Beyond the point of no return

It’s too late to stop climate change, argues Ross Gelbspan — so what do we do now?

This is a guest essay from Ross Gelbspan, who’s retired from a 30-year career as an editor and reporter at The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He is author of The Heat Is On and Boiling Point, and he maintains the website heatisonline.org.

—–

As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, is preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise.

The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.

We can’t.

We have failed to meet nature’s deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes. These will happen either incrementally — or in sudden, abrupt jumps.

Under either scenario, it seems inevitable that we will soon be confronted by water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, collapsing infrastructures, and, potentially, breakdowns in the democratic process itself.

—–

Start with the climate activists, who are telling us only a partial truth.

Virtually all of the national and grassroots climate groups are pushing hard to reduce carbon emissions. The most aggressive are working to change America’s entire energy structure from one based on coal and oil to a new energy future based on noncarbon technologies — as they should.

The Step It Up campaign inspired more than 1,500 protests in all 50 states this year, and is hoping to build on that impact by joining forces with the 1Sky climate campaign. The Campus Climate Challenge is planning a new and more energetic clean energy campaign. Focus the Nation continues to exhort colleges and universities around the country to green their campuses. Al Gore’s dedication to bringing the climate crisis to public attention won him a well-deserved Nobel Prize, and he’s using his newfound credibility to push even harder for action against climate change. The large Washington-based environmental groups are pressing to improve climate and energy bills that are moving through Congress — even though the bills are clearly inadequate to the challenge before us.

But even assuming the wildest possible success of their initiatives — that humanity decided tomorrow to replace its coal- and oil-burning energy sources with noncarbon sources — it would still be too late to avert major climate disruptions. No national energy infrastructure can be transformed within a decade.

All these initiatives address only one part of the coming reality. They recall the kind of frenzied scrambling that is characteristic of trauma victims — a frantic focus on other issues, any other issues — that allows people to avoid the central take-home message of the trauma: in this case, the overwhelming power of inflamed nature.

—–

Within the last two years, a number of leading scientists — including Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), British ecologist James Lovelock, and NASA scientist James Hansen — have all declared that humanity is about to pass or already has passed a “tipping point” in terms of global warming. The IPCC, which reflects the findings of more than 2,000 scientists from over 100 countries, recently stated that it is “very unlikely” that we will avoid the coming era of “dangerous climate change.”

The truth is that we may already be witnessing the early stages of runaway climate change in the melting of the Arctic, the increase in storm intensity, the accelerating extinctions of species, and the prolonged nature of recurring droughts.

Moreover, some scientists now fear that the warming is taking on its own momentum — driven by internal feedbacks that are independent of the human-generated carbon layer in the atmosphere.

Consider these examples:

• Despite growing public awareness of global warming, the world’s carbon emissions are rising nearly three times faster than they did in the 1990s. As a result, many scientists tell us that the official, government-sanctioned forecasts of coming changes are understating the threat facing the world.
• A rise of 2 degrees C over preindustrial temperatures is now virtually inevitable, according to the IPCC, as the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is approaching the destabilizing level of 450 parts per million. That rise will bring drought, hunger, disease, and flooding to millions of people around the world.
• Scientists predict a steady rise in temperatures beginning in about two years — with at least half of the years between 2009 and 2019 surpassing the average global temperature in 1998, to date, the hottest year on record.
• Given the unexpected speed with which Antarctica is melting, coupled with the increasing melt rates in the Arctic and Greenland, the rate of sea-level rise has doubled — with scientists now raising their prediction of ocean rise by century’s end from about three feet to about six feet.
• Scientists discovered that a recent, unexplained surge of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is due to more greenhouse gases escaping from trees, plants, and soils — which have traditionally buffered the warming by absorbing the gases. In the lingo of climate scientists, carbon sinks are turning into carbon sources. Because the added warmth is making vegetation less able to absorb our carbon emissions, scientists expect the rate of warming to jump substantially in the coming years.
• The intensity of hurricanes around the world has doubled in the last decade. As Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research explained, “If you take the last 10 years, we’ve had twice the number of category-5 hurricanes than any other [10-year period] on record.”
• In Australia, a new, permanent state of drought in the country’s breadbasket has cut crop yields by over 30 percent. The 1-in-1,000-year drought exemplifies a little-noted impact of climate change. As the atmosphere warms, it tightens the vortex of the winds that swirl around the poles. One result is that the water that traditionally evaporated from the Southern Ocean and rained down over New South Wales is now being pulled back into Antarctica — drying out the southeastern quadrant of Australia and contributing to the buildup of glaciers in the Antarctic — the only area on the planet where glaciers are increasing.

As one prominent climate scientist said recently, “We are seeing impacts today that we did not expect to see until 2085.”[1]

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The panic among climate scientists is expressing itself in geoengineering proposals that are half-baked, fantastically futuristic, and, in some cases, reckless. Put forth by otherwise sober and respected scientists, the schemes are intended to basically allow us to continue burning coal and oil.

Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, for example, is proposing to spray aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting earth. Tom M. L. Wigley, a highly esteemed climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), ran scenarios of stratospheric sulfate injection — on the scale of the estimated 10 million tons of sulfur emitted when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991 — through supercomputer models of the climate, and reported that Crutzen’s idea would, indeed, seem to work. The scheme was highlighted in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times by Ken Caldeira, a climate researcher at the Carnegie Institution.

Unfortunately, the seeding of the atmosphere with sun-reflecting particles would trigger a global drought, according to a study by other researchers. “It is a Band-Aid fix that does not work,” said study co-author Kevin Trenberth of NCAR. The eruption of Pinatubo was followed by a significant drop-off of rainfall over land and a record decrease in runoff and freshwater discharge into the ocean, according to a recently published study by Trenberth and other scientists.

The noted British ecologist James Lovelock recently proposed the idea of installing deepwater pipes on the ocean floor to pump cold water to the surface to enhance the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Others suggest dumping iron filings into the ocean to increase the growth of algae which, in turn, would absorb more carbon dioxide.

These proposals fail to seriously acknowledge the possibility of unanticipated impacts on ocean dynamics or marine ecosystems or atmospheric conditions. We have no idea what would result from efforts to geoengineer our way around nature’s roadblock.

At a recent conference, Lisa Speer of the Natural Resources Defense Council noted, “These types of proposals are multiplying around the world, and there is no structure in place to evaluate if any of them work. People are going after these gigantic projects without any thoughtful, rational process.”

What these scientists are offering us are technological expressions of their own supercharged sense of desperation.

—–

To be fair, the reality that faces us all is extremely difficult to deal with — as much from an existential as from a scientific point of view.

Climate change won’t kill all of us — but it will dramatically reduce the human population through the warming-driven spread of infectious disease, the collapse of agriculture in traditionally fertile areas, and the increasing scarcity of fresh drinking water. (Witness the 1-in-100-year drought in the southeastern U.S., which has been threatening drinking water supplies in Georgia and other states.)

Those problems will be dramatically intensified by an influx of environmental refugees whose crops are destroyed by weather extremes or whose freshwater sources have dried up or whose homelands are going under from rising sea levels.

In March, the U.S. Army War College sponsored a conference on the security implications of climate change. “Climate change is a national security issue,” retired General Gordon R. Sullivan, chair of the Military Advisory Board and former Army chief of staff, said in releasing a report that grew out of the conference. “[C]limate instability will lead to instability in geopolitics and impact American military operations around the world.”

One frequently overlooked potential casualty of accelerating climate change may be our tradition of democracy (corrupted as it already is). When governments have been confronted by breakdowns, they have frequently resorted to totalitarian measures to keep order in the face of chaos. It is not hard to imagine a state of emergency morphing into a much longer state of siege, especially since heat-trapping carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for about 100 years.

Add the escalating squeeze on our oil supplies, which could intensify our meanest instincts, and you have the ingredients for a long period of repression and conflict.

Ominously, this plays into the scenario, thoughtfully explored by Naomi Klein, that the community of multinational corporations will seize on the coming catastrophes to elbow aside governments as agents of rescue and reconstruction — but only for communities that can afford to pay. This dark vision implies the increasing insulation of the world’s wealthy minority from the rest of humanity — buying protection for their fortressed communities from the Halliburtons, Bechtels, and Blackwaters of the world while the majority of the poor are left to scramble for survival among the ruins.

The only antidote to that kind of future is a revitalization of government — an elevation of public mission above private interest and an end to the free-market fundamentalism that has blinded much of the American public with its mindless belief in the divine power of markets. In short, it requires a revival of a system of participatory democracy that reflects our collective values far more accurately than the corporate state into which we have slid.

Unfortunately, we seem to be living in an age of historical amnesia. One wonders whether our institutional memory still recalls the impulses that gave rise to our constitution — or whether we have substituted a belief in efficiency, economic rationalization, and profit maximization for our traditional pursuit of a finely calibrated balance between individual liberties and social justice.

—–

From a more personal viewpoint, an acknowledgement of the reality of escalating climate change plays havoc with one’s sense of future. It is almost as though a lone ocean voyager were suddenly to lose sight of the North Star. It deprives one of an inner sense of navigation. To live without at least an open-ended sense of future (even if it’s not an optimistic one) is to open one’s self to a morass of conflicting impulses — from the anticipated thrill of a reckless plunge into hedonism to a profoundly demoralizing sense of hopelessness and a feeling that a lifelong guiding sense of purpose has suddenly evaporated.

This slow-motion collapse of the planet leaves us with the bitterest kind of awakening. For parents of young children, it provokes the most intimate kind of despair. For people whose happiness derives from a fulfilling sense of achievement in their work, this realization feels like a sudden, violent mugging. For those who feel a debt to all those past generations who worked so hard to create this civilization we have enjoyed, it feels like the ultimate trashing of history and tradition. For anyone anywhere who truly absorbs this reality and all that it implies, this realization leads into the deepest center of grief.

There needs to be another kind of thinking that centers neither on the profoundly dishonest denial promoted by the coal and oil industries, nor the misleading optimism of the environmental movement, nor the fatalistic indifference of the majority of people who just don’t want to know.

There needs to be a vision that accommodates both the truth of the coming cataclysm and the profoundly human need for a sense of future.

That vision needs to be framed by the truly global nature of the problem. It starts with the recognition that this historical era of nationalism has become a stubborn, increasingly toxic impediment to our collective future. We all need to begin to think of ourselves — now — as citizens of one profoundly distressed planet.

I think that understanding involves a recognition that a clean environment is about far more than endangered species, toxic substances, and the “dead zones” that keep spreading off our shorelines. A clean environment is a basic human right. And without it, all the other human rights for which we have worked so hard will end up as grotesque caricatures of some of our deepest aspirations.

Fortuitously, the timing of the climate crisis does coincide with other worldwide trends. Like it or not, the economy is becoming globalized. The globalization of communications now makes it possible for anyone to communicate with anyone else anywhere else in the world. And, since it is no respecter of national boundaries, the global climate makes us one.

At the same time, the coming changes clearly suggest that, to the extent possible, we should be eating locally and regionally grown food — to minimize the CO2 generated by factory farming and long-distance food transport. We should also be preparing to take our energy from a decentralized system using whichever noncarbon energy technologies are best suited to their natural surroundings — solar in sunny areas, offshore wave and tidal power in coastal areas, wind farms in the world’s wind corridors, and geothermal almost everywhere. (It may even be feasible to maintain a low-level coal-fired grid, of about 15 percent of current capacity, as a back-up for days the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.) But it’s critical to stop thinking in terms of centralized energy systems and to begin thinking in terms of localized, decentralized technologies.

At the level of social organization, the coming changes imply the need to conduct something like 80 percent of our governance at the local grassroots level through some sort of consensual democratic process — with the remaining 20 percent conducted by representatives at the global level.

—–

For some years, I have been promoting a policy bundle of three specific strategies as one model for jump-starting a global transition to clean energy. Those policies, which are spelled out in my book Boiling Point and on my website, include:

• Redirecting more than $250 billion in subsidies in industrial countries away from coal and oil and putting them behind carbon-free technologies;
• Creating a fund of about $300 billion a year for a decade, to transfer clean energy to poor countries; and
• Adopting within the Kyoto framework a mandatory progressive fossil-fuel efficiency standard that would go up by 5 percent a year until the 80 percent global reduction is attained.

The initial impulse behind these strategies was to craft a policy bundle to stabilize the climate — and at the same time create millions of jobs, especially in developing countries. Initially, I, along with the other people who helped formulate them, envisioned these solutions as a way to undermine the economic desperation that gives rise to so much anti-U.S. sentiment. They would, we hoped, turn impoverished and dependent countries into trading partners. They would raise living standards abroad without compromising ours. They would jump the renewable energy industry into a central driving engine of growth for the global economy and, ultimately, yield a far more equitable, more secure, and more prosperous world.

Unfortunately, given all the apathy, indifference, and antagonism to taking real action, nature has now relegated that earlier vision to the rear-view mirror.

But this kind of global public-works plan, if initiated in the near term, could still provide a platform to bring the people of the world together around a common global project that transcends traditional alliances and national antagonisms — even in today’s profoundly fractured, degraded, and combative world. Along the way, it could also provide decentralized stand-alone energy sources for disconnected social communities in a post-crash world.

The key to our survival as a civil species during an era of profound natural upheaval lies in an enhanced sense of community. If we maintain the fiction that we can thrive as isolated individuals, we will find ourselves at the same emotional dead end as the current crop of survivalists: an existence marked by defensiveness, mistrust, suspicion, and fear.

As nature washes away our resources, overwhelms our infrastructures, and splinters our political alignments, our survival will depend increasingly on our willingness to join together as a global community. As the former Argentine climate negotiator, Raul Estrada-Oyuela, said, “We are all adrift in the same boat — and there’s no way half the boat is going to sink.”[2]

To keep ourselves afloat, we need to change the economic and political structures that determine how we behave. In this case, we need to elevate the ethic of cooperation over the deeply ingrained reflex of competition. We need to elevate our biological similarities over our geographical differences. We need, in the face of this oncoming onslaught, to reorganize our social structures to reflect our most humane collective aspirations.

There is no body of expertise — no authoritative answers — for this one. We are crossing a threshold into uncharted territory. And since there is no precedent to guide us, we are left with only our own hearts to consult, whatever courage we can muster, our instinctive dedication to a human future — and the intellectual integrity to look reality in the eye.

—–

Footnotes:

[1] Author’s conversation with Dr. Paul Epstein, of the Center for Health and the Global Environment of Harvard Medical School, September, 2006.

[2] Raul Estrada-Oyuela, Argentine negotiator, at the U.N Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto, Japan, December, 1997.

David was my boss, mentor, friend, and I loved him. He recruited me into VFP by simply being the person he was, a veteran working for peace. There are few people outside of my family whose death means such a loss to me personally. There are few in our nation whose loss means so much to our movement.

A quote David loved so much guided his thoughts and actions. He carried it in his wallet so that he could whip it out to motivate us at any time. Of course he also had it memorized.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” –Frederick Douglass

David Cline, we salute you.

–Michael T. McPhearson
Executive Director, Veterans for Peace

“I am firmly convinced that the passionate will for justice and truth has done more to improve (the human condition) than calculating political shrewdness which in the long run only breeds general mistrust.” — Albert Einstein, “Moral Decay,” 1937

I’ve always liked this quote of Einstein’s. It’s extremely relevant to our situation today. And by today I really mean today, this week, this month, right now.

It’s relevant for those “calculating” Democrats who have been afraid to call for or to vote to cut off the funding that finances the Iraq war. The only money that should be voted is to finance the withdrawal of troops, equipment and private contractors, the shutting down of military bases, and for reconstruction and reparations.

The use of funds for those purposes would not just undercut Al Qaeda’s appeal to those in the Arab world furious at Bush/Cheney’s brutal war and occupation. Such a change in policy would signify some real hope that the U.S. government is getting it when it comes to respect for national sovereignty and a turn away from oil imperialism. It’d be a good first step in the direction of what we desperately need-not Democratic Party “imperialism light” but a foreign policy truly based upon social and economic justice, peaceful resolution of conflicts as much as possible, and dramatic support for the spread of solar power and wind energy technology to the Global South.

The Einstein quote is also relevant for those “calculating” Democratic Presidential candidates who have kept their mouths shut while George Bush makes it clear by his recent rhetoric that the “bomb Iran” option is very much in play. You can’t be a candidate committed to peace and justice and keep quiet on this fundamental issue.

It may be that Bush is ratcheting up the rhetoric because he knows from experience that this works with chicken-hearted Democrats who are afraid of looking like they are “soft on terrorism.” It is likely that this is part of his criminal gang’s strategy for getting their $460 billion dollars for the Pentagon, their $147 in “supplemental” funds for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and, now we learn, an additional $50 billion more for the Iraq war on top of all of that.

It may also be that Bush and Cheney have decided to ratchet up their escalating pressure on Iran to provoke the Iranian government into an action that they can use as their Gulf of Tonkin, their Niger yellow cake incident. Then they can unleash bombing by U.S. planes ringing Iran at military bases and on aircraft carriers. It makes absolute sense that these power hungry, mad men would do something like this as a desperate “hail Mary” action that they hope will scramble the U.S. political scene to their benefit.

All of this will only happen if the Democratic Party and the leading Democratic Presidential candidates pull their punches, act in their usual “shrewd” way, refuse to seriously mix it up with a President and Vice-President whose Nixon-like polling numbers should actually be emboldening them.

And, of course, this is where the anti-war and progressive movement come in.

September is going to be a big month. The national anti-war actions in
Washington, D.C. on September 15th and September 29th are both important, as are the local actions planned during Declaration of Peace week the 14th-21st, both the traditional legal actions and the up-the-ante nonviolent civil disobedience. The September 6th call-in to Congress is also important.

It seems to me that all of us within driving range of D.C., including UFPJ members, should make every effort to turn out for one or the other of the September actions. I understand why UFPJ made a decision two years ago that they weren’t going to work with ANSWER (which at that point had not split in two) anymore. But politics and history move on, and given the urgency of now, today, this month, when it comes to the war in Iraq and a possible war in Iran, our “passionate will for justice” should lead us to appreciate that there are good reasons to support and participate in major demonstrations in D.C. right now.
Those who are active or passive supporters of one of the Democratic Party Presidential candidates have an obligation to communicate in no uncertain terms that any continuing support is contingent upon whether they speak up loudly and strongly against military action in Iran and against funding of the Bush/Cheney imperialist war of occupation for oil.

Which leads to the October 22nd No War, No Warming mass nonviolent direct action being planned for Capitol Hill, with local actions around the country www.nowarnowarming.org intervention on the morning of Monday the 22nd. Democrats in particular should know that we’ve had it with the fumbling of their mandate from last fall’s elections. If they roll over again and let Bush get what he wants, they should be prepared for thousands of angry, determined activists descending on their work space.

This is a decisive fall season. We need to meditate on that. The Bush/Cheney gang are politically wounded but they continue to have their hands on the levers of power. Absent a much stronger impeachment movement that could put them on the defensive-as the impeach Nixon movement did in 1973-74, insuring that the U.S. government completed its withdrawal from South Vietnam–we cannot underestimate the dangers we face.

I’ll be fasting this September and possibly into October as part of the Climate Emergency Fast (www.climateemergency.org), but that won’t stop me from participating to the best of my physical and other abilities in the rest of this fall’s essential peace, justice and climate actions.

Ted Glick is the coordinator of the U.S. Climate Emergency Council. He can be reached at indpol@igc.org.

From: The Missing Measure of Our Outrage
If most of us can agree the Iraq War is a colossal failure, why aren’t we doing much about it? by Courtney E. Martin

Read the rest here: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_missing_measure_of_our_outrage

Naomi Klein
You can hear Naomi Klein on

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/15/1432250&mode=thread&tid=25

She will also be a plenary speaker at October’s 18th Annual Bioneers Conference in San Rafael California. www.bioneers.org

Curtis sent out the following open letter to say goodbye and to explain his decision to move on to other fights than the one here in the U.S.:

A Message from an Organizer to the Left and Progressive Forces inside the USA
by Curtis Muhammad

With this second anniversary of Katrina upon us, there are a few words I wish to speak. This letter
is written to the progressive, left movement for justice in the USA. In the last two years, every left
organization has been in New Orleans, but despite that there is still no sign of a mass movement.
There is still no sign that most activists are willing to put their knowledge and resources at the service
of the grass roots and take their leadership from the bottom. I have found myself wondering, have
poor black people been so vilified and criminalized that they are completely off the radar even of
the so-called left? When Katrina happened, I hoped and expected that this would be the trigger to
once again set off a true mass movement against racism and for justice in the US, led by those
most affected: poor, black working people. When it became abundantly clear that this was not
happening, I found myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness, and began to wonder
how to spend the last years of my life in the service of my people.

The thing that I remind myself when I'm contemplating hopelessness is the beauty of humanity and
the fact that people have always fought for what was right even when they knew they  couldn't win.
They tried because they loved each other; I think it's because it's built into human beings for people
to look out for each other. There is a drive in humanity to be just, to live in a society that is just, equal
and respectful. I believe that ultimately people will achieve a just society; I believe humanity came out
of a just society and will create it again.

I do believe that there was a time that the lovers of life, the lovers of humanity, the lovers of  justice
dominated the world. Some say this was so during the hunter-gatherer days, when  though there
were evil people they could never gain dominance. Their numbers were always small, less than 1%;
people ran their lives collectively, and therefore the greedy could not dominate. Well then, I say what
happened, there is only that same 1% who dominates the world now.

This thinking, this logic has been the motivating factor in my life of movement work: the belief that
there is a basic humanity that is inside the soul of most people. That this humanity can be harvested
and organized into a movement for justice to free our people from slavery, bondage, oppression and
exploitation. That the 80% of the world who live on an average of $2 a day can and will overcome
the 1% and return us to a collective life organized around love, justice and equality.

Most of you who know me also know I'm a storyteller and believe story to be a universal language
that can be a vehicle for voice – the voice of all regardless of status, class, cast, race, gender.
Story is an egalitarian language. So I wish to share with you my story, an abbreviated story of my
organizing work from SNCC in Mississippi through the ghettoes of the US to the villages and jungles
of Africa, to CLU, PHRF, NOSC, POC and finally the International School for Bottom-up Organizing.
My story is meant to clarify why I now choose to live, work, teach and write outside the US and
away from the grip of a drastically de-energized and often opportunistic and reactionary left in the USA.

*	*	*
I grew up in a community that, of necessity, had to take care of its own. In rural Mississippi in the 40s,
50s and 60s, mothers and fathers, grandparents, uncles and cousins protected the children from the
hostile, racist world and collectively helped each other meet their needs. Nonetheless, when I was a
child traveling to church on Sundays, I had to pass the tree from whose branches my cousin was
lynched. The community of my birth gave me both my strength -- my faith in the people, my dedication
to egalitarianism – and my undying hatred of racism and the oppressive few that control the world.

When SNCC came to town, I found my direction. It was both a community of love and a set of
organizers devoted, at the risk of their lives, to the folk on the bottom: the poorest black folk in
Mississippi, those who had nothing, not even the knowledge of how to read. SNCC introduced me
to the struggles of my brothers and sisters around the world, and particularly in Africa. I became an
internationalist and a revolutionary. The lessons of Ella Baker and SNCC have stayed with me
throughout my life; I labored to make them a reality from Mississippi to the ghettoes of our major
cities, from my time in the revolutionary movement in Africa to my work as a labor organizer, and
I have done my utmost to apply them in post-Katrina New Orleans.

In 1998, I helped to organize Community Labor United (CLU), a coalition that was founded with a
commitment to bottom-up organizing. (CLU principles included "ending the exploitation of oppressed
peoples everywhere; educating, organizing and mobilizing the masses within our organizations and
communities from the bottom up.") After eight years of organizing in some of the poorest areas of
New Orleans, it became the "first responder" after Katrina, and led the formation of the People's
Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF).

As a founding member of PHRF and an organizer and New Orleans resident, I was back in the city
within 8 days of the flood, struggling with overwhelming pain and anger. I felt that Katrina represented
an historic moment. Never before had all levels of government united to attempt genocide of 100,000
black people at the same time. Even in the 60s in Mississippi, they were murdering us in ones, twos
and threes. I threw myself into the attempt to put the knowledge and resources of the left and
nationalist organizations and "movement" people under the direction of the bottom: the poor and
working class black folk who had been left to die in New Orleans. PHRF became a coalition that
committed itself on paper to that goal.

What followed was a dramatic learning experience for me and for all those whose commitment is truly
to the people and not to their own particular grouping. Within months, mainly as a result of a speaking
tour I went on for PHRF, we had raised about a million dollars from folk across the country who were
deeply moved by the attempted genocide of over a hundred thousand black folk. And by December,
there was already conflict over who controlled that money and how it was to be used.

The New Orleans Survivor Council was organized by PHRF with the understanding that it was to
become the leadership of the organization and the movement, and should control all resources. By
April of 2006, when the NOSC began to sound like it wanted oversight of the funds, the interim
leadership of PHRF took the money and ran, firing its own organizers for daring to tell the poor black
residents in NOSC that they had the right to control the resources raised in their names.

Undaunted, the young organizers continued working for the survivors and formed a new group called
People's Organizing Committee (POC). This event was a turning point for me. I realized that the words
of those who I had considered my comrades were empty, that their so-called commitment to bottom-up
 was a fiction; that their real commitments were to various organizations and their own egos. Our
attempt to institutionalize bottom-up had led instead to a coalition of opportunists.

When I had spoken to mass audiences about Katrina in the fall of 2005, I had spoken of my discovery
of the depth of the fear and hatred America has for poor, black people. The images on the media of
those left to die could have been taken in sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean: those people were
very poor and very black. With the desertion of PHRF, I was confronted by the knowledge that this
hatred of poor black people extended into and throughout the progressive movement, even within
exclusively black organizations. I felt very lonely in my continued commitment to lift up precisely that
segment of oppressed Americans to lead the movement.

But POC plunged ahead, still dedicated to that vision. Thousands of volunteers came in the spring and
summer, and many continue to come to this day. The hearts of so many people are in the right place.
The New Orleans Survivor Council and its member group Residents of Public Housing continue to
work to put bottom-up leadership on the map and fight for the right of our community to return and
control its own destiny. But the past year has also revealed further weakness and lack of vision in
our movement.

From the days immediately following the flood, we recognized that immigrants – brown people, some
of the poorest and most desperate of our brothers and sisters from countries to the south – were
being brought into our city. They were put to the dirtiest, most dangerous clean-up tasks, and later to
replace the forcibly dispersed black labor force, for slave wages and in slave conditions. From the
start, we called for organizing this new part of the New Orleans community in unity with and under
the leadership of the black folk on the bottom.

This call was part of my message in the speeches I made in the fall of 2005, and several immigrant
organizers heeded the call and came to work with us. However, despite many serious attempts to
develop unity between black survivors and immigrants, it has become clear that those organizers
refuse to unite with and take leadership from black folk. They have organized immigrant slaves into
separate groupings with no contact with the NOSC, despite their initial commitment to unity. They
are essentially, wittingly or unwittingly, following the government's agenda, which is to build a racist,
assimilationist immigrant "movement" that will serve the needs of a war economy and patriotism.

And so we come to the second anniversary of Katrina. Bottom-up organizing is still embryonic, though
hanging on to life and with a small, dedicated band of survivors, organizers and volunteers. But the
rest of the movement is in shambles, or under direct or indirect influence of our enemies.

Through the experience of the last two years, I have also come to the conclusion that the infiltration
of and direct attacks on the movement that started (in my lifetime as an activist) in the late 60s and
early 70s with Cointelpro have never stopped. Our movement has been successfully divided into
thousands of groupings, non-profits and NGOs, and the left has been rendered ineffectual. It is not an
accident that, for forty years now, the movement has been so totally reformist, or that those who want
to be revolutionaries are so isolated as to be irrelevant. The government and its agencies have a
stranglehold on the people, the culture and even the left. I do not think it is possible in the U.S. at this
time – for me – to develop and train organizers with a real understanding and commitment to the
folk on the bottom.

And thus, I find myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness. I find myself possibly in the
position of writing not mainly to the current readers of these words, but to those future revolutionaries
who will learn from our impasse. I find myself deciding to work toward creating an international
organizing school as a vehicle to discover, recruit and train radical organizers. I want to continue my
investigation of the movements in Mexico and South America among very poor -- members of the
informal economy, workers, campesinos and landless people -- learn more about how class and hue
interact to shape oppression, take inspiration from the fact that the struggle continues, un-abandoned,
worldwide, and share my own knowledge and experience with the rebels of today and tomorrow.

I have lived 64 years and have struggled intentionally for justice for about forty-six of those years.
I am thankful and appreciative to all those who have traveled some of that distance with me: those
who helped nurture my children, who stood with me when I was imprisoned and tortured, those who
have always supported my work and stood by me when all seemed to stand against me. To these
worthy friends, comrades and loved ones, I will always honor you, be there for you, and know you
are there for me.

Still, I have arrived at a place in my life where I wish to share everything I have and know with
the "sufferers." My principle continues to be the struggle to engage the poor, oppressed, voiceless,
and those who have the least and suffer the most. The only struggle that matters to me now is finding
justice for those who have never had it.

This is me, where I am, trying to figure out how to organize our folk in a way that we always look
at need as the principle of justice. If you are looking for me, look among the youth, the poor, and the
struggling masses trapped in slave-like conditions throughout the world, for I am no longer available
to an opportunistic and racist left. I NOW SEEK REFUGE AMONG THE POOR.

This is my struggle.

Wish me well,

Curtis

Feel free to take this letter and submit it to the Bergen Record with some modifications – perhaps if they receive more than one letter on a similar theme, they’ll print one of them.

Madelyn Hoffman, Director, NJ Peace Action

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Dear Editor,
I am glad the Record covered the August 25th People’s March for Peace, Equality, Jobs and Justice (Several Causes on the Peace Rally Menu, by Elizabeth Fitch), but disappointed that the event was described as a series of unrelated causes, not as a conscious effort to draw connections between the war in Iraq and the war on our communities. The $186,000 spent each minute in Iraq is money taken away from jobs, education, housing, health care, public safety officers for our streets, and the resources needed to prevent bridge collapse and Hurricane Katrina-type devastation following a natural disaster.

The article also fails to communicate the multi-racial nature of the event. Participants traveled to Newark from all over New Jersey and beyond because they understand how the tremendous costs of the war, both human and financial, are being borne disproportionately by urban residents but affect us ALL, regardless of where we live.

Perhaps the media are afraid that if they reported on the how military families, civil rights organizations, the labor movement, the peace movement, urban and suburban residents, all see that our current foreign policy makes us all “prisoners of this war,” that they would convey a vision of hope. Perhaps they are afraid to motivate the vast majority who believe the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. The nearly 2000 people marching down Broad Street in Newark on August 25th, dared to think that perhaps we are moving closer to Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream expressed so movingly 44 years ago!! Shouldn’t we all be allowed to dream?

Sincerely,

Madelyn Hoffman
Director, NJ Peace Action