi Awolowo put it, “It was [the British] who created Nigeria out of a welter of independent and warring villages, towns, and communities, and imbued the various Nigerian national groups with an overriding desire for the unity of the entire Federation.” 26

Before the 1914 amalgamation, Nigeria consisted of two distinct colonial territories, separately ruled and administered. The Sokoto Caliphate, founded by the Islamic warrior and scholar Uthman Dan Fodio in 1817, was a theocratic state — at least in theory — and was administered along lines outlined by its founder in his book Kitab al-Farq. The Caliphate was more closely linked to North Africa and Saudi Arabia, culturally and commercially, than with its neighbors west and east of the Niger, who were mainly Christians and traditional religion practitioners and had had contact with Europe dating back to the fifteenth century.

The interests of British trade were paramount, however, and the dictates of commerce, coupled with the financial difficulties of administering the various nations and ethnic groups as separate entities, compelled the colonial administrators, from Frederick Lugard onward, to treat the country as a single unit, using a system of “indirect rule” in the North and “direct rule” in the South. While the northern emirs who held unchallenged sway over their subjects were allowed to administer their territories with minimal interference from the colonial residents, Lugard discovered that this system of indirect administration could not apply in the more egalitarian south, where the ruler's authority was circumscribed by a large number of checks and balances. The South was therefore ruled directly through courts and a “warrant” system whereby certain individuals were raised to positions of authority specifically to dispense justice and collect taxes as the emirs did in the North. 27 The British were, however, determined to rule the country as two separate political units, employing the infamous tactics of divide-and-rule that they had perfected in India to keep the various indigenous groups constantly at each other's throats.

The 1922 Constitution, introduced by Lugard's successor as Governor General, Sir Hugh Clifford, provided for the first time for elected African members in a legislative council. The 1930s and early 1940s witnessed rapid social and political changes in colonial Nigeria. The Eastern and Western regions were created out of the old Southern Nigeria by administrative fiat in 1939, while the Northern Region was left intact. A small but educated and articulate indigenous elite had emerged. The Second World War also saw Nigerian soldiers serving alongside their European counterparts on an equal footing, and this further accelerated political consciousness among the population. Led by Western-educated journalists and politicians, they began to agitate for greater participation in the administration of the country. The Richards Constitution, which became effective in January 1947, was the colonial government's attempt to accommodate the demands of the nationalists by attempting “to secure greater participation by Africans in the discussion of their own affairs." 28 Governor Arthur Richards's constitution united the northern and southern parts of the country in one central legislature for the first time. Richards, though, made provisions for regional councils, thus ensuring that the North enjoyed a degree of autonomy and was not “contaminated” by the southern politicians, whom the colonialists generally looked down upon as upstarts and political agitators. The Richards Constitution thus helped lay the foundation of tribalism in Nigerian politics and proved a most effective counterfoil to the nationalistic, pan-Nigerian outlook of the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons, which Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe founded in August 1944, with the aim of driving the colonialists from the country. 29

Arthur Richards also established the basis for an unequal and unwieldy federation, with the northern region twice the size of the East and West. Like his predecessors, Richards refused to listen to wise counsel from C. L. Temple, Lugard's lieutenant governor of the North, and restructure the country into seven or eight provinces, generally corresponding with the geographical space occupied by the various ethnic nationalities. 30

Richards had hoped that his constitution would last for nine years. But this was not to be. As soon as a new governor, Sir John Macpherson, was appointed in April 1948, he announced that he would give the country a new constitution that would further widen the participation of the people in the political process. The Macpherson Constitution, which replaced Richards's in January 1952, put in place a federation with a central legislature and executive, but at the same time the regional assemblies were enlarged and given legislative and financial powers. Perhaps this was Macpherson's attempt to widen the democratic space at the regional level. The North, however, was given half of the seats in the central legislature of 148 members, ensuring its near total dominance of the nascent country's politics. It is instructive that such regional and ethnic-inspired political parties as the Action Group and Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) emerged in the West and North respectively, at this time.

The series of constitutional conferences that were later to culminate in independence for the country on October 1, 1960, under an NPC-led government were attempts by Nigeria's political leaders to fashion a federal constitution that would work smoothly “to promote efficiency in, and harmonious relations and unity among, the constituent parts of the Federation.” 31 This laudable goal proved difficult to achieve, however, partly due to the lopsided nature of the federation the British left behind, and partly due to corruption, intolerance, and abuse of office on the part of the politicians. The breakdown of law and order in the Western Region in late 1965, orchestrated by the NPC — which wanted to crush the Action Group, the party of the opposition — triggered a chain of events culminating in a military coup led by Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, a young major, in January 1966. Several politicians and military officers were killed, among them the Prime Minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

Attempts by the new military Head of State, General Johnson AguiyiIronsi, to introduce a new unitary constitution in May 1966 sparked a mutiny by young Hausa-Fulani military officers, who claimed that the January coup was an attempt by the Igbo to take over the political leadership of the country. Ironsi was killed in a countercoup in July, and the killing of Igbos and other easterners began in northern towns and cities. There was a massive exodus of the latter to the Eastern Region, and when Ironsi's successor, Colonel Yakubu Gowon, proved incapable of stopping the genocide in the North, the military governor of the East, Colonel Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, called on his fellow easterners in other parts of the country to return home. A new constitutional arrangement making for a loose confederation of the three regions was worked out for the country by the two sides in Aburi, Ghana, as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war and the subsequent disintegration of the country. But Gowon reneged on this agreement after realizing that the Aburi Accord effectively gave the Eastern Region political autonomy. On May 27, 1967, he announced that the country would henceforth be divided into twelve states. Ojukwu saw this as an attempt to bury the Aburi Accord, and he responded three days later by proclaiming the former Eastern Region as the sovereign Republic of Biafra. The federal government declared war on Biafra on July 6, a bloody carnage that did not stop until Nigerian troops forcibly brought the East back into the federation in January 1970. An estimated two million people, the bulk of them Biafran children, lost their lives in this conflagration.

People of the Niger Delta Today

The bulk of the inhabitants of the Niger Delta live in three states in present-day Nigeria — Rivers, Delta, and the newly created Bayelsa. These states take up about 80 percent of the area. The rest are scattered in such other states as Cross Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Imo, and Ondo.

The years of slavery, palm oil trade, and subsequent colonial conquest brought with them massive migrations and intermingling of ethnic groups in the Delta. The rapid growth of Port Harcourt, the area's biggest city, in the decades leading to independence also encouraged intermarriage and resettlement of whole communities. As a result, today the Niger Delta is a fascinating collage of ethnic nationalities, clans, and language groups that, while still relatively distinct, nevertheless have many cultural similarities.

The Niger Delta has substantial oil and gas reserves. Oil mined in the area accounts for 95 percent of the country's foreign exchange earnings and about one-fourth of Gross Domestic Product. The bulk of Nigeria's proven oil reserves, currently estimated at twenty billion barrels, is located in the area, although exploration is also going on in the state of Bauchi and the Lake Chad Basin. Rivers, Bayelsa, and Delta states alone currently produce three-fourths of the country's crude oil. 32 Besides its great mineral wealth, the Niger Delta also has fertile agricultural land, forests, rivers, creeks, and coastal waters teeming with fish and sundry water creatures. Clearly, the Niger Delta is, at least for the moment, the goose that lays Nigeria's golden egg.

Yet, in spite of its considerable natural resources, the area is one of the poorest and most underdeveloped parts of the country. Seventy percent of the inhabitants still live a rural, subsistent existence characterized by a total absence of such basic facilities as electricity, pipe-borne water, hospitals, proper housing, and motorable roads. They are weighed down by debilitating poverty, malnutrition, and disease. While decades of corruption and mismanagement in the echelons of power have plunged the country's GNP per capita to an all-time low of $280, annual incomes in the Niger Delta are still far below the national average. The area also has one of the highest population densities in the world, and annual population growth is currently estimated at 3 percent. Rapid population growth is increasingly exerting pressure on cultivable land, a good part of which is in any case prone to flooding almost all year. The population of Port Harcourt and the other major towns is literally exploding. The ensuing scenario — urbanization without the economic growth that would ordinarily generate more jobs — has resulted in the human ecologist's ultimate nightmare: a growing population that, in a bid to survive, is destroying the very ecosystem that should guarantee its survival.

Historically, the people of the Niger Delta have always been at the mercy of greedy outsiders who plunder their natural resources without giving them anything in return, from the days of slavery to the present day. The civil war, however, was a watershed in the political and economic development of the peoples of the Niger Delta. It created the conditions for the accelerated exploitation of their resources and the devastation of their environment. Following the takeover of the Shell oil terminal in Bonny from Biafran troops, the Gowon regime enacted the Petroleum Act in 1969, which transferred all oil revenue to the Federal Military Government, which in turn was expected to disburse the money to the various states, partly on the basis of need. This decree and the subsequent legislation enacted by the military government in Lagos was to transform Nigeria from a genuine federation to a de facto unitary state.

But the unitary state that General Gowon and his military-dominated cabinet imposed on Nigerians did not have room for the peculiar needs of the minority people of the Niger Delta, even though they produced all the oil. The revenue went straight to the coffers of the Federal Military Government, the bulk of which was spent to finance the expensive lifestyle of the indolent and unproductive elite. Oil revenue and the corruption it engendered brought great wealth to this parasitic economic class. By 1976, Nigeria had become the seventh-largest producer of oil in the world, exporting two million barrels of crude a day. Federal revenue had risen to a staggering $5 billion per annum, compared to $590 million in 1965. The oil boom was in full swing, and members of the political and economic elite began to live it up, acquiring an unrivaled taste for imported Western luxuries.

Notes

1. Kenneth O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830-1885. An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 1956), 21.

2. Michael Crowther, The Story of Nigeria (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 59.

3. Ibid., 60.

4. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade. The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 21-22.

5. Dike, Trade and Politics, 101.

6. Crowther, The Story of Nigeria, 123.

7. Dike, Trade and Politics, 112.

8. Kenneth O. Dike, “John Beecroft 1790-1854: Her Britannic Majesty's Consul to the Bights of Benin and Biafra 1849-54, in Crowther, The Story of Nigeria, 314.

9. See Dike, Trade and Politics, Chapter Seven, for details of Beecroft's career.

10. J. F. Ade Ajayi, “The British Occupation of Lagos 1851-1861," Nigeria Magazine, No. 69, August 1961, 96-105.

11. See Chapter Seven of Dike, Trade and Politics.

12. Foreign Office. F.O. 84/1117, No. 112, Class B, F.O., Russel to Hutchinson, September 4, 1860.

13. Foreign Office. F.O. 2/34, Minutes on Captain Washington's report, Palmerstone, April 22, 1860.

14. Dike, Trade and Politics, 198.

15. Foreign Office. F.O. 84/1630, Opobo Town, Ja ja to Lord Granville, April 3, 1882.

16. Foreign Office. F.O. 84/1630, F.O. 84/1617, F.O. 84/1634.

17.Obaro Ikime, Niger Delta Rivalry (London: Longmans, 1969), 69.

18. Dike, Trade and Politics, 213.

19. Foreign Office. F.O. 84/1617, No. 16 and its enclosures, Hewett to Granville, November 8,
1882.

20. Dike, Trade and Politics, 210.

21. Dike, ibid., 209-215.

22. Alan C. Burns, History of Nigeria (London:Allen and Unwin, 7th edition, 1956), 157-158.

23. J. E. Flint, Sir George Goldie and the Making of Nigeria (London: Macmillan, 1960), 187-215.

24. Foreign Office. Annual Report for Northern Nigeria, 1902, Appendix 111;105.

25. Crowther, The Story of Nigeria, 191.

26. Obafemi Awolowo, Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution (Ibadan University Press, 2nd edition, 1966), 14.

27. Frederick Lugard, Reports on Amalgamatton, 14-15, cited in Crowther, Story, 200.

28. Proposals for the Revision of the Constitution of Nigeria (London, 1945), 6. Cited in Okechurkewu Nebolisa, Nigeria and the Crisis of Constitutionalism (Enugu, Nigeria: Stone Press), 78.

29. Kenneth O. Dike, One Hundred Years of British Rule in Nigeria 1851-1951 (Lagos, 1957), 43.

30. Crowther, Story, 197.

31. Obafemi Awolowo, Thoughts, 26.

32. See Alexander Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafra War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980), for a full account of the civil war.

Wild horse rights advocates say 14 horses killed in Arizona

yesterday

SPRINGERVILLE, Ariz. (AP) — Wild horse rights advocates are calling on authorities to prosecute whoever is responsible for the reported killing of more than a dozen wild horses in northeastern Arizona.

U.S. Forest Service officials announced Friday that they were investigating the horse deaths, but didn’t release any details.

Phoenix TV station KTVK reported Saturday that witnesses told them 14 horses were found in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest with fatal gunshot wounds to the abdomen, face and between the eyes.

“The person or persons responsible for this act of premeditated, vicious animal cruelty poses a very real danger to people and animals,” Scott Beckstead, director of campaigns and equine welfare specialist for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for a Humane Economy, told KTVK. “We hope to see swift and aggressive action by federal, state, and local law enforcement.”

Simone Netherlands of the Salt River Wild Horse Management group in Arizona said the horses “are not protected by federal government, not protected by state laws, so it’s sickening that someone can just come here and kill them.”

The dead horses were found near Forest Road 25 on the Alpine and Springerville Ranger Districts, according to the Forest Service, which said in a statement that they are “coordinating with the appropriate officials in support of the investigation.”

Meanwhile, a $20,000 reward continues to being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever killed five wild horses in eastern Nevada late last year.

The Bureau of Land Management announced last week that the National Mustang Association pledged to double the previous $10,000 reward in the case.

It’s unknown if the Nevada and Arizona cases are related.

Authorities said five mortally wounded horses were discovered Nov. 16 in Jakes Valley, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Ely.

They said the horses all were located within 600 yards of each other about 2 miles (3 kilometers) south of U.S. Highway 50, and an aborted fetus was attached to one of the dead animals.

The BLM is investigating and prosecuting the killings as part of the enforcement of the Wild Horses and Burro Act of 1971.
California tribes will manage, protect state coastal areas
By SOPHIE AUSTIN
yesterday

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 Sea lions are shown on the northwest coast of San Miguel Island, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009. The California Ocean Protection Council voted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022, to provide $3.6 million to support the Tribal Marine Stewards Network, a collaboration between five coastal tribes and state government to protect marine ecosystems. 
(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)


SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Five California tribes will reclaim their right to manage coastal land significant to their history under a first-in-the-nation program backed with $3.6 million in state money.

The tribes will rely on their traditional knowledge to protect more than 200 miles of coastline in the state, as climate change and human activity have impacted the vast area.

Some of the tribes’ work will include monitoring salmon after the removal of a century-old defunct dam in the redwood forests in the Santa Cruz mountains and testing for toxins in shellfish, while also educating future generations on traditional practices.

The partnership comes three years after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom apologized for the state’s previous violence and mistreatment against Indigenous peoples. Newsom said the state should allow for more co-management of tribes’ ancestral lands.

Megan Rocha, who’s on the Tribal Marine Stewards Network’s leadership council, said these coastal areas hold cultural significance for various tribes, making the partnership monumental.

“It’s focused on tribal sovereignty,” she said. “So how do we build a network where it provides for collaboration, but again, it allows each tribe to do it in the way that they see fit and respects each tribe’s sovereignty.”

The network plans to create agreements between tribes and with state government for managing these areas.

Rocha is also executive director of Resighini Rancheria, a tribe of Yurok people that is part of the network.

She worked with other tribal leaders, members of nonprofit groups and the state’s Ocean Protection Council, which coordinates activities of ocean-related state agencies, to develop a pilot program for the network that was years in the making.

In 2020, Ocean Protection Council staff recommended the agency set aside $1 million toward the pilot program to support the network in conducting research, reaching out to tribes and creating plans for the future.

The council voted Thursday to provide an additional $3.6 million which will support the groups in their continued efforts to monitor coastal and ocean resources, offer educational opportunities to tribal members, and pass along cultural knowledge to younger generations.

Taking inspiration from similar partnerships in Australia and Canada, the groups said they hope other networks bloom across the United States.

Leaders plan to expand the network to include more tribes throughout the state, Rocha said. California has 109 federally-recognized tribes, the second highest number in the country behind Alaska. But there are also many tribes that aren’t federally recognized.

Multiple tribal leaders referenced Newsom’s public apology in explaining part of why the network’s public launch is happening now. In recent years, U.S. officials have committed to collaborating with tribes on managing public lands.

Creating a network of tribes to steward areas with the backing of state government money and nonprofit support breaks new ground in the United States, said Kaitilin Gaffney of the nonprofit Resources Legacy Fund.

“I think we’re going to look back in 20 years and be like, ‘Oh, we were there. That was where it was started. Look what’s happened since,’” she said.

Some tribes in California and around the nation have had their rights to ancestral lands restored under the Land Back movement.

About 60 attendees from nonprofit groups, tribal nations and the Ocean Protection Council gathered in Sacramento to commemorate the network’s public launch last week. Leaders thanked experts, advocates, tribal leaders and public officials who made the launch possible.

Valentin Lopez, chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, which is part of the network, said climate change has forced governments with a history of exploiting Indigenous lands to acknowledge tribes’ deep-rooted knowledge of protecting ecosystems.

“We’re in the crisis mode,” he said.

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Sophie Austin is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow her on Twitter.
Early data indicates Idaho wolf population is holding steady

By KEITH RIDLER
October 6, 2022

 A wolf is shown in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo., in this file photo provided by the National Park Service, Nov. 7, 2017. Idaho's wolf population appears to be holding steady despite recent changes by lawmakers that allow expanded methods and seasons for killing wolves, the state’s top wildlife official said Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. (
Jacob W. Frank/National Park Service via AP, File)


BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Idaho’s wolf population appears to be holding steady despite recent changes by lawmakers that allow expanded methods and seasons for killing wolves, the state’s top wildlife official said Thursday.

Idaho Department of Fish and Game Director Ed Schriever told lawmakers on the Natural Resources Interim Committee that preliminary data on human-caused and natural wolf mortality looks similar to three previous years.

He also said the agency is using changes in wolf hunting laws that could lead to killing more wolves in areas with livestock conflicts or where elk herds are below population goals, potentially through a wolf-killing reimbursement program for skilled trappers and hunters.

“I think the best way to describe Idaho’s population right now is that it’s fairly stable, and it’s fluctuating around 1,250,” he told lawmakers. “Part of the year it’s below that; part of the year it’s above that. But the population is fluctuating around 1,250.”

Schriever, in a graph presented to lawmakers, showed the state’s wolf population from 2019 to 2021 fluctuating with a high of more than 1,600 in May when wolf pups are born down to a low of about 800 in April as wolves die through natural mortality, hunting or trapping.

Schriever said that the same pattern with potentially similar numbers could be repeated this year. But the agency won’t have a solid estimate for the 2022 wolf population until January when it analyzes additional information and millions of photos taken by remote cameras.

The agency in previous years picked August as the date to set the wolf population, putting it at about 1,500. The 1,250 estimate is a snapshot of the wolf population in November, at about the midpoint of the annual population fluctuation.

Idaho lawmakers in 2021 approved a law backed by ranchers that greatly expanded wolf killing in what some lawmakers stated could reduce the wolf population by 90%. Backers said it would reduce the wolf population and attacks on livestock while also boosting deer and elk herds.

Idaho wildlife officials also last year announced the state would make available $200,000 to be divided into payments to hunters and trappers who kill wolves in the state.

However, there has been concern the new rules could overshoot the mark because if the state’s wolf population were to fall below 150, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could take over management of wolves from the state.

“If you go below that (150), that’s bad news,” Schriever told lawmakers.

Schriever cited a 2009 Fish and Wildlife Service rule delisting northern Rocky Mountain gray wolves. The rule was blocked by a federal court but took effect when approved by Congress in 2011. Schriever noted the rule has a wolf population for Idaho fluctuating around 500, with a potential high of about 650 and a low of about 350.

“I think there are a whole bunch of us that would be happy if we could get to what’s described in the federal delisting rule as a population fluctuating around 500,” Schriever said.

Getting there could be challenging because wolves, Schriever noted, get wary when hunted.

He gave a breakdown of 389 wolves killed last year by some 50,000 hunters and trappers, noting only 72 hunters and trappers killed more than one wolf, accounting for 236 wolves in all that year.

“Those people are very important in the concept of managing the wolf population,” Schriever said, suggesting the reimbursement program could be a key component to target wolves in specific areas of the state.

“The reimbursement program may, in fact, be very important in keeping some of these highly skilled people engaged in this for a longer period of time,” he said.

Besides setting up the reimbursement program, the law passed in 2021 also expanded wolf killing methods to include trapping and snaring wolves on a single hunting tag, no restriction on hunting hours, using night-vision equipment with a permit, using bait and dogs and allowing hunting from motor vehicles. It also authorized year-round wolf trapping on private property.

Montana lawmakers also changed their laws to expand wolf killing. That prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service late last year, at the request of environmental groups, to announce a yearlong review to see if wolves in the western U.S. should be relisted and again receive federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. Such a move would take away Idaho’s management of the species.

On another front, a U.S. District Court judge in August rejected a request by conservation groups to temporarily block Idaho’s expanded wolf trapping and snaring rules. Environmental groups said Idaho’s expanded wolf-killing regulations violate the Endangered Species Act because they will lead to the illegal killing of federally protected grizzly bears and Canada lynx. Schriever said Thursday that no grizzlies have so far been caught in a wolf trap.

It’s not clear when the court will make a ruling on the merits in that case.
‘Forever chemicals’ in deer, fish challenge hunters, tourism
By PATRICK WHITTLE
October 5, 2022

A 10-point white-tailed deer walks through the woods in Freeport, Maine, on Nov. 10, 2015. Wildlife agencies are finding elevated levels of PFAS chemicals, also called "forever chemicals," in game animals such as deer, prompting new restrictions on hunting and fishing in some parts of the country. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Wildlife agencies in the U.S. are finding elevated levels of a class of toxic chemicals in game animals such as deer — and that’s prompting health advisories in some places where hunting and fishing are ways of life and key pieces of the economy.

Authorities have detected the high levels of PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, in deer in several states, including Michigan and Maine, where legions of hunters seek to bag a buck every fall. Sometimes called “forever chemicals” for their persistence in the environment, PFAS are industrial compounds used in numerous products, such as nonstick cookware and clothing.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched an effort last year to limit pollution from the chemicals, which are linked to health problems including cancer and low birth weight.

But discovery of the chemicals in wild animals hunted for sport and food represents a new challenge that some states have started to confront by issuing “do not eat” advisories for deer and fish and expanding testing for PFAS in them.

“The fact there is an additional threat to the wildlife — the game that people are going out to hunt and fish — is a threat to those industries, and how people think about hunting and fishing,” said Jennifer Hill, associate director of the Great Lakes Regional Center for the National Wildlife Federation.

PFAS chemicals are an increasing focus of public health and environmental agencies, in part because they don’t degrade or do so slowly in the environment and can remain in a person’s bloodstream for life.

The chemicals get into the environment through production of consumer goods and waste. T hey also have been used in firefighting foam and in agriculture. PFAS-tainted sewage sludge has long been applied to fields as fertilizer and compost.

In Maine, where the chemicals were detected in well water at hundreds of times the federal health advisory level, legislators passed a law in 2021 requiring manufacturers to report their use of the chemicals and to phase them out by 2030. Environmental health advocates have said Maine’s law could be a model for other states, some working on their own PFAS legislation.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed a bill in September that bans the chemicals from cosmetics sold in the state. And more than 20 states have proposed or adopted limits for PFAS in drinking water, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

More testing will likely find the chemicals are present in other game animals besides deer, such as wild turkeys and fish, said David Trahan, executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, a hunting and outdoors advocacy group.

The discovery could have a negative impact on outdoor tourism in the short term, Trahan said. “If people are unwilling to hunt and fish, how are we going to manage those species?” he said. “You’re getting it in your water, you’re getting it in your food, you’re getting it in wild game.”

Maine was one of the first states to detect PFAS in deer. The state issued a “do not eat” advisory last year for deer harvested in the Fairfield area, about 80 miles (129 kilometers) north of Portland, after several of the animals tested positive for elevated levels.

The state is now expanding the testing to more animals across a wider area, said Nate Webb, wildlife division director at the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “Lab capacity has been challenging,” he said, “but I suspect there will be more facilities coming online to help ease that burden — in Maine and elsewhere in the country.”

Wisconsin has tested deer, ducks and geese for PFAS, and as a result issued a “do not eat” advisory for deer liver around Marinette, about 55 miles (89 kilometers) north of Green Bay. The state also asked fishermen to reduce consumption of Lake Superior’s popular rainbow smelt to one meal per month.

Some chemicals, including PFAS, can accumulate in the liver over time because the organ filters the chemicals from the blood, Wisconsin’s natural resources department told hunters. New Hampshire authorities have also issued an advisory to avoid consuming deer liver.

Michigan was the first state to assess PFAS in deer, said Tammy Newcomb, senior executive assistant director for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

The state issued its first “do not eat” advisory in 2018 for deer taken in and near Oscoda Township. Michigan has since issued an advisory against eating organs, such as liver and kidneys, from deer, fish or any other wild game anywhere in the state. It has also studied waterfowl throughout the state in areas of PFAS surface water contamination.

The state’s expanded testing also has proven beneficial because it helped authorities find out which areas don’t have a PFAS problem, Newcomb said.

“People like to throw up their arms and say we can’t do anything about it. I like to point to our results and say that’s not true,” Newcomb said. “Finding PFAS as a contaminant of concern has been the exception and not the rule.”

The chemical has also been found in shellfish that are collected recreationally and commercially. Scientists from the Florida International University Institute of Environment sampled more than 150 oysters from around the state and detected PFAS in every one, according to their study in August. Natalia Soares Quinete, an assistant professor in the institute’s chemistry and biochemistry department, described the chemicals as “a long-term poison” that jeopardizes human health.

Dr. Leo Trasande, a professor of pediatrics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine who has studied PFAS, said the best way to avoid negative health effects is reducing exposure. But, Trasande said that’s difficult to do because the chemicals are so commonplace and long-lasting in the environment.

“If you’re seeing it in humans, you’re likely going to see the effects in animals,” he said.

Wildlife authorities have tried to inform hunters of the presence of PFAS in deer with posted signs in hunting areas as well as advisories on social media and the internet. One such sign, in Michigan, told hunters that high amounts of PFAS “may be found in deer and could be harmful to your health.”

Kip Adams, chief conservation officer for the National Deer Association, said the discovery of PFAS in states like Maine and Michigan is very concerning to hunters.

“With the amount of venison my family eats, I can’t imagine not being able to do that,” Adams said. “To this point, everything we’ve done has been about sharing information and making sure people are aware of it.”

___

Follow Patrick Whittle on Twitter: @pxwhittle

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.


This photo provided by the National Wildlife Federation shows a sign warning hunters not to eat deer because of high amounts of toxic chemicals in their meat, in Oscoda, Mich., March 26, 2021. Wildlife agencies in some parts of the country are finding elevated levels of PFAS chemicals in game animals such as deer, prompting new restrictions on hunting and fishing.
(Photo by Drew YoungeDyke, National Wildlife Federation via AP)
FASCIST WORLD FRONT
Trump speaks via video at rally of global far-right in Spain
By JOSEPH WILSON and ALICIA LEÓN
yesterday


Spain's Vox party leader Santiago Abascal speaks to supporters during a rally in Madrid Spain, Sunday Oct. 9, 2022. Former U.S. President Donald Trump has thrown his weight behind Spain's far-right in a video shown at a rally in Madrid that also featured messages Italy's Giorgia Meloni and Hungary's Viktor Orban. The annual rally comes just weeks after Abascal and the rest of Europe's far-right celebrated the victory of Meloni's neo-fascist Brothers of Italy Party. (Jesus Hellin/Europa Press via AP)

MADRID (AP) — Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw his weight behind Spain’s far-right Sunday in a video shown at a rally in Madrid that also featured messages by the leading stars of Europe’s populist right like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

In a recording that lasted under 40 seconds made while Trump was on a plane, Trump thanked Spain’s far-right Vox party and its leader Santiago Abascal for what he called the “great job” they do.

“We have to make sure that we protect our borders and do lots of very good conservative things,” Trump said. “Spain is a great country and we want to keep it a great country. So congratulations to Vox for so many great messages you get out to the people of Spain and the people of the world.”

Vox captured national attention on Spain’s political landscape in 2019 when it became the third-largest force in Spain’s Parliament after an election that led to a national left-wing coalition that still holds power. Vox’s messages include zero tolerance for Catalan separatism, disdain for gender equality, diatribes against unauthorized immigration from Africa and embracing both the “Reconquista” of medieval Spain from Islam as well as the legacy of Gen. Francisco Franco’s 20th-century dictatorship.


Abascal returned the flattery when he took to the stage at the outdoor venue after more video messages by European and South American right-wing politicians and an in-person speech by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

“My thanks for President Donald Trump, a visionary in the fight for sovereign nations, a visionary in the fight for secure borders, who has had to suffer (attacks) from the most powerful establishment in the world and the largest media attack that any world leader has had to face in recent memory,” Abascal told the crowd of several thousand, many waving red-and-yellow Spanish flags.



Despite its spectacular rise, the party led by Abascal failed to meet the expectations it set for itself in regional contests this year and had suffered its first serious bout of in-fighting among its leaders. Vox is now eyeing regional and municipal elections next year as it battles to surpass Spain’s traditional conservatives.

The annual rally came just weeks after Abascal and the rest of Europe’s far-right celebrated the victory of Meloni’s neo-fascist Brothers of Italy Party.

Meloni’s recorded message lasted several minutes and was focused on her priorities as she prepares to become Italian premier: pushing for a price cap on energy in the European Union and recovering economic self-reliance.



The win by Meloni has worried European Union leaders that Italy, the bloc’s third-largest economy, could put national interests first, like Hungary and Poland are doing.

“We are not monsters, the people understand that. Long live Vox, long live Spain, long live Italy, long live Europe patriots,″ Meloni said. “Only by winning in our countries can Europe become a political giant that we want, and not a bureaucratic giant.”

Vox and its supporters are hoping that Meloni’s surge in Italy can spill over to Spain.

“Meloni’s victory has given us reasons to believe that this is possible and that our side is not as demonized in Europe as some want to make us believe,” said Francisco Hermida, a 25-year-old entrepreneur attending the rally.

Trump and others leading figures of the world’s popular right have been trying for years to weave together networks of support in what they describe as a winner-take-all struggle against the political left. Orban was in the U.S. recently to speak to leading conservatives there and met with Trump.

The Vox rally also featured video appearances by former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, Chilean right-wing politician José Antonio Kast, the daughter of former Bolivian interim President Jeanine Añez, and U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz.


“On the one side, there is the global elites and the global left, that is growing evermore thuggish and violent, on the other side are conservative populist, who share the values of God, and country and family and freedom,” Cruz said. “Sometimes the left scores dangerous victories, as we saw in Colombia. Sometimes the good guys win, like we saw in Italy.”

Cruz said he is looking forward to a landslide Republican win in the U.S. congressional midterm election next month. Trump has been campaigning for right-wing candidates in the Nov. 8 election and is pondering another presidential run for the 2024 vote.

___

Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain. AP writer Colleen Barry contributed to this report from Milan, Italy.









UNDERFUNDED PUBLIC EDUCATION
Kids with disabilities face off-the-books school suspensions

By MEREDITH KOLODNER and ANNIE MAOctober 4, 2022

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Lisa Manwell works on school work with her son John Jinks, 12, at their home in Canton, Mich., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022. Manwell says her son was improperly removed from his classroom last year because of behaviors that stemmed from his disability. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)


The phone call from her son’s school was alarming. The assistant principal told her to come to the school immediately.

But when Lisa Manwell arrived at Pioneer Middle School in Plymouth, Michigan, her son wasn’t sick or injured. He was sitting calmly in the principal’s office.

John, who has ADHD and finds it soothing to fidget during class, had been removed from the classroom after he refused to stop using a pair of safety scissors to cut his cuticles.

When she asked why he couldn’t stay for the rest of the day, Manwell said the school told her they would call child protective services if she didn’t take him home.

REACTION TO AP'S REPORTING– Senators call for stronger rules on off-the-books suspension

The call was just one of a dozen that Manwell received last fall telling her John couldn’t stay in school because of behaviors she says stemmed from his disability, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Many schools have promised to cut down on suspensions, since kids can’t learn as well when they aren’t in class. But none of these pickups was ever recorded as suspensions, despite the missed class time.

The practice is known as informal removal, defined by the U.S. Education Department as an action taken by school staff in response to a child’s behavior that excludes the child for part or all of the school day — or even indefinitely.

Excessive use of informal removals amounts to a form of off-the-books discipline — a de facto denial of education that evades accountability, advocates and legal experts say. It has special implications for kids with disabilities: Informally removing these students circumvents federal law that protects them from being disciplined or barred from class for behaviors related to their disability.

Since the pandemic began, parents of disabled kids say the practice is on the rise, denying their kids their legal right to an education.

“This is a repeat issue that we see in enforcement across the country, over years,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for the department’s Office for Civil Rights. “And that means that the practice has taken hold in a way that is dangerous for students and needs to be addressed.”

In July, the department issued guidance on discriminatory practices in discipline for students with disabilities. Lhamon said the guidance included informal removals because of how frequently they appeared in the office’s investigations of complaints against school districts.

Informal removals can happen through frequent parent pickups, shortened school days or hours spent in “time-out” rooms.

The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report interviewed 20 families in 10 states who described being called repeatedly and at all hours of the school day to pick up their children. In some cases, parents were called less than an hour into the school day. Others said they had to leave work to get their child so frequently they lost their jobs. Many felt they had no choice but to change schools, or even districts.

Because the removals aren’t recorded, there’s no way to quantify how often they happen. But the National Disability Rights Network says it has seen an increase during the pandemic.

Teacher shortages mean there are fewer staffers available to do evaluations and provide services for disabled students, creating “more of an incentive or more of a push for getting kids with behavioral needs out,” said Dan Stewart, the organization’s managing attorney for education and employment.

Students of color with a disability appear to be disproportionately affected based on anecdotal reports to the network from disability rights advocates around the country.

“It’s pervasive,” said Ginny Fogg, an attorney at Disability Rights North Carolina, “and the reason for that is that most parents don’t know their rights and the consequence for the school system is not enough to make them not do it.”

“The remedy isn’t, ‘You just can’t go to school,’” she added. “The law was enacted 50 years ago to prevent this very outcome — that students with disabilities aren’t allowed to go to school and participate in an education.”

Manwell said the calls from her son’s school felt relentless.

“They would be calling my personal phone, my work phone. They were calling my husband, who works nights,” said Manwell, a resource planner at Ford Motor Co. “It was impossible. I couldn’t function. I never knew when they were going to call or what was going to happen.”

An official from the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools district in Michigan where John goes to school said he couldn’t comment on specific student issues, citing federal student privacy law.

Federal law protects disabled students from being repeatedly disciplined or removed from school for behaviors related to their disability. If they are suspended for more than 10 days, families are entitled to a meeting with the school to determine whether the behaviors are a result of the child’s disability. If they are, then the school must offer adjustments instead of suspension. For example, if a child’s disability makes it difficult for them to focus in a loud classroom with dozens of other children, the parent has the right to request a quieter classroom or one with fewer children.

The Education Department’s July guidance made clear that children who are informally removed have the same rights, such as reviews of whether the student’s behavior was a result of their disability, as those who had been officially suspended.

Tricia Ellinger says she would have requested a hearing to make sure her 10-year-old daughter was getting appropriate services and support, had she known that her frequent removals from the classroom amounted to suspensions.

One day last spring, she received three phone calls in rapid succession, telling her to immediately pick up Cassie from Kenneth J. Carberry Elementary School in Emmett, Idaho. When she arrived, her daughter was sitting quietly in the school’s resource room eating a snack. She says a school staff member told her that Cassie was refusing to do her work and needed to go home.

“When I got her in the car, I asked her, ‘Cass, what happened? Did you tear up your notebook? Did you throw your pencil?’” Ellinger recalled. “She said, ‘No, it was just hard. Math is hard.’”

The call was one of about 20 Ellinger says she got last year from the school, which is designed specifically to educate students with disabilities. She says her daughter was also taken out of class repeatedly and kept in a room by herself. None of the removals was recorded as suspensions.

Emmett School District Superintendent Craig Woods said he couldn’t comment, citing federal student privacy law.

Families often do not know what grounds they have to lodge a complaint, Lhamon said. Sometimes they aren’t aware their child should not have been suspended in the first place.

“That is so concerning when schools are excluding students for reasons that are unlawful,” she said. “We want our kids to be in class, learning with other students, fully participant and respected as learners. We do not want our school communities to be sending a message that there’s some category of kids who can’t be there.”

Manwell said most of the calls she got last year from her son’s school were a result of bullying. On the fourth day of school, John got shoved in the locker room, and she got a call to pick him up. Another time, he went to the bathroom and another student threatened to beat him up.

Because of his disability, John was supposed to be granted access to a quiet room so he could recover from difficult incidents. But often, she said, either there wasn’t a room or when he didn’t want to return to class, she’d get a call to come pick him up.

“It was just the stress of never knowing what I was sending my kid into each day. I was worrying the whole time he was gone,” said Manwell. “I could see the damage.”

“He was withdrawing. He started talking about hurting himself,” she said, her voice breaking.

In January, she made the difficult decision to switch John to homebound instruction, sending him to a tutoring center every day for a couple of hours and rearranging her work schedule. It made her life more predictable, she said, and John began to act like his old self.

She said she’d like to send him back to school but doesn’t trust what will happen.

“You want to protect your kids, right?” she said. “I just can’t send him to a school where he won’t be safe.”

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Parents, has your child been removed from class, especially because of a disability? We want to hear from you. Visit: https://hechingerreport.org/informal-removals/

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More coverage of the pandemic’s impact on back-to-school: https://apnews.com/hub/back-to-school

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This story was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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The Associated Press’ reporting around issues of race and ethnicity is supported in part by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Half-Earth Socialism’s Five Book Plan

Verso Books
16 May 2022

As authors Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass argue in their thrilling and provocative new book, we must humbly accept that humanity cannot fully understand or control the earth—but we can plan new energy systems, large-scale rewilding, and food production for the common good.

Here the authors present their Five Book Plan for imagining a utopian eco-socialist future – or a future at all.



Over the next generation, humanity will confront a dystopian future of climate disaster and mass extinction. Yet the only ‘solutions’ on offer are toothless cap-and-trade programmes, catastrophic geoengineering schemes, and privatized conservation, which will do nothing to reverse the damage suffered by the biosphere. Indeed, these mainstream approaches assume that hyper-consumerism in the Global North can continue unabated. It can’t.

As authors Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass argue in their thrilling and provocative new book, we must humbly accept that humanity cannot fully understand or control the earth—but we can plan new energy systems, large-scale rewilding, and food production for the common good.

The authors collaborated with designers from the Jain Family Institute and Trust to create a video game based on the book, at play.half.earth.

Here the authors present their Five Book Plan for imagining a utopian eco-socialist future – or a future at all.

*****


Half-Earth Socialism is a work of utopian socialism, a tradition that has been largely ignored by the Left over the last century. Utopianism is an inherently interdisciplinary genre as a good utopian is forced to contemplate the myriad facets of a new society, from how to organise the world economy to how one eats and lives. By melding economics, ecology, philosophy, and fiction to delineate the utopia of Half-Earth socialism we were pulled into disciplines beyond our own specialties of history and physics. In short, it has been difficult for us to select only five books from the intellectual potpourri inspiring our zany manifesto.

What the books we chose have in common is a commitment to rigorous contemplation of a new society. Indeed, most people have the wrong impression of utopianism. It is not idle daydreaming, but technically difficult and politically necessary work. It is hard to dismiss William Morris’ News from Nowhere as playful fantasy after reading the chapter of ‘how the change came’. There, Morris imagines how a socialist revolution might transpire and details how a worker-led movement slowly builds dual power to finally overcome the bourgeois state. Perry Anderson called the chapter an ‘extraordinary theoretical feat [...] of remarkable complexity and verisimilitude’. We try to build upon this tradition of hard-nosed utopianism in the fourth chapter of our book, where we imagine life in the mid-twenty first century some ten years after a Half-Earth socialist revolution. It was through writing and imagining such a world that we could see more clearly for ourselves the reciprocal relationship between utopian and quotidian politics. Current struggles influence how we imagine the future, while utopian thought directs these struggles by cohering a broad coalition working together towards the shared horizon of a new society.



1) E.O. Wilson, Half-Earth (Liveright 2016)

Two thirds of our book’s title are borrowed from E. O. Wilson’s monograph, Half-Earth. Wilson – who identified hundreds of new ant species, wrote Pulitzer-prize winning popular books on ecology, and liaised with ‘race realist’ charlatans – studied the relationship between land-area and biodiversity as a young scholar in the 1960s. The insights from his seminal Theory of Island Biogeography (co-authored with Robert MacArthur) undergirded the argument of Half-Earth almost fifty years later. Wilson argued in the latter book that ‘a reduction in area [of a habitat] results in a fraction of the species disappearing in time by roughly the fourth root of the area’. To infuse lifeblood into the dry vein of mathematics, imagine ninety per cent of wild ecosystems are lost – forests turned into pastures, mountains decapitated for mines, suburbs spilling over into greenbelts – then one can expect nearly half of the species to vanish. Wilson did not have much faith that the remaining ten per cent of the wild world would provide much refuge because ‘a team of lumbermen’ could raze it ‘in a month’. Yet, if fifty per cent of the world is preserved – which would create Half-Earth – then only fifteen per cent of the world’s biodiversity would be lost. A tragedy to be sure, but not a disaster of geological proportions. (Perhaps humanity might later opt for a Two-Thirds Earth, who knows). Near the end of the book, Wilson lists eighteen ‘best places in the biosphere’ – from Californian redwood forests to Mozamqbiue’s Gorongosa National Park – that could become the kernels for an expanded system of global nature preserves.

We build upon Wilson’s idea because it is not sufficient in itself. Most importantly, conservationists need to reckon with their movement’s dark past if they want to build a broad coalition that could actually realise their biodiverse utopia. The history of Half-Earth includes other conservationists beyond Wilson – indeed, some are so nefarious as to make him appear mostly harmless. For example, the founders of the WILD Foundation include a Jungian con-man, an admirer of Rhodesia and pioneer in militarised conservation, as well as a game ranger who worked closely with the Apartheid government and the quising Inkatha Freedom Party. The new allies of the conservation movement are billionaire philanthropists, which has led to the delusion that half the world could be bought and turned into ranches for big game hunters and gourmands. Given this history, it may be tempting for socialists to renounce the goal of conservation altogether. Instead the Left needs a radical conservation programme to ensure a task as enormous as Half-Earth is justly realised. Decolonizing conservation has myriad benefits for biodiversity, climate, and people alike, as Indigenous-managed forests sequester twice as much carbon as other lands and support more biodiversity than conventional nature reserves. Protecting the biosphere must be a priority. The Left and its allies cannot stand by and let the worst extinction event in sixty-six millions years transpire without a fight.

We also chose to name Half-Earth Socialism after Wilson’s concept because it expresses the humility and groundedness of our project. We wanted to discuss the environmental crisis in all of its facets – not just climate change – because the Left so far has shown little interest in biodiversity or animal rights. Furthermore, Half-Earth foregrounds the problem of land scarcity because there are trade-offs between the competing goals of meat production, biofuels, and conservation. To create Half-Earth, conservationists must embrace socialism, and socialists should imagine a new utopia predicated upon a new relationship to nature.





2) Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Parnassus 1968)

Ursula Le Guin not only transformed the genre of science fiction, she also changed the way socialists imagined utopias. Fredric Jameson described her books as an exercise in ‘world-reduction’, by which he meant Le Guin’s practice of honing in on questions that interested her – the genderless society in The Left Hand of Darkness – by shedding everything that could clutter her thought experiment. Her spare writing style differed from the genre’s frequent striving for the grandiose; instead of space operas, Le Guin’s books were ‘anti-Dune’ in Jameson’s judgement. She explained that her ‘carrier bag of fiction’ was filled with ‘far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions’ and was instead ‘full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don't understand’. She had little interest in stories of Promethean mastery or easy utopias, and instead focussed on the friction encountered in changing the world.

Le Guin’s overtly political novel The Dispossessed might seem the most relevant for socialist theorising (and indeed is widely admired on the Left), yet we were surprised by the unexpected resonances between our book and A Wizard of Earthsea. In Earthsea, a wizard’s magic comes from knowing the ‘true names’ of nature, and Ged – the magical young protagonist – must study ‘the name of every cape, point, bay, sound, inlet, channel, harbor, shallows, reef and rock of the shores of Lossow, a little islet of the Pelnish Sea’. Despite their prodigious learning, wizards accept the limits of knowledge. ‘The lists [of True Names] are not finished,’ Ged is told. ‘Nor will they be, till world’s end.’ Half-Earth Socialism espouses a similar epistemology (a philosophy of knowledge). To counter Marxism’s congenital ‘Prometheanism’ – the desire to dominate nature – we engage with the ideology’s roots in the works of GWF Hegel, a philosopher who deeply influenced Karl Marx. Hegel believed history was propelled by the ‘humanization of nature’, the process where the alien natural world is transformed by labour. When people turn a river into a canal or a forest into a field, they see human consciousness reflected back at themselves and thus reconcile with this ‘humanised’ nature. Both Hegel and Marx welcomed a future where the entire world would be humanised. We counter that Prometheanism is a dangerous creed and the attempt to fully humanise nature will inevitably crash into the accumulating debris of a wrecked biosphere long before it is achieved. Half-Earth is a kind of ‘world-reduction’, as the humanisation of nature must be careful and even reversed (i.e., rewilded) to ensure the stability of essential systems we do not fully understand.

Ged learns the lesson of epistemic humility after casting a spell he half understands and accidentally releases a daemonic ‘shadow’. Zoonotic diseases, which emerge from disturbing biomes and the brutal livestock industry, are shadows of a foolhardy humanisation of nature. In his Jena Lectures, Hegel speaks of the ‘name-giving power’ of language, where Geist incorporates nature into the ‘realm of names’. Perhaps one day humanity will see the magic in trying to know nature without seeking dominion over it.



3) Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (Verso 2013)

Late in 2013, Vettese heard Philip Mirowski speak at e-flux, an artists’ den on East Broadway in Manhattan. Mirowski, a science and technology scholar who had previously studied neoclassical economics and the commodification of university research, was presenting his new work on the history of neoliberalism – an ideology commonly associated with the conservative reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – and its near-death experience after the 2008 financial crisis. Mirowski is an idiosyncratic scholar, whose lectures can be compared to a Cormac MacCarthy novel spoken aloud – erudite, bizarre, menacing, and bleak. Vettese was enchanted. Mirowksi makes clear the necessity of taking neoliberal thought seriously, rather than dismissing it as mindless ‘market fundamentalism’. Mirowski clearly defines neoliberalism as the belief in the market as an ‘über information processor’ able to efficiently discover and collect knowledge in the form of prices. It was this epistemological turn in the inter-war period that cohered the nascent neoliberal movement and encouraged its hostility to rival knowledge-producing institutions, such as university science.

Half-Earth Socialism engages closely with neoliberal thought. In the introduction, we imagine the next twenty-five years of neoliberal hegemony, which in many ways was inspired by the final chapter in Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. In both cases, toothless cap-and-trade programmes buy time for the neoliberals’ preferred solution to the climate crisis: geoengineering. Rather than infringing on the semi-divine market by restricting fossil fuel firms and the many auxiliary industries that depend upon them, scientist-entrepreneurs will develop reckless schemes such as ‘solar radiation management’ (SRM) to manage the climate crisis. SRM relies on high-flying jets to spray sulphur high into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back into space and thus cool the Earth. The consequences of SRM are unpredictable but likely to be dire. Avoiding such a future requires the renewal of the socialist movement within a broad coalition. We believe the Left should engage in self-critique, as neoliberals did after the Great Depression demolished their erstwhile faith in laissez faire. In Half-Earth Socialism, we similarly begin with the epistemological question of ‘what can we know’ and answer that the biosphere is far more unknowable than the economy. With this principle in place, we see the need to control the economy within planetary boundaries to protect complex systems we cannot fully understand. Mirowski shows the need to understand the ruthless and adaptable neoliberal movement, but perhaps the Left can learn from it too.



4) Otto Neurath, Economic Writings Selections 1904–1945 (Springer 2004)

Although in the popular imagination neoliberalism was born in the conservative revolution of the 1980s, its true origins lie in a memorandum written by a socialist named Otto Neurath. A largely forgotten polymath from early twentieth century Vienna, Neurath articulated a highly original vision of economic democracy that sparked the ‘socialist calculation debate’ between neoliberals and the Left. In 1919, Neurath was appointed the head planner for the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, which emerged during the German Revolution after World War I. His proposed method was based on his experience as a war planner and study on the moneyless economy of ancient Egypt. In ‘Through War Economy and Economy in-Kind’ he extended the lessons learned from wartime planning to a socialist utopia: ‘during the war people everywhere turned toward a conscious shaping of life’ because production needed to be carried out in a way that ‘might not in itself be profitable’. If war planners quickly got rid of profit to guide their decisions, they too realised there was no other universal metric – no ‘war units’ – to guide their schemes. Instead, ‘total plans’ were what mattered, an approach that could be adopted by socialist planners to build new utopias. Neurath imagined planners and parliaments debating several possible blueprints for the future that would balance trade-offs through the ‘scientific study of utopias’. For example, does society want more houses or shorter working hours? Neurath’s memorandum provoked the ire of Ludwig von Mises, a conservative economist and Neurath’s former colleague at the Ministry of War. Mises laid the foundation of neoliberal epistemology by claiming Neurath’s economy would collapse without the information-gathering capacity of markets. Yet, it is notable that at the very beginning of the debate, Mises conceded to Neurath that the market could not properly value the environment.

By studying this early exchange between these two Austrian rivals, it becomes possible to imagine a new socialism fit for our age of environmental crisis. We agree with Neurath’s critique of capitalist ‘pseudorationality’ because the market will never accept the rationale of letting trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuels languish ground. Instead, humanity should collectively decide what kind of world it wants to live in. A new generation of Neurathian planners would use physical units (e.g., steel, land, concrete, labour, petroleum, lithium) rather than money and estimate the consequences of such plans on living standards and the biosphere. This might sound technocratic, but Neurath was deeply hostile to the rule of experts. He lambasted ‘the totalitarian kind [who] may try to make scientists the leaders of a new society [...] like the magicians, nobles, or churchmen of former societies.’ Neoliberals may be priests of the market, but Neurath knew socialism required an educated and engaged citizenry. By collaborating with artists Marie Reidemeister and Gerd Arntz, Neurath created the ISOTYPE pictorial language — a precursor to infographics today — to help the Austrian working class visualise the economy. If they could see the economy, Neurath believed, then they could imagine one day controlling it. This is why neoliberals stress the inscrutability of the market. Our attempt to practise Neurathian pedagogy is a video game based on Half-Earth Socialism (available at http://half.earth). You play as a planetary planner experimenting with a wide variety of technologies and policies to create the good life for all and overcome the environmental crisis. In a nod to Neurath’s call for ‘scientific utopias’, our game includes a real climate model. Hopefully, your plans win democratic approval and avoid catastrophe along the path to ecological stability.



5) Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries (MIT 2011)

Most socialists thought that Neurath lost the first round of the socialist calculation debate to Mises because Neurath offered no mechanisms for drawing up and realising his proposed ‘total plans’. War economies, after all, are hardly paragons of freedom and efficiency. The neoliberal critique of socialism was based on the impossibility of collecting the information needed for planning. How then can humanity co-ordinate the world economy without markets? In Half-Earth Socialism we journey through the twentieth century to survey experiments in planning to glean how Neurath’s vision might be realised. For example, we examine mathematician Leonid Kantorovich’s achievement in the 1930s of creating the field of linear programming, as well as his failed effort in the 1960s to ‘program the USSR’. We also draw on historian Diana Kurkovsky-West’s research on Olga Burmatov, who developed novel tools in the 1980s to jointly consider ecological and economic factors while planning a huge new railway in Siberia.

One of the fruitful case studies that we draw on is Chile’s Cybersyn (or Synco in Spanish). To understand this oft-admired socailist project, we relied on Eden Medina’s excellent historical monograph, Cybernetic Revolutionaries. After the election of Salvador Allende in 1970, the government attempted to transition from capitalism to democratic socialism. The public sector grew rapidly as firms were nationalised, and Allende and his staff recognised that a new kind of management was needed to uphold their egalitarian principles while maintaining economic productivity. The government invited Stafford Beer, a consultant whose book Cybernetics and Management had recently been translated into Spanish. Cybernetics was a new, sprawling field focussed on human-machine interfaces. Beer believed that complex systems like the economy could be controlled, but that the controller should create a model with the flexibility and complexity commensurate with the original system. His approach, the ‘viable system model’, assumed that worker self-management would be largely sufficient to co-ordinate activity at a single firm, but that additional levels of co-ordination were necessary to ensure that firms received the materials they needed, that investment was rationally dispersed, that crises could be overcome, and that the economy as a whole could be directed towards collectively decided ends. In Half-Earth Socialism, we try to update Beer’s cybernetic vision with advances that have accrued over the past half-century, especially in Pendergrass’s field of climate modelling and data assimilation. Medina’s history reveals the creativity and courage of those trying to create socialism in Chile before the neoliberal-led coup crushed it. Today, socialists can learn from their movement’s past to create scientific utopias for the future.





Half-Earth Socialism
by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese
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April 2022 / 9781839760334

“Half-Earth Socialism conclusively demonstrates how a liveable future requires a fundamentally different relationship to the Earth, the only home our species has ever known. A must read for post-capitalists and those who care about the climate crisis.”

– Aaron Bastani, author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism
In Tribute to Meredith Tax

Verso editor Jessie Kindig remembers socialist feminist activist and author Meredith Tax, and we reprint the 2021 introduction to Tax's classic of socialist feminist labor history, The Rising of the Women.


Meredith Tax at a recent demonstration

Meredith Tax, dynamic voice of socialist feminism for over fifty years, passed away recently at the age of 80. Meredith was one of a generation of women I have learned from and looked up to all my life.

I'm happy to say that we can count Meredith among Verso's authors, for we just last year released Meredith's important work of American socialist feminist labor history, The Rising of the Women, in our Feminist Classics series. Rising is a classic that examined the fraught alliances between working-class women and middle-class women, and the possibility for what Meredith called "a united front of women." I remember reading an old secondhand edition raptly in my dorm room as a college student: I had read socialist labor history, but I hadn't ever read socialist feminist labor history -- but here it was, bringing together what often felt like unreconcilable parts of my political world!

I never met Meredith in person -- she was already ill when we signed her book -- but even over the phone you could tell that she was dynamic, restless, driven, and had a wry sense of humor. Just a few moments from her life: as a young activist, she was kicked out of the Leninist October League for criticizing their treatment of women, and rankled Planned Parenthood by pointing out their sterilization abuse of poor women and women of color. A part of the socialist feminist New York left in the 1970s and 80s, she never stopped working; most recently, documenting the struggle of Kurdish women fighters in Rojava and the new forms of demcoratic feminism they were building in the midst of war.

Meredith helped to found CARASA, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, one of the foundational reproductive justice organizations in the Americas, as well as the PEN America Center Women's Committee -- and I'm sure, a host of other things. A true heir of the "bread and roses too" tradition, she even wrote novels about bohemian life in Greenwich Village!

Below is her 2021 introduction to The Rising of the Women -- a fitting tribute to the work she's left us with, which will guide us in all the work we have yet to do.

– Jessie Kindig,
Brooklyn, NY, 2022


The Rising of the Women
by Meredith Tax
Paperback
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368 pages / April 2022 / 9781839765742

Forty Years Later


In the late seventies, when I wrote The Rising of the Women, most of the US left thought revolution would come via the classical Marxist strategy of building the labor movement until it was strong enough to form its own political party and, through elections, command the heights of government. The anarchist version of this strategy was that the labor movement would gain power through a general strike, not the vote. In both cases, women were but an adjunct to the main protagonist: the (white) male worker whose courage and collective strength would transform society and free us all.

Almost 175 years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, nothing remotely resembling either scenario has yet taken place in the United States. There have been many attempts to explain why the Marxist model couldn’t be implemented, from the continual availability of new farmland as the frontier extended and indigenous peoples were killed off and expropriated, to the constant flood of new immigrants who could be used to break strikes and the divisive effects of racism in a system founded on slavery. All of these factors distinguished the US economic system from the nineteenth-century English capitalism on which Marx based his paradigm—though, as Cedric Robinson points out, the economies of England and the rest of Europe incorporated slavery from the time of ancient Athens. Robinson believes Marx’s desire to produce elegant theory led to serious oversimplifications. “Fully aware of the constant place women and children held in the workforce,” he writes, “Marx still deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist, noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation.”

As I worked on The Rising of the Women, I too had doubts about the reliability of Marxist revolutionary predictions—partly because the US labor movement had only a fraction of the strength of its UK counterpart, but principally because the theory excluded women and community organizing. By 1984, I had lost so much faith in the paradigm that, when I made a speech for Monthly Review, which had published The Rising of the Women, I focused on the socialist tradition’s neglect of women’s organizing:

A pattern of male repression, exclusion, devaluation and just not getting the point runs like a thread through the history of the left. With few important exceptions, left-wing movements have been overwhelmingly led and controlled by men and serviced by women: men making speeches, women making coffee. As a result, our hundred-odd years of socialist history is lopsided, reflecting the ideas, history, and experience of only half the species. Within left-wing organizations, the “woman question,” as Leninists quaintly call it, is commonly treated as a petty-bourgeois diversion from the class struggle, its concerns trivial items to be placed on the bottom of an agenda and skipped for lack of time. Women who try to stimulate discussion of it are normally encouraged to tum their attention to more important matters… The socialist movement has paid the price for such stupidity. Its theory does not accurately describe the world and its practice does not prefigure any future society most of us would want to belong to. No wonder it has reached an impasse. How could a theory and practice based—at best—on the experience of only half the human race possibly be adequate?

Today I would go farther, possibly even as far as Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned former Marxist guerilla and ideological leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, who said, “The role the working class have once played, must now be taken over by the sisterhood of women.”

Theories about the failure of Marxism in the United States also overlook a crucial aspect of US history: every time a progres- sive movement became strong enough to cause concern, the state came down on it with a heavy hand, murdering, jailing, blacklist- ing, and deporting as many leftists as it could find. This happened in the Red Scare following World War I, the McCarthy period, and the attacks during the sixties on the civil rights and antiwar movements, particularly the Black Panthers.

With this history in mind, and in light of the current danger from the extreme right, I believe our strategy for profound social change in the United States must be based not only on the labor movement, but on two other nineteenth-century movements, those of Black people and of feminists, both born in the struggle to abolish slavery. Against a state as powerful as this one, only a united front that bring these movements and labor together will have enough muscle for serious transformation. And time is running out.
The Current Crisis

We are at a turning point in human history. The climate emergency demands that we immediately move from a fossil fuel–based economy to one that is environmentally sustainable. This will require drastic political and economic changes. Nor is the climate crisis the only one we face: by October 2021 the COVID-19 epidemic had already produced over 242 million cases, according to the World Health Organization, and it has not yet run its course. The economic depression resulting from the epidemic is likely to doom millions more to homelessness, hunger, and unemployment.

Climate change, COVID, and the economic slide have put overwhelming stress on a system that had already reached its breaking point. In the last thirty years, global economic integration based on free market ideology has led to obscene wealth for a very few and desperate poverty and uncertainty for most. The decisions that shape today’s world are more often made by trans- national corporations than by governments or national elites. Unwilling to relinquish the power they once had, some members of these elites support right-wing politicians whose appeal is based on a toxic brew of racism, fundamentalism, hatred of women and LBGTQ+ people, and paranoia about cultural dilution by migrants. With help from the religious right, a new axis of fascist politicians has come to power, including Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Donald Trump here in the United States.

These politicians, and the right-wing movements behind them, are a danger not only to democracy but to life on earth itself, for their disregard for climate change will make it even more difficult to deal with global warming. Lacking the legitimacy that comes from solving real social problems, they rule by force, fear, and deception, relying on the military, police, and support from fundamentalists and a captive media to contain popular dissent. In order to build their base, they target minorities, migrants, women, and LGBTQ+ people; undermine basic democratic rights like voting, assembly, and freedom of speech; and invoke religion to attack the very idea of universal human rights. Some are open fascists; others are willing to accommodate fascism.

Politicians of the center, who spent the last thirty years cheering market solutions and unrestrained economic growth, were unprepared for the cascade of crises we now face. Their main fix for the problems of late capitalism has been austerity and further shredding of the social safety net; their response to climate change has been slow and inadequate; and too few have fiercely opposed the rise of right-wing movements. They are not strong enough by themselves to turn back the extreme right.

The rise of this new global axis demands a united front against fascism comparable to that of World War II and late-twentieth-century movements in China and Vietnam. These were all led from the left. But the reborn US left is young, and, like a toddler, is still learning to walk.

Its rebirth began with Occupy Wall Street in 2011. That led to the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2015 and 2019, which in turn led to the resurrection of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as a mass organization, and the election of new progressive politicians to a host of offices. Black Lives Matter (BLM), a movement against police brutality and a racialized justice system, began in 2013 with mass protests against the acquittal of the man who killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. This led to the formation of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over a hundred abolitionist, anti-capitalist groups, while BLM itself went on to build a national network that protested the murders by police of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and many others, culminating in the vast mobilization after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. But where is the comparable progressive organization or network focused on women’s issues? It doesn’t exist. This is a problem not just for feminists but for all of us, because the organized strength of women is needed to fight fascism.
Suffrage and the United Front of Women

In The Rising of the Women, I use the term “united front of women” to mean a broad women’s movement of different classes in which socialists must fight for their own political goals without destroying the unity needed to move forward. The suffrage movement in the early part of the twentieth century drew in everyone from millionaire J. P. Morgan’s daughter Anne to socialist union organizer Clara Lemlich. Each faction fought for leadership, but while the Anne Morgans had money and social status on their side, socialist feminists did not even have the full support of the left for women’s suffrage. Anarchists and syndicalists thought the vote was a bourgeois distraction, while some socialist politicians feared that women were so backward they might all vote for capitalist parties.

Still, most progressives saw the vote as a basic democratic right that should be extended to women as well as men. In this period the Socialist Party was large and mass-based and elected many local and state officials; socialist Eugene V. Debs won more than 900,000 votes in the 1912 and 1920 presidential elections. The party’s founding program in 1901 included equal rights for men and women. When it did nothing to put this position into practice, socialist feminists around the country organized local women’s groups. These women were not separatists by choice; they wanted access to the party’s national reach. So, in 1908, they submitted two resolutions to the party convention: one to set up a Women’s National Committee, the other for a women’s suffrage campaign. When both resolutions passed, they set to work. A year later, the party had ten times more female members.

But how were they going to approach the suffrage movement, most of which was anti-labor, anti-immigrant, and racist towards Black women? They had three options: work within existing suffrage organizations as individuals; build socialist suffrage organizations that could participate in the movement alongside mainstream organizations; or form socialist suffrage organizations that would criticize the movement from the sidelines rather than collaborate with the bourgeoisie.

To find out what they did, you will have to read Chapter 7. But these strategic questions confront the left in any united front situation: do you give up your independence to be part of the action, build your own organization and fight for leadership in the broad movement, or stay pure on the sidelines? A mature left is capable of working with liberals without forgetting its objectives or losing its soul. An infantile left is not. But without their own autonomous women’s organizations, left-wing feminists cannot fight for leadership within the united front.
Feminism and the Left

In my preface to the second edition, I painted a picture of the feminist movement in 2001: many sectors, each with its own objectives and style, but still demonstrably part of one movement. Look for feminist organizations today and what do you see?

There’s #MeToo, an unquestionably powerful movement against job-related sexual harassment and assault, with a huge impact. But because it is a campaign, not a membership organization, there is no way for people who support this movement to ensure either consistency or accountability. Then there’s the Women’s March, which started out strong after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2016, staging the largest protest in US history: up to a million people in Washington, DC, and between 3 and 5 million people in the United States as a whole. But because it was a campaign originated on Facebook, its governance was up for grabs, and it has had many ups and downs since 2016. Reproductive rights organizations, notably Planned Parenthood, and the reproductive justice movement have been on the front lines against the right-wing religious assault on women since the late seventies. Now, as many states pass laws cutting off access to abortion, spontaneous groups funding women’s travel to abortion clinics have sprung up. All this is well and good. But multi-issue left-feminist organizations are also needed if we are to defeat the right.

The history in this book shows what happens when women rely on progressive groups led by men to do feminist organizing, and the US left today is a long way from grasping feminism, let alone integrating it into a general political program. In 2008, Linda Burnham, an experienced Black left-wing feminist, did an in-depth study of US grassroots organizations’ approach to racism and sexism, interviewing leaders of eleven community organizing groups, mostly people of color. She found that while all of them had a structured program to deal with racism, not a single one had anything comparable on sexism.

Our generation learned about sexism the hard way. One of the igniting events of women’s liberation was the 1969 counter-inaugural rally in Washington, DC, which made the limitations of the antiwar movement extremely clear. When Marilyn Webb and Shulamith Firestone came onstage to read a women’s statement, the predominantly male audience shouted them down, yelling, “Take them off the stage and fuck them!” Dave Dellinger, who was chairing the rally, responded by telling the women to leave the stage. Furious, they went home and started women’s groups.

Women in the Black movement faced similar hostility. Their voices were deliberately excluded from the 1963 March on Washington, and Fran Beal, who fought the sexism she found in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), remembers the pushback she encountered when discussing abortion rights for Black women: “We were called lesbians and dykes. They accused us—this was from the SNCC people—they accused us of dividing the movement. They said, That’s not as important as race.”

Today, many feminists work inside and often lead unions and left-wing organizations. But their personal feminism cannot trans- form the overall consciousness of these groups, much less the progressive movement as a whole. Such large-scale transformations in consciousness do not come about merely by women winning over their male colleagues. Autonomous feminist groups are needed to push from the outside at the same time.

The work of the Illinois Women’s Alliance discussed in Chapter 4 and the history of the shirtwaist strike in Chapter 8 show how much can be accomplished by a united front of women with progressive leadership. The story of the Lawrence strike in Chapter 9 shows what more can be done when a strike unites the entire working class at both the union and the community level. And the struggles over socialist suffrage work in Chapter 7 shows what happens to women’s work when the left disregards it, or when its male leaders feel threatened by feminist activism, and the women involved have no independent organization that can keep their issues alive.

Today a large and aggressive right-wing movement is on the attack against feminists, queers, and especially transgender people. At a time when the right is led by angry white men and religious fundamentalists, it is critical for progressives to fight attacks on trans people while strengthening the fight against patriarchy in general. Only by doing both can we build a progressive movement that will fight for all of our rights, not play one group off against another. Everyone in this movement needs to understand gender, patriarchy, racism, and class, and the specific ways they intersect and overlap. In addition, progressive feminists have to build both our own independent organizations and a broad united front of women, and work with and within the left to achieve our common social justice objectives. Unless we can do all these things, and fight climate change at the same time, we will fall short. And failure could mean the end of human life on earth.
Notes

“Fully aware of the constant place...” Cedric Robinson, “Preface to the 2000 edition,” Black Marxism, London: Penguin, 2000, xlix.

“The US labor movement had only a fraction of the strength of its UK counterpart...” In 2020, only 10.8 percent of the US workforce were unionized; most of these union members were government workers. “News Release,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 22, 2021, BLS.gov. In the same year, 23.7 percent of workers in the United Kingdom were union members. D. Clark, “Percentage of Employees That Are Members of a Trade Union in the United Kingdom from 1995 to 2020,” June 7, 2021, Statista.com.

“I made a speech for Monthly Review...” In the end, my speech proved too heterodox to be published in Monthly Review and ended up in Dissent: “The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Women’s Liberation and the Left,” Dissent, Fall 1988, available at MeredithTax.org.

“The role the working class have once played, must now be taken over by the sisterhood of women...” Abdullah Öcalan, Liberating Life: Women’s Revolution, Cologne, Germany: International Initiative and Mesopotamian Publishers, 2013, 52, Freeocalan.org.

“In 2008, Linda Burnham, an experienced Black left-wing feminist, did an in-depth study...” Linda Burnham is an American journalist and organizer in women’s rights movements, particularly those serving women of color. She was a co-founder of the Third World Women’s Alliance and founder of the Women of Color Research Center in Oakland, and is now research director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. The study is here: Linda Burnham, “The Absence of a Gender Justice Framework in Social Justice Organizing,” Center for the Education of Women, University of Michigan, July 2008, CEW.UMich.edu.

“We were called lesbians and dykes....” Fran Beal, interview by Loretta Ross, March 18, 2005, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, p. 40, cited in Burnham, “The Absence of a Gender Justice Framework.”