http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/26/international/americas/26WATE.html

As Multinationals Run the Taps, Anger Rises Over Water for Profit

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

SAN ISIDRO DE LULES, Argentina
˜ When Jorge Abdala’s water bill jumped to 59 pesos a month from 24 a few
years ago, he went looking for someone to blame. He soon found his villain:
a French multinational company at the forefront of a global effort to privatize
government-run water systems.

    Mr. Abdala,
a soft-spoken 54-year-old, scarcely seems the revolutionary. Scrambling
for a living like most of his neighbors in this sprawling town tucked up
under the Andes, he runs a meager catering business out of his kitchen.

    But the
protests Mr. Abdala organized here forced the company, now known as Vivendi
Environnement, to abandon its long-term contract to overhaul and manage
the waterworks of the Tucumán Province, where Mr. Abdala and roughly
one million other Argentines live.

    “Our
main demand was, simply, `Go home!’ ” he said, shifting to the edge of
his seat in the living room of his simple one-story home. “We kept presenting
facts showing that they were not making any investments, just raising the
price of water. And any investments they made were with government money.”

    Vast
numbers of people have also demonstrated in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Panama,
in South Africa and elsewhere in a vivid illustration of how highly charged
the economics of water have become. At issue is this question: should water,
a substance close to life itself, be a profit-making business?

    The backlash
in Tucumán continues today as the province struggles to find a new
company to operate its aging water system. The reaction is still being
felt by the big European concerns that dominate the world water business
and the Western aid institutions that support privatization.

    Already,
corporations own or operate water systems across the globe that bring in
about $200 billion a year. Yet they serve only about 7 percent of the world’s
population, leaving a potentially vast market untapped. Protesters are
determined to limit that market.

    The protests
have heartened the companies’ critics, mainly environmentalists who oppose
globalization, but also consumer groups and labor unions. They all object
to private enterprise making a profit on water.

    “Water
is a resource essential to life,” said Hannah Griffiths, of Friends of
the Earth, an environmentalist group based in Britain. “Decisions about
allocation and distribution should be democratic and based on everyone’s
fundamental right to a clean, healthy supply.”

    Not all
agree. Some argue that unless water is treated as an increasingly precious
commodity and priced to reflect its value ˜ particularly for heavy users
like farmers and factories ˜ much of it will be wasted.

    It also
often takes more money than some governments are willing or able to spend
to improve the systems that deliver fresh water to cities and towns around
the world, especially to the poor.

    But will
allowing private enterprise to manage or own many of the world’s water
systems help overcome those problems? And will it expose the poor to impossibly
high water bills?

    The widespread
inability of public utilities in the developing world to provide clean
water is one of the strongest arguments in favor of privatization.

    “As a
general rule, they’re heavily overstaffed, provide poor quality, are unwilling
or unable to invest, with not enough money to serve everybody,” said John
Briscoe, senior water adviser at the World Bank in Washington, referring
to public utilities.

    But private
enterprise appears to be no panacea. Here in Tucumán, Vivendi’s
critics say that the company recklessly pursued the contract in order to
break into the market and that most of the problems it encountered were
of its own making.

    To Gilda
Pedinoce de Valls, a former state’s attorney in Tucumán, Vivendi
failed to recognize how strongly people feel about tampering with the substance
essential to sustaining what has long been a dusty region noted for its
citrus fruit crop.

    Water,
she said, “is a gift from God.”

    Olivier
Barbaroux, the president of Vivendi’s water business, agreed ˜ but only
up to a point.

    “Yes,”
Mr. Barbaroux said, “but he forgot to lay the pipes.”

More Water, but No Sewers

When water filled the cellar
under Basilio Sajnik’s pizzeria in downtown Lomas de Zamora, a sprawling
suburb of Buenos Aires, he, too, looked for a culprit.

    Like
Mr. Abdala, he found a leading French multinational. That company, Suez,
along with Vivendi has led the push to privatize water management.

    In 1992,
Suez signed a 30-year contract to manage the water around Buenos Aires.
Lomas, a sprawling low-slung city of 600,000 on the capital’s southern
edge, is home to many of the 2 million people that Suez provided with water
for the first time.

    But the
company was slower to install sewers. Now the cellar under the three-family
building that houses Mr. Sajnik’s pizzeria is permanently flooded. A pump
runs seven days a week.

    “It’s
the third pump I’ve purchased, yet nobody pays me for the electricity”
Mr. Sajnik, 58, said recently as he waded in dirty water almost to the
top of his knee-high boots.

    The water
Suez brought to the neighborhood produced so much runoff that the water
table rose, causing streams of sewage to trickle along curbs and flood
cellars, even in the driest of seasons. In summer, the stench is overwhelming.
So far there have been no outbreaks of sickness, but the threat to public
health is constant.

    “I could
go to court, but it is too slow, and the powerful always win,” Mr. Sajnik
said. “They say it’s nature, and what can you do about nature?”

    Suez
executives blame Argentina’s financial crisis instead of nature. Jacques
Petry, chief executive of Ondeo, the water division of Suez, explained
in Paris that Suez’s original investment plan foresaw the installation
of sewers. But the collapse of the Argentine peso has frozen the work.
Suez, he said, supports a program to provide 1,500 pumps to the area.

    For the
time being, said Jean Bernard Lemire, the new chief executive of Suez’s
Argentine affiliate, spending has been reduced to the essentials: paying
wages, buying chemicals and energy, and basic maintenance.

    He acknowledges
that renegotiating the original contract, which has already been modified
dozens of times, mocks the original agreement.

    “Of course,
our competitors can say, `Under those conditions, we could have won the
contracts, too,”‘ he said. But he added, “We cannot forecast on a 30-year
basis; we have to be flexible.”

    Overall,
Suez says it is proud of its accomplishments in Buenos Aires. It modernized
treatment plants that were once on the verge of collapse, and efficiently
runs a fleet of more than 1,000 repair trucks. Billings are now computerized.
And except for the first eight months, when Suez lost $23 million, it has
been highly profitable.

    Daniel
Azpiazu, director of research at the Latin American School of Social Sciences
in Buenos Aires, accuses Argentina’s political leadership of cynically
permitting the public utilities to deteriorate so that voters would embrace
privatization.

    In a
1992 survey, he said, 82 percent of Argentines questioned had favored privatization.
In the haste to privatize, however, regulatory bodies and oversight authorities
were rarely installed.

    “In the
early phase, a regulatory agency was not in place,” said Abel Fatala, the
engineer in charge of public services in the municipal government of Buenos
Aires. “When it did start up, it was made in the image of the water company.
The concrete result was that there was no control at all.”

A Vast Market Gap to Fill

By 2025, as the world’s
population grows to eight billion, the United Nations expects the number
of people suffering from an inadequate supply of clean water to grow to
five billion from the current two billion.

    The vast
potential to make money by filling that gap has prompted several large
multinationals like Vivendi and Suez to target what they see as a lucrative
market for the future.

    The case
for privatization germinated decades ago after the World Bank unsuccessfully
tried to fix the public water supply system in Manila. Despite five repair
attempts over the years, water loss was as high as 64 percent.

    “Fundamentally
we realized that without a change in incentives ˜ some very logical, sensible
things ˜ this was not working,” said Mr. Briscoe, of the World Bank said.

    Critics
still say it is unrealistic to expect private companies, whose main responsibility
is to their shareholders, to assume the financial risk of supplying water
to portions of the world’s population that may not be able to afford it
in the first place.

    But investors
are betting that the business of water will boom in coming decades. “This
is a $200 billion market, growing at a 6 percent rate annually, in terms
of population,” said Hans Peter Portner, a fund manager at Banque Pictet
in Geneva who handles the bank’s Global Water Fund. He predicts that privatized
water systems will expand to serve about 17 percent of the world’s population
by 2015, up from 7 percent now.

    Compared
with the Europeans, the American company with the biggest international
business in the field, Bechtel, whose directors include former Secretary
of State George P. Shultz, is a novice. Another American company, Azurix,
a unit of Enron, collapsed before its parent did.

    That
leaves the field mostly to the French giants, Vivendi Environnement and
Suez. Last year, almost half of Vivendi Environnement’s $26 billion of
revenue came from water; roughly one quarter of Suez’s $38 billion in revenue
was generated by the water division, Ondeo.

    French
dominance is now challenged by a third global player, Thames Water P.L.C.
of Britain. Thames rose, after Margaret Thatcher privatized water services
in Britain in 1989, by swallowing up smaller British competitors. In 1999,
it agreed to a $9.8 billion takeover bid from the big German utility RWE
A.G.

    All three
European companies have spent lavishly expanding in the United States.
This year, Thames acquired American Water Works, the American market leader,
for $7.6 billion. It was playing catch-up to Suez, which spent $6 billion
in 1999 to buy United Water Resources and Nalco, a maker of chemicals for
water treatment. Earlier that year, Vivendi acquired the U.S. Filter Corporation
for almost $8 billion.

    Contracts
are pouring in. This year, both Suez and Vivendi signed long-term deals,
some for up to 50 years, to manage municipal water systems in China, which
faces huge water shortages. In Central Europe, cities like Warsaw and Budapest
are struggling to upgrade their water systems to meet the standards of
the European Union, which Poland and Hungary are expected to join within
the next few years.

    Industry
executives recognize the need for oversight. “It’s always a difficult decision
to ask a private water company to manage such an essential service,” said
Gérard Mestrallet, the chief executive of Suez, in his Paris office.
“It is your duty to demonstrate that the arrival of the private sector
brings something concrete.”

    But in
their hurry, the companies often underbid to get a foot in the door, with
prices that fail to take account of the full cost of upgrading old and
inefficient water systems. Contracts are therefore regularly renegotiated.

    Renegotiation
often means that parts of the contract, like obligations to provide sewers
to go with water distribution, are cut or scaled back, sometimes causing
environmental difficulties. The situation in Lomas de Zamora is a pungent
illustration of the point.

    Critics
charge that it is all part of corporate strategy. If the project doesn’t
make money, the critics say, the companies cry for renegotiation, threatening
to leave otherwise.

 
Moreover, there is an inherent contradiction
in many of the efforts to privatize water systems, particularly those in
developing countries.

   
Municipalities award those contracts in part to shift the investment risk
to the private sector. Often, however, the private contractors commit little
of their own capital, relying instead on the municipalities themselves,
private lenders like banks, and international development organizations
like the World Bank or regional development banks.

   
In South Africa, for example, 80 percent of the money for a recent water
development project came from the Development Bank of South Africa. In
Peru, 100 percent of the money for a similar project originated at the
Interamerican Development Bank.

   
Given those flaws, opponents, many representing nongovernmental organizations
that have becoming increasingly involved in development issues, contend
that the role of private companies in delivering water supplies should
be sharply limited, confined to simply building things like treatment plants
for public entities.

    “Water
has to be a public good,” said Mr. Azpiazu, of the School of Social Sciences.
“It cannot be a predator business, in which you stay for a few years, make
your money and leave.”

    In North
America, most water remains publicly managed. Yet many municipal systems
are old and inefficient, and competition to take them over is intense.
Indianapolis, Atlanta and Milwaukee are among the city water services licensed
for management and operation to the European giants. In March, Suez landed
a 10 year, $4 billion contract to mange the water system of Puerto Rico.

    Company
executives muse about the billions of dollars modernization of the old
and dilapidated water works of great metropolises like New York might one
day bring.

Uniting Against Vivendi

After Suez landed its lucrative
30-year contract to manage the water system in Buenos Aires, Vivendi decided
to jump in. It bid aggressively for the similar contract in Tucumán
Province, even after four other bidders dropped out.

    After
rates continued to rise, Mr. Abdala joined other consumer leaders from
all over the province in calling for a payment strike. Vivendi’s collection
rate in Tucumán, which rose to 70 percent after it reorganized bill
collecting, plummeted to 10 percent.

    When
Vivendi employees sought to shut off a nonpaying customer’s water, Mr.
Abdala and other protest organizers sent demonstrators who stood on manhole
covers and blocked access to the water mains.

    “We
lived in a permanent state of mobilization,” Mr. Abdala recalled.

    In early
1996, after manganese deposits, always present in the local water, became
so great that tap water ran the color of cola, popular anger translated
into large-scale demonstrations against Vivendi. Local officials blamed
the ineptitude of Vivendi’s French engineers; Vivendi suspected sabotage.

    By the
summer of 1998, Vivendi was losing almost $3 million a month in the province,
and it unilaterally canceled the contract. One month later, Tucumán
Province pulled out of the deal as well. Vivendi then sued Tucumán
before a World Bank tribunal, but lost.

    Now the
province is starting from scratch. Water engineers sent from a neighboring
province to run the system have cut jobs at the water utility, to 500 from
850. A regulatory agency is being established to prepare for a new contract
later this year.

    “We don’t
know what company will invest here,” said José Cuneo Verges, a former
government official who is working on the project. “Yet we want to show
that Tucumán is ready.”

    That
is why Mr. Abdala is still on the case.

    “Whoever
takes it over must have good ties to us,” he said. “We want the participation
of consumers.”

godspeed
you! black emperor

yanqui
u.x.o.

(cst024 )

2xLP/CD

release dates:

europe nov 04, 2002

n. america nov 11, 2002

u.x.o. is unexploded ordnance
is landmines is cluster bombs. yanqui is post-colonial imperialism is international
police state is multinational corporate oligarchy.  godspeed you!
black emperor is complicit is guilty is resisting.  the new album
is just music.

recorded by steve albini
at electrical audio in chicago.  mixed by howard bilerman and godspeed
you! black emperor at the hotel2tango in montreal.  available on single
compact disc and double phonograph record.

stubborn tiny lights vs.
clustering darkness forever ok?

 

===========

CONSTELLATION
MANIFESTO:

Independence is a much-invoked
term in the music world, and its co-optation by the industry all too often
corrupts and invalidates whatever real meaning the word possesses. Independence
is an empty pose to the extent it does not relate critically and stand
in opposition to the homogenising force of corporatism and culture commodification.
The capitalist system of exchange is at a certain level inescapable – it
takes money to make records and money to buy them – but the worst traits
and tendencies of this system must be resisted, not just in spirit, but
in practice. We understand our position as an independent record label
to be an ongoing attempt to define and enact such a practice.

Corporatism divides and
conquers and falsifies social participation in its pre-formed, group-tested,
hermetically-sealed cycle of marketed product, setting up a closed circle
of blind consumption. The corporation is inhuman, managerial, driven solely
by profit and “the sell”. It is incapable of actually caring about and
preserving the supposedly cultural objects it shills, for it can ascribe
no real content to them. The very concept of quality is anathema to it
– capitalism in its grossest form is a total reduction to quantity, to
moving units. Exceptions only prove the rule – if you’ve heard something
on a major label that you dig, this is purely accidental. To the degree
you have made this positive valuation in relative aesthetic freedom, you
are already approaching the corporate product in terms that are foreign
and threatening to it. The corporation would much prefer your docility
to your activity, and in fact does everything in its power to engender
that docility by creating the illusion of activity.

Independence is to our minds
the affirmation of real community, real conversation, and the real exchange
of artistic work. The urgent task is to build up and promote real dependency
through a network of dissemination and valuation of culture that strives
to address the truth of our human situation – a dependency based on freedom,
critique, and dialogue. Obviously putting out rock music, however experimental
and boundary-pushing, is only obliquely a political and social activity,
but we nevertheless hope to contribute in a tiny way to a meaningful model
of communication which takes its lead from art. We deal with bands face-to-face,
without formal contracts, on the basis of ongoing discussion and mutual
decision-making. A shared understanding of principles is crucial to the
process, the aim being to collectively define and set the terms of engagement.
Our foremost concern is to minimise the corrupting effect of bringing a
work to market, allowing it to preserve its own terrain, to speak for itself.
We are learning as we go, attempting to remain as critical as possible
about our methods of self-definition.

In most other respects, the
enemy lies without and is much easier to identify. We have no interest
in and make no effort towards the placing of our recordings in corporate
retail outlets. However, we do work with distributors we feel we can trust,
and relinquish control of certain commercial aspects to them. In a sense
there is more than a mundane convenience here, as it not only saves us
from much of the distasteful work involved in negotiating and penetrating
the marketplace, but allows us to deflect responsibility for the ultimate
placement of our records in shops. Guilty as charged – if we could afford
to work personally and directly with every Mom & Pop record store on
the planet, we would. At the very least, we are committed to a model of
expansion that seeks to minimise the role of corporate chains. The expectation
is that as our catalogue of releases and our understanding of distribution
networks increase, so too will our ability to expand and strengthen the
lines connecting points of independent exchange. Insofar as this possibility
exists and can be actualised, we have hope. The role of chain stores in
the pre-determination and warehousing of culture is to be resisted. Do
not shop at these temples of payola and product placement – they are zones
of domination. Seek out your local independent record shop, and if you
are amongst the unlucky many whose community has already been ravaged and
gutted by Wal-mart or HMV, please mail-order directly from us. This is
your least expensive option in any case.

Duplication is a cornerstone
of corporate capital – you too can be hand-fed your own identity as you
suckle the same fucking hamburger in the same fucking prefab environment
in the four corners of the world – but it can proceed by way of non-corporate
techniques. Avoidance of pre-formulated package design sets up the parameters
for localised multi-step reproduction. Our practice of record-making involves
local artisans, craftspeople and small businesses. You can read all about
this in the section on packaging. Sometimes we find ourselves with no choice
but to dirty our hands and do business with a behemoth. Paper producers
and suppliers are the foremost example, as they are almost without exception
directly tied to corporate harvesters of trees. We’re not about to forgo
the use of paper, so the best we can do is seek out those producers who
aren’t vertically-integrated from top to bottom, who don’t exist directly
as an arm of an odious multi-national. Reproduction of music on vinyl and
CD is also potentially dangerous terrain, though the former has mostly
become an independently-owned process by now. Our commitment to vinyl certainly
stems in part from its inherent resistance to the advent of compact discs
as the vehicle of mass duplication. We are neither absolute purists nor
luddites in this regard – while we do prefer vinyl both for sonics and
for its ability to create a larger canvas for art direction, we also recognise
the decentralising potential of digital duplication and transmission. It’s
clear that digital technology is increasingly empowering localised and
independent production, which for us mostly means the ability to press
our discs with small-scale companies. We are still wholly unconvinced of
the worth, aesthetic or otherwise, of displacing the tangible record-as-object
to the ephemeral realm of the internet. There may be limited applications
that we haven’t yet grasped, but until the technology is made both accessible
and refined enough to permit the exchange of music without compromising
either its inherent sonics or its contextualisation in a package, this
appears to us peripheral.

Mechanical reproduction,
whether digital or analogue with regard to the music itself, whether at
the local die-cutter or silkscreener with regard to packaging and printing,
is accessible technology and allows for the duplication and dissemination
of cultural work at the micro-level, even if the macroscopic potentials
of the technology machine, with respect to art no less than labour practice
or weaponry, are terrifying. It’s all about maintaining a human scale.
Fin-de-siecle capitalism both facilitates and threatens independent production,
and the key for us is to utilise those technologies that captialism itself
has marginalised and dispersed in order to create cultural objects that
are inherently critical of the system. To the extent this condemns us to
pursuing quality at the expense of quantity, it is a fate to which we willingly
submit.

 

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Owners of Malibu Mansions Cry, ‘This Sand Is My Sand’

By TIMOTHY EGAN

MALIBU, Calif., Aug. 23 ˜
It started as another golden California day, the shoreline aglow in the
haloed light of midmorning. Rob LeMond was teaching children in his surfing
camp, passing on nearly a half-century of knowledge about riding the waves
of the Pacific.

    Then
a nearby homeowner complained that Mr. LeMond’s surfing students had crossed
the line onto his beach property. The sheriff was called. A long argument
followed over which strip of sand belonged to the public and which was
private.

    “Finally,
this homeowner turned to me and said something I thought I’d never hear
on a California beach,” said Mr. LeMond, 54, of Malibu. “He
said he did not like to look out his window and see people swimming, because
it blocked his view.”

    Skirmishes
over surf and sand have become particularly intense up and down the Southern
California coast this summer.

    To some
people, the fight is about a California birthright: public access to every
inch of the state’s 1,160-mile shoreline. By law, there is no such thing
as private beach in California. In a state where 80 percent of the 34 million
people live within an hour of the coast, it is no small fight.

    Others
see a gold coast of hypocrisy. Some of Hollywood’s and the Democratic Party’s
biggest contributors to liberal causes, like David Geffen, have turned
into conservative property-rights advocates because the battle is taking
place in their sandy backyards.

    “The
real issue here is money,” said Steve Hoye, the leader of a nonprofit group,
Access for All, and an active Democrat.

    “These
people who live on the beach here think that the public cannot be trusted
to walk or swim in front of these million-dollar houses,” Mr. Hoye said.

    A court
fight, initiated by Mr. Geffen, the entertainment mogul, could take the
question of beach access well beyond the shores of Malibu. Last month,
he filed suit seeking to block public access to a narrow walkway that goes
by his Malibu compound.
He promised access 19
years ago, but the path has never been opened, and Mr. Geffen now says
it would be unsafe, dirty and impractical to allow people to walk by his
home to the beach.

    Mr. Geffen
contends in the lawsuit that the access way amounts to a “taking of property
without compensation,” an argument that conservatives have used in environmental
fights for years. If the suit is successful, it could make it much harder
for state and federal agencies to open paths to public beaches throughout
the United States, or even to acquire open space for wildlife or recreation,
some experts say.

    “This
could keep the public away from a lot of beaches,” said Robert Ritchie,
director of research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, who is writing
a book on beach culture. “And because a very significant percentage of
the United States population now lives in counties facing the ocean, the
pressure for public access has become enormous. At the same time, you have
these homeowners fighting to keep the hordes back.”

    The stand
taken by beachfront owners here in Malibu, long a Democratic Party stronghold,
has infuriated another sector of party supporters ˜ environmentalists.

    “Here
you have the superrich wanting to have a private beach in a state that
decided long ago it would not allow any private beaches,” said Carl Pope,
executive director of the Sierra Club. “It’s a huge land grab. By blocking
access, they want to lock up the coast.”

    Further
complicating the issue, a prominent environmental philanthropist, Wendy
McCaw, has vowed to take her lawsuit against beach access to the United
States Supreme Court, making many of the same arguments as Mr. Geffen.

    Ms. McCaw,
the billionaire owner of The Santa Barbara News-Press, is trying to block
access to a 500-foot strip of beach below her 25-acre estate on a bluff
in Santa Barbara County. The easement was granted by a previous owner,
and Ms. McCaw says it does not apply to her. She has already paid $460,000
in fines in her fight to prevent access. She says if the state is going
to require an access path from her private property, then she should be
compensated.

    “There
needs to be more effort toward protecting the embattled wildlife calling
our beaches home, rather than focusing on how to pack more humans with
their destructive ways into those sensitive habitats,” Ms. McCaw said.

    In most
states, beaches that are covered by water at high tide but are relatively
dry at low tide are public. The entire West Coast falls under this mean
high tide doctrine. But some states, notably New York, Massachusetts and
Maine, are more restrictive, allowing fences in the water and private ownership
of tidelands.

    California
voters, in a populist campaign 30 years ago, took the additional step of
guaranteeing “access” to beaches, and empowered the California Coastal
Commission to fight on the public’s behalf.

    Since
then, the state has reached more than 1,300 access deals with private property
owners, but many of those have a time limit and are set to expire within
a few years.

    “Development
shall not interfere with the public right of access to the sea,” reads
a section of the California Coastal Act.

    Beachfront
owners in Malibu have surveyed the tide lines and posted signs warning
people that it is trespassing to walk within a zone they have claimed from
their houses to the ocean. The coastal commission says these private surveys
are meaningless because the definition of what a public beach is changes
daily, with the tides.

    Still,
homeowners
in parts of Malibu have hired private security forces to roam the beach
on three-wheeled vehicles, herding people away from areas they consider
private property.

    A 1987
Supreme Court ruling, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, limited
the commission’s authority to insist on public access, saying it had power
only over new developments. Mr. Geffen and Ms. McCaw are trying to expand
the Nollan ruling.

    Mr. Geffen’s
spokesman, Andy Spahn, said the Nollan ruling should be applied retroactively
to Mr. Geffen. Mr. Spahn said the public access promise Mr. Geffen made
in 1983 was “extorted” from him as a condition to expand his beach property
with maid quarters and other improvements.

    Mr. Spahn
also said he wanted to start a debate about the “beachgoing experience”
of the public.

    “We think
this is the wrong place for access,” Mr. Spahn said, referring to the path
next to Mr. Geffen’s house. “People are looking for safety, for bathrooms,
for lifeguards. They’re not going to want to cross four lanes of highway,
carrying beach furniture.”

    But the
coastal commission says that it has granted hundreds of access points that
are no more than footpaths next to mansions, and that they operate without
lifeguards or bathrooms and have few problems.

   
The path by Mr. Geffen’s estate is blocked by a locked gate. In front of
the house is a 275-foot stretch of beach, which is open to the public at
low tide, but requires a 20-minute hike to reach now.

    “What
David Geffen is doing is simply breaking his promise,” said Sara Wan, chairwoman
of the coastal commission. “He has a very nice stretch of beach in front
of his house, and it belongs to the public.”

    The city
of Malibu, a 27-mile strip of beach castles and hillside homes along each
side of the Pacific Coast Highway with a population of 13,000, has joined
Mr. Geffen in his lawsuit.

    Jeff
Jennings, the mayor of Malibu, said the city was concerned about safety
and garbage pickup if the access point at Mr. Geffen’s house was not properly
maintained by Access for All, the group that has been granted the right
to manage the pathway should it ever be opened.

    “I have
no interest in keeping the public off public land,” Mr. Jennings said.
“But most people who come to the beaches are not experts in water safety.
It can be a highly dangerous situation.”

    Veteran
surfers, who rely on the narrow public paths to get to some of the best
waves of the Pacific, say they do not need lifeguards or bathrooms. But
they would like to bring back an earlier era.

    “In the
old days, it was live and let live,” said Kurt Lampson, a surfing instructor
who grew up on Malibu’s beaches. “Now you got these guards going around
saying sit here, don’t walk there. It’s depressing.”

http://www.msnbc.com/news/768925.asp

Malaria is spread to humans through the Anopheles mosquito. A new study in the journal Science expects global warming would extend the range of the mosquito and the disease.

From coral reefs to rainforests, diseases are spreading among marine and land animals ˜ including humans ˜ and global warming appears to be a major factor, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science. The study, said to be the first to analyze disease epidemics across entire plant and animal
systems, bolsters climate models that have factored in the possibility of a
warmer Earth creating a sicker planet.

 „WHAT IS MOST surprising
is the fact

that climate sensitive outbreaks
are happening with so many different types of

pathogens ˜ viruses, bacteria,
fungi, and parasites ˜ as well as in such a wide

range of hosts including
corals, oysters, terrestrial plants, birds and humans,‰

lead author Drew Harvell,
a Cornell University biologist, said in a statement.

      
The researchers said they felt that common traits are likely linked to

global warming. „Climate
change is disrupting natural ecosystems in a way that

is making life better for
infectious diseases,‰ stated Andrew Dobson, a

Princeton University epidemiologist.
„The accumulation of evidence has us

extremely worried. We share
diseases with some of these species. The risk for

humans is going up.‰

Human influences

Humans might be magnifying
warming by adding to the greenhouse gases naturally

present in the atmosphere.
Fuel use is the chief cause of rising carbon dioxide

levels. On the other hand,
humans create temporary, localized cooling effects

through the use of aerosols,
such as smoke and sulfates from industry, which

reflect sunlight away from
Earth.

         

The study tracked both causes and carriers of diseases that develop

more rapidly with slight
rises in temperature. It found that as temperatures

increase, carriers are likely
to spread into new areas where they could

devastate species that have
not been previously exposed.

      
In the statement accompanying the study, the scientists cited these

examples of disease outbreaks
tied to climate change:

 Expanding range of
disease carriers due to temperature. Honeycreepers, forest

songbirds that evolved only
in Hawaii, are being decimated by malaria from

mosquitoes that have been
able to range higher in elevation due to warmer

temperatures. „Today there
are no native birds below 4,500 feet,‰ said Dobson.

 Expanding range of
carriers due to moisture. Rift Valley Fever, a deadly viral

illness spread by mosquitoes,
is strongly linked to heavy rains, which trigger

mosquito explosions. „There
is clear evidence that Rift Valley Fever outbreaks

are linked to El Niño
years and we expect an increase in the frequency of El

Niños with climate
change,‰ stated coauthor Richard Ostfeld, a researcher at the

Institute of Ecosystem Studies
in Millbrook, N.Y.

 Increased susceptibility
to disease. Coral reefs have become susceptible to

disease once they are stressed
by warmer sea temperatures. The researchers

isolated one fungus threatening
Caribbean sea fans and found that it grows

fastest at exactly the temperature
at which many of the corals in the Florida

Keys start to bleach, a
stress-created condition that turns coral white and can

eventually lead to die-offs.

 Expanding range of
carriers in winter. Warmer winter temperatures can also

affect ranges of diseases
and carriers. A winter warming trend in the mid-1990s

allowed a parasite to spread
north to Maine‚s oysters, the researchers noted.

MORE STUDIES URGED

      
The researchers urged other experts to consider that diseases in their

specialty might share a
common link in global warming.

      
„This isn‚t just a question of coral bleaching for a few marine

ecologists, nor just a question
of malaria for a few health officials ˜ the

number of similar increases
in disease incidence is astonishing,‰ said Ostfeld.

„We don‚t want to be alarmist,
but we are alarmed.‰

       

The authors said they expect others to question their findings, in part
because

the issue of climate change
and diseases has had very little monitoring and few

long-term studies.

      
An immediate critic was Sherwood Idso, head of the Center for the Study

of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change. He said the Science paper was based largely

on speculation and presented
„no concrete examples that these things will happen

in the real world.‰

      
The authors urged the scientific community to tackle the issue head on

with more research and gathering
of statistics.

      
„We need to pay better attention to this issue in an increasingly

unnatural world,‰ stated
Dobson.

      
MSNBC.com‚s Miguel Llanos and The Associated Press contributed to this

report.

In the Killing Fields

Samantha Power documents a century of atrocities – and excoriates the policymakers who refuse to stop the mass murders

By John Leonard

John Leonard, a contributing editor to New York magazine and The Nation, is the
author of “Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures.”

July 7, 2002

A PROBLEM FROM HELL: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power.

Basic,
610 pp., $30.

Alexander Herzen, the gentleman-anarchist, once cautioned his bloodthirsty buddy, Mikhail Bakunin:
“We want to open men’s eyes, not tear them out.”

Samantha Power goes both ways. In one of her aspects – the journalist with the law degree who reported on ethnic cleansing in the Balkans for The Washington Post and then became executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government – she insists on our seeing the mass murders of the 20th century through her own wounded eyes, as scholars,
jurists and diplomats try to keep up with killers by establishing courts and naming crimes. But in another
aspect – angel of wrath – she would invade Cambodia or Rwanda all by herself: “When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable
risk, it has a duty to act.”

She is so furious at policymakers who turn their backs on that duty, who spin silky extenuations out of their bowels like managed-health-care spiders, that she would smoke or smite them where they
bystand.

Warren Christopher, for instance, the former secretary of state who gave Power the title for her book when he described Bosnia as “a problem from hell” – and thus beyond mere mortal agency. During Christopher’s twiddle, the heretofore unheard of happened: Junior officers actually resigned from the foreign service on principle. Nor was the president, at whose pleasure Christopher served, such
a bargain. Candidate Clinton may have rattled sabers on the 1992 campaign trail, but President Bill let Serbs behave like Hutus and Hutus behave like Serbs, until it cost him in the opinion polls.

If Clinton seems Power’s least favorite president, she is not much kinder to his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, on whose watch Yugoslavia disintegrated in the first place while his secretary of state, James Baker, so colorfully explained: “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” Or Ronald Reagan, who didn’t care if Saddam Hussein nerve-gassed Kurds in 1987 and 1988, so long as Iraq continued to buy a million tons of American wheat a year. Or Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who were not about to go back to Southeast Asia no matter what Pol Pot got up to, from 1975 to 1979, outside Phnom Penh. As negligent as Franklin Roosevelt might have been about European Jewry during the Nazi Holocaust, he had before him Woodrow Wilson’s example of choosing to ignore the very prototype of genocides to come –
Turkey’s massacre of a million Armenians in 1915.

“It is the smell of oil and the color of money that corrodes our principles,” said the Republican senator
from Maine, William Cohen, about our coddling of Iraq in 1990. Cohen, along with William Proxmire, Bob Dole and Claiborne Pell, is one of the few members of Congress to end up on Power’s list of valiant diplomats and journalists, troublemakers and whistleblowers who tried to stop a slaughter. Besides reminding us in searing detail just how it happened that 100,000 Kurds, 200,000 Bosnians,
800,000 Rwandans, 1 million Armenians, 2 million Cambodians and 6 million Jews were exterminated while we slumbered, she also wants us to honor those who couldn’t sleep, as well as men like Raphael
Lemkin, the refugee linguist who coined the word “genocide” and devoted his entire adult life to helping
get a law against it into a treaty among nations.

Still, the behavior of presidents
is what most infuriates her. From Dwight

Eisenhower on, they refused
even to sign the 1948 treaty against genocide till

Reagan did so in 1988 to
escape criticism for his visit to the Nazi cemetery at

Bitburg, Germany. Power
is convinced, from hundreds of interviews and thousands

of pages, that each administration
knew the dreadful worst and didn’t want to

talk about it. That each,
when it had to say something in public, cited

“national sovereignty” before
blaming “both sides,” “civil war” and “ancient

history” for what it called
a “tragedy” instead of an atrocity, a crime against

humanity or, of course,
a genocide. That each, for domestic political reasons,

chose to do nothing while
claiming that anything it might do would be “futile”

or counterproductive. “No
U.S. president,” she tells us, “has ever made genocide

prevention a priority, and
no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for

his indifference to its
occurrence.”

And she quotes the writer
David Rieff’s redefinition of the meaning of “Never

again” after his experience
in Bosnia: “Never again would Germans kill Jews in

Europe in the 1940s.”

As an anthology of horrors
from the equal-opportunity 20th century – Christians,

Muslims, Buddhists and Jews,
in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East – “A

Problem From Hell” has so
much ground to cover that it only nods in passing at

Pakistan and Bangladesh,
at Nigeria and Biafra, at Indonesia and East Timor. As

a pocket history of what
might be called the jurisprudence of the unthinkable –

how to get to Nuremberg
or The Hague – it might have wondered why the United

States

is so adamantly opposed to
the very idea of an international criminal court. And

as a fiery brief for our
intervention wherever there are killing fields, it

ought at least to mention
American meddlings in Latin America and

Southeast Asia that actually
upped the bloody ante.

But as an anguished reminder
that state violence is still the leading cause of

sudden death all over the
world, it is a much-needed corrective to our

generalized panic about
terrorism. However confounded and twitchy we’ve become,

looking over our shoulders
in fear of ambush by the lunatics of one idea and the

kamikazes of Kingdom Come,
we should never forget the worst thing about the

century just passed: What
we knew of war in 1900 was that 85 percent of its

casualties would be warriors
themselves – and only 15 percent civilians. But

according to the latest

United Nations figures, by
the end of the 20th century, that ratio had pretty

much reversed itself. More
than 80 percent of the damage is collateral. Which,

of course, is insane.

from the New York Times:

Amazon Forest Still Burning
Despite the Good Intentions

By LARRY ROHTER

RAIRÃO, Brazil, Aug.
19 ˜ By decree, the official burning season here in the Amazon is supposed
to be severely limited in scope and not to start until Sept. 15. Yet the
skies south of here are already thick with smoke as big landowners set
the jungle ablaze to clear the way for cattle pasture and lucrative crops
like soybeans.

    The Amazon
basin, which is larger than all of Europe and extends over nine countries,
accounts for more than half of what remains of the world’s tropical forests.
But in spite of heightened efforts in recent years to limit deforestation
and encourage “sustainable development,” the assault on its resources continues,
with Brazil in the lead.

    On Monday,
the United Nations’ World Summit on Sustainable Development is to begin
in Johannesburg. That conference comes 10 years after an Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro was attended by more than 100 nations, who signed a series
of ambitious agreements aimed at protecting forests, oceans, the atmosphere
and wildlife.

    As the
host country, Brazil was one of the sponsors of those accords. Within three
years, however, the annual deforestation rate in the Amazon, which accounts
for nearly 60 percent of Brazil’s territory, had doubled, to nearly 12,000
square miles, an area the size of Maryland.

    Since
then, the rate of destruction has slowed and the government has begun numerous
initiatives aimed at further curbing the cutting and burning of the forest.
Just this week, the government announced the creation of the world’s largest
tropical national park, in the northern state of Amapá near the
border with French Guyana.

    But the
Brazilian jungle is still disappearing at a rate of more than 6,000 square
miles a year, an area the size of Connecticut. What is more, the deforestation
is likely to accelerate, environmentalists warn, as the government moves
ahead with an ambitious $43 billion eight-year infrastructure program known
as Brazil Advances, aimed at improving the livelihoods of the 17 million
people in the Amazon.

    Over
the last 30 years, most destruction in the Amazon has been in a 2,000-mile-long
“arc of deforestation” along the southern and eastern fringe of the jungle.
But now the government is moving to turn the Cuiabá-Santarém
road, which slices through the heart of the forest, into a paved, all-weather
highway so that farmers to the south can more easily transport soybeans
and other products to the Amazon River and then to Europe.

    Soybean
production has begun to play a big role in the destruction of the jungle.
Both the deforestation here and the growing pressure to finish paving the
highway are to a large extent driven by economic developments half a world
away, in China. Rising incomes there have created a huge and expanding
middle class whose appetite for soybeans is growing rapidly.

    As recently
as 1993, the year after the Rio conference, China was still a soybean exporter.
Now it is the world’s biggest importer of soy oil, meal and beans. Brazil,
the largest exporter of soy products after the United States, is rushing
to meet that demand.

    The potential
environmental impact of asphalting the 1,100-mile-long road is enormous.
About 80 percent of deforestation in the Amazon occurs in a 31-mile corridor
on either side of highways and roads, and when these are paved “deforestation
goes up tremendously,” said Philip Fearnside, a researcher at the National
Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus, known as INPA.

    A paved
section of the highway ends barely 12 miles from here, putting this remote
and dusty town of 14,000 on the front line of the agricultural frontier.
Dozens of sawmills now operate along the road where just a handful existed
five years ago, and at night, after government inspectors have gone home,
trucks carrying illegal loads of valuable hardwoods rattle down side roads
that lead deep into the jungle.

    “The
sensation is that of being on a battlefield and not having the weapons
to defend ourselves,” said the Rev. Anselmo Ferreira Melo, the parish priest
here.

    Trairão,
founded in 1993, is named for a game fish that has traditionally been plentiful
throughout the Amazon. But the new lumber yards here are dumping so much
sawdust into local streams that the fish population has dropped sharply.

    No one
knows exactly the quantity of greenhouse gases Brazil is already pumping
into the atmosphere as a result of such efforts to tame its vast jungle.
Though a national inventory of carbon emissions was supposed to have been
announced three years ago, it still has not been made public.

    But scientists
at INPA estimate that Brazil’s carbon emissions may have risen as much
as 50 percent since 1990. They calculate that “land use changes,” most
of which occur in the Amazon, now pour about 400 million tons of greenhouse
gases into the air each year, dwarfing the 90 million tons annually from
fossil fuel use in Brazil and making it one of the 10 top polluters in
the world.

    Part
of the recent decline in deforestation rates is attributable to the Brazilian
economy, whose rapid growth was responsible for the spike of the mid-1990’s
but has since cooled, or simply to weather patterns. But scientists also
credit specific Brazilian government steps for the improved performance.

    One symbolically
important step with practical consequences has been the demarcation of
indigenous lands. According to government statistics, more than 385,000
square miles, or 12 percent of Brazil’s territory, an area larger than
England and France combined, has been formally transferred to Indian control.

    As a
result, tribes with a warrior tradition, like the Kayapó, Wamiri-Atroari
and Mundurucú, have rushed to defend the reserves set aside for
them and become aggressive defenders of the forest.

    “If you
put together satellite images of all the fires burning in the Amazon, you
can see the outline of the indigenous areas just from that,” said Stephan
Schwartzman, senior scientist at Environmental Defense in Washington. “Where
Indian land starts is where the fires stop.”

    In some
areas of the Amazon, the Brazilian government’s environmental protection
agency, known as Ibama, has also played a leading role in deterring deforestation.
An environmental crimes law passed in 1998 gave the agency, founded in
1989, new enforcement powers, which it has used, albeit selectively, in
raids aimed at arresting and fining the most blatant violators of the law.

    “Ibama
is full of problems and underfunded, but they are still making progress,
thanks especially to these blitzes,” said Daniel Nepstad of the Amazon
Environmental Research Institute in Belém. “The cost of doing business
as a logger has increased and the profit margins have gone down, and the
sense of impunity that existed just a few years ago has diminished.”

    But the
initiative that the Brazilian government sees as most promising is in the
southern Amazon state of Mato Grosso, where deforestation is licensed and
monitored by satellite. Though the state’s name means “thick jungle” in
Portuguese, huge deforestation began in the 1970’s and accelerated with
the soybean boom of the 1990’s.

    Since
the program went into effect late in 1999, deforestation in Mato Grosso,
which has had the fastest growing economy of any Brazilian state, has declined
by more than half, to about 4,600 square miles over the two-year period
that ended on Jan 1.

    Large
ranchers and farmers can clear no more than 20 percent of their land, and
those who exceed that limit are punished with fines and prison sentences.

    “The
truth is that nobody ever controlled this, and that you can’t control properties
one by one even if you have an entire army of men,” said Federico Muller,
director of the state’s environmental protection agency. “But now the satellite
does it for us. It’s like Big Brother, an all-seeing eye in the jungle.”

    But the
neighboring states of Pará and Rondônia, where deforestation
has been equally intense, have yet to adopt the initiative. As a result,
loggers, sawmill operators, cattle ranchers, land speculators and other
adventurers have simply moved northward up the Cuiabá-Santarém
highway, deeper into the heart of the jungle, to areas like this one.

    Armed
with guns and global positioning satellite locators, loggers are also pushing
into the Tapajós National Park west of Trairão and other
nature reserves. Peasant settlers here say that they have complaimed to
the police and to the environmental protection agency but that nothing
has been done.

    “Everything
functions on the basis of bribes or threats, and so Ibama does not act,”
said José Rodrigues do Nascimento, who farms 250 acres. “These
loggers tell us they have the authorization to go in there, but they never
show any papers, and because they have gunman, you don’t dare to contradict
them.”

    José
Carlos Carvalho, the environment minister, acknowledged problems but promised
improvements by next year’s dry season, saying that the states of Pará
and Rondônia were now installing the same monitoring system as Mato
Grosso. In addition, he said, the environmental protection agency is to
double the number of its agents, to 2,000.

    “We recognize
that the predatory occupation of the jungle doesn’t work and has to give
way to a system of sustainable development, and we are moving in that direction,”
he said.

From http://www.burningheart.com/turbonegro/

THE MOTHERFUCKER HAS LANDED.

PRESSRELEASE

ACHTUNG CITIZENS OF EARTH:

O.K., this story has been pirated more times than your asshole in the Hazard County lock up…. so
don’t be surprised if it leaves some funky boils on your genitals. But
yes my wigglies, it was way back in 1995 when I first found out about a
li’l treasure titled “Stinky Fingers”, plans went into effect immediately
to obtain what had to be a guaranteed hit? I mean with a song called “Midnight
NAMBLA” (in the days when over-zealous PC dogma patrollers ruled “the scene”)
you can’t go wrong. The completely in your face Hobbit-Motherfucker bustin’
attitude and loud-ass action riffage made this a refreshing treat from
the usual lame pseudo pussy ‘hardcore’ manure manifesting itself and passing
for punk in back those days. (things would only go downhill from there
but that’s another story). A whole band joined in enhanced aggression mode
attacking Dungeons and Dragons retards gets my thumbs up any day. (“Your
Cloak of Indifference will not protect you from the vicious attacks of
a psychotic Denim Demon shredding your face and taking a hot steaming shit
on your breastplate!!!”)

Although I WAS SOLD (5 years
ahead of my time, as always) the rest of us non-Norwegian Euro’s and later
the remaining parts of the world remained unaware of this fantastic band
for at least half a decade. Only when this thing called “The Scandinavian
Wave” was upon us, taking the world by storm, TURBONEGRO briefly took to
the slimelight, quickly moving on to create a different musical genre,
all in their own right (which would become known as DEATHPUNK). Soon after,
they exploded like a wet sock of spooge hitting a frathouse wall, long
before reaching their peek. No justice in Rock ‘n’ Roll?AGAIN.

The fateful year was 1998,
my friends?Buggers can’t be choosers, you say??

Well, now that you are properly
briefed, let it be known that NORWAY’S DEATHPUNK SUPERSTARS and masters
of dungaree TURBONEGRO are back!!

THAT’S RIGHT! The band has
just signed to Burning Heart/Epitaph.

If you pissed your pants
hearing “Ass Cobra”? If you creamed your BVD’s during “Apocalypse Dudes”…
Well, get ready to shit yourself senseless when you hear their upcoming
album!…because no bones about it: the Danger Dudes will continue to throw
out more and more hilarious shit as their (ahem) star glistens brighter
yet. In addition to the quality music, which borrows blatantly from 70’s
sources as well as old school 80’s hardcore roots (much like Kunta Kente),
the lyrics also offers one of the most perceptive and brilliantly inflated
renditions of some Euro-US trash culture hybrid that appears to have been
conceived in some twisted darkroom of sorts. With utter disregard for taste
or class, tongues are stuck up ALL KINDS OF cheeks ALL THE TIME. Gripping
drama it definitely AIN’T. And that’s why we love it so much! APOCALYPSE
DUDES is one fucked up amyl-nitrate induced trip through what seems to
be several genres, it will, no doubt stand the test of time royally as
a true MASTERPIECE in a class of it’s own. A true juggernaut of the genre.
And if something’s good enough for the most jaded of jaded, bet your bippy
it’ll be good enough for you. TURBONEGRO offer a nutritious and well-balanced
meal that includes all of the trimmings. They also got enough raw fibre
to clog the ass of a pregnant chinchilla.

But, the band is successful
at so many different levels for a number of other reasons as well! TURBONEGRO
don’t need to rely on hotrods, flames, devil chicks, or fuzzy dice imagery.
Besides, there’s too many mental and chemical demons involved for the band
to devote time to such superficial symbolics. The band broke up in the
emergency room of a mental hospital in Milan, ending their triumphant “Darkness
Forever!” 1998 tour in ruins, and have spent the last 4 years licking their
wounds, preparing for their triumphant comeback, which has included headlining
this summer’s Bizarre, Quart and Hultsfred Festivals, playing for a total
of at least 100.000 crazed pieces of Euro Trash.

(left to right) Pål
Pot Pamparius, Hank Von Helvete, Rune Rebellion, Euroboy, Happy Tom and
Chris Summers getting ready for some darkness.

Must-have classics to be
re-released by BHR:

Ass Cobra (1996)

 A Dazzling Display
Of Talent

 Midnight NAMBLA

 Deathtime

 Black Rabbit

 Denim Demon

 Bad Mongo

 Mobile Home

 I Got Erection

 Just Flesh

 Hobbit Motherfuckers

 Sailorman

 Turbonegro Hate The
Kids

 Imorgen Skal Eg Daue

 Raggare Is A Bunch
Of Motherfuckers

Apocalypse Dudes (1998)

 The Age Of Pamparius

 Selfdestructo Bust

 Get It On

 Rock Against Ass

 Don’t Say Motherfucker,
Motherfucker

 Rendezvous With Anus

 Zillion Dollar Sadist

 Prince Of The Rodeo

 Back To Dungaree High

 Are You Ready (For
Some Darkness)

 Monkey On Your Back

 Humiliation Street

 Good Head

– They got the songs. Ones
you can sing along to with your fist raised in the air. Songs that WILL
ROCK THE HAIR OFF YOUR ASS AND MAKE YOU CRY LIKE A MAN.

– They got the denim. (arguably
the most genius concept since the Ramones, in a day and age where we’re
“treated” to whining teens and goofy-toothed college dorks who look like
they stepped out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad).

– They got a shtick. A GOOD
one. The gay part is a bit of an enigma, don’t ask. Other characters evolve
around maritime themes, a most blatant Alice Cooper look-alike, and much
more.

– TURBONEGRO HAVE A DOCTRINE
that operates on many levels of consciousness, most of which are far too
elaborate for their critics’ intellectual capacities to grasp. They call
it “Darkness”. Once again, don’t ask.

– They have undying credibility
status with “the kids”. Lacking multi-million funded promotion campaigns
the band achieved WORLDWIDE success in spite of THE MOST ADVERSE CONDITIONS
doing it THE HARD WAY, out there on the road, like real rock’n’roll bands
should. This is not some fucking White Stripes “saviours Of Rock’n’Roll”
media hype bullshit! Nobody cares about Rock’n’roll, and nobody cares about
a European band. These guys are BOTH. Go figure. As it stands now, TURBONEGRO
are huge enough to turn down serious major record deals.

– None of the members of
TURBONEGRO skateboard.

– Friends in high places:
Suddenly EVERYONE wants to be chums with them. Currently, TURBONEGRO has
had rim-jobs from Metallica, the Norwegian Black Metal elite (Mayhem occasionally
play Turbo tunes live and claim that “Turbonegro is THEE most evil band
in the world”, Jello Biafra (who claimed that Apocalypse Dudes was “possibly
the best European record ever”, the Beastie Boys, Placebo, the Hives (who
stated in an recent interview that “something as great as Turbonegro happens
only once every century”, and many more, as heard on last years “Alpha
Motherfuckers: A Tribute to Turbonegro” (Bitzcore), which included tracks
from The Queens of the Stone Age, The Supersuckers, The Residents (!),
Satyricon and many more.

– Their legions: Yes, TURBONEGRO
can marshall up their own private 5th column army consisting of countless
loyal human slave volunteers (which are called “TURBOJUGEND”) to carry
out their grand schemes. As the band proceeds to seize control of rock-fodder
and society minds alike, they are expected to press forward with their
ultimate move for global domination. Currently, TURBOJUGEND chapters are
found everywhere on the planet. From Tromsø, Norway, to Santiago
de Chile via Cornwall, – on all continents (the USA alone accounts for
7 Turbo cover bands). This incredible global phenomenon slipped by the
defences of any and all established media on a worldwide scale on all continents.

So listen to Sluggy, folks.
I’ve been saying this all along: REAL ROCKNROLL IS CONFRONTATIONAL, AND
HITS YOU BELOW THE BELT. By now, maybe you can take a wild guess at who
fits that bill.

Look, I’ve seen ’em rock,
and I’ve seen ’em roll, so trust me, people. Hundreds did before you! I’ve
been playing this punk rock shit since 1978 and it’s not for nothing that
I’m recognized as one of the world authority on the subject. OK, so I don’t
have a record deal. And no, I never get a whammy. But when I solve the
puzzle it gets the ladies wet. My joker’s always wild, bitch. And if you
ever doubt my intellectual supremacy again, I’ll bust out some Jet Li moves
and kick your goofy ass to the curb. So what I’m saying is, get on board
of the Man-Train. The Man-Train that is Turbonegro.

Tony Slug, Amsterdam, August
19th, 2002

Residents of Daraganj look at 26-year-old Sunil Sahu’s wounded arm, allegedly caused by an unidentified flying object they call Moohnochwa, in Allahabad, India.

SHANWA, India (AP) — It comes in the night, a flying sphere emitting red and blue lights that attacks
villagers in this poor region, extensively burning those victims it does not kill.

At least that’s what panic-stricken villagers say. At least seven people have died of unexplained injuries
in the past week in Uttar Pradesh state.

“A mysterious flying object attacked him in the night,” Raghuraj Pal said of his neighbor, Ramji Pal,
who died recently in Shanwa. “His stomach was ripped open. He died two days later.”

Many others have suffered scratches and surface wounds, which they say were inflicted while they
slept. In the village of Darra, 53-year-old Kalawati said she was attacked last week and displayed blisters on her blackened forearms.

“It was like a big soccer ball with sparkling lights,” said Kalawati, who uses only one name. “It burned my skin. I can’t sleep because of pain.”

Doctors dismiss the stories as mass hysteria.

“More often than not the victims have unconsciously inflicted the symptoms themselves,” said Narrotam
Lal, a doctor at King George’s Medical College in Lucknow, the state capital.

The police have another explanation: bugs.

“It is a three-and-a-half-inch-long winged insect” that leaves rashes and superficial wounds, Kavindra P. Singh, a superintendent of police, told the Press Trust of India news agency.

Police drew this conclusion after residents of one village found insects they had never seen before.

Villagers are unconvinced.
In the most affected area, the Mirzapur district, 440 miles southeast of New Delhi, people have stopped sleeping outdoors despite the sweltering heat and frequent power outages.

Villagers also have formed protection squads that patrol Shanwa, beating drums and shouting slogans
such as, “Everyone alert. Attackers beware.”

Some accuse district officials of inaction and failing to capture the “aliens.” One person died Thursday
in nearby Sitapur when police fired shots to disperse a 10,000-strong crowd demanding that authorities capture the mysterious attackers.

“People just block the roads and attack the police for inaction each time there’s a death or injury,”
said Amrit Abhijat, Mirzapur’s district magistrate, who claims he has captured the UFO on film.