Here’s the board I made for the Board IV show at Art Walk tonight. Make sure you come check it out. I’m selling the board for $15, but most importantly created it to shed more light on the construction of the enormous new courthouse downtown. I know the old courthouse is becoming overcrowded, and as our city slowly grows crime levels will rise. But why not use the money to invest in education?
If our children are being taught by motivated teachers, and we have programs like art, music, and recreation creating an inviting educational environment, the generations to come won’t have an overcrowded courthouse but a vibrant community.
Are you angry about Wall Street’s reckless excesses? Are you disappointed with President Obama’s limp approach to reform? You can change this, acting individually and collectively. Withdraw your deposit and savings accounts from the large banks that brought the system to ruin and were subsequently rescued with billions in government bailouts. Put your money instead in smaller, safer banks or credit unions closer to home–the thousands of community institutions that do not harvest their profits from greed and recklessness.
“Move Your Money” is an electrifying slogan that’s lighting up the Internet because it shows people how they can push back against the big dogs of banking. The concept is simple, but this is a big idea that could alter the timid direction of financial reform.
This campaign is potentially more than a feel-good gesture. If coordinated with institutional reform efforts, it could lead to a broad rebellion against the financial system, with citizens reclaiming the power to act directly when politicians are too intimidated by moneyed interests to act in the public interest. Economist Jane D’Arista put it crisply: “We are not a nation of widows and orphans. We have quite a lot of money, and people control some of it. They might ask why they don’t control more of it.”
The campaign was launched just before New Year’s Eve by Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post and Rob Johnson of the Roosevelt Institute. An influential bank-rating firm, Institutional Risk Analytics, donated a website window (moveyourmoney.info/find-a-bank), where citizens can find banks in their ZIP code that IRA certifies as safe and sound.
In the first forty-eight hours more than 100,000 responded with inquiries. Within a week, people had searched for good banks in 16,631 ZIP codes–nearly 40 percent of the nation. The search tool is now getting 45,000 users a day. Naturally, the corporate media promptly assured readers that “ordinary Americans lack the power to hurt the big banks,” as a Washington Post headline put it.
Wrong. The cynics either do not understand banking or misunderstand the widespread public anger. Dennis Santiago, IRA’s CEO and managing director, explained that banks compete fiercely for the “core deposits” provided by individual and small business accounts–this stable money is their preferred base for profitable lending. Take away core deposits, and bankers feel immediate balance-sheet stress. Expand the account base for community banks, and they gain greater stability and greater lending power. “Will moving your money have an effect?” Santiago asked. “And by effect, I don’t mean making a momentary political statement. I mean making a structural difference to the country’s financial system. The answer is yes.”
Structural change ought to be the primary goal of financial reform–breaking up the concentrated power held by mega-banks and creating a balanced system of smaller, more diverse lending institutions that thrive by serving local credit needs. Alas, the Obama administration and Congress are pursuing the opposite goal–rescuing the behemoths that failed and encouraging even greater financial concentration. This will lead to more reckless adventures, more “too big to fail” bailouts.
“Move Your Money” is an important model for teaching people how to change a dysfunctional system. The same principle of taking control of your own money is at work in related reform movements. A campaign launched by faith-based community organizations associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation identifies sky-high interest rates on credit cards and other lending as the ancient sin of usury. IAF groups are asking churches, foundations and local governments to withdraw funds from the usurious banks that profit by destroying borrowers. Organized labor, likewise, has launched an aggressive movement to insist on responsible investing values for the pension-fund wealth of working people, urging state treasurers and fund managers to invest for society’s interests as well as good returns.
Changing the nature of finance capitalism is a long road, to be sure, and the industry will resist change every step of the way. But the fight begins in earnest when people decide to move their money.
Open The Health Care Conference Committee To Public Scrutiny
(H.Res.847).
Last night we got an email from a Republican member of Congress
calling for public access to any health care bill conference
committee (H.Res.847). As you should well know by now, we are NOT
Republicans, we’ve only been advocating for every possible
progressive action for the last five years. But what progressive
could possibly be opposed to public scrutiny for the legislative
process? And sure enough, our most reliable hero Dennis Kucinich is a
sponsor as well.
The fact is, it’s not just the Republicans who have been shut out of
the debate to set national health care policy. The American people
have been completely shut out as well. This goes all the way back to
the beginning of the process, when activists were arrested and hauled
out of the Senate Finance committee for protesting the preemptive
exclusion of any discussion of Single Payer (Medicare for all) as a
basis for reform.
Now we hear that they don’t even plan on having a conference
committee to reconcile the weak bill passed by the House with the
total insurance industry sell out passed by the Senate. No, they are
just going to make another back room deal and install the worst case
Senate version by fiat. Even our House of Representatives is to be
shut out unless they entirely capitulate as well.
Action Page For Public Conference Committee:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1026.php
We all know the Republicans just want to obstruct the process,
whether the bill is good or bad. And we say bring it on, let the
American people SEE their obstructionism on our TVs. But shame on the
Democrats, shame, shame, shame, for giving the Republicans good cause
for doing so. And shame on us, if we for our own partisan reasons do
not protest this outrage. The public’s business must be conducted in
the full light of day.
You would be wrong if you were to think you are doing the President
and the Democratic Congress a favor, by not calling them out for
betraying the hope of the American people for a robust public plan.
Such a plan is broadly supported and would be wildly popular. It
would cement the Democrats in power for a generation. Instead, the
current administration seems bent on forcing through a medical
insurance industry sell out that will discredit the leadership of the
Democratic party beyond redemption.
You see it happening already. Joe Lieberman, the guy who demanded any
public option be taken out of the bill, including a possible expanded
Medicare buy in proposal, is seeing his approval ratings tank down to
George Bush numbers. And that same fate awaits ANY Democrat who does
not stand up now and demand better. Because when the American people
wake up to what a sick suck up to the insurance industry this bill
is, there will be hell to pay at the polls.
And the dirtiest shame is that the Republicans are getting a free
pass in all this. Nobody will remember that they actually opposed a
strong public plan too. All anybody will remember is that they
opposed the bill that everybody hates the guts out of, the bill the
Democrats forced through without even a fair conference committee,
that passed without a single Republican vote.
Action Page For Public Conference Committee:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1026.php
How can the Democrats be so utterly tone deaf, so politically stupid?
Who can save them from themselves? How could they be so perversely
determined to thrown away every scrap of good will and optimism that
the American people had riding on the outcome of this last election.
We’d better all speak up, and the Democrats had better listen, or the
current majority will be very short-lived indeed. And that’s not what
any of us want.
For Facebook Participants ONLY:
Once again, the regular action page links above are for anyone. But
we told you two years ago, when we developed Voices, our action page
application for Facebook, that we could change the world with
Facebook alone. At that time they had about 50 million participants.
That number is now up to 350 million, and they are now the biggest
social media network there is, 3 times bigger than MySpace. There are
totally frivolous GAME applications on Facebook now with 75 million
users. That’s more people than it takes to elect a president of the
United States.
We have gigantic mobilization plans for Facebook, but the first thing
we need all of you to do, if you are on Facebook already, is to get
your OWN Voices application tab on your own profile page, a new
capability they just made possible. This is what will enable you to
watch and submit action pages over there and to mobilize and alert
all your friends to do the same. You can even create your own action
pages on any issue you care about. You can put the Voices application
tab right on your own personal profile page, just as Democrats.com
has already done.
http://www.facebook.com/democratscom?v=app_2370152746
So if you are already on Facebook, go to the link above, check out
what the application does, and most importantly, click on “Get
Application Tab” in the menu at the top for quick and easy
instructions on getting your own Voices tab for your profile page.
Three simple steps. Do it now. When you submit an action you can
automatically alert all your friends. Why aren’t we taking more
advantage of this built in mobilization engine?? Now we are.
Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.
by Carlos in DC
If you haven’t seeing Avatar, then you are missing out a good movie, and I suggest you watch it its 3D version. The film excels in creativity, imagination and technical work, the result is overwhelmingly pleasing to the senses.
Most importantly, there is a clear message in the film beyond the typical boy-girl romance story, and that is the main reason to see this film. No, I don’t want to spoil your experience by telling you all about it; however I would like you to understand the context of its main story.
Avatar is real: Pandora exists in South and Central America, and the Na’vi peoples are being displaced and killed right now. The names are different, but the facts are almost the same.
In the next generation, Central and South America will be the next battle fields for rich countries to fight over natural resources like minerals, oil, water, gas, which they need to continue growing and keeping up to their consumerists, excessive ways of life. The last pristine, virgin forests on Earth will be taken over by rich and powerful military armies, working on behalf of the interests of multinational corporations, especially those coming from the U.S., Europe and Canada; and soon India, China, Brazil and of course Russia.
It’s happening already in the Amazonian forests of Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Ecuador, where mining, oil, tourism, real state and lodging corporations are trying to take over the Indigenous peoples ancestral lands, in complicity with the local puppet governments.
Sebastian Machineri is a leader of the Yaminawa people that live in the border area of Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, deep in the Amazon forest. He was in Washington, DC, recently and told me at the end of a working meeting at Organization of American States that Indigenous peoples in Brazil are being killed, attacked, displaced, and exterminated by the government and the private ranch owners. “I have no hope that anything will change in the future” he also said that international declarations of Indigenous peoples rights -like the OAS- aren’t helping much, when powerful interests are pushing governments to destroy our planet.
In 2009, Indigenous peoples in all over the Americas faced increasing violence, deadly military attacks, displacement, persecution, and incarceration from governments, paramilitaries, guerrillas and military forces linked to corporate interests.
In order to do displace Indigenous peoples, governments and interest groups in Latin America passed special legislation based on the “free-trade” policies models, designed by Wall Street. This has opened the doors of protected areas to any corporation with enough money and the right connections.
Last year in Peru, hundreds of Awajun and Wampis Indigenous farmers were massacred by US-trained militarized police forces of Peru, in the Bagua region. The Natives were protesting government legislation that would allow corporations to take over their lands resources, without previous consultation.
In several regions of Peru, mining corporations are causing pollution and poising Indigenous towns, and many community leaders have been incarcerated when protesting against the government plans to lease 73% of the Amazon forest to corporations, and extensive areas of the Andean mountains. Last year, the Awajun and Wampis peoples of Peru detained five employees from the Canadian mining company IAMGOLD, which did not have any authorization to enter their territory.
Also in Peru, the authorities of Cusco were forced to pass legislation that bans biopiracy or “the appropriation and monopolization of traditional population’s knowledge and biological resources”, in order to prevent the negative effects of the unpopular and controversial U.S.-Peru free trade agreement.
In Colombia, the Amazonian Indigenous peoples are caught in the middle of the internal war between the government, the guerrillas and the government-supported paramilitary. Twenty members of the Awa Indigenous community were killed in 2009 by the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), by the end of the year 74 more Awas were killed by apparent paramilitary groups linked to the illegal drugs traffic.
More than 2,000 Indigenous Embera people in Colombia abandoned their 25 villages from their territory to escape violence from paramilitaries. Meanwhile the Colombian House of Representatives approved a controversial program to convince local Women to submit to sterilization. This same type of program affected over 330,000 Indigenous people in Peru in the 1990’s decade.
According to information posted by Intercontinental Cry, an Indigenous news website, these are some of the most violent attacks faced by Indigenous peoples in Central and South America in 2009:
In central Brazil, the Yanomami community of Paapiu began calling for the immediate expulsion of illegal gold miners occupying their land. Survival International reported, “[the Yanomami] say they are prepared to use bows and arrows to expel the invaders themselves if the authorities do not take immediate action.”
The Guarani Kaiowa community of Apyka´y in Brazil was attacked by ten gunmen, who fired shots in to their camp, wounding one person. The gunmen also beat up and injured others with knives and then set fire to their village. This was the second village torched in less than a week.
As many as 300 troops from Panama’s National Police demolished a Naso village in Bocas del Toro–for the second time. No injuries were reported, however, some 150 adults and 65 children were left with no shelter and limited access to food and water.
Following an overturned eviction, an Ava Guarani indigenous community in Paraguay’s Itakyry district was sprayed with toxic chemicals, most likely pesticide, resulting in nearly the entire village needing medical treatment.
In Guatemala, a group of Maya Mam villagers set fire to a pickup truck and an exploration drill rig, after the Canadian company Goldcorp repeatedly failed to remove the equipment off the community’s land.
In Chile, several Mapuche communities began to reclaim lands in Araucania, a region located in central Chile, which they say were stolen from them in the XVI century during the Hispanic invasion. At least five people have been killed by the Chilean government, which has passed anti-terrorism legislation to imprison and trial Mapuche leaders.
In Ecuador, Indigenous peoples are suing U.S. oil corporations for damages due to land and water pollution, while the leftist government in power tried to betray its electoral promises by selling extensive lands to oil and mining corporations, the response was a strong national strike and social protests.
Meanwhile in Bolivia, Indigenous people, are moving towards self-government under their own cultural traditions, after the December 6 presidential and legislative elections, when 12 of the 327 nation’s municipalities voted in favor of indigenous self-government, giving them control over the natural resources on their land. The same model, but at a smaller scale is being applied in Venezuela, by the government of president Hugo Chavez.
In the U.S. the Obama administration and the biased U.S. media have decided to attack the governments of Bolivia and Venezuela, while remaining silent in the massacres of Indigenous peoples in Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and the violent repression in Chile, Ecuador, and the violent coup regime of Honduras, where death squads trained in the U.S. have reappeared, attacking the Garifuna, Meskito and other Indigenous groups.
The future of South and Central America depends directly of how much power are given to multinational corporations today. In the last decades, Wall Street and London have told the world that small governments are the key for progress of third world countries. The less control, the more democracy, human rights and foreign investment. What we see right now happening in Congo with 6 million people killed and 500,000 raped Congolese is a painful proof of that mistaken model.
Growing in South America, we were told that Indigenous people were exterminated, disseminated, gone. They taught us in the school that nothing was left to reverse the colonization, but there is so much to do in order to stop it. We can see how rich countries are still oppressing poorer nations with with military force like in Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, or with violent forced private “investments” like we see in Latin America.
During the Bush administration, the strategy to take over the natural resources of Latin America was domitated by free-trade agreements (FTA) and the funding of violent conflicts in Colombia, Haiti, and Mexico. In 2009, with Barack Obama in power, the U.S. government has stopped policies but it has announced that will be opening seven military bases in Colombia, while it increased its presence in Peru with possible three military stations.
Colombia is the second biggest recipient in U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel, and its neighbor Venezuela is not taking this too lightly, and has bought armament from Russia, China and possibly Iran. Meanwhile the Pentagon’s South Command increased military exercises conducted with Peru, Panama, and Colombia militaries, while Chile received approval from U.S. Congress to buy high technology missiles.
In the James Cameron’s film Avatar, the US military became a sophisticated army of private mercenaries, working for huge profits resulting from extractive industries, and no matter what they need to destroy or who they will kill, they will get the job done.
Beyond the silly way -and offensive for some- that Indigenous peoples are portrayed in this movie as half animals, actually they are the peoples of Avatar, not humans. However in reality that is how some people see our Indigenous peoples in the South side of the Americas, almost as sub humans.
Thus, a mostly-white US war command leadership along with their corporate bosses are leading destructive enterprises in distant regions of green, tropical forests that are rich in beauty but also abundant in minerals and unknown treasures hidden behind human’s eyes. In Central and South America, there are signs of U.S. military and corporate involvement in coups, paramilitary groups, military training of torturers and repressive forces, and financing of anti-Indigenous governments.
In the film as in reality, these thugs are a bunch of cold hearted and insensitive people who would invest tons of money in science, research and cultural programs in order to get into the hearts and minds of Indigenous peoples, who are living in the sacred, untouched, pristine forests of a balanced but fragile environment. Those places are the final destinations for destructive mining machinery, ready to extract the insides of the mother land.
Luckily, not all US soldiers are money-obsessed beasts. Some of them, a multiracial group we should notice in Avatar, take action to protect the Indigenous populations and their sacred land.
As a result of fantastic experiments, some mercenaries become laboraratory-mixed with the Natives and become a new race, mixed, mestizo individuals called Avatar, who are physically similar to the Indigenous, but mentally more aware of certain things. They learn the spirituality and sciences of nature from the “savages” and with time, they learn that mining is not worth the price of the destruction it causes. So they become the protectors of Natives, who using a mixture of knowledge, both human and Indigenous, eventually kick the invaders out of their land by actually killing most of them. Sorry I just told you the movie, but at least I didn’t reveal the romantic story part.
Avatar will represent a new step in the filming, not just because it mixes high technology animation with reality fiction, but also Avatar is showing us the most likely future of this planet, presented as fiction but not really.
The possible military conflicts to take place in Central and especially in South America in the next years, are related to corporate greediness and special interests. This is the scary future that awaits for future generations, unless of course, the United States ends its colonialist, imperialistic policies that are designed and dominated by a corporate and military machine regime, and the people regain its true democracy. And the same should happen all over the world, before we become a true Pandora.
18×24 black and white print with F-U-C-K cut out.
Bush in, the media conglomerate’s capitalize and subdue with chants of change. Bush out, Obama in. They now thieve on bashing socialist ideals and slow compromised, marginal changes.
16×20 mixed media on canvas.
Why is Jacksonville wasting so much money on a new courthouse? I don’t think it’s going to solve any of our economical problems. It’ll just put more money it the construction industries hands. If we really need a new courthouse, why not renovate one of the growing number of empty buildings downtown. How did they spend $64.3 million dollars on site before even breaking ground?
Nobel prize for a war president and privatized companies banking on the continued wars.
The BBB Complex Art Show 2 was really awesome. Just wanted to say thanks for letting me do a bag. Below are pictures of the bag I made. Photos courtesy of
http://www.burrobags.com/.
Dig the bag. Check it out here.
The 2nd annual March of the Impoverished will take place on Sunday, 12/13/09 at 4:30PM in St. Augustine, FL.
We will start in the Plaza and proceed along the bayfront to Orange to Cordoba and back to the Plaza where dinner will be served. This march is to draw attention to the increasing number of homeless, unemployed and working poor in our community. It is also the celebration of Food Not Bombs’ 6 years of serving meals in St. Augustine. Last year about 200 people from all sectors of our community participated. It was an amazing display of solidarity among our homeless, Food not Bombs, PUSH and members of the public, including agencies and clergy.
Call President Obama TODAY! 202-456-1111
Join or plan a demonstration Tuesday or Wednesday!
President Obama will unveil his new Afghanistan policy tomorrow. But we must not let up! Last week, we flooded the White House with so many calls that the White House Comment Line was continually busy! Now is the time to keep the pressure on and keep the calls coming.
Call the White House today at 202-456-1111. Tell President Obama to send NO additional troops to Afghanistan, WITHDRAW the troops already there, begin serious DIPLOMACY with all parties to the conflict, and REDIRECT the money wasted on the Afghanistan war to people’s urgent needs at home.
UFPJ member groups are already planning protests either Tuesday evening or Wednesday at Federal buildings or other public places. Check the listings to find a protest in your area, or organize one if none has been planned and post it here. Be sure to notify the press using this sample press release.
We oppose the war because:
• 298 U.S. soldiers lost their lives so far in 2009. Tens of thousands of returning troops are damaged by physical injury, PTSD, psychological damage, suicides, and domestic violence. There is a backlog of up to 1 year for veterans waiting for VA care.
• The war is unaffordable. The White House says we are paying $1 million a year for each soldier sent to Afghanistan. At that price, the war will soon cost $100 billion a year. Yet Congress is not willing to pay that kind of money for health care, jobs, housing, or environmental protection.
• The war is making conditions worse for the Afghan people. UNICEF reported last week that eight years after the start of U.S. military occupation of that country, Afghanistan is the world’s worst place to be born. Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world — 257 deaths per 1,000 live births – and 70 percent of the population lacks access to clean water. Afghanistan ranked 181st out of 182 countries in the UN’s human development index for 2009. The presence of U.S. troops breeds resistance, conflict, and instability.
• The war is not helping Afghan women, whose conditions are as bad as ever. The government turns a blind eye to rape and violence against women. Civilian casualties, who are primarily women and children, are rising each year as the violence increases.
• In addition to being wrong, the war is also unwinnable. As U.S. troop levels have grown from 15,000 in 2004 to 68,000 now, more and more Afghans have joined the Taliban and resistance groups to defend against foreign invaders. Yet The Nation reported this week that the U.S. military cannot even protect the trucks which bring gasoline and other supplies to outlying U.S. bases, and that contractors are paying protection of $800 to $1500 per truck to the Taliban.
• War funding is feeding corruption, private armies, and the drug trade. The more money the U.S. and NATO pour into Afghanistan, the greater the rake-offs and corruption among U.S. contractors and the U.S.-supported Afghan government. President Karzai’s re-election was confirmed even though his supporters had stuffed boxes with more than one million fake ballots. Five ministers in Karzai’s cabinet have been given immunity from prosecution for corruption.
Call the White House today at 202-456-1111. Be out in the streets if the President does order an escalation of troop levels. Let Americans know that we will not be silent and we will keep opposing this needless, senseless war for as long as it takes.
On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.
But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.
Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.
Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.
In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.
Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which “private security” ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren’t ambushed by insurgents.
A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals’ Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.
What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan’s current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up shop in Washington, because of Wardak’s connections there. On NCL’s advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as “a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer.” It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser.
But the biggest deal that NCL got–the contract that brought it into Afghanistan’s major leagues–was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.
At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a Weapons System,” the US military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “service members will not get food, water, equipment, and ammunition they require.” Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defense minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.
Host Nation Trucking does indeed keep the US military efforts alive in Afghanistan. “We supply everything the army needs to survive here,” one American trucking executive told me. “We bring them their toilet paper, their water, their fuel, their guns, their vehicles.” The epicenter is Bagram Air Base, just an hour north of Kabul, from which virtually everything in Afghanistan is trucked to the outer reaches of what the Army calls “the Battlespace”–that is, the entire country. Parked near Entry Control Point 3, the trucks line up, shifting gears and sending up clouds of dust as they prepare for their various missions across the country.
The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: “The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money.” That is something everyone seems to agree on.
Mike Hanna is the project manager for a trucking company called Afghan American Army Services. The company, which still operates in Afghanistan, had been trucking for the United States for years but lost out in the Host Nation Trucking contract that NCL won. Hanna explained the security realities quite simply: “You are paying the people in the local areas–some are warlords, some are politicians in the police force–to move your trucks through.”
Hanna explained that the prices charged are different, depending on the route: “We’re basically being extorted. Where you don’t pay, you’re going to get attacked. We just have our field guys go down there, and they pay off who they need to.” Sometimes, he says, the extortion fee is high, and sometimes it is low. “Moving ten trucks, it is probably $800 per truck to move through an area. It’s based on the number of trucks and what you’re carrying. If you have fuel trucks, they are going to charge you more. If you have dry trucks, they’re not going to charge you as much. If you are carrying MRAPs or Humvees, they are going to charge you more.”
Hanna says it is just a necessary evil. “If you tell me not to pay these insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase exponentially.”
Whereas in Iraq the private security industry has been dominated by US and global firms like Blackwater, operating as de facto arms of the US government, in Afghanistan there are lots of local players as well. As a result, the industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. “Every warlord has his security company,” is the way one executive explained it to me.
In theory, private security companies in Kabul are heavily regulated, although the reality is different. Thirty-nine companies had licenses until September, when another dozen were granted licenses. Many licensed companies are politically connected: just as NCL is owned by the son of the defense minister and Watan Risk Management is run by President Karzai’s cousins, the Asia Security Group is controlled by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. The company has blocked off an entire street in the expensive Sherpur District. Another security firm is controlled by the parliamentary speaker’s son, sources say. And so on.
In the same way, the Afghan trucking industry, key to logistics operations, is often tied to important figures and tribal leaders. One major hauler in Afghanistan, Afghan International Trucking (AIT), paid $20,000 a month in kickbacks to a US Army contracting official, according to the official’s plea agreement in US court in August. AIT is a very well-connected firm: it is run by the 25-year-old nephew of Gen. Baba Jan, a former Northern Alliance commander and later a Kabul police chief. In an interview, Baba Jan, a cheerful and charismatic leader, insisted he had nothing to do with his nephew’s corporate enterprise.
But the heart of the matter is that insurgents are getting paid for safe passage because there are few other ways to bring goods to the combat outposts and forward operating bases where soldiers need them. By definition, many outposts are situated in hostile terrain, in the southern parts of Afghanistan. The security firms don’t really protect convoys of American military goods here, because they simply can’t; they need the Taliban’s cooperation.
One of the big problems for the companies that ship American military supplies across the country is that they are banned from arming themselves with any weapon heavier than a rifle. That makes them ineffective for battling Taliban attacks on a convoy. “They are shooting the drivers from 3,000 feet away with PKMs,” a trucking company executive in Kabul told me. “They are using RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] that will blow up an up-armed vehicle. So the security companies are tied up. Because of the rules, security companies can only carry AK-47s, and that’s just a joke. I carry an AK–and that’s just to shoot myself if I have to!”
The rules are there for a good reason: to guard against devastating collateral damage by private security forces. Still, as Hanna of Afghan American Army Services points out, “An AK-47 versus a rocket-propelled grenade–you are going to lose!” That said, at least one of the Host Nation Trucking companies has tried to do battle instead of paying off insurgents and warlords. It is a US-owned firm called Four Horsemen International. Instead of providing payments, it has tried to fight off attackers. And it has paid the price in lives, with horrendous casualties. FHI, like many other firms, refused to talk publicly; but I’ve been told by insiders in the security industry that FHI’s convoys are attacked on virtually every mission.
For the most part, the security firms do as they must to survive. A veteran American manager in Afghanistan who has worked there as both a soldier and a private security contractor in the field told me, “What we are doing is paying warlords associated with the Taliban, because none of our security elements is able to deal with the threat.” He’s an Army veteran with years of Special Forces experience, and he’s not happy about what’s being done. He says that at a minimum American military forces should try to learn more about who is getting paid off.
“Most escorting is done by the Taliban,” an Afghan private security official told me. He’s a Pashto and former mujahedeen commander who has his finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry. And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. “Now the government is so weak,” he added, “everyone is paying the Taliban.”
To Afghan trucking officials, this is barely even something to worry about. One woman I met was an extraordinary entrepreneur who had built up a trucking business in this male-dominated field. She told me the security company she had hired dealt directly with Taliban leaders in the south. Paying the Taliban leaders meant they would send along an escort to ensure that no other insurgents would attack. In fact, she said, they just needed two armed Taliban vehicles. “Two Taliban is enough,” she told me. “One in the front and one in the back.” She shrugged. “You cannot work otherwise. Otherwise it is not possible.”
Which leads us back to the case of Watan Risk, the firm run by Ahmad Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal, the Karzai family relatives and former drug dealers. Watan is known to control one key stretch of road that all the truckers use: the strategic route to Kandahar called Highway 1. Think of it as the road to the war–to the south and to the west. If the Army wants to get supplies down to Helmand, for example, the trucks must make their way through Kandahar.
Watan Risk, according to seven different security and trucking company officials, is the sole provider of security along this route. The reason is simple: Watan is allied with the local warlord who controls the road. Watan’s company website is quite impressive, and claims its personnel “are diligently screened to weed out all ex-militia members, supporters of the Taliban, or individuals with loyalty to warlords, drug barons, or any other group opposed to international support of the democratic process.” Whatever screening methods it uses, Watan’s secret weapon to protect American supplies heading through Kandahar is a man named Commander Ruhullah. Said to be a handsome man in his 40s, Ruhullah has an oddly high-pitched voice. He wears traditional salwar kameez and a Rolex watch. He rarely, if ever, associates with Westerners. He commands a large group of irregular fighters with no known government affiliation, and his name, security officials tell me, inspires obedience or fear in villages along the road.
It is a dangerous business, of course: until last spring Ruhullah had competition–a one-legged warlord named Commander Abdul Khaliq. He was killed in an ambush.
So Ruhullah is the surviving road warrior for that stretch of highway. According to witnesses, he works like this: he waits until there are hundreds of trucks ready to convoy south down the highway. Then he gets his men together, setting them up in 4×4s and pickups. Witnesses say he does not limit his arsenal to AK-47s but uses any weapons he can get. His chief weapon is his reputation. And for that, Watan is paid royally, collecting a fee for each truck that passes through his corridor. The American trucking official told me that Ruhullah “charges $1,500 per truck to go to Kandahar. Just 300 kilometers.”
It’s hard to pinpoint what this is, exactly–security, extortion or a form of “insurance.” Then there is the question, Does Ruhullah have ties to the Taliban? That’s impossible to know. As an American private security veteran familiar with the route said, “He works both sides… whatever is most profitable. He’s the main commander. He’s got to be involved with the Taliban. How much, no one knows.”
Even NCL, the company owned by Hamed Wardak, pays. Two sources with direct knowledge tell me that NCL sends its portion of US logistics goods in Watan’s and Ruhullah’s convoys. Sources say NCL is billed $500,000 per month for Watan’s services. To underline the point: NCL, operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister’s son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai’s cousins, for protection.
Hamed Wardak wouldn’t return my phone calls. Milt Bearden, the former CIA officer affiliated with the company, wouldn’t speak with me either. There’s nothing wrong with Bearden engaging in business in Afghanistan, but disclosure of his business interests might have been expected when testifying on US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After all, NCL stands to make or lose hundreds of millions based on the whims of US policy-makers.
It is certainly worth asking why NCL, a company with no known trucking experience, and little security experience to speak of, would win a contract worth $360 million. Plenty of Afghan insiders are asking questions. “Why would the US government give him a contract if he is the son of the minister of defense?” That’s what Mahmoud Karzai asked me. He is the brother of President Karzai, and he himself has been treated in the press as a poster boy for access to government officials. The New York Times even profiled him in a highly critical piece. In his defense, Karzai emphasized that he, at least, has refrained from US government or Afghan government contracting. He pointed out, as others have, that Hamed Wardak had little security or trucking background before his company received security and trucking contracts from the Defense Department. “That’s a questionable business practice,” he said. “They shouldn’t give it to him. How come that’s not questioned?”
I did get the opportunity to ask General Wardak, Hamed’s father, about it. He is quite dapper, although he is no longer the debonair “Gucci commander” Bearden once described. I asked Wardak about his son and NCL. “I’ve tried to be straightforward and correct and fight corruption all my life,” the defense minister said. “This has been something people have tried to use against me, so it has been painful.”
Wardak would speak only briefly about NCL. The issue seems to have produced a rift with his son. “I was against it from the beginning, and that’s why we have not talked for a long time. I have never tried to support him or to use my power or influence that he should benefit.”
When I told Wardak that his son’s company had a US contract worth as much as $360 million, he did a double take. “This is impossible,” he said. “I do not believe this.”
I believed the general when he said he really didn’t know what his son was up to. But cleaning up what look like insider deals may be easier than the next step: shutting down the money pipeline going from DoD contracts to potential insurgents.
Two years ago, a top Afghan security official told me, Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the American military to the problem. The NDS delivered what I’m told are “very detailed” reports to the Americans explaining how the Taliban are profiting from protecting convoys of US supplies.
The Afghan intelligence service even offered a solution: what if the United States were to take the tens of millions paid to security contractors and instead set up a dedicated and professional convoy support unit to guard its logistics lines? The suggestion went nowhere.
The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. I asked Col. David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of the Tenth Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies paying off insurgents? “The American soldier in me is repulsed by it,” he said in an interview in his office at FOB Shank in Logar Province. “But I know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, ‘Hey, don’t hassle me.’ I don’t like it, but it is what it is.”
As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan overall, “We understand that across the board 10 percent to 20 percent goes to the insurgents. My intel guy would say it is closer to 10 percent. Generally it is happening in logistics.”
In a statement to The Nation about Host Nation Trucking, Col. Wayne Shanks, the chief public affairs officer for the international forces in Afghanistan, said that military officials are “aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring.” He added that, despite oversight, “the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent.”
In any case, the main issue is not that the US military is turning a blind eye to the problem. Many officials acknowledge what is going on while also expressing a deep disquiet about the situation. The trouble is that–as with so much in Afghanistan–the United States doesn’t seem to know how to fix it.
