Leftist movements around the world are facing new problems and possibilities. Each spring in New York City, organizers and intellectuals gather at what has become known as the Left Forum. They discuss, debate, and develop new visions and strategies. On this edition, we hear selections from the opening panel of the Left Forum, recorded March 9, 2007.

The 2007 Left Forum was subtitled: "Forging a Radical Political Future," but creating a leftist vision in today's world generated some questions: Is "reform" alone the best that leftists can hope for? If not, what are the steps to deep economic, political, and social transformation, and what kinds of organizations are needed to bring about real change?

Hear more about the Left Forum on "Making Contact."

Featuring::

Cornel West, professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University; Stanley Aronowitz, co-managing editor of the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination; Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper magazine and fellow at the Center for Global Governance at the London School of Economics.

Guest Host: Sandina Robbins
Intern: Alexis McCrimmon

For more information::

Left Forum
c/o Ph.D. Program in Sociology
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
212-817-2003; leftforum@leftforum.org
www.leftforum.org

Center for African American Studies
Princeton University
One Palmer Square, Suite 315
Princeton, NJ 08544
609-258-0021; maryannr@princeton.edu
www.princeton.edu/africanamericanstudies

Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination
The Center for the Study of Culture, Technology, and Work
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 6115
New York, NY 10016
saronowitz@igc.org
http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations

Red Pepper
1B Waterlow Road
London N19 5NJ, UK
+44 020 7263 9345; redpepper@redpepper.org.uk
www.redpepper.org.uk

Harlan Douglas Weikle

Angela Davis, activist, organizer, and philosopher once associated with the Black Panther Party as well as the Communist Party of the United States of America, is still an activist; she now works for racial and gender equality and for prison abolition.

Born: January 26, 1944, Birmingham, Alabama, Davis received a B.A. from Brandeis University in 1965. She later studied as a doctoral candidate at the University of California-San Diego, under the Marxist professor and "One-Dimensional Man" (1964) author Herbert Marcuse.

She joined the Communist Party in 1968, and like many American Blacks during the late 1960s, suffered discrimination for her personal political beliefs and commitment to revolutionary ideals. But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the philosophy department at UCLA by the California Board of Regents, under then California Governor Ronald Reagan's administration.

Davis had worked to free the Soledad (Prison) Brothers, African-American prisoners held in California during the late 1960s. She befriended George Jackson, one of the prisoners accused in an August 7, 1970 abortive escape attempt from Marin County's Hall of Justice; the trial judge and three people were killed, including George Jackson's brother Jonathan. Davis was implicated when police claimed that the guns used had been registered in her name.

Davis fled and was subsequently listed on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list, sparking one of the most intensive manhunts in American history. That August, Davis was captured and imprisoned in New York City but freed by an all-white jury eighteen months later, cleared of all charges.

Today Davis is a professor of history of consciousness at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the United States and abroad.

Davis remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a member of the advisory board of the Prison Activist Resource Center and is currently working on a comparative study of women's imprisonment in the United States, the Netherlands, and Cuba.

During the last 25 years, Davis has lectured around the world. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class (Vintage, 1983), Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (Vintage, 1999), and The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1998).

Davis video segment

Harlan Douglas Weikle

Worldwide, more than one billion people lack access to an improved water source, such as a rainwater collection or wells. Two billion still need access to basic sanitation facilities.

By 2015, the international community, working through United Nations' Millennium Development Goals adopted in September, hopes to reduce by half the number of people without safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

In the developed world, the moment a drop of water hits the ground it goes into the water system until it becomes wastewater. Then it's treated and put it back into the system.

"We have a large-scale infrastructure in the United States to provide clean water," said Joseph Hughes, chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Using our current approach will not provide the rapid fix the United Nations is looking for in developing countries. It would take decades."

Hughes outlined four steps to solving the developing world's water and sanitation problems. First, researchers must determine how big the problem is, then analyze the water distribution process, understand the complexity of the systems required and, finally, create new approaches to water supply and sanitation through research and development, which might include new methods of storing, treating, and disinfecting water and developing sanitation systems that minimize pathogen release.

Urbanization, climate changes, water scarcity, and economic development will affect where water will be available in the future and where concentrated amounts of water will be required to meet the needs of large populations, Hughes says. The United Nations projects that two-thirds of the world's population will live in areas that face water scarcity by 2025.

"Historically we've tried to go to groundwater sources, such as a well, to initiate improved water sources, but there's a very finite capacity in groundwater," Hughes noted. "We have to work much harder to make ocean or surface waters safe."

The water must be safe and in reliable quantities

"We need to go beyond providing better water," Hughes added. "We need to provide water that you and I would drink and consider safe. If a pregnant woman drank it, she wouldn't be worried about her health or the baby's health."

In the United States, the only thing consumers need to know about their water supply is how to pay their bill and call a plumber if there's a leak, said Susan Cozzens, who organized the AAAS session on water and sanitation in developing countries. But a family in a developing country with a latrine needs to know a tremendous amount — how to build the latrine and how to maintain it.

"If a part breaks, what does that family do? Does the family stay in touch with the organization that came and provided the service or part originally? Is there someone who assumes the role of civil engineer in every town?" asked Cozzens.

Cozzens, in order to answer these questions, plans to investigate how communities in developing countries share their knowledge. She will conduct case studies in urban as well as rural locations in Mozambique, South Africa, Costa Rica, and Brazil.

Cozzens' goal is to provide insight to international and local water authorities helping developing countries set the right conditions for people to learn and solve the problems of unsafe water and sanitation.

TECHNICAL CONTACTS:
1. Susan Cozzens (404-385-0397); Email: susan.cozzens@pubpolicy@gatech.edu
2. Joseph Hughes (404-894-2201); Email: joseph.hughes@ce.gatech.edu

Harlan Douglas Weikle

Last year Panamanians voted overwhelming approval of the planned expansion to the Panama Canal. Since its opening in 1920, the canal has been and remains, today, a vital link to East-West shipping between the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Photo:The Nordcapital Group

Recent advances in ship design, however, have put pressure on the canal to refit its infrastructure to allow passage of supertankers, sometimes called “over-panamax,” or too large to transit the canal. The current width allowance of Panama’s locks system is about 32 meters wide, or 104 feet.

The largest supertankers in service today are on the order of 63 meters wide, almost double the width allowable through the locks at Panama.

The expansion, which is scheduled to be completed in 2014, will increase the canal locks’ capacity to 55 meters wide, about 180 feet. With that, the Panama Canal system will once again be open to all but the very largest carriers. Gulf ports like Tampa, Galveston, and Baton Rouge are already making plans to accommodate increased shipping schedules.

Perhaps the most significant outcome, however, is that by this timely upgrade to the Panama Canal, East Coast and European Union countries can once again transit the safer, faster route to Asia through the Panama Canal; the infrastructure that so influenced East-West trade from the mid-20th century will once again enable Panama to play a lead role in an increasingly competitive global market.

Related::

With the announcement by Dubai Ports World in December that it would sell to rival AIG its U.S. ports management operations, including seaports in New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, Tampa, and New Orleans, the giant United Arab Emirates corporation signaled its exit from the North American market and pressure mounted once again for East Coast ports to refurbish and upgrade their infrastructure.

The move away from U.S. ports management by DP World had been widely anticipated following the storm of criticism surrounding the revelation that the UAE-owned company was managing port operations in several U.S. locations. Many “run-for-cover” politicians deemed the situation threatening to homeland security. Among them, New York’s then-mayor Rudy Giuliani and Senators Charles Schumer, D-NY, and Robert Menendez, D-NJ, claimed that the United Arab Emirates-based company constituted a grave security risk.

Now Menendez and Schumer, two of DP World's loudest critics last year, find themselves defending the company’s new deal and bemoaning the port agency’s “greed,” saying that the New York and New Jersey Port Authority’s demand for 84 million dollars in payments from the new owners for past improvements and future upgrades to infrastructure is unconscionable and will spoil the deal.

If the deal falls through, DP World might yet find itself in a position to capitalize on its market share of operations in western ports, a prospect that, perhaps, may not disappoint DPW’s investors, provided of course that the politicians can refrain from muddying the waters.

Harlan Douglas Weikle

Tomorrow's democratic elections in Senegal may mark the last hoorah for octogenarian, reform President Abdoulaye Wade. Wade, who was elected to the presidency in 2000 by a coalition of all the Senegalese people, including Christians, Animists, and Muslims, leads the socialist opposition party known as the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS).

The president's final campaign rally was held Friday in Dakar, the Senegalese capitol. Cheered by hundreds of youthful supporters, Wade told the crowd that he would bring jobs to the country’s youth, those who are desperate for a chance to leave the country. Many young men and women attempt to illegally emigrate to Europe in hopes of finding employment. 

His election marked the first time since Senegal achieved independence in 1960 — after 300 years of French rule — that there was a peaceful transition of government when socialist President Abdou Diouf, who had ruled since 1981, stepped aside.

The country of approximately 12 million is the only West African nation to have successfully avoided political violence in the form of a coup, which most observers credit to the Senegalese democratic experience under French rule.

Wade is anticipated to emerge victorious in Sunday’s election, having the support of a majority of the country’s Muslim base led by the Mourides. The Mourides are a Sufi Muslim brotherhood founded in Senegal in the early 1900s.  Millions of Senegalese claim allegiance to them.

Several days ago, supporters of Mr. Wade were accused of disrupting a rally for a former protégé of the president, Idrissa Seck, who is now a rival for the presidency.
Seck's campaign team blamed the attack on followers of Cheikh Bethio Thioune, a Mouride leader who, at Friday's rally, sat on center stage with Mr. Wade. Thioune denied any involvement in the violence at the Seck rally, while at the same time acknowledging that he favors Wade’s candidacy.

Senegalese election rules prohibit any candidate from attaining office without at least a better than 50 percent minimum of the popular vote. There are 15 candidates in Sunday’s election, so Wade, some believe, may not make it in the first round. If that happens, there will be a runoff election between the two leading candidates on March 11.

In recent years, thousands of young Senegalese have arrived by boat, hungry and ill from the hazardous trip, suffering from exposure, and angry at the lack of opportunity they say faces them in their homeland. No one knows for certain how many have died on these voyages. Their much painful slogan is "BARCELONA OR DEATH."

At the rally, the president promised to embark the nation on an unprecedented round of modernization, which would create jobs in construction as the country improves its infrastructure by building modern hotels, airports, highways, and a new rail system.

Additional Resource:: CIA World book, Senegal

Harlan Douglas Weikle

According to Richard Re, a senior editor at the Harvard International Review, "Conservative estimates indicate that at least 27 million people, in places as diverse as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil, live in conditions of forced bondage."

Some estimates place that figure at 10 times the number, more than a quarter of a billion people. To put that in perspective, Re writes, "It is believed that 13 million slaves were taken from Africa through the trans-Atlantic slave trade that ended in the 19th century."

When Dred Scott and his wife Harriet arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, in the spring of 1846, they came as refugees in their own land, and they must have been overwhelmed by the willingness of white St. Louisans to accept them as free Americans.

The Scotts, after all, had been the property of white America their entire lives. Moved from one state to another by their owner, Dr. John Emerson – a military physician – the Scotts lived for many years in Illinois and Wisconsin, two states where slavery was not institutionalized.

Following the death of Emerson, Dred and Harriet Scott returned to Missouri where, with the help of white sympathizers, they applied through the courts to obtain their freedom. Three years later, in 1850, a jury decided the Scotts should be freed under the Missouri doctrine of "once free, always free."

That, however, was not to be the case; after a torturous, eleven-year court battle, the U.S Supreme Court ruled the following in 1847:

• Any person descended from black Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States, according to the U.S. Constitution.
• The Ordinance of 1787 could not confer freedom or citizenship within the Northwest Territory to black people.
• The provisions of the Act of 1820, known as the Missouri Compromise, were voided as a legislative act because the act exceeded the powers of Congress, insofar as it attempted to exclude slavery and impart freedom and citizenship to black people in the northern part of the Louisiana cession.

The decision shook the entire nation when it was announced, and its aftershocks reverberated through the end of the Civil War.

March 2007 marks the 150th anniversary of the Supreme Court's momentous Dred Scott decision, which denied full American citizenship to African Americans and gave legal sanction to a racial hierarchy that would undermine the most basic principles of American justice.

In honor of this landmark case, Washington University will host a conference, "The Dred Scott Case and Its Legacy: Race, Law, and the Struggle for Equality," from March 1-3.

Speaking for the event, David Konig, Ph.D., professor of law in the School of Law and of history and African & African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, says "This anniversary will undoubtedly be a moment of deep national reflection on enduring issues of race and justice and is a reminder of the persistence of so-called 'badges of slavery' making the 13th Amendment an unfulfilled promise, and the 14th and 15th Amendments incomplete."

The event, which is free and open to the public, will bring together leading law, history, and culture experts, as well as judges and descendents of Dred and Harriet Scott.
"This symposium, devoted to the continuing legacy of the Scotts' struggle, hopes to examine the legal background of the case and its legacy, both of which involve the uncertain and problematic role of the law in addressing fundamental questions of justice, racism, and inequality," says Konig.

"It will inquire into the legal strategies of black and white abolitionists before 1857, as well as the efforts of civil rights attorneys, to make meaningful the full legal citizenship that the decision denied. Its concerns will, therefore, be contemporary as well as historical, combining the perspectives of many disciplines to examine the historical roots of legal inequality and to understand the power of its persistence."

"The Dred Scott case isn't a ghost," Konig says. "We haven't outgrown implicit embedded cultural forces from Dred Scott. They act on the law, they penetrate the law, and they come through the law to enforce stereotypes. The current immigration debate is just one example."

John Baugh, Ph.D., the director of African & African American studies in Arts & Sciences and Washington University's Margaret Bush Wilson Professor, notes that the Scott trial has global relevance to anyone concerned with equality.

"It far exceeds the experience of slave descendants in the United States, although it is an iconic example of the historical injustice suffered by U.S. slaves and their descendants," he says.

"The Scott case confirmed that America was once a nation where racial discrimination, supported by legal statute, defied the doctrine of equal opportunity and justice for all that has been the beacon of American liberty to those whose ancestors came to America of their own volition," says Baugh. "Slaves were denied access to justice, and the Scott decision attempted to codify racial inequality, albeit in direct defiance of the colorblind vision that Dr. King expressed in his unfulfilled dream of American racial equality."

Resources:

Washington University Symposium March 1-3, 2007

Full text of Supreme Court Dred Scott decision

Harlan Douglas Weikle

Follow your intuition and act? When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn’t work, says a University of Oregon psychologist. Any large numbers of reported deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion or feeling, fail to motivate. Even going from one to two victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon professor and president of Decision Research, a non-profit research institute in Eugene, Ore., urged a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention, mandated by much of the world after the Holocaust in World War II. “It has obviously failed because it has never been invoked to intervene in genocide,” Slovic said.

Slovic is studying the issue from a psychological perspective, trying to determine how people can utilize both the moral intuition that genocide is wrong and moral reasoning to reach not only an outcry but also demand intervention. “We have to understand what it is in our makeup – psychologically, socially, politically, and institutionally – that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century,” he said. “If we don’t answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world.”

In the 20th century, genocides have occurred in Armenia, the Ukraine, Nazi Germany, Bangladesh, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe. Currently, killings continue in Darfur. “America has done little or nothing to stop genocide,” Slovic said, adding that the lack of response has come from both Republican and Democratic administrations. Research shows that people cannot trust moral intuitions to drive action. “Instead, we have to create institutions and laws that will force us to do what we know through moral argument are the right thing to do.”

How to reach that critical mass for decision-making, however, will be a challenge. It is thought that every life is equally important and thus the value of saving lives rises linearly as the numbers of people at risk increase.

However, models based on psychology are unmasking a haze on the issue. One model suggests that people react very strongly around the zero point. “We go all out to save a single identified victim, be it a person or an animal, but as the numbers increase, we level off,” he said. “We don’t feel any different to, say, 88 people dying than we do to 87. This is a disturbing model because it means that lives are not equal and that, as problems become bigger, we become insensitive to the prospect of additional deaths.”

In Slovic’s latest research, evidence is mounting for an even more disturbing "collapse model" that he described in his talk. “This model appears to be more accurate than the psychophysical model in describing our response to genocide,” he said. “We have these large numbers of deaths occurring, and we are doing nothing.”

His new research follows up an Israeli study published in 2005 in which subjects were presented three photos. One depicted eight children who needed $300,000 in medical intervention to save their lives. Another photo depicted just one child who could be helped with $300,000. Participants were most willing to donate for one child’s medical care. The level of giving declined dramatically for donating to help the entire group.

Slovic and colleagues Daniel Vastfjäll and Ellen Peters used the same approach but narrowed the focus. Participants in Sweden were shown a photo of a starving African girl, her individual story, and the conditions of the nation in which she lives. Another photo contained the same information but for a starving boy. A third photo showed both children. The feelings of sympathy for each individual child were almost equal but dropped when they were considered together. Donations followed the same pattern, being lower for two needy children than for either individually.

"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency,” Slovic said. “Our capacity to feel is limited.” Even at two, he added, people start to lose it.

If we see the beginning of the collapse of feeling at just two individuals, “it is no wonder that at 200,000 deaths the feeling is gone.” This insensitivity to large numbers is understandable from an evolutionary perspective. Early humans fought to protect themselves and their families. “There was no adaptive or survival value in protecting hundreds of thousands of people on the other side of the planet,” he said. “Today, we have modern communications that can tell us about crises occurring on the other side of the world, but we are still reacting the same way as we would have long ago.”

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is a major supporter of Slovic’s current research.

Paul Slovic, UO psychology department and president of Decision Research, 541-485-2400, pslovic@oregon.uoregon.edu

Links:: http://www.uoregon.edu/~uocomm/experts/faculty-data/Slovic+_Paul.html and http://www.decisionresearch.org

Keywords:: GENOCIDE, PSYCHOLOGY, RISK, NUMBERS, COGNITION, BEHAVIOR, OREGON

Photo, International Rescue Committee

Harlan Douglas Weikle

The World Food Programme (WFP) Friday announced serious concern about current flooding in the Zambezi Valley in central Mozambique.

Amir Abdulla, WFP Regional Director for Southern Africa, said in a press release issued by the organization, "We are particularly concerned about the worsening situation in Mozambique which has yet to hit peak levels and is still being fed by rains in neighboring countries.”

"Our response in the region is hampered by a critical funding shortage and the need is now most acute in Mozambique," Abdulla said. "With the situation likely to worsen in the coming days, we are going to need the full support of the international community."

"We have been using pre-positioned stocks to respond to the floods across the region, but the severity of flooding in Mozambique will require urgent additional funding," he added.

The priority destination for WFP aid has been the district of Mutarara in Tete province, scene of severe flooding in Zambezi along the Shire River in January. The WFP has been distributing 300 tons of pre-positioned emergency food rations to 2,000 people gathered in centers in Mutarara.

Analysts point out, however, that local officials may have overstated the seriousness of the situation when they said that the rains have "filled the Cahora Bassa dam above capacity levels."

In fact, as the bulletins from the National Water Board (DNA) clearly state, Cahora Bassa Lake is at less than 70% capacity.

The WFP warns, however, that the current level of outflow from Cahora Bassa will push flooding in the Zambezi basin to levels similar to a major flood, which occurred in 2001.

The WFP plans to launch an appeal to the international community this week "to support the Mozambique government's efforts to contain the crisis."

That appeal is likely to request food aid, air support to rescue people who are stranded, and to deliver relief goods and telecommunications equipment to facilitate coordination of the humanitarian response.

Programme authorities estimate that 285,000 people "may need food assistance for the next few months, as many have had to flee the rising flood waters, leaving behind their meager possessions and food stocks."

WFP "already faces a critical shortfall in funding for all its operations in southern Africa,” say programme officials. They estimate “the efforts will require 105 million U.S. dollars through to the end of this year."

"Our response in the region is hampered by a critical funding shortage and the need is now most acute in Mozambique," Abdulla said. "With the situation likely to worsen in the coming days, we are going to need the full support of the international community."

global spin

Keywords:: Africa UN flood Mozambique aid   

Harlan Douglas Weikle