Citizen Reporter

Behind the Famine in Somalia

Earlier this year a famine was declared in Somalia. It was not the first time the world had heard about a humanitarian crisis in that struggling country. How did the world respond? How did Somalia get to the state it is in today and who was involved in getting it that way?

As part of a new monthly series, a veteran of the international scene and my good friend Tarak and I sit down here in Amsterdam and talk about the case of a massive under-reported concern with many lives on the line and a lot of money invested or, not invested, as the case may be. We break down the situation and look at it through a critical and caring lens.

Workers in Indonesia Rise Up Against Freeport

Here’s what we know:

Freeport MacMoRan is the world’s lowest-cost copper producer and the largest gold producer in the world. Producer is a funny term, they pull it from the earth. I suppose the production label comes from everything they do to the stuff they take from the earth.. the processing.

The company is almost 100 years old with its headquarters in Arizona, but of course its operations are located all over the world. Freeport operates the largest copper mine in the world, the Grasberg Mining Complex in West Papua, a province of Indonesia.

West Papua has long been the stage for conflict, where the Indonesian government uses whatever means at its disposal to keep the independence movement down. For many Papuan people the mine is a major part of that conflict, due to the massive environmental damage it causes on their territory, the lack of financial benefit or return to the region, and the use of notorious elements of the Indonesian Military to handle security. Since 2002 there have been several incidents involving the shooting deaths of workers at the plant.

For the past two months workers at the mine have been on strike, demanding better wages. According to Reuters, their current payrate is $1.5 to $3 an hour. They are now demanding that it be raised to $12.50 to $37 an hour. Recent demonstrations by the workers have attracted crowds numbering around 8,000. According to the Jakarta Post, during one of those demonstrations police fired into the crowd and killed 2 workers. The paper also reports that Freeport had been trying to fire all the workers and have them replaced, a tactic an Indonesian Minister said would be a violation of their labor laws.

Freeport is number 136 on the Forbes Fortune 500 list, with over $4 billion in profit for 2010. They have been heavily criticized by human rights organizations and corruption watchdogs for their payments to the Indonesian Government and the Military in an effort to maintain the status quo and quell labor disputes at their mine. The millions of dollars in lost revenue are often mentioned in the media for every day their mine is shut. What does their copper go into? The list is massive and touches on many aspects of our everyday lives in the western world.

First Ever User Survey

In an effort to keep up with what you the site visitors, readers, listeners, and viewers are thinking and feeling, I present to you the citizenreporter.org user survey. 12 questions. 5 minutes. The info you provide will be taken very seriously, read carefully, and helps me in all my future work on this site. Won’t you please fill it out: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGl6YXVSSG9OUEtXYkhHYXJMdWpqaXc6MQ

Education, Portugal, and the World

JHW John Howard Wolf doesn’t know how to fix the global economy, but he can teach us a thing or two about education. Its been his business and passion for most of his adult life. Having immigrated from the US to Portugal in the late 1970’s, even back then he was a swimming against the current, setting up a primary school in a country still getting over its post-fascist hangover. As a Americano-Luso (American-Portuguese) he has a unique perspective based on the kind of experiences most of us only wish we could have. John Howard Wolf knows literature and he knows history, but what he knows that the world would be lucky to hear about, is another way to approach life and human relations on this planet. For one great hour on the last days of summer in Lisbon, we sat together watching the world go by during a financial crisis, and talking about how this all happened and what is to come.

Read John’s piece in the Portuguese-American Journal

His article on Rural Development and Portugal from January 1992 (note – academic journal paywall)

The Opium War Syndrome Continues

Writer and historian Amitav Ghosh writes about the Opium Wars of the later part of the 1800’s, a time where not unlike today, the western world had wracked up a great trade deficit with China. And also just like today, the dominant discourse that was proselytized like the answer to all ills, was what they called free trade. The benefactors of this trade were some of the largest corporations of that era, the British East India Company and names like that. They all claimed that free trade was their goal and insisted that empires in the east adopt this practice for the good of the world. But with this good came a long list of problems, as western traders pushed Opium on Chinese traders, and eventually triggered the Opium Wars.

Opium War Museum In the US education system, both primary and higher education, the Opium Wars are hardly mentioned. Children are taught that it was a British problem, a disagreement with the Chinese, and has nothing to do with the United States or these modern times we live in. But in fact, the opposite is true. The US played a major role, with relatives of presidents Thomas Jefferson, Calvin Coolidge, and even the Delano (Roosevelt) family being major investors in the Opium trade. And once we again we find ourselves in an era where nations claim free trade will solve the problems of the world, while at the same time pushing, secretly or overtly, monopolies and other “unfree” business tactics.

As people around the United States and throughout the western world occupy and retake public spaces and confront centers of business and trade, I wonder if they know how far back the practices they are raging against go. The lives we know, for well over a century have been built on top of deep traditions connected to corruption and greed at the expense of massive groups of people. How do you halt or change a system so deeply ingrained in how things function? I think its a good time to revisit the Opium Wars, especially for those of us who don’t know the lessons that were never learned.

Re-inventing Ourselves and Our Homes

VTHouse — The Vermont Home / photo by Erik

Erik Nelson moved from house to house as an urban dweller, never living in a space that he felt connected to. Until he found forest land that appealed to him and built his own home there. Or as he explains it: “While most people find a job and then live near that job, we picked the place where we really want to live and then made it work with jobs we could get.”

But approach to work isn’t the only thing interesting about how Erik and his family live. In this podcast we talk about the reasons for making your own home on the side of a hill in Vermont, how the experience was building it and how it is now living there. In his experience we find yet another example of those who have left the conventional path and made their own home in a unique place/way.

Recommended: Erik’s Vlog, Wreck & Salvage and the entire collection of house photos on flickr.