Toward Freedom welcomed Jacqueline Luqman onto the board of directors on March 17. Jacqueline brings a background in activism and in journalism, and describes herself as a “Pan-Africanist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolutionary.”Jacqueline co-hosts the weekday radio show, “By Any Means Necessary,” on Radio Sputnik as well as the weekly Black Power Media show, “Luqman Nation.” She also is the organizer of the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Black Alliance for Peace and is an organizer with Pan-African Community Action. Besides all that, Jacqueline is the moderator and member of the Board of Social Action of the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C.
Here’s what Jacqueline told Toward Freedom’s editor, Julie Varughese.
What got you interested in joining Toward Freedom’s board of directors?
I enjoyed the content of the publication and particularly like how Toward Freedom incorporates entertainment critique with political commentary.
Your background is in activism and in journalism. How do you reconcile what are normally seen as mutually exclusive endeavors?
Activism is the response to issues being reported in the news that are the result of politics and policies. Activism is the response to the injustice of those politics and policies on communities that have little to no say in how those policies are made. So reporting on the impact of those policies and politics on the people in the streets is a necessary aspect of activism, as it connects people who are doing the work with many who may not know what is even going on.
Tell us about Bruskie.
He is my 10-year-old furbaby. He thinks he is a person. He may be channeling my late husband, Abdus. But he is a complete 100-pound clown and big baby. He also is a very good Protest Dog, except when other people’s dogs are around, and then he forgets that he’s supposed to be Comrade To All Man and Dogkind. He’s working on that.
What is the next big story Toward Freedom should try to pursue?
The impact the war in Ukraine has had on de-prioritizing the U.S. dollar in developing countries in Africa; multi-polar solidarity among Global South and African nations, and in and between working-class movements in those countries; as well as the role of China as the new leader of the multi-polar world and what that means to the international working class.
The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon / credit: U.S. Department of Energy
Editor’s Note: The following represents the writer’s opinion.
“This a critical moment for nuclear disarmament, and for our collective survival,” wrote Ray Acheson of Reaching Critical Will, commenting on the 10th Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference taking place since August 1 and ending August 26 at the United Nations.
I attended the conference for several days last week as an NGO delegate from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and have been closely watching the negotiations going on for the entire month over an outcome statement for the conference.
After two weeks, a draft preamble was submitted that reaffirms, among other things, “…that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, and commits to ensuring that nuclear weapons will never be used again under any circumstances.”
This could be an extraordinary breakthrough toward global nuclear disarmament. Right now, 191 countries are represented in this treaty and are seated in the General Assembly hall listening to each other. In the first week, we heard urgent warning statements from the nations without nuclear weapons, such as, “The clouds that parted following the end of the Cold War are gathering once more.” Meanwhile, a representative from Costa Rica scolded, “The lack of firm deadlines has provided the nuclear-armed states with a pathway to disregard their disarmament commitments as flagrantly as they have since the last Review Conference.”
In a hopeful step, 89 non-nuclear states in the last year have either signed or ratified a binding disarmament agreement called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which requires disarmament commitments. These states no longer tolerate the double talk from the nine-nation nuclear mafia made up of UN Security Council member states China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), India, Israel and Pakistan.
How can the United States consider signing the draft preamble while the House and Senate are finalizing the National Defense Authorization Act, which calls for the modernization of its nuclear arsenal? How can the U.S. government even take part in this conference while it is seeking funding for a renewed nuclear edifice of destruction, including Modernized Strategic Delivery Systems and refurbished nuclear warheads? Over the next decade, the United States plans to spend $494 billion on its nuclear forces, or about $50 billion a year, according to a 2019 Congressional Budget Office report. Trillions of dollars for submarines, bombers and buried nuclear missiles. Things they are committing to not use. Please, does this make sense?
At one of the NGO meetings I attended in the basement of the UN, I blurted out, “This conference IS A FRAUD.” The nuclear mafia have no serious plans to disarm, as required by Section 6 of the NPT Treaty. Their duplicity could be rebuked to the world by a walkout in the final days of the conference by the countries that have signed and ratified the agreement, as well as by their supporters.
For the NPT Treaty to collapse would be tragic. But for it to continue when everyone knows it is a lie is a moral and mortal affront to the people of the world.
Robin Lloyd is secretary of the Toward Freedom Board of Directors. She is a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in the United States.
United Nations peacekeepers from Brazil conduct a security patrol in Cité Soleil, Haiti, during the second round of senatorial elections in 2009 / credit: United Nations
Editor’s Note: The following opinion was originally published in Black Agenda Report.
It is an exhilarating time for the “leftists” of the Americas. This past week, at the 77th meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, leader after Latin American leader made grand statements against U.S. and Western imperialism, the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, the violations of human rights, and the West’s assault on the sovereignty of smaller nations. Colombia’s brand-new president, Gustavo Petro, made an impassioned plea against the genocidal “War on Drugs.” Cuba’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla, rejected the attacks on the sovereignty of China and Russia. Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Faría railed against the Western sanctions against Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran and Russia. Honduran President Xiomara Castro demanded that the United States stop its attempts at destabilizing her country and strongly pushed against Western policies of intervention in the region. Nicaragua’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Denis Ronaldo Moncada Colindres, made perhaps the most explosive claims when he stated :
“The assault, the robbery, the disgraceful abominable depredation, the looting and the genocides unleashed by the colonialists and imperialists of the Earth, are the real crimes and they are the real criminals against humanity, and we denounce this… It’s time to say enough to hypocritical imperialism that politicizes, falsifies and denigrates the very human rights which they themselves violate and deny on a daily basis.”
Most of these leaders spoke to the urgent question of Cuba, calling for the lifting of the economic blockade against the country and for Cuba’s removal from the U.S.-created list of countries that supposedly “sponsor terrorism.”
Yet, for all the eloquent denunciations of imperialism and the impassioned defenses of Latin American and Caribbean sovereignty and independence, one country was conspicuously avoided: Haiti. Not a single one of these countries applied their critiques of imperialism to Haiti. Sure, Cuba and Venezuela mentioned Haiti. Cuba’s representative called for reparations for the Caribbean for slavery, said that humanity owed a debt to the Haitian revolution, and stressed that Haiti needed international support “through a special contribution for its reconstruction and development.” Venezuela’s representative name-dropped Haiti within a list of countries, which have suffered bloodshed from “imperialism and supremacism.”
Beyond the casual mentions, the hollow rhetorics, and the empty invocations, there were no concrete critiques of the current imperial machinations in Haiti—of Haiti’s complete loss of sovereignty through the ongoing destruction of the Haitian state apparatus, of the current occupation of the country by the Western-led Core Group, and of the repression (and violent misrepresentation) of the Haitian people as they have taken to the streets to demand their sovereignty and call for an end to foreign intervention. Instead, the extension and intensification of foreign intervention appears to be the strategic end goal of not only the usual suspects of the West, but our supposed Leftist allies in the Americas.
One has to ask: Do the leaders of the region even know what has been going on in Haiti? Surely they know about the 2004 U.S./Canada/France-led coup d’etat against Haiti’s democratically elected president, and the Chapter 7 deployment of a United Nations occupation force (euphemistically known as a “peacekeeping” force). Indeed, it was Lula’s Brazil that led the military wing of that occupation that brought nothing but violence and devastation to Haitian peoples. Brazil’s active participation in that occupation led to the migration of thousands of Haitian workers to Brazil, where they provided cheap labor to build the infrastructure for the Olympics and World Cup. The savage racism experienced by Haitian migrants in Brazil, combined with the disappearance of work, led them to flee overland through Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border in search of asylum.
The leaders of the Americas must also know about the Core Group—the self-selected, unelected group of foreigners, with representatives from the European Union, the United States, Brazil, Canada, that was created during the early months of the occupation. The Core Group continues to control Haiti’s internal political affairs. They certainly know that the UN still occupies Haiti; after all, it is the left’s “anti-imperialist” darling, Andrés Manual López Obrador (AMLO), who is serving, along with the United States, as “co-penholder” and writing the UN Security Council’s imperial policies on Haiti. Similar to Brazil, will Mexico’s bid to play power-broker in the region come at the expense of Haitian people and Haiti’s sovereignty?
AMLO must know what he’s doing. After all, even as it gets celebrated for its “leftist” credentials, the Mexican government continues to collude with the U.S. Border Patrol to militarize its southern border against migrants, and enforce the U.S. “Remain in Mexico” policy. Meanwhile, Haitian and other Black migrants continue to suffer racist abuse in Mexico.
It is not lost on me that there is a deep-seated, racist view of Haiti as exceptional—and therefore exceptionally difficult to engage. The constant refrain from anti-imperialist groupings in the West is that Haiti is so “complex” and its sociopolitical terrain so difficult that there’s no way to truly understand what’s going on there. During a recent webinar against U.S. imperialism in Latin America, I brought up the current UN/US occupation in Haiti, only to have the host soberly agree with me that this was, indeed, an important problem to engage, but that, perhaps, Haiti needed a separate webinar. Many webinars later, discussion of Haiti’s destruction by a brutal Western imperialism, continues to get short shrift.
While we celebrate the rise of another “Pink Tide” in Latin America, the emergence of a truly multipolar world, with new economic and political alignments, it seems clear that Haiti will continue to be on the outside of “leftist” imaginations—beyond, of course, the non-specific words of “solidarity” thrown its way.
In a discussion on Twitter about the ways that Haiti appears— and dismissed—in global discourses, a colleague, Vik Sohonie lamented , “Haiti is unfortunately where all good will, solidarity, and Third Worldism goes to die… The ‘international community’ that occupies it, as you know, is Nepali, Brazilian. You get looked at funny elsewhere in the Carib if you compliment Haiti. It’s astonishing.” He’s not wrong. One of the reasons that the brutal UN military occupation of Haiti could fly under the radar was because it was populated by a multi-national and multi-racial military and civilian force. The United States admitted as much, as revealed in the Wikileaks files. Former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson lauded the occupation force (MINUSTAH) as a cheap source of U.S. power in Haiti, as it is made up of a multinational coalition of Western and non-Western forces, including countries ranging from Benin and Kenya to Brazil and Ecuador, who seem all bent on using Haiti as their training ground.
Why is it so easy for these nonwhite and oppressed nations to come and serve U.S. and Western imperial interests in Haiti? Could it be that they, too, have imbibed the dehumanized and, frankly, racist views about Haitian people? Is Haiti’s Blackness seen as the root cause of its problems and struggles—even by many Black people? One would think so if one reviewed the recent actions of the leaders of CARICOM who, also, deploy the dehumanizing language and white supremacist assumptions about Haiti that is the foundation of Western imperialist actions in the country.
This wasn’t always the case, of course. Back in 2004, under the leadership of PJ Patterson, CARICOM at least spoke up against the U.S./France/Canada coup d’etat against elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide (and this was despite his often problematic public positions against him). Jamaica was even threatened with sanctions—by the Bush administration’s Condoleeza Rice—if it attempted to provide Aristide asylum. The other bold voice was Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who railed against the coup and later provided direct support to Haiti’s masses through the PetroCaribe fuel subsidies.
Where are those voices now?
Perhaps if people in the region saw Haiti less as an abstraction and more as a place with real humans, citizens of the world, with the same claims to rights and livelihood, confronting a white supremacist imperialism, they would recognize the current denial of its sovereignty. Until that time, the Leftists of the Americas are betraying a people that have given so much to the struggles for sovereignty and independence in the region.
Jemima Pierre is an editor and contributor to Black Agenda Report, the Haiti/Americas Co-Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace, and a Black Studies and anthropology professor at UCLA.
On September 10, sections of the second Nord Stream 2 pipeline laid from the German shore and Danish waters were connected in a so-called “above water tie-in.” The opposing pipe strings were lifted from the seabed by the lay barge, Fortuna. Then the pipe ends were cut and fitted together. The welding to connect the two lines took place on a platform located above the water on the side of the vessel. Then the connected pipeline was lowered to the seabed as one continuous string / credit: Nord Stream 2 / Axel Schmidt
Editor’s Note: The following represents the writer’s analysis and was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter.
The current crisis of spiraling gas prices in Europe, coupled with a cold snap in the region, highlights the fact that the transition to green energy in any part of the world is not going to be easy. The high gas prices in Europe also bring to the forefront the complexity involved in transitioning to clean energy sources: that energy is not simply about choosing the right technology, and that transitioning to green energy has economic and geopolitical dimensions that need to be taken into consideration as well.
Gas wars in Europe are very much a part of the larger geostrategic battle being waged by the United States using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine. The problem the United States and the EU have is that shifting the EU’s energy dependence on Russia will have huge costs for the EU, which is being missed in the current standoff between Russia and NATO. A break with Russia at this point over Ukraine will have huge consequences for the EU’s attempt to transition to cleaner energy sources.
The European Union has made its problem of a green transition worse by choosing a completely market-based approach toward gas pricing. The blackouts witnessed by people in Texas in February 2021 as a result of freezing temperatures made it apparent that such market-driven policies fail during vagaries of weather, pushing gas prices to levels where the poor may have to simply turn off their heating. In winter, gas prices tend to skyrocket in the European Union, as they did in 2020 and again in 2021.
For India and its electricity grid, one lesson from this European experience is clear. Markets do not solve the problem of energy pricing, as they require planning, long-term investments and stability in pricing. The electricity sector will face disastrous consequences if it is handed over to private electricity companies, as is being proposed in India. This is what the move to separate wires from the electricity they carry aims to achieve through Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s proposed amendment to the existing Electricity Act of 2003.
In order to understand the issues related to transitioning toward green energy, it is important to take a closer look at the current gas supply-related issues being faced by the European Union. The EU has chosen gas as its choice of fuel for electricity production, as it goes off coal and nuclear while also investing heavily in wind and solar. The argument advanced in favor of this choice is that gas would provide the EU with a transitional fuel for its low carbon emission path, as gas tends to produce less emissions than coal. It is another matter that gas is at best a short-term solution, as it still emits half as much greenhouse gas as coal.
As I have written earlier, the problem with green energy is that it requires a much larger capacity addition to handle seasonal and daily fluctuations that planners have not accounted for while advocating for switching over to clean energy sources. During winter, days are shorter in higher latitudes, and the world therefore gets fewer hours of sunlight. This seasonal problem with solar energy has been compounded in Europe with low winds in 2021 reducing the electricity output of windmills.
The European Union has banked heavily on gas to meet its short- and medium-term goals of cutting down greenhouse emissions. Gas can be stored to meet short-term and seasonal needs, and gas production can even be increased easily from gas fields with requisite pumping capacity. All this, however, requires advance planning and investment in surplus capacity building to meet the requirements of daily or seasonal fluctuations.
Unfortunately, the EU is a strong believer that markets magically solve all problems. It has moved away from long-term price contracts for gas and toward spot and short-term contracts—unlike China, India and Japan, which all have long-term contracts indexed to their oil prices.
Why does the gas price affect the price of electricity in the EU? After all, natural gas accounts only for about 20 percent of the EU’s electricity generation. Unfortunately for the people in the EU region, not only the gas market but also the electricity market has been “liberalized” under the market reforms in the EU. The energy mix in the grid is determined by energy market auctions, in which private electricity producers bid their prices and the quantity they will supply to the electricity grid. These bids are accepted, in order from lowest to highest, until the next day’s predicted demand is fully met. The last bidder’s price then becomes the price for all producers. In the language of Milton Friedman’s followers—who were known as the Chicago Boys—this price offered by the last bidder is its “marginal price” discovered through the market auction of electricity and, therefore, is the “natural” price of electricity. For readers who might have followed the recently concluded elections in Chile, Augusto Pinochet—who was a military dictator in Chile from 1973 to 1990—introduced the Constitution of 1980 in Chile and had incorporated the above principle in a constitutional guarantee to the neoliberal reforms in the electricity sector in the country. Hopefully, the victory of the left in the presidential elections in Chile and the earlier referendum on rewriting the Chilean constitution will also address this issue. Interestingly, it was not the former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—as is commonly thought—who started the electricity “reforms” but Pinochet’s bloody regime in Chile.
At present in the EU, natural gas is the marginal producer, and that is why the price of gas also determines the price of electricity in Europe. This explains the almost 200 percent rise in electricity price in Europe in 2020. In 2021, according to an October 2021 report by the European Commission, “Gas prices are increasing globally, but more significantly in net importer regional markets like Asia and the EU. So far in 2021, prices tripled in [the] EU and more than doubled in Asia while only doubling in the U.S.” [emphasis added].
The coupling of the gas and the electricity markets by using the marginal price as the price of all producers means that if gas spot prices triple as has been seen recently, so will the electricity prices. No prizes for guessing who gets hit the hardest with such increases. Though there has been criticism from various quarters regarding the use of marginal price as the price of electricity for all suppliers irrespective of their respective costs, the neoliberal belief in the gods of the market has ruled supreme in Europe.
Russia has long-term contracts as well as short-term contracts to supply gas to EU countries. Putin has mocked the EU’s fascination with spot prices and gas prices and said that Russia is willing to supply more gas via long-term contracts to the region. Meanwhile, in October 2021, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Russia was not doing its part in helping Europe tide over the gas crisis, according to an article in the Economist. The article stated, however, that according to analysts, Russia’s “big continental customers have recently confirmed that it is meeting its contractual obligations,” adding that “[t]here is little hard evidence that Russia is a big factor in Europe’s current gas crisis.”
The question here is that the EU either believes in the efficiency of the markets or it doesn’t. The EU cannot argue markets are best when spot prices are low in summer, and lose that belief in winter, asking Russia to supply more in order to “control” the market price. And if markets indeed are best, why not help the market by expediting the regulatory clearances for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will ship Russian gas to Germany?
This brings us to the knotty question of the EU and Russia. The current Ukraine crisis that is roiling the relationship between the EU and Russia is closely linked to gas as well. Pipelines from Russia through Ukraine and Poland, along with the undersea Nord Stream 1, currently supply the bulk of Russian gas to the EU. Russia also has additional capacity via the newly commissioned Nord Stream 2 to supply more gas to Europe if it receives the financial regulatory clearance.
There is little doubt that Nord Stream 2 is caught not simply in regulatory issues but also in the geopolitics of gas in Europe. The United States pressured Germany not to allow Nord Stream 2 to be commissioned, and also threatened to impose sanctions on companies involved with the pipeline project. Before stepping down as the chancellor of Germany in September 2021, Angela Merkel, however, resisted pressure from Washington to halt the work on the pipeline and forced the United States to concede to a “compromise deal.” The Ukraine crisis has created further pressure on Germany to postpone Nord Stream 2 even if it means worsening its twin crises of gas and electricity prices.
The net gainer in all of this is the United States, which will get the EU as a buyer for its more expensive fracking gas. Russia currently supplies about 40 percent of the EU’s gas. If this stalls, the United States, which supplies about 5 percent of the EU’s gas demand (according to 2020 figures), could be a big gainer. The United States’ interest in sanctioning Russian gas supply and not allowing the commissioning of Nord Stream 2 has as much to do with its support to Ukraine as seeing that Russia does not become too important to the EU.
Nord Stream 2 could help form a common pan-European market and a larger Eurasian consolidation. Just as it did in East and Southeast Asia, the United States has a vested interest in stopping trade following geography instead of politics. Interestingly, gas pipelines from the Soviet Union to Western Europe were built during the Cold War as geography and trade got priority over Cold War politics.
The United States wants to focus on NATO and the Indo-Pacific region, as its focus is on the oceans. In geographical terms, the oceans are not separate but a continuous body covering more than 70 percent of the world’s surface with three major islands: Eurasia, Africa and the Americas. (Although in the formulation of British geographer Halford Mackinder, the originator of the world island idea, Africa was seen as a part of Eurasia.) Eurasia alone is by far the bigger island, with 70 percent of the world’s population. That is why the United States does not want such a consolidation.
The world is passing through perhaps the greatest transition that human civilization has known in meeting the current challenges posed by climate change. To address these challenges, an energy transition is required that cannot be achieved through markets that prioritize immediate profits over long-term societal gains. If gas is indeed the transitional fuel, at least for Europe, it needs long-term policies of integrating its gas grid with gas fields, which have adequate storage. And Europe needs to stop playing games with its energy and the world’s climate future for the benefit of the United States.
For India, the lessons are clear. Markets do not work for infrastructure. Long-term planning with state leadership is what India needs to ensure supply of electricity to all Indians and ensure the country’s green transition—instead of dependence on electricity markets created artificially by a few regulators framing rules to favor the private monopoly of electricity companies.
Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.
