Confronting big oil
In a September article in the Toronto Globe & Mail, Naomi Klein raised questions about the portrayal of the oil blockades in Britain and France.

"Watched from a distance, the oil blockades in Britain look like spontaneous popular uprisings: regular working folk, frightened for their livelihoods, getting together to say, 'Enough's enough.' Indeed, the fuel protests began when a couple hundred farmers and truckers formed blockades outside the oil refineries. But the protests became effective only when the multinational oil companies that run those refineries decided to treat those rather small barricades as immovable obstacles, preventing them from delivering oil to gas stations.

"The companies -- Shell, BP, Texaco et al. -- claimed they wouldn't ask their tanker drivers to drive past the blockades because they feared for their 'safety.'

"The claim is bizarre. First, no violence was reported. Second, these oil companies have no problem drilling pipelines through contested lands in Colombia and political revolts directed against them in Nigeria. ...

"Third, the truckers' 'pickets' were illegal blockades since the protesters were not members of trade unions -- unlike the cases in which union members form legal pickets and companies hire scabs to cross them anyway.

"So why would the oil companies tacitly cooperate with anti-oil protesters? Easy. So long as attention is focused on high oil taxes, rather than on soaring oil prices, the pressure is off the multinationals and the OPEC cartel. The focus is also on access to oil -- as opposed to the more threatening issue of access to less polluting, more sustainable energy sources than oil.

"Furthermore, the oil companies know that, if the truckers get their tax cut, as they did in France, oil will be cheaper for consumers to buy, which will mean more oil will be sold. In other words, Big Oil stands to increase its profits by taking money out of the public purse -- money now spent, in part, on dealing with the problems created by Big Oil.

"More mysterious has been the government response to the illegal trucker protests. While Tony Blair has not caved in to demands for lower taxes (yet), he didn't clear the roads, either, a fact all the more striking considering the swift police crackdowns against other direct-action protests in Britain and around the world.

"The oil blockades in Britain and France ... likely caused more real economic damage than every Earth First!, Greenpeace and anti-free-trade protest combined. And yet, on Britain's roads last week, there was none of the pepper spray, batons or rubber bullets now used when labour, human-rights and environmental activists stage roadblocks that cause only a small fraction of the fuel protest's disruption."

Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center, who forwarded this excerpt to The Witness, comments that "this whole scenario reinforces the sense that for people who are committed to social justice and healing the earth, it's important in the U.S. and Canada to prepare in advance a very different analysis and campaign -- one that focuses on taxing excess oil-company profits, not reducing taxes on gasoline or heating oil. And on channeling the money raised to: a) assistance for the poor who will be hardest hit by higher prices for heating oil and natural gas, and b) to support for mass transit, biking, conservation of energy and renewable energy sources."

Sacred earth and space
On Sept. 9, the 20th anniversary of the first "Plowshares" disarmament action, five women entered the Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs to carry out a "Sacred Earth and Space Ploughshares" action. The women, all members of Roman Catholic religious congregations, were arrested after they hammered and poured blood on a mockup of the Milstar communications satellite and an F-18 A-1 plane, a type used extensively in the ongoing bombing of Iraq.

Colorado peace activist Bill Sulzman, director of Citizens for Peace in Space, said of their action that "the cutting edge of Christian anti-war resistance has for the first time come head-to-head with the cutting edge of futuristic, space-based war-making."

According to a 1/00 Progressive article quoted in the Fall 2000 issue of Nukewatch Pathfinder, the U.S. military "explicitly says it wants to 'control' space to protect its economic interests and establish superiority over the world.

"Several documents reveal the plans. Take 'Vision for 2020,' a 1996 report of the U.S. Space Command, which 'coordinates the use of Army, Navy and Air Force space forces' and was set up in 1985 to 'help institutionalize the use of space.'

"The multicolored cover of 'Vision for 2020' shows a weapon shooting a laser beam from space and zapping a target below. The report opens with the following: 'U.S. Space Command -- dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict.' A century ago, 'Nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests' by ruling the seas, the report notes. Now it is time to rule space.

"'The medium of space is the fourth medium of warfare -- along with land, sea and air,' it proclaims on page three. 'The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea and air superiority will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance.'"

The Sacred Earth and Space Ploughshares statement quotes Peter's words in Acts 14: "Friends, what do you think you are doing? ... We have come with good news, to make you turn from these empty idols to the living God who made sky and earth and the sea and all that these hold."

Welfare reform and civil rights
Gary Delgado argues that welfare advocates should reframe the issue in terms of civil rights (ColorLines, Fall 00).

"Studies of what happens to women forced off welfare into the low-wage job market are just beginning to come out. Not surprisingly, they show that most of those leaving TANF have found their way into the gender ghettoes of service, sales, and clerical work where, even in northern industrial states, they are earning barely above minimum wage. ...

"And for women of color leaving welfare, there is the old triple whammy of race, gender, and welfare-recipient-status to shape their experiences in the job market. A 1999 study comparing the treatment of black and white welfare recipients, conducted by Dr. Susan Goodman of Virginia Tech University, found that black women earn less than whites, are less likely to be employed full-time, and are overrepresented in lower paying occupations. Gooden also found that black job applicants were asked twice as often as whites to complete a pre-application and that blacks were less likely to receive thorough interviews (45 percent as opposed to 71 percent for whites). Furthermore, 36 percent of African-American respondents were subjected to drug tests and criminal record checks, while the 24 percent of whites who were asked to take any test at all were merely asked 'character questions.'

"While there is not yet an overwhelming body of research, the research that does exist clearly establishes that racial and gender discrimination is compounded by welfare reform. ...

"A civil rights approach to welfare organizing isn't traditional, but the new demographics suggest that emphasizing race and gender discrimination in the welfare system might be just the wedge we need to get into broader efforts to reframe the national debate as welfare reauthorization comes before the Congress in 2001. Race and gender discrimination may not be the most screwed-up thing about welfare deform, but it is one of the few areas in which legal rights exist."

Transcending repair
"Mending is a major occupation in traditional societies," Barry Boyce writes in a reflection on the demise of shoe repair in the U.S. (Shambhala Sun, 9/00). "It is one of the perverse virtues of advanced civilization to have transcended repair and renewal. We have abandoned a more basic understanding of economy -- the careful ordering of the house (which is what it means etymologically) -- and have redefined it as the sum total of our consumption.

"We need to repair and reuse not because the earth will run out, not because the cosmic meter maid is coming down the street to give us a ticket, but because it is the only way to live well. Our willingness to toss away that which we so recently valued, our unwillingness to repair the material things in our lives, speaks volumes about our unwillingness to repair other things that really matter -- our errors, our relationships, our lives, our world."