The government, IDS and Katie Hopkins are all lying about food banks – the evidence that welfare “reforms” are causing poverty and hunger

Katie Hopkins is hardly renowned as a great intellect. In fact she’s famous for her stupidity, for example criticising people who named their children after countries on live TV when she called one of her own children India.

However there is more to her than just a brainless celeb. She’s also a brainless celeb who was handed everything on a plate from the age of 3 in an incredibly pampered upbringing as part of a smug establishment, but loves to condemn people so poor they rely on food banks to eat .

She has become a spokesperson for the rich and powerful, targeting the poor and the powerless on their behalf. That’s not exactly a hard position to get if you were born into the right family. There are thousands of the smug braying nobodies spilling nonsense at us from every newspaper from the tabloids to The Telegraph. They have these positions not because of any talent, but because they are part of the smug establishment, “one of us” , grew up with them, went to public school with them.

No wonder The Sun gave her a column and she goes out shooting with its editors. And The Sun pretends it’s the newspaper of ordinary people!

They share their prejudices and blind ideology, which is why Hopkins is so often stating her agreement with something tory government ministers like Michael Gove have said. In her ludicrous Huffington Post piece on food banks she quotes him on those who rely on food banks supposedly only having to do so because they mismanage their finances.

What a co-incidence that Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, condemns food banks too. And they both, like Hopkins, are tories who went to public school (1).

Hopkins claimed recently on twitter that only people who deliberately give up working could become poor.

She also tweeted that “Food banks are bridging the gap between income and the number of Sky, mobile, car finance contracts clueless individuals prioritised.”

And she keeps on posting links to her own 2013 comment article as supposed proof that food banks are “a complete con”. (2) – (3)

Hopkins’ idiotic witterings would be irrelevant on their own. But they’re part of a propaganda campaign against the poorest by the government, political parties and the establishment. So the lies have to be challenged.

Now let’s take a look at the facts – or more accurately the lack of them – in her piece on food banks.

Hopkins writes that

‘One food bank user commented: "We were given a food parcel. Me and my partner sat down and ate for four hours solid until it was all gone".

To get hold of this free food, users have to wangle a voucher from an agency worker at a job centre or drop in clinic, supposedly to a maximum of three. This limit is not enforced.

Oscar-winning performances of desperation are plenty. A recent BBC documentary showed one man lying that it was his son's birthday in order to procure a voucher.

Individuals like this have become vouchers tourists travelling between agencies, collecting vouchers quicker than genital warts on a student.’ (4)

No source for the “comment” from the food bank user. Googling the quote provides no sources for it. So basically her entire article is based on one BBC documentary.

Given the date of her article it has to be ‘Britain’s Hidden Hungry’ from November  2012. Either she didn’t watch it or else she just picked out the bits she liked, because even the summary on the BBC website page says:

‘Care-leaver Charlotte eats just one meal a day. It's all she can afford, so she starves herself till evening. Sandra, middle class mother of five, is embarrassed that all she can give her son for his school packed lunch is bread and butter. Middle manager Kelly, mother of two, hasn't eaten for two days. Meet Britain's hidden hungry.

As of 2012, more than 170,000 people are believed to be dependent on a chain of 300 foodbanks run by a Christian charity, the Trussell Trust. Bafta award winning film-maker David Modell has spent six months at the Coventry foodbank following the stories of Charlotte, Sandra and Kelly to find out how, in 2012, so many Britons are suffering genuine and prolonged bouts of real hunger.’

Another BBC documentary on hunger and food banks this year ‘Hungry Britain’ came to similar conclusions. You can watch that documentary online here.

A report by Oxfam and Church Action Against Poverty in 2013 found that:

‘We estimate that over 500,000 people are now reliant on food aid – the use of food banks and receipt of food parcels ….Some of the increase…is caused by unemployment, increasing levels of underemployment, low and falling income, and rising food and fuel prices. The National Minimum Wage and benefits levels need to rise in line with inflation…

…up to half of all people turning to food banks are doing so as a direct result of having benefit payments delayed, reduced, or withdrawn altogether. Figures gathered by the Trussell Trust …show that changes to the benefit system are the most common reasons for people using food banks…

There is a real risk that the benefit cuts and the introduction of Universal Credit (which will require internet access and make payments less frequently) will lead to even larger numbers being forced to turn to food banks. Food banks may not have the capacity to cope with the increased level of demand.’ (5)

A recent report of an inquiry into food banks and hunger by MPs of all parties had similar findings – that the main causes of food bank use were rising costs of food, energy bills, low wages, unemployment and welfare “reforms” (6)

So Hopkins, like IDS and Gove, is picking out a handful of examples of people exploiting food banks and ignoring the mountain of evidence that the majority of people going to food banks are in genuine poverty and would go hungry without them.

And now on the lie that most people in poverty are unemployed and unemployed because they don’t want to work.

First, large numbers of people going into work remain in poverty (under 60% of median income or £119 per week for an adult or £288 for a couple with two children) or in deep poverty (a third or less lower income than that). Since 2012 there have been more people in work and in poverty than out of work and in poverty in the UK (7) – (8).

Newly created jobs have increasingly becoming part-time and/or low paid over the past two decades. This accelerated after the banking crisis with the number of people in the UK who want full-time work but can only get part-time having increased by 1 million between 2008 and 2012 alone (9).

Second the number of unemployed people continues to exceed the number of job vacancies even on the government’s figures of 1.96 million and 637,000 respectively, which fiddle the former down and the latter up (10) – (11).

So much for Katie Hopkins’, IDS and every other propagandist and useful idiot who claims food banks are “a con” and that anyone in hunger or poverty is there purely due to their own failings.

Sources

(1) = Independent 22 Dec 2013 ‘Iain Duncan Smith accuses food bank charity the Trussell Trust of scaremongering’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/iain-duncan-smith-accuses-food-bank-charity-the-trussell-trust-of-scaremongering-9021150.html

(2) = Huffington Post 18 Oct 2013 ‘The Real Reason Food Banks Have Trebled’,
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/katie-hopkins/food-bank-real-reason-use-has-trebled_b_4121733.html

(3) = Huffington Post 10 Jan 2014 ‘Katie Hopkins Calls Food Banks 'A Complete Con' And Defends Benefits Street (VIDEO)’, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/10/katie-hopkins-food-banks_n_4574311.html

(4) = See (2) above

(5) = Oxfam & Church Action Against Poverty 30 May 2013 ‘Walking the Breadline: The scandal of food poverty in 21st-century Britain’, http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/walking-the-breadline-the-scandal-of-food-poverty-in-21st-century-britain-292978

(6) = BBC News 08 Dec 2014 ‘'Pay benefits faster' to reduce hunger, MPs urge’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-30346060

(7) = Joseph Rowntree Foundation 06 Dec 2010 ‘Monitoring poverty and social exclusion 2010’,
http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/monitoring-poverty-2010

(8) = Joseph Rowntree Foundation 26 November 2012 ‘In-work poverty outstrips poverty in workless households’, http://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/2012/11/work-poverty-outstrips-poverty-workless-households

(9) = ONS 28 Nov 2012 ‘People in Work Wanting More Hours Increases by 1 million Since 2008’, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lmac/underemployed-workers-in-the-uk/2012/rpt-underemployed-workers.html

(10) = ONS Statistical bulletin: UK Labour Market, November 2014 ‘Vacancies Aug – Oct 2014’,
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2014/statistical-bulletin.html#tab-14--Vacancies

(11) = ONS Statistical bulletin: UK Labour Market, November 2014, ‘Key Points for July to September 2014’,
http://ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2014/statistical-bulletin.html

Why welfare to work won't work in the UK

President Clinton signs the 1996 Responsibility and work opportunity act which gave federal approval to state 'welfare to work' laws which are the model for British 'welfare reforms'

‘Perhaps the greatest danger of our national life arises from the power of selfish and unscrupulous wealth
which influences public opinion largely through the press’

Joseph Rowntree (1836 – 1925) , businessman and philanthropist, - one of the first people in Britain to do research proving poverty was not caused only by alcoholism or the laziness of those in poverty.

(What follows is a summary – to see the full version with contents links and sources on my website go here.)

Tabloid newspaper owners and the leaders of the main parties in both the US and the UK have promoted myths about the causes of unemployment and poverty and so the solutions to them. The ‘welfare reform’ narrative of the tabloids and the Labour, Conservative, Republican and Democratic parties has been that there are plenty of jobs for everyone but that the supposedly ‘out of control’ growth or expansion of the welfare state has led to generations of people in the same households deciding to live on benefits as this gives them a better and easier life than working would. This is portrayed as having placed an increasing burden on those who do work and as being the main cause of poverty. Just as US welfare to work from the 1990s on returned to a 19^th century view of poverty as due to the moral failings of the poor (especially ‘laziness’ and being ‘unwilling to work’) the same has happened in theUK, with government adviser and Labour MP Frank Field  advising the Conservative-Liberal coalition that poverty is primarily caused by bad parenting rather than low incomes.

Labour MP and adviser to the Conservative-Liberal Coalition government - Frank Field - who believes poverty is primarily the result of bad parenting

This is coupled with political rhetoric about ‘social mobility’, ‘meritocracy’ (whether Labour or Conservative) ,‘equal opportunity for all’ and a ‘classless society’, in which politicians talk as though getting everyone into work will increase all of their incomes and get them out of poverty, as though there are enough jobs with a living income for everyone. The assumption is that as more people come off benefits and into work the welfare bill can be cut, the welfare state can be cut further or gradually phased out as the private sector takes over from it - and everyone will be better off.

Surveys show these claims have influenced British public opinion to become more hostile to those on benefits, with a majority now seeing them as lazy and opposed to increased redistribution of wealth through taxation and welfare.

The trouble is that even politically massaged Government figures, along with research by charities like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and think tanks like the IPPR, shows that there are between hundreds of thousands and millions more people unemployed than there are job vacancies in the UK through recessions and economic booms over past decades to present.

Employers also told researchers that, far from the unemployed being unwilling to do the kind of jobs they used to do, most applicants were considered over-qualified by the employer

They also show that large numbers of people going into work remain in poverty (under 60% of median income or £119 per week for an adult or £288 for a couple with two children) or in deep poverty (a third or less lower income than that) – and that there are more people in work and in poverty than out of work and in poverty in the UK, with newly created jobs increasingly becoming part-time and/or low paid over the past two decades and over 1 million people who want full-time jobs only being able to get part-time ones.

Despite the tabloid myths this is not due to over-generous benefits, but due to low minimum wages, a lack of enough in-work benefits for those on low incomes. For instance unemployment benefit is only between £51.85 and £65.45 a week depending on age in theUK, just as it was under the previous Labour government.

While many of the measures of poverty used are relative to they are reliable indicators that many of those on these incomes are suffering some forms of absolute poverty – i.e are unable to afford some basic necessities and so suffering frequent hunger, cold and subsequent long term health problems for adults and developmental problems for children. For instance the JRF’s 2000 study found 9.5 million people in Britain could not afford to heat their homes adequately, 4 million couldn’t afford either two meals a day or fruit and vegetables to eat ; and 6.5 million people went without essential clothing such as a warm waterproof jacket or decent shoes (with 2% of children lacking a warm waterproof coat or properly fitting shoes and many unable to afford a healthy diet). One parent interviewed in a later report ate nothing but bread so their children could eat better diets, while another (in 2008) said being in poverty meant “Being hungry, only having enough food to give the children, hoping they would leave some leftovers on the plate, so I wouldn't be so hungry.”)

There are also absolute measures of poverty used, based on the number of people in any year whose income has fallen below 60% of what was the median for a chosen benchmark year. The British government used 60% of the median in financial year 1998/1999 as it’s measure of poverty until 2010, when 60% of the median in 2010 was chosen as the benchmark for the next decade (though the new government may well choose a different definition).

British Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor (finance minister) have claimed that under their Labour predecessors welfare spending was “out of control” - but the figures don't back their claims up

Treasury figures also show that welfare spending in the UK has actually fallen as a percentage of GDP (national wealth) between 1997 at 7.76% (during an economic boom with lower unemployment) and just over 7% in 2009 (during a deep recession with higher unemployment) – (credit to Duncan’s Economics blog for pointing this out). Despite the “there is no money” rhetoric the UK increased it’s GDP per capita (wealth per person) by around 67% over the same period on World Bank figures.

This is even more striking as 1997 was an economic boom year with relatively low numbers of unemployed people (and so a lower cost in unemployment benefit) while 2010 was a deep recession with relatively high unemployment levels and benefit costs.

If looking for unfair government spending going to those who neither need nor deserve it there are many better candidates for cut. These include Private Finance Initiatives or ‘Public Private Partnerships’, which the Conservatives began, Labour expanded and the Coalition are planning to expand again, leading to increased taxes for cut services; Export Credit Guarantees to British Aerospace for arms and dual use equipment going to dictatorships and human rights abusers (often including those who later become our enemies such as Saddam Hussein’s forces in the past); and military aid to dictatorships.

US government figures and independent studies show ‘welfare to work’ programmes in the US have led to greatly increased poverty and homelessness.

Cutting benefits and public sector jobs during a period of recession also risks further reducing demand in the economy and a spiral of falling demand and increased job losses in the private sector.

Cartoonist Steve Bell on British welfare minister Ian Duncan Smith MP's welfare to work plans

This may well lead to many of those persuaded to vote to punish those on benefits for supposedly all being workshy fraudsters suffering alongside many of them due to the reality that many are poor or unemployed through no fault of their own – and that even if everyone who isn’t working tried to get work there aren’t enough jobs.

This shows that the model of welfare reform adopted by the main parties in both countries is bound to lead to increasing levels of poverty for the unemployed and many in work alike unless it’s changed to expand the welfare state and public sector employment and government intervention to provide more in-work benefits for those on low incomes, along with increasing minimum wages and more public sector jobs

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that relative poverty for pensioners declined throughout New Labour’s period in government from 1997 to 2008/9 and relative and absolute child poverty fell too, but as out-of-work poverty fell, the numbers of people in work but in poverty rose.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ 2010 report estimates increases in the numbers of adults and children in poverty of hundreds of thousands each year as a result of the Coalition’s policies

This is not to deny that there are some people defrauding the benefit system or who are unwilling to work. It does show that there’s no evidence to suggest the tabloid rants claiming they are the majority of the unemployed or poor are true ; that ‘laziness’ is most definitely not the only cause of unemployment ; and that welfare spending and benefits are if anything too low and too hard to get in low income jobs. Any welfare reforms that would have a chance of reducing unemployment and poverty would have to provide more in work-benefitsm, or a higher minimum wage, or both, along with more public sector jobs.

(This post is a summary – to see the full version with contents links and sources on my website go here.)

Winning the War for Hearts and Minds

“Lack of money is the root of all evil”

George Bernard Shaw

He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

There's a lot of talk of “a war for hearts and minds”, as there was in the Vietnam war, but, as in Vietnam and El Salvador, far more money and effort  is being spent blowing peoples’ hearts and minds out of their bodies and creating grief, rage and a desire for revenge in the hearts and minds of survivors than is spent on providing enough money to buy food to feed hearts and minds, clothing to cover them, medical care to keep them healthy or an education that gives them more than one extreme interpretation of a single book (the Quran) (1).

A “war for hearts and minds” may sound noble and idealistic. In fact in reality such wars by US forces from Vietnam to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Iraq have involved terrorism of a kind that even the Taliban or Al Qa’ida could not match for brutality. In Vietnam  the US ‘Phoenix programme” involved the torture and murder of vast numbers of civilians suspected of being “Communist sympathisers” (2). In El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala US military trainers like General Simeon Trombitas and Major James Steele trained right-wing militaries in how to break the will not only of armed guerrillas but trade unionists and school teachers by a campaign of massacres of entire villages involving torture, rape and murder. One favourite technique was to cut the foetus from the belly of a pregnant woman in front of everyone, then kill mother and child. The same men were training Iraqi ‘security forces’ in the same methods in Iraq from 2005 to 2009 – and probably still are, if they’ve not been moved to Afghanistan already (3), (4).

So the phrase “a war for hearts and minds”, as it’s used by the US government and its allies, is just Orwellian doublespeak; Like “counter terrorism” it means a war to instil terror and fear in the hearts and minds of anyone who might dissents from total domination of their country by those who collaborate with foreign firms and governments to rob them in return for a share of the loot. Some British officers also privately admit it can simply mean propaganda.

Airstrikes, suicide bombings and torture and murder by the Taliban and US and Afghan government forces, terrible as they are, are not the only killers in Afghanistan or Pakistan though. Cold and hunger, diseases caused by lack of clean water and a lack of medical treatment have killed many times more. During the 2001 invasion the airstrikes made aid truck drivers refuse to cross the border from Pakistan, out of fear of being bombed the way Kosovan Albanian refugees were in 1999 in Kosovo, mistaken for tanks and APCs by pilots ordered to bomb from high altitude to avoid any possible anti-aircraft systems. Their fears were well grounded – US planes repeatedly bombed the International Red Cross headquarters in Kabul, despite its roof being clearly marked with a giant red cross (5) – (10).

As a result by January 2002 hundreds of refugees were dying every night of exposure and hunger in the Maslakh refugee camp near Herat alone (11). In refugee camps and villages across the country desperate people ate grass to try to survive the withdrawal of aid workers due to a war begun in the middle of a famine in winter(12) – (15). At the same time US airstrikes and missile strikes killed more civilians in Afghanistan than died in New York on September 11th (16) – (22).

The Bush administration and the Pentagon made a great show of dropping food aid by parachute (which according to Medicins Sans Frontiers and others was far too little and much of it wrapped in the same yellow packaging as cluster bombs they dropped simultaneously, resulting in many deaths among children picking them up) (23) – (24).

The Taliban’s Afghan rivals of the ‘Northern Alliance’ meanwhile robbed many Pashtun civilians of the last of their food, using accusations that they were Taliban as an excuse (25).

You may think that this is the past, but nothing much has changed, except that starvation is increased by both airstrikes and Taliban suicide bombings and hijackings these days, as a result of NATO forcing aid workers to join military reconstruction teams, making them into Taliban targets.

NATO governments still haven’t provided most of the aid they promised. Hunger, cold and lack of medical attention remain killers on a scale at least as great as NATO offensives or Taliban suicide bombings in Afghanistan and there has been very little in the way of reconstruction. This is often blamed on insurgents, like the similar situation in Iraq. Take a look at New Orleans though, where there is no insurgency, and you’ll see there’s no reconstruction there either – unless you count locking people out of their public housing before demolishing it to let developers build flats to rent to the wealthy – something the poor of Kabul have also seen done by the Karzai government and the warlords allied to NATO, who demolished the homes of the poor with their inhabitants still in them to make way for luxury residences for government ministers (26) – (30).

“Reconstruction” is mostly simply a euphemism for theft. Much of the 'aid' pledged is never delivered, while 40% goes to firms from the donor country. The top management in the reconstruction consortia do well from it, so do major shareholders and some consultants. Ordinary Afghans and Iraqis see little or none of it. British and American forces don’t even get the armour and armoured vehicles available. Afghan army and police units are using equipment from the 1960s and 1970s.

There are exceptions, but they are the minority.

Petraeus’ supposedly brilliant “troop surge” in Iraq has not ended the civil war there because there is no military solution to problems caused by poverty, hunger, lack of education and a cycle of revenge creating sectarian kidnappings, murders and bombings. As in Afghanistan hunger, poverty and disease have been increased for Iraqis as a result of the corruption of the occupying governments and the new government they’ve installed.

By 2008 Iraqis were on a quarter of the food rations they received under Saddam Hussein and sanctions, many reduced to searching rubbish bins for food, like many of the people of the Phillipines, El Salvador and Nicaragua – whose hunger was similarly the result of brutal US military-led campaigns for “democracy”. Some of the continuing “insurgent” bombings in Iraq look suspiciously like those carried out by the CIA in Guatemala in the 1950s to justify a US backed military coup there. According to Professor Greg Grandin, they often made claims of responsibility for bombings and other attacks on behalf of non-existent terrorist groups they had invented like the ‘Organisation of Militant Godless’ – echoed by the many ‘previously unheard of’ groups claiming responsibility for bombings today (31).

A real war for Hearts and Minds can only be won by those who fire the least bullets and explode the least bombs; by the side who kill the fewest people and so create the fewest enemies seeking vengeance on them, whether as a result of airstrikes or suicide bombings or torture or summary ‘execution’. It will be won by the side that kills the least mothers, fathers, children, uncles, cousins, grandparents, lovers, neighbours and friends. It will be won by the side that provides decent jobs paying enough to feed a family; by the side that helps grow crops rather than spraying chemicals on them or burning them as part of a “war on drugs” carried out by a government proven by the US National Security Archive, and investigative journalists historians to have colluded with drug traffickers from Vietnam, El Salvador and Nicaragua to Panama, Colombia and Afghanistan; by the side that provides people with a decent education; by the side that helps provide hospitals and the funding to pay doctors and buy or produce medicines (32) – (35).

It will be won by defeating the greatest killers in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the world : hunger, cold, ignorance and illness. Every dollar or pound spent on bombs, bullets and fuel to transport them to the war zone is a dollar or a pound that could have been spent on saving lives and winning hearts and minds rather than destroying some and turning others against us.

A real war for hearts and minds can only be won by only firing in self-defence or the defence of others – and not by seeking to secure control of areas by offensives, nor by airstrikes, nor by assassination by missile strike or airstrike, nor by ‘counter terrorism’ or ‘counter insurgency’ operations’. US “counter-insurgency” methods are terrorism and brutality of a kind that even the Taliban has never matched.

A genuine ‘war for hearts and minds’ is won by the side that explodes the least bombs, fires the fewest bullets and provides the most food, education and medical care to allow others’ hearts and minds freedom to develop the way they want to – and not the way big companies and Pentagon planners in another country want them to.

(1) = Professor Marilyn B. Young (1990) ‘The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990’

(2) = Professor Marilyn B. Young (1990) ‘The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990’, pages 212-213

(3) = Professor Greg Grandin (2007) ‘Empire’s Workshop : Latin America, the United States and the Rise of Imperialism’, Holt Paperbacks, New York, 2007, Chapter 3, especially pages 90-91, 101 and 116-117

(4) = See this post and Guardian 22 Nov 2009 'US pours millions into anti-Taliban militias in Afghanistan', http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/22/us-anti-taliban-militias-afghanistan

(5) = Independent 19 Oct2001 ‘Blair in row with aid group over claim that Taliban are looting food convoys’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/blair-in-row-with-aid-group-over-claim-that-taliban-are-looting-food-convoys-631897.html

(6) = AP 26 Oct 2001 ‘U.S. Jets Hit Red Cross in Kabul’, http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-47764791.html and http://www.rawa.org/s-rc.htm

(7) = Independent 27 Oct 2001 ‘Kabul Red Cross is bombed again byAmerican jets again’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/kabul-red-cross-is-bombed-again-by-american-jets-again-748595.html

(8) = BBC News 17 May 1999 ‘Nato pilot bombed refugees’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/319943.stm

(9) = Independent 14 May 1999 ‘Robinson criticises Nato'sbombing’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/war-in-the-balkans-refugees--riddle-as-hundreds-of-disappeared-turn-up-1095561.html

(10) = Human Rights Watch Feb 2000 ‘CIVILIAN DEATHS IN THE NATO AIRCAMPAIGN’, http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/nato/

(11) = Guardian 3 Jan 2002 Refugees left in the cold at 'slaughterhouse' camp http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jan/03/immigration.afghanistan

(12) = Guardian 9 Jan 2002 ‘Afghans eat grass as aid fails to arrive’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2002/jan/09/disasterresponse

(13) = Observer 27 Jan 2002 ‘Hunger and vengeance haunt Afghanistan's sprawling tent city’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jan/27/afghanistan.suzannegoldenberg

(14) = The Ecologist March 2002 ‘Media indifference to Afghan crisis :
Why is the mainstream media ignoring the mass death of Afghan civilians?’,
 http://www.rawa.org/ignoring.htm

(15) = Guardian 4 Feb 2002 ‘Aid packages ignore starving Afghans’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/04/afghanistan.suzannegoldenberg

(16) = Independent 27 Nov 2001 ‘Legacy of civilian casualties in ruins of shattered town’,http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/legacy-of-civilian--casualties-in-ruins--of-shattered-town-618256.html

(17) = Independent 05 Dec 2001 ‘Civilians abandon homes after hundreds are casualties of US air strikes on villages’ , http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/civilians-abandon-homes-after-hundreds-are-casualties-of-us-air-strikes-on-villages-619093.html

(18) = Independent  01 Jan 2002 ‘US accused of killing 100 civilians in Afghan bombing raid’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/us-accused-of-killing-100-civilians-in-afghan-bombing-raid-621643.html

(19) = Independent  04 Dec 2001 ‘A village is destroyed. And America says nothing happened’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/a-village-is-destroyed-and-america-says-nothing-happened-619007.html

(20) = Guardian 7 Jan 2002 ‘Bloody evidence of US blunder’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jan/07/afghanistan.rorycarroll

(21) = Guardian 20 May 2002 ‘Forgotten victims’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/20/afghanistan.comment

(22) = Professor Marc Herold ‘A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan : October 7, 2001 thru March 2002’, http://cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm

(23) = Guardian 9 Oct 2001 ‘Border stays shut to fleeing Afghans’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/09/afghanistan.immigration

(24) = Independent 21 Aug 2002 ‘Return to Afghanistan: Explosives that US knew would kill innocents continue to take their toll’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/return-to-afghanistan-explosives-that-us-knew-would-kill-innocents-continue-to-take-their-toll-639403.html

(25) = Sunday Herald 24 March 2002 Eyewitness: Afghanistan - 'They took our food stocks and water pumps, then beat us', http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20020324/ai_n12574522/?tag=content;col1

(26) = Mail & Guardian (South Africa) 21 Dec 2007, 'Housing protests grip New Orleans', http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/&articleid=328354&referrer=RSS

(27) = Klein, Naomi (2007), 'The Shock Doctrine' , Penguin , London, 2007, Chapter 20

(28)  = Washington Post 12 Jan 2007, ‘New Orleanians March to Protest Crime Wave’, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/11/AR2007011101875.html

(29) = Independent 05 Sep 2003 ‘UN fears instability in Kabul after Mayor demolishes 'illegal' homes’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/un-fears-instability-in-kabul-after-mayor-demolishes-illegal-homes-578847.html

(30) = Washington Post 16 Sep 2003 ‘Land grab in Kabul embarrasses government’ and several other articles reproduced at http://www.hewad.com/news1.htm

(31) = Professor Greg Grandin (2007) ‘Empire’s Workshop : Latin America, the United States and the Rise of Imperialism’, Holt Paperbacks, New York, 2007, p 48

(32) = Professor Alfred McCoy (1991) ‘The Politics of Heroin - CIA complicity in the global drug trade’, Lawrence Hill , New York ,1991

(33) = US National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 2, ‘The Contras, Cocaine,
and Covert Operations’, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/nsaebb2.htm

(34) = See sources on this link http://alienatedleft.blogspot.com/2009/11/kims-howells-of-protest-against-war-in.html#_ftn4b

(35) = US National Security Archive 02 Aug 2004 'U.S. INTELLIGENCE LISTED COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT URIBE AMONG "IMPORTANT COLOMBIAN NARCO-TRAFFICKERS" IN 1991', http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/index.htm