From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 1 09:49:50 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:49:50 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Monbiot: Canada threatens the well-being of the world Message-ID: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/nov/30/canada-tar-sands-copenhagen-climate-deal guardian.co.uk 30 November 2009 Canada's image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro-state is today the greatest obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen George Monbiot [Photo: Syncrude Oil Sands, Mine and Refinery, the world's largest oil sand operation producing crude oil at Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, October 20, 2001. Photograph: Greg Smith/Corbis] When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country's government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I've broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto. So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush. Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works. In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%. It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won't accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void. After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th. In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada's obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth. In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation ? especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries ? could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the wellbeing of the world. Why? There's a simple answer: Canada is developing the world's second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It's actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, comprising pristine forests and marshes, will be be dug up ? unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale. To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases. Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta's tar sands operation is the world's biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun. Canada hasn't acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government's share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten ?8bn for mining the tar sands. The purpose of Canada's assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada's politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place. Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of Neanderthals to trample over it. Timber firms were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government's scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan. I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true? From haroldshuster at shaw.ca Tue Dec 1 10:30:41 2009 From: haroldshuster at shaw.ca (Harold Shuster) Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 10:30:41 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Monbiot: Canada threatens the well-being of the world In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7737FBD3-77A0-41F3-81FC-4C34277C85F9@shaw.ca> Hi Richard, I don't think you often serve as a PSA service, but George Monbiot, with Elizabeth May, will be debating climate change on the Munk Debates tonight. The question: C02 levels in the atmosphere are climbing steadily higher. Some believe this is having a devastating effect on humans and nature, while others argue that the threat has been overstated. Is this the moment for a bold international treaty to curb carbon emissions? Or, are the social and economic costs of reducing C02 emissions too high in world where a billion people live on a dollar or less a day? The will be debating Bjorn Lomborg and Lord Nigle Lawson. Thanks for helping to keep me informed! Harold PS - do you have a copy of The Night by Elie Weisel? On 2009-12-01, at 9:49 AM, RICHARD MENEC wrote: > http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/nov/30/canada-tar-sands-copenhagen-climate-deal > > guardian.co.uk 30 November 2009 > > Canada's image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is > to whaling > > The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro- > state is today the greatest obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen > > George Monbiot > > [Photo: Syncrude Oil Sands, Mine and Refinery, the world's largest > oil sand operation producing crude oil at Fort McMurray, Alberta, > Canada, October 20, 2001. Photograph: Greg Smith/Corbis] > > When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's > peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the > harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, > well-governed? Think again. This country's government is now > behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party. So > amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my > Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I've broken > my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto. > > So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, > cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is > slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, > diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, > which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price > of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a > government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged > by George Bush. > > Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage > a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. > The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by > Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works. > > In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its > targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other > country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant > to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have > already risen by 26%. > > It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for > abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced > only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive > future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the > future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other > rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won't accept even an > equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international > process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By > demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're > written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen > void. > > After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the > other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it > singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding > targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in > Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, > presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most > to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which > assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest nations, was > published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th. > > In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents > which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. > During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire > developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was > speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the > Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually > won) against Canada's obstructions. A concerted campaign has now > begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth. > > In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its > power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything > in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate > agreements that one rich nation ? especially a member of the G8, the > Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries ? could > scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the wellbeing of the world. > > Why? There's a simple answer: Canada is developing the world's > second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It's actually a filthy > mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. > The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted > by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size > of England, comprising pristine forests and marshes, will be be dug > up ? unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks > like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are > creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale. > > To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. > Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The > contaminated water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic > that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the > surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and > mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream > have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases. > > Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as > refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough > natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta's tar sands operation > is the world's biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. > By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more > greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to > the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita > emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun. > > Canada hasn't acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands > is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public > that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, > initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants > built to process it. The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to > you and me (the government's share will soon rise to 84%), has lent > or underwritten ?8bn for mining the tar sands. > > The purpose of Canada's assault on the international talks is to > protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend > for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar > barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to > ransom. They have captured Canada's politics and are turning this > lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place. > > Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a > band of Neanderthals to trample over it. Timber firms were licensed > to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies > were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get- > rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this > is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government's > scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what > whaling has done for Japan. > > I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an > agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be > writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a > peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or > China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true? > > _______________________________________________ > FreshInk mailing list > FreshInk at booksinternationale.info > http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From may at applebybooks.net Tue Dec 1 11:22:57 2009 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:22:57 -0800 Subject: [Fresh Ink] FYI: Link to tonight's Munk debates Message-ID: <4B1550F1.8090905@applebybooks.net> http://www.munkdebates.com/ From penney.kome at gmail.com Tue Dec 1 12:11:35 2009 From: penney.kome at gmail.com (PJ Kome) Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 11:11:35 -0700 Subject: [Fresh Ink] FYI: Link to tonight's Munk debates In-Reply-To: <4B1550F1.8090905@applebybooks.net> References: <4B1550F1.8090905@applebybooks.net> Message-ID: You can also listen through CBC online at: http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200912/20091201.html Scroll down to the second section of the show. cheers, Penney On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 10:22 AM, May at Appleby Books wrote: > http://www.munkdebates.com/ > > _______________________________________________ > FreshInk mailing list > FreshInk at booksinternationale.info > http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink > -- ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Penney Kome, author and journalist Editor, Straight Goods http://www.straightgoods.ca http://penneykome.ca -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 1 12:17:21 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:17:21 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] A "Necessary War" -- for a Gas Pipeline Message-ID: http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp11302009.html November 30, 2009 A "Necessary War" -- for a Gas Pipeline It's Obama's War Now By GARY LEUPP There are now at present some 68,000 U.S. troops and 42,000 allied forces occupying Afghanistan, in league with the Northern Alliance warlords and the corrupt and feeble Karzai regime in Kabul. President Obama clearly wishes to increase the figure and will announce before an audience of West Point cadets Tuesday that he will add over 30,000 more while pushing the Europeans to add 10,000. This will bring the total number of occupation forces to around the level of the Soviet deployment at its peak in the 1980s. The Soviets were trying to protect the secular government in Afghanistan and to discourage Islamic fundamentalism, a potential threat to the neighboring Soviet Central Asian republics such as Uzbekistan. What is Obama trying to do? Because make no mistake about it, this is Barack Obama?s war now. With this announcement he will have personally increased the force in Afghanistan by over 50,000 troops in response to appeals from his generals. Obama?s mantra about the conflict in Afghanistan is that it is a ?war of necessity.? But this is really just a version of the neocon ?War on Terror? trope, which is to say that it implies that it is the natural, reasonable retaliatory response to the 9-11 attacks. (They started it, after all, so we have to take the war to them.) But neocon strategy has always required the simplistic conflation of disparate phenomena, and the exploitation of public ignorance and fear, in the execution of policy. Who are they, after all? The invasion of Iraq required the Big Lie that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11. The earlier invasion of Afghanistan required the clever sleight-of-hand by which the mainly Saudi Arab but international al-Qaeda was equated with the purely Afghan Taliban. ?We don?t distinguish between terrorists and the governments that support them,? Bush declared. This was almost a boast that the U.S. would be boldly ignorant as a matter of public policy, and a warning to the empirical rationalists of the world that the White House was in the grip of truly simplistic minds and would indeed shamelessly exploit popular Islamophobia as they pleased even as they made elaborate public gestures in support of religious tolerance. (The calculated message was: Be scared, world, because we?ve got cowboys in power, and hell, we can get kinda crazy when we?re pissed!) The fact is, there was and is a difference between al-Qaeda, an international jihadist organization that wants to reestablish a global Caliphate and confront the U.S., and the Taliban, which wanted to stabilize Afghanistan under a harsh interpretation of the Sharia but maintain a working relationship with the U.S. And now, eight years after being toppled, the Taliban are back with a vengeance, demonstrating that they have a real social base. Moreover a Pakistani Taliban has emerged across the border as a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion. Any number of intelligence reports have pointed out the obvious: more troops just breed more ?insurgency.? Obama?s national security advisor, Gen. James Jones, has stated clearly, ?The Al Qaeda presence [in Afghanistan] is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.? If there had been a ?necessity? to destroy al-Qaeda in Afghanistan that matter has been taken care of. What does Obama think necessary to achieve now? I imagine he will argue that the Taliban must not be allowed to return to power. But doesn?t that mean implicitly acknowledging that they have genuine roots in Afghan, particularly Pashtun society? The best military estimates put the number of Taliban militants at no more than 25,000, with fully-armed fighters around 3,000. There are about 100,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army (ANA) in addition to all the foreign occupying troops. ANA forces are often described as of ?poor quality,? meaning they are illiterate, and mainly attracted by the money. But the Talibs are also generally illiterate and many of them fight largely for the pay as well. Why is it whole provinces like Nuristan have come under Taliban control despite all the counterinsurgency manpower? Why in attempting to ?secure? Helmand province in an anti-Taliban offensive over the summer did the U.S. forces discover that their ANA allies included almost no Pashtuns but were disproportionately Tajiks? Why were U.S. forces unable to dislodge the Taliban from Marjeh, a city of about 50,000 people and hub of the opium trade? The problem isn?t too few forces. Were that the case the increasing number of forces over the last several years would have produced a better, not worse, security situation. The problem is the premise that imperialists can re-colonize a country under the pretense of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency or liberation in the face of mass resistance. But why is Obama so intent on staying the course in Afghanistan? What is so important about Afghan policy that the Man of Change can?t change it, even when 57 per cent of the people of the U.S. say they want out? He will say on Tuesday evening, as eloquently as he and his speechmakers can manage the task, that we simply cannot afford to let Islamist extremists back into power so that they might harbor terrorists who?ll attack the United States. But recall there was a time when the U.S. State Department was hell-bent to drive a secular government out of Afghanistan---one that wanted to educate girls and establish local clinics and curb the power of the tribal chiefs and mullahs---and determined to assist the most profoundly reactionary forces in Afghanistan with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at their head in establishing an alternative Islamist regime. Jimmy Carter?s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski thought the pro-Soviet Saur Revolution in 1978, in which left-wing Afghan Army officers staged a coup and the Democratic People?s Party seized power, producing a backlash from the mullahs and tribal chiefs, was a golden Cold War opportunity. Even before Soviet forces crossed the border in December 1979, the CIA was organizing Afghan and international forces to challenge the leftish government and Brzezinski was urging the fighters to view their struggle as a jihad or Holy War. This continued of course through the eight bloody years of the Reagan administration. The jihadis won, Washington?s friends established a regime in 1993, immediately fell out among themselves plunging the country into Tajik-Pashtun civil war involving the bombing of Kabul (hitherto spared in the fighting). Washington politely distanced itself, having lost interest with the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving ally Pakistan to deal with the mess. Pakistan opted to support the Taliban, a force which against the motley backdrop of opium-dealing, boy-raping warlords seemed attractive by virtue of its reputation for moral probity if nothing else. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto later explained Islamabad needed to embrace the Taliban to maintain the trade lines through Central Asia. The U.S. kept its distance from the harshly fundamentalist group, which took power in 1996, withholding diplomatic recognition. But it was historically responsible for its inception and the descent of Afghanistan into the disaster of medieval reaction that began with the stoning of adulterous women in soccer stadiums and culminated with the blasting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. The sins of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan are just staggering. Imagine what might have happened had the U.S. just stayed out of Afghan affairs from the late 1970s and allowed that experiment in secular. reformist government in a highly conservative Muslim society to take its course without billions in arms to precisely the sort of fighters who are being vilified as ?Islamic extremists? and ?terrorists? today. There may have never been an international CIA-coordinated mujahadeen movement, no young Osama bin Laden persuaded to suspend his studies to head up Arab holy warriors in coordination with the CIA, no total collapse of Afghan society, no ?blowback.? Unfortunately people in this country are generally clueless about the recent history of Southwest Asia and the role of U.S. administrations in producing the very problems about which they complain. (I don?t include Obama among these; he knows what he?s doing. Hence total moral culpability.) The Taliban never invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan; he was there when they took power, guest of a warlord who had been hostile to themselves. He had flown in from Sudan, booted out by the government there following a demand from the U.S. The Taliban extended to him the hospitality required by the pashtunwali code, in appreciation for his services in anti-Soviet struggle in the 1980s. But as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair have documented on this site, from 2000 the Taliban initiated talks in Frankfurt with the EU, facilitated by the Afghan-American businessman Kabir Mohabbat, to transfer bin Laden out of the country. Mohabbat was employed from November by the National Security Council to negotiate with the Taliban about bin Laden?s fate. The Taliban, who had confined bin Laden and his key aides to his compound at Daronta, 30 miles from Kabul, invited the U.S. to send one of two Cruise missiles as the easiest way to solve the problem but the Clinton administration delayed in taking action. The Bush administration also dispatched Mohabbat repeatedly to Kabul---three times in 2001---to discuss bin Laden. In other words, at minimum, on can say that the State Department knew, and we should know, and Obama should know, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are two very different things. So if the president argues that we need to continue the fight with more troops to keep the Taliban down, to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a center of international terrorism, he?s going to be speaking so much eloquent nonsense. He will probably not address the recent comment by the Prime Minister of Pakistan, the country after Afghanistan itself most victimized by U.S. aggression in the region. Speaking in English Yousef Raza Gilani told reporters: ?Our only concern is that when US sends more troops to Afghanistan?s Helmand area, if there will be influx of militants they will be moving to Balochistan. This is the concern that we already discussed with the US administration, that influx of militants towards Balochistan should be taken care of otherwise that can destabilise Balochistan. ?A stable Afghanistan is in Pakistan?s interest - but at the same time we also do not want our country to be destabilized. We have asked US administration to consult us in case of any paradigm shift in the policy... so that we can formulate our strategy accordingly.? Balochistan is over 40 per cent of the land area of his country. It is beset with ethnic unrest; some of the majority Balochis resent the fact that they receive few profits from the exploitation of the uranium and copper of their region, and are neglected by Islamabad. There is an armed insurgency led by members of the Bugti tribe. This has some support from educated Pakistanis critical of ?Pashtun chauvinism? who accuse the state of trying to keep Balochis backward. (While listed as ?terrorist? by the State Department this movement is a separate phenomenon from the Taliban.) State Department officials have dismissed Pakistani concerns. Isn?t that typical though? They have been dismissing them since the initial invasion in 2001, and as Pakistan becomes more and more destabilized, the U.S. merely repeats its demands for more military cooperation, continues its drone strikes across the border, and pursues its goals in the region in what Islamabad perceives as disregard for its interests. Pakistan has its own problems that policy-makers in the U.S. State Department seem either not to understand or to willfully ignore as it exacerbates them. And President Obama will not mention that according to the Asia Foundation?s 2009 poll in Afghanistan 56 per cent of respondents say they have some sympathy for the motivations of the armed groups, including the Taliban and Hekmatyar?s outfit, opposing occupation. He won?t note how the PR strategy of depicting this effort as a ?liberation? symbolized by the removal of the burqa has been long since quietly shelved, since the burqa is actually back with a vengeance and the warlords upon whom the U.S. must rely to maintain order have always laughed at U.S. proposals for social reform. They know that?s not what the troops are there for. The U.S. intervened indirectly in Afghanistan in the ?80s, with no thought for the welfare of the Afghan people and with tragic consequences for them, in order to fight the Soviets and the imagined menace of ?communism.? To do that it nurtured a ferocious Islamist extremist trend. There?s never been any acknowledgement of error or apology and don?t expect one. It all made sense at the time from a U.S. imperialist point of view. What makes sense now, from a U.S. imperialist point of view? Just look at the map. Realize that Afghanistan has no products the U.S. corporate world wants or needs. During the Cold War, Iran, Iraq, Turkey sometimes played crucial roles in U.S. geostrategic thinking but Afghanistan was practically conceded to the Soviet camp even before 1978. It only acquired significance as a Cold War battleground when U.S. strategists realized (in Brzezinski?s words) that they could ?bleed the Soviets?the way they did us in Vietnam.? More recently, it has acquired significance as U.S. energy corporations do global battle with the Russians over access to Caspian Sea natural gas. At present Europe is dependent on the supply of gas via Russia from the Caspian Sea, principally from Turkmenistan. This gives Moscow enormous political leverage when it comes to such matters as NATO?s decision to admit Georgia or Ukraine. U.S. policy has been to build pipelines from the Caspian avoiding Russia or Iran. Construction of the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline which will pump the gas straight to the Indian Ocean and on to world markets has been long delayed due to the fighting in Afghanistan. The pipeline will run through Helmand province, then into Pakistan?s Balochistan. If it all works out, this will represent a highly significant improvement in the geostrategic position of the U.S. in the region, including in the event of another world war (such as might be provoked by a U.S. attack on Iran?s nuclear facilities and unpredictable repercussions of such action). But Obama will not be talking about the history of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, or the feelings of the Afghan people about occupation, or the reactions of the Pakistanis to the unmitigated disaster on their doorstep, or the real geopolitical reasons for U.S. interest in this backward impoverished Central Asian nation that has been ?the graveyard of empires? since the time of Alexander the Great. He will say it?s still a necessary war to defend Americans from terrorist attack. We should recall, once again, the observation of Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering during the Nuremburg trial that while ?naturally the common people don?t want war ? the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.? We should respond: No it?s not necessary! in the streets that day and those following---until we force Obama to end what are now unmistakably his criminal imperialist wars. Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at: gleupp at granite.tufts.edu From mark at parit.ca Tue Dec 1 12:25:22 2009 From: mark at parit.ca (Mark Jenkins) Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:25:22 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] FYI: Link to tonight's Munk debates In-Reply-To: References: <4B1550F1.8090905@applebybooks.net> Message-ID: <4B155F92.9080303@parit.ca> PJ Kome wrote: > You can also listen through CBC online at: > http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200912/20091201.html > > Scroll down to the second section of the show. > cheers, Penney Actually, that discussion on /The Current/ is a "warm-up" for the Munk Debate. The actual debate is tonight. CBC radio is carrying it on /Ideas/ next Wednesday, and CPAC will probably air it at some point. From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 2 02:31:23 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:31:23 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Swiss and the Muslims Message-ID: http://www.portside.org/?q=showpost&i=6947 Portside 1 Dec 2009 The Swiss and the Muslims By Victor Grossman in Berlin The Swiss, known for cheese, Alps, watches, chocolate and secret bank accounts, at least two of which are full of holes, have now added a sixth important product: intolerance. 57.5 percent of its 8 million population, or of those who went to the polls, voted to forbid minarets next to Muslim mosques. As nearly everyone agreed, the minarets themselves were not so important. The 400,000 Muslims living in Switzerland now have only four minarets. Their architecture disturbs almost no-one, nor do muezzins call loudly over the rooftops five times a day. The minarets are symbols, and while few who voted for the ban said so openly, what many thought was: "There are too many damned furriners in our Christian republic anyway. We can't even understand their foreign lingo. Keep `em out!" Several sad ironies are involved. One is linguistic. Switzerland has four official languages to begin with, which should breed tolerance, especially since German- speaking Swiss, and it is they who voted most frequently against the minarets, have a folksy dialect which sounds rather quaint to people in Germany but is so difficult to understand that Swiss films shown there require sub-titles. Variety in cultures is a good thing, intelligent people generally believe, but it involves tolerance toward other people's cultures. Another ironic note is more tragic. Christianity is no constitutional requirement in Switzerland; religious freedom is supposed to be the rule. But it was Swiss authorities equally determined to keep their country Christian who turned away Jewish refugees from neighboring Germany during the Hitler years, resulting in death to many or most of them. This shameful episode, though most other countries at that time were equally guilty, makes the decision by over half of Swiss voters especially disturbing, and not only because it was a victory for the far-right Swiss People's Party. Like cheese and watches, such intolerance promises to be an export product whose political effects recall the crippling medical effects of thalidomide, or Contergan. And far too many in other countries are overly willing to buy this poison. Among those rejoicing were the Berlusconi backers in Italy. A leader of the government party Lega Nord fantasized for the media: "Flying high above a Europe now almost fully Islamized is the flag of courageous Switzerland, which wishes to remain Christian." The daughter of that old racist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who now heads his Front national in France, expressed her warm satisfaction. Geerd Wilders, the handsome blond and rabid Dutch film-maker currently building a party based on Islamophobia, said: "We need a referendum like that in the Netherlands!" His brother-in-arms in the Danish People's Party echoed his sentiments. In Austria, England, Spain and elsewhere there were fanatic nationalists, racists and neo-fascists, both the jackbooted thugs and the suave, elegant wheeler- dealers, to welcome this smoke signal from the Alps. They were the extremists, of course, rarely with anything like majorities. But their numbers were often tending upward. Many German politicians were undoubtedly horrified. Others, thinking of German history or counting the growing numbers of Muslim voters in urban centers, were careful and quiet. Few were exuberant. But some, while not explicitly approving the referendum results, betrayed their inner thoughts. Referring to Swiss voters, Wolfgang Bosbach, a key leader of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, said: "Their worries must be taken seriously!" He was quickly slapped down, but his message got through even the thickest shaven skulls. Muslimphobia is not unknown in Germany. In one borough of Berlin enraged demonstrations, egged on by a Christian Democratic candidate, opposed building a mosque and modest minaret. Now completed and in use, it causes no troubles to anyone. A menacing rally in Cologne against a new mosque was prevented by a counterdemonstration of almost all parties, unions and religious groups, but its sponsors did manage to form a new local party and win city council seats for their unholy crusade. The list of those warning against the fictional monster of Islamization, recalling "Yellow Peril" campaigns on the US West Coast, contained a few surprisingly prominent names. If unemployment figures in Germany grow worse and social assistance is further cut by the new government, part of any angry protests can be misdirected, not against those guilty of the misery, the banks, corporations and politicians obliged to them, indeed, their whole system, but instead, as so often in history, against those who are suffering even more. Eighty years ago it was the Jews who were blamed, discriminated against and then murdered. The Jewish community today, although its size has increased in recent years, is hardly large or conspicuous enough to serve this purpose sufficiently. It is still on the neo-Nazi list, but the main attacks, usually verbal thus far, are directed against Muslim communities, which include about 2 million people of Turkish descent, but also many Kurds, Africans and Arabs from Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and other areas. This problem for immigrants is clearly international, involving long-lasting pressures of northern and western economies and cultures on those of the south and east. Experience in many countries indicates that large immigrant groups usually can integrate into their host country but the process often lasts two or three generations. Until then their differing appearance and culture, and the results of poverty and oppression, are all too often utilized to prevent unity among poor people and working people. Even if the referendum vote should be reversed by the Swiss Supreme Court or the European Court of Human Rights, to which all European countries belong, even Switzerland, the 57.5 percent result of those who bothered to vote has done damage enough to any Swiss reputation for tolerance, while encouraging the most dangerous elements of political life in all Europe. From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 2 02:49:20 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:49:20 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The anti-war movement responds to President Obama's speech Message-ID: http://answer.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ANS_homepage The anti-war movement responds to President Obama's speech Statement from the ANSWER Coalition Rhetoric and Reality: Masking War Escalation as a Withdrawal Plan The U.S. cannot ?win? the war in Afghanistan. It was losing the war when Barack Obama took office. In March 2009, President Obama ordered another 30,000 troops. Rather than reverse the outcome, the U.S. and NATO effort lost even more ground. Now President Obama has ordered another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Attempting to deflect growing opposition to the announcement of his dramatic escalation of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama is simultaneously claiming that U.S. troops will start to be withdrawn in July 2011. The Generals and Admirals, and now the White House, are unwilling to accept responsibility for a military setback. The President knows they cannot win and yet is unwilling to leave. Since no leader is willing to take responsibility, they are instead sending thousands more to their deaths. Bush and Cheney ordered the invasion thinking it would be easy going. They thought Iraq would be easy, too. They were going to wipe out the governments in Iran, Syria and North Korea. This colonial-type fantasy, nourished by ?great nation? arrogance and the acquiescence of a caste of corrupt politicians in Congress, set the stage for the current catastrophe of a war without end. After eight years of war, more than 140 armed insurgent groups of Afghans now exist as a response to the invasion and they control large parts of the country. The people in Afghanistan perceive the occupation as a colonial-type takeover of their country. September 11 was a pretext, but there were no Afghans or Iraqis who hijacked the planes. The people of Afghanistan, like the people in Vietnam, will never accept foreign military occupation in their country. In the 1968 election Nixon ran on a platform of a ?secret peace plan? for Vietnam. In reality, Nixon?s ?peace plan? meant more bombing of Vietnam, expansion of the war into Cambodia, and ?Vietnamization? ? the building up of the South Vietnamese puppet army under the direction of U.S. ?advisors.? The puppet army was supposed to do the fighting and dying in the place of U.S. troops in an increasingly unpopular war. The new plan for Afghanistan calls for more bombing and drone attacks, and ?Afghanization? ? the building up of a puppet Afghan army trained and led by U.S. commanders. This follows President Obama's escalation of massive bombing of the people of Pakistan. Bush Policy ? Obama Policy On Jan. 20, the day that Barack Obama took the oath of office, a government helicopter carrying George W. Bush lifted off and made the ceremonial flight away from the nation?s capital, signaling the end of one era and the start of a new administration. It was a remarkable event to witness. As the Bush helicopter passed over the inaugural throng, millions of people on the ground started cheering spontaneously. The official pomp of the transfer of power was overwhelmed by the euphoria of those who hated Bush and his policies. But was there a transfer of power? The personalities change, but the institutions of militarism, war and empire remain intact. Since Obama took over as president, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan has nearly doubled, and that?s before the new deployment of 30,000 more soldiers. Today, less than a year since Bush departed, there are actually more combined U.S. military forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan than at any time during Bush?s tenure. Between official military forces, private mercenaries and other contractors, by the middle of 2010 there will be nearly a half-million U.S. personnel in the two countries. At a time of deep economic crisis, with tens of millions out of work and losing their homes, the cost of the wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq is already running at over $225 billion per year or $1.2 billion every two days. Escalating the war will escalate that cost. The war is not about "the security of the people of the United States being at stake." If it was, there could be no talk about exit strategies and announced plans for withdrawal. Starting today, there will be a growing escalation of anti-war protests in the United States. Tonight and tomorrow there are demonstrations across the country. On Saturday, March 20, 2010, tens of thousands will march in Washington, D.C., with coinciding mass actions in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Real change comes from below. It comes from the millions who are suffering from unemployment, foreclosure, evictions and poverty. It comes from the young people who are being driven from college because of soaring tuition. The children of working-class families are the ones who do the bleeding and the killing, and they are told they do it for ?national security.? This is not our war. This is a war for empire, one that has gone very badly for the occupying force. How many more will die for the U.S. to avoid the appearance of defeat? The ANSWER Coalition, in partnership with scores of organizations and echoing the sentiment of millions of people who want the wars to end, will be in the streets today, tomorrow and in the months to come. That is now clearly the only prescription to end the violence and occupation of the American Empire. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 2 10:55:06 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:55:06 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Canadian Government Rocked by Accusations of Abuse, Torture of Afghan Prisoners Message-ID: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/281.php The B u l l e t Socialist Project ? E-Bulletin No. 281 December 2, 2009 ------------------------------------------------------ Canadian Government Rocked by Accusations of Abuse, Torture of Afghan Prisoners Roger Annis The Canadian government's war effort in Afghanistan has been shaken by new accusations that Afghans detained by Canadian forces were tortured and abused. The charges were made by Richard Colvin, a highly placed diplomat in the Canadian embassy in Kabul during 2005-07, the years when Canada escalated its military role in Afghanistan. Colvin testified on November 18 before the Canadian Parliament's Standing Committee on National Defense that he had sent more than 15 reports to his political superiors and the military high command warning that Canadian forces were complicit in the abuse and torture of Afghans it had detained. He said the practice of handing detainees over to Afghan authorities and then turning a blind eye to their treatment not only violated international law, but would also do incalculable damage to Canada's role in the Afghan war and its reputation among the Afghan people. ?Instead of winning hearts and minds, we caused Kandaharis to fear foreigners,? he said. ?Canada's detainee practices alienated us from the population and strengthened the insurgency.? Colvin told the committee that virtually all of the scores of Afghans detained by Canadians from 2005-07 were ending up in torture dungeons. Many were not even connected to fighters resisting the foreign military occupation. ?Many were just local people ? farmers, truck drivers, tailors, peasants ? random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time. In other words, we detained and handed over for severe torture a lot of innocent people.? His account echoes concerns expressed at the time by Human Rights Watch, the Independent Afghanistan Human Rights Commission, and others. Even the U.S. State Department in 2006 described continuing evidence of ?torture, extrajudicial killings, poor prison conditions, official impunity, prolonged pretrial detention? and other human rights violations at Afghan prisons and detention centers. Afghan Member of Parliament Malalai Joya confirms Colvin's account. During a speaking tour across Canada to promote her new book, A Woman Among Warlords, Joya told CBC news on November 24, ?What he has been saying is what I've heard from my people.? She says that many of the victims are women and children, and many of those suffered sexual assault. ?It's not new for our people.? Denial and Cover-Up Torture allegations against Canadian forces first surfaced in early 2007 in the national daily Globe and Mail and elsewhere. At the time, the Canadian government and military denied the accusations, but local and international human rights organizations confirmed them. Even the International Committee of the Red Cross, always reluctant to enter into political controversy, denied Ottawa's claim that Red Cross officials were watching over the conditions of prisoners and could protect them from abuse. So the government tried a new tack: in May 2007 it announced a deal with Afghan authorities to prevent future torture and abuse, and promising to monitor prisoner treatment closely. (Of note, Canada's expressed concern about prisoner abuse only applied to detainees turned over by Canadian soldiers). Colvin's testimony challenges the effectiveness of that deal. He says Canadian military record keeping was notoriously bad and that a regime of ?internal censorship? was imposed on the diplomatic and military mission. Following the 2007 revelations, his superiors discouraged written correspondence as well as any public statements on the deteriorating political and military situation in Afghanistan. Government, Generals Hit Back The response of the government and military to Colvin's testimony has deepened the crisis. In brief, their strategy has been to deny and attack. Defense Minister Peter MacKay, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and other government representatives flooded Parliament and the press with the message that Colvin's testimony is unreliable and unsubstantiated. Three of Canada's top generals who were in command in Afghanistan from 2005-07 also challenged Colvin's credibility when they appeared before the Standing Committee on November 25. Former chief of defense staff Rick Hillier called Colvin's accusations ?ludicrous.? Hillier led the Canadian military when it expanded its military role in Afghanistan in November 2005, famously declaring that Canada's role would be to ?kill detestable murderers and scumbags.? In 2006, he described the mission: ?We are the Canadian forces, and our job is to be able to kill people.? The general's testimony implicitly acknowledged Colvin's claim that innocent Afghans were being rounded up. He said it was near to impossible for Canadian troops to distinguish Afghans who are ?farmers by day and Taliban by night.? Lawsuit Challenges Government Colvin's testimony might never have taken place if not for a lawsuit initiated by Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association in February 2007. The suit argued that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms must apply to Canada's prisoner and detainee policy in Afghanistan. Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada in May, 2009, rejected the suit but the courts did note that Canadian forces in Afghanistan are obliged to obey international law, including the Geneva Conventions on warfare. The suit succeeded in exposing many documents pertaining to military and diplomatic operations. The two litigants also initiated a formal complaint to the Military Police Complaints Commission. That process also has pried loose more information, but the government and military have successfully stalled the MPCC's work, including recently firing its head when his term expired. There are now calls, including from the opposition New Democratic Party, for a public judicial inquiry into Colvin's revelations and other torture allegations. The government has resisted, citing concerns over ?national security? and the confidentiality of information. The government has also refused to give the Standing Committee such documentation as e-mail and written reports from Colvin that would corroborate or disprove his testimony and the government's and military's rebuttals. A Public Inquiry? The main opposition party in the Parliament, the Liberals, would probably find a public inquiry very uncomfortable and even damaging. After all, it was a Liberal Party government that led Canada into an escalation of the war in Afghanistan in November 2005, and its support for the war has not wavered since it was voted out of office in January 2006. The Liberals' leader, Michael Ignatieff, not only supports the war in Afghanistan, but has also supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and defended the use of torture against enemies of the U.S. empire. In 2003 Ignatieff, then teaching at Harvard University, published Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, in which he argued that the United States was a ?humanitarian empire? dedicated to human rights and democracy. The book provided intellectual justification for the Bush administration's use of torture and targeted assassination. Canada's military and political leaders are also concerned. A public inquiry could expose them to charges of war crimes. Retired Lieutenant-General Michel Gauthier, who headed oversees deployment for the Canadian military in 2006 and 2007, voiced this concern when he told the Standing Committee on November 25: ?As we were sitting at home watching television, my wife and I were mortified to hear a member of this committee appear on a national news network, name me and three others by name, and state as fact that we had either been negligent or that we had lied ? effectively branding us war criminals.? Two war crimes experts ? Payan Akhavan, a professor of international law at McGill University and former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal at the World Court in The Hague, and Errol Mendes, a professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Ottawa ? told CBC Radio's The Current on November 24 that Canada's political and military leaders have good reason to be concerned. There is a precedent for a public inquiry into the Afghanistan war, and it does not bode well for its success or utility. In 1993, the elite paratroop regiment of the Canadian military was accused of human rights atrocities in Somalia, including torture and summary execution of ordinary citizens. The regiment was ultimately disbanded. A public inquiry into its conduct, established in 1994, was summarily cancelled by Liberal Party Prime Minister Jean Chr?tien in 1997. One of the commissioners of that inquiry was Peter Desbarats, a former Dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario. He wrote a book on his experience, Somalia Cover-up: A Commissioner's Journal. Commenting on the Colvin revelations and fallout on The Current on November 20, Desbarats said, ?We haven't learned anything from Somalia ? this is another Somalia-style cover-up.? Desbarats says he doesn't have a lot of confidence that a public inquiry will end up any differently than the one that he was part of, and pointed to the only appropriate solution to this political scandal: ?We should get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible before it does some real damage to us.? That's also the view of Graeme Smith, a correspondent with the Globe and Mail and Canada's most experienced journalist in Afghanistan. Writing on the news website The Mark on November 12, he said: ?Making the country better doesn't necessarily require fighting the insurgents ? in many cases, it requires working with them. ?Our soldiers have bravely followed orders in Kandahar. But they're being swept aside by a tidal wave of U.S. forces, and this surge is likely doomed to bring the same results as previous surges. Canada should withdraw its battle group, and push its allies toward peace talks.? Richard Colvin's testimony adds a layer of complication onto an Afghanistan situation that is already difficult for the Canadian government. Its U.S. ally is poised for a significant escalation of the war, including as many as 40,000 additional troops, and an expansion of the war into Pakistan. The Harper government, meanwhile, is saddled with a 2008 parliamentary resolution, adopted for domestic political purposes, that calls for an end to Canada's military role in Kandahar by 2011, though it implicitly leaves open the possibility of military deployment to elsewhere in the country. The resolution also commits Canada to ?a policy of greater transparency with respect to its policy on the taking of and transferring of detainees including a commitment to report on the results of reviews or inspections of Afghan prisons undertaken by Canadian officials.? (For background, see Escalation of Afghanistan War: Canada Faces a Fateful Decision, November 18, 2009.) The latest torture revelations will make it all the more difficult for the Conservative Party government, or a Liberal Party government that might replace it, to sell the Canadian public on any delay or reversal of the 2011 withdrawal commitment. While a public inquiry into the latest revelations may expose more scandal, it is no substitute for building a sustained anti-war movement that fights for an end to the interlocked wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine. Only such a movement can end these reckless and predatory wars and help create the political conditions needed to end the regimes of permanent war that now rule in all the major capitalist countries of the world. ? Roger Annis is an aerospace worker in Vancouver. He can be reached at rogerannis[at]hotmail.com. For ongoing news and reports of the situation in Afghanistan, follow the blog of the Vancouver anti-war coalition, Stopwar.ca. This article originally published by Socialist Voice. ~~~~~~(((( The B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~ From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 3 02:08:13 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:08:13 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] A Giant Step Backward: The Dominican Republic Reforms Its Constitution Message-ID: https://nacla.org/node/6278 North American Congress on Latin America Dec 2, 2009 A Giant Step Backward: The Dominican Republic Reforms Its Constitution Reed M. Kurtz In a region where leaders' efforts to reform their nations' constitutions dominate the headlines, one political regime is flying under the radar in its efforts to radically overhaul its foundational political charter. On November 16, an assembly in the Dominican Republic overwhelmingly approved the final draft of sweeping reforms for what may become the most reactionary constitution in the Americas. The constitutional reforms are expected to be officially signed into law by President Leonel Fern?ndez in a ceremony in early December. Fern?ndez has spearheaded the reform campaign with the backing of a powerful coalition of the Catholic Church, the business community, and the hard Dominican right. But while conservative proponents of the new constitution (ironically) defend the changes as "progressive" and "liberal," many observers both inside and outside the country have expressed their grave concerns that these changes will in fact mark a great step backwards for the Dominican Republic. Accordingly, the effort to implement these reforms has been met with a vigorous campaign of popular resistance as dissident Dominicans have been taking to the streets in protest, expressing outrage at their exclusion from the debates surrounding the reform process, as well as their fears that the reforms will have devastating consequences for the most vulnerable segments of Dominican society. The most controversial of the new reforms is Article 30, which establishes that the "right to life is inviolable from conception until death." Effectively, this provision will outlaw abortion under all circumstances, including cases of rape and/or situations in which the mother's health is at risk. Critics have complained that this measure is likely to undermine women's access to contraception and reproductive health care in the country. Women's health advocates and human rights organizations have strongly criticized the measure and the majority of what little international media attention there has been on the constitutional reform process has been focused on this issue. Noting that the new provision not only undermines women's bodily sovereignty and the right to full access to medical procedures and sexual health care, organizations such as Amnesty International also argue that a total ban on abortions will only lead to an increase in maternal deaths. This fear has been heightened by a recent study on the negative effects of the total abortion ban in Nicaragua. The Guttmacher Institute, a sexual rights and reproductive health organization, recently issued a report documenting the severe harm caused by complications from unsafe abortion procedures upon the health care systems of developing nations, costing these already strained systems hundreds of millions of dollars each year. The Catholic Church, which maintains a very powerful presence in the country, played an instrumental role in lobbying lawmakers to implement Article 30. But despite the fact that an estimated 90% of Dominicans consider themselves Roman Catholic, recent polls also demonstrate that 80% of Dominicans reject a total ban on abortions and only 14% support regulating abortion through constitutional reform. Also included in the new version of the Carta Magna is language that defines marriage as "the union between a man and a woman," legally institutionalizing discrimination against same-sex couples and further contributing to a social climate in which bigotry towards gays, lesbians, and transgendered people is prevalent. LGBT people in the country have been widely scapegoated for the spread of the AIDS virus and recently, several transgendered people have been brutally murdered. Another controversial provision that may well inflame already-existing tensions within the country would strip the native-born children of undocumented immigrants of their Dominican citizenship. This "reform" will surely have severe consequences for those children born into a state of legal limbo, and is likely to foster further discord in relations between Dominicans and their Haitian neighbors. About one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, many without official documents. They, like other vulnerable minorities, are blamed for the country's social and economic problems, and routinely face harassment, exploitation, systematic prejudice, and direct violence. Finally, in a move that has significant symbolic effect on the marginalization of ordinary Dominicans, another constitutional reform would establish private property rights on the country's valuable public beaches. This last measure only further validates the new constitution's antidemocratic credentials. Indeed, one might even say that this provision is a fitting summary for reform process itself. Just as the majority of Dominicans will soon be excluded from their own beaches, they have been excluded from any meaningful role in the drafting of their new constitution, forcing them to take to the streets in order to make their voices heard. Meanwhile, left-leaning political regimes elsewhere in the region have been instituting constitutional reforms by means of popular referendums, ensuring that the public plays an active role in shaping their political institutions. Yet not only have leaders such as Venezuela's Hugo Ch?vez, Ecuador's Rafael Correa, and Bolivia's Evo Morales come under intense media scrutiny for their efforts, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was deposed in a coup this past summer for his mere attempt at a popular referendum to consider a constitutional reform. Where, we might ask, is the same level of scrutiny and criticism from Western media outlets towards this blatantly discriminatory and antidemocratic reform process in the Dominican Republic? The Dominican reform process, and the resistance it generates, merits our close attention. One way or another, it will have broader, regional consequences in the not too distant future. Reed M. Kurtz is a NACLA Research Associate. From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 3 03:44:24 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:44:24 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] As emissions increase, carbon 'sinks' get clogged Message-ID: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/02/AR2009120203732.html?hpid=moreheadlines As emissions increase, carbon 'sinks' get clogged World's oceans, forests becoming less able to absorb CO2 By Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 3, 2009 In the race to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, scientists have been looking to forests and oceans to absorb the pollution people generate. Relying on nature to compensate for human excesses sounds like a win-win situation -- except that these resources are under stress from the very emissions we are asking them to absorb, making them less able partners in the pact. Consider it the latest inconvenient truth about climate change. The benefits of these natural carbon "sinks" are many: Their diverse ecosystems soak up carbon dioxide. What's more, the international carbon enables industries to compensate for their emissions at a fraction of the price of installing cleaner technology, essentially by investing in forests; meanwhile, poorer countries that are rich in woodland profit from selling not lumber but carbon credits. Now, a global society of conservation biologists has launched a lobbying campaign, asking key decision-makers -- from the Danish officials chairing next week's climate talks in Copenhagen to U.S. lawmakers -- to push for steeper emission cuts to ensure that humans do not exhaust forests' capacity to store carbon in the decades to come. Earlier this year, a team of nearly 70 researchers published a paper in the journal Science showing that the drought-stressed Amazon rain forest emitted roughly as much carbon dioxide in 2005 as it usually stores -- about the same amount as the European Union and Japan together emit in a single year. "This dramatic new information confirms that unsustainable human demands on the Earth's dwindling primary and old-growth forests have pushed them to the wall," said Dominick DellaSala, president-elect of the Society for Conservation Biology's North America section. A separate article published last month in the journal Nature analyzed the sea's uptake of carbon between 1765 and 2008, finding that the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10 percent. The study's lead author, Samar Khatiwala, an oceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said oceans are becoming more acidic as more carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, so they are losing their ability to soak up emissions produced by people. "What our ocean study and other recent land studies suggest is that we cannot count on these sinks operating in the future as they have in the past and keep on subsidizing our ever-growing appetite for fossil fuels," Khatiwala said. Absorption rate slowing According to the Global Carbon Project, which tracks emissions, land and ocean carbon sinks took up 57 percent of human-generated carbon emissions between 1958 and 2008. While the size of these sinks has expanded in the past few decades, their absorption rate is slowing as greenhouse gas emissions have risen (by 41 percent since 1990). Ed Grumbine, an environmental studies professor at Prescott College and another member of the Society for Conservation Biology, said future drought and other factors make it difficult to determine what the exact rate of absorption will be. He noted that the Amazon has now returned to soaking up carbon rather than emitting it, but it's projected to be drier in future decades. To the north, Canada's boreal forest has suffered pine-beetle infestation on 51 million acres, an area half the size of California, which can lead to a massive carbon release as trees die off. "It's climate change with an emphasis on 'change,' " Grumbine said, adding that the climate bills pending in Congress do not factor in these trends. "They're pretty much rear-window views on what forests can and cannot do." Concerns for old trees The calculations matter because countries such as Brazil, which has pledged to reduce its deforestation rate 80 percent by 2020, are planning to receive money for these reductions as part of an allowance-trading system through the carbon market. Some environmentalists argue that the fact that forests are becoming less efficient carbon sponges should not lessen the incentive for preserving long-standing forests in developing countries. Such forests are more effective at storing carbon because the trees are bigger. Mark Tercek, president and chief executive of the Nature Conservancy, called the issue "a distraction. . . . In a climate-changing world, does that mean the level of difficulty goes up? Yes, but that doesn't mean you stop doing what you're trying to do." Miguel Calmon, director of forests and climate change for the Nature Conservancy's Latin America program, said environmental groups are trying to protect the integrity of natural carbon sinks. "The more biodiversity in any ecosystem, the higher the resilience," he said. New research does point to one promising new avenue of natural carbon sequestration: coastal salt marshes, mangroves and seagrass meadows. Emily Pidgeon, Conservation International's marine climate change director, said these habitats "are extremely efficient at burying carbon in the sediment below them, where it can stay for centuries or even millennia." But human activity is eroding these coastal habitats. As Grumbine observed, the future capacity of natural sinks to absorb carbon "is going to depend on human action." From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 3 04:12:31 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:12:31 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?windows-1252?q?Cynthia_McKinney=3A_Is_Obama=92s_Sur?= =?windows-1252?q?ge_A_Trap=3F?= Message-ID: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16368 Global Research December 2, 2009 Is President Obama?s Surge A Trap? by Cynthia McKinney Last night, President Obama announced both his decision to add 30,000 U.S. troops to the mire in Afghanistan and his desire to see other countries and N.A.T.O. match his surge. Thanks to U.S. taxpayers, mercenaries will continue to be a part of the foreign presence in Afghanistan. The Republicans support the President?s move and are expected to reward President Obama with the bulk of their Congressional votes to pass his plan. However, there is deep disquiet today within the ranks of the President?s own base in the Democratic Party, with independents, and with middle-of-the-roaders called ?swing? voters. In unprecedented numbers, voters in the United States of all previous political persuasions went to the polls and invested their dreams and, most importantly, their votes in the ?hope? and ?change? promised by the Obama campaign. But in light of the President?s defense of Bush Administration war crimes and torture in U.S. courts, the transfer of trillions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars to the wealthy banking elite, continued spying on environmental and peace activists as well as support for the extension of the Patriot Act, and removal of Medicare-for-all (single payer) as a central feature of proposed health care reform, Obama voters are rethinking their support. Already, according to a Daily Koss report written by Steve Singiser: ?Two in five Democratic voters either consider themselves unlikely to vote at this point in time, or have already made the firm decision to remove themselves from the 2010 electorate pool. Indeed, Democrats were three times more likely to say that they will ?definitely not vote? in 2010 than are Republicans.? By contrast, Republicans are happy today. Almost giddy with glee as far as I can see. Warmonger John McCain and most Republicans will make sure the President gets what he wants. And in 2012, they will abandon their support of this President and support the candidate that comes from their base. War-weary voters in this country are committed to peace. They reject the notion, as put forward by Vice President Dick Cheney that ?the American way of life? is something worth fighting for when that means that war becomes an energy policy. Tragically, the major unstated U.S. interest in the region that the President has bought into is the unacceptability of a proposed Iran-Pakistan-India (I-P-I) pipeline at a time when our country is saber-rattling against and threatening Iran with more sanctions. Earlier this year, Iran and Pakistan decided to move forward with their pipeline even if India decides to drop out. Ironically, I-P-I is also known as the ?peace pipeline.? The alternative pipeline route, Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (T-A-P-I), is supported by Washington because it denies an important economic benefit to Iran. Sadly, nowhere in the President?s remarks did he mention the pipeline on which construction is slated to begin in 2010. U.S. policy is not only guided by pipeline politics. There is also the consideration of chessboard geo-positioning necessary to contain Russia, China, and ensure U.S. empire?for those inclined to traditional Cold Warrior ?containment? thinking. Apparently, behind what some are calling a ?shadow war in Muslim lands,? are targeted assassination teams that have wreaked tri-border havoc in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Fortunately, this time around, I?m convinced that U.S. voters will vote for peace. President Obama has now ensured this outcome. Imagine, John McCain and Joe Lieberman have just been made very happy by the President?s choice while that same choice leaves swing voters, independents, and some Democrats who enthusiastically supported Obama?s campaign looking for somewhere else to go. Cynthia McKinney is a frequent contributor to Global Research. From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 3 11:13:52 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:13:52 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Honduras] Election Report: The People Say "We Didn't Vote!" Message-ID: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/2235/1/ Election Report From Honduras: The People Say "We Didn't Vote!" Written by Jackie McVicar Wednesday, 02 December 2009 Tegucigalpa, Honduras - After a long bus ride back from the north eastern part of the country and the department of Colon, we arrived in the capital today just in time to join a massive caravan organized by the Popular Resistance Front. Like the other demonstrations held since the coup d'etat on June 28, the mobilization winded through the "barrios", the neighborhoods in Tegucigalpa where supporters left their homes to show their support. This time, instead of walking, organizers decided to drive their cars in a caravan, to avoid confrontation or repression that they feared by the State security forces. Hundreds of cars and people drove through the streets honking their horns, with flags, horns and music. Both those in the caravan and people yelling support from the streets, "I didn't vote!" showed their ink-less fingers, to show they had not been registered at a polling station where a finger print as part of your id is normally taken. Though the media is reporting record high turnouts for Sunday's election, no one is buying it. One woman I interviewed who didn't want to be identified because of fear ("if they see my picture, they [the military] will come after me"), said, "I have over 150 people in my [extended] family and not one went out to vote." Another man, when asked what the streets of Tegucigalpa looked like yesterday, said with pride, "The streets were deserted. That is the reality. Those who went to vote were just a few...I didn't go out to vote, precisely because we don't support the de facto regime. And conscious people who didn't vote in Honduras, is 65%. It's the majority who didn't go vote and the Tribunal [Supreme Electoral Tribunal - TSE] wants to cheat us by saying the majority went to vote. In Honduras, people are conscious after the 28th of June. And it's the majority who won, it's the popular resistance." On election day at 3pm, the TSE announced that they were having a large turnout and didn't have enough paper and ink so were going to extend voting by an hour. Others suggest that they extended the voting hour precisely because there wasn't a large turnout and there are reports that police started going into neighbors' houses announcing that all citizens must vote. Despite this, many didn't. One taxi driver I asked from Tocoa, in the department of Colon, said, "I didn't leave my house yesterday. I shut the door and didn't open it all day. Who knows what they [State forces] would've done." This driver had reason to be nervous. Five members of our delegation were in Tocoa the day before the election and we saw at least five unmarked trucks and SUVs with tinted windows driving through the small town, reminding those on the streets they were being watched. Some didn't even bother taking the National Party banner off the vehicles as they drove past folks walking on the streets or pulling up in front of the homes of resistance leaders homes. When our delegation met with the Sub-Chief at the National Police Station in Tocoa on election day, after receiving a call that up to eight people had been illegally detained, he said that the police were, "doing all they could to ensure the safety of citizens." He noted that the police register any unmarked cars they see to ensure they do not have dangerous materials inside and that they are registered to the right people driving the car. When I asked why the police hadn't stopped the unmarked vehicles we saw, despite the fact that every other car was being stopped and registered at the police check point, he simply didn't answer. Later that night, a pipe bomb exploded in the Liberal Party Headquarters in Tocoa and the eight missing still have not been found or the story cleared about their whereabouts. Outside of Tocoa, in the municipality of Trujillo, we visited the community of Guadalupe Carney (named after an Irish American Priest who worked there and who was killed in the 1980s), who had heard the night before that military were encircling the community from both directions. Thankfully, they never raided the community, but they sent a message loud and clear: be careful, we're not far away. We heard reports that the military in part were camped out a Colonel's hacienda near by. The police had Guadalupe on their radar and had been "prepared for the worst" in that community, according to Officer Sauceda. When we visited, we saw signs posted: Don't vote! Of the over 800 families living in the community, they suspect only a handful went to vote. The campesinos in this community know this will be a long battle, but one man, Augustin, age 75, said proudly, "I have seen a lot in my life time. We continue the struggle because it is part of who we are, we are conscious and we believe in the struggle." In other polling stations, we saw political hype but not too many voters. In Corosito, Colon, we visited the polls with members of the Coordination of Popular Organizations of Aguan (COPA) and saw many empty rooms in the school where the poll had been set up. Military and police guarded the door, the first time for this kind of security during a civilian election. In other parts of the country, including San Pedro Sula where people in resistance had planned a peaceful march to show opposition to the election process, tear gas and water bombs served to control the crowds. Back in Tegucigalpa, there are many unknowns: will Mel Zelaya leave the Brazilian Embassy this week and fulfill his term as President before Pepe Lobo of the opposing National Party takes power at the end of January? What political alliances will be made now that the vote has taken place? Will Canada, the US and other nations go ahead and accept these unfair, unfree elections and accept a highly militarized state and a President elected during a coup d'etat as trade partners and go ahead with business as usual? Will the newly elected National Party be able to convince the world that Honduras' "problems" are a thing of the past, part of Liberal Party squabbling that have ended? One issue isn't in question: the strength and courage of the Honduran people. As the caravan ended tonight in front of the Brazilian Embassy, in an act of solidarity with President Zelaya held captive inside, chanting, singing and dancing (there was even a Mariachi band!) could be seen and heard while the police and military called in reinforcements and pointed their 50 mm machine gun at the celebrating crowd. So when it was time, people left - peacefully, just as the caravan had started. They weren't about to enter a conflict with the military, a physical fight is not what they want. When I asked a young woman in the crowd why she was there, what she wanted, she didn't surprise me with her answer, "la constituyente" - the constituent assembly that many believe could one day lead to real change in Honduras. Until then the people keep singing, "The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!". Just as the graffiti says throughout Honduras, "The Power Is In The Streets." From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 6 02:14:16 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:14:16 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?windows-1252?q?Switzerland=92s_Invisible_Minarets?= Message-ID: <> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/opinion/05stamm.html December 5, 2009 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Switzerland?s Invisible Minarets By PETER STAMM Winterthur, Switzerland THREE years ago I was invited to the Tehran International Book Fair; afterward I traveled around the country. The mosques I visited were so empty as to give the impression that Iran was as secular as Western Europe. It wasn?t until I took a trip to a place of pilgrimage in the mountains that I saw large numbers of the faithful. The traffic started piling up even before my group reached the town of Imamzadeh Davood. A few of the pilgrims were making the trek on foot, together with the sheep they intended to sacrifice. The narrow streets were bustling just as at Christian places of pilgrimage: booths crammed with junk, groups of teenagers taking pictures of each other, every nook and cranny packed with candles lighted by believers in the hope their wishes would be fulfilled. I was received by the mayor and invited to dinner ? the first Swiss he had ever met. He showed me the mosque and led me to the tomb of the saint. I, the unbeliever, was allowed into places where even pilgrims were not permitted. During my three weeks in Iran, my faith, or rather the lack thereof, was never an issue. However bellicose the political face of Islam often appears, in everyday practice what I experienced was a religion of hospitality and tolerance. Switzerland, on the other hand, appeared alarmingly intolerant last weekend, when 58 percent of our voters approved a ban on the building of new minarets. When the minaret referendum was proposed by the rightist Swiss People?s Party, no one really took it seriously. Some consideration was given to having it declared invalid on the grounds that it was unconstitutional as well as a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, but in the end the government agreed to allow the referendum to go forward, probably in the hope that it would be roundly defeated and thereby become a symbol of Swiss open-mindedness. So certain were the politicians of prevailing that hardly any publicity was fielded against the initiative. As a result, the streets were dominated by the proponents? posters, which showed a veiled woman in front of a forest of minarets that looked like missiles. Minarets have never been a problem in Switzerland. There are four in the entire country, some of which have been standing for decades. (One of them is in my city but I?ve never seen it.) And only two other minarets were being planned. Most mosques are in faceless industrial districts where no one notices them. But perhaps that is exactly the problem. Islamic immigrants don?t live with us but beside us, just as French, German, Italian and Romansch-speaking Swiss live alongside each other without a great deal of animosity ? or interaction. The average Swiss citizen has no real contact with Islam. Headscarves are seldom seen on the street, and chadors are practically nonexistent. Moreover, when young proponents of the ban talk about problems with Muslims, they almost exclusively mean young men from the Balkans, who come across as male chauvinists but are almost never active members of Muslim communities. Most people encounter Islam only through the news media, which don?t report on the Muslims in our country but focus on terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Iranian plans for an atomic bomb and Muammar el-Qaddafi?s absurd proposal to abolish Switzerland. It?s hard to find one overarching explanation for why the Swiss voted as they did. Similar referendums have brought surprises: 35 percent of voters wanting to do away with the army, for instance, or 58 percent approving of same-sex partnerships. The prevailing Swiss attitude is both conservative and liberal: on the one hand everything should stay the way it is, on the other everyone should be able to do what he or she wants. What?s most conspicuous in these referendums is that we are a nation of pragmatists, inclined to our dour obstinacy, and we owe our success not to grand ideas but to problem-solving. So focused are we on getting things done, it almost doesn?t matter if the problem isn?t a problem, or if the solution risks sullying the country?s reputation. We Swiss sacrificed our good standing as a multicultural and open-minded society to ban the construction of minarets that no one intends to build in order to defend ourselves against an Islam that has never existed in Switzerland. Perhaps Muslims here are more Swiss than the rest of us might think. They too will solve the problem we?ve made for them: they are likely to swallow the results of this referendum, do without their minarets and continue to assemble for prayer, unnoticed and unperturbed. Peter Stamm is the author of the novel ?On a Day Like This.? This essay was translated by Philip Boehm from the German. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 6 03:49:01 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Sun, 06 Dec 2009 03:49:01 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Making the TransAfghanistan Pipeline Safe for Democracy Message-ID: McCamy Taylor Making the TransAfghanistan Pipeline Safe for Democracy Intro. I don?t pretend to know why President Obama is so determined to escalate the war in Afghanistan, the country that drove the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. Maybe he covets the executive privilege that goes with being a war time president. Maybe he is courting the center and center-right in anticipation of the 2012 election. Maybe he does not want to bring too many troops home all at once for fear of worsening the economic recession at home. Maybe he is scared of being called a waffler a flip flopper or some other unpleasant name if he goes back on his word. Maybe he is afraid that terrorists will attack the mainland U.S. again and he will be blamed for ending one of Bush?s foreign wars too soon. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The only thing I know for certain is that the troops will not be back home until after 2014. That is when the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is scheduled to be operational. I. A Brief History of Greed The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is the reason the Taliban rose to power. In the mid 1990s, Unocol began plans for an oil and a gas pipeline that would run from the Caspian Sea, through Afghanistan and Pakistan and finally to India. You know, the country where they are sending all our jobs. Unocol and the CIA helped to put the Taliban in power, thinking that the new regime would permit them to build the pipeline. Full: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7159913 From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 6 03:51:27 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Sun, 06 Dec 2009 03:51:27 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Unocal Corporation on a pipeline for Afghanistan Message-ID: (Also from democraticunderground...) http://www.house.gov/international_relations/105th/ap/wsap212982.htm (until it was removed sometime in 2003!) TESTIMONY BY JOHN J. MARESCA VICE PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS UNOCAL CORPORATION TO HOUSE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE ON ASIA AND THE PACIFIC FEBRUARY 12, 1998 WASHINGTON, D.C. Mr. Chairman, I am John Maresca, Vice President, International Relations, of Unocal Corporation. Unocal is one of the world's leading energy resource and project development companies. Our activities are focused on three major regions -- Asia, Latin America and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. In Asia and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, we are a major oil and gas producer. I appreciate your invitation to speak here today. I believe these hearings are important and timely, and I congratulate you for focusing on Central Asia oil and gas reserves and the role they play in shaping U.S. policy. Today we would like to focus on three issues concerning this region, its resources and U.S. policy: The need for multiple pipeline routes for Central Asian oil and gas. The need for U.S. support for international and regional efforts to achieve balanced and lasting political settlements within Russia, other newly independent states and in Afghanistan. The need for structured assistance to encourage economic reforms and the development of appropriate investment climates in the region. In this regard, we specifically support repeal or removal of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. For more than 2,000 years, Central Asia has been a meeting ground between Europe and Asia, the site of ancient east-west trade routes collectively called the Silk Road and, at various points in history, a cradle of scholarship, culture and power. It is also a region of truly enormous natural resources, which are revitalizing cross-border trade, creating positive political interaction and stimulating regional cooperation. These resources have the potential to recharge the economies of neighboring countries and put entire regions on the road to prosperity. About 100 years ago, the international oil industry was born in the Caspian/Central Asian region with the discovery of oil. In the intervening years, under Soviet rule, the existence of the region's oil and gas resources was generally known, but only partially or poorly developed. As we near the end of the 20th century, history brings us full circle. With political barriers falling, Central Asia and the Caspian are once again attracting people from around the globe who are seeking ways to develop and deliver its bountiful energy resources to the markets of the world. The Caspian region contains tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves, much of them located in the Caspian Sea basin itself. Proven natural gas reserves within Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan equal more than 236 trillion cubic feet. The region's total oil reserves may reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil -- enough to service Europe's oil needs for 11 years. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels. In 1995, the region was producing only 870,000 barrels per day (44 million tons per year [Mt/y]). By 2010, Western companies could increase production to about 4.5 million barrels a day (Mb/d) -- an increase of more than 500 percent in only 15 years. If this occurs, the region would represent about five percent of the world's total oil production, and almost 20 percent of oil produced among non-OPEC countries. One major problem has yet to be resolved: how to get the region's vast energy resources to the markets where they are needed. There are few, if any, other areas of the world where there can be such a dramatic increase in the supply of oil and gas to the world market. The solution seems simple: build a "new" Silk Road. Implementing this solution, however, is far from simple. The risks are high, but so are the rewards. Finding and Building Routes to World Markets One of the main problems is that Central Asia is isolated. The region is bounded on the north by the Arctic Circle, on the east and west by vast land distances, and on the south by a series of natural obstacles -- mountains and seas -- as well as political obstacles, such as conflict zones or sanctioned countries. This means that the area's natural resources are landlocked, both geographically and politically. Each of the countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia faces difficult political challenges. Some have unsettled wars or latent conflicts. Others have evolving systems where the laws -- and even the courts -- are dynamic and changing. Business commitments can be rescinded without warning, or they can be displaced by new geopolitical realities. In addition, a chief technical obstacle we face in transporting oil is the region's existing pipeline infrastructure. Because the region's pipelines were constructed during the Moscow-centered Soviet period, they tend to head north and west toward Russia. There are no connections to the south and east. Depending wholly on this infrastructure to export Central Asia oil is not practical. Russia currently is unlikely to absorb large new quantities of "foreign" oil, is unlikely to be a significant market for energy in the next decade, and lacks the capacity to deliver it to other markets. Certainly there is no easy way out of Central Asia. If there are to be other routes, in other directions, they must be built. Two major energy infrastructure projects are seeking to meet this challenge. One, under the aegis of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, or CPC, plans to build a pipeline west from the Northern Caspian to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossisk. From Novorossisk, oil from this line would be transported by tanker through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean and world markets. The other project is sponsored by the Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), a consortium of 11 foreign oil companies including four American companies -- Unocal, Amoco, Exxon and Pennzoil. It will follow one or both of two routes west from Baku. One line will angle north and cross the North Caucasus to Novorossisk. The other route would cross Georgia and extend to a shipping terminal on the Black Sea port of Supsa. This second route may be extended west and south across Turkey to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. But even if both pipelines were built, they would not have enough total capacity to transport all the oil expected to flow from the region in the future; nor would they have the capability to move it to the right markets. Other export pipelines must be built. Unocal believes that the central factor in planning these pipelines should be the location of the future energy markets that are most likely to need these new supplies. Just as Central Asia was the meeting ground between Europe and Asia in centuries past, it is again in a unique position to potentially service markets in both of these regions -- if export routes to these markets can be built. Let's take a look at some of the potential markets. Western Europe Western Europe is a tough market. It is characterized by high prices for oil products, an aging population, and increasing competition from natural gas. Between 1995 and 2010, we estimate that demand for oil will increase from 14.1 Mb/d (705 Mt/y) to 15.0 Mb/d (750 Mt/y), an average growth rate of only 0.5 percent annually. Furthermore, the region is already amply supplied from fields in the Middle East, North Sea, Scandinavia and Russia. Although there is perhaps room for some of Central Asia's oil, the Western European market is unlikely to be able to absorb all of the production from the Caspian region. Central and Eastern Europe Central and Eastern Europe markets do not look any better. Although there is increased demand for oil in the region's transport sector, natural gas is gaining strength as a competitor. Between 1995 and 2010, demand for oil is expected to increase by only half a million barrels per day, from 1.3 Mb/d (67 Mt/y) to 1.8 Mb/d (91.5 Mt/y). Like Western Europe, this market is also very competitive. In addition to supplies of oil from the North Sea, Africa and the Middle East, Russia supplies the majority of the oil to this region. The Domestic NIS Market The growth in demand for oil also will be weak in the Newly Independent States (NIS). We expect Russian and other NIS markets to increase demand by only 1.2 percent annually between 1997 and 2010. Asia/Pacific In stark contrast to the other three markets, the Asia/Pacific region has a rapidly increasing demand for oil and an expected significant increase in population. Prior to the recent turbulence in the various Asian/Pacific economies, we anticipated that this region's demand for oil would almost double by 2010. Although the short-term increase in demand will probably not meet these expectations, Unocal stands behind its long-term estimates. Energy demand growth will remain strong for one key reason: the region's population is expected to grow by 700 million people by 2010. It is in everyone's interests that there be adequate supplies for Asia's increasing energy requirements. If Asia's energy needs are not satisfied, they will simply put pressure on all world markets, driving prices upwards everywhere. The key question is how the energy resources of Central Asia can be made available to satisfy the energy needs of nearby Asian markets. There are two possible solutions -- with several variations. Export Routes East to China: Prohibitively Long? One option is to go east across China. But this would mean constructing a pipeline of more than 3,000 kilometers to central China -- as well as a 2,000-kilometer connection to reach the main population centers along the coast. Even with these formidable challenges, China National Petroleum Corporation is considering building a pipeline east from Kazakhstan to Chinese markets. Unocal had a team in Beijing just last week for consultations with the Chinese. Given China's long-range outlook and its ability to concentrate resources to meet its own needs, China is almost certain to build such a line. The question is what will the costs of transporting oil through this pipeline be and what netback will the producers receive. South to the Indian Ocean: A Shorter Distance to Growing Markets A second option is to build a pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. One obvious potential route south would be across Iran. However, this option is foreclosed for American companies because of U.S. sanctions legislation. The only other possible route option is across Afghanistan, which has its own unique challenges. The country has been involved in bitter warfare for almost two decades. The territory across which the pipeline would extend is controlled by the Taliban, an Islamic movement that is not recognized as a government by most other nations. From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of our proposed pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders and our company. In spite of this, a route through Afghanistan appears to be the best option with the fewest technical obstacles. It is the shortest route to the sea and has relatively favorable terrain for a pipeline. The route through Afghanistan is the one that would bring Central Asian oil closest to Asian markets and thus would be the cheapest in terms of transporting the oil. Unocal envisions the creation of a Central Asian Oil Pipeline Consortium. The pipeline would become an integral part of a regional oil pipeline system that will utilize and gather oil from existing pipeline infrastructure in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. The 1,040-mile-long oil pipeline would begin near the town of Chardzhou, in northern Turkmenistan, and extend southeasterly through Afghanistan to an export terminal that would be constructed on the Pakistan coast on the Arabian Sea. Only about 440 miles of the pipeline would be in Afghanistan. This 42-inch-diameter pipeline will have a shipping capacity of one million barrels of oil per day. Estimated cost of the project -- which is similar in scope to the Trans Alaska Pipeline -- is about US$2.5 billion. There is considerable international and regional political interest in this pipeline. Asian crude oil importers, particularly from Japan, are looking to Central Asia and the Caspian as a new strategic source of supply to satisfy their desire for resource diversity. The pipeline benefits Central Asian countries because it would allow them to sell their oil in expanding and highly prospective hard currency markets. The pipeline would benefit Afghanistan, which would receive revenues from transport tariffs, and would promote stability and encourage trade and economic development. Although Unocal has not negotiated with any one group, and does not favor any group, we have had contacts with and briefings for all of them. We know that the different factions in Afghanistan understand the importance of the pipeline project for their country, and have expressed their support of it. A recent study for the World Bank states that the proposed pipeline from Central Asia across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea would provide more favorable netbacks to oil producers through access to higher value markets than those currently being accessed through the traditional Baltic and Black Sea export routes. This is evidenced by the netback values producers will receive as determined by the World Bank study. For West Siberian crude, the netback value will increase by nearly $2.00 per barrel by going south to Asia. For a producer in western Kazakhstan, the netback value will increase by more than $1 per barrel by going south to Asia as compared to west to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea. Natural Gas Export Given the plentiful natural gas supplies of Central Asia, our aim is to link a specific natural resource with the nearest viable market. This is basic for the commercial viability of any gas project. As with all projects being considered in this region, the following projects face geo-political challenges, as well as market issues. Unocal and the Turkish company, Koc Holding A.S., are interested in bringing competitive gas supplies to the Turkey market. The proposed Eurasia Natural Gas Pipeline would transport gas from Turkmenistan directly across the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey. Sixty percent of this proposed gas pipeline would follow the same route as the oil pipeline proposed to run from Baku to Ceyhan. Of course, the demarcation of the Caspian remains an issue. Last October, the Central Asia Pipeline, Ltd. (CentGas) consortium, in which Unocal holds an interest, was formed to develop a gas pipeline that will link Turkmenistan's vast natural gas reserves in the Dauletabad Field with markets in Pakistan and possibly India. An independent evaluation shows that the field's resources are adequate for the project's needs, assuming production rates rising over time to 2 billion cubic feet of gas per day for 30 years or more. In production since 1983, the Dauletabad Field's natural gas has been delivered north via Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia to markets in the Caspian and Black Sea areas. The proposed 790-mile pipeline will open up new markets for this gas, travelling from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Multan, Pakistan. A proposed extension would link with the existing Sui pipeline system, moving gas to near New Delhi, where it would connect with the existing HBJ pipeline. By serving these additional volumes, the extension would enhance the economics of the project, leading to overall reductions in delivered natural gas costs for all users and better margins. As currently planned, the CentGas pipeline would cost approximately $2 billion. A 400-mile extension into India could add $600 million to the overall project cost. As with the proposed Central Asia Oil Pipeline, CentGas cannot begin construction until an internationally recognized Afghanistan government is in place. For the project to advance, it must have international financing, government-to-government agreements and government-to-consortium agreements. Conclusion The Central Asia and Caspian region is blessed with abundant oil and gas that can enhance the lives of the region's residents and provide energy for growth for Europe and Asia. The impact of these resources on U.S. commercial interests and U.S. foreign policy is also significant and intertwined. Without peaceful settlement of conflicts within the region, cross-border oil and gas pipelines are not likely to be built. We urge the Administration and the Congress to give strong support to the United Nations-led peace process in Afghanistan. U.S. assistance in developing these new economies will be crucial to business' success. We encourage strong technical assistance programs throughout the region. We also urge repeal or removal of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. This section unfairly restricts U.S. government assistance to the government of Azerbaijan and limits U.S. influence in the region. Developing cost-effective, profitable and efficient export routes for Central Asia resources is a formidable, but not impossible, task. It has been accomplished before. A commercial corridor, a "new" Silk Road, can link the Central Asia supply with the demand -- once again making Central Asia the crossroads between Europe and Asia. Thank you. From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 6 14:24:20 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:24:20 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Pepe Escobar: Vietnam-lite is unveiled Message-ID: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KL03Df04.html Asia Times Online Dec 3, 2009 THE ROVING EYE Vietnam-lite is unveiled By Pepe Escobar The United States is in the midst of the most serious unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, and US President Barack Obama is following George W Bush in lavishing trillions of dollars on a few big banks. American taxpayers got nothing. Now, they get the cherry in the cheesecake; Obama escalating his war in Afghanistan. A Vietnam-lite - with a tentative expiry date, July 2011, for the start of a withdrawal. The much-hyped Obama speech on Tuesday night at West Point - edited by the president himself up to the last minute - was a clever rehash of the white man's burden, sketching a progressive narrative for US national security clad in the glorious robes of "the noble struggle for freedom". On a more pedestrian level, history does repeat itself - as farce. With Obama's surge-lite, US plus North Atlantic Treaty Organization occupation troops in Afghanistan will reach in the first half of 2010 the level of the Soviet occupation at its peak in the first half of the 1980s. And all this formidable firepower to fight no more than 25,000 Afghan Taliban - with only 3,000 fully weaponized. Each soldier of the new Obama surge (a word he did not pronounce in his speech except when he referred to a "civilian surge") will cost US$1 million - though the Pentagon insists it is only half a million. Real men go to Riyadh Obama still says Afghanistan is a "war of necessity" - because of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Wrong. The Bush administration had planned to attack Afghanistan even before 9/11. See Get Osama! Now! Or else ... Asia Times Online, August 30, 2001.) "War of necessity" is a polite remix of the same old neo-conservative "war on terror"; blame it on the "towelheads" and exploit public ignorance and fear. That's how al-Qaeda was equated with the Taliban and how Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, according to the neo-con gang. For all his lofty rhetoric, Obama is still pulling a Bush, not making any distinction between al-Qaeda - an Arab jihadi outfit whose objective is a global caliphate - and the Taliban - indigenous Afghans who want an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan but would have no qualms in doing business with the US, as they did during the Bill Clinton years when the US badly wanted to build a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. On top of it, Obama cannot admit that the "Pak" neo-Taliban now exist because of the US occupation of "Af". Taking pains to distance his new policy from the Vietnam trauma, Obama stressed, "Unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan." Wrong. If the official narrative of 9/11 holds, the hijackers were trained in Western Europe and perfected their skills in the US. And even while he still emphasizes the drive to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al-Qaeda and deny it a "safe haven", Obama is fully contradicting his own national security advisor, General James Jones, who has admitted that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaeda jihadis in Afghanistan. The myth of al-Qaeda has to be exposed. How could al-Qaeda pull off 9/11 but be incapable of mounting a single significant attack inside Saudi Arabia? That's because al-Qaeda is essentially a thinly disguised brigade of Saudi intelligence. The US wants to win "the war on terror"? Why not send special forces to Saudi Arabia instead of Afghanistan and knock the Wahhabis - the root of it all - out of power? Obama could at least have noticed what notorious Afghan mujahid, former Saudi protege, former Central Intelligence Agency darling and current American public enemy, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, told al-Jazeera. He stressed, "The Taliban government came to an end in Afghanistan due to the wrong strategy of al-Qaeda." This is a graphic illustration of the current, total split between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, both "Af" and "Pak". The Afghan Taliban, starting with their historical leader, Mullah Omar, have learned from their big mistake - and are not allowing al-Qaeda Arabs to fester inside Afghanistan. Equally, the rise of neo-Talibanistan on both sides of the border does not necessarily translate into a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda jihadis are harbored by a handful of selected, paid-up tribals which the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence, if it really wanted, could pinpoint in a flash. Obama also bought in the Pentagon premise that America can re-colonize Afghanistan with counter-insurgency. In General David "I'm always positioning myself to 2012" Petraeus' own counter-insurgency doctrine, the proportion of soldiers to natives must be 20 or 25 per 1,000 Afghans. Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal have now got 30,000 more. Inevitably the generals - just like in Vietnam, whether Obama likes it or not - will ask for a lot more till they get what they really want; at least 660,000 soldiers, plus all the extras. At present the US has about 70,000 troops in Afghanistan. That would imply the reinstatement of the draft in the US. And that's trillions of dollars more the US does not have and will have to borrow ... from China. And what would that buy in the end? The mighty Soviet red army used every single counter-insurgency trick in the book during the 1980s. They killed a million Afghans. They turned five million into refugees. They lost 15,000 soldiers. They virtually bankrupted the Soviet Union. They gave up. And they left. What about the new great game? So why is the US still in Afghanistan? Facing the camera, as if addressing "the Afghan people", the president said, "we have no interest in occupying your country". But he could not possibly tell it like it really is to American prime-time TV viewers. For corporate America, Afghanistan means nothing; it's the fifth-poorest country in the world, tribal and definitely not a consumer society. But for US Big Oil and the Pentagon, Afghanistan has a lot of mojo. For Big Oil, the holy grail is access to Turkmenistan natural gas from the Caspian Sea - Pipelineistan at the heart of the new great game in Eurasia, avoiding both Russia and Iran. But there's no way to build the hugely strategic TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline - crossing Helmand province, and then Pakistan's Balochistan province - with Afghanistan mired in chaos, thanks to the pitiful performance of the US/NATO occupation. There's a hand in surveying/controlling the $4 billion-a-year drug trade, directly and indirectly. Since the beginning of the US/NATO occupation, Afghanistan became a de facto narco-state, producing 92% of the world's heroin under a bunch of transnational narco-terrorist cartels. And there's the full spectrum dominance Pentagon agenda - Afghanistan as part of the worldwide US empire of bases, monitoring strategic competitors China and Russia at their doorstep. Obama simply ignored that there is an ultra-high-stakes new great game in Eurasia going on. So because of all that Obama did not say at West Point, Americans are being sold a "war of necessity" draining a trillion dollars that could be used to reduce unemployment and really help the US economy. We also know how to surge The Taliban will inevitably come up with their own, finely tuned, counter-surge. Even surge-less, and up against tons of Petraeus' counter-insurgency schemes, they recently captured Nuristan province. And remember Obama's summer surge in Helmand province? Well, Helmand is still the opium capital of the world. In his speech, Obama tried by all means to convey the impression that the Afghan war can be controlled from Washington. It simply can't. For all his pledges of "partnership with Pakistan" (mentioned 21 times in the speech) Obama could not possibly admit his surge-lite will destabilize Pakistan even more. Instead, he could turn over the whole war to Pakistan. Unlike the Obama-approved July 2011 date for the (possible) beginning of a withdrawal, subject to "conditions on the ground", this real exit strategy would have to come up with a fixed timetable for a complete withdrawal attached. That would be the go-ahead for Islamabad to do what neither the Soviets nor the Americans could do - sit down with all the relevant tribal locals and negotiate through a series of jirgas (tribal councils). Obama bets on what he calls "transition to Afghan responsibility". That's a mirage. The Pakistani intelligence establishment - which still regards Afghanistan as its "strategic depth" in the bigger picture of a conflict with India - will never allow it to happen strictly under Afghan terms. That may not be fair to Afghans, but these are the facts on the ground. Virtually everyone in rural Afghanistan considers - correctly - that President Hamid Karzai is the occupation president. Karzai, who can barely hold on to his throne in Kabul, was imposed in December 2001 on King Zahir Shah by Bush proconsul Zalmay Khalilzad after a heated argument, and recently ratified in an American-style, blatantly stolen election. The American way is not the Afghan way. The tried-and-tested Afghan way for centuries has been the loya jirga - a grand tribal council where everyone joins, debates and a consensus is finally reached. So the endgame in Afghanistan cannot be much different from a power-sharing coalition, with the Taliban as the strongest party. Why? One just has to examine the history of guerrilla warfare since the 19th century - or take a look back at Vietnam. The guerrillas who are the fiercest fighters against foreigners always prevail. And even with the Taliban sharing power in Kabul, Afghanistan's powerful neighbors - Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, India - will make sure there won't be chaos spilling over across their borders. This is an Asian issue that has to be solved by Asians; that's the rationale for a solution to be developed inside the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Meanwhile, there's reality. The full spectrum dominance Pentagon gets what it wanted - for now. Call it the revenge of the generals. Who wins, apart from them? Australian armchair warrior David Kilcullen, an adviser and ghostwriter for Petraeus and McChrystal and who is a demi-god for Washington warmongers. Some light neo-cons - certainly not former vice president Dick Cheney, who's been blasting Obama's "weakness". And overall, all subscribers to the Pentagon concept of the "long war". Two weeks before going to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama sells his new Vietnam-lite to the world out of a US military academy. George Orwell, we salute you. War is indeed peace. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com. From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 7 08:16:54 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:16:54 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] 56 Papers in 45 Countries: Climate change a "profound emergency" Message-ID: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004051277 56 Papers in 45 Countries Publish Joint Editorial By E&P Staff Published: December 06, 2009 7:10 PM ET NEW YORK Tomorrow 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the perhaps unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. Many if not most will publish it on the front page, warning of a "profound emergency." The Guardian of London, which helped draft the editorial, published it today, with a note at the end. Here it is. Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted. Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone. The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C ? the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction ? would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based. Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so. But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay." At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided ? and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels. Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere ? three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level. Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction. Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down ? with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners. The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance ? and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing. Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it. But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels. Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation. Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature". It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too. The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice. * This editorial will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E&P Staff =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 7 09:51:24 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:51:24 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Chris Hedges: Addicted to Nonsense Message-ID: <> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/addicted_to_nonsense_20091129/?ref=patrick.net Addicted to Nonsense Posted on Nov 30, 2009 By Chris Hedges Will Tiger Woods finally Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama?s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin?s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on ?Dancing With the Stars?? The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd. What really matters in our lives?the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke?doesn?t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism. Celebrity worship has banished the real from public discourse. And the adulation of celebrity is pervasive. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of viewers to Oprah, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and ?The Purpose Driven Life? won?t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated. Nothing else in life counts. We yearn to stand before the camera, to be noticed and admired. We build pages on social networking sites devoted to presenting our image to the world. We seek to control how others think of us. We define our worth solely by our visibility. We live in a world where not to be seen, in some sense, is to not exist. We pay lifestyle advisers to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life. Martha Stewart constructed her financial empire, when she wasn?t engaged in insider trading, telling women how to create a set design for the perfect home. The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look, with the acquisition of wealth and power, or at least the appearance of it. Glossy magazines like Town & Country cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set pieces that are their homes. The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we present ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness. Hedonism and wealth are openly worshiped on Wall Street as well as on shows such as ?The Hills,? ?Gossip Girl,? ?Sex and the City,? ?My Super Sweet 16? and ?The Real Housewives of (whatever bourgeois burg happens to be in vogue).? The American oligarchy?1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined?are the characters we most envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar mansions. They marry models or professional athletes. They are chauffeured in stretch limos. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres to fabulous resorts. They have surgically enhanced, perfect bodies and are draped in designer clothes that cost more than some people make in a year. This glittering life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying. And this is the life we want. Greed is good, we believe, because one day through our acquisitions we will become the elite. So let the rest of the bastards suffer. The working class, comprising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are locked out of television?s gated community. They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power. Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded. We consume these countless lies daily. We believe the false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved and protected. The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities and evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists and business tycoons, peddle this fantasy. Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity or as inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality, along with those who grasp the hollowness and danger of celebrity culture, are condemned for their pessimism or intellectualism. The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us. Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled and unique. All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame and success. This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything. And because of this self-absorption, and deep self-delusion, we have become a country of child-like adults who speak and think in the inane gibberish of popular culture. Celebrities who come from humble backgrounds are held up as proof that anyone can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are examples that the impossible is always possible. Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success and of fulfillment are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real. The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our ?insignificant? individual achievements, however, is leading to an explosive frustration, anger, insecurity and invalidation. It is fostering a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear. The worse things get, the more we beg for fantasy. We ingest these lies until our faith and our money run out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is. I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called ?American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.? I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. Many have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working class into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. Unless we rapidly re-enfranchise these dispossessed workers, insert them back into the economy, unless we give them hope, these demagogues will rise up to take power. Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 7 10:22:42 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:22:42 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Noam Chomsky interviewed on "Hopes and Prospects" Message-ID: http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/1409/chomsky_half_full/ Chomsky Half Full Joel Whitney interviews Noam Chomsky, November 2009 Noam Chomsky discusses his forthcoming book, the hypocrisy of neoliberalism, where he feels hopeful about democracy despite U.S. terrorism, and his friendship?okay, passing acquaintance?with Hugo Chavez and other ?pink tide? presidents. If Noam Chomsky?s critics have a common refrain, it is pointing to his habit of being far too hard on America?s motives and too easy on its opponents. The former, of course, is his m?tier. The latter criticism has limited (though a few important) instances. In fact, Chomsky?s central question is how do you punish the crook who owns the jailhouse, pays the police their salaries, and fails consistently to see his crimes as such? Or perhaps, how do you get a self-enamored hypocrite to reckon with his pathology? Certainly not by repeating the praise, or what Chomsky sometimes calls America?s ?state religion? of self-worship. And despite this, in a very limited way, Chomsky does give credit where credit is due. In his forthcoming book Hopes and Prospects, Chomsky admits that a black family in the White House is historic. But he credits not ?America,? a ?system of power? defined by ?market interventions? in the economy that once tolerated, and even fought for, the right to own humans as slaves. Nor does he give much credit to ?Brand Obama,? as he calls the phenomenon that elected our new president, insisting that the new president is ?likely to ?have more influence on boardrooms than any president since Ronald Reagan.?? In fact, Chomsky gives credit for the 2008 election, in a way, to himself and his ilk. In an early manuscript of the book (the text may change), Chomsky writes, ?The two candidates in the Democratic primary were a woman and an African-American. That, too, was historic. It would have been unimaginable forty years ago. The fact that the country has become civilized enough to accept this outcome is a considerable tribute to the activism of the nineteen sixties and its aftermath, with lessons for the future.? As such, this small tome is Chomsky?s legacy book. And high time. His landmark critique of B.F. Skinner that crippled behaviorism?s predominance in psychology and linguistics turns fifty this year. His first book on politics, American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays, turns forty. The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, came out from the New Press last year, in time for Chomsky?s eightieth birthday. And Chomsky?s wife died of cancer last winter (he cites her below anyway as the person he can go to to air his robust anger, rather than admit its effect on his work). Regularly voted into the ?top public intellectual? polls various magazines frequently run, the linguist and foreign policy critic, said to be worth two million dollars, remains a polarizing figure. What?s remarkable is how Chomsky?s criticism of the Vietnam war and America?s many interventions seem even more relevant today, prescient in their understanding of how American greed, dehumanization of others, cultural ignorance, and hypocrisy are rewritten as pragmatic, not moral, mistakes. In ?The Remaking of History,? from Toward a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, he writes, ?They may concede the stupidity of American policy, and even its savagery, but not the illegitimacy inherent in the entire enterprise.? He continues a page later, ?One may criticize the intellectual failure of planners, their moral failures, and even the generalized and abstract ?will to exercise domination? to which they have regrettably but understandably succumbed. But the principle that the United States may exercise force to guarantee a certain global order that will be ?open? to transnational corporations?that is beyond the bounds of polite discourse.? Yet Chomsky has been criticized for accuracy and balance, for the petty (citing statements made by an ?embassy? rather than ?ambassador?) and the heinous (apologist for Pol Pot; a distortion of his views), but most commonly, it seems, for comparing U.S. behavior to Hitler?s. In Prospect Magazine, Oliver Kamm writes of Chomsky?s early political writings as going ?beyond the standard left critique of U.S. imperialism to the belief that ?what is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification.?? (In fact, Chomsky discusses statements like this, insisting, below, that context justifies the comparisons, adding, ?I think it?s just the right thing to say.?) ?This diagnosis,? Kamm continues, ?is central to Chomsky?s political output. While he does not depict the U.S. as an overtly repressive society?instead, it is a place where ?money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print and marginalize dissent??he does liken America?s conduct to that of Nazi Germany. In his newly published Imperial Ambitions, he maintains that ?the pretenses for the invasion [of Iraq] are no more convincing than Hitler?s.?? On balance, Chomsky is a vital, even indispensable voice in the American cultural debate, needed to remind us of the outrage we should feel as the modernization of American life brings us to accept as necessary and understandable the devastation of foreign countries with little actual public debate and no input from the citizens of those countries. How do our presidents? ?terrorist? campaigns (in Chomsky?s terms) become a normal functioning of the state? How does a country that so readily welcomes outsiders, or purports to, so easily bury them by ?overthrowing governments around the world and installing malicious dictatorships, assassinating people? or write them off as collateral damage? Perhaps we should, or do, on some level, share his outrage. And yet his voice has been every bit as ruthless, and occasionally selective (like most good rhetoricians), as his opponents suggest. Does that run counter to, or complement, the voice and methodology of the systems of power he criticizes? ?Joel Whitney for Guernica Guernica: You?ve been savaging U.S. foreign policy for a long time. What?s new in Hopes and Prospects? Or would you say that you?re reworking a single thesis with new examples? Noam Chomsky: There are new things that are happening. But I don?t think the basic principles of international affairs or social organization or aspirations for the future change very much. In fact, they haven?t for a long time. Guernica: Does that imply that your approach as a critic isn?t effective? Noam Chomsky: On the contrary, it has been quite effective in ways I have discussed repeatedly and at length, even though it hasn?t reached as far as changing fundamental principles and their institutional basis. Guernica: One thing that never changes in your work is the meditation on the devastating effects of U.S. foreign policy. Here in the U.S., we endlessly tell ourselves, and our leaders especially do this, that ?we?re good.? No matter the results, our intentions are good. Noam Chomsky: Systems of power don?t have good intentions. You?ll occasionally in history find a benevolent dictator or a king who has the interests of the people at heart. But fundamentally, structures of power are not moral agents. We don?t look for good intentions. Of course, they all profess good intentions. But of course that?s also true of Hitler. Guernica: Are ?structures of power? amoral or immoral? Noam Chomsky: Structures of power are amoral. The CEO, say, of the American Petroleum Institute may care a lot about whether his grandchildren will have a decent world to live in. But as CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, he?s going to try to make that impossible by doing what they?re doing right now, in fact. Working out ways to try to duplicate the success of the insurance industry in undermining any kind of health reform. They?ve already announced, ?We?re gonna try to learn from [the health insurance industry?s] tactics and block any kind of energy or environmental bill.? Now he knows (he?s not an idiot) that could lead to a serious catastrophe which could undermine the prospects for the life of his grandchildren whom he cares a lot about. But as the director of a petroleum institute, he can?t consider that. If he did, he?d no longer have that position. Consider the systematic dismantling of GM plants, destroying the workforce and communities, while Obama?s transportation secretary is abroad seeking to use federal stimulus money to contract with Spanish firms to provide high-speed transport. Guernica: You write about how corporations have these super-human rights and that investors and by-laws force them to take every advantage to maximize profits. But what you just said about structures of power being amoral, it seems to me that your work is actually asking them to be moral, no? Noam Chomsky: I?m not addressing CEOs of corporations or President Obama or anything like that. I?m addressing people, saying, ?Look, you?ve got a lot of opportunities. You can effect changes, which will change the actions of structures of power, which will in fact dissolve the structures of power.? Guernica: What are those changes you mention above that can dissolve the structures of power? Noam Chomsky: Consider the systematic dismantling of industrial capacity, say GM plants, destroying the workforce and communities, while Obama?s transportation secretary is abroad seeking to use federal stimulus money to contract with Spanish firms to provide high-speed transport?which could be produced by converting the plants that are being dismantled, by the skilled workforce being abandoned. It might require takeover of the facilities by ?stakeholders??workforce and community. There?s no economic principle that bars that, and it could happen with sufficient consciousness and popular support. Guernica: One group you seem to expect a little more out of, by way of intermediaries between us people and the ?power structures,? seems to be intellectuals. In the ?Responsibility of?? Noam Chomsky: The people we call intellectuals aren?t necessarily smarter or more knowledgeable than anyone else. But they happen to have a lot of privilege, and privilege confers responsibility. And so they oughta do things. I don?t expect them to. Guernica: You?ve called ?the inability of educated classes to perceive what they are doing? an ?historical universal.? Noam Chomsky: Close to it. Guernica: And you cite a story in the New York Times where ?the reviewer,? you write, ?constitutional lawyer Noah Feldman, described Osama [bin Laden]?s descent to greater and greater evil over the years, finally reaching the absolute lower depths, when ?he put forth the perverse claim that since the United States is a democracy, all citizens bear responsibility for its government?s actions, and civilians are therefore fair targets.?? What?s significant about this? Noam Chomsky: What?s significant is what directly follows it. There had been an election in Palestine, actually the first really free election in the Arab world, and two days after Noah Feldman?s article appeared, Steven Erlanger on the front page of the New York Times reported blandly that the U.S. government has just undertaken to punish the people of Palestine for voting the wrong way in a free election. Well, that makes Osama bin Laden look pretty tame. And these things appear right next to each other, and no one notices it. Guernica: Am I right to believe that you essentially make no distinction between U.S. ?terrorism,? i.e. interventions, and, say, al Qaeda?s terrorism? Noam Chomsky: Yeah, U.S. terrorism is often far worse because it?s a powerful state. Take 9/11. That was a serious terrorist act. In Latin America, they often call it ?the second 9/11? because there was another one, namely September 11, 1973. I?ve been writing about terrorism using the official definition in the U.S. code. Now that?s considered outrageous. And the reason is when you use the official definition, it follows pretty quickly that the United States is a leading terrorist state. Guernica: In Chile. Noam Chomsky: Suppose that al Qaeda had not just blown up the World Trade Center, but suppose that they?d bombed the White House, killed the president, established a military dictatorship, killed maybe fifty to a hundred thousand people, maybe tortured seven hundred thousand, instituted a major international terrorist center in Washington, which was overthrowing governments around the world and installing malicious dictatorships, assassinating people, [and] brought in a bunch of economists who drove the economy into its worst disaster maybe in history. Well, that would be worse than what we call 9/11. And it did happen, namely on 9/11/1973. All that I?ve changed is per capita equivalence in numbers, a standard way to measure. Well, okay, that?s one we were responsible for. So yeah, it?s much worse. Guernica: Some critics of U.S. foreign policy have been arguing for a universally accepted definition of terrorism to standardize in media, governments, etc. Noam Chomsky: I agree. Reagan declared a war on terror in 1981?he said that?d be the core of our foreign policy. And since then, I?ve been writing about terrorism using the official definition in the U.S. code, and in Army manuals, and, in fact, in British law. It?s a pretty good definition. Now that?s considered outrageous. And the reason is when you use the official definition, it follows pretty quickly that the United States is a leading terrorist state. Now that?s the ?wrong? conclusion, so therefore we can?t use that definition. There are academic conferences and sober volumes on terrorism trying to find some appropriate definition, and the ?appropriate? definition has a very definite condition to meet. It has to include the terror that they carry out against us but exclude the terror that we carry out against them. Guernica: True or false: no one did more to oppose the tyrannical communism of the Soviets? Noam Chomsky: I don?t know what you mean by ?tyrannical communism of the Soviets.? That was one particular form of tyranny, one that was out of U.S. control, and perceived as offering a model for others, so naturally the U.S. generally opposed it?though not when it was bearing the brunt of the war against the Nazis. The U.S. has also opposed democracies and repeatedly overthrew them and established tyrannies. And it supported, and still supports, brutal tyrannies. The question is misformulated and can?t be answered. Guernica: Soviet communism?you don?t know what that is? Noam Chomsky: I know what I think it is, and has been since 1918: the most severe attack on socialism/communism apart from fascism. What I don?t know is what you think it is. Guernica: Your definition sounds fine. Utne characterized your work as having ?an unflagging sense of outrage.? I?m wondering, when you diligently dissect exactly what your country has done in places like Chile, Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere, when you log numbers of innocent civilians killed, and carefully present these outrageous quotes from members of government or heads of corporations, what you?re feeling. I believe the anger comes through. What else is going on? Shame? Guilt? Noam Chomsky: All of them. Shame and guilt, of course, because there?s much that we can do about it, that I haven?t done. And outrage because, yes, it?s outrageous. And disgust at the hypocrisy in which it?s veiled. But there?s no point in revealing those emotions. You know, maybe I can talk about them with my wife or something. But what?s the point of going public with them? Doesn?t do any good. Guernica: Yet those emotions come through in your work as a subtext. Noam Chomsky: Maybe. And it very much angers supporters of state violence; in fact, they?re infuriated by it, when it comes out. Guernica: What do you mean? Noam Chomsky: When it comes out, they are sometimes infuriated by it. I happened to be in England a couple of days ago [for] an interview at BBC. One of the things the interviewer brought up is a statement of mine showing how incomparably awful I am. The statement is ?One has to ask whether what the United States needs is dissent or denazification.? And that?s so utterly outrageous; it shows I?m kind of a maniac from outer space. So I asked him what I always do when somebody brings it up. I said, ?Did you read the context?? And of course he hadn?t. So I said, ?Okay, here?s the context.? During the Vietnam War, the Chicago Museum of Science set up a diorama of a Vietnamese village in which children could be on the outside with guns and shoot into the village and try to kill people. And there was a protest by a group of mothers, a quiet protest, protesting this thing. There was an article in the New York Times condemning?not the exhibit, but the mothers?because they were trying to take away fun from the kiddies. And in that context I said, ?Sometimes you have to wonder whether what?s needed is dissent or denazification.? I think it?s just the right thing to say. Guernica: You?ve written how utterly Iraqis are excluded from the decisions made about their country... Noam Chomsky: Or Vietnamese or Central Americans, or a long list of others. In fact, we don?t even care about them. If you listen to National Public Radio and happened to have it on last night (or maybe it was PBS), they were discussing the debates about what to do in Afghanistan. One of their correspondents was asked to comment on the costs of the war. She went through the costs of the war, so many hundreds of billions, and then the most severe cost?you know, a thousand American soldiers killed?and then the discussion ended. Now, is that the only cost? There?s no cost to Afghans? Guernica: One of the ironic ?hopes? in your book is the term ?hope? as used by what you call ?Brand Obama.? Brand Obama seemed to buttress Americans? assumptions that because we elected a part-black president, we must be over our racism and this is more evidence that we have a noble purpose and a basic goodness. But you point to other countries, India, Bolivia?and where else??where an outsider was elected. Noam Chomsky: It?s happening in many parts of Latin America. Bolivia is particularly dramatic. But it?s also true in Brazil. Lula, the president of Brazil; he?s a peasant, steel worker, union organizer, didn?t have much higher education. What put him into power are these vast popular movements. They don?t go along with his policies altogether; by any means, they?re pretty critical of them. But part of the electoral base, like the Landless Workers? Movement may be the most important mass popular movement in the world. The same is happening elsewhere. Comparing that with our system should lead us to a deal of introspection about just who and what we are. Guernica: Are you and Hugo Chavez friends? Noam Chomsky: We?ve met on a friendly basis, but I think you might ask yourself why you are asking this question, and not asking, for example, whether Lula, Correa, and others are friends (for the record, they are, to the same extent). I think we know the answers, but they might be useful for you to think about the matter more carefully. Guernica: I am unaware of either of those others holding up one of your books and giving your sales a renewed jolt. Noam Chomsky: It doesn?t answer my question. The fact that he held up my books says nothing about whether we are friends. We?ve never met. I?ve praised work of Hume?s, but it doesn?t mean he was my friend. The question arises about Chavez, not Lula (who I know a lot better) or Correa (who I just spent a few hours with) or many others who are at the heart of the ?pink tide? because Chavez is demonized by state/media propaganda. I don?t accept that. Nor, I think, should you. Guernica: You just said you have met him. Now you haven?t? Your reflexive antagonism aside, I?m happy to give you a moment to explain why we shouldn?t accept state/media propaganda against Chavez. Noam Chomsky: I hadn?t met him when he held my book up at the UN. Since then, I did spend a few hours with him, like Correa, nothing like Lula, who I spent several days with and got to know pretty well. Sorry if it sounds like reflexive antagonism. It?s rather that I think we should be asking ourselves why the reflexive question is about Chavez?not Lula, or Correa, or for that matter Morales, who I haven?t met but have written about far more than Chavez. I?m not recommending protectionism. I?m just saying, let?s be honest. Before we preach to others, let?s find out the truth about what we ourselves do. Guernica: In the new book, you hit Obama pretty hard over his cabinet and the Wall Street types in his administration. You also basically allege that neoliberalism and the free market policies that we recommend to others?not only do we not follow them, but they don?t work, in terms of standard of living, wages, etc. You actually say protectionism does work and point to some interesting examples. Ronald Reagan. South Korea. Noam Chomsky: Adam Smith had advice for the American colonies in the seventeen seventies. He advised the colonies to follow classical economic principles?they?re not very different from neoliberalism. In fact, it?s pretty much what economists today recommend to the third world. He said, Keep to your comparative advantages?the term ?comparative advantage? hadn?t been invented yet?produce what you?re good at, which is catching fish, hunting fur, and growing food, and export it to us in England. And import superior British manufactures. But the U.S. gained its independence, so it didn?t have to follow that advice, and didn?t. It immediately set up under Alexander Hamilton high protective barriers to try to bar superior British textiles, in later years British steel. And it built up its own manufacturing base under protective barriers and by an enormous amount of state intervention. Take, say, cotton, the fuel of American industrialization. Well, how did America produce cotton? First of all, by exterminating the indigenous population. Secondly, by slavery. Those are pretty severe market interventions. Yeah, they worked. Guernica: So your greater point is... Noam Chomsky: I?m not recommending protectionism. I?m just saying, let?s be honest. Before we preach to others, let?s find out the truth about what we ourselves do. So take Ronald Reagan whom you mentioned. He?s considered the high priest of free markets. In fact, he was by far the most protectionist president in post-war U.S. history. Guernica: So what are you recommending? Noam Chomsky: I think decisions should be made in an entirely different manner for entirely different ends. Should producing more goods and consuming more goods be the highest value in life? That?s not obvious, by any means. Guernica: And what would be? Noam Chomsky: Living decent lives, in an environment that provides for people?s essential needs, offers them opportunities to become creative, active, to work together in solidarity, [and lead] more happy, creative lives. That?s a more important goal, I think. Guernica: Here?s one critic of your work, Nick Cohen in the Guardian: ?The lesson of 11 September is that no constraints of morality or conscience would stop al-Qaeda exploding a nuclear weapon. If however, it is all our fault, as Chomsky says, perhaps we can avert catastrophe by being nicer and better people. Perhaps we can, but Chomsky is as reluctant to admit that al Qaeda is an autonomous movement as he is to admit the existence of the democratic and socialist opposition to Saddam Hussein.? Noam Chomsky: They?re mentioning somebody with my name. But it doesn?t relate at all to anything I?ve ever said or believe. Who did you say you?re quoting? Guernica: Nick Cohen in the Guardian. Noam Chomsky: Oh, Nick Cohen?s a maniac. If you?ll notice, he never cites anything. Does he cite anything? That already gives you the answer. Go back and check. He doesn?t cite anything. These are just diatribes, tantrums. I?m not interested in them. Guernica: The greater point is that there are maniacs who have sought from their clerics and received permission to use nuclear weapons on civilians. Noam Chomsky: Yes, there are. And we should try to prevent it. And there are ways to prevent it, and I discuss them, but they?re not his ways. His ways are just bomb everybody in sight. Well, I think that?s the way to increase terror. In fact, it has increased terror. Guernica: It?s increased terror sevenfold, you write (citing analysts on the Iraq war). Noam Chomsky: But he doesn?t like what I say, so he?ll scream and shout and slander. Why pay attention to him? Do you read Stalinist party acts? Guernica: I don?t. Noam Chomsky: Okay. Noam Chomsky?s Recommendation: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell Editor?s Recommendations: Why We Can't See the Forest or the Trees: The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia, by Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky isn?t on the networks because he lacks ?concision,? said one network producer. Chomsky agrees; his ideas don?t fit in soundbites. See him at his best see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ghoXQxdk6s (it runs one hour). To contact Guernica or Noam Chomsky, please write editors at guernica.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view revious postings or subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 7 10:51:32 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:51:32 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Video] Honduras Elections Exposed (The Real News) Message-ID: PLEASE SPREAD THIS VIDEO AND HELP THE HONDURAN PEOPLE FREE THEMSELVES OF THIS COUP PRISON. This may be the most important video I've done in my life, http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4573&updaterx=2009-12-07+01%3A43%3A09 it's up now on www.therealnews.com: ( http://therealnews.com/t2/ ) It proves that the Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal falsified data to make the election turnout seem higher than it was in Honduras' controversial general election on. Falsifying turnout numbers doesn't seem like a big deal, but this video shows how the turnout data has been used as a reason for numerous countries to recognize the coup government of President-Elect Pepe Lobo. The turnout data is, in effect, the lie that consolidated the coup (for now). This video shouldn't be necessary, there are a 1000 better reasons why these elections should have never taken place to begin with, but now that they have, I hope that you can help get this story the wide attention it needs, and that it can have an impact on this dire situation, which, in the eyes of many here, has put Honduras on the path toward inevitable civil war. With the poor majority of the Western Hemisphere's most unequal country unable to get any of their demands met by a regime that has effectively criminalized their perspective, and repeatedly represses them. A regime that has now consolidated all the levers of the state, and is being applauded internationally for doing so. This was not a great piece of journalistic effort, the evidence was sitting right out in the open for anyone to see, the fact that I'm the one to put it out there has less to do with any skills or effort on my part, and more to do with exactly how detached most journalists are from the people and issues that they cover. Hardly anyone writing about Honduras came here last week with intentions to do anything more than just cover another election and report the 'official' data, candidate statements, and tidbits from the international diplomacy circus. The despicable coverage of the situation in Honduras from all the mainstream sources stands as a testament to their disillusionment from reality, and another reason why I get giddy with excitement every time I see another one of them near the cliff of impending bankruptcy. >From now until December 11th I can be reached at 504-8817-0789 (dial 011 first if you're in North America). Will be out of contact in El Salvador for a couple days, and then reachable in Washington DC at 310-622-5982 from the 13th on. There will be a Spanish language version of the video coming out very shortly. For a small window into life as a Honduran coup-resister, check out the video previous to this one, from election day in San Pedro Sula. Jesse. -- Jesse Freeston Producer/Journalist The Real News Network (c) 310-622-5982 www.therealnews.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 7 11:34:32 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:34:32 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama's War Whoop: "Let the bloodbath begin!" Message-ID: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/25329 Obama's War Whoop: "Let the bloodbath begin!" by Mike Whitney | December 4, 2009 - 5:30pm Barack Obama is not the type of guy who agonizes over sending soldiers into battle. This isn't Lyndon Johnson, after all, who paced the Oval Office night after night, quaffing Bushmill's and dreading the next troop deployment to Saigon. Obama is more in the George Bush "What-me-worry" mold. He has no problem clowning around with the same cadets he'll ship off to the Afghan killing fields just weeks later. No worries. Maybe, that's why this week's speech at West Point was such a bust; it lacked the empathy that one expects from a leader who's sending his fellow countrymen into war. Yes, there was plenty of the usual rhetorical fanfare, but nothing that vaguely resembled genuine concern or -- dare we say -- compassion. That's just not part of Obama's repertoire. Part of the problem has to do with the fact that Obama always looks like he just stepped out of the White House sauna after an invigorating workout at the gym. He seems a little too spunky and carefree for someone who's supposed to be overseeing two wars at the same time. When people's kids are in harm's way, they want to see it etched-deeply into the president's face. It should resonate in his voice and guide his behavior. This is apparently lost on the Hollywood set-designers who run the White House public relations team. They're still stuck in the "Reagan is God" mode, where every president is expected to be ebullient, energetic, and resolute; an odd-mix of Winston Churchill and Lance Armstrong. Obama also has a glaring truth-in-advertising problem. He's just not who he pretends to be. He was sold as an avatar of change but, as soon as he was sworn in, he proceeded to reinforce the most regressive policies of the Bush administration. With typical callousness, he has run roughshod over his liberal base who mistook his sweeping proclamations as a sincere commitment to progressive politics. Boy, were they duped. No change, no way. Tuesday's recitation at West Point is a perfect illustration of Obama as cardboard figurehead rallying the public for more gratuitous carnage in the Afghan meat-grinder. While earnest-looking cadets gazed on in stunned silence, Obama went through his usual ruminations, pretending that the platitudes flashing on the monitor before him were his most heartfelt convictions. The problem is, Obama's heartfelt convictions are as rare as the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, a fact that crestfallen liberals are just now starting to grasp. "It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united, bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear," Obama thundered. "I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again. I believe with every fiber of my being that we ? as Americans ? can still come together behind a common purpose." Talk about audacity! Here's Obama channeling George Bush to his captive audience, invoking the same stale imagery, the same demagoguery, the same flawed logic as his reviled predecessor. Is it any wonder why the far-right loonies at the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard are now gushing over our new War President? Obama's speech was laced with Bushisms: America is the victim...America never asked for this war...America only invaded to spread democracy and liberate the tormented Afghan people... Anything America does can be justified by 9-11. "9-11, 9-11, 9-11." Oh, and did I mention, "9-11." So what exactly is the difference between George Bush and Barack Obama? 3 inches and maybe 20 lbs, beyond that, not a thing. They're carbon copies. Obama will now deploy 30,000 troops to the Afghan hellhole while activating Gen Stanley "death squad" McChrystal's savage counterinsurgency operation which will integrate psyops, special forces, NGOs, psychologists, media, anthropologists, humanitarian agencies, public relations, reconstruction, robotic drones, and conventional forces to assert control over the South and the tribal areas of Pakistan, to quash the indigenous resistance, and to pacify the restive and increasingly pessimistic population. Sounds great, eh? The Pentagon's plan to overpower, occupy and subjugate Afghanistan while grinding its people beneath the iron-heel of Yankee militarism, will be dramatically intensified under the guidance of America's charismatic and warmongering Commander-in-chief, Barack Obama. Let the bloodbath begin! _______ Mike Whitney About author Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney at msn.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 7 13:55:07 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:55:07 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Quebec Left Debates Independence Strategy Message-ID: The B u l l e t Socialist Project ? E-Bulletin No. 284 December 7, 2009 ----------------------------------------------------- Quebec Left Debates Independence Strategy Richard Fidler LAVAL ? Qu?bec solidaire, the left-wing party founded almost four years ago, held its fifth convention in this Montr?al suburb on November 20-22. About 300 elected delegates debated and adopted resolutions on the Quebec national question, electoral reform, immigration policy and secularism. The convention clarified the party's position on some important questions at the heart of its strategic orientation that had been left unresolved at its founding. Qu?bec solidaire is the product of a fusion process lasting several years among various organizations and left-wing groups that had developed in the context of major actions by the women's, student, global justice and antiwar movements in the 1990s and the early years of this decade. But the party has faced many obstacles as it struggled to establish a visible presence in Quebec's political landscape.[1] As in other parts of North America, Quebec experienced a general downturn in extraparliamentary mobilizations after 9-11, with the notable exception of the massive antiwar actions prior to the Iraq war. Added to this was the political demoralization of many militants following almost a decade of neoliberal austerity under a Parti Qu?b?cois government that for many discredited the very idea of Quebec ?sovereignty? as envisaged by the PQ. Shortly after Qu?bec solidaire was launched, the trade union movement suffered major defeats in the face of an antilabour offensive by the newly elected Liberal government. The student movement has been relatively quiescent since a successful mobilization against tuition fee increases in 2005. Although antiwar sentiment remains high, mass actions are fewer and smaller. Aware that ?politics? is conventionally viewed as electoral and parliamentary activity, Qu?bec solidaire quickly established itself as an officially recognized party under Quebec law. It soon found its attention, energy and finances absorbed by electoral activity to the detriment of actions outside the electoral arena ? contesting two general elections and several by-elections within its first three years, on a limited platform of demands. Exactly a year ago, however, it scored a significant breakthrough when, despite an undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system, it managed to elect a member to the National Assembly, Quebec's legislature. The election of Amir Khadir in the Montr?al constituency of Mercier brought welcome media attention to the party, while increasing the pressure on it to develop a more comprehensive program on the key issues of the day. Early this year, the party launched what promises to be a lengthy process aimed at producing a formal program. This convention concluded the first stage of the process. Under the complex procedure established by the national leadership, members were urged to form ?citizens' circles? or affinity groups, which would include non-members. The idea was to use the debate as a means of reaching out to social movement activists. In later stages, a policy commission was to assemble and ?synthesize? the proposals from these groups in a series of resolutions that would either reflect a consensus view or offer alternative positions on the various topics, to be debated in the local and regional associations and later at the convention. About 70 citizens' circles were formed. But since many were organized around specific views or areas of interest, there was little exchange with others in the initial period. It was only quite late in the process, with the publication of the draft resolutions in September, that the major preconvention debates could begin. The proposals and amendments were then put together in a synthesis booklet for debate at the convention. National Question The major objective at this convention was to define a clear position on the Quebec national question. Although there is today little mention in Qu?bec solidaire ? or, indeed, in Quebec society as a whole ? of ?national oppression,? the issues that motivate the thrust for national sovereignty or independence testify to the existence of a distinct Francophone nation whose language and culture are under constant attack from the Canadian constitutional and political regimes. For decades now, the people of Quebec have stopped referring to themselves as ?French Canadians?; they self-define as ?Qu?b?cois? and they overwhelmingly reject the existing federal system even though they are divided on whether to reform it or repudiate it altogether by establishing an independent country. That is what is meant by the ?national question?: the need to resolve this problem, the major fault line in the Canadian state and the major source of instability in the politics of Canada. The first task in the Qu?bec solidaire debate, then, was to define what is meant by the Quebec nation. This issue has been much debated since the federal Parliament voted in 2006 that ?the Qu?b?cois form a nation within a united Canada.?[2] The Harper government motion was widely recognized as a politically opportunist ruse. Qu?bec solidaire approached the issue in a much more serious way. First, the delegates discussed what the Quebec nation does not include. They acknowledged the sovereignty of ?the ten Amerindian peoples and the Inuit people who also inhabit Quebec territory,? and pledged Qu?bec solidaire's support to their ?fundamental right? to national self-determination, however they choose to exercise that right ? whether through self-government within a Quebec state or through their own independence. Ghislain Picard, Chief of the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec and Labrador, was a keynote speaker at the convention on its opening night. He has praised Qu?bec solidaire as the only party in Quebec that addresses native concerns. Full: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/284.php#continue =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 8 05:40:50 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:40:50 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Colombia] New Evidence Links Dole Food Co. to Assassinations Message-ID: http://smallfarmersbigchange.coop/2009/12/07/new-evidence-links-dole-food-company-to-paramilitary-assassinations-in-colombia/ New Evidence Links Dole Food Company to Paramilitary Assassinations in Colombia December 7, 2009 by Phyllis Robinson We just received a letter today from the Field Office of International Rights Advocates (IRA) -- http://iradvocates.org/ -- with new evidence linking even more strongly Dole Food Company to the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitaries. The following is an excerpt from this letter urging those involved in the campaign to bring justice to the victims of Dole and Chiquita to step up their efforts. In addition to shedding light on Dole?s complicity with the paramilitaries, IRA is asking that the campaign advocates do more to publicize Dole?s egregious labor rights record in Colombia where an alarming number of union activists were brutally assassinated: ? Jos? Gregorio Mangones Lugo, alias ?Carlos Tijeras,? who commanded the William Rivas Front of the AUC?s Northern Block, has provided a sworn statement which sheds new light on the nature of Dole?s relationship to the AUC paramilitaries. The William Rivas Front operated in the banana zone and surrounding areas in the Colombian province of Magdalena, until it demobilized in 2006. Mangones is currently in jail in Barranquilla, Colombia. Both Dole and Chiquita have for many years exported bananas from this area. To read an English translation of the affidavit, click here: http://viewer.zoho.com/docs/rcddboi In the affidavit, Mangones, who has already confessed to hundreds of murders as part of the ?Justice and Peace? process in Colombia, asserts not only that both Dole and Chiquita regularly paid money to the AUC, but that they did so in return for certain ?services,? including the murder of unionized banana workers and others who it was suspected could potentially interfere with the two companies? profitable operations. Though Chiquita confessed to criminal charges that it violated U.S. anti-terrorism laws, the company has claimed that it was a victim of extortion. Dole, for its part, has denied ever making payments to the AUC. The new revelations by Mangones will make it more difficult for Dole to deny the truth, and for Chiquita to continue portraying itself as a victim. International Rights Advocates and the Conrad & Scherer law firm have filed civil lawsuits against both Dole and Chiquita, representing the heirs of approximately 2,000 victims of the AUC in Magdalena and adjacent provinces. The lawsuits can be viewed at (Dole) http://www.iradvocates.org/dolecase.html and (Chiquita) http://www.iradvocates.org/chiquitacase.html . Given that the Magdalena banana zone was the William Rivas Front?s primary area of operation, one of the Front?s ?main functions ? was to provide security for the banana plantations,? according to Mangones. ?The income that the William Rivas Front received from Chiquita and Dole was essential to our operation. In a normal month, 80% to 90% of the income for the William Rivas Front came from the banana companies.? ?The AUC even had an open public relationship with the heads of the plantations, whether it be Dole or Chiquita. The AUC moved like fish in water in the banana plantations, because we liberated the banana zone in northern Magdalena [from the FARC guerrillas] and had military control of the territory.? As part of its provision of security to the banana companies, the AUC ?guarded the plantations and trucks that carried fruit to the port so that they were not attacked by the guerillas, looted, or robbed by common delinquents, protected their managers, assets, and employees and we made sure that the workers and unions collaborated with the company and would not demand unjust or exaggerated labor claims or be manipulated to carry out banana strikes.? Not all employees were protected, though: ?My men were contacted on a regular basis by Chiquita or Dole administrators to respond to a criminal act or address some other problems. We would also get calls from the Chiquita and Dole plantations identifying specific people as ?security problems? or just ?problems.? Everyone knew that this meant we were to execute the identified person. In most cases those executed were union leaders or members or individuals seeking to hold or reclaim land that Dole or Chiquita wanted for banana cultivation, and the Dole or Chiquita administrators would report to the AUC that these individuals were suspected guerillas or criminals.? Mangones has provided especially chilling details of Dole?s responsibility for murders in Magdalena: he lists the names of 16 of his victims whom, he states, the AUC murdered because Dole ?managers, administrators, supervisors or plantation heads? fingered them as guerrilla ?collaborators? or ?militiamen.? These 16 are just ?a few of the most representative? among ?countless examples.? Among the victims were Dole employees, some of them members of SINTRAINAGRO, the banana and agricultural workers? union. Some other victims listed were members of a peasant association that had invaded land that Dole wanted for banana production. After listing the names of the victims and the places/dates of their extra-judicial executions, Mangones adds, ?As I stated earlier, most of the work of the William Rivas Front in the Zona Bananera was on behalf of Chiquita or Dole. Likewise, a large number of the executions we performed can be linked directly to either Dole or Chiquita or both companies.? Another crucial ?service? involved ?pacifying? the Magdalena section of the SINTRAINAGRO trade union. In the Urab? region of Antioquia province, Colombia?s larger banana zone, by the mid 1990s SINTRAINAGRO?s came to be firmly controlled by former EPL guerrillas who demobilized in 1991, and then entered into a strategic alliance with banana growers and the paramilitaries against the Left. But the leadership of the Magdalena section of SINTRAINAGRO remained more politically diverse until the AUC violently imposed its control in 2001. According to Mangones, ?We also helped Chiquita and Dole by pacifying the labor union that represented banana workers in the [Magdalena] region. When I became Commander of the William Rivas Front, the union that represented banana workers was SINTRAINAGRO. This was an aggressive, leftist union. I believe they were sympathetic to the FARC. I directed the execution of SINTRAINAGRO?s leftist President, Jose Guette Montero. On January 24, 2001, in Cienaga, near the Olympic supermarket, between 17th Street and 18th Street, we shot Jose Guette Montero and killed him. I then installed Robinson Olivero as President of the union, and to this day, the leaders of SINTRAINAGRO are people the AUC has approved. Once we put our people in charge of SINTRAINAGRO, the union paid me 10% of the union dues it collected on a monthly basis. This union represented workers for both the Dole and Chiquita plantations.? For more information about these lawsuits, contact International Rights Advocates. http://www.iradvocates.org/ -------------------------------------------------- Possibly related posts: (automatically generated) Dilemmas of a Fair Trade Banana Enthusiast It?s Dole vs. Bananas Banana Revolutions, Coups, Price Wars? and Fair Trade? Bananas =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 8 05:55:56 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:55:56 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Harper pledges to sabotage G20 Talks on Climate Change Message-ID: ---- Original message ---- From: Murray Dobbin Subject: [Word-warriors] Harper pledges to sabotage G20 talks on climate change -- Stephen Harper is clearly not moved by Canada?s rapidly decaying reputation over its appalling position of climate change. In a story I have not seen reported anywhere in the Canadian media, Harper is quoted in a Bloomberg report as saying that he will ??use Canada?s co-chairmanship of next year's Group of 20 countries meeting to urge members to put economic recovery before efforts to protect the environment.? This is a blatant violation of the role that Canada has been given to chair the first meeting of the G20 as a body slated to effectively replace the G8. Canada is now not only a rogue country on climate change but is headed by a rogue prime minister ? stating openly that he will abuse his power as a co-chair to do everything he can to derail climate change action and protect the *deadly* tar sands of Alberta from any effort to slow down its development. Murray Please forward this to your lists. ---- end forwarded message ---- =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 8 06:03:55 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:03:55 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama's Afghan Timetable Reflects Isolationist Surge Message-ID: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125987857235175481.html?mod=WSJ_hps_RIGHTTopCarousel The Wall Street Journal December 4, 2009 Timetable Reflects Isolationist Surge By GERALD F. SEIB President Barack Obama faces a lot of problems in executing his new Afghanistan strategy, but here is a basic one: He is trying to ramp up an operation abroad at a time when an economically weary country is growing more isolationist. That helps explain why Mr. Obama has declared so explicitly that the Afghan surge will be strictly limited in duration. In a conversation with columnists this week, he said his two-year timetable is needed to create leverage with the Afghan government to force it to prepare quickly to take over. It is also clear the president needs some leverage with his own people, many of whom want to simply look the other way. That picture -- of a recession-battered American public turning inward -- emerged Thursday in a broad new survey of American attitudes conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations. Pew and the council found, as have other recent polls, that support for bulking up the force in Afghanistan is low; only a third favored adding troops. Broader and more striking is the discovery of a marked rise in isolationist sentiment, which by some measures stands at a four-decade high. When Americans were asked whether the U.S. should "mind its own business internationally," 49% said they agreed with that sentiment. That is up sharply from 30% in 2002, when memories of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were fresh, and is the highest reading found since the Gallup Survey first asked the question in 1964. And here is one detail that has to be of concern to the White House: More than half of Mr. Obama's Democrats -- 53% -- share the "mind our own business" sentiment, compared with 43% of Republicans. A corollary of that isolationist sentiment is a feeling that, when the U.S. does travel abroad, it should do so on its own. Pew and the council found that 44% agreed that because the U.S. "is the most powerful nation in the world, we should go our own way in international matters, not worrying about whether other countries agree with us or not." That also is the highest reading on that question since it was first asked in 1964. The silver lining for Mr. Obama as he undertakes his new Afghan policy is that foreign-policy elites -- that is, Council of Foreign Relations members, who were surveyed separately -- are considerably more supportive of the Afghan surge and far less inclined toward pulling in America's horns. The broader reality, though, is that the president is asking the country to support an expanded military effort abroad, along with allied nations, at a time when the country is less inclined to expand efforts abroad, and less inclined to do so in partnership with other countries. [pulling in horns] To some extent this isn't surprising, nor is it entirely unexpected at the White House. In that luncheon conversation with columnists, Mr. Obama said it was "painfully clear" that the troop surge in Afghanistan wasn't politically popular. "Not only is this not popular," he said, "but it's least popular in our own party." Isolationist sentiment grows naturally in America when the country is battered economically, which is precisely what happened after the Great Depression. The trend is especially acute when an economic drubbing occurs after the country already has been made weary by foreign conflicts. The combination of the Vietnam War, an oil shock and stagflation in the 1970s produced a similar rise in public doubts about whether America could or should be a world leader. And it is understandable. Wars cost money, which Americans don't think they have right now. What Mr. Obama is trying to do is tack toward that sentiment enough that voters know he feels it, without succumbing to it. It is a balancing act not unlike the one Ronald Reagan pulled off with a defense buildup and confrontation of the Soviet Union during the deep recession of 1981 and 1982. The more frightening prospect may be that this kind of isolationist sentiment is often accompanied by its first cousin, protectionist sentiment. That is the narrative of the Great Depression, in a nutshell. Yet on this front, the survey by Pew and the council carries some surprisingly good news. It finds support for free trade holding up pretty well, despite the economic carnage of the last year. Indeed, Americans today are more likely to say that free-trade agreements are good for the country (43%) than to say they are bad for the country (32%). And they are more likely to say that trade is good than they were in April 2008, when more Americans said free trade was bad than good for the country. Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, calls the uptick in support for free trade "amazing." There was a bit more support for free trade in the fat-economy years earlier this decade, but the reading isn't anywhere close to the collapse some have anticipated. Maybe that finding will give politicians who support free trade a bit more courage in their convictions. Yet it also raises a question: Have American attitudes toward trade fundamentally changed because of the global economy -- or has the protectionist sentiment just not surfaced yet? Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib at wsj.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 8 09:08:18 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:08:18 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] U.S. makes first move at Copenhagen Message-ID: <> . . . . . . . <> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/climate-change/us-makes-first-move-at-copenhagen/article1391958/ Globe and Mail Dec. 07, 2009 U.S. makes first move at Copenhagen Agency declares greenhouse gases a health risk, strengthening Obama's hand at summit and posing challenge for industry Eric Reguly Copenhagen ? From Tuesday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Dec. 07, 2009 6:21PM EST The Obama administration delivered a much-needed jolt of optimism on the opening day of the Copenhagen climate change summit by declaring greenhouse gases a health hazard, strengthening the President's hand to push for deal at the make-or-break meeting. The ruling about the health dangers of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases would allow the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to use the Clean Air Act to regulate industrial emissions, potentially making climate-change legislation, now stalled in the U.S. Senate, unnecessary. Environmental groups said the ruling will help give U.S. President Barack Obama the moral authority to push hard for a successful global carbon-reduction deal at the Copenhagen summit, which is to end Dec. 18 when 192 countries are due to lend their political endorsement to a new climate-change accord. ?President Obama's [EPA] decision today sends an important signal to the Copenhagen Climate Summit that the President can act, regardless of whether Congress passes legislation to cut greenhouse gases,? Greenpeace International said. EPA head Lisa Jackson is to build on U.S. carbon-reduction momentum by addressing the Copenhagen summit Wednesday. ?Climate change has now become a household issue,? she said Monday. ?This administration will not ignore science or the law any longer, nor will we ignore the responsibility we owe to our children and our grandchildren.? The EPA's move was condemned by many industrial and business groups, who said regulations would destroy jobs, raise the price of energy and be horrendously costly to administer. They prefer a less heavy handed legislative approach. Under pressure from the EPA, the Senate may redouble its efforts to break its legislative stalemate. Despite the EPA ruling, Mr. Obama ?still believes the best way to move forward is through the legislative process,? according to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. Praise for the Obama administration's move came as Canada's already battered image at the summit took another blow. Last night a coalition of 450 environmental groups awarded Canada a Fossil of the Day award, given to the countries ?doing the most to obstruct progress in the global climate change talks.? In a press conference, Michael Martin, Canada's chief climate change negotiator, made it clear that Canada's would not alter its stated carbon reduction targets, which are among the lowest of the industrialized countries. Canada has committed to a 20 per cent reduction by 2020, but from a new base ? 2006. The figure translates into a mere 3 per cent reduction from 1990, the base year for the Kyoto Protocol, the climate change agreement that is to expire in 2012. Canada's emissions were supposed to fall under Kyoto. Instead they rose 26 per cent. Mr. Martin said that even though Canada is not altering its carbon-reduction target, Canada's presence in Copenhagen is worthwhile. ?This is a much broader process? than just setting emission targets, he said, noting the discussions also focus on implementation of any new accord, green-technology transfers to developing countries and climate-change adaptation. John Dexhage, director of climate change and energy for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and a former negotiator for Canada on the Kyoto Protocol, said ?Canada is the only country in Kyoto calling for a 2006 base year. Canada is totally isolated? (The United States did not ratify Kyoto). In Ottawa, environment minister Jim Prentice denied widespread criticism that Canada was a laggard in Copenhagen. ?We'll take on our just and fair share of that [treaty] obligation, bearing in mind that Canada only emits two per cent of the world's greenhouse gases,? he told reporters. ?This is a treaty that is going to require all of the major emitters including China, including the United States as signatories and that's what we're working towards.? Only a few days ago, expectations of success at Copenhagen were low, partly because the EPA had yet to make its ruling and partly because of serious questions about the legitimacy of climate science. Those doubts intensified when leaked e-mails from climate-change scientists of the University of East Anglia appeared to undermine some of the evidence that the planet was becoming warmer. Saudi Arabia, one of the world's top oil exporters, said the e-mails have raised skepticism about IPCC's reliability. ?The level of trust is definitely shaken,? said Mohammed al-Sabban. Rajendra Pauchauri, head of the United Nations's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, used Copenhagen's opening session to defend the science. He said IPCC's findings in 2007 that humans are almost certainly to blame for global warming were ?subjected to extensive and repeated reviews by experts as well as by governments.? Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen urged the countries at the summit to compromise to achieve one of the most important agreements that the world would ever make. ?The political resolve to forge a global deal is manifest,? he said. ?Differences can be overcome if the political will is present. I believe it is.? With a report from Shawn McCarthy in Ottawa =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 8 09:24:30 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:24:30 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Chris Hedges: Liberals Are Useless Message-ID: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/liberals_are_useless_20091206/ Liberals Are Useless Posted on Dec 7, 2009 By Chris Hedges Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama?as if he reads them?asking the president to come back to his ?true? self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America?s liberal class an object of public derision. I am not disappointed in Obama. I don?t feel betrayed. I don?t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don?t dislike Obama?I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor?though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered. ?You have a tug of war with one side pulling,? Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. ?The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ?least-worst? voter you don?t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don?t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can?t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.? I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky?s ?Notes From Underground.? They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky?s depraved character, have come to believe that the ?conscious inertia? of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses. Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act?designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing?and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush?s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity. I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to ?credentialize? yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these ?revolutionaries? found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot. I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, ?I hope we get mugged.? They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them. I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire?self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don?t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are. Chris Hedges, author of ?Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,? will speak with other anti-war activists at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 11 a.m. Dec. 12 in a rally calling for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 8 09:53:45 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:53:45 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Manufactured Doubt Industry and the Hacked Email Controversy Message-ID: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/07-1 Published on Monday, December 7, 2009 by Weather Underground The Manufactured Doubt Industry and the Hacked Email Controversy by Jeff Masters In 1954, the tobacco industry realized it had a serious problem. Thirteen scientific studies had been published over the preceding five years linking smoking to lung cancer. With the public growing increasingly alarmed about the health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry had to move quickly to protect profits and stem the tide of increasingly worrisome scientific news. Big Tobacco turned to one the world's five largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton, to help out. Hill and Knowlton designed a brilliant Public Relations (PR) campaign to convince the public that smoking is not dangerous. They encouraged the tobacco industry to set up their own research organization, the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), which would produce science favorable to the industry, emphasize doubt in all the science linking smoking to lung cancer, and question all independent research unfavorable to the tobacco industry. The CTR did a masterful job at this for decades, significantly delaying and reducing regulation of tobacco products. George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels, who is President Obama's nominee to head the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), wrote a meticulously researched 2008 book called, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. In the book, he wrote: "the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain". The title of Michaels' book comes from a 1969 memo from a tobacco company executive: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy". Hill and Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, had founded the "Manufactured Doubt" industry. The Manufactured Doubt industry grows up As the success of Hill and Knowlton's brilliant Manufactured Doubt campaign became apparent, other industries manufacturing dangerous products hired the firm to design similar PR campaigns. In 1967, Hill and Knowlton helped asbestos industry giant Johns-Manville set up the Asbestos Information Association (AIA). The official-sounding AIA produced "sound science" that questioned the link between asbestos and lung diseases (asbestos currently kills 90,000 people per year, according to the World Health Organization). Manufacturers of lead, vinyl chloride, beryllium, and dioxin products also hired Hill and Knowlton to devise product defense strategies to combat the numerous scientific studies showing that their products were harmful to human health. By the 1980s, the Manufactured Doubt industry gradually began to be dominated by more specialized "product defense" firms and free enterprise "think tanks". Michaels wrote in Doubt is Their Product about the specialized "product defense" firms: "Having cut their teeth manufacturing uncertainty for Big Tobacco, scientists at ChemRisk, the Weinberg Group, Exponent, Inc., and other consulting firms now battle the regulatory agencies on behalf of the manufacturers of benzene, beryllium, chromium, MTBE, perchlorates, phthalates, and virtually every other toxic chemical in the news today....Public health interests are beside the point. This is science for hire, period, and it is extremely lucrative". Joining the specialized "product defense" firms were the so-called "think tanks". These front groups received funding from manufacturers of dangerous products and produced "sound science" in support of their funders' products, in the name of free enterprise and free markets. Think tanks such as the George C. Marshall Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and Dr. Fred Singer's SEPP (Science and Environmental Policy Project) have all been active for decades in the Manufactured Doubt business, generating misleading science and false controversy to protect the profits of their clients who manufacture dangerous products. The ozone hole battle In 1975, the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) industry realized it had a serious problem. The previous year, Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina, chemists at the University of California, Irvine, had published a scientific paper warning that human-generated CFCs could cause serious harm to Earth's protective ozone layer. They warned that the loss of ozone would significantly increase the amount of skin-damaging ultraviolet UV-B light reaching the surface, greatly increasing skin cancer and cataracts. The loss of stratospheric ozone could also significantly cool the stratosphere, potentially causing destructive climate change. Although no stratospheric ozone loss had been observed yet, CFCs should be banned, they said. The CFC industry hired Hill and Knowlton to fight back. As is essential in any Manufactured Doubt campaign, Hill and Knowlton found a respected scientist to lead the effort--noted British scientist Richard Scorer, a former editor of the International Journal of Air Pollution and author of several books on pollution. In 1975, Scorer went on a month-long PR tour, blasting Molina and Rowland, calling them "doomsayers", and remarking, "The only thing that has been accumulated so far is a number of theories." To complement Scorer's efforts, Hill and Knowlton unleashed their standard package of tricks learned from decades of serving the tobacco industry: ?Launch a public relations campaign disputing the evidence. ?Predict dire economic consequences, and ignore the cost benefits. ?Use non-peer reviewed scientific publications or industry-funded scientists who don't publish original peer-reviewed scientific work to support your point of view. ?Trumpet discredited scientific studies and myths supporting your point of view as scientific fact. ?Point to the substantial scientific uncertainty, and the certainty of economic loss if immediate action is taken. ?Use data from a local area to support your views, and ignore the global evidence. ?Disparage scientists, saying they are playing up uncertain predictions of doom in order to get research funding. ?Disparage environmentalists, claiming they are hyping environmental problems in order to further their ideological goals. ?Complain that it is unfair to require regulatory action in the U.S., as it would put the nation at an economic disadvantage compared to the rest of the world. ?Claim that more research is needed before action should be taken. ?Argue that it is less expensive to live with the effects. The campaign worked, and CFC regulations were delayed many years, as Hill and Knowlton boasted in internal documents. The PR firm also took credit for keeping public opinion against buying CFC aerosols to a minimum, and helping change the editorial positions of many newspapers. In the end, Hill and Knowlton's PR campaign casting doubt on the science of ozone depletion by CFCs turned out to have no merit. Molina and Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995. The citation from the Nobel committee credited them with helping to deliver the Earth from a potential environmental disaster. The battle over global warming In 1988, the fossil fuel industry realized it had a serious problem. The summer of 1988 had shattered century-old records for heat and drought in the U.S., and NASA's Dr. James Hansen, one of the foremost climate scientists in the world, testified before Congress that human-caused global warming was partially to blame. A swelling number of scientific studies were warning of the threat posed by human-cause climate change, and that consumption of fossil fuels needed to slow down. Naturally, the fossil fuel industry fought back. They launched a massive PR campaign that continues to this day, led by the same think tanks that worked to discredit the ozone depletion theory. The George C. Marshall Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and Dr. Fred Singer's SEPP (Science and Environmental Policy Project) have all been key players in both fights, and there are numerous other think tanks involved. Many of the same experts who had worked hard to discredit the science of the well-established link between cigarette smoke and cancer, the danger the CFCs posed to the ozone layer, and the dangers to health posed by a whole host of toxic chemicals, were now hard at work to discredit the peer-reviewed science supporting human-caused climate change. As is the case with any Manufactured Doubt campaign, a respected scientist was needed to lead the battle. One such scientist was Dr. Frederick Seitz, a physicist who in the 1960s chaired the organization many feel to be the most prestigious science organization in the world--the National Academy of Sciences. Seitz took a position as a paid consultant for R.J. Reynolds tobacco company beginning in 1978, so was well-versed in the art of Manufactured Doubt. According to the excellent new book, Climate Cover-up, written by desmogblog.com co-founder James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, over a 10-year period Seitz was responsible for handing out $45 million in tobacco company money to researchers who overwhelmingly failed to link tobacco to anything the least bit negative. Seitz received over $900,000 in compensation for his efforts. He later became a founder of the George C. Marshall Institute, and used his old National Academy of Sciences affiliation to lend credibility to his attacks on global warming science until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. It was Seitz who launched the "Oregon Petition", which contains the signatures of more than 34,000 scientists saying global warming is probably natural and not a crisis. The petition is a regular feature of the Manufactured Doubt campaign against human-caused global warming. The petition lists the "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine" as its parent organization. According to Climate Cover-up, the Institute is a farm shed situated a couple of miles outside of Cave Junction, OR (population 17,000). The Institute lists seven faculty members, two of whom are dead, and has no ongoing research and no students. It publishes creationist-friendly homeschooler curriculums books on surviving nuclear war. The petition was sent to scientists and was accompanied by a 12-page review printed in exactly the same style used for the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A letter from Seitz, who is prominently identified as a former National Academy of Sciences president, accompanied the petition and review. Naturally, many recipients took this to be an official National Academy of Sciences communication, and signed the petition as a result. The National Academy issued a statement in April 2008, clarifying that it had not issued the petition, and that its position on global warming was the opposite. The petition contains no contact information for the signers, making it impossible to verify. In its August 2006 issue, Scientific American presented its attempt to verify the petition. They found that the scientists were almost all people with undergraduate degrees, with no record of research and no expertise in climatology. Scientific American contacted a random sample of 26 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to have a Ph.D. in a climate related science. Eleven said they agreed with the petition, six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember the petition, one had died, and five did not respond. I could say much more about the Manufactured Doubt campaign being waged against the science of climate change and global warming, but it would fill an entire book. In fact, it has, and I recommend reading Climate Cover-up to learn more. The main author, James Hoggan, owns a Canadian public relations firm, and is intimately familiar with how public relations campaigns work. Suffice to say, the Manufactured Doubt campaign against global warming--funded by the richest corporations in world history--is probably the most extensive and expensive such effort ever. We don't really know how much money the fossil fuel industry has pumped into its Manufactured Doubt campaign, since they don't have to tell us. The website exxonsecrets.org estimates that ExxonMobil alone spent $20 million between 1998 - 2007 on the effort. An analysis done by Desmogblog's Kevin Grandia done in January 2009 found that skeptical global warming content on the web had doubled over the past year. Someone is paying for all that content. Lobbyists, not skeptical scientists The history of the Manufactured Doubt industry provides clear lessons in evaluating the validity of their attacks on the published peer-reviewed climate change science. One should trust that the think tanks and allied "skeptic" bloggers such as Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That will give information designed to protect the profits of the fossil fuel industry. Yes, there are respected scientists with impressive credentials that these think tanks use to voice their views, but these scientists have given up their objectivity and are now working as lobbyists. I don't like to call them skeptics, because all good scientists should be skeptics. Rather, the think tanks scientists are contrarians, bent on discrediting an accepted body of published scientific research for the benefit of the richest and most powerful corporations in history. Virtually none of the "sound science" they are pushing would ever get published in a serious peer-reviewed scientific journal, and indeed the contrarians are not scientific researchers. They are lobbyists. Many of them seem to believe their tactics are justified, since they are fighting a righteous war against eco-freaks determined to trash the economy. I will give a small amount of credit to some of their work, however. I have at times picked up some useful information from the contrarians, and have used it to temper my blogs to make them more balanced. For example, I no longer rely just on the National Climatic Data Center for my monthly climate summaries, but instead look at data from NASA and the UK HADCRU source as well. When the Hurricane Season of 2005 brought unfounded claims that global warming was to blame for Hurricane Katrina, and a rather flawed paper by researchers at Georgia Tech showing a large increase in global Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, I found myself agreeing with the contrarians' analysis of the matter, and my blogs at the time reflected this. The contrarians and the hacked CRU emails A hacker broke into an email server at the Climate Research Unit of the UK's University of East Anglia last week and posted ten years worth of private email exchanges between leading scientists who've published research linking humans to climate change. Naturally, the contrarians have seized upon this golden opportunity, and are working hard to discredit several of these scientists. You'll hear claims by some contrarians that the emails discovered invalidate the whole theory of human-caused global warming. Well, all I can say is, consider the source. We can trust the contrarians to say whatever is in the best interests of the fossil fuel industry. What I see when I read the various stolen emails and explanations posted at Realclimate.org is scientists acting as scientists--pursuing the truth. I can see no clear evidence that calls into question the scientific validity of the research done by the scientists victimized by the stolen emails. There is no sign of a conspiracy to alter data to fit a pre-conceived ideological view. Rather, I see dedicated scientists attempting to make the truth known in face of what is probably the world's most pervasive and best-funded disinformation campaign against science in history. Even if every bit of mud slung at these scientists were true, the body of scientific work supporting the theory of human-caused climate change--which spans hundreds of thousands of scientific papers written by tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of different scientific disciplines--is too vast to be budged by the flaws in the works of the three or four scientists being subject to the fiercest attacks. Exaggerated claims by environmentalists Climate change contrarians regularly complain about false and misleading claims made by ideologically-driven environmental groups regarding climate change, and the heavy lobbying these groups do to influence public opinion. Such efforts confuse the real science and make climate change seem more dangerous than it really is, the contrarians argue. To some extent, these concerns are valid. In particular, environmentalists are too quick to blame any perceived increase in hurricane activity on climate change, when such a link has yet to be proven. While Al Gore's movie mostly had good science, I thought he botched the treatment of hurricanes as well, and the movie looked too much like a campaign ad. In general, environmental groups present better science than the think tanks do, but you're still better off getting your climate information directly from the scientists doing the research, via the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Another good source is Bob Henson's Rough Guide to Climate Change, aimed at people with high-school level science backgrounds. Let's look at the amount of money being spent on lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry compared to environmental groups to see their relative influence. According to Center for Public Integrity, there are currently 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That's five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Climate lobbyists working for major industries outnumber those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one. For the second quarter of 2009, here is a list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity of all the oil, gas, and coal mining groups that spent more than $100,000 on lobbying (this includes all lobbying, not just climate change lobbying): Chevron $6,485,000 Exxon Mobil $4,657,000 BP America $4,270,000 ConocoPhillips $3,300,000 American Petroleum Institute $2,120,000 Marathon Oil Corporation $2,110,000 Peabody Investments Corp $1,110,000 Bituminous Coal Operators Association $980,000 Shell Oil Company $950,000 Arch Coal, Inc $940,000 Williams Companies $920,000 Flint Hills Resources $820,000 Occidental Petroleum Corporation $794,000 National Mining Association $770,000 American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity $714,000 Devon Energy $695,000 Sunoco $585,000 Independent Petroleum Association of America $434,000 Murphy Oil USA, Inc $430,000 Peabody Energy $420,000 Rio Tinto Services, Inc $394,000 America's Natural Gas Alliance $300,000 Interstate Natural Gas Association of America $290,000 El Paso Corporation $261,000 Spectra Energy $279,000 National Propane Gas Association $242,000 National Petrochemical & Refiners Association $240,000 Nexen, Inc $230,000 Denbury Resources $200,000 Nisource, Inc $180,000 Petroleum Marketers Association of America $170,000 Valero Energy Corporation $160,000 Bituminous Coal Operators Association $131,000 Natural Gas Supply Association $114,000 Tesoro Companies $119,000 Here are the environmental groups that spent more than $100,000: Environmental Defense Action Fund $937,500 Nature Conservancy $650,000 Natural Resources Defense Council $277,000 Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund $243,000 National Parks and Conservation Association $175,000 Sierra Club $120,000 Defenders of Wildlife $120,000 Environmental Defense Fund $100,000 If you add it all up, the fossil fuel industry outspent the environmental groups by $36.8 million to $2.6 million in the second quarter, a factor of 14 to 1. To be fair, not all of that lobbying is climate change lobbying, but that affects both sets of numbers. The numbers don't even include lobbying money from other industries lobbying against climate change, such as the auto industry, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc. Corporate profits vs. corporate social responsibility I'm sure I've left the impression that I disapprove of what the Manufactured Doubt industry is doing. On the contrary, I believe that for the most part, the corporations involved have little choice under the law but to protect their profits by pursuing Manufactured Doubt campaigns, as long as they are legal. The law in all 50 U.S. states has a provision similar to Maine's section 716, "The directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers and discharge their duties with a view to the interest of the corporation and of the shareholders". There is no clause at the end that adds, "...but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, the public safety, the communities in which the corporation operates, or the dignity of employees". The law makes a company's board of directors legally liable for "breach of fiduciary responsibility" if they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. Shareholders can and have sued companies for being overly socially responsible, and not paying enough attention to the bottom line. We can reward corporations that are managed in a socially responsible way with our business and give them incentives to act thusly, but there are limits to how far Corporate Socially Responsibility (CSR) can go. For example, car manufacturer Henry Ford was successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day. The courts declared that, while Ford's humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders. So, what is needed is a fundamental change to the laws regarding the purpose of a corporation, or new regulations forcing corporations to limit Manufactured Doubt campaigns. Legislation has been introduced in Minnesota to create a new section of law for an alternative kind of corporation, the SR (Socially Responsible) corporation, but it would be a long uphill battle to get such legislation passed in all 50 states. Increased regulation limiting Manufactured Doubt campaigns is possible to do for drugs and hazardous chemicals--Doubt is Their Product has some excellent suggestions on that, with the first principle being, "use the best science available; do not demand certainty where it does not and cannot exist". However, I think such legislation would be difficult to implement for environmental crises such as global warming. In the end, we're stuck with the current system, forced to make critical decisions affecting all of humanity in the face of the Frankenstein monster our corporate system of law has created--the most vigorous and well-funded disinformation campaign against science ever conducted. Copyright ? 2009 Weather Underground, Inc. Jeff co-founded the Weather Underground in 1995 while working on his Ph.D. He flew with the NOAA Hurricane Hunters from 1986-1990. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 8 11:27:43 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:27:43 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Harper pledges to sabotage G20 Talks on Climate Change In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: (an update on the original report cited by Murray Dobbin) http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=aypC61AZIPec Harper Says Global Recovery Must Precede Environment (Update1) By Rob Delaney Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he will use Canada?s co-chairmanship of next year?s Group of 20 countries meeting to urge members to put economic recovery before efforts to protect the environment. ?Without the wealth that comes from growth, the environmental threats, the developmental challenges and the peace and security issues facing the world will be exponentially more difficult to deal with,? Harper said in an address to South Korea?s National Assembly. Harper is in Seoul, his last stop on an Asian tour, to discuss with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak how the G20 conference they?re co-chairing in Canada will advance efforts to coordinate a global recovery. The remarks were made ahead of global climate change talks starting today in Copenhagen. Toronto will host the next G20 summit on June 26 and 27, and the following summit will be in Seoul in November, Lee and Harper said today in their meeting. Participants at the Copenhagen conference, including Lee, Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama, said last month that their original goal of completing a climate accord at the meeting was out of reach. About 190 nations will gather in the Danish capital until Dec. 18 to set a framework for a treaty to curb emissions blamed for global warming. Talks have been slowed by differences between industrialized nations such as the U.S. and developing countries, including India and China, over emissions-reduction targets and how much financial help rich nations should provide to poor ones. North Korea ?Flounders? Harper?s visit to South Korea started with a trip to the demilitarized zone that has separated the Korean peninsula since 1953. He accused North Korea of embracing ideals that have let the nation ?flounder.? ?The truth of the ideals for which we?ve fought has been revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt as this republic has flourished while the communist north has floundered,? Harper said in today?s speech. Harper?s tour started on Dec. 2 in Beijing, where he shored up relations with China, won commitments for more purchases of Canadian commodities and said trans-Pacific trade will drive his country?s future growth. To contact the reporter on this story: Rob Delaney in Seoul at robdelaney at bloomberg.net. Last Updated: December 7, 2009 03:20 EST ----- Original Message ----- From: RICHARD MENEC Date: Tuesday, December 8, 2009 5:56 am Subject: [Fresh Ink] Harper pledges to sabotage G20 Talks on Climate Change To: freshink at booksinternationale.info Cc: RAD TIMES , ICH , ALTERNET , COMMON DREAMS , COUNTERCURRENTS , ASHEVILLE GLOBAL REPORT > ---- Original message ---- > > From: Murray Dobbin > Subject: [Word-warriors] Harper pledges to sabotage G20 talks on > climate change > > -- > Stephen Harper is clearly not moved by Canada?s rapidly decaying > reputation over its appalling position of climate change. In a > story I have not seen reported anywhere in the Canadian media, > Harper is quoted in a Bloomberg report as saying that he > will ??use Canada?s co-chairmanship of next year's Group > of 20 countries meeting to urge members to put economic recovery > before efforts to protect the environment.? > > > This is a blatant violation of the role that Canada has > been given to chair the first meeting of the G20 as a body > slated to effectively replace the G8. Canada is now not only a > rogue country on climate change but is headed by a rogue prime > minister ? stating openly that he will abuse his power as a co- > chair to do everything he can to derail climate change action > and protect the *deadly* tar sands of Alberta from any effort to > slow down its development. > > Murray > > Please forward this to your lists. > > ---- end forwarded message ---- > > > =============================== > Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by > forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a > friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: > http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink > =============================== > _______________________________________________ > FreshInk mailing list > FreshInk at booksinternationale.info > http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink > =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 8 14:56:52 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:56:52 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?windows-1252?q?Gwich=92in_Elder=3A_=93We_Are_Having?= =?windows-1252?q?_a_Hard_Time_Surviving=94?= Message-ID: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/8/we_are_having_a_hard_time Democracy Now! December 08, 2009 ?We Are Having a Hard Time Surviving? Gwich?in Elder Sarah James on How Climate Change Is Altering Life in the Alaskan Arctic While 15,000 delegates, activists and journalists are gathered here at the Bella Center for the official climate conference, a people?s summit called Klimaforum09 opened last night across town. Speakers at the Klimaforum include Sarah James, a longtime advocate for the Gwich?in people in Alaska. She traveled to Copenhagen with the Indian-born photographer Subhankar Banerjee, who has spent years documenting life in the Arctic. [includes rush transcript] AMY GOODMAN: It?s day two of the COP15 climate change summit here in Copenhagen. Democracy Now! is the only daily global TV, radio news hour broadcasting from right here inside the Bella Center for the next two weeks. While 15,000 delegates, activists and journalists are gathered here at the Center for the official climate conference, a people?s summit called Klimaforum09 opened last night across town. In a statement, the Klimaforum organizers write, quote, ?We are here to represent ordinary concerned citizens from all around the world. We don?t represent vested interests such as bureaucrats, politicians, business or civil servants.? Speakers at the Klimaforum include Sarah James, a longtime advocate for the Gwich?in people in Alaska. She traveled to Copenhagen with the Indian-born photographer Subhankar Banerjee, who has spent years documenting life in the Arctic. I spoke with them last night. SARAH JAMES: My name is Sarah James, and I?m from Arctic Village, Alaska. Climate change, global warming is real in the Arctic. There?s a lot of erosion, because permafrost is melting. When that happens, it runs off, off to another lake, another water, another body of water, when the land gives out. And then, after that, it dries up, and it cause a lot of fire and a lot of erosion. And fire dries up and causes drought. And last summer, there was a fire all summer long, no visibility. Last spring, twenty villages got flooded along the Yukon. And along the Yukon, there?s about sixty villages within the Yukon area, villages. They never got their fish. And this year, some of their mushing dogs can?t even make it this winter. They have to give them away, or they have to kill them, so they won?t starve. AMY GOODMAN: How has it changed your culture? SARAH JAMES: It got so that our people don?t have the knowledge of the land anymore. And it?s confusing to us. It?s confusing to the animals and way of life in Alaska. And it?s displacing animal and displacing us. And we really have to?we?re having hard time surviving. AMY GOODMAN: Where is Arctic Village? SARAH JAMES: Arctic Village is Northeast Alaska, about 110 miles northeast of Arctic Circle in interior. There?s fifteen Gwich?in villages, united since 1988 to protect the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where many birds fly. About 150 birds fly there to nest there every year from all over the world. SUBHANKAR BANERJEE: My name is Subhankar Banerjee. I?m originally from India, now I live in the US in Santa Fe. And for the last ten years I have been?all my work has focused on the Arctic, primarily dealing with human rights issues of the indigenous communities, both the Gwich?in Nation, where Sarah James is from, as well as the Inupiaq communities. And the reason I brought Sarah James to Copenhagen, it was a wonderful opportunity. When the curators, (Re-) Cycles of Paradise, approached me and said it?s organized by the Global Gender and Climate Alliance, I said, ?How wonderful it would be to bring one of the leading American indigenous voice to Copenhagen.? So it?s more of a site-specific intervention, because at the formal Bella Center we?ll be hearing from all the politicians, ministers, and so on and so forth, but we won?t really get a chance to hear directly from someone who is experiencing climate change on a firsthand and somebody who?s really truly an American hero. So, for me, Sarah James is my American hero. So it?s a great opportunity for me. And Sarah and I have worked together for nine years. We have done multiple events together at various universities, in DC, at Harvard and Dartmouth and multiple places. So it just feels great to be here. AMY GOODMAN: And the Arctic, why is it so important to you as a man originally from India? SUBHANKAR BANERJEE: Opposites attract. But as I went to the Arctic, thinking that I?m going to a faraway place remote from my home country, as it happens, Arctic is connected. Today, after ten years, I call the Arctic the most connected place on the planet. And that connection is both celebratory and tragic. It?s celebratory because birds travel to the Arctic from every part of the planet, including from Calcutta. There is a species called yellow wagtail that winters outside of Calcutta, where I?m originally from, and nests in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where I?ve been working for ten years. So that?s a celebratory connection. And then the Arctic is getting connected to the rest of the planet in a tragic manner, climate change being, of course, at the leading edge of?affecting the Arctic. It?s the canary in the coal mine, as well as the Antarctic, but also toxicity few people know about, that?like Greenland. Breast milk of Greenland women is now scientifically considered as hazardous waste. It?s more hazardous than the trucks that you see that?hazardous waste. And that?s because these toxins are migrating from all over the planet, and they?re ending their migration in the Arctic. So all my work is actually a metaphor for this interconnectedness. Even the exhibit I?m presenting in Copenhagen is the idea of interconnectedness, this pregnant caribou engendered theme, migrating and connecting up fifteen Gwich?in communities in USA and Alaska through their?in US and Canada through their harvest practices. And then the climate change is affecting them. So it?s this whole idea we live in a connected planet, whether economically or ecologically, but we don?t pay much attention to the ecologic side. And for me, it?s also a great human rights issue, because it?s?right to survival is one of the first rights people should have?access to their food, access to their water?and that?s being seriously threatened up in the Arctic. AMY GOODMAN: Subhankar Banerjee is a photographer focusing on indigenous human rights. He actually lives in Santa Fe. Sarah James is the chairperson of the Gwich?in Steering Committee. She is from Arctic Village in Alaska. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 8 16:53:11 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:53:11 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak Message-ID: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-climate-summit-disarray-danish-text guardian.co.uk 8 December 2009 Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol ? Read the 'Danish text' http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-climate-change ? In pictures: Copenhagen day two http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-in-pictures-day-two John Vidal in Copenhagen The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations. The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals. The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" ? but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark ? has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week. The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol ? the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions. The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks". A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to: ? Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement; ? Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable"; ? Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance; ? Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes. Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations. "It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process," said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless. Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: "This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed." Hill continued: "It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks." The text was intended by Denmark and rich countries to be a working framework, which would be adapted by countries over the next week. It is particularly inflammatory because it sidelines the UN negotiating process and suggests that rich countries are desperate for world leaders to have a text to work from when they arrive next week. Few numbers or figures are included in the text because these would be filled in later by world leaders. However, it seeks to hold temperature rises to 2C and mentions the sum of $10bn a year to help poor countries adapt to climate change from 2012-15. ? For news and analysis of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen sign up for the Guardian's environment email newsletter Green light =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 17 12:35:42 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:35:42 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] FW: Urgent - Harper killing Copenhagen Message-ID: Dear friends, Enough is enough. As the world mounts a desperate effort to stop catastrophic global warming in Copenhagen, Canada should be leading the way. Instead, we're receiving global "fossil awards" for wrecking this crucial summit! And new leaked documents show that while the entire world is increasing cuts to carbon emissions, the government is secretly planning roll back ours. At the Bali climate summit in 07, a massive national outcry forced Harper to stop blocking the talks. But the oil companies that PM Harper works for know that Copenhagen is the make or break moment for climate. It will not be easy to win this time, but to save the planet and our country we have to. Let's mount a tidal wave of pressure on Harper with the largest petition in Canadian history - click below to sign, and forward this email to everyone: http://www.avaaz.org/en/harper_enough_is_enough/?cl=405292942&v=4944 The petition will be delivered directly to the Canadian delegation in Copenhagen as Harper arrives this week, and names of the signers will actually be read out in the summit hall. The Canadian delegation has become the object of international disbelief and ridicule in Copenhagen, but we can show the world that the Canadian people still hold our values of being good neighbours and global citizens. Harper is undermining our deepest values and proudest traditions. But this is about more than our reputation. Studies show that climate change is already taking up to 300,000 human lives a year through turning millions of farms to dust and flooding vast areas. We can no longer allow Harper to make us responsible for these deaths, or put Canada's economic future in jeopardy by sacrificing our green competitiveness for a brown economy based on the dirtiest (tar sands) oil in the world. Copenhagen is seeking the biggest mandate in history to stop the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. History will be made in the next few days, and our country is the problem, not the solution. How will our children remember this moment? Let's tell them we did all we could. With hope, Ricken, Laryn, Anne-Marie, Iain and the Avaaz Canada team More information at these sites: CBC -- "Tories pondered weaker emission targets for oil and gas": http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/12/14/greenhouse-gas-emissions.html Mail and Guardian -- "Canada's climate shame": http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-12-04-canadas-climate-shame Toronto Star -- "Who are the Yes Men and why did they punk Canada at Copenhagen": http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/738933--who-are-the-yes-men-and-why-did-they-punk-canada-at-copenhagen Macleans -- "Suddenly the world hates Canada": http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/12/15/suddenly-the-world-hates-canada/3/ Fossil of the Day Awards: http://www.fossiloftheday.com/ ============== Canada is blocking crucial UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen and secretly rolling back our efforts to fight climate change. A massive national outcry has stopped Harper before, the planet needs us now: http://www.avaaz.org/en/harper_enough_is_enough/?cl=405292942&v=4944 =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 17 12:45:24 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:45:24 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] 2010: "The Year of Severe Economic Contraction" Message-ID: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16569 Global Research December 15, 2009 2010: "The Year of Severe Economic Contraction" by Mike Whitney Upbeat reports in the financial media, belie the effects of the ongoing credit contraction. Massive injections of central bank liquidity have prevented the collapse of financial markets, but have done little to ease the deleveraging of households or stimulate activity in the broader economy. The crisis has stripped $13 trillion in equity from working families who now find their access to credit either cut off or severely curtailed by the same banks that received hefty taxpayer-funded bailouts. The fiscal strangulation of the millions of people who are no longer considered "creditworthy" is progressively weakening demand and spreading pessimism across all income levels. Growing public desperation was the focus of a special weekend report by Bloomberg News: "Americans have grown gloomier about both the economy and the nation?s direction over the past three months even as the U.S. shows signs of moving from recession to recovery. Almost half the people now feel less financially secure than when President Barack Obama took office in January, a Bloomberg National Poll shows. The economy is the country?s top concern, with persistently high unemployment the greatest threat the public sees. Eight of 10 Americans rate joblessness a high risk to the economy in the next two years, outranking the federal budget deficit, which is cited by 7 of 10. An increase in taxes is named as a high risk by almost 6 of 10. Fewer than 1 in 3 Americans think the economy will improve in the next six months....Only 32 percent of poll respondents believe the country is headed in the right direction, down from 40 percent who said so in September." (Bloomberg) The near-delirious optimism that followed the 2008 presidential election has fizzled in less than 12 months. While the policies of the Obama administration have improved Wall Street's prospects for record profits and lavish bonuses, ordinary working people continue to fight to keep their jobs and maintain their standard of living. Recent data show that household debt which surged during the boom years is being pared back at a historic pace. Household debt to disposable income has plummeted from 136 percent to 122 percent in a little more than a year, leaving many families with little to spend at the malls or shopping centers. Severe retrenchment has triggered a shift towards personal thriftiness which is reducing economic activity and strengthening deflationary pressures. 2010 is likely to be even worse, as mushrooming foreclosures and commercial real estate defaults force banks to slash lending accelerating the rate of decline. This is from Bloomberg: "Foreclosure filings in the U.S. will reach a record for the second consecutive year with 3.9 million notices sent to homeowners in default, RealtyTrac Inc. said. This year?s filings will surpass 2008?s total of 3.2 million as record unemployment and price erosion batter the housing market... Foreclosure filings exceeded 300,000 for the ninth straight month in November, RealtyTrac said today. A weak labor market and tight credit are "formidable headwinds" for the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a Dec. 7 speech in Washington. The 7.2 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007 are the most of any postwar economic slump, Labor Department data show. Unemployment, at 10 percent last month, won?t peak until the first quarter, Quigley said." (Bloomberg) The Obama administration's $787 billion stimulus pushed GDP into positive territory for the first time in more than a year, but the maximum impact has already been felt. President Obama--under advice from his chief advisors-- has shifted his focus from soaring unemployment to long-term deficits. Additional stimulus will be no more than $200 billion, of which, a mere $50 billion will go towards jobs initiatives. At the same time, Fed chair Ben Bernanke will terminate the quantitative easing (QE) program which kept long-term interest rates low while providing financing for the housing market. When the program ends, rates will rise, housing prices will tumble, and liquidity will drain from the system. The end of QE coupled with dwindling stimulus ensures that economy will slide back into recession in the 2nd or 3rd Quarter of 2010. Policymakers have decided to create conditions that are favorable to financial sector consolidation and the further privatization of public assets. The economy is being strangled by design. Here's economist Mark Thoma explaining why consumption will not return to pre-crisis levels: "For the immediate future and likely for much longer than that, slow consumption growth is expected. One way that could change is if the government implements a successful jobs program or uses some other means to increase household income (e.g. a payroll tax cut), and households spend rather than save the extra income..., but the political environment makes a jobs program or further fiscal policy action highly unlikely. Similarly...the Fed is anxious to unwind its massive policy intervention, not extend it, so monetary policy is unlikely to help much either. Since monetary and fiscal policy authorities are unwilling to provide further help, slow growth is the best outcome we?re likely to get." ("Will Consumption Growth Return to Its Pre-Recession Level?" Mark Thoma, moneywatch.com) Along with flagging consumption, economists Antonio Fatas and Ilian Mihov show why both investment and employment will not rebound in the way that many bullish analysts expect. By tracking the rate of recovery in the last 5 recessions, the two economists show that demand will remain flat for a prolonged period of time, precipitating a "jobless" and "investmentless" recovery. Their research supports additional stimulus to reduce the output gap and engage the labor force in productive activity. The administration's policies are the exact opposite of the majority of professional economists who believe that deficits need to increase to effect overcapacity and underutilization. Obama is deliberately steering the economy into a double-dip recession. While financial institutions have been propped up with zero-rates, myriad lending facilities and boatloads of Fed liquidity, the real economy continues to on a downward path. As households rebalance accounts and increase savings, the signs of distress are becoming more apparent. In Europe, the ECB and IMF have begun to use the financial crisis to wrest control of the budgets of deficits-plagued nations to apply business-friendly austerity measures. The economic meltdown--that was generated by overleveraged banks trading dodgy investment paper--is now being used to assert corporate/bank control over sovereign nations. Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain are all presently in the crosshairs of neoliberal restructuring. Surely, the same policies will be applied within the United States under the guidance of supply-side economist and chief advisor to the president, Lawrence Summers. Thus, in 2010, economic contraction will continue to force state and local governmnets to lay off millions of more workers while public assets and services are made available at firesale prices to private industry. Debt deflation and deleveraging will continue into 2011, while foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and defaults continue to mount. The public's frustration with ineffective government policies, is likely to change from pessimism to rage on short notice. The prospect of social unrest or sporadic incidents of violence can no longer be excluded. Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 17 12:51:08 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:51:08 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Hugo Chavez calls for system change at Copenhagen Message-ID: http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/821/42241 Hugo Chavez calls for system change at Copenhagen: ?If the climate was a bank, they would have bailed it out already? 17 December, 2009 ?The Copenhagen climate summit was pretty much summed up in the high-level segment yesterday when [Australian climate minister] Penny Wong's speech was interrupted by whistles and chanting and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez got a standing ovation?, Lenore Taylor wrote in the December 17 Australian. Taylor said that before Wong ?rose to speak the conference proceedings were interrupted by people with whistles and sirens chanting ?stop green capitalism? ? a sign of the anger in the developing world ...? ?Then President Chavez brought the house down.? Taylor reported that when Chavez said ?there was a ?silent and terrible ghost in the room? and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening?. Taylor said when Chavez insisted that ?capitalism is the road to hell ... let?s fight against capitalism?, he ?won a standing ovation?. In the article below, Kiraz Janicke, who is a member of the Green Left Weekly Caracas bureau, reports on Chavez?s speech to the United Nations climate summit at Copenhagen. The article was first published at Venezuelanalysis.com. * * * During his speech to the 15th United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez slammed the ?lack of political will? of the most powerful nations to take serious action to avert climate change, and called for systemic change to save the planet. Chavez, who received a standing ovation for his speech, said the process in Copenhagen is ?not democratic; it is not inclusive.? In particular, he criticised an attempt by rich countries to overturn the Kyoto Protocol. Doing so would eliminate differentiation between the obligations of rich and poor countries, treating countries from the Global North and South as equally responsible for climate change. ?There is a group of countries that believe they are superior to those of us from the South, to those of us from the Third Word?, Chavez said. ?This does not surprise us ... we are again faced with powerful evidence of global imperial dictatorship.? The Venezuelan president also applauded the initiative of the protesters outside the summit calling for serious measures to stop catastrophic climate change. ?There are many people outside ... I?ve read in the news that there were some arrests, some intense protests there in the streets of Copenhagen, and I salute all those people out there, the majority of them youth ... They are young people concerned for the world?s future. ?I have been reading some of the slogans painted in the streets ... One said, ?Don?t Change the Climate, Change the System!? And I bring that on board for us. ?Let?s not change the climate. Let?s change the system! ?And as a consequence, we will begin to save the planet. Capitalism is a destructive development model that is putting an end to life, that threatens to put a definitive end to the human species.? Chavez said another notable slogan was: ?If the climate were a bank, they would have bailed it out already?. He said: ?It?s true; the rich governments have saved the capitalist banks?. But, he noted they lack ?the political will? to make the necessary reductions to greenhouse emissions. ?One could say there is a spectre at Copenhagen, to paraphrase Karl Marx ... almost no-one wants to mention it: the spectre of capitalism.? History requires all people to struggle against capitalism or else life on the planet ?will disappear?, the Venezuelan president argued. ?Do the rich think they can go to another planet when they?ve destroyed this one?? Chavez asked, as he recommended a copy of a book by Herve Kampf, How the Rich are Destroying the Planet. ?Climate change is undoubtedly the most devastating environmental problem of this century. Floods, droughts, severe storms, hurricanes, melting ice caps, rise in average sea levels, ocean acidification, and heat waves, all of that sharpens the impact of global crisis besetting us.? Human activity is exceeding the limits of sustainability and endangering life on the planet, but the impacts of climate change are also being felt disproportionately by the world?s poor, Chavez said. He pointed to the relationship between economic inequality and levels of greenhouse gas emissions. He said the richest 500 million people, or 7% of the world?s population, are responsible for 50% of global greenhouse emissions, while the poorest 50% of the worlds population are responsible for only 7% of total emissions. Using this analysis, he argued that it was not feasible to call countries such as the US and China to sit at the summit on an equal footing, insisting that the same obligations can not be imposed on both nations. He said the US, with a population of 300 million, consumes more than 20 million barrels of oil a day, while China, whose population is almost five times greater than that of the US, consumes around 5-6 million barrels a day. The behind-the-scenes negotiations at the summit have been marked by sharp disputes between the US and China, and between rich and poor nations. Poor countries have criticised rich countries for attempting to set inadequate emissions targets for industrialised countries and for pledging insufficient funding for poor countries to alleviate the impacts of climate change. Various reports have said poor nations argue that rich countries should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. The European Union has pledged a 20% reduction. The US, however, has only offered only a 3-4% cut. Outside in the streets of Copenhagen, mass demonstrations calling for ?climate justice? have been repressed by police using pepper spray and batons. More than 1000 people have been arrested. ?We ask from Venezuela?, said Chavez: ?How much longer are we going to allow such injustices and inequalities? How much longer are we going to tolerate the current international economic order and prevailing market mechanisms?? Chavez called for the summit to change direction. ?We cannot continue like this. Let?s change course, but without cynicism, without lies, without double agendas, no documents out of the blue, with the truth out in the open.? From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #821 9 December 2009. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 17 14:28:25 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:28:25 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?windows-1252?q?Brazil=92s_President_Lula_on_global_?= =?windows-1252?q?warming?= Message-ID: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2009/1215/Brazil-s-President-Lula-on-global-warming-No-delay-at-Copenhagen/%28page%29/2 Opinion Brazil?s President Lula on global warming: No delay at Copenhagen Postponing hard decisions about the fight against global warming will only make an already tragic predicament worse. By Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva / December 15, 2009 Copenhagen Just over two months ago in Copenhagen, I enjoyed one of the happiest days of my life when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. I am now returning to the Danish capital for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15). The IOC event was the highpoint of Brazil?s successful bid. For the international community, it is the COP15 that marks a crucial juncture in a long negotiation process. Every day that we postpone the critical decisions before us, the greater the damage to the planet?s health. While some still question the criteria used in assessing the scale of the damage, there is no disputing the gravity of the accumulated losses and the real and imminent threat they pose to humanity. Development and consumption patterns dating back to the Industrial Revolution became globalized in the 20th century. In the 21st century, their disruptive legacy is obvious in degradation that is not only environmental, but also social and economic. The task of building consensus and ensuring more balanced growth will require courage and openhandedness, virtues that have sadly been absent from this debate. It is therefore a cause for hope that more than 100 heads of state and government are attending the decisive moments of the conference. Gathering such a significant number of world leaders in Copenhagen is a good start, but clearly not enough. We must all make concessions and sacrifices, avoiding backroom maneuverings that only fuel suspicions and delay a final solution. It is beyond doubt that both the benefits of economic development as well as the costs of environmental degradation over the past decades have been unevenly distributed both among and within countries. While some profited and continue to profit from the irrational exploitation of natural resources and unsustainable levels of consumption, the vast majority of the world?s population has little to show for it. As if this were not enough, it is the poorest and most vulnerable that have been hit hardest. The time has come to discuss how best to share these costs and sacrifices. This means establishing concrete ?housecleaning measures? to rethink the tasks and priorities ahead. It is time to pay up. However, for lack of agreement, interest arrears continue to pile up, leaving the coming generations to foot the bill. We must deal with this matter in a timely manner if we are to avert the environmental disasters that plagued the 20th century and to reverse, with the help of modern technology, the growing gap between rich and poor. This will require taking to heart the universally acknowledged concept of common but differentiated responsibilities. All accept it in theory, but endless excuses, disagreements and delays keep it from being put into practice. Developed countries can no longer avoid sharing in the costs and sacrifices. Brazil believes that developing countries should equally be part of the solution. We have therefore made a significant offer at the negotiating table in COP15: an ambitious proposal to reduce by 2020 national CO2 emissions by between 36.1 percent and 38.9 percent. We have also committed to cutting deforestation in the Amazon by 80 percent over the same period. This year alone deforestation of the Amazon dropped 45.7 percent by comparison to 2008, a testament to Brazil?s earnestness. These proposed reductions in emissions from deforestation alone will be larger than those offered by many developing countries in Copenhagen. Such glaring disparities will have to be ironed out during negotiations. Brazil?s successful experience in renewable energy ? which accounts for an impressive 47 percent of the country?s energy mix ? compares very favorably with the global average of just 13 percent. In fact, large-scale use of hydropower as well as flex-fuel cars that run on sugarcane-based ethanol have for decades helped Brazil fight global warming. Brazil?s use of ethanol fuel starting in the 1970s has alone avoided 800 million tons of CO2 emissions. If Copenhagen is to be a success, all must pull their weight. This means avoiding the temptation to polarize the debate along the North-South divide, or wasting time looking for scapegoats. It we are to avoid such traps, we must focus on identifying partners truly committed to working toward common goals and leave aside jaundiced preconceptions and vested interests. My conversations over recent months as well as the media coverage of the first week of COP15 offer hope that the leaders gathered in Copenhagen will have the courage of their convictions. Let us rise to the challenge. As a politician and a former labor leader, I am coming back to Denmark fully aware that no breakthrough is possible without open dialogue and earnest negotiating. I am prepared to engage in a frank discussion with all those committed to finding meaningful answers to climate change. The G-20?s effective response to the international financial crisis offers an encouraging example of how multilateral dialogue can come up with solutions that avoid catastrophic outcomes. Let us take to heart this inspiring example and commit the necessary resources to fighting climate change, just as we did to avoid the global financial meltdown. The time to act is now. Let us not waste the opportunity at Copenhagen. Postponing hard decisions will only make an already tragic predicament worse. Let us tackle it without delay. Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva is the president of Brazil. ? 2009 Global Viewpoint Network/Tribune Media Services. Hosted online by The Christian Science Monitor. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 17 14:31:11 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:31:11 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity Message-ID: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/14/climate-change-battle-redefine-humanity The Guardian 14 December 2009 This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity George Monbiot It's hard for a species used to ever-expanding frontiers, but survival depends on accepting we live within limits This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us. The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks. The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow. This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness. The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings. I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's interests forbid us to live. Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands. So here we are, in the land of Beowulf's heroics, lost in a fog of acronyms and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required to accommodate everyone's demands. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it. Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved. While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet. For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change. There's another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can. We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60% of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees. We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5C. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion. But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it - rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth - must begin. If governments don't show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers' weakness. They will attack - using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest - the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world's ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 17 14:46:17 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:46:17 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Iraq Inquiry: Normalising an epic crime Message-ID: http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/1649/1/ 10 December 2009 Iraq Inquiry: Normalising an epic crime The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalize an epic crime by providing enough of a theater of guilt to satisfy the media so that the only issue that matters, that of prosecution, is never raised. During 17 years of assault on a defenseless civilian population, veiled with weasel monikers like "sanctions" and "no-fly zones" and "building democracy," more people have died in Iraq than during the peak years of the slave trade. By John Pilger - www.johnpilger.com More than anyone, it was Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Tony Blair?s ambassador to the United Nations in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, who tried every trick to find a UN cover for the bloodbath to come. Indeed, this was his boast to the Chilcot enquiry on 27 November, where he described the invasion as "legal but of questionable legitimacy." How clever. Under international law, "questionable legitimacy" does not exist. An attack on a sovereign state is a crime. This was made clear by Britain?s chief law officer, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, before his arm was twisted, and by the Foreign Office?s own legal advisers and subsequently by the secretary-general of the United Nations. Crime of the 21st century The invasion is the crime of the 21st century. During 17 years of assault on a defenseless civilian population, veiled with weasel monikers like "sanctions" and "no-fly zones" and "building democracy," more people have died in Iraq than during the peak years of the slave trade. Set that against Sir Jeremy?s skin-saving revisionism about American "noises" that were "decidedly unhelpful to what I was trying to do [at the UN] in New York." Moreover, "I myself warned the Foreign Office ? that I might have to consider my own position." It wasn?t me, guv. The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalize an epic crime by providing enough of a theater of guilt to satisfy the media so that the only issue that matters, that of prosecution, is never raised. When he appears in January, Blair will play this part to odious perfection, dutifully absorbing the hisses and boos. All "inquiries" into state crimes are neutered in this way. In 1996, Lord Justice Scott?s arms-to-Iraq report obfuscated the crimes his investigations and voluminous evidence had revealed. At that time, I interviewed Tim Laxton, who had attended every day of the inquiry as auditor of companies taken over by MI6 and other secret agencies as vehicles for the illegal arms trade with Saddam Hussein. Had there been a full and open criminal investigation, Laxton told me, "hundreds" would have faced prosecution. "They would include," he said, "top political figures, very senior civil servants from right throughout Whitehall ? the top echelon of government." Thuggish That is why Chilcot is advised by the likes of Sir Martin Gilbert, who compared Blair with Churchill and Roosevelt. That is why the inquiry will not demand the release of documents that would illuminate the role of the entire Blair gang, notably Blair?s 2003 cabinet, long silent. Who remembers the threat of the thuggish Geoff Hoon, Blair?s "defense secretary," to use nuclear weapons against Iraq? In February, Jack Straw, one of Blair?s principal accomplices, the man who let the mass murderer General Pinochet escape justice and the current "justice secretary," overruled the Information Commissioner who had ordered the government to publish Cabinet minutes during the period Lord Goldsmith was pressured into changing his judgement that the invasion was illegal. How they fear exposure, and worse. The media has granted itself immunity. On 27 November, Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, wrote that the invasion "was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain." More than four years before the invasion, Ritter, in interviews with myself and others, left not a shred of doubt that Iraq?s weapons of mass destruction had been disabled, yet he was made a non-person. In 2002, when the Bush/Blair lies were in full echo across the media, the Guardian and Observer mentioned Iraq in more than 3,000 articles, of which 49 referred to Ritter and his truth that could have saved thousands of lives. What has changed? On 30 November, the Independent published a pristine piece of propaganda from its embedded man in Afghanistan. "Troops fear defeat at home," said the headline. Britain, said the report, "is at serious risk of losing its way in Afghanistan because rising defeatism at home is demoralizing the troops on the front line, military commanders have warned." In fact, public disgust with the disaster in Afghanistan is mirrored among many serving troops and their families; and this frightens the warmongers. So "defeatism" and "demoralizing the troops" are added to the weasel lexicon. Good try. Unfortunately, like Iraq, Afghanistan is a crime. Period. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 17 15:37:53 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:37:53 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Afghan protection racket Message-ID: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/16/AR2009121604126.html Congress investigating charges of 'protection racket' by Afghanistan contractors By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 17, 2009 A House oversight subcommittee said Wednesday that it has begun a wide-ranging investigation into allegations that private security companies hired to protect Defense Department convoys in Afghanistan are paying off warlords and the Taliban to ensure safe passage. "If shown to be true, it would mean that the United States is unintentionally engaged in a vast protection racket and, as such, may be indirectly funding the very insurgents we are trying to fight," said Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.), chairman of the House oversight subcommittee on national security and foreign affairs. Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described the same situation before a Senate committee while discussing the truck convoys that bring supplies into landlocked Afghanistan. "You offload a ship in Karachi [Pakistan]. And by the time whatever it is -- you know, muffins for our soldiers' breakfast or anti-IED equipment -- gets to where we're headed, it goes through a lot of hands," she said. "And one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money." A preliminary inquiry by Tierney's investigators determined that the allegations warranted a full-scale inquiry, focused initially on eight trucking companies that share a $2.2 billion Defense Department contract to carry goods and material from main supply points inside Afghanistan -- primarily Bagram air base -- to more than 100 forward operating bases and other military facilities in the country. The eight companies have completed 40,000 missions since May, carrying food, water, fuel, equipment and ammunition, according to Tierney. The congressman has written to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates requesting records on all the trucking contractors as well as their subcontractors and expenses for convoy security. In addition, he has sought the records of the Armed Contractor Oversight Directorate, the unit within the military's Afghanistan command that is responsible for overseeing private security companies. Tierney sent letters Wednesday to the companies that share the trucking contracts, three of which have offices in the Washington area. Tierney is seeking access to their records for the contracts, including those related to security and the companies' possible use of licensed or unlicensed private security providers. He has requested that the documents be provided by Jan. 15. One of the companies, NCL Holdings, in McLean, was awarded a two-year trucking contract this year that could reach $360 million. The company's chairman and chief operating officer is Hamed Wardak, the Georgetown-educated son of Afghanistan's defense minister, Rahim Wardak. NCL Holdings also has a five-year contract to provide guard services. The two other area companies are Anham of Vienna and the Sandi Group, based in todayimmediately returned. =============================== Support the alternative online news service "Fresh Ink" by forwarding this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 07:47:36 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 07:47:36 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Review] Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded Message-ID: <0EBFC2E39A8B4C7E80B8DB153F3AC612@agingCHS072729> SolidarityEconomy.Net December 2009 Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. $27.95. Pp. 438. By Jerry Harris Thomas Friedman is always the head cheerleader for the next big thing. At first it was globalization and now it's the green revolution. Friedman's instincts are good, it's just his analysis and politics are lacking. There are certainly valuable and interesting insights in his work, but his adolescent enthusiasm for capitalism often turns his critique to shallow propaganda. The book's title, Hot, Flat, and Crowded is a good indicator as to how Friedman understands environmental problems. Underline that word crowded because the book takes us on a Malthusian ride through the Third World. It's overpopulation, not capitalism and its need for every expanding accumulation that is destroying the world's environment. Friedman marches us through China, India, Brazil and Nigeria offering a myopic view that only occasional refers to the developed countries and their use of energy and resources. When it comes to energy markets transnationals such as Exxon and Shell disappear as does any discussion of imperialism and its history in the Middle East. Instead Friedman targets "petrodictorships" and "Sheikhs.with bags of cash" indoctrinating madrassa students to "breed like rabbits" and "swarm" over the Islamic world. (p. 88) In conjunction with this racist trash, Friedman advocates the green revolution as a matter of national security, joining those like James Woolsey, former CIA director, who call themselves "environmental hawks." He makes the case for green technology like a salesman pitching venture capitalists. In the chapter "Green Is the New Red, White, and Blue" Friedman argues that companies who invent and deploy new technologies will have a "dominant place in the global economy." (p.171) Exporting green technology will be the new "currency of power" and the "mother of all markets." (p172) "It's all about national power.what could be more patriotic, capitalistic and geostrategic than that?" (173) Leave it up to Friedman to make saving the planet a project of U.S. imperialism. Like others who understand globalization within a narrow national strategy the author finds himself in a trap. Friedman turns to First Solar, headquartered in Arizona with facilities in Ohio, as a leading example of a green U.S. corporation. But because Germany leads in solar technology CEO Mike Ahearn says, "First Solar is to a large extent a German success story.we purchase over half of the equipment used in our production lines from German manufacturers and we count suppliers in Easter Germany as among our most important business partners." (pp. 389-90) So much for U.S. dominance in a global market where technology and capital are transnational and borderless. Yet Friedman seems to be in s?ance with Rudyard Kipling's ghost, voicing a new version of the "white man's burden" now dressed up as green imperialism. For Friedman U.S. dominance benefits the planet, saves the world's poor, and makes an Americanized global middle class possible. He believes everyone should have more energy, just as long as the U.S. sells it. Nevertheless, the author is smart enough to understand the limits of "the ecological logic of capitalism." (p. 57) Friedman calls for a fundamental redesign of the economy and in the second half of the book on "How We Move Forward" he makes use of Mao's famous quote that "Revolution is not a dinner party." In this section Friedman's neo-Keynesian ideas emerge with his broad advocacy of government directed policies to enable corporations and markets to make sweeping changes. This is not old style Keynesianism focused on job creation, a social contract and national markets, but governmental policy for global competitive supremacy. It's in this area where Friedman scores his best points. He advocates a serious and deep structural change to our entire energy and transportation systems using a variety of regulations, performance standards, set prices, taxes, incentives and disincentives. As he states, "green will be the standard.It will be the new normal-nothing else will be available, nothing else will be possible." (p296) If previously Friedman acted as Silicon Valley's best pitchman, he now joins Al Gore as salesman for green entrepreneurial capitalism. As with Paul Hawkins and Amory Lovins, Friedman contends that capitalism can renew itself by building a sustainable green economy. They have no doubt that with the right government policies and market incentives a historic transformation is possible. To Friedman's credit he admits for the green movement to make progress it needs "a million people on the Mall." (p. 399) Other environmental experts, like Marxists John Bellamy Foster and Joel Kovel, argue that such a transformation is impossible within the confines of capitalism, even with a mass movement. In their view capitalism by its very nature needs to constantly expand, using ever more resources that destroy our environment in the ongoing process of accumulation. While I have sympathy for this view, Marxists have too often declared capitalism's imminent demise. Such predictions are based on perceived irresolvable economic contradictions and the inability of capitalism to grow further without causing a permanent crisis that would destroy society. Friedman's vision of growth is one that reduces inputs and energy, so that competition and profits turn on a qualitatively different type of sustainable expansion. One problem with this debate is that Friedman and Gore reach millions, while Foster and Kovel speak to a much smaller audience. But in the sense that Friedman is making people aware that we face a deeply serious ecological crisis he helps lay the basis to consider many different alternatives beyond his own. Friedman doesn't go beyond where Gore has already taken the public, nor does he add much new. But considering few mainstream elites have fully embraced the need for a "revolutionary" ecological change we shouldn't begrudge Friedman his place. Neither do we need to endorse his views, but rather engage in an environmental debate that will determine the direction of our future. [Jerry Harris is a professor at DeVry University, Chicago. He is author of Dialectics of Globalization (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and, together with Carl Davidson, CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age ( http://stores.lulu.com/changemaker ).] From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 08:11:00 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:11:00 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] US Attack Kills 120 In Yemen Message-ID: <92E91D4470474CF2A8EED4EEDE1983AF@agingCHS072729> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24225.htm US Attack Kills 120 In Yemen Obama Ordered U.S. Military Strike on Suspected "Terrorists" By BRIAN ROSS, RICHARD ESPOSITO, MATTHEW COLE, LUIS MARTINEZ and KIRIT RADIA December 18, 2009 "ABC News" -- On orders from President Barack Obama, the U.S. military launched cruise missiles early Thursday against two suspected al-Qaeda sites in Yemen, administration officials told ABC News in a report broadcast on ABC World News with Charles Gibson. One of the targeted sites was a suspected al Qaeda training camp north of the capitol, Sanaa, and the second target was a location where officials said "an imminent attack against a U.S. asset was being planned." The Yemen attacks by the U.S. military represent a major escalation of the Obama administration's campaign against al Qaeda. In his speech about added troops for Afghanistan earlier this month, President Obama made a brief reference to Yemen, saying, "Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold -- whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere -- they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships." Until tonight, American officials had hedged about any U.S. role in the strikes against Yemen and news reports from Yemen attributed the attacks to the Yemen Air Force. President Obama placed a call after the strikes to "congratulate" the President of Yemen, Ali Abdallah Salih, on his efforts against al Qaeda, according to White House officials. A Yemeni official at the country's embassy in Washington insisted to ABC News Friday that the Thursday attacks were "planned and executed" by the Yemen government and police. Along with the two U.S. cruise missile attacks, Yemen security forces carried out raids in three separate locations. As many as 120 people were killed in the three raids, according to reports from Yemen, and opposition leaders said many of the dead were innocent civilians. American officials said the missile strikes were intended to disrupt a growing threat from the al Qaeda branch in Yemen, which claims to coordinate terror attacks against neighboring Saudi Arabia. The al Qaeda presence in Yemen has been steadily growing in the last two years. "Al Qaeda generally has been pushed into these ungoverned areas, whether it is the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area [or Yemen]," said Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N.'s Taliban al-Qaeda Sancitions Monitoring Committee. "I think many of the key people have moved to Yemen." The U.S. embassy was attacked by suspected al Qaeda gunmen last year. And the presumed leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Qaaim al-Raymi, has frequently appeared on internet videos, offering an alternative to the training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. "If they can go to Yemen just as easily or easier and get training there and come out again," said Barrett, "all your efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan are a waste of time." Qaaim al-Raymi was considered a prime target of the attack Thursday but was reported to have escaped the attack. However, U.S. officials believe one of his top deputies may have been killed. Click Here for the Blotter Homepage. Copyright ? 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 08:21:48 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:21:48 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Fidel Castro: The Moment Of Truth Message-ID: <042EF2737311468D982D2357188A4C1A@agingCHS072729> http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/reflexiones/2009/ing/f171209i.html Cuba.cu 18 December, 2009 The Moment Of Truth By Fidel Castro The news from the Danish capital gives a picture of chaos. After planning a conference with about 40 thousand people in attendance, the hosts find it impossible to honor their promise. Evo, the first of the two presidents of ALBA-member countries to arrive, stated some truths derived from the millennium-old culture of his people. According to press agencies he said that he had received a mandate from the Bolivian people to oppose any agreement that does not meet the expectations. He explained that climate change is not the cause but the effect, and that we all have an obligation to defend the rights of Mother Earth vis-?-vis a capitalist development model; to defend the culture of life vis-?-vis the culture of death. He also addressed the climate debt that the rich countries should pay to the poor countries and the return of the atmospheric space taken from the latter. He considered ridiculous the annual figure of 10 billion USD offered until the year 2012 while the yearly needs amount to hundreds of billions. At the same time, he accused the United States of spending trillions to export terrorism to Iraq and Afghanistan and to set up military bases in Latin America. The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela addressed the Summit on the 16th, at 8:40 a.m. Cuban time. He made a brilliant speech that was much applauded. His phrases were remarkable. He challenged a document proposed to the Summit by the Danish minister chairing the conference. He said: ".this text has come out of the blue; we shall not accept any text that has not been produced by the working groups, I mean, the legitimate texts that have been the subject of negotiations for the past two years." "There is a group of nations that feel above us in the South, in the Third World." ".it's not a surprise, there is no democracy, we are facing a dictatorship." ".I was reading some slogans painted in the streets by the youths. one read: 'don't change the climate, change the system,' and another: "if the climate had been a bank it would have been bailed out.'" "Obama [.] received the Nobel Peace Prize the same day he sent 30 thousand troops to kill innocent people in Afghanistan." "I support the view of the representatives of Brazil, Bolivia and China, I only wanted to express my support [.] but I was not given the floor." "The rich are destroying the planet, could it be they are planning to move to another when this one is destroyed?" ".there is no doubt that climate change is the most devastating environmental issue of this century." ".the United States' population is barely 300 million; China's is almost five times that. The United States' oil consumption exceeds 20 million barrels a day; China's is hardly 5 or 6 million barrels a day. Thus, the same cannot be asked from the United States and from China." ".the reduction of unfriendly gas emissions and the acceptance of a long-term agreement on cooperation [.] seem to have failed, for now. Why? [.] the irresponsible attitude and the lack of political will of the most powerful nations on Earth." ".the gap between the rich and the poor countries has continued to widen despite all of the summits and the unfulfilled promises, and the world continues its destructive march." ".the total income of the wealthiest 500 persons in the world is higher than the income of the 416 million poorest persons." "Infant mortality amounts to 47 per 1000 live births, but in the rich countries it is only 5/1000." ".how much longer can we let millions of children die from curable diseases?" "Actually, 2.6 billion have no access to health services." "The Brazilian author Leornardo Boff has written: 'The strongest survive on the ashes of the weakest.'" "Jean Jacob Rousseau said that 'Between the strong and the weak freedom oppresses.' That's why the empire talks of freedom; freedom to oppress, to invade, to kill, to annihilate and to exploit: that's their freedom. And then Rousseau added the saving phrase: 'Only the Law can make us free.'" "How much longer are we going to tolerate armed conflicts that massacre millions of innocent people so that the powerful can grab the resources of others? "Nearly two centuries back a universal liberator, Simon Bolivar, said: 'If nature opposes, we shall fight it and force it to obey.'" "This planet lived for billions of years without us, without human beings; it doesn't need us to exist, but we can't live without Earth." Evo addressed the conference in the morning of today, Thursday. His speech will also be treasured. He very candidly opened his remarks by saying: "I wish to say how upset we are over the lack of organization and the delays in this international gathering." His basic ideas were the following: "When we ask what is it with the hosts, [.] we are told it's the United Nations; when we ask what is it with the United Nations, they say it's Denmark, so we don't know who is the disorganizer of this international meeting." ".I'm amazed because only the effects and not the causes of climate change are being discussed." "If we fail to identify where the destruction of the environment comes from [.] we will never be able to solve this problem." ".two cultures are antagonizing: the culture of life and the culture of death; the culture of death is capitalism, which the indigenous peoples identify with those who want to live better at the expense of others." ".exploiting others, plundering their natural resources, assaulting Mother Earth, privatizing basic services." ".living well is living in solidarity, in equality, in complementation, in reciprocity." "When it comes to climate change, these two ways of life, these two cultures of life are antagonizing, and if we don't decide which is the best way of life, we will not be able to solve it, because we have problems with life: luxury and consumerism hurt society, and sometimes in this kind of international meeting we avoid telling the truth." ".in our way of life being truthful is sacred, and that is not being observed here." ".in our Constitution it reads ama sua, ama llulla, ama quella, which means don't steal, don't lie, don't be weak." ".Mother Earth or Nature exist and will exist without the human being, but human beings can't live without planet Earth, therefore, we have the obligation to defend the right of Mother Earth." ".I applaud the United Nations because finally this year it has established the International Day of Mother Earth." ".our mother is sacred, our mother is our life; a mother cannot be rented, cannot be sold or assaulted, a mother must be respected." "We have profound differences with the Western model, and that is under discussion at this moment." "We are in Europe now, and you know that many Bolivian families, many Latin American families come to Europe, why do they come here? They come to improve their living conditions. In Bolivia, they could be earning 100 or 200 dollars a month, but that family or that person comes here to care for a European grandmother or grandfather, and he earns 1,000 Euros a month." "Such are the asymmetries we have from one continent to another, and it is our obligation to discuss the ways to achieve a certain balance, [.] cutting down the deep asymmetries between families, between countries and, especially, between continents." "When [.] our brothers and sisters come here to survive or improve their living conditions they are expelled, with those papers known as expatriation documents [.] but when a long time ago the European grandfathers arrived in Latin America, they were not expelled. My families, my brothers and sisters are not coming here to own mines, nor are they landowners with thousands of hectares of land. In the past, no passports or visas were needed to get to Abya Yala, that is, to the Americas." ".if the rights of Mother Earth are not recognized, it will be useless to speak of 10 billions or 100 billions, which is an offense to humanity." ".the wealthy nations should welcome all the immigrants affected by climate change instead of forcing them to return to their countries as they are doing now." ".our obligation is to save all of humanity and not half of humanity." ".the FTAA, Free Trade Area of the Americas, [.] is not a Free Trade Area of the Americas, but a free colonization area of the Americas." Evo suggested the following questions, among others, for a worldwide referendum on climate change: "..Do you agree to restore a harmonious relationship with Nature recognizing the rights of Mother Earth...?" ".Do you agree to change this excessively consumerist and wasting model, that is, the capitalist system...?" ".Do you agree that the developed countries should reduce and reabsorb their greenhouse effect gas emissions.?" ".Do you agree on transferring everything that is currently being spent in wars to create a budget higher than the defense budget to tackle the problem of climate change..?." As it is widely known, the UN Agreement on Climate Change was signed in Kyoto in 1997. This instrument bound 38 industrial nations to cut down their greenhouse effect gas emissions to a certain percentage in comparison with those of 1990. The European Union countries committed to an 8% as of 2005, the year when most of the signatories had already ratified it. George W. Bush, then President of the United States, --the largest greenhouse effect gas producer country which is responsible for one-fourth of such emissions-had rejected the agreement since the midst of 2001. The other UN members continued their efforts. The research centers proceeded with their work. It is evident by now that a major catastrophe is threatening our species. Perhaps the worst could be that the blind selfishness of a privileged wealthy minority tries to bring the burden of the necessary sacrifices to weigh heavily on the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the planet. That contradiction can be perceived in Copenhagen where thousands of people are standing firm by their views. The Danish police are resorting to brutal methods to crush resistance; many protesters are being preventively arrested. I spoke over the phone with our Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, who was at a solidarity rally in Copenhagen with Chavez, Evo, Lazo and other representatives of ALBA. I asked him who those people were that the Danish police suppressed with such hate, twisting their arms and beating their backs repeatedly. He said they were Danish citizens and people from other European nations as well as members of the social movements who were demanding from the Summit a real solution now to deal with climate change. He also told me that debates in the Summit would continue at midnight. It was already night in Copenhagen as I spoke with him. The time difference is six hours. Our comrades have reported from the Danish capital that a worse situation is expected tomorrow, Thursday. At 10 in the morning, the UN Summit will be adjourned for two hours as the Danish Head of Government meets with 20 Heads of Government he has invited to talk "global problems" with Obama. That's what they have called the meeting whose objective it is to impose an agreement on climate change. Even though all of the official delegations will take part, only "the invitees" will be allowed to offer their views. Of course, neither Chavez nor Evo are counted among those entitled to express their opinions. The idea is to give an opportunity to the Nobel Laureate to read a previously elaborated speech, after the decision has been made in that meeting to postpone the agreement until the end of next year in Mexico City. The social movements will not be allowed to attend. After that show, the "Summit" will resume its works in the plenary hall until its inglorious closing. Since television has carried the images, the world has seen the fascist methods used against the people in Copenhagen. The protesters, most of them young people, have won the solidarity of the peoples. Despite the maneuvers and deception of the leaders of the empire, their moment of truth is drawing closer. Their own allies are losing confidence in them. In Mexico, the same as in Copenhagen or elsewhere in the world, they will be met by the growing resistance of the peoples that have not renounced the hope to survive. Fidel Castro Ruz December 17, 2009 6:46 p.m. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 08:31:23 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:31:23 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] ALBA and G77 Denounce Copenhagen Sham Message-ID: <496592A11DDD4536BF9CA068D26446A1@agingCHS072729> http://links.org.au/node/1418 Copenhagen: `Imperial' climate deal rejected by poor-country delegates [Photo: Hugo Chavez denounces Obama's ``imperial'' deal. Photo COP15.] December 18, 2009 -- Speaking on behalf of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, President Hugo Ch?vez of Venezuela took the floor at the plenary of the COP15 climate talks in Copenhagen to denounce the final ``deal'' that was soon to emerge and be imposed on the majority poor-country delegates, and which would fall far short of their demands. Chavez accused US President Barack Obama of behaving like an emperor "who comes in during the middle of the night . and cooks up a document that we will not accept, we will never accept". Ch?vez declared that "all countries are equal". He would not accept that some countries had prepared a text for a climate deal and just "slipped [it] under the door" to be signed by the others. He accused them of "a real lack of transparency". "We can't wait any longer, we are leaving . We are leaving, knowing that it wasn't possible getting a deal," he said. Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, also took the floor to express annoyance at the way a climate deal was being thrashed out by a small group of world leaders at the last minute. "If there is no agreement at this level, why not tell the people?", he said at the plenary meeting . He called for further consultations with the people. "Who is responsible?", Morales he asked. Concluding that "the responsibility lies on the capitalist system -- we have to change the capitalist system". Sham deal The so-called "Copenhagen Accord" was pushed by the US and Australia, and sealed in meetings behind closed doors with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa. It was announced by Obama late on the evening of December 18, and presented as ``final'' even before the COP15 delegates had a chance to vote on it. It does not commit governments to interim 2020 carbon emissions-reduction targets, or to legally binding reductions and only expresses a general aim of limiting the global warming increase to 2 degrees Celcius -- well above the 1 degree C-1.5 degree C target most delegations were calling for. [Photo: Obama negotiates the fate of the world, December 18, 2009. Photo COP15.] Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, delegation head of the G77 group of developing countries, rejected the accordand vowed to fight it. "Obama, acting the way he did, definitely established that there's no difference between him and the Bush tradition", he told Time magazine. Nnimmo Bassey, prominent Nigerian environmentalist and chair of Friends of the Earth International, described Copenhagen as "an abject failure". "Justice has not been done. By delaying action, rich countries have condemned millions of the world's poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life as climate chang accelerates. The blame for this disastrous outcome is squarely on the developed nations. We are disgusted by the failure of rich countries to commit to the emissions reductions they know are needed, especially the US, which is the world's largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases. "In contrast African nations, China and others in the developing world deserve praise for their progressive positions and constructive approach. Major developing countries cannot be blamed for the failure of rich industrialised countries. "Instead of committing to deep cuts in emissions and putting new, public money on the table to help solve the climate crisis, rich countries have bullied developing nations to accept far less. Those most responsible for putting the planet in this mess have not shown the guts required to fix it and have instead acted to protect short-term political interests." `Real leadership' on the streets "The only real leadership at the conference has come from the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who've come together to demand strong action to prevent climate catastrophe. Their voices are loud and growing - and Friends of the Earth International will continue to be part of the fight for climate justice." Greenpeace criticised the accord for not having "targets for carbon cuts and no agreement on a legally binding treaty". Oxfam International called the deal "a triumph of spin over substance. It recognises the need to keep warming below two degrees but does not commit to do so. It kicks back the decisions on emissions cuts and fudges the issue of climate cash." The ``accord'' confirms the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Developed countries commit collectively to providing US$30 billion in new, additional funding for developing countries for the 2010-2012 period. It also says developed countries support "a goal of mobilising jointly 100 billion dollars a year" by 2020 from a variety of sources. Erich Pica, president of the Friends of the Earth (USA), said that the "climate negotiations in Copenhagen have yielded a sham agreement with no real requirements for any countries. This is not a strong deal or a just one -- it isn't even a real one. It's just repackaging old positions and pretending they're new. The actions it suggests for the rich countries that caused the climate crisis are extraordinarily inadequate. This is a disastrous outcome for people around the world who face increasingly dire impacts from a destabilising climate... "With the future of all humans on this planet at stake, rich countries must muster far more political will than they exhibited here. If they do not, small island states will become submerged, people in vulnerable communities across the globe will be afflicted with hunger and disease, and wars over access to food and water will rage. "The devastation will extend to those of us who live in wealthy countries'', said Pica. "The failure to produce anything meaningful in Copenhagen must serve as a wake up call to all who care about the future. It is a call to action. Corporate polluters and other special interests have such overwhelming influence that rich country governments are willing to agree only to fig leaf solutions. This is unacceptable, and it must change. "Fortunately, while the cost of solving the climate crisis rises each day we fail to act, the crisis remains one that can largely be averted. It is up to the citizens of the world -- especially citizens of the United States, which has so impeded progress -- to mobilise and ensure that true solutions carry the day. I firmly believe that together, we can still achieve a politics in which climate justice prevails." Rich countries blackmailing poor to sign onto flawed, unjust `accord' December 19, 2009 -- Friends of the Earth International -- On the day that the UN Climate talks officially closed, Friends of the Earth International warned against the false conclusion that the UN Climate Conference has adopted the ``Copenhagen Accord''. The Copenhagen Accord announced on December 18 by US President Barack Obama was not adopted by delegates to the United Nations climate conference here. Instead, delegates merely ``noted'' the agreement's existence, giving it no force whatsoever. Today rich countries led by the United States are pressuring poorer nations to ditch the UN process and sign onto the Copenhagen Accord. They are threatening poor nations that refuse to sign on with the loss of their share of the US$100 billion that rich countries have pledged to compensate for climate impacts the rich countries themselves have caused. UN officials are struggling to figure out what the accord even means and how it's related to the UN process, but what's is clear is that it was not approved by the 192 countries that are members of the UNFCCC. By signing onto the accord, poor countries risk displacing the legitimate negotiation process taking place under the auspices of the UN. The US is so desperate to claim a Copenhagen success that it is now attempting to destroy the existing climate process and sideline 20 years of real multilateral negotiation. Nnimmo Bassey, Friends of the Earth International chairperson, said: First the US came to Copenhagen with nothing new to offer, and now it's trying to package the weak, flawed, unjust 'Copenhagen Accord' as a replacement for the UN process -- and armtwist poor countries into signing on. President Bush ignored the UN process, now President Obama risks to torpedo it. Countries seeking a just and effective solution to climate change should not sign this illegitimate and distracting ``Copenhagen Accord''. They should instead ensure a rapid return to the formal UN process to achieve a fair, strong and legally binding agreement as soon as possible within the next year. Developing countries have shown real leadership in Copenhagen and must not give up the UNFCCC for the ``Copenhagen Accord''. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 08:41:24 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:41:24 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Canada] Fury grows over anti-Semitism charge Message-ID: Toronto Star December 19, 2009 Fury grows over anti-Semitism charge Churches want answers from PM after senior Tory levels accusation against aid group they support "It's a horrible charge to make, and to do it with so little thought cheapens the reality of anit-Semitism in the world," says Bruce Gregersen, United Church spokesperson. OTTAWA-The United Church of Canada and other Canadian churches are demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper explain why one of his cabinet ministers accused them of being anti-Semitic. The United, Catholic and Anglican churches are part of KAIROS, an aid group that was shocked to hear Immigration Minister Jason Kenney say its funding was lifted as part of the Conservatives' effort to cut off anti-Semitic organizations. "It's a horrible charge to make, and to do it with so little thought cheapens the reality of anti-Semitism in the world and diminishes the very careful attention that it deserves," said United Church spokesperson Bruce Gregersen. "We're quite disappointed in the government on this. "The policies of KAIROS have all been approved by the collective board of KAIROS, so in a sense what Mr. Kenney is doing is accusing Canadian churches of being anti-Semitic and I think that's really unfortunate," Gregersen said in an interview. Sam Carri?re, director of communications for the Anglican Church of Canada, said the church supports a statement released Friday by KAIROS, which condemned Kenney's remarks as false and warned the Harper government against letting politics dominate Ottawa's foreign aid priorities. Besides the United and Anglican churches, Toronto-based KAIROS's members include the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Mennonite Central Committee - Canada. Working with 21 partner organizations around the world, KAIROS sponsors projects promoting social and economic justice in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Canada's development community appeared stunned after Kenney, in a speech in Jerusalem, cited Ottawa's decision to end 35 years of funding for KAIROS as an example of the Conservatives' push to cut funding for anti-Semitic groups. KAIROS was "defunded," Kenney said, because it took a leadership role in "the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign" against Israel. "Minister Kenney's charge against KAIROS is false," the group said in its public response. KAIROS has raised questions about Israeli government policies but rejected the idea of a national boycott against Israel two years ago, its executives pointed out. "To label KAIROS's criticism of Israeli government actions as 'anti-Semitic' silences dissent and honours no one," the statement said. "KAIROS has a clear position of support for the legitimate right of the Israeli people to a safe and secure state." After its request for $7 million in funding over four years was turned down last month, International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda told KAIROS it was because the group did not fit the government's priorities of food security, helping youths and economic growth. The Toronto-based group Friday called on Ottawa to restore its funding and explain the discrepancy between Oda's and Kenney's comments. "Minister Kenney's statement, in a highly charged environment, raises very disturbing questions about the integrity of Canadian development aid decisions," KAIROS said. Oda and Kenney were not available for interviews Friday. Alykhan Velshi, Kenney's director of communications, explained the decision by citing several non-government sources of information on Middle East political issues going back to 2006 that were critical of KAIROS's activities. Gerry Barr, president of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation, said Kenney's remarks have compromised the integrity of the Canadian International Development Agency's entire foreign aid funding operation. "Any aid manager will now be looking two or three times to see what is on the table and wondering what is underneath," he said. Liberal and New Democrat MPs said Oda should be brought before a House of Commons committee to explain the KAIROS decision. "There needs to be a larger discussion about CIDA's decision-making than merely what's happened to KAIROS, but KAIROS would be the classic example," said the Liberals' John McKay. Based on KAIROS's experience, McKay said, a non-governmental organization "could be absolutely welded to the 'priorities' of the government as stated by Minister Oda, but if you fall outside of the government's particular dictum of political correctness, you're toast." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 08:53:35 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:53:35 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Being Anti-Israel and Anti-Zionist Is the "New Anti-Semitism" Message-ID: <5DB66DE4A70C4DB686DBE81B9B0D8D30@agingCHS072729> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharmine-narwani/being-anti-israel-and-ant_b_393971.html The Huffington Post December 20, 2009 Sharmine Narwani Posted: December 16, 2009 09:37 AM Being Anti-Israel and Anti-Zionist Is the "New Anti-Semitism" A Jewish woman, deriding protesters at a UK rally on Sunday in support of charging former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni with war crimes, declared loudly into a TV camera that being anti-Israel and anti-Zionist is the "new anti-Semitism." Such licentious language. Meant primarily, I might add, to inflame passions and mislead public opinion by invoking a word - anti-Semitism - that we have been well-conditioned to condemn above all other forms of racism or prejudice. I am sorry the woman fears anti-Semitism, pogroms and hatred around every corner. It's not my problem, frankly. Let her get therapy. Does that sound harsh? Sorry, again. But I for one get pretty irritated hearing false cries of anti-Semitism against anyone who criticizes Israel, its human rights crimes, its crazy settler movement, its unique brand of crypto-racism against non-Jews living within the state and its occupied territories. These targets include Jews as well. Like Richard Goldstone - a man who served the international community honestly and fairly by rooting out the perpetrators of real evil and putting them on trial for the most despicable of human rights violations in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. A Jewish man, a Zionist too. "Anti-Semite," they roared when he charged Israel with war crimes in his UN report on the 2009 Gaza War. Or Harvard scholar Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer, whose paper The Israel Lobby And US Foreign Policy was skewered in a Washington Post column as anti-Semitic. Writer Eliot Cohen says: If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic. I read this paper, and it is well researched, fair and thought-provoking. Cohen's claim is far and away the most emotionally muddled interpretation by an academic I have yet to encounter. Yet other targets of this convoluted connection between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism are - well - entire countries. Like Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, for instance. Yup, anti-Semites, one and all. "Norway is the most anti-Semitic country in Scandinavia," said Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, a scholar of Western European anti-Semitism from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, who spoke last year at a gathering of Israeli scholars highlighting anti-Semitism in Scandanavia. Oops. Might want to check in on Sweden. An article in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet alleged a few months ago that IDF soldiers harvested the organs of Palestinians they killed, before returning the stitched up bodies to families for burial, igniting a crisis between Israel and Sweden. When the Swedish government refused to condemn the newspaper article, citing "freedom of the press," accusations of anti-Semitism went flying. That was just the maelstrom we heard in our media. In June, a pro-Israel group that monitors NGOs for bias in the Mideast conflict, issued a report identifying Sweden as a major source of funding for NGOs that routinely use anti-Semitic language - which in this case meant language primarily viewed as unfavorable to Israel. What were some of these inflammatory, potentially anti-Semitic terms? "Nakba" - the Arabic word meaning "catastrophe" that Palestinians use to describe the events of 1948. Also "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide," in reference to Israeli policies against Palestinians. Only Jews, it seems, can use the lessons of the holocaust for political impact. But most of the report targets Swedish-supported NGOs for any direct or implied criticism of Israel - one example: The Palme Center, established by the Swedish Social Democratic Party and trade unions, "promotes an overwhelmingly Palestinian narrative of the conflict. The Palme Center makes the absurd statement accusing Israel of 'provoking' the al-Aqsa rising and the 'Second Intifada,' 'contributing to a chaotic security situation' in Gaza following the Disengagement, and 'disproportionate violence against civilians, unlawful executions and torture.'" Such overt displays of anti-Semitism, indeed. Ex Norwegian Prime Minister K?re Willoch has said the kinds of anti-Semitism allegations leveled at some Scandanavian nations is "a traditional deflection tactic aimed at diverting attention from the real problem, which is Israel's well-documented and incontestable abuse of Palestinians." The Israeli paper Haaretz quotes Danish daily Berlingske Tidende's Mideast Bureau Chief Louise Stigsgaard Nissen as saying: "Why is criticism of Israel automatically considered anti-Semitism? Why can't one criticize Israel as one criticizes the U.S. without being called an anti-Semite?" Some anti-Semitic allegations border on the absurd. As far back as the 1960s, survivors of the USS Liberty - the US Navy technical research ship that some say was deliberately bombed, napalmed and shot at by Israeli fighters as it sat in international waters on June 8, 1967 - were systematically accused of anti-Semitism when they gave their accounts of the events that day. Accounts that suggest the Israeli attack was a deliberate one on an American military vessel. It is worthwhile to note that both Secretary of State Dean Rusk and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs Thomas Moorer believed the attack to be premeditated. As to the present: President Obama has been called an anti-Semite by right-wing Israelis and politicians, who have invoked his middle name, "Hussein" as proof enough. Others cite his association with an array of individuals and policies considered to be anti-Israel as further damning evidence. Former President Jimmy Carter has been called one for years, even though he brokered Israel's very first peace agreement with an Arab state. Ironically, Obama's has just hired Hannah Rosenthal, the former head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, as the State Department's Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Rosenthal, the daughter of a Rabbi and Holocaust survivor has this to say: "Criticizing a certain policy in Israel or a certain policy in the United States regarding Israel does not make someone an anti-Semite. It makes them, perhaps, a thoughtful analyst of what's going on, recognizing we can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them." And of course, the ever-vigilant Anti-Defamation League, which has criticized Rosenthal publically, spent the early part of this year churning out press releases during Israel's 2009 military onslaught on Gaza's civilians, claiming that the throngs of protestors hitting the streets in capitals around the world were fueling "the explosion of anti-Semitic rhetoric." This is the same ADL that two years ago opposed congressional legislation recognizing the Armenian Genocide. I hate being treated like an idiot. We can see for ourselves the carnage caused by Israeli troops in Gaza and Lebanon, the daily acts of collective punishment and brutality against Palestinians in the territories. So when supporters of Israel pull out the anti-Semitism card no matter how ridiculous the claim, it does Jews everywhere a disservice by severely diluting the impact of the word, and therefore lessening the gravity of real and harmful prejudice against Jews. Like the boy who cried wolf, the cries become meaningless when invoked for political gain - or simply when all other arguments fail to convince a weary world that yet another Israeli atrocity was justified to protect Jews. To the woman accusing pro-Palestinian protestors on TV of anti-Semitism, I too wearily say, frankly my dear, I just don't give a damn. Sharmine Narwani is a Senior Associate at St. Anthony's College, Oxford University Follow Sharmine Narwani on Twitter: www.twitter.com/snarwani =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 14:14:52 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:14:52 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Slandering Patricia Highsmith Message-ID: <092D040C4A174B449D8614728072A059@agingCHS072729> (posted to the marxmail list by Louis Proyect) In a review of a new biography of the author of "Strangers on a Train" and the Ripley novels, the NY Times dubs her as an anti-Semite: >>Highsmith was never comfortable with blacks, and she was outspokenly >>anti-Semitic - so much so that when she was living in Switzerland in the >>1980s, she invented nearly 40 aliases, identities she used in writing to >>various government bodies and newspapers, deploring the state of Israel >>and the "influence" of the Jews. Yet Highsmith had Jewish friends, and her >>first boss was a Jew who did nothing but support her work. She wrote him >>out of her history, as she did her stint at writing comic strips in New >>York in the 1940s.<< full: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/books/review/Winterson-t.html In my review of movies and books by Highsmith, I dealt with this accusation and concluded that it was her hostility to Zionism that got up the nose of reviewers such as the one cited above. Here's a quote from an earlier biography by Andrew Wilson that I read as background for my article: In an unpublished essay Highsmith wrote about the Middle East conflict in August 1992, she outlined the historical background that had formulated her position. When Israel was created -- in May 1948, while Highsmith was at Yaddo, writing Strangers on the Train -- following the withdrawal of the British, she remembers feeling optimistic about its future. 'How happy and cheerful we all were then, gentiles and Jews alike!' she wrote. 'A new state had been born, and was therefore to be welcomed into the community of democracies.' Yet soon after the state was formed -- initially an area comprising of Jewish and Arab land, together with an internationally administered zone around Jerusalem -- it was invaded by Arab forces, a move which in turn prompted Israeli troops to seize and gain control of three-quarters of Palestine. Highsmith was appalled at what she saw as Israeli brutality and insensitivity, remembering how some of her Palestinian friends were forced to flee their homeland. Since then, of course, the area has been the site of a series of complex, and increasingly violent, power struggles, yet from the beginning Highsmith aligned herself with other writers such as Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky and Edward W. Said, who believed in Palestinian self-determination. In December 1994, Highsmith nominated a collection of Said's essays and talks, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994, as her book of the year for the Times Literary Supplement, commenting that she thought him 'both famous and ignored. His eloquence on the real issues makes America's silence seem all the louder.' Highsmith agreed with Said's opinion that the alliance between Zionism and the United States had resulted in the continued displacement of Palestinians. As a result, she felt forced to take a stand, no matter how small. After the election of Menachem Begin as Prime Minister in 1977, Highsmith would not allow her books to be published in Israel. 'I'm sure the world couldn't care less, but it shows that not every American refuses to see what's happening,' she said. In interviews she told journalists that she loathed Ariel Sharon and the Likud party, and that she found America's support of the Israeli regime to be despicable. 'Americans and the world know that America gives so lavishly to Israel,' she wrote, 'because the United States wanted Israel as a strong military bulwark against Soviet Russia during the Cold War. Now that the Cold War is over, America has cut none of its aid . . . What is an American tax-payer to make of the fact that the USA gives thirteen million dollars a day, still, to Israel without any request for repayment? . . . I blame my own country for the majority of injustices now being inflicted by the Israelis in what they consider Greater Israel... I blame [the] American government for the bad press permitted about the Arabs in the United States.' full: http://www.swans.com/library/art14/lproy43.html =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 15:27:42 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:27:42 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] From "Yes we can" to "No we won't" Message-ID: <8D109EEC8F334639B0BBF5DC812A4BDC@agingCHS072729> >From "Yes we can" to "No we won't" http://socialistworker.org/2009/12/18/yes-we-can-to-no-we-wont Many people who were Barack Obama's most enthusiastic supporters a year ago have grown disillusioned and angry. Alan Maass looks at the differences between President Obama and Candidate Obama--and where the hope for real change lies. December 18, 2009 AS THE first year of Barack Obama's presidency drew to a close, one event symbolized the gap between the promise he represented to so many people and the frustrating reality: A war president accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. Here was the man who owed his electoral success, at least during the Democratic primaries, to the perception that he was the main antiwar candidate--and he accepted the Nobel in Oslo a week after announcing he would escalate the already-eight-year-old U.S. war on Afghanistan, with a second troop surge that brought to more than 50,000 the total number of soldiers he had committed to the war since taking office. Sure, Obama's Nobel speech started with the usual claims of "great humility" to be receiving such an honor--right before he delivered as ugly an example of American imperial arrogance as anything George W. Bush could have managed: Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea. Underwritten global security? Tell it to the relatives of the innocent Afghans torn to pieces by U.S. bombs dropped on wedding parties. Promoted peace and prosperity? Ask the people of East Timor trying to rebuild a ruined nation after a quarter century of a U.S.-sanctioned occupation and genocide by Indonesia. Blood of our citizens? An Iraqi could tell you about the blood of their citizens, spilled to protect the U.S. government's control of Middle East oil. If Obama's goal was to win the approval of right-wing Republicans--the ones who accuse him of "paling around with terrorists" and pander to the crazies who think Obama was born in Kenya--he did succeed on that count. "I liked what he said," Sarah Palin chirped. Newt Gingrich praised "a very historic speech." Walter Russell Mead--whose title of Henry Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations tells you everything you need to know about him--couldn't contain his delight: There are no flies on our President. He could sell shoes to a snake. Barack Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was a carefully reasoned defense of a foreign policy that differs very little from George Bush's. He is winding down one war, escalating a second, and stepping up the pressure on Iran. He is asserting America's sovereign right to unilateral action in self-defense, while expressing the hope that this right will not need to be exercised. If Bush had said these things, the world would be filled with violent denunciations. When Obama says them, people purr. That is fine by me...I've waxed lyrical about Obama's ability to sell our foreign policy to the world. He didn't just put lipstick on the pig; he gave it a makeover and sent it to charm school. Meanwhile, among the people who actually wanted Barack Obama to become president, there was bitter disappointment. As author Garry Wills wrote: Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement...I cannot vote for any Republican. But Obama will not get another penny from me, or another word of praise, after this betrayal. Obama's surge to Afghanistan was a turning point for others who supported him in 2008. But it's worth noting that many leading liberals weren't nearly as put off as Wills. Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, speaking to National Public Radio, claimed that Obama's Nobel speech--the very same one admired by Sarah Palin--"had a humility and grace while confronting the paradoxes." When Obama announced his Afghanistan escalation a week earlier, the liberal antiwar group MoveOn.org urged its members not to protest Obama, but to call on Congress to support "a binding military exit strategy and firm benchmarks so we can bring our troops home safely and quickly." So the president of the United States doubles the number of U.S. troops committed to a war that even some conservatives now considered a disaster, and all MoveOn.org could ask for was "benchmarks"? That tepid response goes a long way in explaining why the Obama administration wasn't concerned about an antiwar backlash when it approved the Pentagon's proposal for a further surge. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LAST YEAR at this time, millions of people were basking in the glow of Barack Obama's historic election victory. As SocialistWorker.org and other left voices pointed out, the new president's actual policies were more conservative than his rhetoric. But in spite of that, the Obama campaign stirred more popular enthusiasm for change and higher expectations than anything to happen in mainstream politics in more than a generation. It was an invigorating climate after years of conservative domination in Washington politics. Twelve months later, the reality has proved very different. For those who put their hopes in Obama, every month and week--sometimes every day--brings greater disillusionment and growing anger. Over the summer, The Onion managed to capture the situation better than most media outlets. "In a slight shift from his campaign trail promise," went a front-page story, "President Barack Obama announced that his administration's message of 'Change' has been modified to the somewhat more restrained slogan 'Relatively Minor Readjustments in Certain Favorable Policy Areas.'" Now, though, it seems like "relatively minor readjustments" would be better than what we got. On every issue, the Obama administration has acted like its hated Republican predecessors far more often than anyone would have guessed. For the bailout of Wall Street, the administration adopted wholesale the policies put in place by the Bush administration in its final months in office. Nothing about nationalization, no more than a toothless executive pay policy, not even new regulations on the banks. On health care reform, the White House started by opening negotiations with "stakeholders"--translation: the medical-insurance-pharmaceutical complex--and bargained away even half-measures like the "public option" for the uninsured. Even on an issue like civil liberties, where it seemed impossible that it could sink to the depths of the Bush administration, the number of times the Obama White House upheld policies from the Bush years--indefinite detention in U.S. prisons overseas, trial by military commissions, rendition of prisoners to regimes where torture is legal, warrantless wiretapping, use of executive powers to hinder the prosecution of U.S. officials--far outnumber the times it changed course. True, Obama hasn't been a carbon copy of Bush. In June, for example, he marked LGBT Pride Month with a powerful statement decrying oppression and harassment that remained "all too common for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community"--surely words that no one could imagine George W. Bush uttering. But within days of this declaration, the Obama Justice Department was in court defending both the Defense of Marriage Act and the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy--two antigay measures Obama the candidate promised to overturn--against legal challenges. The Employee Free Choice Act, immigration raids, climate change legislation, racial profiling, education "reform"--the list of issues where Barack Obama has disappointed his most enthusiastic supporters goes on and on. What it shows is that Barack Obama was never the crusader for change he claimed to be on the campaign trail, but a much more conventional politician--as committed to the priorities of protecting the status quo as any other member of the two-party political establishment that runs Washington. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A CENTURY ago, another Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, explained the reality of the two-party Washington system as well as any radical: Suppose you go to Washington and try to get at your government. You will always find that while you are politely listened to, the men really consulted are the men who have the big stake--the big bankers, the big manufacturers and the big masters of commerce...The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States. Barack Obama's campaign last year was built around a carefully crafted image of a candidate who came from outside the Washington establishment, and would set a new direction for the country--in a way that the Republicans obviously wouldn't, and fellow Democrats like Hillary Clinton, bound up for so many years in Beltway politics, couldn't. But the image conflicted with the reality of a politician who "really consulted" with the big bankers and masters of commerce. Check the phone directory of the senior staff at the Obama Treasury Department--the men and women overseeing the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street--and you'll search in vain for any figure associated with liberal policies. No one from the unions, no one from liberal think tanks, no community organizers or progressive bloggers. What you will find are plenty of former employees of Goldman Sachs--the mega-bank that presided over the Wall Street bubble, and then got its hooks into the government's bailout program. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, while not a Goldman alumnus, is perfectly representative of the brand of people that makes up the Obama administration--someone whose political views are shaped by with the narrow world of the financial and political elite, within which he has operated his entire professional life. A few months ago, the Associated Press used a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain Geithner's phone records and calendar during his time as Treasury Secretary. What they showed, AP reported, was that the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were among a small core of "Wall Street executives who have known Geithner for years, whose multibillion-dollar companies survived the economic crisis with his help, and who can pick up the phone and reach the nation's most powerful economic official...Goldman, Citi and JPMorgan can get Geithner on the phone several times a day if necessary, giving them an unmatched opportunity to influence policy." It would be hard to find a better example of how the U.S. political system really works. Ordinary people are supposed to be able to have an effect on their government by voting for candidates they support every two or four years. But if you run Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, you can have a far more direct effect on government policy every two or four hours, just by picking up the phone. Many people who voted for Obama disdain Geithner, but don't always apply their criticisms to Obama himself, in part because they think he is being led astray from his correct instincts--the ones he expressed during the campaign--by bad advisers like Geithner. But after a year in office--during which Obama made concessions time and again on promised policies and programs, and hired no one but mainstream advisers straight out of the political and corporate establishment--this rings hollow. It makes much more sense, in light of the record, to recognize that Obama is a part of the same corporate money-soaked system he claimed in his campaign speeches that he wanted to change. On this point, it helps to remember that Obama and the Democrats displaced the Republicans as the primary recipients of political donations from a number of industries in 2008, the financial sector among them. As a New York University finance professor told the Washington Post, the threat of re-regulation on Wall Street meant that hedge funds "have a strong interest in becoming involved in the political process, and that is really the whole story behind their support of Obama...[I]t is very much in their advantage to have a strong voice with him." Seen in this light, the Obama administration's generous bailout terms for Wall Street, reluctance to restrict pay for financial executives and hesitation to push for stronger rules to regulate the banks are easier to understand. The hedge funds did, indeed, buy "a strong voice" in the new administration. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE POINT isn't that Barack Obama is unique in being influenced by corporate power, but how much he has in common with business as usual in the Washington system. He isn't a reformer or a maverick, but the leader of one of the two mainstream political parties that dominate American politics. Both parties have a long history, whatever their rhetoric to win votes, of running that system in the interests of the corporate and political elite. Unless forced to by pressure from below, they instinctively lean to the conservative option in any given situation. Of course, winning elections means getting ordinary people to vote for you, and no one would do that if the politicians were honest about how they really operate, and who they really listen to. All candidates--even the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican tools of big business--talk about "serving the people" and giving ordinary Americans a better deal. But this is a fraud--a fraud that reflects the basic nature of government under capitalism. The politicians are the public face of a system that's set up to serve the ruling class. Their job is to say one thing to the majority of people to win their votes--while doing another in office. For all his powerful speeches, Barack Obama isn't an exception, but the rule. Keep in mind something else, though: Franklin Delano Roosevelt wasn't an exception either back in the 1930s. When Obama first took office, the media delighted in drawing parallels between them--two liberals prepared to come to the rescue of working people in times of severe economic crisis. It's a telling statement about the record of the Obama administration that those comparisons have disappeared. Roosevelt gets the credit for Depression-era "New Deal" reforms like Social Security and unemployment insurance. But the blue-blooded Roosevelt didn't come into office promoting workers' rights and government jobs programs. He was pressured to break with a much more conventional economic program by a tide of protest and revolt brewing throughout society as a result of the Great Depression. It took grassroots action to give a pro-worker content to the New Deal. Whatever the other differences, Obama hasn't faced the same scale of social struggle--and so the main pressure to shape his agenda has been the pressure from Wall Street, Corporate America and the mainstream political establishment. At the same time, the discontent with Wall Street greed and the disasters of capitalism is deeper than it was on Election Day a year ago--working-class people in the U.S. are still bearing the brunt of a painful economic crisis caused by Wall Street, while the banks and speculators are celebrating a return to prosperity. The question is when and how this discontent will take the form of struggle and political action. On this score, the Obama campaign could still loom large in ways its leaders never intended. For millions of people, Obama's presidential race offered a first glimpse that something different from the status quo was possible. Among them was a smaller core that got a taste of organizing for the first time. Now, they are facing the questions that come inevitably with the reality of a Democratic Party administration that does the opposite of what it promised to win votes. The anger with the system--and increasingly with Barack Obama as the face of that system--needs to be turned into concrete action. The struggles of the future depend on more and more people recognizing what the historian Howard Zinn once said: "[T]he really critical thing isn't who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in--in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating--those are the things that determine what happens." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 17:20:48 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:20:48 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Copenhagen: Obama Guts Progressive Values Message-ID: <601FBC1152A7403AA4729BE01E2429C8@agingCHS072729> http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/12/copenhagen-obama-guts-progressive-values Mother Jones Dec. 18, 2009 Copenhagen: Obama Guts Progressive Values - By Bill McKibben The President of the United States did several things in his agreement today with China, India, and South Africa: * He blew up the United Nations. The idea that theres a world community that means something has disappeared tonight. The clear point is, you poor nations can spout off all you want on questions like human rights or the role of women or fighting polio or handling refugees, but when you get too close to the things that count -the fossil fuel that's at the center of our economy- you can forget about it. We're not interested. You're a bother, and when you sink beneath the waves we don't want to hear much about it. The dearest hope of the American right for fifty years was essentially realized because in the end coal is at the center of America's economy. We'd already done this with war and peace, and now we've done it with global warming. What exactly is the point of the UN now? * He formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super polluters. China, the US, and India don't want anyone controlling their use of coal in any meaningful way. It is a coalition of foxes who will together govern the henhouse. It is no accident that the targets are weak to nonexistent. We don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with targets, he said. Indeed. And now imagine what this agreement will look like with the next Republican president. * He demonstrated the kind of firmness and resolve that Americans like to see. It will play well politically at home and that will be the worst part of the deal. Having spurned Europe and the poor countries of the world, he will reap domestic political benefit. George Bush couldn't have done this because the reaction would have been too great. Obama has taken the mandate that progressives worked their hearts out to give him, and used it to gut the ideas that progressives have held most dear. The ice caps won't be the only things we lose with this deal. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 20 17:34:59 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:34:59 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] DOD: Obama's Afghan Surge Will Rely Heavily On Private Contractors Message-ID: <16FF8042239B406EB405C211B1EA381D@agingCHS072729> DOD: Obama's Afghan Surge Will Rely Heavily On Private Contractors Justin Elliott | December 15, 2009 Private contractors will make up at least half of the total military workforce in Afghanistan going forward, according to Defense Department officials cited in a new congressional study. As President Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan unfolds, the number of contractors will likely jump by between 16,000 and 56,000, adding up to a total of 120,000-160,000, according to an updated study from the Congressional Research Service. DOD officials who spoke with the study's author said contractors would make up 50-55 percent of the total workforce -- troops plus contractors -- in the future. This would actually be a significant reduction from the last two years, when contractors have averaged 62 percent of the total. As we've reported -- http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/military_contractors/ --, many questions about the army of contractors, which outnumbers the size of the U.S. troop force, remain unanswered and underexamined. We don't have up to date numbers on how much the United States spends on private contracts, and the DOD does not break down the services done by contractors in Afghanistan (it does for Iraq). As of September 2009, contractors providing security, transportation, and logistical services numbered 104,100 in Afghanistan and 113,700 in Iraq, according to the military. Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are local nationals, according to the military. Here's a table looking at how much the numbers in Afghanistan will increase with Obama's surge: Interestingly, it looks like military planners themselves -- not just the media and politicians -- find it all too easy to ignore the role of contractors in U.S. foreign policy. The most recent Quadrennial Defense Review -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrennial_Defense_Review --, a key strategic overview of American defense and military policy, runs over 100 pages. Just five sentences of the QDR document addresses the use of private contractors, the CRS study notes. Besides crunching the numbers, the study also looks at whether contractors can undermine U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the issue of abuses of civilians by contractors. Here's a graph we've shown you before, now updated through September 2009: The whole study is worth a read: (CRS Contractors Study 12/09) http://www.scribd.com/doc/24124212/CRS-Contractors-Study-12-09 =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 21 07:41:56 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:41:56 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] A Coup at Foggy Bottom? (On US Foreign Policy) Message-ID: <0094A107ED644D6C9A32E559EDBE745C@agingCHS072729> <> http://tpjmagazine.us/hallinan09 December 20, 2009 A Coup at Foggy Bottom? By Conn Hallinan Watching the Obama Administration's about-face in the Middle East and Latin America raises an uncomfortable question: have neo-conservative Democrats-a section closely associated with the Clinton wing of the Party- undermined U.S. foreign policy? Whatever the source of the shifts, their effect has been to heighten tensions in both areas of the world and marginalize the U.S. just as it was beginning to break out of the isolation of the Bush years. When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton abandoned the White House's demand to halt the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it not only drew outrage from U.S. allies like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, it brought into question the entire peace process. For the first time in decades, Palestinians are threatening to unilaterally declare a state, and some are openly raising the possibility of abandoning a two-state solution in favor of a single bi-national entity. A bi-national solution would "spell the end of Israel as a democratic state," editorialized the Financial Times. "It would come to resemble in many ways the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. If [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu believes that he has achieved a victory by refusing to halt the settlements, he is wrong. It is more like a project of national suicide." The Economist put the blame squarely on Obama: "From the Palestinian and Arab points of view, his administration.has meekly capitulated to Israel." The recent announcement that Israel would build 900 units in East Jerusalem suggests that the Netanyahu government feels it can now act without fear of a break with Washington. While Tel Aviv announced a 10-week "freeze" last week, the "freeze" will not cover 3,000 units already under construction, more than 20 "public" buildings, or any of the new construction in East Jerusalem. If outrage is the reaction to the Administration's U-turn in the Middle East, shock is the common response in Latin America to the State Department's about face on the Honduran coup. When President Manuel Zelaya was ousted by the military June 28, the White House joined the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations in demanding his reinstatement. "We believe the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the democratically elected president there," said Obama. Now, according to State Department spokesman Ian Kelly, the U.S. intends to break that pledge and recognize the winner of the Nov. 29 elections, which were organized by the coup government. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, demonstrations opposed to the election have been savagely repressed. So far, only Panama and Costa Rica have supported the U.S. position. Almost overnight, the good will Obama created by his Cairo address to the Muslim world, and his Administration's quick denunciation of the Honduran coup has vanished. What happened? On Honduras, the Republicans are taking credit for the Administration's change of heart. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) claims it was his hold over two State Department nominees that caused the White House to drop its support of Zelaya. DeMint said he was "very thankful" that Obama and Clinton "have finally taken the side of the Honduran people." According to COIMER & OP poll, only 22.2 percent of Hondurans support the coup government led by Roberto Micheletto. But it seems unlikely that the White House would cave over two appointments. In fact, the State Department had begun backing away from Obama's statement long before DeMint came into the picture. Zelaya's name was suddenly dropped in favor of a formula that called for a "return to constitutional order." A muscular foreign policy-and strong support for Israel-are policies that have long been touchstones for the right wing of the Democratic Party. It was the Clinton Administration that first intervened in the Colombian civil war, bombed the Sudan, and launched the war against Serbia. Secretary Clinton, along with other hawks, is pushing for a major expansion of the war in Afghanistan. It seems more likely that the State Department's support for the Nov. 29 election was a not-so-subtle shot across the bow aimed at countries that the U.S. considers unfriendly. The recent release of a U.S. Air Force document on current U.S.-Colombian military agreement suggests that the U.S. is indeed preparing to exert greater military power in Latin America. According to Venezuelan lawyer Eva Golinger, the document, submitted to the U.S. Congress last May as part of the 2010 budget considerations, contradicts claims by the U.S. and the Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe that the deployment of U.S. forces in Colombia is solely aimed at local narcotics traffic and terrorism, and will not affect Colombia's neighbors. The agreement says U.S. deployment in seven bases scattered around Colombia will allow Washington to engage in "full spectrum military operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from narcotics funded terrorists insurgencies.and anti-US governments." And further, that the Palanquero Base in particular ".will also increase our capability to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), improve global reach, support logistics requirements, improve partnerships, improve theater security cooperation and expand expeditionary warfare capability." In a statement that had a strong whiff of the Monroe Doctrine about it, U.S. Southern Command head General Douglas Fraser warned that Iran's "growing influence" in the region poses a "potential risk." Speaking in Miami last June, the General charged that Iran is building connections to "extremist organizations" on the continent, and has forged close ties with Venezuela and Cuba. The U.S. recently reactivated the Fifth Fleet, giving it the ability to project considerable naval power throughout Latin America. The scope of the Colombia base agreement should make a number of countries nervous, especially those that the State Department considers "anti-US": Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. The term "unfriendly" could also include Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and even Brazil, which has helped lead a continent-wide independence movement against U.S. domination of the region. The Bolivian government of Evo Morales charges that U.S. organizations like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) support a separatist movement in the oil and gas rich eastern provinces of the country. This past April, Bolivian special forces stormed a hotel in Santa Cruz-the center of the anti-Morales movement-and killed several heavily armed mercenaries who apparently planned to sow chaos in the province. Weapons and explosives used to attack Morales supporters were traced to wealthy business owners who are active in the rightwing separatist Santa Cruz Civic Committee. The Committee has received support from USAID and NED. Venezuela says that the Colombian bases threaten the government of Hugo Chavez, against whom the U.S. supported a short-lived coup in 2002. Chavez and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa both charge that the U.S. aided a recent invasion of Ecuador by Colombian troops seeking out members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Ecuador's Defense Minister, Javier Ponce, has requested a meeting with the President Obama over the U.S.-Colombia agreement. The atmosphere in Paraguay is tense following the removal of the country's top military leaders by leftist President Fernando Lugo. There have been several coup attempts since the end of the 35-year military dictatorship in 1989, and Chavez recently charged that a plan to overthrow Lugo was recently hatched in Bolivia by "ultra-rightwing elements." In neighboring Uruguay left-wing former guerrilla Jose "Pepe" Mujica won the election for president, and some of the right-wing in that country vows he will never be allowed to take power. An outbreak of coups in all these countries seems unlikely, but is certainly not out of the question, particularly if right-wingers-who dominated the continent throughout the 1980s and '90s-think overthrowing an "unfriendly" government will be met with a wink and a nod from Washington. U.S. support for the Honduran elections effectively torpedoed a diplomatic solution to the crisis. When Micheletti formed a "unity" government excluding Zelaya, the ousted president, holed up in the Brazilian embassy, announced that the U.S. brokered agreement was "dead." The Honduran congress said it would not consider reinstating Zelaya until after the election. U.S. isolation on this issue is palpable. Meeting in Jamaica, the foreign ministers of the Rio Group-every country in Latin America and most the Caribbean-called for reinstating Zelaya. OAS President Jose Miguel Insulza demanded that the Honduran government be led by its "legitimate" president. Both the UN and the European Union say they will not recognize the Nov. 29 elections. More than 240 leading U.S. academics and Latin American experts sent a letter to Obama calling on the State Department to denounce human rights violations by the Micheletti government and re-instate Zelaya. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka demanded that the Obama Administration oppose the Nov. 29 election and return Zelaya to the presidency. Mark Weisbrot, director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, says unless the Obama Administration reverses course, it is going to be "just as isolated as Bush vis-?-vis the hemisphere." Whatever the explanation for the shift in foreign policy, there is little argument about the results: anger, charges of betrayal, and a diminishment of hope, from the Middle East to Latin America. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 21 07:47:13 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:47:13 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Eva Golinger: Obama Is Preparing for War in South America Message-ID: <776CAD0E75B34FAEB2392E3EC189065F@agingCHS072729> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24219.htm Obama Is Preparing for War in South America Interview with Eva Golinger by Mike Whitney www.informationclearinghouse (December 18 2009) Mike Whitney: The US media is very critical of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He's frequently denounced as "anti-American", a "leftist strongman", and a dictator. Can you briefly summarize some of the positive social, economic and judicial changes for which Chavez is mainly responsible? Eva Golinger: The first and foremost important achievement during the Chavez administration is the 1999 Constitution, which, although not written nor decreed by Chavez himself, was created through his vision of change for Venezuela. The 1999 Constitution was, in fact, drafted - written - by the people of Venezuela in one of the most participatory examples of nation building, and then was ratified through popular national referendum by 75% of Venezuelans. The 1999 Constitution is one of the most advanced in the world in the area of human rights. It guarantees the rights to housing, education, healthcare, food, indigenous lands, languages, women's rights, worker's rights, living wages and a whole host of other rights that few other countries recognize on a national level. My favorite right in the Venezuelan Constitution is the right to a dignified life. That pretty much sums up all the others. Laws to implement these rights began to surface in 2001, with land reform, oil industry redistribution, tax laws and the creation of more than a dozen social programs - called missions - dedicated to addressing the basic needs of Venezuela's poor majority. In 2003, the first missions were directed at education and healthcare. Within two years, illiteracy was eradicated in the country and Venezuela was certified by UNESCO as a nation free of illiteracy. This was done with the help of a successful Cuban literacy program called "Yo si puedo" (Yes I can). Further educational missions were created to provide free universal education from primary to doctoral levels throughout the country. Today, Venezuela's population is much more educated than before, and adults who previously had no high school education now are encouraged to not only go through a secondary school program, but also university and graduate school. The healthcare program, called "Barrio Adentro", has not only provided preventive healthcare to all Venezuelans - many who never had access to a doctor before - but also has guaranteed universal, free access to medical attention at the most advanced levels. MRIs, heart surgery, lab work, cancer treatments, are all provided free of cost to anyone (including foreigners) in need. Some of the most modern clinics, diagnostic treatment centers and hospitals have been built in the past five years under this program, placing Venezuela at the forefront of medical technology. Other programs providing subsidized food and consumer products (Mercal, Pdval), job training (Mission Vuelvan Caras), subsidies to poor, single mothers (Madres del Barrio), attention to indigents and drug addicts (Mission Negra Hipolita) have reduced extreme poverty by fifty percent and raised Venezuelans standard of living and quality of life. While nothing is perfect, these changes are extraordinary and have transformed Venezuela into a nation far different from what it looked like ten years ago. In fact, the most important achievement that Hugo Chavez himself is directly responsible for is the level of participation in the political process. Today, millions of Venezuelans previously invisible and excluded are visible and included. Those who were always marginalized and ignored in Venezuela by prior governments today have a voice, are seen and heard, and are actively participating in the building of a new economic, political and social model in their country. Mike Whitney: On Monday, President Chavez threw a Venezuelan judge in jail on charges of abuse of power for freeing a high-profile banker. Do you think he overstepped his authority as executive or violated the principle of separation of powers? What does this say about Chavez's resolve to fight corruption? Eva Golinger: President Chavez did not put anyone in jail. Venezuela has an Attorney General and an independent branch of government in charge of public prosecutions. Chavez did publicly accuse the judge of corruption and violating the law because that judge overstepped her authority by releasing an individual charged with corruption and other criminal acts from detention, despite the fact that a previous court had not granted conditional freedom or bail to the suspect. And, the judge released the suspect in a very irregular way, without the presence of the prosecutor, and through a back door. The suspect then fled the country. This is part of Venezuela's fight against corruption. Unfortunately - as in a lot of countries - corruption is deeply rooted in the culture. The struggle to eradicate corruption is probably the most difficult of all and will probably not be achieved until new generations have grown up with different values and education. In the meantime, the Chavez administration is trying hard to ensure that corrupt public officials pay the consequences. That judge, for example, engaged in an act of corruption and abuse of authority by illegally releasing a suspect and therefore was charged by the Public Prosecutor's office and will be tried. It has nothing to do with what Chavez said or didn't say, it has to do with enforcing the law. Mike Whitney: Why is the United States building military bases in Colombia? Do they pose a threat to Chavez or the Bolivarian Revolution? Eva Golinger: On October 30th, the US formally entered into an agreement with the Colombian government to allow US access to seven military bases in Colombia and unlimited use of Colombian territory for military operations. The agreement itself is purported to be directed at counter-narcotics operations and counter-terrorism. But a US Air Force document released earlier this year discussing the need for a stronger US military presence in Colombia revealed the true intentions behind the military agreement. The document stated that the US military presence was necessary to combat the "constant threat from anti-US governments in the region". Clearly, that is a reference to Venezuela, and probably Bolivia, maybe Ecuador. It's no secret that Washington considers the Venezuelan government anti-US, though it's not true. Venezuela is anti-imperialist, but not anti-US. The US Air Force document also stated that the Colombian bases would be used to engage in "full spectrum military operations" throughout South America, and even talked about surveillance, intelligence and reconnaisance missions, and improving the capacity of US forces to execute "expeditionary warfare" in Latin America. Clearly, this is a threat to the peoples of Latin America and particularly those nations targeted, such as Venezuela. Most people in the US don't know about this military agreement, but if they did, they should question why their government, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, is preparing for war in South America. And, in the midst of an economic crisis with millions of people in the US losing jobs and homes, why are millions of dollars being spent on military bases in Colombia? The US Congress already approved $46 million for one of the bases in Colombia. And surely more funds will be supplied in the future. Mike Whitney: What is ALBA? Is it a viable alternative to the "free trade" blocs promoted by the US? Eva Golinger: The Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas - Trade Agreement for the People, is a regional agreement created five years ago between Venezuela and Cuba, and now has nine members: Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Dominica. ALBA is a trade agreement based on integration, cooperation and solidarity, contrary to US trade agreements which are based on competition and exploitation. It promotes a way of trading between nations that assures mutual benefits. For example, Venezuela sells oil to Cuba and Cuba pays with services - doctors, educators and technological experts that help to improve Venezuela's industries. Venezuela sells oil to Nicaragua and Nicaragua pays with food products, agricultural technology and aide to build Venezuela's own agricultural industry, which long ago was abandoned by prior governments only interested in the rich oil industry. ALBA seeks to not just provide economic benefits to its member nations, but also social and cultural advances. The idea is to find ways to help members develop and progress in all aspects of society. ALBA recently created a new currency, the SUCRE, which will be used as a form of exchange between member nations, eliminating the US dollar as the standard for trade. Mike Whitney: Are US NGO's and intelligence agents still trying to foment political instability in Venezuela or have those operations ceased since the failed coup? Eva Golinger: In fact, the funding of political groups in Venezuela, and others throughout Latin America that promote US agenda, has increased since the April 2002 coup against President Chavez. Through two principal Department of State agencies, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US government has channeled more than $50 million to opposition groups in Venezuela since 2002. The USAID/NED budget to fund groups in Venezuela in 2010 is nearly $15 million, doubled from last year's $7 million. This is a state policy of Washington, which the Obama Administration plans to amp up. They call it "democracy promotion", but it's really democracy subversion and destabilization. Funding political groups favorable to Empire, equipping them with resources, strategizing to help formulate political platforms and campaigns - all geared towards regime change - is a new form of invasion, a silent invasion. Through USAID and NED, and their "partner NGOs" and contractors, such as Freedom House, International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, Pan-American Development Foundation and Development Alternatives, Incorporated, hundreds of political groups, parties and programs are presently being funded in Venezuela to promote regime change against the Chavez government. US taxpayer dollars are being squandered on these efforts to overthrow a democratically elected government that simply isn't convenient for Washington. Remember, Venezuela has 24% of world oil reserves. That's a lot! Mike Whitney: How hard has Venezuela been hit by the economic crisis? Do the people understand Wall Street's role in the meltdown? Eva Golinger: Actually, the Chavez government has taken important steps to shelter Venezuela from the financial crisis. People here in Venezuela absolutely understand Wall Street's role in the crisis and know that the US capitalist-consumerist system is principally responsible for causing the financial crisis, but also the climate crisis that the world is facing. The Venezuelan government took preventive steps against the financial crisis, such as withdrawing Venezuela's reserves from US banks two years ago, creating cushion funds to ensure social programs would not be cut and diversifying Venezuela's oil clientele so as not to be dependent solely on US clients. Recently, several banks have been nationalized by the Venezuelan government and others have been liquidated. But this was more due to the mismanagement and internal corruption within those banks. The Venezuelan government reacted quickly to take over the banks and guarantee customers' savings would not be lost. In fact, it's the first time in Venezuela's history that no customers have lost any of their money during a bank liquidation or takeover. This is part of the Chavez Administration's policy of prioritizing social needs over economic gain. Mike Whitney: Here's an excerpt from a special weekend report by Bloomberg News: "Americans have grown gloomier about both the economy and the nation's direction over the past three months even as the US shows signs of moving from recession to recovery. Almost half the people now feel less financially secure than when President Barack Obama took office in January ... Fewer than one in three Americans think the economy will improve in the next six months ... Only 32 percent of poll respondents believe the country is headed in the right direction, down from forty percent who said so in September." (Bloomberg) The frustration and disillusionment with the US political/economic system has never been greater in my lifetime. Do you think people in the United States are ready for their own Bolivarian Revolution and steps towards a more progressive, socialistic model of government? Eva Golinger: The rise of Barack Obama neutralized a growing sentiment for profound change inside the US. Hopefully, the slowdown in US activism will only be temporary. South of the border, there is tremendous change taking place. New social, political and economic models are being built by popular grassroots movements in Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American nations that seek economic and social justice. I believe strongly that models in process, like the Bolivarian Revolution, provide inspiration and hope to those in the US and around the world that alternatives to US capitalism do exist and can be successful. The US has a rich history of revolution. There are many groups inside the US dedicated to building a better, more humanist system. Unity and a collective vision are essential aspects of building a strong movement capable of moving forward. Every nation has its moment in history. This is the time of Latin America. But there is great hope that the people of the US will soon unite with their brothers and sisters south of the border to bring down Empire and help build a true world community based on social and economic justice for all. _____ Eva Golinger, winner of the International Award for Journalism in Mexico (2009), named "La Novia de Venezuela" by President Hugo Chavez, is a Venezuelan-American attorney from New York, living in Caracas, Venezuela since 2005 and author of the best-selling books, The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela (2006 Olive Branch Press), Bush vs Chavez: Washington's War on Venezuela (2007, Monthly Review Press), The Empire's Web: Encyclopedia of Interventionism and Subversion, La Mirada del Imperio sobre el 4F: Los Documentos Desclasificados de Washington sobre la rebeli?n militar del 4 de febrero de 1992 and La Agresi?n Permanente: USAID, NED y CIA. Since 2003, Eva, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and CUNY Law School in New York, has been investigating, analyzing and writing about US intervention in Venezuela using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain information about the US Government's efforts to destabilize progressive movements in Latin America. Her first book, The Chavez Code, has been translated and published in six languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian & Russian) and is presently being made into a feature film. In accordance with Title 17 USC. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 21 08:00:35 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:00:35 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Colombia beefs up forces on border with Venezuela Message-ID: <2127E065EEFE458AAF6AA29BDACD1676@agingCHS072729> http://en.trend.az/regions/world/ocountries/1604059.html Colombia beefs up forces on border with Venezuela 20.12.2009 08:39 The Colombian government has announced it is building a new military base on its border with Venezuela and has activated six new airborne battalions, BBC reported. Relations between the two nations are at a historic low with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez already telling his generals to prepare for war. He moved 15,000 more troops up to the border, accusing Colombia and its ally, the US, of planning an attack. A BBC correspondent says the potential for conflict is heightened. Colombian Defence Minister Gabriel Silva announced the formation of a new base in La Guajira in the north, near the Venezuelan border. At the same time, the Colombian army activated the new airborne battalions, which are equipped with US helicopters. The helicopter fleet, made up mainly of Blackhawks, now numbers 120, making the Colombian Army Air Corps the best equipped and most experienced in Latin America, the BBC's Jeremy McDermott in Colombia says. Preparing for war President Chavez has criticised a pact announced last month allowing US troops to use several bases in Colombia. Mr Silva said that the new base would have up to 1,000 soldiers. It would, he added, also have a care facility for indigenous Wayuu people who live in the area. Since Venezuelans were told by Mr Chavez to prepare for war and the Venezuelan army starting blowing up bridges that link the two nations, Colombia has been overhauling its defence strategy. Until now this strategy has been geared almost exclusively to fighting the country's 45-year Marxist insurgency. With the increasing build-up of military on both sides of the border, the potential for conflict is heightened, particularly when one considers 2,000 rebels in the border region prepared for a fight between the two nations, our correspondent says. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 21 08:13:09 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:13:09 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Chavez gives order to shoot down U.S. Drone Planes entering Venezuela Message-ID: see also Eva Golinger: US Military Agression against Venezuela escalating http://www.chavezcode.com/2009/12/us-military-aggression-against.html ============= http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=afLh0mswgVTE Chavez Says U.S. Drone Planes Entered Venezuela (Update2) By Daniel Cancel Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that U.S. pilotless planes have crossed the border recently from Colombia, and he's ordered his military to shoot down the drones if they appear in Venezuelan airspace again. A drone was spotted by troops near the Fuerte Mara military base, in the northwestern Zulia state, Chavez said. He said that Colombia and the U.S. are preparing for "aggressions" against Venezuela, after an agreement signed in October allows U.S. troops access to seven Colombian military bases for counternarcotics operations. "The other night, a drone plane entered Venezuelan airspace," Chavez said in comments on state television. "They can't enter one meter, but they're doing it. They control the planes remotely, planes that can even drop bombs. I'm alerting the international community that aggressions against Venezuela are increasing." The U.S. Embassy's press officer in Caracas, Robin Holzhauer, told Bloomberg News that the Venezuelan government hadn't told the embassy about the incident and that U.S. officials are "open" to a dialogue with the nation. Chavez, who froze relations with Colombia in July because of the military accord with the U.S., said that Colombia is increasing troop numbers along the shared border and the U.S. is sending more military planes to small bases in nearby Curacao and Aruba. Venezuelans should be calm and on alert, he said. In May 2008, a U.S. Navy S-3 aircraft crossed into Venezuelan airspace off the northern coast. Chavez claimed the plane was spying; the U.S. said that the error was because of navigational problems. The alleged violation of airspace is a "serious" incident and constitutes an "act of war," Chavez said. The drones may be spying by taking photographs and plotting coordinates of areas in Venezuela, he said. To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Cancel in Caracas at dcancel at bloomberg.net. Last Updated: December 20, 2009 16:49 EST =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 21 14:11:58 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:11:58 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Why Copenhagen Failed Message-ID: http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16612 Global Research December 19, 2009 Why Copenhagen Failed by Shamus Cooke To anybody interested in the future of the earth's climate, the conclusion of the Copenhagen conference represents either colossal disappointment or profound rage. The financial pledges- if honored- that rich nations made to poor nations will do nothing to combat global warming. The few climate related agreements that were made were of zero substance, especially when compared to what the situation demanded. The sorrowful outcome, however, could have been predicted in the conference's first week, based on two seemingly unrelated events: The conference showcased the largest police action in Denmark 's history (including mass arrests of "troublemakers"); while also producing the largest ever boom in limousine rentals. Both happenings helped reveal the true nature of the conference, spelling doom for climate progress. Contrary to the hopes of billions of people, the talks were a purely elite affair. Many of the thousands of delegates sent to the conference were not looking to save the planet, as advertised, but were looking out for the national interest of their native governments. Most of these countries are dominated by the "special interests" of giant corporations. Big business in the rich nations used the conference as a cynical maneuver to maintain their economic dominance over the "emerging business" in the developing countries. This fact was at first obscured by technical language, until the now-famous "Danish Text" was leaked to the press in the first week of the conference. This document was a conference proposal written by the U.S. and England, though submitted by Denmark. The Danish Text proposes that developed nations - the U.S., Europe, Japan, etc. - be allowed to pollute twice the amount of developing countries - China, India, Russia, Brazil, etc. - for the next fifty years. If enacted, the corporations of the developing nations would be forced to function under an incredible economic handicap. Their governments would have, of course, rejected such nonsense, giving the U.S. delegates the needed excuse to blame China for the failed talks (the U.S. media has done this with absolute disregard for facts). The Danish Text also proposed to move future climate talks out of the realm of the too-democratic UN into the U.S./Europe dominated World Bank. Obama has thus surpassed his predecessor in the realm of global arrogance. However, the U.S. torpedoed the talks long before they ever began, forcing the international media to campaign in favor of "lower expectations." The New York Times explains: ". when Mr. Obama and other world leaders met last month, they were forced to abandon the goal of reaching a binding accord at Copenhagen because the American political system is not ready to agree to a treaty that would force the United States, over time, to accept profound changes in its energy, transport and manufacturing [corporate] sectors." (December 13, 2009). Instead of building upon the foundation of the already-insufficient Kyoto Protocol, the Obama administration demanded a whole new structure, something that would take years to achieve. The Kyoto framework was abandoned because it included legally binding agreements, and was based on multi-lateral, agreed-upon reductions of greenhouse gasses (however insufficient). Instead, Obama proposed that ".each country set its own rules and to decide unilaterally how to meet its target." (The Guardian, September 15, 2009). This way, there is zero accountability, zero oversight, and therefore, zero climate progress. Any country may make any number of symbolic "pledges" to combat global warming, while actually doing very little to follow through - much like billions of dollars rich countries pledged to Africa that have yet to leave western bank accounts. Obama's maneuvering to ruin Copenhagen was correctly assessed by Canadian writer Naomi Klein, who said that Obama, like Bush, is "using multi-lateralism to destroy multi-lateralism." This means that Obama is participating in international organizations like the UN Copenhagen conference, with no intention of reaching agreements. Once the U.S. blames its overseas rivals for the failure to "cooperate," a more independent path can be struck. This is reminiscent of Bush's path to invading Iraq: he used the UN Security Council to pass resolutions against Iraq, which helped him weaken Iraq while strengthening U.S. public opinion. But when the Security Council wouldn't agree to an invasion, Bush assembled a pathetic "coalition of the willing" to attack, completely abandoning the UN (Obama appears to be following an identical approach with Iran). U.S. corporations wanted to dominate Iraq's huge oil reserves and other treasures, to the detriment of the corporations within Europe, Russia, and China. Another example of Obama's fake multi-lateralism is the World Trade Organization (WTO). The U.S. is again being blamed for blocking a multi-lateral agreement in this corporate-controlled organization - some U.S. corporations want market protection from rival corporations of other countries. The international WTO continues to be unofficially abandoned in favor of regional (unilateral) trade blocs like NAFTA, CAFTA, the EU, etc., increasing international tensions, which, if one looks below the surface, are conflicts between giant corporations based in rival nations, battling for control of international markets, raw materials, and cheap labor. The failure of the WTO, the UN, and now Copenhagen are all examples of an increasingly conflict-ridden world, based on the emerging economies challenging the rule of the old powers. This dynamic clearly resembles the situation prior to WWI, when the big powers - England and the U.S. - felt threatened by the rise of Germany and Japan, and used a strategy of "containment" to stunt their growth. The end result was war. This time, however, China, India, Brazil, and Russia are the emerging threats, and the issue of climate change is being used as yet another tactic to "contain" their growth. With such a dynamic unfolding, there can be no future multi-lateral agreements expected, minus the "symbolic" type that Copenhagen produced. The unbridgeable national conflicts are not the result of bad policy from na?ve leaders, but an inherent future of a market economy [capitalism]. Giant corporations in different countries are constantly growing and competing with each other for a very limited global marketplace, always attempting to monopolize markets, raw-materials, and labor by any means necessary. This vicious competition pushes all other social issues into the background - human needs are subordinate to blindly chasing profits. Such an irrationally competitive system cannot be smoothed over with good intentions and on-paper cooperation. Deeper, conflicting corporate interests between nations are the motor force pushing countries further apart the more cooperation is needed. But soon the fake cooperation Obama stresses will be too much for the U.S. corporate-elite to bear. Many of them are bored with the international community, especially when the U.S. is the sole military super-power in the world. Soon Obama's "failed attempts" to cooperate internationally will evolve into a more independent, Bush-like approach. The largely ignored UN is likely to be further pushed aside so that brute force can continue to dictate US international policy, an agenda already begun by the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Obama's expanding war in Pakistan, and the "looming threat" that supposedly Iran is. As long as governmental policy is dictated by the corporations - represented in the U.S. by the two party system - multi-lateralism and cooperation are doomed. Thus, the battle to save the environment and end war must include a fight against these corporations, who wield a political/economic vise grip over society. Only by publicly controlling these billionaire-owned mega-enterprises can the peaceful and cooperative impulses of the earth's people find their full expression. /Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (//www.workerscompass.org/ /). He can be reached at //shamuscook at yahoo.com/ =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 22 11:27:00 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:27:00 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Honduras: The Coup That Never Happened Message-ID: <2552E90F55D34A67A10981A89BF07585@agingCHS072729> http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/290.php#continue The B u l l e t Socialist Project . E-Bulletin No. 290 December 22, 2009 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Honduras: The Coup That Never Happened Tyler Shipley "When the media goes quiet, the walls speak." - graffiti in Tegucigalpa. (see photos) What strikes a visitor to the Honduran capital most immediately in this moment is the degree to which the social and political conflict that has erupted since the golpe de estado (coup d'etat) on June 28th is actually written on the walls, the fences, the rockfaces, bridges, errant bits of siding, abandoned buildings, and even the concrete upon which one walks. Though the discourse in the international press is muddled and misinformed, the situation in Honduras is very obvious to those who are here - as a quick taxi ride around Tegucigalpa demonstrates. Nov. 26, 2009 - Tegucigalpa, indeed all of the country, is covered in political graffiti. It doesn't take long to recognize that the state is in a moment of intense political struggle and repression, despite the international media's insistence that 'everything is fine.' Honduras has been long dominated by a handful of some ten to fifteen wealthy families. Everyone here knows their names - Facusse, Ferrari, Micheletti - and now they are scrawled on walls everywhere, next to accusations of golpista (coup-supporter) and asesino (assassin). These oligarchs used to be satisfied by controlling the economy and buying off the politicians, but they now increasingly insist upon exercising direct political control themselves, and their names show up more and more in congress, in the supreme court and now even in the executive branch. It is in that context that an event that fit perfectly the definition of a coup is being recast by the Honduran elite, and its foreign allies, as a constitutional transfer of power. Never mind that the democratically elected President was abducted from his home and flown out of the country in his pyjamas on the morning of a non-binding referendum on re-opening the constitution to reform. Never mind that the movement to reform the constitution was driven by a social movement that wanted to re-found the country along more equitable lines, breaking the decades of uncontested dominance by the few over the many. Never mind that President Manuel Zelaya's only transgression was that he was appealing directly to the people, in defiance of a congress and supreme court that was subservient to the oligarchy and would never consent to reforming a constitution that was written to serve their interests. These details - say the golpistas - are not important. Instead, they spin a tale in which Zelaya was a minion of Venezuela's President Hugo Ch?vez (who according to this discourse is inherently bad) and claim that Zelaya intended to change the constitution to make himself president-for-life. In order to preserve democracy, the story says, the congress and supreme court proceeded with a legal process to remove the elected president and replace him until new elections could be held. This story has been taken up by the international press, despite its being patently untrue, and repeated ad nauseam in the hopes of giving legitimacy to a process that seeks to re-entrench an oligarchy feeling its power threatened for the first time in decades. The U.S.S. Honduras The central issue at stake in Honduras today - and the spark for the oligarchy's risky decision to carry out the coup in June - is the increasingly adamant insistence on the part of Honduran social movements for a constituyente, the striking of an assembly to re-write the constitution. It was, indeed, this very question that was to be put to a non-binding referendum on the morning of the coup and it was expected that the people would support the idea overwhelmingly. Like many of its Central and South American neighbours, Honduras' principle legal code was written during a period dominated by U.S. Cold War imperialism and local comprador quasi-fascists. The legacy of the Operation Condor/School of the Americas era was, among so many other tragedies, legal and political structures that ensured the continued dominance of the elite few and Honduras was a perfect case study. In fact, the current constitution of Honduras was ratified in 1982, during the period in which it earned the nickname 'U.S.S. Honduras.' The most successful resistance group in Honduras in the 1970s was called the National Federation of Honduras Peasants (FENACH) and wasn't able to muster the kind of strength that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua built, nor even to achieve the limited level of challenge of the guerillas in Guatemala or El Salvador. As a result, Honduras became the perfect base for U.S. operations in Central America, and indeed the Contra Wars against Nicaragua were waged from the U.S. military base at Palmerola, just outside of Tegucigalpa, among countless other interventions and terror campaigns in the region. In addition to the 18 military bases it established and the 10,000 American troops stationed there, the U.S. also provided the Honduran armed forces with over $100-million between 1980-84. This infusion of money and technical support to the military and business elite reinforced the strength of the oligarchy in Tegucigalpa and led to dramatic increases in poverty, inequality and political repression. The 1982 constitution was written after decades of military dictatorship while Honduras was playing host to a U.S.-led paramilitary contra force of over 15,000 soldiers trained in what we now call 'counter-insurgency' - specializing in campaigns of terror against primarily poor and ill-equipped guerilla forces and their supporters. During that period, according to Joan Kruckewitt, "the use of repression, instead of concessions and reform, became the norm" and that "the military emerged from the period of U.S.-led militarization as the most powerful sector in the country, with few checks and balances to restrain them."[1] Indeed, between 1981-84, while the new constitution was being written, ratified and established into political order, the military carried out 214 political assassinations, 110 'disappearances,' and 1,947 illegal detentions. Given that context, calling the 1982 constitution 'representative' of any but the most elite strata of Honduran society would be patently absurd; the vast majority of people in the country were living in abject poverty and ceaseless fear of their own soldiers and police. But as the political climate in Latin America has shifted, and as new openings for emancipatory projects have emerged, Hondurans have become increasingly insistent on the need to re-establish the country on their own terms. Social movements centered around trade-unions, human rights and campesino groups increasingly drew people from a wide variety of Honduran civil society into a broad movement for significant reform, and had their greatest successes between 2005-2008 under President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya. June 28th and the Demise of Democracy Perhaps the most interesting thing about June 28th was the way that it created Mel Zelaya as a popular figure in Honduras. He was elected President in 2005 as a member of the Liberal Party, one of the two primary parties, neither known for any history of radicalism. Zelaya's own background was as a junior-member of the oligarchy, a wealthy rancher from the south, and his long political career had never shown any signs of divergence from the standard conservatism of Honduran politics. In fact, the only thing that separated Zelaya from someone like Roberto Micheletti - the tremendously unpopular figure who emerged as de facto President after the coup - was that he recognized the growing popularity of the movements for social reform. His decisions to raise the minimum wage, to declare a moratorium on foreign mining concessions and to veto a law banning birth-control pills were not simply manifestations of his own radical spirit, no matter how noble his intentions may have been. No, Zelaya executed in a calculating way - through undeniably positive - political decisions that kept him palatable to the people on whom his support relied. Indeed, he relied on that support increasingly after his support for the constituent assembly broke him from his allies in the Liberal Party. But Zelaya before June 28th was simply a means to an end for the social movements in Honduras - a politician who had proven to be malleable to demonstrations of popular politics. His endorsement of the constituyente was the most important move he made and, in fact, he conducted the process with due diligence to the existing constitution and, despite its being repeated in every AP news bulletin since the coup, it never contained even the possibility of giving Zelaya another term in office. The process was to be as follows: on June 28th, Hondurans would vote in a non-binding referendum on whether they supported the addition of a fourth ballot in the general elections scheduled for Nov. 29th. Normally, Honduran elections feature three ballots, corresponding to each of the three levels of government. If the referendum came back with a strong 'yes,' Zelaya would have added the fourth ballot asking the question "do you support the creation of a national constituent assembly to re-draft the constitution?" Accordingly, the constitution could not have possibly been changed before the Nov. 29th elections, and so Zelaya could not have possibly stood for re-election. Furthermore, the primaries for that election had already taken place and, again, Zelaya's name was not put forward - even had he wanted to, it was illegal. The notion that Zelaya intended to manipulate the process to stay in power is patently absurd. But the Honduran Congress, packed with members of the oligarchy, felt that the re-opening of the constitution could represent a real threat to their stranglehold on power and refused to accept the idea. Zelaya, in response, appealed directly to the people - implicitly rejecting the legitimacy of the Honduran form of representative democracy that had brought him to power in the first place - and vowed to pursue the constituyente if the people asked for it. Of course, that process never went ahead, because the morning that the first non-binding poll was supposed to happen, Zelaya was abducted by the military and flown to Costa Rica. Roberto Micheletti was sworn in as de facto President, and the referendum was cancelled. Dramatic footage from that morning showed people in the early hours of the day, coming out to vote and finding the military in the streets - outrage turned to despair which, in turn, was channeled into absolute determination to resist this transparently coercive undermining of popular will. Demonstrations erupted in the immediate aftermath of the coup, and the golpista regime expected them to last for only a few days. Unlike Zelaya, they underestimated the strength and commitment of the Honduran movement for reform. Resistencia! "I'm proud that Hondurans are usually so peaceful, but I'm even more proud that we're finally standing up for ourselves." - Rosa Mayda Martinez, office worker, Jutiapa. What followed was the largest sustained demonstration in Central American history. For 156 straight days, Hondurans took to the streets of Tegucigalpa. The numbers fluctuated from as high as hundreds of thousands to the still impressive thousands that were protesting right up to the day of the 'elections' on Nov. 29th. Predictably, they met widespread and violent repression. Between June and November, 33 people were killed in political violence and hundreds more were detained, beaten, kidnapped, raped and otherwise victimized by an increasingly militarized state apparatus. In September, President Zelaya returned to the country and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy, where he still remains, guarded by police who are under orders to arrest him the moment he leaves Brazilian territory. Nov. 29, 2009 - In the southern town of Jutiapa, the community has refused to be intimidated by the military and police. Despite kidnappings and detentions, beating and death threats, and a ceaseless campaign of terror, they hang a banner on the main road through town declaring themselves against the coup and the elections. They pose for a photo, cheering beneath their banner, knowing that police are stationed just a few blocks away. There is much more to be said about the nature of the resistance than space here permits. For the time being, it will have to suffice to say that the coup produced the unintended consequence of uniting an otherwise fragmented group of organizations into a broad coalition - the Frente Popular Nacional de Resistencia (National Popular Resistance Front) - which has become the most important popular organization in Honduras. Its members come primarily from the poorest classes - workers and campesinos - but are also drawn from the relatively small 'middle' classes, including teachers, lawyers, doctors, left-liberal politicians and civil servants etc. They have worked closely with local human rights organizations and some foreign NGOs, but they have maintained absolute autonomy from foreign interlocutors (whatever their intentions) in defiance of the characterization of the Frente as a Ch?vez-exported ring of professional troublemakers and socialists. The demonstrations have not been limited to Tegucigalpa. The second largest city in Honduras, San Pedro Sula, is a major industrial center and is the epicenter of foreign-owned Honduran maquiladora-style production. Protests have erupted there regularly, including one on the day of the Nov. 29th 'elections.' It was repressed with tear gas and rubber bullets injuring dozens of people, including a Reuters photographer from Brazil. Furthermore, rural Hondurans have been active in the resistance, blocking highways, distributing information and protesting outside government offices. Only a few areas of Honduras have not seen major movements against the coup - primarily Roatan and the Bay Islands, a ring of tropical island destinations off the north coast, dotted with, and politically controlled by, foreign-owned resort hotels (many of them Canadian). The foreign and local elite who have turned the islands, and most of their inhabitants, into tools for their personal profit have been the most vocally supportive of the coup. They pump out misleading or, at best, willfully ignorant anti-Zelaya rants everywhere they can, notably on internet news sites; my own reports have been consistently attacked and, in one instance, they even went as far as to threaten my life. These attacks are most likely motivated by the insistence of the social movements for tax reforms that would bring a share of their profits back to the state for the purposes of re-distribution through increased support for education, housing, health care and other social programs. Foreign-owned companies currently operate in an almost-entirely tax free environment, one of the many grievances that the proponents of the constituyente were hoping to redress. The Re-Emergence of State Terror "In my case, I am known by the police, they can do anything to me. I thought about moving to a new house with comrades, do you think this is a good idea?" - Rosner Giovanni Reyes, member of Resistance, in a meeting with COFADEH representatives, Nov. 28th, 2009. But the golpistas and their beneficiaries are bound and determined to block that process indefinitely. Repression of the resistance has been violent and thorough. Human rights groups like the Committee of the Families of the Disappeared and Detained in Honduras (COFADEH) have worked tirelessly since June 28th to produce detailed documentation of the brutality. Their reports, not surprisingly, fall on deaf ears. The campaign of state terror they have documented is too far-reaching to possibly reproduce here, but they provided a very useful summation in a report on Nov. 28th. This report, produced by the five leading human rights groups in Honduras, was presented to the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) on the day before the 'elections' in a formal declaration demanding that the elections be cancelled on account of the impossibility of their being fair and free in the context of the coup and state terror: "(These elections are being conducted) in a context of grave and systematic violations of human rights. Since the day of the coup, we have documented 33 violent and politically motivated deaths, torture, cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment, sexual assault and restrictions on freedom of association, assembly, expression, opinion and more."[2] They go on to note that holding elections under these circumstances is absurd, given that the same people who are committing this violence are those who are supposed to be responsible for running fair elections. They also note some of the most high-profile cases of repression. Carlos H. Reyes, a member of the social movements and initially an independent Presidential candidate, was hospitalized after a brutal blow from police in a peaceful demonstration. Ulises Sarmiento, a well-known member of the Liberal Party who sympathized with the resistance had his home ransacked by soldiers with automatic weapons in the province of Olancho. Eliseo Hernandez Juarez, a vice-mayoral candidate, was assassinated. Not surprisingly, the violence has not been limited to high-profile politicians. Victor Corrales Mejia and his son, members of the resistance, were arrested the night before the elections and beaten in their home. Police came to their home, hit Victor in the head and spine with batons and threatened to kill him. "They kicked in my door, they threw me out like I was a sack of corn, they want to intimidate us," he told me. "But our desire for democracy is stronger than they are." In Comayagua, where the resistance is strong and led by teachers, campesinos and women's and indigenous rights activists, the Mayor threatened to give the names and addresses of anyone who interfered with the election to the military. In fact, the military sent a letter a month before the elections demanding such lists from all the Mayors across the country. Meanwhile, state henchmen shot Alejandro Villatoro, the owner of Radio Globo - one of the few media outlets brave enough to speak out against the coup - and stole the computer from which the station was broadcasting. Indeed, Radio Globo had by that point resorted almost exclusively to broadcasting online from secret locations, after months of repression. Radio Globo, along with Radio Progreso and Radio Uno, television station Canal 36 and newspaper El Libertador are among the media outlets that have faced relentless repression since the coup. Some, like Canal 36, have shut down altogether after having equipment destroyed, signals interrupted, offices ransacked and editors assassinated. Even organizations that are not directly linked to the resistance are being targeted in the context of police impunity. Red Comal, a campesino organization that helps small farmers to market their produce and runs educational campaigns designed to build networks between campesinos and social movements, had its offices attacked, computers and money stolen, and employees beaten. Miguel Alonzo Macias, the director of the organization, explained to me, "we teach people why they are poor. For that, we are a threat." Whitewashing the Coup "No to the coup regime elections! Free men and women of Honduras, they want to use your vote to legalize the coup. Each vote is a blow to your freedom." - Resistencia poster. Given the context described above, it is hard to imagine how anyone could seriously claim that 'the event' on Nov. 29th could be called a free or fair election. On the day of the vote, the Frente urged Hondurans to stay home and boycott la farsa (farce). And that is precisely what happened - on a day that is normally a boisterous street party filled with red or blue flags representing to the two primary political parties, Honduras was quiet and subdued. Most polling stations had more military and police than civilians. The TSE itself admitted that only around 1.7 million people voted, in a country of nearly 8 million, with 4.6 million eligible to vote. That makes a turnout of around 35%, the lowest since the end of military dictatorships in the early 80s. Inexplicably, on the night of Nov. 29th, the TSE announced a projected turnout of 60%, which became the number repeated in almost every international news source. Fox News in the United States was one of the few exceptions, reporting the absurd figure of 70% - no one has yet been able to explain where that number came from. A few days after the election, video journalist Jesse Freeston of the Real News was able to get into the TSE headquarters and produced a video documenting fraudulent reporting of voter totals, designed to create the illusion that Hondurans had not boycotted the election. This documentation is important in demonstrating to the international community that these elections should never be recognized as legitimate in any way. But it is totally unnecessary for Hondurans themselves, who knew long before the elections ever took place that they would be a sham, and had that knowledge confirmed on Nov. 29th. As the human rights organizations explained in their Nov. 28th document: "holding reliable elections does not depend solely on the implementation of sophisticated technology, international observers or the strict adherence to the formal process; it also requires knowing that there was a clean process preceding the elections, produced by a climate of full freedom, one where candidates and the electorate can express themselves openly and in a context of absolute equality, without fear of assassination, torture, detention and incarceration."[3] Indeed, an interview I conducted with Edward Fox, a former USAID official, Republican campaign financer and an elections observer sent from Washington to legitimate the process, demonstrated quite plainly that the few organizations who went to Honduras for Nov. 29th were not interested in investigating what was happening away from the polling stations. As we spoke on camera from Miami International Airport on Dec. 1st, Fox claimed to know nothing about "alleged" human rights violations, cast suspicion on the groups documenting the violence despite not being able to name a single one of them, and justified his endorsement of the elections by telling me that he had spoken to the U.S. Ambassador who is, Fox reminded me, "there all the time." His organization, the Washington Senior Observer Group, reported that they: "witnessed the enthusiastic desire of thousands of Honduran citizens to cast their ballots. Many took time to thank us for our presence today. Without exception, they expressed confidence in the electoral system, pride in exercising their right to vote, and a profound hope that their election is a decisive step toward the restoration of the constitutional and democratic order in Honduras."[4] They further asserted that they saw "no voter intimidation by any group, individual, or party" and that their observations "coincide with those reported by other observers and by the media throughout Honduras." Nonetheless, when I asked Edward Fox about those other observers, the groups who have been documenting the violence and terror, he admitted that he had not spoken to any of them. Avoiding them must have taken some effort, because when those groups presented their report to the TSE on Nov. 28th, the U.S. observers were there; in fact, the human rights delegation had their meeting scheduled for 2:00 p.m. but had to wait until well after 4:00 p.m. because TSE officials were meeting with the U.S. observers. We were all there together, and at one point I overheard the U.S. observers chatting amongst themselves derisively about the human rights group and about Honduras in general. Looking Ahead "Where are the people? The people are in the streets, struggling for their freedom!" - Resistencia chant. Sadly, though not surprisingly, reports like Fox's bolstered the positions taken by governments of the global North and their right-wing allies in Latin America. Both have fallen all over themselves to legitimate the election process and, in so doing, legitimate the coup itself. Canada's foreign affairs minister Peter Kent responded to the elections announcing that Canada: "congratulates the Honduran people for the relatively peaceful and orderly manner in which the country's elections were conducted. While Sunday's elections were not monitored by international organizations such as the Organization of American States, we are encouraged by reports from civil society organizations that there was a strong turnout for the elections, that they appear to have been run freely and fairly, and that there was no major violence."[5] Much more needs to be said about Canada's relationship to Honduras and the golpistas. A petition, calling for non-recognition of the elections is circulating and has garnered nearly 400 names - a small step toward building public awareness of Canada's complicity in this desecration of democracy and human rights. In the meantime, a death squad killed five more people on a street corner on Dec. 6. A human rights worker with links to Amnesty International was murdered on Dec. 14. The teenaged daughter of a critical journalist was found dead on Dec. 16. Repression has increased and turned even more vicious and calculated since the farce elections; the regime has evidently been emboldened by their successful misrepresentation of the fiesta democratica and the willingness of the international media to ignore the reality facing the majority of Hondurans. Nonetheless, the resistance continues, having realized long ago that this will be a long struggle. It is hard to predict at this point what shape the struggle will take in the coming months, though it is clear that the Jan. 27th transfer of power to golpe-President-elect Pepe Lobo - Pepe Robo (the Robber) as the walls call him - will be another flashpoint for the resistance. "The police keep telling us they will come to our homes and take us away, and it makes us want to run," says Francisca, a high school teacher in Comayagua. "But we have worked too hard for too long to build the homes we have." . Tyler Shipley is a doctoral candidate and activist from Toronto, Canada. He did research and human rights observation in Tegucigalpa with a delegation organized by Rights Action, reporting on the resistance to the coup and the Nov. 29 elections. The entire photo essay "Honduras Police State - A Week In Pictures" is at available at toronto.mediacoop.ca. Notes 1. Joan Kruckewitt, "U.S. Militarization of Honduras in the 1980s and the Creation of CIA-backed Death Squads," in Cecilia Mejivar and Nestor Rodriguez, When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 2005. 2. Official Statement by representatives of CODEH, COFADEH, FIAN, CDM, CPTRT, CIPRODEH to the TSE, Nov. 28, 2009. Translated from Spanish. 3. Ibid. 4. Statement on the National Elections in Honduras, Washington Senior Observer Group, December 1, 2009. 5. Peter Kent, "Canada Congratulates Honduran People on Elections," December 1, 2009. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( The B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 22 11:38:38 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:38:38 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] This Is About Us Message-ID: <8CD75B500EC047E2B37A92B13F17BD8C@agingCHS072729> http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/12/14/this-is-about-us/ This Is About Us The talks at Copenhagen are not just about climate change. They represent a battle to redefine humanity. by George Monbiot Published in the Guardian (December 15 2009) This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us. The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks. The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accomodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow. This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness. The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings. I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's interests forbid us to live. Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battlelines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments, and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands. So here we are, in the land of Beowulf's heroics, lost in a fog of acronyms and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required to accommodate everyone's demands. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it. Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe that they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved. While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accomodated on a finite planet. For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change. There's another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can. We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of sixty per cent of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees {1}. We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion. But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it - rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth - must begin. If governments don't show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers' weakness. They will attack - using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest - the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world's ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this is a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today. www.monbiot.com Reference: {1} http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/08/31/not-even-wrong/ From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 22 13:31:49 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:31:49 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] For Obama, No Opportunity Too Big To Blow Message-ID: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/copenhagen/508215/for_obama_no_opportunity_to_big_to_blow 12/21/2009 For Obama, No Opportunity Too Big To Blow by Naomi Klein Contrary to countless reports, the debacle in Copenhagen was not everyone's fault. It did not happen because human beings are incapable of agreeing, or are inherently self-destructive. Nor was it all was China's fault, or the fault of the hapless UN. There's plenty of blame to go around, but there was one country that possessed unique power to change the game. It didn't use it. If Barack Obama had come to Copenhagen with a transformative and inspiring commitment to getting the U.S. economy off fossil fuels, all the other major emitters would have stepped up. The EU, Japan, China and India had all indicated that they were willing to increase their levels of commitment, but only if the U.S. took the lead. Instead of leading, Obama arrived with embarrassingly low targets and the heavy emitters of the world took their cue from him. (The "deal" that was ultimately rammed through was nothing more than a grubby pact between the world's biggest emitters: I'll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.) I understand all the arguments about not promising what he can't deliver, about the dysfunction of the U.S. Senate, about the art of the possible. But spare me the lecture about how little power poor Obama has. No President since FDR has been handed as many opportunities to transform the U.S. into something that doesn't threaten the stability of life on this planet. He has refused to use each and every one of them. Let's look at the big three. Blown Opportunity Number 1: The Stimulus Package When Obama came to office he had a free hand and a blank check to design a spending package to stimulate the economy. He could have used that power to fashion what many were calling a "Green New Deal" -- to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. Instead, he experimented disastrously with reaching across the aisle to Republicans, low-balling the size of the stimulus and blowing much of it on tax cuts. Sure, he spent some money on weatherization, but public transit was inexplicably short changed while highways that perpetuate car culture won big. Blown Opportunity Number 2: The Auto Bailouts Speaking of the car culture, when Obama took office he also found himself in charge of two of the big three automakers, and all of the emissions for which they are responsible. A visionary leader committed to the fight against climate chaos would obviously have used that power to dramatically reengineer the failing industry so that its factories could build the infrastructure of the green economy the world desperately needs. Instead Obama saw his role as uninspiring down-sizer in chief, leaving the fundamentals of the industry unchanged. Blown Opportunity Number 3: The Bank Bailouts Obama, it's worth remembering, also came to office with the big banks on their knees -- it took real effort not to nationalize them. Once again, if Obama had dared to use the power that was handed to him by history, he could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn't tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it's harder than ever to get a loan. Imagine if these three huge economic engines -- the banks, the auto companies, the stimulus bill -- had been harnessed to a common green vision. If that had happened, demand for a complementary energy bill would have been part of a coherent transformative agenda. Whether the bill had passed or not, by the time Copenhagen had rolled around, the U.S. would already have been well on its way to dramatically cutting emissions, poised to inspire, rather than disappoint, the rest of the world. There are very few U.S. Presidents who have squandered as many once-in-a-generation opportunities as Barack Obama. More than anyone else, the Copenhagen failure belongs to him. Research support for Naomi Klein's reporting from Copenhagen was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 22 13:35:09 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:35:09 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Whose foreign policy is it? Message-ID: <35202C837AE543E5A9EE4E579715F8FC@agingCHS072729> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/21/british-foreign-policy-democratic-deficit#history-byline The Guardian 21 December 2009 Whose foreign policy is it? There's a democratic deficit at the heart of UK policymaking. But voters do have the political tools to change the balance of power David Wearing While few people would expect every government policy to precisely reflect majority public opinion, it is hard to see what is democratic about a British foreign policy whose very fundamentals - agreed by both Labour and the Conservatives - are consistently opposed by voters. Britain is not a totalitarian state. It has regular elections and free speech, and its citizens have the freedom to organise politically. So how is it that such a democratic deficit exists when it comes to the country's role in the world? In February 2003, more than 90% of Britons opposed Tony Blair's government joining the invasion of Iraq in the absence of a second UN resolution. As we know, the invasion went ahead the following month without such a resolution being passed. Three years later, 63% thought Blair had tied Britain too closely to the Bush White House. In the same poll, 61% opposed the assault on Lebanon that Israel was undertaking at that time - an assault that was nevertheless effectively supported by Britain. At present, both main parties plan to renew the Trident nuclear system, despite opposition from 63% of voters. Fifty-four per cent of Britons express support for the rule of international law yet, last week, Gordon Brown's government began discussing "safeguards" to exempt suspected war criminals from the reach of British courts. The de facto purpose of Britain's foreign policy has traditionally been to advance the interests of various concentrations of social and economic power, not to reflect the will of the voting public. Above all, it is the commercial interests of those best placed to influence the government that tend to be prioritised by policymakers. This in turn is why Britain has supported the US-led maintenance of a global system seen as amenable to those commercial interests, and tried to maximise Britain's influence within that system. This picture needs to be placed in an historical context. While we think of globalisation as a recent phenomenon, its roots go back to the imperial age of the 19th century. Then, Britain presided not merely over an empire but over a global trading system, lubricated by credit from London's banks, underwritten by its insurers, and imposed on weaker nations by military force. The devastation wrought by the calamitous years of 1914-1945 dealt a fatal blow to the country's capacity to perform this global management role. The task was inherited by the US, whose view of how the world should be organised economically and politically was broadly consistent with that of British elites. London therefore sought to protect its economic power and international status by placing itself close to Washington. The instruction given by Blair's chief of staff to Britain's ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer, to "get up the arse of the White House and stay there", was an expression of that longstanding policy. At a time when taxpayers face spending a generation paying off the gambling debts of the City, the disproportionate influence of wealth over policymakers is not a difficult concept to understand. This influence is exerted in myriad ways - some obvious, some less so. Wealth is power. It buys lobbying consultants, concentrates the minds of politicians in need of campaign donations, owns most of the media and is generally well-placed to make life easy or difficult for government depending to what extent its needs are being met. The dividing line between public and private interests is in any case far from clear. In a country with low social mobility, people in positions of state or corporate power are disproportionately likely to have come from wealthy backgrounds, and to have internalised the general values and outlook associated with that background. The interests of this elite are diverse but broad consistency exists, and sets the framework for how the country is governed. The public-private boundaries are particularly blurred when it comes to foreign policy. As Anthony Sampson noted in his recent study of power in modern Britain, Who Runs This Place?, "many [British] embassies now include temporary 'secondees' from big corporations, including BP, Shell, banks and construction companies, who pay their salaries". Two years ago the Guardian reported that "the chief lobbyist of Britain's biggest arms company [BAE Systems] was given an official security pass allowing him to wander freely around the Ministry of Defence". Access comes at all levels. Sampson quotes former foreign secretary Robin Cook saying BAE's chairman "appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10", and that "certainly I never once knew No 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommodating to British Aerospace". Of Washington's influence over Whitehall there is much that can be said, but one aspect is perhaps more telling than most. Britain's retention of an "independent nuclear deterrent" is probably the most obvious example of an attempt to bridge what the historian Paul Kennedy called "the divergence between Britain's shrunken economic state and its overextended strategic posture". Yet British nuclear weapons have always been reliant on US management and technology. The effect of this longstanding dependency is, in the words of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's permanent secretary, Sir Robert Scott, to "put us in America's pocket". It is reasonable to assume that the 2004 renewal of the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement was one factor in the minds of policymakers during the early years of the "war on terror" and in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. These are just some of the pressures that crowd the public's voice out of decision-making. Locating power and mapping influence with real precision is a complex task in relatively open societies like Britain's, and this article provides just a snapshot. Nevertheless, evidence of a serious democratic deficit in British foreign policy is reasonably clear. What remains then for the public is a choice: accept marginalisation, or use our political freedoms to change the balance of power. From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 22 13:39:28 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:39:28 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] New War Order Message-ID: <70E895DAEA224112B6C9E3001F252229@agingCHS072729> http://amconmag.com/article/2010/feb/01/00022/ The American Conservative February 01, 2010 Issue New War Order How Panama set the course for post-Cold War foreign policy By Ted Galen Carpenter For a fleeting moment 20 years ago, the United States had the chance to become a normal nation again. From World War II through the collapse of European communism in 1989, America had been in a state of perpetual war, hot or cold. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, all of that could have changed. There were no more monsters to destroy, no Nazi war machine or global communist conspiracy. For the first time in half a century, the industrialized world was at peace. Then in December 1989, America went to war again-this time not against Hitler or Moscow's proxies but with Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Tensions between George H.W. Bush's administration and Noriega's government had been mounting for some time and climaxed when a scuffle with Panamanian troops left an American military officer dead. On Dec. 20, U.S. forces moved to oust and arrest Noriega. Operation Just Cause, as the invasion was called, came less than a month after the Berlin Wall fell, and it set America on a renewed path of intervention. The prospect of reducing American military involvement in other nations' affairs slipped away, thanks to the precedent set in Panama. How real was the opportunity to change American foreign policy at that point? Real enough to worry the political class. Wyoming Sen. Malcolm Wallop lamented in 1989 that there was growing pressure to cut the military budget and that Congress was being overwhelmed by a "1935-style isolationism." But the invasion of Panama signaled that Washington was not going to pursue even a slightly more restrained foreign policy. That the U.S. would topple the government of a neighbor to the south was hardly unprecedented, of course. The United States had invaded small Caribbean and Central American countries on numerous occasions throughout the 20th century. Indeed, before the onset of Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in the 1930s, Washington routinely overthrew regimes it disliked. During the Cold War, however, such operations always had a connection to the struggle to keep Soviet influence out of the Western Hemisphere. The CIA-orchestrated coup in Guatemala in 1954 and the military occupations of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983 all matched that description. Whatever other motives may have been involved, the Cold War provided the indispensable justification for intervention. And for all the rhetoric about democracy and human rights that U.S. presidents employed during the struggle against communism, there was no indication that Washington would later revert to the practice of coercing Latin American countries merely, in Woodrow Wilson's infamous words, to teach those societies "to elect good men." Thus the invasion of Panama seemed a noticeable departure. Odious though he may have been, Noriega was never a Soviet stooge. The motives that President Bush cited for the Panama intervention foreshadowed the rationales for nation-building and so-called humanitarian missions that would recur frequently over the next two decades. Among other goals, the president said, the invasion aimed to "defend democracy in Panama." He expressed hope "that the people of Panama will put this dark chapter of dictatorship behind them and move forward as citizens of a democratic Panama." Bush emphasized that "the Panamanian people want democracy, peace, and a chance for better life in dignity and freedom. The people of the United States seek only to support them in pursuit of these noble goals"-apparently with U.S. troops, if necessary. Questions immediately arose in the media and elsewhere as to whether the Panama mission was an isolated example-or whether it was a template for a new American global strategy. Time correspondent George J. Church asked the question that was on many minds: "Does this suggest a new post-cold war foreign policy that casts the U.S. as a different kind of global policeman, acting to save democracy rather than to stop Soviet expansionism?" He noted that administration officials "affirm that Bush is showing a new willingness to use American military power to further U.S. interests that have little or nothing to do with communism." The worrisome question was how those "U.S. interests" would be defined. An answer came less than a year later, in an area far removed from the Western Hemisphere, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Bush administration's initial reaction seemed surprisingly restrained. Secretary of State James Baker reportedly quipped to his cabinet colleagues that it "appeared that the sign on the [Middle East] gas station just changed," an attitude that conveyed little alarm about a possible threat to American interests. It was not clear that the president ever shared that complacency, however. He certainly didn't after a bracing conversation with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who admonished him not to "go wobbly." The United States ultimately adopted a policy that was the antithesis of wobbly, sending more than half a million American troops to the Persian Gulf, at first to dissuade Saddam from expansionist designs he might have on Saudi Arabia, then finally to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. But if President Bush at times justified this large-scale military venture in language that echoed his Panama rhetoric, there were at least some tangible U.S. interests at stake, notably keeping the main global source of oil production and reserves in friendly hands. That was not even remotely the case in the next, and last, military intervention of the elder Bush's administration, where we saw the full flowering of the Panama precedent: the humanitarian mission in Somalia. That mission, launched in December 1992, confirmed what Panama had suggested: that the ideology of democracy, human rights, and nation-building had become a motive for police action anywhere in the world. America had no stake in Somalia, vital or otherwise, and administration officials made little attempt to pretend that it did. The justifications for sending more than 20,000 troops halfway around the world were purely altruistic. The narrow object of the U.S. military intervention in East Africa was to distribute food and medical supplies to relieve Somalis long caught up in a multisided civil war. But such small-scale humanitarian goals were never realistic, and perhaps not even sincere. U.S. forces soon became entangled in Somalia's complex, chaotic politics. The involvement of the United Nations, which Bush embraced, meant that the mission would inevitably have a wider, nation-building aspect. Any reluctance that the outgoing president might have had on that score was not shared by incoming Clinton officials. The new president's spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers candidly stated, "We went in there with a clear vision of humanitarian relief and nation-building." To that was added a murky vision of regime change. Just as the Panama invasion centered on the person of Manuel Noriega, and Saddam Hussein personified evil during the Gulf War, Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed became the focus of President Clinton's-and the media's-attention. Aideed proved more elusive than Noriega: a botched attempt to arrest him led to a running firefight in the capital of Mogadishu and left 18 Army Rangers dead. The Clinton administration ultimately withdrew U.S. forces following that bloody incident, but the president and his advisers did not lose their enthusiasm for nation-building and regime change. Indeed, Somalia was just the beginning. The following year U.S. troops landed in Haiti to restore the elected president (and populist demagogue) Jean Bertrand Aristide to office. Later, U.S. air power was brought to bear against Bosnian Serbs to influence the civil war in Bosnia. That was followed by the dispatch of ground forces to implement the Dayton Accords. This was the new norm-there may no longer have been a global menace to contend against, but dictators and warlords now had to be overthrown or hemmed in to ensure democracy and human rights. Virtually no one in the Clinton administration argued that Bosnia was essential to the security and well-being of the United States. Although Secretary of State Warren Christopher made a feeble attempt to justify intervention on the basis of general American security concerns-much as canal security and the wider implications for the drug war had been invoked in the Panama invasion-even he did not seriously argue that a parochial conflict could trigger another world war. Instead, he asserted, "This is an important moment for our nation's post-Cold War role in Europe and the world. It tests our commitment to the nurturing of democracy and the support of environments in which democracy can grow and take root." The U.S. was now responsible for guaranteeing order everywhere, not only in our relative "backyard" of Latin America but from the Middle East to the Horn of Africa to the Balkans. The United States had assumed an identity as leader and defender of the free world during the Cold War. After the fall of European communism, the whole world was "free"-or should have been, in the eyes of our foreign-policy elites. There was no systematic challenger to U.S. power, and the only thing standing in the way of universal prosperity and democracy was the occasional Third World strong man. The Cold War itself had never been about democracy or human rights-not really-but it became an incubator for this new ideology. After the Berlin Wall fell, the war against the Noriegas of the world could begin-and it provided a convenient pretext for maintaining U.S. military power at Cold War levels. There was a new world to order, after all. Operation Just Cause was a catalyst for Washington's new role not only as worldwide policeman, but as global armed social worker. There was a time two decades ago when empire could have been forsaken. But instead of coming home, we went to Panama City. | __________________________________________ Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 22 14:56:05 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:56:05 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Now I'm Really Getting Pissed Off Message-ID: <88F3830AC5394E3CB739EA49D679D0AC@agingCHS072729> Now I'm Really Getting Pissed Off http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24229.htm By David Michael Green December 21,2009 Hey did you hear about the iconic African-American guy who plays golf, and whose relationship with the public is in a free-fall lately? No, as a matter of fact - I'm not talking about Tiger Woods. You know, I've really been trying not to write an article every other week about all the things I don't like about Barack Obama. But the little prick is making it very hard. Like any good progressive, I've gone from admiration to hope to disappointment to anger when it comes to this president. Now I'm fast getting to rage. How much rage? I find myself thinking that the thing I want most from the 2010 elections is for his party to get absolutely clobbered, even if that means a repeat of 1994. And that what I most want from 2012 is for him to be utterly humiliated, even if that means President Palin at the helm. That much rage. Did this clown really say on national television that "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street"?!?! Really, Barack? So, like, my question is: Then why the hell did you help out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street?!?! Why the hell did you surround yourself with nothing but Robert Rubin proteges in all the key economic positions in your government? Why did you allow them to open a Washington branch of Goldman Sachs in the West Wing? Why have your policies been tailored to helping Wall Street bankers, rather than the other 300 million of us, who just happen to be suffering badly right now? Are you freakin' kidding me??? What's up with the passive president routine, anyhow, Fool? You hold the most powerful position in the world. Or maybe Rahm forgot to mention that to you. Or maybe the fat cat bankers don't actually let do that whole decision-making thing often enough that it would actually matter... But, really, are you going to spend the next three interminable years perfecting your whiney victim persona? I don't really think I could bear that. Hearing you complain about how rough it all is, when you have vastly more power than any of us to fix it? Please. Not that. Are you going to tell us that "I did not run for office to be shovel-feeding the military-industrial complex"? But what - they're just so darned pushy? "...I did not run for office to continue George Bush's valiant effort at shredding the Bill of Rights. It's just that those government-limiting rules are so darned pesky." "...I did not run for office to dump a ton of taxpayer money into the coffers of health insurance companies. It's just that they asked so nicely." "...I did not run for office to block equality for gay Americans. I just never got around to doing anything about it." "...I did not run for office to turn Afghanistan into Vietnam. I just didn't want to say no to all the nice generals asking for more troops." Here's a guy who was supposed to actually do something with his presidency, and he's turned into the skinny little geek on Cell Block D who gets passed around like a rag doll for the pleasure of all the fellas with the tattoos there. He's being punked by John Boehner, for chrisakes. He's being rolled by the likes of Joe Lieberman. He calls a come-to-Jesus meeting with Wall Street bank CEOs, and half of them literally phone it in. Everyone from Bibi Netanyahu to the Japanese prime minister to sundry Iranian mullahs is stomping all over Mr. Happy. And he doesn't even seem to realize it. Did you see him tell Oprah that he gave himself "a good solid B+" for his first year in office? And that it will be an A, if he gets his healthcare legislation passed? Somebody please pick me up and set me back on my chair, wouldya? I am seriously beginning to worry that this cat is delusional. He has lopped off twenty full points from his job approval rating in less than a year's time, falling now below fifty percent. His party, once dominant in generic congressional election poll questions, is today almost even with hated Republicans in the public mind. Last month, Obama's inverted coattails (don't even ask where those go) got two Democrats clobbered running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. The otherwise obnoxious George F. Will (very) rightly points out that in Kentucky, "a Republican candidate succeeded in nationalizing a state Senate race. Hugely outspent in a district in which Democrats have a lopsided registration advantage, the Republican won by 12 points a seat in Frankfort by running against Washington". Wow. Obama is now wrecking state senate races! What's next? Will local Republican candidates for sheriff win office just by opposing the embarrassment in the White House who chooses abysmal policies and then refuses to fight for them, lest he should ruffle any feathers? "For Democrats, the red flags are flying at full mast," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart in a recent AP article. "What we don't know for certain is: Have we reached a bottoming-out point?" Au contraire, Peter. Au contraire. I think anyone more sentient than a newborn amoeba can answer that question. The first thing to note is that the economy is not coming back anytime soon, if it comes back at all. Unless, of course, you're a fat cat Wall Street banker. Then you're just fine, because the Bush-Obama administration took care of you quite nicely, thanks very much. The rest of us poor slobs out here in real-world land, on the other hand, got a "jobs summit". I can't even begin to describe how insulting Obama conducting a "jobs summit" is to me, or what an unbelievably ham-fisted piece of public relations that was for the White House, which is increasingly showing itself not just to be sickeningly regressive, but also fully inept. I think I speak for a whole lot of Americans when I say that, one year into his stewardship over a destroyed economy that was actually atomizing for at least six months before inauguration day, I don't want my president sitting around a table, running a dog-and-pony show, pretending to kick around ideas on how to generate jobs. I wanted him to have those ideas, himself, before he was inaugurated. I wanted those to be real ideas, that produce real jobs for real Americans who are really hurting. I wanted that to be, and still be, the be-all and end-all of his presidency, not some distant fourth-place priority, behind healthcare and the White House dog selection process. And, especially not some fourth-place priority behind jive healthcare reform. Which brings us to the second answer to Mr. Hart's question. If Democrats think they'll be screwed next November because of unemployment, wait till Congress passes this healthcare monstrosity. Or doesn't. At this point, either way they're gonna get slammed for it, and rightly so. If they don't pass anything, they will be seen as unable to govern. This perception will be quite true because they will have failed to pass a major piece of legislation, despite having 60-40 majorities in both houses of Congress and control of the presidency. It doesn't get much better than that for a governing party in the American system. But it will be true in an even more profound sense, because the whole priority structure of the Democratic agenda is wrong. Sure, people want healthcare reform right now (especially if it were to miraculously also have the virtue of being authentic healthcare reform), but what they really want, overwhelmingly, is jobs. This choice of priorities is the equivalent of, say, invading Iraq when you've been attacked by people in Afghanistan. Surely no president would be that stupid, right? Surely any political party would realize the costs of having priorities so divorced from those of the voters, right? On the other hand, the Democrats and their hapless president are probably in worse shape if they actually pass this legislation. Especially now that it's been stripped of nearly every real progressive reform imaginable, it has become an incredibly stupid bill, from the political perspective. It will force people who can't afford it to spend a giant amount of money on lousy insurance, without any real choice to hold down costs, and it will fund this by hacking away at the Medicare budget. No wonder an insurance industry lobbyist broadcast an email last week declaring: "We WIN. Administered by private insurance companies. No government funding. No government insurance competitor." But here's a little riddle that any sixth-grader can easily figure out, although it seems to have eluded the brain trust at the White House: If insurance companies are winning big-time, then who is doing the losing? Something tells me that if Democrats are dumb enough to pass their own legislation, voters will provide them the answer to that puzzle in November of 2010, and then again two years later. What could be stupider than saddling thirty-five million Americans with a new monthly bill that will probably represent the second or third biggest item in their budget, in exchange for crappy private sector health insurance that is unlikely to pay out when needed, and wastes a third of the dollars paid in premiums on bureaucracy and profits anyhow? Slapping big fines on them if they don't pony up for the insurance, perhaps? Yep, that's in there too. This bill alone could mobilize legions of people to go to the polls and vote for whichever party didn't do it, and I'm pretty sure the GOP won't be shy about reminding Americans who that is. I mean, if Democrats were searching for legislation less likely to win them votes, why didn't they just bring back slavery or the debtor's prison? Why not come out for pedophilia? It would have been so much more efficient. At least they wouldn't have spent the last year looking like idiotic bunglers who, in addition to sponsoring really unpopular ideas, also inadvertently left their testicles at the coat check and have spent the last thirty years trying to find their way back to the gala. Ah, but wait! If you order now, there's more! As I understand it, the bill doesn't even actually force insurance companies to cover people, at least in the sense that they can charge prohibitive amounts to those with whatever they define as pre-existing conditions. You know, like the young woman who had a policy but died when she was denied cancer treatment because she had a bad case of acne as a teenager. This will be a total train wreck for the Democratic Party. Already, the public opposes the plan by a ratio of 47 to 32 percent. And they haven't even been handed the bill for it yet. And they haven't even had their premiums skyrocket yet. And they haven't even seen insurance corporation executives buy small countries for use as second homes with the increased compensation they will be floating in. And they haven't even found out what this does to their Medicare yet. And they haven't even seen the impact on the national debt yet. And they haven't even realized that the 'good' parts of the bill don't go into effect until FOUR YEARS from now. You know, elite Republicans may be sociopaths, and they may be lower on the moral totem pole than your basic cannibal, but they're not stupid. I bet they're salivating at the idea that this thing passes. I bet they'd even have Olympia Snowe vote for it if necessary, just to put it over the top. They must be laughing their asses off at this gift. All they have to do is oppose it right down the line, then say "Told ya so!" at the next election, squashing the pathetic Demognats, one after the next. Hey, even if worse comes to worse and the thing eventually becomes popular, they can always wait a decade or two and become champions of the new publically beloved healthcare system - just like they did for Medicare, Social Security, civil rights, etc. This is President Nothingburger's great gift to America, along with doing nothing about jobs, doing nothing about the Middle East, nothing about civil liberties, nothing about civil rights, and now doing nothing at Copenhagen. Regarding the latter, the world is literally on fire, and he jets in, gives a speech haranguing the delegates that "Now is not the time for talk, now is the time for action", then splits even before the vote in order to beat the snowstorm headed to the east coast that might delay him getting home to his comfy bed. I'm not kidding. You can't make this shit up, man. This guy is killing me, though at the same time I still can't quite figure him out. Here's what I get: This president is a corporate hack. Like Bush or Clinton, he has constituents, alright - but you and I are not on that particular list. Here's what I don't get: He is radically tanking, at a moment when people no longer have patience for those kind of politics anymore. Here's what I get: This president has his fingers in many pies, as he needs to, ranging from global warming to economic implosion to two wars abroad to massive federal debt. Here's what I don't get: Why does he bother to do these things in a way that pleases no one, and only dramatically undercuts his own political standing? Why does he refuse to make anyone his enemy, thus making everyone his enemy? Is he just massively deluded? I wouldn't have thought so, but watching the guy give himself a very good grade for 2009 - straight face and all - during the same year he's lost twenty points off his job approval rating, and at a moment when even blacks and gays are deserting him, you know, you have to wonder. Is he happy just to be a one-term president - just to say he's been there and done that, and then sell some more books - even if he is reviled as one of the worst in history? Maybe. But what about the rest of us? The rest of us, indeed. It's been quite some time since anyone in the White House ever cared about that sorry pack of rabble. Obama looked like he could've been something different. He ain't. So this is it, folks. Change you can believe in? More like bullshit you can take a bath in, if you ask me. -- David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg at regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 23 08:52:16 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:52:16 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Nurses: Health Care "Reform" Could Exacerbate Crisis Message-ID: <6A6FE00DB87A41E9AB2053B86E8A63A1@agingCHS072729> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/22/nations-largest-nurses-or_n_400765.html The Huffington Post December 23, 2009 Nation's Largest Nurses Organization: Health Care Bill Cedes Too Much To Insurance Industry First Posted: 12-22-09 01:07 PM | Updated: 12-22-09 03:11 PM National Nurses United, the nation's largest registered nurses union and professional organization, declared on Tuesday that the Senate health care bill gives away too much to insurance companies and "fails to meet the test of true health care reform." "It is tragic to see the promise from Washington this year for genuine, comprehensive reform ground down to a seriously flawed bill that could actually exacerbate the health care crisis and financial insecurity for American families, and that cedes far too much additional power to the tyranny of a callous insurance industry," said co-president Karen Higgins in a statement. "Sadly, we have ended up with legislation that fails to meet the test of true health care reform, guaranteeing high quality, cost effective care for all Americans, and instead are further locking into place a system that entrenches the chokehold of the profit-making insurance giants on our health. If this bill passes, the industry will become more powerful and could be beyond the reach of reform for generations," she added. The group argued that the bill does not do enough to control prices considering it would force all Americans to buy insurance. They say many of the same flaws are in the House bill, and they don't expect the legislation to be improved in conference committee. National Nurses United is a "super union" formed this year by the combination of three major nurses organizations. The American Nurses Association supports the Senate health care bill. Here's the full statement: The 150,000 member National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and professional organization of registered nurses in the U.S., today criticized the healthcare bill now advancing in the U.S. Senate saying it is deeply flawed and grants too much power to the giant insurers. "It is tragic to see the promise from Washington this year for genuine, comprehensive reform ground down to a seriously flawed bill that could actually exacerbate the healthcare crisis and financial insecurity for American families, and that cedes far too much additional power to the tyranny of a callous insurance industry," said NNU co-president Karen Higgins, RN. NNU Co-president Deborah Burger, RN challenged arguments of legislation proponents that the bill should still be passed because of expanded coverage, new regulations on insurers, and the hope that it will be improved in the House-Senate conference committee or future years. "Those wishful statements ignore the reality that much of the expanded coverage is based on forced purchase of private insurance without effective controls on industry pricing practices or real competition and gaping loopholes in the insurance reforms," said Burger. Further, said NNU Co-president Jean Ross, RN, "the bill seems more likely to be eroded, not improved, in future years due to the unchecked influence of the healthcare industry lobbyists and the lessons of this year in which all the compromises have been made to the right." "Sadly, we have ended up with legislation that fails to meet the test of true healthcare reform, guaranteeing high quality, cost effective care for all Americans, and instead are further locking into place a system that entrenches the chokehold of the profit-making insurance giants on our health. If this bill passes, the industry will become more powerful and could be beyond the reach of reform for generations," Higgins said. NNU cited ten significant problems in the legislation, noting many of the same flaws also exist in the House version and are likely to remain in the bill that emerges from the House-Senate reconciliation process: 1. The individual mandate forcing all those without coverage to buy private insurance, with insufficient cost controls on skyrocketing premiums and other insurance costs. 2. No challenge to insurance company monopolies, especially in the top 94 metropolitan areas where one or two companies dominate, severely limiting choice and competition. 3. An affordability mirage. Congressional Budget Office estimates say a family of four with a household income of $54,000 would be expected to pay 17 percent of their income, $9,000, on healthcare exposing too many families to grave financial risk. 4. The excise tax on comprehensive insurance plans which will encourage employers to reduce benefits, shift more costs to employees, promote proliferation of high-deductible plans, and lead to more self-rationing of care and medical bankruptcies, especially as more plans are subject to the tax every year due to the lack of adequate price controls. A Towers-Perrin survey in September found 30 percent of employers said they would reduce employment if their health costs go up, 86 percent said they'd pass the higher costs to their employees. 5. Major loopholes in the insurance reforms that promise bans on exclusion for pre-existing conditions, and no cancellations for sickness. The loopholes include: * Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail "wellness" programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions. * Insurers are permitted to sell policies "across state lines", exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states. * Insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees. * Insurers may continue to rescind policies for "fraud or intentional misrepresentation" - the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage. 6. Minimal oversight on insurance denials of care; a report by the California Nurses Association/NNOC in September found that six of California's largest insurers have rejected more than one-fifth of all claims since 2002. 7. Inadequate limits on drug prices, especially after Senate rejection of an amendment, to protect a White House deal with pharmaceutical giants, allowing pharmacies and wholesalers to import lower-cost drugs. 8. New burdens for our public safety net. With a shortage of primary care physicians and a continuing fiscal crisis at the state and local level, public hospitals and clinics will be a dumping ground for those the private system doesn't want. 9. Reduced reproductive rights for women. 10. No single standard of care. Our multi-tiered system remains with access to care still determined by ability to pay. Nothing changes in basic structure of the system; healthcare remains a privilege, not a right. "Desperation to pass a bill, regardless of its flaws, has made the White House and Congress subject to the worst political extortion and new, crippling concessions every day," Burger said. "NNU and nurses will continue to work with the thousands of grassroots activists across the nation to campaign for the best reform, which would be to expand Medicare to cover everyone, the same type of system working more effectively in every other industrial country. The day of that reform will come," said Ross. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 23 13:37:31 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:37:31 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Foundations of Christianity; A Historical Materialist Analysis Message-ID: <4144957CA318485885E9E53BA730F2D8@agingCHS072729> http://www.marxist.com/foundations-of-christianity-jp.htm Foundations of Christianity Written by John Pickard Wednesday, 23 December 2009 Many of us know that the origins of Christianity have nothing to do with silent nights or wise men. So what are its true origins? John Pickard looks at the reality of how this religion came about - from the standpoint of class forces and the material developments of society, rather than by the pious fictions fed from church pulpits. My late father had a very wry sense of humour. At Christmas, whenever there was a reference to church services on the television, he would tut and shake his head. "Look at that", he would say, "They try to bring religion into everything!" I imagine much the same complaint may have been made by ancient celts, annoyed that the Christian priests were taking over their traditional Yule festival, celebrating the winter solstice. Or perhaps by Roman citizens, peeved at the Christians taking over their annual 'Saturnalia' festival in the last weeks of December. Those complaining would have been right, because in the absence of an identifying date anywhere in the canonical gospels, Christians grafted their celebration of the birth of Jesus onto the existing pagan festivals. In one stroke they absorbed the pagan rites into the Christian tradition and softened opposition to the new creed. Many practising Christians today are completely unaware of the pagan and sometimes arbitrary origins of important elements of their religious beliefs and practices. Many seriously believe the origin of Christianity lies in a 'silent night' in a barn visited by quiet shepherds and several awe-struck 'wise' men. But nothing could be further from the truth. Materialism For Marxists, who base themselves on the real, material world, there was a completely different reality. Last year marked the centenary of the publication of 'The Foundations of Christianity' by the German Marxist theoritician, Karl Kautsky. This was the first attempt to describe the rise of that major western religion from the standpoint of class forces and the material developments of society, rather than by the pious fictions fed from church pulpits. Karl Kautsky's book was deficient in many respects, but the main lines of his argument still stand the test today. What was especially significant about Kautsky's book was that it was the first comprehensive attempt to describe the foundation and rise of Christianity using the method of historical materialism. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels used the method of historical materialism and applied it to social and historical developments. In his book 'Anti-Duhring', Engels summarised what this meant: "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or estates is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch." Karl Kautsky, therefore, rejected the metaphysical myths behind Christianity - the miracles, supernatural events, and so on - and attempted to describe its origins and rise through the social conditions that existed in the Roman Empire. The classical description of the origins of Christianity is as outlined in the New Testament. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are taken as historical accounts of real events in the first thirty five years of the first millennium: how Jesus was born miraculously, how he performed miracles and preached alongside his twelve disciples, how he was crucified for his preaching and how he arose from the dead. The gospels are taken to be eye-witness accounts by four of the disciples. Karl KautskyDespite harassment, persecution and innumerable martyrs, the superior ideas of the Christians - and particularly the offer of life after death and the redemption of human sins by the crucifixion of Jesus - led to an increase of support for Christianity until it became an unstoppable force eventually recognised by the Roman Emperor Constantine. The rest, as they say, is history. This is the 'official' history of the Church.and most of it is a fairy-tale. For Marxists the question has to be asked, what were the conditions in Palestine in the first century? Karl Kautsky alludes to the fact that the Roman Empire was a slave-based system in which the vast majority of the population were impoverished and lived from hand to mouth for most of their lives. And it is true that Palestine was a society riven with bitter class conflicts and contradictions. The characteristics of the entire period were turmoil, upheaval and revolt. Overlying the class struggle was the additional factor of the national oppression of the majority Semitic population by the Romans. Within Jewish society, the priestly caste and the nobility were propped up by the Roman regime for the greater exploitation of the mass of the population. "The fundamental conflict was between Roman, Herodian, and high priestly rulers, on the one hand, and the Judean and Galilean villagers, whose produce supplied tribute for Caesar, taxes for King Herod, and tithes and offerings for the priests and temple apparatus on the other." (Horsley, 'Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs' ) The Temple priests who were paid tithes (church taxes) by the local peasantry were not a small group - some scholars number them in the thousands. The Jewish King Herod 'the Great', who died in 4 BCE [Before the Common Era], left a country economically exhausted from the earlier Roman conquest and subsequent taxation. "The Jewish agricultural producers were now subject to a double taxation, probably amounting to well over 40 per cent of their production. There were other Roman taxes as well, which further added to the burden of the people, but the tribute was the major drain. "Coming, as it did, immediately after a period of ostensible national independence under the Hasmonians (Jewish kings), Roman domination was regarded as wholly illegitimate. The tribute was seen as robbery. Indeed it was called outright slavery by militant teachers such as Judas of Galilee, who organised active resistance to the census (record of people for tax purposes) when the Romans took over direct administration of Judea in 6 CE." [in the Common Era] ('Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs') Revolts The only contemporary account there is of this history is that of Josephus, a Jewish general who fought against the Romans during the revolt of 66 CE and who subsequently changed sides. It is clear from his histories that this whole period was one of great upheaval. There were many occasions when revolts of peasants were led by popular anointed kings (or 'messiahs'), all of which were viciously repressed. It was not uncommon for whole towns to be razed and their inhabitants sold into slavery. These revolts reflected the material conditions and class conflicts of the time, but they were invariably dressed up in terms of messianic revivalism and religious aspirations. Given the tradition and scripture of the Jews, these movements inevitably adopted the mantles of scriptural leaders, including, notably, Joshua. There were, in fact, many 'Joshua' sects at the time. ('Jesus' is a Romanised name which wouldn't have been recognised in Palestine at the time). Many of these cults had a 'communist' outlook with property shared in common within the community. The writings of Josephus are the only genuine surviving works written by a participant of the events. He describes what he sees as the evil influence of seers and prophets on more than one occasion, such as: ".Imposters and demagogues, under the disguise of divine inspiration, provoked revolutionary actions and impelled the masses to act like madmen. They led them out into the wilderness." Josephus ('Jewish Wars') mentions by name several of the seers, 'prophets' and revolutionaries who stirred up the Jews, but the Joshua described in the New Testament does not appear at any point in the voluminous work of his supposed contemporary, Josephus. The revolutionary-minded force in this period was the peasantry, which strove time and again to throw off the national and class oppression under which they laboured. A small selection of commentaries from Josephus illustrates the turmoil of the period: "Many [Jewish peasants] turned to banditry out of recklessness, and throughout the whole country there were raids, and among the more daring, revolts." ".the whole of Judea was infested with brigands." ('Jewish Wars') "Felix [Roman governor, 52-58 CE] captured [revolutionary leader] Eleazar, who for twenty years had plundered the country, as well as many of his associates, and sent them to Rome for trial. The number of brigands that he crucified.was enormous." (Josephus , 'Antiquities') Nothing could be further removed from 'silent night'! The revolutionary upheaval spilled over into a generalised uprising in 66 CE, against the Romans and their collaborators, the Jewish ruling class the high priests of the Temple. ".hostility and violent factionalism flared between the high priests on the one side and the priests and leaders of the Jerusalem masses on the other." ('Antiquities') Siege of Jerusalem For the next four years there was a bloody and protracted guerrilla war followed by a prolonged siege of Jerusalem, during which the masses, fearing betrayal by the Jewish aristocracy and high priests effectively took power into their own hands in Jerusalem. One of their first acts in the revolt was the storming of the Temple and the burning of the deeds and documents relating to the debts and taxes of the peasantry. It was not surprising that the aristocracy and the high priests fled the city to the safety of the Roman lines - including Josephus himself. Even before this revolution, Palestine had been a whirlpool of different cults and religious sects, most based loosely on traditional Jewish scripture, but often coloured by the widespread discontent with the collaboration of the priesthood and the parasitism of the Temple culture. Among these would have been the 'Joshua' and other messianic sects organised by a variety of charismatic leaders. Following the bloody suppression of the revolution and the capture of Jerusalem (during which the Temple was destroyed) in 70 CE, tens of thousands of Jews fled the region and many thousands more were enslaved. Such an enormous disaster could not fail to affect the huge Jewish Diaspora, who fled from their homeland, spread round every major city in the whole Roman Empire, including the larger cities like Rome, Alexandria and the big cities in the East. Long before the revolutionary events, all manner of sects had taken root in the Jewish Diaspora communities in parallel to those in Palestine itself. Within this lively sectarian milieu was a Joshua cult developed by Paul, with a policy of converting non-Jews as well as Jews. This sect, in effect, became the mainspring of modern Christianity by, among other things, simplifying Jewish 'Law' to remove the need for circumcision and strict dietary taboos. All of the early Christian works, which were circulating from the middle towards the end of the first century - including the letters of Paul - were significantly missing any historical narrative connecting Joshua to a real-life biography. It was only later that the gospel of Mark (on which Matthew and Luke were based) was written as an allegorical description of a life, composed to match the Joshua doctrine that was becoming established. It was an expression of the growing confidence and numerical strength of this particular sect. But it was also an expression of the growing class division within the Christian community itself as it accommodated to Roman society. Of the original communistic ideas of the Joshua cults, there remain only a few hints and suggestions in the New Testament today. It was largely in polemics with their former co-religionists, the Jews, and against the plethora of rival proto-Christian sects that the early Church elaborated its doctrine in the first decades of the second century. In parallel with the elaboration of doctrine, the Church established an apparatus to maintain itself. The evidence of the existence of a huge variety of early Christian sects has only come to light recently precisely because this apparatus, once having established itself, did its best to eliminate all others as 'heresies,' in the process removing most of the evidence that other strands of the Joshua cult even existed. The question has to be asked as to why Christianity grew over the next two centuries. It was not an anti-slavery movement: slavery was ubiquitous throughout the Roman Empire and Christians possessed slaves like anyone else. There is evidence that even bishops just like well-to-do Romans owned slaves throughout this whole period. Theological considerations were secondary. The rigid and self-perpetuating bureaucracy which had grown within the Church reflected the class divisions in society and had become an important bulwark of the class system. "In time the discourse and sermons of the Christian leaders came to incorporate not only the formal aspects of aristocratic status concerns but also the values and ideology of the late Roman upper class." (Salzman, 'The Making of a Christian Aristocracy') Conversion This comment refers to the period following the so-called conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, but long before this the Church was playing a key social and economic role on behalf of the ruling class. Many officials of state were Christian bishops or leaders. More importantly, they play a key role in the management and organisation of local government. In so far as it meant anything in a Roman Empire facing terminal decline, they were the local government. Bishops and Church officials collected tax, distributed alms (church-based charity) and supervised local legal and land disputes. They were an unofficial 'civil service' on behalf of the Roman bureaucracy long before Emperor Constantine gave them imperial sanction. The Church fulfilled a social and economic function, in managing and containing an increasing proportion of the poor and dispossessed and for that reason, not because of a 'spiritual awakening' within the ruling class, it was allowed to grow and develop. The Church was able to fulfil this role because it offered a safety valve for the aspirations of the masses. It gave the peasantry their only opportunity to sit in the same building with landlords and bishops (if not the same pews) and even if there was limited hope in this world, they were at least offered the promise of equality with the rich in the next. The Christians offered a messiah and 'life after death', in contrast to the aloof and indifferent gods of Greece and Rome. The Church bureaucracy consciously developed policy (and theology) in its own interests, increasingly identified with the interests of the ruling class. But in its structure and outlook, it also anticipated the development of feudal society better than the decaying slave-owning state. The Church didn't campaign for emancipation, but offered a new arrangement for exploitation. As for the peasantry and city poor: as long as they knew and accepted 'their place' in the rigid class structure, for the poorest it offered a structure of alms, and support which provided respite to the worst of their poverty and insecurity. Even if watered down, it offered a sense of community. Almost uniquely in the Roman Empire, it had a limited welfare structure, moreover one that offered belonging to a national and even international church. For these reasons it had disproportionate appeal to the poor and the oppressed; indeed it was ridiculed for being a movement "of slaves and women." Persecution Once it was backed by the power of the state the Church destroyed its opponents. Roman persecution of the Church in the first three centuries is greatly exaggerated, but it pales against the terrible persecution that the Church visited on all the unorthodox sects once it was backed by imperial power. Books and heretics were burnt. Theological history was re-written. Myths were piled upon myths, century after century. So much so that today even so-called 'scholars' treat the New Testament like a true historical narrative and not as they should as a story, no more true than 'The Iliad' or 'Beowulf'. Within a few hundred years any evidence of the existence of other Christian sects, including their pre-history in Palestine, was all but eliminated. The Church became - and remains to this day - a powerful conservative force, politically, financially and diplomatically (and at one time, militarily). In his introduction to 'A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', Marx referred to religion as "the sigh of the oppressed". He explained that it is not spirituality, or the lack of it, which breeds support for religion. It is the alienation of the mass of the population from the class society in which they find themselves. The crisis of capitalism is at root the crisis of a rotten economic system, but it manifests itself also as a crisis of ideas. For millions of people their hopes and aspirations are so stunted by the limits of the capitalist world that they project their hopes on to a life after death. And just as in the first decades of the first millennium, so also in the age of capitalism, new religious and messianic movements reflect the intellectual and moral impasse of a failed and failing society. Marx continued: ".To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo." Thus he made it clear that it is not a question of religion being "abolished". The idea is absurd. To combat superstition and ignorance, the task for socialists is to struggle against the material conditions upon which these things grow - and that means above all, a struggle against capitalism. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 23 13:44:44 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:44:44 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Is the Harper government playing the anti-Semitic card? Message-ID: <47871AD7F53142A3BD2D4D195FFF4649@agingCHS072729> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/is-the-harper-government-playing-the-anti-semitic-card/article1408771/ Globe and Mail Dec. 22, 2009 Is the Harper government playing the anti-Semitic card? Are Canadian Jews going to be seduced by a government that uses anti-Semitism for political reasons? Gerald Caplan Since I wrote last week, the Harper government's bizarre embrace of Canadian Jewry continues to tighten. On Dec. 16, Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, Multiculturalism, was in Jerusalem speaking at a conference on combatting anti-Semitism. All Canadians should know that Kenney and his government will not abide anti-Semitism. That, of course, is in sharp contrast to all other Canadian political parties that do abide anti-Semitism. Kenney's stated message was his government's opposition to those who "advocate the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish people." That is in sharp contrast to those Canadian parties that do not oppose those who advocate such destruction. To demonstrate its firmness, Kenney announced that the "Canadian government has now.implemented a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism in Canada. What does this mean? In part it means we have eliminated any government funding relationship with organizations.who are taking a leadership role" in the campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. That's why, he said, "we have defunded organizations most recently like KAIROS who are taking a leadership role" in this campaign. KAIROS is a Canadian NGO whose mission is social justice and support for oppressed groups. What's distinct about it is that it's the only such organization supported by just about all Canadian churches. When KAIROS was abruptly defunded by CIDA early in December, officials claimed it no longer fit CIDA priorities. But on the basis of a few other hints, I reached a different conclusion. The Conservatives simply can't stomach KAIROS' support of Palestinians, even if that support is restricted to those who protest peacefully against Israeli actions. Now Jason Kenney has confirmed my deduction. But hold on. There are a couple of problems with Kenney's statement. First, it's completely false. Not only does KAIROS not lead a BDS campaign against Israel, it does not endorse one. Any check of their website would instantly see that they explicitly do not support such campaigns. What they do scrupulously support is the legitimate right of the Israeli people to a safe and secure state. Second, how is it tolerable for a government minister to baldly accuse an organization of being anti-Semitic without a single shred of evidence, which is of course non-existent. And don't tell me that's not what Kenney deliberately implied. The Anglican Church immediately issued an angry statement condemning Kenney's accusations as false. So too did the United Church, whose spokesperson pointed out that KAIROS' policies are approved by its Board, on which 11 Canadian churches are represented. "So in a sense," he observes, " what Mr. Kenney is doing is accusing Canadian churches of being anti-Semitic." Of course the Harperites insist that anyone who criticizes the Israeli government in any way is an anti-Semite. Yet if Kenney had bothered to look around him in Jerusalem, he would have discovered a slew of Israeli writers, commentators, scholars, soldiers, human rights activists and others who routinely and severely criticize their own government. Imagine NOT criticizing an extremist Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a radical nationalist; Avigdor Lieberman, who supports ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians; and the ultra-Orthodox Shas party. Or he could have met with Prof. Neve Gordon, a nice Jewish boy who's also chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. They could have discussed Gordon's advocacy of an international boycott against Israel "to save Israel from itself". But perhaps Gordon too is anti-Semitic. If I were KAIROS, or any of the mainstream churches that support it, I'd feel that I'd been slandered, libelled and maligned by my own government, for no reason other than to make some political points with Canadian Jews. What my fellow Jews in Canada make of this extraordinary campaign of seduction by the Harper government is not yet clear. I'm especially curious--and nervous-- about the position of the Canadian Jewish establishment and the small number of organizations that claim to speak for us all. Is the romancing of Canadian Jews by the Harper government requited? As United Church spokesperson Bruce Gregerson points out, to charge KAIROS with anti-Semitism "with so little thought cheapens the reality of anti-Semitism in the world and diminishes the very careful attention that it deserves". I've yet to see a Canadian Jewish "leader" make this all-important point. Did Kenney's despicable accusation of anti-Semitism against KAIROS not somewhat trouble the Canadian Jews in the audience who have actually worked with KAIROS? Real enemies of anti-Semitism do not throw the term around recklessly. In the United States, the leading Jewish neoconservatives made an unholy alliance with evangelical Protestants whose ultimate vision was a Jew-free world--Hitler's demented goal finally realized. What they had in common was support for the state of Israel-at least for the moment. Are Canadian Jews now going to be seduced by a government that uses anti-Semitism for political reasons? That maliciously accuses decent men and women of being anti-Semitic? That identifies legitimate, democratic criticism of Israeli governments with anti-Semitism? Is there not one among them who will say to this Government: We reject your right to play the anti-Semitic card for your own crass political purposes. There's another way to make this point as well. Harper has rejected KAIROS' request for $7-million over the next 4 years for a series of important human rights projects across the world, including the Middle East. A self-respecting Jewish community would make sure that this fine, dedicated NGO and those it serves will receive the funds it needs. What an honourable message that would send this holiday season. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 23 13:54:55 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:54:55 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] U.S. Military One of the World's Largest Sources of C02 Message-ID: http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Elephant-in-the-Room--by-George-Washington-091221-894.html December 21, 2009 The Elephant in the Room: The U.S. Military is One of the World's Largest Sources of C02 By George Washington Sara Flounders writes: By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements. The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon's aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon. This information is not readily available ... because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change" ... Bryan Farrell in his new book, "The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism," says that "the greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency ... the Armed Forces of the United States." Just how did the Pentagon come to be exempt from climate agreements? At the time of the Kyoto Accords negotiations, the U.S. demanded as a provision of signing that all of its military operations worldwide and all operations it participates in with the U.N. and/or NATO be completely exempted from measurement or reductions. After securing this gigantic concession, the Bush administration then refused to sign the accords. Although the U.S. had already received these assurances in the negotiations, the U.S. Congress passed an explicit provision guaranteeing U.S. military exemption. Inter Press Service reported on May 21, 1998: "U.S. law makers, in the latest blow to international efforts to halt global warming, today exempted U.S. military operations from the Kyoto agreement which lays out binding commitments to reduce 'greenhouse gas' emissions. The House of Representatives passed an amendment to next year's military authorization bill that 'prohibits the restriction of armed forces under the Kyoto Protocol.'" According to environmental journalist Johanna Peace ... "The military accounts for a full 80 percent of the federal government's energy demand." As I pointed out out last week: Professor Michael Klare noted in 2007: Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. And in 2008, Oil Change International released a report showing that: The [Iraq] war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year. Between March 2003 and October 2007 the US military in Iraq purchased more than 4 billion gallons of fuel from the Defense Energy Support Center, the agency responsible for procuring and supplying petroleum products to the Department of Defense. Burning these fuels has directly produced nearly 39 million metric tons of CO2 Just transporting 4 billion gallons of fuel to the military in Iraq consumed at least as much fuel as was delivered nearly doubling overall fuel-related emissions. Emissions from the Iraq War to date are nearly two and a half times greater than what would be avoided between 2009 and 2016 were California to implement the auto emission regulations it has proposed (but that the Bush Administration struck down). If the war were ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world's nations do, more than 60% of all countries on the planet... Of course, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan will lead to a huge surge in greenhouse gas emissions as well. The fact that the U.S. military is one of the world's largest sources of C02 is an open secret that no one is addressing. If C02 causes warming and the military is one of the largest producers of C02, then any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 23 14:02:47 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:02:47 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Cuba's other revolution is green, not red Message-ID: <4C56C4216D254B7F90D86206C955C024@agingCHS072729> http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/dec/12/cubas-green-revolution Cuba's other revolution is green, not red In Copenhagen they are debating how to end deforestation, but in Cuba's Pinar del R?o they were replanting 50 years ago, creating lush, unspoilt valleys Jane Owen The Guardian, Saturday 12 December 2009 [photo: Cuban hills ... typical bungalows in Las Terrazas, Sierra del Rosario Nature and Biosphere Reserve, Pinar del Rio. Photograph: John Harden/Robert Harding/Rex Features ] Birds and butterflies are swooping above us and, as our taxi reaches the summit of this forest road just 40 minutes from the heat and noise of Havana, the view opens to an undulating landscape painted every shade of green. Before Castro these hills were dusty yellow and brown scrub. If Copenhagen needs a model, this is the most eloquent I know, a visionary example of reforestation and the long term benefits it brings. While the rest of the world is ripping up forests in the name of minerals and wood, Cuba has been replanting its tropical forests in the name of jobs, the environment and a lush holiday destination for decades. This policy has worked so well that in 1984 Unesco gave biosphere status to 26,686 hectares of forest in the western region of Pinar del R?o, where I am heading to stay at Las Terrazas, 50km from Havana. Our journey has taken us along an empty motorway, past plains with grazing cattle and sugar cane fields. Few Cubans can afford the petrol to make trips out here. Those who live here survive on smallholdings down dirt tracks that wind into the forest or in villages where the main employment comes from tourism at Las Terrazas. We reach our destination, Las Terrazas valley, and drive across a lake studded with water lilies. Clouds of turkeys and chickens scatter in front of us and, above us, orange and blue shuttered apartments for local people curve around the hillside. Hotel Moka, and a host of restaurants, bars and attractions, are dotted discreetly around the community. We check in and walk 40 minutes along a hilly track in search of a river to wash away the dust and heat of Havana. Steps lead from the track down to a river cascading from the hills into a series of natural pools. Above, sunlight trickles through bamboos, the orange-red blooms of hibiscus trees, teaks, royal palms and a tree covered in curly red seed pods. We plunge into the cool, clear water. Grey and red bromeliads and tiny orchids stud the trees above us. A large kingfisher swoops onto a rock a couple of metres away. Eagles circle overhead. This is Castro's Eden, a paradise he dreamt up soon after the revolution in 1959, when he ordered a reforestation programme. Back then this place was grassland. Now it looks much like it must have done before European settlers cleared the forest for coffee and cattle. When Columbus arrived here in 1492 the island was 90% forest. By the time Castro came to power the figure had dropped to 11%. Now forest covers about a quarter of the island. Later, we walk though the forest with curator Fidel Hernandez, who lives at Las Terrazas. "The climate is cooler and the people are gentler than the rest of Cuba," he says, leading us through the cultivated edges of the forest past grapefruit trees, red ginger and Cuba's national flower, the mariposa. We walk uphill along one of the steep tracks that crisscross the area. Guides lead parties through the forest but it's OK to walk independently and the snakes, Fidel says, are not poisonous. "Las Terrazas was made to create better conditions for the peasants here who were very poor. They had no water or electricity or medicine and so it was decided to build this community and give the people the work of replanting the forest. Between 1983 and 1990 we planted 8 million trees over 5,000 hectares. Now we have more than 500 plant species, 117 bird species, and 13 bat species, from tiny ones weighing four to five grams to fishing bats with a wingspan of 17cm." Thanks to reforestation, Las Terrazas has become a tourist attraction. When the eastern bloc, Cuba's main trading partner, collapsed in 1989, the country was thrown into crisis as food and cash supplies dried up almost overnight. Tourism became crucial to the island's survival. The Moka hotel appeared along with nine cafes and restaurants. We walk to one of them, Bamboo, upstream beside a river. We have a late lunch of classic black beans and rice, chicken and tinned vegetable "salad", a souvenir of Soviet-sponsored Cuba. I had heard a lot about Cuba's terrible food but most of the food at Las Terrazas is fine, although not always cheap. Main courses range from around ?3-?10. A Cuban carrying palm baskets of oranges passes our table. I offer money and point to one of the baskets but the orange seller looks baffled. In Havana there's pressure on tourists to buy CDs, cigars, food and souvenirs, but here we are offered nothing except conversation. Las Terrazas is pressure free. In fact it is unpressured to the point of frustration, because Las Terrazas doesn't mention or sign many of its glorious attractions. It is a charmingly naive mix of being geared up for tourism and unaware of how to market itself. By chance we find several beautiful mountain pools, complete with lifeguards and bars. These natural pools are picture postcard perfect and they are open to everyone. But, like the motorway, they are often empty. We come across one while trying to find the ecology centre. The centre - a small room with a few posters about the climate, creatures and flora of the forest - is closed so we join young Cubans partying along to deafening music on a lake with a floating trampoline. In Cuba partying is second nature. While in Havana a car stopped outside our hotel at around midnight, pumped up the music and attracted dancing locals like moths to a lamp. The same thing happens when we visit Las Terrazas' Boat House restaurant. The banging music is not as welcome at the homestay where we sleep (not a lot) for the first two nights at Las Terrazas. The homestay is a sort of B&B without the breakfast. It is thatched with royal palm and has balcony views over the valley on one side and a courtyard garden of roses and staghorn fern on the other. As the tropical night plunges us into dark, the crickets start . . . along with some of the loudest music I have ever heard. Next door parties all night, every night if the comments in the visitors' book are anything to go by. We return to the peace of Hotel Moka across the valley. It is relatively luxurious although it sometimes runs out of hot water. Given our budget we should have booked into one of the permanent campsites or thatched huts a mile or so from the hotel - both have water and electricity. And I should have worked on my fitness. The steep, precarious concrete steps between the home stay, the community and the hotel are reminding my calf muscles that they need more exercise. We take another calf-aching walk to find the 900m zip wire "canopy ride". We can't find the ride but we find plenty of interest as we walk through the community: an old man roasting coffee, his wife making guava membrillo (quince). A group of handsome fighting cocks tethered in a garden. A family celebrating a birthday who invite us to share marshmallow-topped rum cake. And a handful of other tourists. Visitors here are mixed. Older people come for the peace and the wildlife coach tours. Young ones are outdoor enthusiasts who want challenging forest walks, horse rides, canyoning, swimming and thigh-pounding bike rides. We head up the valley past turkeys, ponies, dogs, cats, children and chickens to the spartan community museum. There are pictures of the area before reforestation plus a skeleton, three pieces of coffee machinery, some palm figures and a mood board about a local artist. Art of all kinds gets state funding and respect in Cuba. At Las Terrazas it is supported by tourism as hotel manager, Lionel Guitierrez, explains through local guide and interpreter Emilio Jorge Arias: "100% of the profit from the hotel goes to the state and 35% from the outlying activities, rides and restaurants. The rest of the money goes to the community for repairing houses and encouraging art and music. Over 90% of the people who live here work here in the hotel or the forest." The standard of living here is now far higher than many other areas as Emilio explains: "100% of the people have electricity here plus drinking water and gas to cook on; 80% have a telephone. In a nearby community of about 3,000 people there is one telephone." There is a waiting list to live here and plans to build another hotel and community to provide jobs and income and satisfy the insatiable demand for beds at Moka. I wish I could persuade Copenhagen's decision makers to book some of those beds and have a look round this pioneering community. And I wish that the world leaders who are flogging their forests instead of transforming them into places like Las Terrazas would come here too. It is an eloquent political statement: an exquisite destination providing a future for the Cuban people. Getting there A seven-night trip to Cuba, including three nights in Havana and three nights in Las Terrazas, guided tours in Havana and international flights and transfers costs from ?1,350pp with Audley Travel (01993 838 685). Where to stay Hotel Moka Las Terrazas has double rooms from ?59 per night. . Jane Owen is a writer and broadcaster working to raise awareness about deforestation and the Baka pygmies of sub-Saharan Africa. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 23 14:48:01 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:48:01 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Imagine if the Palestinian resistance movement were happening in Iran! Message-ID: http://mondoweiss.net/2009/12/oh-just-imagine-if-the-palestinian-resistance-movement-were-happening-in-iran.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+feedburner%2FWDBc+%28Mondoweiss%29 Oh just imagine if the Palestinian resistance movement were happening in Iran! by Philip Weiss on December 23, 2009 ? 10 comments Imagine if the Palestinian resistance movement were taking place in Iran! Dashing Mohammad Othman now rotting in detention would be a global cause. The middle-of-the-night arrest of Abdallah Abu Rahmah would be on the Nightly News. The New York Times would tell the stories of international freedom riders, the Gaza Freedom March, and the role of Twitter in the resistance. The video of Abu Rahme's murder during a peaceful protest of the unending landgrab would be viral. The all-night protests of the East Jerusalem evictions that are being carried out a racial basis- ethnic cleansing!- would fire the conscience of kings and counselors. Columnists would go on TV and decry the crushing of a popular resistance movement. College students would sing out the words, Sheikh Jarrah! and talk about 8000 political prisoners and a Foreign Minister whose foreign policy is directed at the Arabs inside his own country. The Council on Foreign Relations would talk about the regime's possession of nukes, and how that affects the outcome of the popular movement. Politico would righteously expose the tax-deductible U.S. sponsors of the landgrab and ask, Where is the Israeli FW de Klerk??? Wake up now: it's not happening in Iran. It's happening in Israel and Palestine, the sovereign territory of the Israel lobby. So our politicians are silent, our media are ball-gagged and duct-taped, Jewish leadership talks about the Holocaust and the existential threat to the Jewish people, the most important political website is a bed of Israel supporters (from Josh Gerstein to Josh Kraushaar), and the left has its tail coiled tightly between its legs. Here is brave Israeli Neve Gordon, who has called for BDS against Israel, telling the same story in the Guardian that Amira Hass told in Haaretz: Israel is terrified of nonviolent resistance. So it needs to break it by military means. It is often forgotten that even the second intifada, which turned out to be extremely violent, began as a popular nonviolent uprising. Haaretz journalist Akiva Eldar revealed several years later that the top Israeli security echelons had decided to "fan the flames" during the uprising's first weeks. He cites Amos Malka, the military general in charge of intelligence at the time, saying that during the second intifada's first month, when it was still mostly characterised by nonviolent popular protests, the military fired 1.3m bullets in the West Bank and Gaza. The idea was to intensify the levels of violence, thinking that this would lead to a swift and decisive military victory and the successful suppression of the rebellion. And indeed the uprising and its suppression turned out to be extremely violent. But over the past five years, Palestinians from scores of villages and towns such as Bil'in and Jayyous have developed new forms of pro-peace resistance that have attracted the attention of the international community. Even Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad recently called on his constituents to adopt similar strategies. Israel, in turn, decided to find a way to end the protests once and for all and has begun a well-orchestrated campaign that targets the local leaders of such resistance. One such leader is Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a high school teacher and the co-ordinator of Bil'in's Popular Committee Against the Wall, is one of many Palestinians who was on the military's wanted list. At 2am on 10 December (international Human Rights Day), nine military vehicles surrounded his home. Israeli soldiers broke the door down, and after allowing him to say goodbye to his wife Majida and three young children, blindfolded him and took him into custody. He is being charged with throwing stones, the possession of arms (namely gas canisters in the Bil'in museum) and inciting fellow Palestinians, which, translated, means organising demonstrations against the occupation. Related Posts Israel fears 'paradigm shift' to grassroots nonviolent resistance in West Bank More on violent/non-violent means of resistance In moderate Egypt and Jordan, they vow resistance 'Washington Post' erases Palestinian population in Israel twice (Imagine if they tried this with blacks in U.S.) A young Palestinian-American woman responds to the feminist resistance to Arab norms =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 23 14:53:33 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:53:33 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?This_has_to_be_seen_to_be_believed=3A_?= =?iso-8859-1?q?Bil=27in_leader_charged_with_arms_possession?= Message-ID: http://mondoweiss.net/2009/12/this-has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed-bilin-leader-charged-with-arms-possession.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+feedburner%2FWDBc+%28Mondoweiss%29 This has to be seen to be believed: Bil'in leader charged with arms possession by Adam Horowitz on December 23, 2009 ? 20 comments Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a leader of the weekly nonviolent protests in Bil'in, has finally been charged after being arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Israeli military. Abu Rahmah's arrest has been part on an ongoing Israeli campaign against Palestinian nonviolent resistance leaders. The charges against him could not be more creative. From a Popular Struggle Coordination Committee press release: Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a school teacher and coordinator of the Bil'in Popular Committee Against the Wall, was indicted in an Israeli military court yesterday. Abu Rahmah was slapped with an arms possession charge for collecting used tear gas canisters shot at demonstrators in Bil'in by the army and showcasing them in his home. An indictment was filed in a West Bank military court yesterday for incitement, stone throwing and arms possession charges against Bil'in Popular Committee coordinator, Abdallah Abu Rahmah. On receiving the indictment Adv. Gaby Lasky, Abu Rahmah's lawyer said that "the army shoots at unarmed demonstrators, and when they try to show the world the violence used against them by collecting presenting the remnants - they are persecuted and prosecuted. What's next? Charging protesters money for the bullets shot at them?" Here is a photo of the "arms" in question: [Spent tear gas grenades and projectiles used on the village of Bil'in for which Abu Rahmah was indicted. Photo: Oren Ziv ActiveStills] Related Posts Bil'in leader arrested as part of ongoing Israeli crackdown on nonviolent Palestinian protest Oh just imagine if the Palestinian resistance movement were happening in Iran! Protests go on in Bilin despite arrest of media coordinator Israel arrests Mohammad Khatib, leader of Bil'in non-violent protests New York Times quotes Israeli military's false account of Bil'in killing despite video evidence =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 23 20:00:41 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:00:41 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Greetings and happy holidays from Leonard Message-ID: Greetings and happy holidays. I hope this letter finds you all enjoying the spirit of the season with family and friends. My August parole denial was appealed in short order. We are expecting a response to that appeal sometime very soon. It has occurred to me that the viciousness of this system knows no bounds, and so I believe strongly in the coming days we will hear of another loss, another denial. This one will be timed and intended specifically as a twisted Christmas present for me, such is the nature of those in charge. With no sense of balance, fairness, or decency, I await my own personal stocking stuffer. We all know the so-called justice system of this country is more about revenge and retribution than finding true and just resolution. It doesn't take into account the plight of the wrongfully convicted, nor does it allow flexibility as human endeavors always require. This system has always been about making money at the top, furthering careers in the middle, and forgetting those at the bottom. Their reason for denying my parole is that I refuse to admit guilt and show remorse for the deaths of two FBI agents. I know the righteousness of my situation. I know what I did and didn't do. I will never yield. I also know what this country did and continues to do to me and many others. While they demand I make a false confession for the sake of my freedom, they show no remorse for the loss of much of my life, or the lives of Joe Stuntz and countless others they have murdered over the generations simply for being who they were. Those lives are meaningless when compared to their precious FBI, I guess. And now, some of the very ones responsible for the deaths and suffering of so many of my people, are peddling books and claiming to be a friend of the Indian. We've seen this before, and I'll speak more about this soon. I remain proud of what I have stood for and mindful of what real justice is. In this season of love and forgiveness, please say a prayer for all of those who never knew justice and others who have such difficulty in finding it still today. My love and my prayers go out to all of you. Happy Holidays, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Leonard Peltier =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 24 07:29:37 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:29:37 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Fw=3A_Please_help_Marchers_enter_Gaza_?= =?iso-8859-1?q?/_Aidez_les_marcheurs_=E0_entrer_=E0_Gaza?= Message-ID: <15A09F28E4FE438A995EF72689C74C18@agingCHS072729> ----- Original Message ----- From: Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East Sent: Thursday, December 24, 2009 6:02 AM Subject: Please help Marchers enter Gaza / Aidez les marcheurs ? entrer ? Gaza Help convince Egypt to let marchers through / Aidez ? convaincre l'?gypte de laisser passer les marcheurs The international siege of Gaza has had the most severe impacts on children and those needing medical services in Gaza. / Les incidences les plus graves du si?ge international de Gaza se sont faites sentir sur les enfants et les personnes ayant besoin de services m?dicaux ? Gaza. Pertinent Links: a.. CJPME Press Statement: Egypt announces it will block historic march b.. CJPME Press Statement: Gaza Freedom March aims to break siege on Gaza c.. Link to official Gaza Freedom March Website CJPME helps Canadians be involved through action alerts. View our video below to see our effectiveness in action alerts. Hyperliens Pertinents: a.. Communiqu? de presse, CJPMO: L'?gypte annonce qu'elle va bloquer la Marche historique b.. Communiqu? de presse, CJPMO: La Marche pour la lib?ration de Gaza vise ? mettre fin au si?ge du territoire c.. Site Web du Gaza Freedom March (en anglais seulement) CJPMO fait en sorte que les Canadiens puissent s'impliquer ? travers ses alertes ? l'action. Regardez la vid?o ci-dessous pour en conna?tre davantage sur l'efficacit? de nos alertes ? l'action (en anglais seulement). 30 seconds to help the Gaza Freedom March Version Fran?aise suit... Dear Friends, Since July, an international demonstration - the Gaza Freedom March - has been planned for next week. Over 1500 internationals are going to Gaza to protest the inhumane siege of Gaza. Earlier this week, however, Egypt announced that it would not let the internationals enter Gaza. Please click here to send an email to the Egyptian representatives urging them to let the marchers pass. Once you have had the opportunity to respond above, please forward this email to friends and acquaintances who you think would like to help. The people of Gaza need our support. More Info CJPME has supported the Gaza Freedom March since its inception in July, 2009. The March was conceived to call international attention to the devastating impacts of the international siege of Gaza. Taking place on the anniversary of Israel's War on Gaza, the March has garnered support from individuals from around the world. Over 1500 marchers - including 57 from Canada - are planning to descend on Gaza for the March. It is essential that they be allowed to enter Gaza, to join the estimated 50,000 Gazans who will participate, and march in protest to the Erez crossing with Israel. Warmest thanks, The CJPME Leadership CJPME Website -------------------------------------------------------- Prenez 30 secondes pour aider la Marche pour la lib?ration de Gaza Chers membres et amis, Depuis juillet dernier, une manifestation internationale - la Marche pour la lib?ration de Gaza - a ?t? planifi?e pour la semaine prochaine. Plus de 1500 participants internationaux se rendront ? Gaza pour protester contre le si?ge inhumain du territoire. Cependant, l'?gypte a annonc? un peu plus t?t cette semaine qu'elle ne laisserait pas ces personnes entrer ? Gaza. Cliquez ici pour envoyer un courriel aux repr?sentants ?gyptiens leur demandant de laisser passer les marcheurs. Soutenez cet action en faisant circuler ce message librement parmi vos amis et connaissances ? travers le Canada. Plus d'informations CJPMO soutient la Marche pour la lib?ration de Gaza depuis l'origine du projet en juillet 2009. La Marche a ?t? con?ue pour attirer l'attention internationale sur les impacts d?vastateurs du si?ge international de Gaza. ?tant pr?vue pour l'anniversaire de la guerre d'Isra?l contre Gaza, la Marche a re?u le soutien d'individus de partout dans le monde. Plus de 1500 marcheurs - dont 57 en provenance du Canada - envisagent de gagner Gaza pour la Marche. Il est essentiel qu'ils soient autoris?s ? entrer ? Gaza afin de rejoindre les 50 000 Gazaouis qui participeront aussi et marcher en signe de protestation jusqu'au passage d'Erez vers Isra?l. Avec tous nos remerciements, L'?quipe de direction CJPMO Le site web CJPMO Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is a non-profit and secular organization bringing together men and women of all backgrounds who labour to see justice and peace take root again in the Middle East. Its mission is to empower decision-makers to view all sides with fairness and to promote the equitable and sustainable development of the region. ? Les Canadiens pour la Justice et la Paix au Moyen-Orient ? (CJPMO) est une organisation s?culaire, sans but lucratif, regroupant des hommes et des femmes d'horizons divers qui ouvrent pour que la paix et la justice renaissent au Moyen-Orient. Elle a pour vocation de responsabiliser les personnes d'influence ? traiter les protagonistes avec ?quit? et ? favoriser l'essor durable et ?quilibr? de la r?gion. Forward email This email was sent to menecraj at shaw.ca by info at cjpme.org. Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribeT | Privacy Policy. Email Marketing by CJPME-CJPMO | 11237 Frigon | Montreal | Quebec | H3M 2R6 | Canada -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 24 07:38:11 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:38:11 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Presenting....The 2009 P.U.-Litzer Awards Message-ID: The 2009 P.U.-Litzer Awards Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting December 22, 2009 http://www.fair.org Media Advisory For 17 years our colleagues Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon have worked with FAIR to present the P.U.-Litzers, a year-end review of some of the stinkiest examples of corporate media malfeasance, spin and just plain outrageousness. Starting this year, FAIR has the somewhat dubious honor of reviewing the nominees and selecting the winners. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. So, without further ado, we present the 2009 P.U.-Litzers. --The Remembering Reagan Award WINNER: Joe Klein, Time Time columnist Joe Klein (12/3/09), not altogether impressed by Obama's announcement of a troop escalation in Afghanistan, wrote that a president "must lead the charge--passionately and, yes, with a touch of anger." He described the better way to do this: Ronald Reagan would have done it differently. He would have told a story. It might not have been a true story, but it would have had resonance. He might have found, or created, a grieving spouse--a young investment banker whose wife had died in the World Trade Center--who enlisted immediately after the attacks...and then gave his life, heroically, defending a school for girls in Kandahar. Reagan would have inspired tears, outrage, passion, a rush to recruiting centers across the nation. Ah, Reagan--now there was a president who could inspire people to fight and die based on lies. ================== --The Cheney 2012 Award WINNER: Jon Meacham, Newsweek Newsweek editor Jon Meacham declared (12/7/09) that Dick Cheney running for president in 2012 would be "good for the Republicans and good for the country." He explained that "Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people.... A campaign would also give us an occasion that history denied us in 2008: an opportunity to adjudicate the George W. Bush years in a direct way." While the 2008 election might have seemed a sufficient judgment of the Bush years, it's worth pointing out that at beginning of the year (1/19/09), Meacham was adamantly opposed to re-hashing Cheney's record, calling it "the rough equivalent of pornography--briefly engaging, perhaps, but utterly predictable and finally repetitive." The difference? That was in response to the idea that Cheney should be held accountable for lawbreaking. Apparently a few months later, the same record is grounds for a White House run. ================== --The Them Not Us Award WINNER: Martin Fackler, New York Times The New York Times (11/21/09) describes the severe problems with Japan's elite media--a horror show where "reporters from major news media outlets are stationed inside government offices and enjoy close, constant access to officials. The system has long been criticized as antidemocratic by both foreign and Japanese analysts, who charge that it has produced a relatively spineless press that feels more accountable to its official sources than to the public. In their apparent reluctance to criticize the government, the critics say, the news media fail to serve as an effective check on authority." The mind reels. ================== --Thin-Skinned Pundits Award WINNER: Dana Milbank, Washington Post Washington Post reporters Dana Milbank and Chris Cilizza got into trouble when, in an episode of their "Mouthpiece Theater" web video series, they suggested brands of beer that would be appropriate for various politicians. What would Hillary Clinton drink? Apparently something called "Mad Bitch." The video, unsurprisingly, was roundly criticized, and was pulled from the Post site. So what lesson was learned? Milbank complained (8/6/09) that "it's a brutal world out there in the blogosphere.... I'm often surprised by the ferocity out there, but I probably shouldn't be." Yes, the problem with calling someone a "bitch" is the "ferocity" of your critics. ================== --The Sheer O'Reillyness Award WINNER: Bill O'Reilly, Fox News Channel--TWICE! 1) Asked by a Canadian viewer, "Has anyone noticed that life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?," Fox's O'Reilly (7/27/09) responded: "Well, that's to be expected, Peter, because we have 10 times as many people as you do. That translates to 10 times as many accidents, crimes, down the line." 2) Drumming up fear of Democrats' tax plans: "Nancy Pelosi and her far-left crew want to raise the top federal tax rate to 45 percent. That's not capitalism. That's Fidel Castro stuff, confiscating wages that people honestly earn." Perhaps Castro was president of the United States in 1982-86, when the top rate was 50 percent. Or maybe all of the 1970s, when it was 70 percent. Or from 1950-63, when it was 91 percent. ================== --The Less Talk, More Bombs Award WINNER: David Broder, Washington Post Post columnist Broder expressed the conventional wisdom on Barack Obama's deliberations on the Afghanistan War, writing under the headline "Enough Afghan Debate" (11/15/09): It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision-- whether or not it is right. ================== --The Racism Is Dead Award WINNER: Richard Cohen, Washington Post Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote (5/5/09): "The justification for affirmative action gets weaker and weaker. Maybe once it was possible to argue that some innocent people had to suffer in the name of progress, but a glance at the White House strongly suggests that things have changed. For most Americans, race has become supremely irrelevant. Everyone knows this. Every poll shows this." For the record, "every poll" does not actually show this; the vast majority of Americans continues to recognize that racism is still a problem. Cohen went on to write months later--still presumably living in his racism-free world--that he did not believe Iran's claims about its nuclear program, because "these Persians lie like a rug." ================== --The When in Doubt, Talk to the Boss Award WINNER: Matt Lauer, NBC News Today show host Lauer announced a special guest on April 15: "If you really want to know how the economy is affecting the average American, he's the guy to talk to." Who was Lauer talking about? Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke. The ensuing interview touched on the Employee Free Choice Act, which Lauer noted was supported by many unions but opposed by some large corporations--leading him to ask Duke, "What's the truth?" Yes, look for "the truth" about a proposed pro-labor bill from the new CEO of an adamantly anti- labor corporation. ================== --The Socialist Menace Award WINNER: Michael Freedman, Newsweek Newsweek's "We Are All Socialists Now" cover (2/16/09) certainly turned heads, but one of the stories inside explained in more detail the real threat. As senior editor Michael Freedman asked: "Have you noticed that Barack Obama sounds more like the president of France every day?" The real problem, though, is what that's going to do to us Americans, says Freedman: "If job numbers continue to look dismal, or get even worse, an ever-greater number of people will start looking to the government for support.... It's very easy to imagine a chorus of former American individualists demanding cushy French-style pensions and free British-style healthcare if their private stock funds fail to recover and unemployment inches upward toward 10 percent and remains there." Pensions and healthcare for all--this is worse than we thought! ================== --The Iraq All Over Again Award WINNER: Too Many to Name After the invasion of Iraq, countless journalists who had treated allegations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as facts were embarrassed when there were no such weapons to be found. So you'd think they'd be more careful about thinly sourced claims that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. But in 2009, many journalists are still willing to treat such allegations as facts. -NBC's Chris Matthews (10/4/09): "As if Afghanistan were not enough, now there's Iran's move to get nuclear weapons." -NBC's David Gregory (10/4/09). "Iran--will talks push that country to give up its nuclear weapons program?" -Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (9/25/09): "All hell breaking loose as a new nuclear weapons facility is discovered in Iran, proving the mullahs have been lying for years.... Iran's nuclear weapons program has now reached critical mass. And worldwide conflict is very possible. Friday, President Obama, British Prime Minister Brown and French President Sarkozy revealed a secret nuclear weapons facility located inside Iran." Some even went further, turning allegations of a nuclear weapons program into the discovery of actual nuclear weapons: -ABC's Good Morning America host Bill Weir (9/26/09): "President Obama and a united front of world leaders charge Iran with secretly building nuclear weapons." ================== --The Talking Like a Terrorist Award WINNER: Thomas Friedman, New York Times In a January 14 column, New York Times superstar pundit Tom Friedman explained Israel's war on Lebanon as an attempt to "educate" the enemy by killing civilians: The Israeli strategy was to "inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical." Friedman added, "The only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians--the families and employers of the militants--to restrain Hezbollah in the future." That strategy of targeting civilians to advance a political agenda is usually known as terrorism; Osama bin Laden couldn't have explained it much better. ================== --The It Only Bothers Us Now Award WINNER: Wall Street Journal editorial page When Barack Obama only called on journalists from a list during a press conference, the Wall Street Journal did not like the new protocol (2/12/09):"We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors." Actually, Bush was famous for calling only on reporters on an approved list; as he joked at a press conference on the eve of the Iraq War (3/6/03), "This is scripted." ================== --The No Comment Award WINNERS: MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski and Rush Limbaugh When asked by Politico (10/16/09) to name her favorite guest, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski named arch-conservative Pat Buchanan "because he says what we are all thinking." Rush Limbaugh on Obama (Fox News Channel, 1/21/09): "We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles...because his father was black." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 24 08:25:10 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:25:10 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Palestine] Danger: Popular struggle against occupation Message-ID: <92EAC9BB9648456BB0398E64D0B8F220@agingCHS072729> http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1137056.html Haaretz.com Dec. 23, 2009 Danger: Popular struggle By Amira Hass There is an internal document that has not been leaked, or perhaps has not even been written, but all the forces are acting according to its inspiration: the Shin Bet, Israel Defense Forces, Border Police, police, and civil and military judges. They have found the true enemy who refuses to whither away: The popular struggle against the occupation. Over the past few months, the efforts to suppress the struggle have increased. The target: Palestinians and Jewish Israelis unwilling to give up their right to resist reign of demographic separation and Jewish supremacy. The means: Dispersing demonstrations with live ammunition, late-night army raids and mass arrests. Since the beginning of the year, 29 Palestinians have been wounded by IDF snipers while demonstrating against the separation fence. The snipers fired expanding bullets, despite an explicit 2001 order from the Military Adjutant General not to use such ammunition to break up demonstrations. After soldiers killed A'kel Srour in June, the shooting stopped, but then resumed in November. Since June, dozens of demonstrators have been arrested in a series of nighttime military raids. Most are from Na'alin and Bil'in, whose land has been stolen by the fence, and some are from the Nablus area, which is stricken by settlers' abuse. Military judges have handed down short prison terms for incitement, throwing stones and endangering security. One union activist from Nablus was sent to administrative detention - imprisonment without a trial - while another activist is still being interrogated. For a few weeks now, the police have refused to approve demonstrations against the settlement in Sheikh Jarrah, an abomination approved by the courts. On each of the last two Fridays, police arrested more than 20 protesters for 24 hours. Ten were held for half an hour in a cell filled with vomit and diarrhea in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem. Israel also recently arrested two main activists from the Palestinian organization Stop the Wall, which is involved in research and international activity which calls for the boycott of Israel and companies profiting from the occupation. Mohammad Othman was arrested three months ago. After two months of interrogation did not yield any information, he was sent to administrative detention. The organization's coordinator, Jamal Juma'a, a 47-year-old resident of Jerusalem, was arrested on December 15. His detention was extended two days ago for another four days, and not the 14 requested by the prosecutor. The purpose of the coordinated oppression: To wear down the activists and deter others from joining the popular struggle, which has proven its efficacy in other countries at other times. What is dangerous about a popular struggle is that it is impossible to label it as terror and then use that as an excuse to strengthen the regime of privileges, as Israel has done for the past 20 years. The popular struggle, even if it is limited, shows that the Palestinian public is learning from its past mistakes and from the use of arms, and is offering alternatives that even senior officials in the Palestinian Authority have been forced to support - at least on the level of public statements. Yuval Diskin and Amos Yadlin, the respective heads of the Shin Bet security service and Military Intelligence, already have exposed their fears. During an intelligence briefing to the cabinet they said: "The Palestinians want to continue and build a state from the bottom up ... and force an agreement on Israel from above ... The quiet security [situation] in the West Bank and the fact that the [Palestinian] Authority is acting against terror in an efficient manner has caused the international community to turn to Israel and demand progress." The brutal repression of the first intifada, and the suppression of the first unarmed demonstrations of the second intifada with live fire, have proved to Palestinians that the Israelis do not listen. The repression left a vacuum that was filled by those who sanctified the use of arms. Is that what the security establishment and its political superiors are trying to achieve today, too, in order to relieve us of the burden of a popular uprising? =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 27 17:48:36 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:48:36 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Could Canadians be charged with war crimes? Message-ID: http://embassymag.ca/page/view/mission-12-16-2009 embassymag.ca December 16, 2009 Could Canadians be charged with war crimes? "I know that it is difficult for Canadians to conceive of this possibility," [Michael] Byers concluded. "But it's a very real possibility." By Jeff Davis Jeff Davis, Embassy With the government refusing to start a public inquiry and the International Criminal Court having launched a "preliminary" investigation into the Afghan detainee issue, law experts say there is a very real chance Canadian officials could be charged with war crimes. Until last week, the government and senior officials had been saying they had no credible reports that people detained by the Canadian Forces and transferred to Afghan authorities were being tortured. While Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Walter Natynczyk revealed on Dec. 9 that such torture had, in fact, occurred in the past, government ministers say they were not aware of the reports. Further, they have not acknowledged they heard the widespread reports that Afghan authorities were abusing detainees. Last week's charged Commons' Afghanistan Committee meeting saw Defence Minister Peter MacKay, Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon and former defence minister Gordon O'Connor testify on the issue. During the meeting, Liberal Defence critic Ujjal Dosanjh noted that in international law, the legal threshold for the war crime of transferring into torture hangs on circumstantial evidence. "International law is very clear," said Mr. Dosanjh, a lawyer and former attorney general of British Columbia. "You need circumstantial evidence; you don't need actual knowledge of any specific allegations, or actual knowledge of torture. There was substantial knowledge of torture in Afghan jails. Every kid on the ground knew that. All of the reports, national or international, knew that." University of Ottawa law professor Errol Mendes says Mr. Dosanjh was correct. The government's oft-repeated line that there was no documented physical evidence of torture of Canadian-transferred detainees is a "detour," he said, which ignores the actual requirements of the law: circumstantial evidence that a risk of torture existed. Having ratified the Geneva Convention, Canada incorporated its principles into domestic law through the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. Under this domestic law, Mr. Mendes said, the RCMP could investigate government officials. Mr. Mendes said that for the "honour and dignity of Canada," the government should call a public inquiry. Once the facts are out in public, he said, the RCMP could decide whether to charge officials, or whether the political consequences-for example, if a minister were to resign-were sufficient. He added that jurisprudence holds that the responsibility for such transfers rests with those who authorized the transfer. "While the front line soldiers may have done the actual transfer, the culpability actually lies at the civilian command level: The ones who set the framework in place," Mr. Mendes said. However, if the government's refusal to launch a Canadian investigation continues, he said, that could open it up to international judicial systems. The International Criminal Court considers itself a court of last resort, abiding the principle of "complemenarity." This means the ICC can only exercise its jurisdiction where the home country of the suspect in question is unable or unwilling to prosecute. The ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, is already conducting a "preliminary examination" into human rights abuses committed in Afghanistan by Taliban and ISAF forces alike. And while the ICC has focused in recent years on prosecuting African despots, Mr. Ocampo said in a November interview with the Wall Street Journal that he will not back down from prosecuting Western governments that are not holding their officials accountable for their actions. "I prosecute whoever is in my jurisdiction. I cannot allow that we are a court just for the Third World. If the First World commits crimes, they have to investigate. If they don't, I shall investigate," Mr. Ocampo said. "That's the rule and we have one rule for everyone." Earlier this month, Mr. Ocampo received an update on Canada's detainee debate from Michael Byers, who teaches international law and the laws of war at the University of British Columbia, and who has run for the federal NDP. The 16-page letter, written with the director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, William Schabas, seeks to draw attention to Richard Colvin's testimony. Due to the failure of Canadian officials to impose a rigorous transfer agreement, Mr. Byers writes, officials "seem to have wilfully been placing detainees at well-documented risk of torture, cruel treatment and outrages upon personal dignity. If so, they would appear to have been committing war crimes...in circumstances that clearly fall within the Court's jurisdiction." This is not Mr. Byers' first foray into the detainee issue. In December 2006, Mr. Byers and Amnesty International Canada secretary-general Alex Neve appeared before the Commons' Defence Committee, testifying that Canada's detainee transfer agreement was insufficient and left the Canadian-transferred prisoners exposed to abuse. The two said that if the government simply adopted a transfer agreement similar to that of the Dutch government, a potential scandal could be avoided. "There are substantial grounds to believe that when Canadian Forces transfer a prisoner into Afghan custody, torture or ill treatment will occur," Mr. Neve told the committee. "In doing so, Canada is in violation of its international human rights obligations." "So where do we go from here? That's the big question," Mr. Byers told the committee. "The Canada-Afghanistan arrangement should be renegotiated to include all the protections provided in the Netherlands-Afghanistan memorandum." The government ignored this advice, until May 2007. Mr. Byers said that due to reports from the US government, former UN high commissioner for human rights Louise Arbour and Richard Colvin, the government had a "general knowledge" of the risks of transferring detainees to Afghan authorities. These reports, he said, "should have set off very loud alarm bells in Ottawa." Mr. Byers said Canadian officials who oversaw the issue between December 2005-when the original agreement was signed-and May 2007-when a new one came into force-are open to prosecution because they didn't act. "For a significant period of time, [officials] knew there was a substantial risk of torture, they knew how to prevent it, and they chose for a substantial period of time not to take preventative measures." He said that this case is particularly serious because, rather than torture being abetted by a low-ranking soldier acting alone, complicity appears to go "all the way up the chain of command up to the defence minister and foreign minister." "That's what distinguishes this from standard war crimes cases," Mr. Byers said. "They've got the command responsibility, and that's why I believe the ICC prosecutor will initiate a formal investigation." Mr. Byers speculated that Canadian officials are more likely to be investigated than American ones because Canada has ratified the ICC's Rome Statutes and the United States has not. "Here you have clear jurisdiction, a history of strong support for the court, and allegations of a governmental policy that goes up and down the chain of command, all the way to Cabinet ministers," he said. "You couldn't imagine a more compelling situation for the prosecutor. "I know that it is difficult for Canadians to conceive of this possibility," Mr. Byers concluded. "But it's a very real possibility." Fearful of the damage an ICC investigation would inflict on Canada's international reputation, Mr. Byers said he hopes the Harper government will launch a public inquiry. Such action, he said, may satisfy the ICC's principle of "complemenarity" and could stop any ICC legal action in its tracks. "We could completely close off the possibility [of Canadians being charged at the ICC] by engaging in domestic procedures," he said. jdavis at embassymag.ca http://embassymag.ca/page/printpage/mission-12-16-2009 =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 27 17:55:29 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:55:29 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Killing Activists in Honduras Message-ID: <1446B01C7A92432598F1B48C11F16FBE@agingCHS072729> http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/2278/1/ Upside Down World December 23, 2009 Killing Activists in Honduras By Joseph Shansky "As a revolutionary I will be today, tomorrow and forever on the front lines of my people, all the while knowing that I may lose my life." - Walter Trochez, 25, murdered in Tegucigalpa on December 13. The bodies of slain activists are piling up in Honduras. While it's being kept quiet in most Honduran and international media, the rage is building among a dedicated network of friends spreading the word quickly with the tragic announcement of each companero/a. Now that the world heard from mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times of a "clean and fair" election on Nov. 29 (orchestrated by the US-supported junta currently in power), the violence has increased even faster than feared. The specific targets of these killings have been those perceived as the biggest threats to the coup establishment. The bravest, and thus the most vulnerable: Members of the Popular Resistance against the coup. Their friends and family. People who provide the Resistance with food and shelter. Teachers, students, and ordinary citizens who simply recognize the fallacy of an un-elected regime taking over their country. All associated with the Resistance have faced constant and growing repercussions for their courage in protesting the coup. With the international community given the green light by the US that democratic order has returned via elections, it's open season for violent forces in Honduras working to tear apart the political unity of the Resistance Front against the coup. The killings are happening almost faster than they can be recorded. On Sunday, Dec. 7, a group of six people were gunned down while walking down the street in the Villanueva neighborhood of Tegucigalpa. According to sources, a white van with no license plates stopped in front of the group. Four masked men jumped out of the van and forced the group to get on the ground, where they were shot. The five victims who were killed were: - Marcos Vinicio Matute Acosta, 39 - Kennet Josua Rame?,??rez Rosa, 23 - Gabriel Antonio Parrales Zelaya, 34 - Roger Andres Reyes Aguilar, 22 - Isaac Enrique Soto Coello, 24 One woman, Wendy Molina, 32, was shot several times and played dead when one of the assassins pulled her hair, checking to see if anyone in the group was still alive. She was taken to the hospital and survived. The Honduran independent newspaper El Libertador reports that the group members were all organizers against the coup. According to a resident in the area, "The boys had organized committees so that the neighbors could get involved in the Resistance Front." This massacre was part of a string of Resistance- related murders during the past few weeks alone. On December 3, Walter Trochez, 25 a well-known activist in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community was snatched off the street and thrown into a van, again by four masked men, in downtown Tegucigalpa. In the report that he later filed to local and national authorities, Walter said he was interrogated for hours for information on Resistance members and activities, and was beaten in the face with a pistol for refusing to speak. He was told that he would be killed regardless, and he eventually escaped by throwing open the van door, falling into the street, and running away. It wasn't the first time Walter had been subject to these kinds of threats. He was a much-loved organizer against the coup who had been documenting human rights violations, particularly in the gay community. Walter had just published two articles. One following the elections was titled "The Triumph of Abstentionism", on the success of the effort by the Resistance to encourage citizens to refuse to vote. The other was called "Escalation of Hate and Homophobic Crimes against the LGBTT Community Rooted in the Civil- Religious-Military Coup d'etat in Honduras". In both, he concludes: "As a revolutionary I will be today, tomorrow and forever on the front lines of my people, all the while knowing that I may lose my life". On Dec. 13, one week later, Walter was shot in the chest by a drive-by gunman while walking home. He died at the hospital. On Dec. 5, Santos Garcia Corrales, an active member of the National Resistance Front, was detained by security forces in New Colony Capital, south of Tegucigalpa. He was then tortured for information on a local merchant who was providing food and supplies to the Resistance. After reporting the incident to local authorities, Santos' body was found five days later on Dec 10, decapitated. There have been others as well, notably a rise in murders in the LGBT community since the coup. In particular, several transvestites have been recently killed in similarly gruesome ways. Human rights advocates report that "up to 18 gay and transgender men have been killed nationwide - as many as the five prior years - in the nearly six months since a political crisis rocked the nation." The latest victim, Carlos Turcios, was kidnapped outside his home in Choloma Cortes, at three in the afternoon of Wednesday Dec. 16. He was found dead the next day, with his hands and head cut off. Carlos had been vice-president of the Choloma chapter of the Resistance Front, a town located a few hours outside of the capital. Andres Pavan, president of CODEH (Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras), commented: "We believe this horrendous crime joins others where the bodies show signs of brutal torture.This aggression is directed to the construction of collective fear." It is a sinister effort to shake up a community that is now in fact stronger than ever. As Walter Trochez noted (and CNN confirmed), most of the country refused to go to the polls that day. Many of the world's governments, including most of Latin America, refused to recognize the results. In this climate of fierce repression, citizens can no longer depend on authorities for the most basic protective rights, and those fearful for their lives cannot report to the police. Complaints they file, such as those of Santos and Walter, could soon become signatures to their own death letters. Many believe with good reason that the killings are state-sponsored. At the very least, they are the result of new conditions which allow for the widespread deterioration of state protection. Paven and other human rights leaders in Honduras have been extremely vocal in denouncing these atrocities, but the story has remained under the radar for most Hondurans and almost all international media. At the time when Hondurans most need exposure to these abuses, they've been left to fend for themselves. How did this happen? Why are people being randomly executed in dark corners of the country for simply standing in opposition to a military coup? Most of the bloodshed is on the hands of coup president Roberto Micheletti and other leaders of the regime. However, President Barack Obama and the US State Department played a major role in allowing conditions to get to this point. The US government took no concrete action against the thousands of documented violations since the coup took place June 28. It's no shock that the violence has worsened dramatically with the eyes of the world now averted. In a recent interview, Francisco Rios of the National Front Against the Coup reiterated Frente communiques which stated that the Resistance, though now lying low, is preparing a massive organization effort for next year and beyond. Rios reported that they have stopped meeting publicly as a safety measure for now, but will soon begin dividing into chapters around the country with plans to emerge as a new, strengthened political force. Walter, Santos, Carlos, and all of the Resistance fighters who gave their lives have inspired others in the movement to continue the struggle for justice in Honduras. _______________ Joseph Shansky was reporting from Honduras during the recent military coup, and can be reached at fallow3 at gmail.com. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 27 18:04:53 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:04:53 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Op-Ed in NYT calls for US attack on Iran Message-ID: <5FD62134D59E4A5698C47F77AEAEC762@agingCHS072729> (here we go again - an op-ed that could have been penned by other cheerleaders for war from the NY Times, like Thomas Friedman, for example) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/opinion/24kuperman.html New York Times December 24, 2009 Op-Ed Contributor There's Only One Way to Stop Iran By ALAN J. KUPERMAN PRESIDENT OBAMA should not lament but sigh in relief that Iran has rejected his nuclear deal, which was ill conceived from the start. Under the deal, which was formally offered through the United Nations, Iran was to surrender some 2,600 pounds of lightly enriched uranium (some three-quarters of its known stockpile) to Russia, and the next year get back a supply of uranium fuel sufficient to run its Tehran research reactor for three decades. The proposal did not require Iran to halt its enrichment program, despite several United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding such a moratorium. Iran was thus to be rewarded with much-coveted reactor fuel despite violating international law. Within a year, or sooner in light of its expanding enrichment program, Iran would almost certainly have replenished and augmented its stockpile of enriched uranium, nullifying any ostensible nonproliferation benefit of the deal. Moreover, by providing reactor fuel, the plan would have fostered proliferation in two ways. First, Iran could have continued operating its research reactor, which has helped train Iranian scientists in weapons techniques like plutonium separation. (Yes, as Iran likes to point out, the reactor also produces medical isotopes. But those can be purchased commercially from abroad, as most countries do, including the United States.) Absent the deal, Iran's reactor will likely run out of fuel within two years, and only a half-dozen countries are able to supply fresh fuel for it. This creates significant international leverage over Iran, which should be used to compel it to halt its enrichment program. In addition, the vast surplus of higher-enriched fuel Iran was to get under the deal would have permitted some to be diverted to its bomb program. Indeed, many experts believe that the uranium in foreign-provided fuel would be easier to enrich to weapons grade because Iran's uranium contains impurities. Obama administration officials had claimed that delivering uranium in the form of fabricated fuel would prevent further enrichment for weapons, but this is false. Separating uranium from fuel elements so that it can be enriched further is a straightforward engineering task requiring at most a few weeks. Thus, had the deal gone through, Iran could have benefited from a head start toward making weapons-grade 90 percent-enriched uranium (meaning that 90 percent of its makeup is the fissile isotope U-235) by starting with purified 20 percent-enriched uranium rather than its own weaker, contaminated stuff. This raises a question: if the deal would have aided Iran's bomb program, why did the United States propose it, and Iran reject it? The main explanation on both sides is domestic politics. President Obama wanted to blunt Republican criticism that his multilateral approach was failing to stem Iran's nuclear program. The deal would have permitted him to claim, for a year or so, that he had defused the crisis by depriving Iran of sufficient enriched uranium to start a crash program to build one bomb. But in reality no one ever expected Iran to do that, because such a headlong sprint is the one step most likely to provoke an international military response that could cripple the bomb program before it reaches fruition. Iran is far more likely to engage in "salami slicing" - a series of violations each too small to provoke retaliation, but that together will give it a nuclear arsenal. For example, while Iran permits international inspections at its declared enrichment plant at Natanz, it ignores United Nations demands that it close the plant, where it gains the expertise needed to produce weapons-grade uranium at other secret facilities like the nascent one recently uncovered near Qom. In sum, the proposal would not have averted proliferation in the short run, because that risk always was low, but instead would have fostered it in the long run - a classic example of domestic politics undermining national security. Tehran's rejection of the deal was likewise propelled by domestic politics - including last June's fraudulent elections and longstanding fears of Western manipulation. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad initially embraced the deal because he realized it aided Iran's bomb program. But his domestic political opponents, whom he has tried to label as foreign agents, turned the tables by accusing him of surrendering Iran's patrimony to the West. Under such domestic pressure, Mr. Ahmadinejad reneged. But Iran still wants reactor fuel, so he threatened to enrich uranium domestically to the 20 percent level. This is a bluff, because even if Iran could further enrich its impure uranium, it lacks the capacity to fabricate that uranium into fuel elements. His real aim is to compel the international community into providing the fuel without requiring Iran to surrender most of the enriched uranium it has on hand. Indeed, Iran's foreign minister has now proposed just that: offering to exchange a mere quarter of Iran's enriched uranium for an immediate 10-year supply of fuel for the research reactor. This would let Iran run the reactor, retain the bulk of its enriched uranium and continue to enrich more - a bargain unacceptable even to the Obama administration. Tehran's rejection of the original proposal is revealing. It shows that Iran, for domestic political reasons, cannot make even temporary concessions on its bomb program, regardless of incentives or sanctions. Since peaceful carrots and sticks cannot work, and an invasion would be foolhardy, the United States faces a stark choice: military air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities or acquiescence to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. The risks of acquiescence are obvious. Iran supplies Islamist terrorist groups in violation of international embargoes. Even President Ahmadinejad's domestic opponents support this weapons traffic. If Iran acquired a nuclear arsenal, the risks would simply be too great that it could become a neighborhood bully or provide terrorists with the ultimate weapon, an atomic bomb. As for knocking out its nuclear plants, admittedly, aerial bombing might not work. Some Iranian facilities are buried too deeply to destroy from the air. There may also be sites that American intelligence is unaware of. And military action could backfire in various ways, including by undermining Iran's political opposition, accelerating the bomb program or provoking retaliation against American forces and allies in the region. But history suggests that military strikes could work. Israel's 1981 attack on the nearly finished Osirak reactor prevented Iraq's rapid acquisition of a plutonium-based nuclear weapon and compelled it to pursue a more gradual, uranium-based bomb program. A decade later, the Persian Gulf war uncovered and enabled the destruction of that uranium initiative, which finally deterred Saddam Hussein from further pursuit of nuclear weapons (a fact that eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion). Analogously, Iran's atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons. As for the risk of military strikes undermining Iran's opposition, history suggests that the effect would be temporary. For example, NATO's 1999 air campaign against Yugoslavia briefly bolstered support for President Slobodan Milosevic, but a democratic opposition ousted him the next year. Yes, Iran could retaliate by aiding America's opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it does that anyway. Iran's leaders are discouraged from taking more aggressive action against United States forces - and should continue to be - by the fear of provoking a stronger American counter-escalation. If nothing else, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the United States military can oust regimes in weeks if it wants to. Incentives and sanctions will not work, but air strikes could degrade and deter Iran's bomb program at relatively little cost or risk, and therefore are worth a try. They should be precision attacks, aimed only at nuclear facilities, to remind Iran of the many other valuable sites that could be bombed if it were foolish enough to retaliate. The final question is, who should launch the air strikes? Israel has shown an eagerness to do so if Iran does not stop enriching uranium, and some hawks in Washington favor letting Israel do the dirty work to avoid fueling anti-Americanism in the Islamic world. But there are three compelling reasons that the United States itself should carry out the bombings. First, the Pentagon's weapons are better than Israel's at destroying buried facilities. Second, unlike Israel's relatively small air force, the United States military can discourage Iranian retaliation by threatening to expand the bombing campaign. (Yes, Israel could implicitly threaten nuclear counter-retaliation, but Iran might not perceive that as credible.) Finally, because the American military has global reach, air strikes against Iran would be a strong warning to other would-be proliferators. Negotiation to prevent nuclear proliferation is always preferable to military action. But in the face of failed diplomacy, eschewing force is tantamount to appeasement. We have reached the point where air strikes are the only plausible option with any prospect of preventing Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. Postponing military action merely provides Iran a window to expand, disperse and harden its nuclear facilities against attack. The sooner the United States takes action, the better. Alan J. Kuperman is the director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Dec 27 19:03:13 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 19:03:13 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Pentagon Spending For War Exceeds That Of All State Governments Combined Message-ID: <90E7420490A04D8D8427C58158358BD6@agingCHS072729> http://www.roguegovernment.com/Pentagon_Spending_For_War_Exceeds_That_Of_All_State_Governments_Combined/18648/0/20/20/Y/M.html Pentagon Spending For War Exceeds That Of All State Governments Combined Published on 12-24-2009 By Sherwood Ross- BLN Contributing Writer The U.S. spends more for war annually than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans. Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008. For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for what the Pentagon calls "defense" in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That's more than all the state governments collect. Henchman says all American local governments combined (cities, counties, etc.) collect about $500 billion in taxes. Add that to total state tax take and you get over $1.3 trillion. This means Uncle Sam's Pentagon is sopping up nearly as much money as all state, county, city, and other governmental units spend to run the country. If the Pentagon figure of $1 trillion is somewhat less than all other taxing authorities, keep in mind the FBI, the various intelligence agencies, the VA, the National Institutes of Health (biological warfare) are also spending on war-related activities. A question that describes the above and answers itself is: In what area can the Federal government operate where states and cities cannot tread? The answer is: foreign affairs---raising armies, fighting wars, conducting diplomacy, etc. And so Uncle Sam keeps enlarging this area. His emphasis is not on diplomacy, either. For every buck spent by the State Department, which gets some $50 billion a year, the Pentagon spends $20. As for the Peace Corps, its budget is a paltry $375 million---hardly enough to keep the Pentagon elephant in peanuts. Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and finance authority Linda Bilmes write in their "The Three Trillion Dollar War"(W.W. Norton), "defense spending has been growing as a percentage of discretionary funding (money that is not required to be spent on entitlements like Social Security), from 48 percent in 2000 to 51 percent today. That means that our defense needs are gobbling up a larger share of taxpayers' money than ever before." And they add, "The Pentagon's budget has increased by more than $600 billion, cumulatively, since we invaded Iraq." With its 1,000 bases in the U.S. and another 800 bases globally, the U.S. truly has become a "Warfare State." Today, military-related products account for about one-fourth of total U.S. GDP. This includes 10,000 nuclear weapons. Indeed, the U.S. has lavished $5.5 trillion just on nukes over the past 70 years. No other nation has anything remotely like this menacing global presence. The Pentagon strengthens its grip by running joint "training" exercises with the military of 110 other nations, including outright dictatorships that suppress internal unrest. The U.S. spends more on weaponry than the next dozen nations combined and is by far the No. 1 world arms peddler. "The government employs some 6,500 people just to coordinate and administer its arms sales program in conjunction with senior officials at American embassies around the world, who spend most of their 'diplomatic' careers working as arms salesmen," writes Chalmers Johnson in "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire(Henry Holt)." Chalmers goes on to say the U.S. military establishment today is "close to being beyond civilian control" and that despite its ability to "deliver death and destruction to any target on earth and expect little in the way of retaliation" it demands more and newer equipment "while the Pentagon now more or less sets its own agenda" and "monopolizes the formulation and conduct of American foreign policy." How long will it be before this tyrannical, anti-democratic, colossus that is sucking up as much money for war as all states, counties and cities spend on peace---and which straddles the globe, boosts dictators, and beats the war drums---turns on its own people? # (Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations executive who formerly worked for major dailies and wire services. Contact him at sherwoodross10 at gmail.com) =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 18:36:14 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:36:14 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Big Zero (Krugman on failed economics) Message-ID: <3547D90EDE324EF8B2AE4C644F539AC6@agingCHS072729> (no mention of escalating wars, of course....not from this pundit) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28krugman.html?_r=1 The Big Zero By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: December 27, 2009 Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever. (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the millennium didn't begin until 2001. Do we really care?) But from an economic point of view, I'd suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true. It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined - the first decade on record in which that happened. It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged "Bush boom," in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next. It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade's middle years - when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble - well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth. Last and least for most Americans - but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV - it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like "Dow 36,000" predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520. So there was a whole lot of nothing going on in measures of economic progress or success. Funny how that happened. For as the decade began, there was an overwhelming sense of economic triumphalism in America's business and political establishments, a belief that we - more than anyone else in the world - knew what we were doing. Let me quote from a speech that Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary (and now the Obama administration's top economist), gave in 1999. "If you ask why the American financial system succeeds," he said, "at least my reading of the history would be that there is no innovation more important than that of generally accepted accounting principles: it means that every investor gets to see information presented on a comparable basis; that there is discipline on company managements in the way they report and monitor their activities." And he went on to declare that there is "an ongoing process that really is what makes our capital market work and work as stably as it does." So here's what Mr. Summers - and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time - believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system. What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero. What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes. Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks' claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn't understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers' expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage. Then there are the politicians. Even now, it's hard to get Democrats, President Obama included, to deliver a full-throated critique of the practices that got us into the mess we're in. And as for the Republicans: now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is - tax cuts and deregulation. So let's bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero - the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 18:52:36 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:52:36 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Patrick Bond: Curing Post-Copenhagen Hangover Message-ID: <1FC2E62AD89940A5B84E032121472D6F@agingCHS072729> http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/bond221209.html MR Zine 22.12.09 Curing Post-Copenhagen Hangover by Patrick Bond In Copenhagen, the world's richest leaders continued their fiery fossil fuel party last Friday night, ignoring requests of global village neighbors to please chill out. Instead of halting the hedonism, Barack Obama and the Euro elites cracked open the mansion door to add a few nouveau riche guests: South Africa's Jacob Zuma, China's Wen Jiabao (reportedly the most obnoxious of the lot), Brazil's Lula Inacio da Silva, and India's Manmohan Singh. By Saturday morning, still punch-drunk with power over the planet, these wild and crazy party animals had stumbled back onto their jets and headed home. The rest of us now have a killer hangover, because on behalf mainly of white capitalists (who are having the most fun of all), the world's rulers stuck the poor and future generations with vast clean-up charges -- and worse: certain death for millions. The 770 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere envisaged in the Copenhagen Accord signatories' promised 15% emissions cuts from 1990 levels by 2020 -- which in reality could be a 10% increase once carbon trading and offset loopholes are factored in -- will cook the planet, say scientists, with nine out of ten African peasants losing their livelihood. The most reckless man at the party, of course, was the normally urbane, Ivy League-educated lawyer who, a year ago, we hoped might behave with the dignity and compassion behooving the son of a leading Kenyan intellectual. But in Obama's refusal to lead the North to make 45% emissions cuts and offer payment of the $400 billion annual climate debt owed to Third World victims by 2020, Obama trashed not only Africa but also the host institution, according to 350.org leader Bill McKibben: "He blew up the United Nations." Economist Jeffrey Sachs charged Obama with abandoning "the UN framework, because it was proving nettlesome to US power and domestic politics. Obama's decision to declare a phony negotiating victory undermines the UN process by signaling that rich countries will do what they want and must no longer listen to the 'pesky' concerns of many smaller and poorer countries." The Accord is "insincere, inconsistent, and unconvincing," Sachs continued, "unlikely to accomplish anything real. It is non-binding and will probably strengthen the forces of opposition to emissions reductions." Moreover, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's "announcements about money a decade from now are mostly empty words. They do not bind the rich countries at all." As Naomi Klein summed up, the Accord is "nothing more than a grubby pact between the world's biggest emitters: I'll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal." A handful of technocrats must also shoulder blame, including two key South African officials. A week earlier, before the politicians arrived, Pretoria bureaucrats Joanne Yawitch and Alf Wills were already criticized by leading Third World negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping for dividing the South's main negotiating group, the G77. Yawitch then forced a humiliating apology from Di-Aping for his frank talk (to an African civil society caucus) about her treachery. On Friday night, Zuma did exactly what she had denied was underway: he destroyed the unity of Africa and the G77. The Pretoria team went to Copenhagen empowered by endorsements from the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace -- alongside gullible climate journalists -- who took at face value a vaguely promised 34% emissions cut below anticipated 2020 levels, even though absolute decline would only begin after 2030. Tristen Taylor of Earthlife Africa begged Pretoria for details and, after two weeks of delays, learned Yawitch's estimates were from a "Growth Without Constraint" (GWC) scenario. According to Taylor, "GWC is fantasy, essentially an academic exercise to see how much carbon South Africa would produce given unlimited resources and cheap energy prices." Officials had already conceded GWC was "neither robust nor plausible" eighteen months ago, leading Taylor to conclude, "The SA government has pulled a public relations stunt." WWF and Greenpeace owe an explanation for their incompetence. Then came Friday, which George Monbiot compared to the 1884-85 Berlin negotiations known as the "Scramble for Africa," which divided and conquered the continent. The African Union was twisted and U-turned to support Zuma's capitulation by the man appointed its climate leader, Meles Zenawi. In September, the Ethiopian dictator claimed, "If needs be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threatens to be another rape of our continent." But he didn't walk out -- he walked off his plane in Paris on the way to Copenhagen, into the arms of Nicolas Sarkozy. The fateful side deal, according to Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), is "undermining the bold positions of our negotiators and ministers represented here, and threatening the very future of Africa." Not only did Zuma and Zenawi surrender on emissions cuts, but also on demanding full payment of the North's climate debt to the South. "Meles wants to sell out the lives and hopes of Africans for a pittance,' said Mwenda. "Every other African country has committed to policy based on the science." Clinton and the US team refused to acknowledge the North's vast climate debt, owed not only for climate damage but for excessive use of environmental space. Huffed Washington's chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, "the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations -- I just categorically reject that." Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations Pablo Solon replied, "Admitting responsibility for the climate crisis without taking necessary actions to address it is like someone burning your house and then refusing to pay for it. . . . We are not assigning guilt, merely responsibility. As they say in the US, if you break it, you buy it." Stern's aversion to "culpability" translates into rejection of his own government's straightforward "polluter pays" principle as well as the foundational concepts of the Superfund, responsible for cleaning toxic waste dumps across the US. Worse, if the Copenhagen Accord is widely endorsed by February 1, much of the promised funding would flow via notoriously corrupt Clean Development Mechanism projects which often do great damage in local settings. According to the Accord, "We decide to pursue opportunities to use markets to enhance the cost-effectiveness of and to promote mitigations actions." But carbon markets continue failing, as long predicted by the Durban Group for Climate Justice and more recently by The Story of Cap & Trade. Last Thursday, the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme anticipated the feeble Copenhagen outcome -- including a defunct forest offsets deal -- by dropping 5%. The benchmark price is just 13.66 euros, less than half the peak of mid-2008, far lower than required to attract renewable energy investments. According to European Climate Exchange director Patrick Birley, "We were hoping that a deal in Copenhagen would open up new opportunities for emissions trading. That expectation has now faded." This leaves South Africa and the others as accomplices to an historic climate crime that cannot be covered up. The claim that post-apartheid Pretoria only looks after itself has often been made elsewhere on the continent. For example, former president Thabo Mbeki's nickname at the World Economic Forum's mid-2003 meeting in Mozambique was "the George Bush of Africa," as the Sunday Times reported. Climate damage to Africa will include much more rapid desertification, more floods and droughts, worse water shortages, increased starvation, floods of climate refugees jamming shanty-packed megalopolises, and the spread of malarial and other diseases. Ironically, Obama's and Zuma's own rural relatives in Kenya and KwaZulu-Natal will be amongst the first victims of the Accord. Did Zuma know what he was doing, acting in Copenhagen on behalf of major mining/metals corporations, which keep SA's ruling party lubricated with cash, "black economic empowerment" deals and jobs for cronies, and which need higher SA carbon emissions so as to continue receiving the world's cheapest electricity, and which then export their profits to London and Melbourne? Perhaps, but on the other hand, two other explanations -- ignorance and cowardice -- were, eight years ago, Zuma's plausible defenses for promoting AIDS denialism in 2000. He helped Mbeki during the period in which 330,000 South Africans died due to Pretoria's refusal to supply anti-retroviral medicines (as a Harvard Public Health School study showed). To his credit, Zuma reversed course by 2003, as public pressure arose from the Treatment Action Campaign and its international allies. That's exactly what the main local activist network, Climate Justice Now! South Africa, must repeat, or otherwise permit Zuma to remain a signatory to a far worse genocide. In the US, given that Obama's counterproductive cap-and-trade legislation is gridlocked in the Senate, the logical response -- if he cares a whit about the climate -- is to compel the Environmental Protection Agency to start shrinking greenhouse gas emissions by the worst polluters through its recent "endangerment" finding, to locate serious resources (e.g. through Third World debt cancellation) to pay carbon debt damages that can finance adaptation for climate victims, and to formally decommission the nascent US carbon markets, which delay the needed structural change towards a post-carbon economy. None of these strategies need congressional authorization. In South Africa, Zuma should do exactly the same. Neither will, of course. So uncivil society will have to take up the slack and apply direct pressure, starting with the slogan "leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, and the tarsand in the land!" Indeed the most effective antidote to the post-Copenhagen hangover came from environmentalists -- most visibly, Greenpeace -- stretching from Australia to Africa to Appalachia to Alberta. On December 20, on a bridge leading to the world's largest coal port, in Newcastle, Australia's Rising Tide activists blocked a train for 7.5 hours, with 23 arrests. In South Africa, groundWork, Earthlife, and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance are amongst the country's serious environmentalists trying to keep coal in the hole, by protesting the recently-announced $3.75 billion World Bank loan to Eskom (which helps fund the vast Medupi coal-fired plant), increased coal exports from Richards Bay, ultra-cheap electricity for aluminum smelters and mines, filthy operations of Sasol oil-to-coal, a new dirty oil refinery near Port Elizabeth, and a proposed Durban-Johannesburg pipeline which will double fuel flow to Africa's least sustainable city. Up the Atlantic Coast, the climate's and the people's main ally is the militancy which keeps Niger Delta oil in the soil. The Port Harcourt-based NGO Environmental Rights Action, led by visionary Nnimmo Bassey, links local destruction to global climate chaos. Sabotage of oil extraction is the consistent tactic of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which ended a two-month ceasefire by attacking a Shell and Chevron pipeline six hours after the Copenhagen Accord was signed. In Appalachia, West Virginia's Climate Ground Zero activists have, according to a December 19 report by Vicki Smith, "chained themselves to giant dump trucks, scaled 80-foot trees to stop blasting and paddled boots online into a 9 million-gallon sludge pond. They've blocked roads, hung banners and staged sit-ins. Virginia-based Massey Energy claims a single 3 1/2-hour occupation cost the company $300,000." And in Canada on December 20, anti-tarsands environmentalist Ingmar Lee climbed a flagpole at the British Columbia parliament to protest carbon crimes by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Provincial Premier Gordon Campbell, and their ally Tzeporah Berman from the corrupted NGO ForestEthics. At the Canadian High Commission on London's Pall Mall last week, Camp for Climate Action activists offered solidarity to Alberta's indigenous Canadian tarsands victims by cutting down the maple-leaf flag, drowning it in crude oil, and then locking down on an upstairs balcony. So if only two things were accomplished in Copenhagen, they were the unveiling of Pretoria, Delhi, Beijing, and Brasilia as willing criminal accomplices to the Washington/Brussel/Tokyo/ Melbourne/Ottawa axis, and the rise of Climate Justice Action, Climate Justice Now!, 350.org, and parallel movements whose hundreds of thousands of protesters swarmed streets of the world's cities. The next question is whether in 2010, before the next fiasco in Mexico City, the latter can cancel the former. We all depend upon an affirmative answer. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 19:05:30 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:05:30 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Getting Away with Torture Message-ID: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23554?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Emailmarketingsoftware&utm_content=484259891&utm_campaign=January142010issue+_+ukndl&utm_term=GettingAwaywithTorture The New York Review of Books Volume 57, Number 1 ? January 14, 2010 Getting Away with Torture By David Cole 1. In the fall of 2002, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen on his way home from Tunisia, was pulled out of line by US officials while changing planes at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. He was locked up for twelve days, much of that time incommunicado, and harshly interrogated. When he was finally allowed to make a phone call, after a week in captivity, he called his mother in Canada, who found him a lawyer. The lawyer saw Arar on Saturday. The very next night-a Sunday evening-immigration officials held an extraordinary six-hour hearing starting at 9 PM, orchestrated from Washington, D.C. When Arar asked to have his lawyer present, they told him that she had chosen not to participate in the hearing. In fact, the only "notice" they had provided was to leave a message on the lawyer's office voice mail that Sunday night. She got the message Monday morning, and immediately called the immigration service. They told her, falsely, that Arar was being transferred to New Jersey, and she could contact him the next day. In fact, that night federal agents took him on a federally chartered jet to Jordan, and from there to Syria. In Syria, Arar was handed over to intelligence officials who imprisoned him in a cell the size of a grave, three feet by six feet by seven feet. Syrian security agents tortured him, including beating him with an electric cable, while asking the same questions that FBI interrogators had been asking at JFK-was he a terrorist, was he linked to al-Qaeda, did he know various other persons thought to be associated with al-Qaeda? (The Syrian security forces are widely known for their use of torture, as the US State Department reports every year in its annual Human Rights Country Reports.) After a year, the Syrians released Arar, concluding that he had done nothing wrong. Arar returned to Canada-this time bypassing JFK. Canada launched a major independent investigation, which concluded that he was wholly innocent, and that Canadian officials had erred in providing the Americans with misleading information about him while he was in US custody. The Canadians erroneously told US officials that Arar was a target of a terrorist investigation; in fact, he had merely been identified as someone who should be contacted to see if he had any information about the target, and was not suspected of any terrorist activity himself. The Canadian parliament offered Arar a unanimous apology, and Canada paid him CAD $10.5 million in compensation.[*] But the Canadians were unaware that the US intended to send Arar to Syria, and they had no part in that decision. It was the US, not Canada, that locked up Arar without charges, blocked his access to the courts, spirited him off to Syria, and then provided the Syrians a dossier of questions to ask him while he was being tortured. Arar filed suit in a US court, suing the federal officials who had a part in his mistreatment-including Attorney General John Ashcroft, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. As a volunteer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, I am one of Arar's lawyers. Arar's claims were simple: to forcibly send him to Syria to be tortured violates the Constitution's due process clause, which the Supreme Court has interpreted as forbidding conduct that "shocks the conscience," as well as the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows torture victims to sue those who subject them to torture "under color of foreign law." Courts have long held that torture is the paradigmatic example of conduct that "shocks the conscience" and violates due process. And Arar alleged that the US defendants sent him to Syria for the purpose of subjecting him to torture under Syrian law. These allegations were largely confirmed not only by the Canadian investigation, but also by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general. In twenty-five years as a lawyer, I have never had a clearer and more egregious case of abuse. Yet thus far the US courts have shut the door entirely on Arar, not even allowing him to offer proof of his claims. In Arar's latest setback, an eleven-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled on November 2, 2009, that "special factors counseling hesitation" barred Arar's core claim that his constitutional rights were violated when he was sent to be tortured. The Supreme Court has ruled that suits for damages are generally available for such violations of constitutional rights, but has refused to permit suits where Congress has provided an alternative remedy, or where "military discipline" would be undermined by permitting soldiers to sue their commanding officers. The Bush administration argued that Arar's claim for damages should similarly be dismissed because it implicated sensitive issues of national security, foreign policy, and secret diplomatic communications between the US and foreign governments. The seven-judge majority agreed, finding that any adjudication would likely involve classified information, and could not proceed without inquiry into the perceived need for the [extraordinary rendition] policy, the threats to which it responds, the substance and sources of the intelligence used to formulate it, and the propriety of adopting specific responses to particular threats in light of apparent geopolitical circumstances and our relations with foreign countries. Two things are remarkable about the majority's reasoning. First, the rationale quoted above appears to presume that sending people to be tortured may be permissible depending on the "geopolitical circumstances" or "the threats to which [the torture] responds." But under our law and international law, torture is never permissible, and thus these concerns ought not even enter the picture. Second, to dismiss Arar's case at this early stage, the court had to find that, even accepting as true his allegations that federal officials sent an innocent man to be tortured, Arar would be entitled to no remedy. The court concluded, without actually reviewing any classified evidence, that Arar's case was too sensitive to adjudicate, because it would require court review of national security policy and confidential diplomacy. The court suggested that Arar ask Congress for a remedy instead-notwithstanding that he is a foreign national with no voice in the US political process, and that US officials have prohibited him from entering the country for any purpose. Four judges dissented. Judge Guido Calabresi, former dean of the Yale Law School, predicted that "when the history of this distinguished court is written, today's majority decision will be viewed with dismay." Judge Rosemary Pooler dismissed the majority's national security concerns as "hyperbolic and speculative," and maintained that Arar should have a remedy "to reinforce our system of checks and balances, to provide a deterrent, and to redress conduct that shocks the conscience." Judge Barrington Parker, appointed to the Second Circuit by President George W. Bush, wrote that "if the Constitution ever implied a damages remedy, this is such a case-where executive officials allegedly blocked access to the remedies chosen by Congress in order to deliver a man to known torturers." Had Arar been able to get to a court to challenge his removal before federal officials put him on a plane, the court would plainly have had authority to review the case and forbid the removal; courts routinely enjoin removal when a foreign national faces a substantial risk of torture. The fact that the defendants lied to Arar's lawyer to keep her from filing an action when the torture could have been averted, in Parker's view, only strengthened the case for a damages remedy after the fact; otherwise, the courts are essentially rewarding the obstruction of justice. Judge Robert Sack reasoned that if Arar had been tortured by federal officials at JFK, he would indisputably have a right to sue, and that the defendants' choice to outsource his torture abroad should not insulate them from liability: I do not think that whether the defendants violated Arar's Fifth Amendment rights turns on whom they selected to do the torturing: themselves, a Syrian Intelligence officer, a warlord in Somalia, a drug cartel in Colombia, a military contractor in Baghdad or Boston, a Mafia family in New Jersey, or a Crip set in South Los Angeles. What no judge pointed out, however, is that this is the same court of appeals that has regularly entertained lawsuits for torture and other gross human rights violations against foreign government officials, even when the wrongs were committed wholly outside the United States and affected only foreigners. One might think that such cases, in which we stand in judgment over other countries' alleged wrongs, would be even more diplomatically sensitive to adjudicate. Yet one month after the court dismissed Arar's suit, it affirmed a $19 million judgment against Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, the former leader of a Haitian death squad, for rape, torture, and attempted killing of three Haitian women by forces under his control. Under this precedent, had Arar been able to sue the Syrians who participated in his torture, the federal courts would have been ready and able to hear his claims. (He could not because none of the Syrians were in the United States, a prerequisite to the court exercising jurisdiction.) But because he sought to hold US officials accountable, his claims were too sensitive even to consider. International human rights, it seems, are something the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stands ready to impose on others, but not on ourselves. The same week that the court of appeals in New York dismissed Arar's case, a court in Milan, Italy, convicted twenty-two American CIA agents, a US Air Force lieutenant colonel, and two Italian military intelligence agents for the "extraordinary rendition" of a Muslim cleric, Abu Omar. He was abducted from the streets of Milan in 2003 and delivered to the Egyptian security service, which imprisoned him for four years without charges and tortured him, before returning him to Italy, uncharged. That case involved the same sort of secret information, diplomatic communications, and conduct on the part of US officials as Arar's. In Italy, however, the courts did not deny all accountability at the threshold, but instead addressed each of these issues in turn as they arose. Some claims against some defendants were dismissed because they rested on secret information, but the case proceeded against most of the defendants. As the Italian court showed, concerns about national secrets and confidential international communications can be accommodated in the course of litigation, and need not serve as a threshold bar to any accountability whatsoever. 2. More than sixty years ago, in a series of trials conducted in Nuremberg, Germany, the United States and its allies made history by holding Nazi officials accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during World War II-including abductions, disappearances, torture, and genocide. The Nuremberg judgments in turn had a critical part in the birth of international human rights. In the ashes of World War II, many nations, working with the United States, created a regime of rights and responsibility designed to affirm the inviolability of human dignity and to ensure that such atrocities would not happen again. The legacy of that period includes a set of charters defining the scope of human rights, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the international treaty prohibiting torture. Equally if not more importantly, however, the same legacy includes the establishment of forums for holding rights violators accountable-including international war crimes tribunals, regional human rights courts (such as the European Court of Human Rights), the International Criminal Court, and domestic courts that hear international human rights claims. Nuremberg was as much about the necessity of a forum for accountability as it was about the norms themselves. In the absence of effective enforcement, international human rights are mere words on paper. The last forum I have mentioned-the domestic court-may be the most important. By bringing human rights home, domestic courts give them a concreteness and immediacy that is critical to their effectiveness. Here, too, the United States has been a leader. In 1980, the same court that dismissed Arar's case ruled, in a landmark decision, Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, that federal courts could adjudicate claims by foreign citizens against foreign defendants for human rights violations committed abroad. Filartiga involved a young man who had been abducted, tortured, and killed by a Paraguyan police chief. When the family learned that the officer had fled to the United States, they sued him in US court. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared that the torturer is the "enemy of all mankind," and therefore may be sued for his wrongdoing wherever he is found. The usual reluctance to have a US court pass judgment on overseas conduct not involving any American citizens was overcome by the fact that the prohibition on torture is universal. Since that decision, US courts have adjudicated human rights claims involving brutality in Burma, South Africa, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Mexico, the Philippines, Argentina, and many other nations. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in 2004. Yet according to the Second Circuit, the same sorts of claims are too sensitive to permit adjudication when brought against US officials. In addition to a forum for enforcement, human rights also require equal application. Their purpose is to identify those norms so fundamental to human dignity that no government may violate them. Indeed, Nuremberg's legacy has always been somewhat clouded by the fact that the Soviet Union, itself responsible for terrible crimes against humanity, participated as a prosecutor, but was never held accountable for its own crimes. If international human rights are to be legitimate, they must be universal, and not a euphemism for "victor's justice." The torture standard does not differ based on whether the United States, Haiti, or Paraguay is engaged in the practice. The Italian court convicted Italians and Americans alike. If anything, it should be easier, not more difficult, to hold one's own government officials accountable than to hold foreign government officials accountable. The notion that domestic courts can hold another country's torturers accountable is not an American anomaly, as the Italian case illustrates. International law recognizes a principle of "universal jurisdiction," which holds that torturers can be held to account anywhere. Applying that principle, a Spanish judge in 1998 issued an arrest warrant for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes against humanity, including torture. Great Britain's highest court, the Law Lords, ruled that the warrant could be enforced to extradite Pinochet from England to stand trial. (In the end, Pinochet was returned to Chile on medical grounds, but was then indicted there.) The same Spanish judge, Baltasar Garz?n, is currently investigating whether criminal charges should be leveled against the Bush administration lawyers responsible for authorizing torture at Guant?namo-John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Jay Bybee, William Haynes, and Douglas Feith. The torture they authorized was inflicted on several Spanish citizens at Guant?namo, causing terrorist charges against them in Spain, also prosecuted by Garz?n, to be dismissed. The principle of universal jurisdiction recognizes that if a country is responsibly pursuing accountability for its own wrongs, a foreign court should defer to the domestic process. In his speech at the National Archives on May 21, 2009, President Obama insisted that the Justice Department and the courts "can work through and punish any violations of our laws or miscarriages of justice." Cases like Arar's belie his confidence, as does the Justice Department's failure even to investigate the lawyers who authorized the CIA and the military to engage in torture and disappearances as a means of getting suspects to talk. If we fail to carry out this responsibility, other nations, using principles that the US did much to develop, may take up the charge. -December 16, 2009 Notes [*]See Raymond Bonner, "The CIA's Secret Torture," The New York Review, January 11, 2007. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 19:16:33 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:16:33 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Video] Chomsky: America is not a Democracy Message-ID: <362C162D614F4F2DABF672B5983CEF00@agingCHS072729> Noam Chomsky America is not a democracy, nor was it intended to be http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24255.htm =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 19:17:50 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:17:50 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] US ground attacks reported in Pakistan Message-ID: <483A78500F5A454BB2D948843FA0E3C8@agingCHS072729> US ground attacks reported in Pakistan: Amid a deepening political crisis in Pakistan and growing popular unrest over US missile strikes and mercenaries, it has been revealed that over the past five years US special operations troops have conducted a number of clandestine cross-border raids into the country's tribal areas. www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/paki-d24.shtml =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 19:30:13 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:30:13 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?A_New_Year=27s_Message_from_IAC_founde?= =?iso-8859-1?q?r_Ramsey_Clark?= Message-ID: <0C47D61A37694CF79168FC76E07F4454@agingCHS072729> International Action Center 55 West 17th St., Fifth Floor, New York, N.Y. 10011 212-633-6646 December 2009 A New Year's Message from IAC founder Ramsey Clark Dear friends, Many of us relearned something obvious over the past year: elections offer only an opportunity to avoid tragedy, further exploitation and, at best, stagnation with a bad outcome or with a good outcome, a better chance for peace, the end of militarism, progress toward economic and social justice and a world of cooperation, not competition. Most often, our two-party national elections offer a slight difference, if any, on critical issues. 2008 broke the race barrier-a great victory for equality, only to be quickly subdued by the dominant powers in the United States-personal and corporate wealth, the plutocracy and its vast military apparatus which consumes more than half the federal budget and exceeds military expenditures of all other countries combined. At this critical time in world history, we dare not let the plutocracy prevail, with its control of the media, the Congress, government bureaucracies, and its sophisticated use of misinformation and fear. Real change takes more-the right priorities, constant vigilance, effective organizing, mass mobilization and unrelenting perseverance. This is the International Action's Center's role; it is known nationally and worldwide. IAC stands in solidarity with all harmed by imperialist aggression. Its bold, independent voice does not waver, compromise or concede. In January, during Israel's assault on Gaza, the IAC helped motivate people to protest nationally in solidarity with the Palestinians. IAC spread a petition worldwide; it called for ending the slaughter and lifting the blockade of Gaza. More than 500,000 messages were sent. In July, the IAC joined Viva Palestina-an aid caravan organized by British MP George Galloway, Ron Kovic, Cynthia McKinney and Charles Barron--to deliver desperately needed aid to Gaza, as the IAC did in Iraq from 1991 to 2003. Its significance rang loud and clear in Gaza, where solidarity was greatly needed and appreciated. Last summer, the dangerous refrain of "weapons of mass destruction" was heard again-this time aimed at Iran. The IAC worked hard to turn the tide and talk common sense, helping to blunt the government's pro-war propaganda, at least temporarily. This vital work set the stage for now, when the vitriol against Iran has begun again. Vigilance and ever-greater mobilization will be critical. IAC recently sent a fact-finding delegation to Honduras, where the U.S. stood by while generals trained at the School of the Americas joined oligarchs in a coup. The importance of continuing vigilance and mass mobilization cannot be overstated here. The Honduran resisters have said, "They fear us because we are fearless." They are confident because they have strong and well-informed supporters, including those who depend on the IAC for the truth and act accordingly. The great progress in Latin America-Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador-following in the footsteps of incomparable Cuba, with Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay moving to break the chains of the nearly two-century stranglehold of the Monroe Doctrine are at work in Honduras. The tide must not turn! Here, in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a crime no less of concentrated wealth, the IAC helped to forge a Bail Out the People Movement. Together we have conducted a steady, systematic organizing effort, with a march on Wall Street, People's Summits in New York and Detroit to counter the big business planners in Detroit and the "G-20" in Pittsburgh. The next step is a national campaign for jobs, like the campaign that won the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps 75 years ago. There is no way of knowing for sure where the struggle will lead. Around the world and here at home, the dangers are immense. U.S. drone missiles rain down on Pakistani villages, killing civilians, as U.S. and NATO missiles increasingly destroy children, women and men in Afghanistan--where tens of thousands more U.S. troops are being sent. The military budget is growing at a gargantuan rate-the highest in U.S. history-- diverting massive funds and depriving millions here of health care, housing, and education, as infrastructures deteriorate. The U.S. will remain the greatest threat to world peace until we force a greater than 50 percent cut in this funding. The spiraling economic meltdown means millions of people have lost their jobs and homes in the face of massive cutbacks in vital social programs--with no end in sight--and more power in the plutocracy when it's over. Yet trillions of dollars in "bailouts" are given to financial institutions, whose executives reward themselves with huge bonuses. However, there is reason for hope. There is growing opposition to the wars abroad, to the crushing economic situation, and to the witch-hunts against immigrants especially Latinos, Arabs and Muslims, Our communications capacity and organizing must grow on every front. Real change depends on an informed people, effective mobilizing and strong, independent and decisive actions. The IAC is well situated and long-experienced as a key organizing force to play a major role in this period. The IAC has been a principled, consistent, determined independent voice and mobilizer against U.S. wars, sanctions and military interventions for 18 years, since the first Gulf War. This organization of activists has courageously led protests, meetings and forums across the country, opposing U.S. aggression against Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Palestine, Somalia, Pakistan, Lebanon, Sudan, Honduras, Bolivia, Panama and Korea. IAC organizers have produced essential books-translated into several languages-for the public, scholars, and anti-war protesters here and worldwide, while providing a center and resources for a new generation of activists. The People's Video Network has produced many political action and educational videos, while building an alternative media network. The IAC has vigorously engaged in struggles against racism, bigotry, and injustice --from standing with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita survivors in their still unmet quest for justice, to supporting immigrants' rights, opposing the death penalty, and challenging military recruitment, war crimes and crimes against humanity. We must never abandon the difficult struggles that require unrelenting solidarity and support. More is required of us as mosques are seized here, secret detentions and torture continue, imams are arrested, an imam is murdered in Detroit, and the heroic civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart is imprisoned with a poisonous appellate court opinion, after a two-year delay. Today, in this crucial time of expanding U.S. wars abroad, and economic crisis at home, the IAC, fiercely committed to a Peoples' Agenda, has helped launch a national campaign for peace, calling for U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Colombia-and elsewhere--while calling for jobs, healthcare and housing. The IAC looks forward to a new year of struggle against war and political, social and economic injustice! We need your strong support! Our New Year's Resolution for 2010 must be to organize together tirelessly to end U.S. occupations abroad, and to stop new wars and incessant provocations against Islam and countries worldwide. We must work to promote international friendship and respect for humankind and oppose the policies of domination, globalization and war. We invite you to be with us every step of the way in the new year of activism with the IAC and to support its vital work. Together we must help reverse the tide that threatens all of humanity. Ramsey Clark You can make an online donation at http://iacenter.org/donate/ About the IAC http://iacenter.org/about/ IAC Books and Resources http://iacenter.org/books_resources/ Contact http://iacenter.org/comments/ =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 20:40:11 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:40:11 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Review] The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of the Military Message-ID: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23472 The Green Zone December 27, 2009 By Kim Scipes Kim Scipes's ZSpace Page The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of the Military By Barry Sanders AK Press, 2009 As a US military veteran-USMC, 1969-73, who turned around while on active duty-I have been incredibly frustrated at the impotence of the anti-war movement in the United States to stop the wars in particularly Iraq, Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan. I am, obviously, not alone. Many other people-veterans, as well as many more civilians-also share this frustration. Barry Sanders' new book, The Green Zone, takes a different angle than any I've seen before, and I believe it's an approach I believe we all need to consider: Sanders focuses on the environmental costs of militarism, particularly those from the US military. Sanders recognizes the incredible threat by greenhouse gases to the worlds' peoples well-being and, in fact, to our very survival. [Percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution started in 1750 to where the latest readings are 392 ppm-should it reach 450, the accompanying temperature rise would lead to uncontrollable melting of the tundra across Russia and Canada, and the release of untold amounts of methane: methane has 20 times greater impact on the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. James Hansen of NASA believes we must go below 350 ppm to prevent serious environmental damage worldwide-KS.] Sanders also knows the environment is not just threatened by greenhouse gasses, but recognizes pollution of the water, air and soil as joining with greenhouse gases to imperil us all. Yet he makes an incredibly important point, trying to put things into perspective and to focus our attention: "... here's the awful truth: even if every person, every automobile, and every factory suddenly emitted zero emissions, the Earth would still be headed head first and at full speed toward total disaster for one major reason. The [US] military-that voracious vampire-produces enough greenhouse gases, by itself, to place the entire globe, with all its inhabitants large and small, in the most immanent danger of extinction" (p, 22). To put it plain language, that social institution that is said to protect Americans is, in fact, hastening our very extermination along with all the other people of the planet. Sanders addresses the military's affects on the environment in many ways. He starts off with trying to figure out how much (fossil) fuel the military uses, with their resulting greenhouse emissions there from. Despite diligent efforts, he cannot find out specific numbers, so he is forced to estimate. After carefully working through different categories, he comes to what he calls a conservative estimate of 1 million barrels of oil a day, which translates to almost 20 million gallons each and every day! He puts this number into international perspective: "If that indeed turns out to be the case, the United States military would then rank in fuel consumption with countries like Iran, Indonesia and Spain. It is truly an astonishing accomplishment, especially when one considers ... that the military has only about 1.5 million troops on active duty, and Iran has a population of 66 million, Indonesia a whopping 235 million" (54) The cost, incidentally, is also quite high. He quotes a US Army General as estimating that the cost of this fuel averages $300 a gallon! (55) Yet, how does this contribute to global warming? He reports that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that "each gallon of gasoline produces 19.4 pounds of CO 2" (carbon dioxide). If his estimate of 1 million barrels of oil a day is correct, he writes, "then the combined armed forces sends into the atmosphere about 400 million pounds of greenhouse gases a day, or 200,000 tons. That totals 146 billion pounds a year-or 73 million tons of carbon a year" (67-68). And that's just regarding fuel use. Sanders further discusses the military's impact on the environment. He talks about the impact of exploding bombs, cluster bombs, napalm, cannon rounds, depleted uranium, etc. He points out that the US military estimates they need about 1.5 billion rounds for their M-16 rifles a year. He talks about the impact of US military bases around the world, including in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. To me, the most sickening chapter was the one on depleted uranium or DU. He explains, "Depleted uranium is essentially U-238, the isotope after the fissionable isotope, U-235, has been extracted from uranium ore." DU has a half-life of 4.7 billion years. He continues: "... a good deal of the country of Iraq, both its deserts and cities, hums with radioactivity. For since 1991, the US has been manufacturing 'just about all [of its] bullets, tank shells, missiles, dumb bombs, smart bombs, and 500- and 2000-pound bombs, and everything else engineered to help our side in the war of Us against Them, [with] depleted uranium in it. Lots of depleted uranium. A single cruise missile, which weighs 3,000 pounds, carries within its casing 800 pounds of depleted uranium.' Recall that the Air Force dropped 800 of these bombs in just the first two days of the war. The math: 800 bombs multiplied by 800 pounds of depleted uranium equal 640,000 pounds, or 320 tons of radioactive waste dumped on that country in just the first two days of devastation" (83). The impact is devastating. When DU hits something, it ignites, reaching temperatures between 3,000-5,000 degrees Celsius (5,432-9,032 degrees F). It goes through metal like a hot knife through butter, making it a superb military weapon. But is also releases radiation upon impact, poisoning all around it. Its tiny particles can be inhaled-people don't have to touch irradiated materials. Thus, Iraqis are being poisoned by simply breathing the air! And, once inhaled, DU hardens, turning into insoluble pellets than cannot be excreted. DU poisoning is a literal death sentence. It not only kills, however, but it can damage human DNA-it's the gift that keeps on giving, to generations and generations. Yet, radiation is an equal opportunity destroyer: it also poisons those in occupying armies. Evidence from the Gulf War I ("Desert Storm") shows the impact on American troops. Sanders quotes Arthur Bernklau, who has extensively studied the problem: "Of the 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are now dead. By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability. More than a decade later, more than half (56 percent) who served in Gulf War I have permanent medical problems." Bernklau then points out that the disability rate for soldiers in Vietnam was 10 percent (87). Yet the impact is not just on Iraqis, or the soldiers who fought there. Sanders points out that, according to the London Sunday Times, radiation sensors in Britain reported a four-fold increase in airborne uranium just a few days after George W. Bush launched the March 19, 2003 attack on Iraq. That sounds bad enough, that the uranium can travel the approximately 2500 miles from Baghdad to London. But what Sanders does not note is that global weather does not travel east to west: it travels west to east. In other words, this uranium had to cross North America to get from Iraq to Britain! There is much more detailed information included in this small, highly accessible book. AK Press deserves our respect and support for publishing such a worthy volume: and this is one we each should purchase and urge others to do so as well. The biggest strength of this book is Sanders' clarity: this man is, if you will permit, "on target." He sees the problem being not just the illegal and immoral wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. He sees the US military as being an essential part of the US Empire, along with the major multinational corporations. He sees the military as an institution as a threat to global environmental survival. He recognizes that politicians won't address the problem; they are too incorporated in the US Empire. It says it is up to us, individually and collectively, in the US (primarily) and together with people around the world. Basically, his argument is this: the US military can continue to launch wars and continue killing people (including Americans) around the world, or we can end war, and devote resources to the well-being of people in this country and others around the world. The choice is our's. But we also need to realize that if we let the US military continue on its path of continual war with its on-going quest for global domination, it will destroy all the humans, animals and vegetation on the planet. Your move, good people. Kim Scipes, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University North Central in Westville, Indiana. Among other courses, he teaches Sociology of the Environment. His web site is http://faculty.pnc.edu/kscipes =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 21:33:23 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:33:23 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Mark Rudd: What It Takes to Build a Movement Message-ID: <883A5FCCCC804301A60CCEDEB662CF44@agingCHS072729> When Spontaneity Fails ... What It Takes to Build a Movement http://www.counterpunch.org/rudd12252009.html By MARK RUDD December 25-27, 2009 Since the summer of 2003, I've crisscrossed the country speaking at colleges and theaters and bookstores, first with The Weather Underground documentary and, starting in March of this year, with my book, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2009). In discussions with young people, they often tell me, "Nothing anyone does can ever make a difference." The words still sound strange: it's a phrase I never once heard forty years ago, a sentiment obviously false on its surface. Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, I  and the rest of the country  knew about the civil rights movement in the South, and what was most evident was that individuals, joining with others, actually were making a difference. The labor movement of the Thirties to the Sixties had improved the lives of millions; the anti-war movement had brought down a sitting president  LBJ, March 1968  and was actively engaged in stopping the Vietnam War. In the forty years since, the women's movement, gay rights, disability rights, animal rights, and environmental movements have all registered enormous social and political gains. To old new lefties, such as myself, this is all self-evident. So, why the defeatism? In the absence of knowledge of how these historical movements were built, young people assume that they arose spontaneously, or, perhaps, charismatic leaders suddenly called them into existence. On the third Monday of every January we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. having had a dream; knowledge of the movement itself is lost. The current anti-war movement's weakness, however, is very much alive in young people's experience. They cite the fact that millions turned out in the streets in the early spring of 2003 to oppose the pending U.S. attack on Iraq, but that these demonstrations had no effect. "We demonstrated, and they didn't listen to us." Even the activists among them became demoralized as numbers at demonstrations dropped off very quickly, street demonstrations becoming cliches, and, despite a big shift in public opinion in 2006, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan droned on to today. The very success of the spontaneous early mobilization seems to have contributed to the anti-war movement's long-term weakness. Something's missing. I first got an insight into articulating what it is when I picked up Letters from Young Activists: Today's Rebels Speak Out, edited by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin and Kenyon Farrow (Nation Books, 2005). Andy Cornell, in a letter to the movement that first radicalized him, "Dear Punk Rock Activism," criticizes the conflation of the terms "activism" and "organizing." He writes, "activists are individuals who dedicate their time and energy to various efforts they hope will contribute to social, political, or economic change. Organizers are activists who, in addition to their own participation, work to move other people to take action and help them develop skills, political analysis and confidence within the context of organizations. Organizing is a process  creating long-term campaigns that mobilize a certain constituency to press for specific demands from a particular target, using a defined strategy and escalating tactics." In other words, it's not enough for punks to continually express their contempt for mainstream values through their alternate identity; they've got to move toward "organizing masses of people." Aha! Activism = self-expression; organizing = movement-building. Until recently, I'd rarely heard young people call themselves "organizers." The common term for years has been "activists." Organizing was reduced to the behind the scenes nuts-and-bolts work needed to pull off a specific event, such as a concert or demonstration. But forty years ago, we only used the word "activist" to mock our enemies' view of us, as when a university administrator or newspaper editorial writer would call us "mindless activists." We were organizers, our work was building a mass movement, and that took constant discussion of goals, strategy and tactics (and, later, contributing to our downfall ideology). Thinking back over my own experience, I realized that I had inherited this organizer's identity from the red diaper babies I fell in with at the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. Raised by parents in the labor and civil rights and communist or socialist movements, they had naturally learned the organizing method as other kids learned how to throw footballs or bake pineapple upside-down cakes. "Build the base!" was the constant strategy of Columbia SDS for years. Yet, young activists I met were surprised to learn that major events, such as the Columbia rebellion of April 1968, did not happen spontaneously, that they took years of prior education, relationship building, reconsideration on the part of individuals of their role in the institution. I.e., organizing. It seemed to me that they believed that movements happen as a sort of dramatic or spectator sport: after a small group of people express themselves, large numbers of bystanders see the truth in what they're saying and join in. The mass anti-war mobilization of the Spring 2003, which failed to stop the war, was the only model they knew. I began looking for a literature that would show how successful historical movements were built. Not the outcomes or triumphs, such as the great civil rights March on Washington in 1963, but the many streams that eventually created the floods. I wanted to know who said what to whom and how did they respond. One book was recommended to me repeatedly by friends, I've Got the Light of Freedom: the Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne (University of California Press, 1995). Payne, an African-American sociologist, now at the University of Chicago, asked the question how young student organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, had successfully organized voter registration and related campaigns in one town, Greenwood, Mississippi, in the years 1961-1964. The Mississippi Delta region was one of the most benighted areas of the South, with conditions for black cotton sharecroppers and plantation workers not much above the level of slavery. Despite the fact that illiteracy and economic dependency were the norm among black people in the Delta, and that they were the target of years of violent terror tactics, including murder, SNCC miraculously organized these same people to take the steps toward their own freedom, through attaining voting rights and education. How did they do it? What Payne uncovers through his investigation into SNCC in Greenwood is an organizing method that has no name but is solidly rooted in the traditions of church women of the rural South. Black churches usually had charismatic male ministers, who, as a consequence of their positions, led in an authoritarian manner. The work of the congregations themselves, however, the social events and education and mutual aid were organized at the base level by women, who were democratic and relational in style. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Council, SCLC, used the ministerial model in their mobilizing for events, while the young people of SNCC  informed by the teaching and examples of freedom movement veterans Ella Baker and Septima Clark  concentrated on building relationships with local people and helping them develop into leaders within democratic structures. SNCC's central organizing principle," participatory democracy," was a direct inheritance from Ella Baker. Payne writes, "SNCC preached a gospel of individual efficacy. What you do matters. In order to move politically, people had to believe that. In Greenwood, the movement was able to exploit communal and familial traditions that encouraged people to believe in their own light." The features of the method, sometimes called "developmental" or "transformational organizing," involve long-term strategy, patient base-building, personal engagement between people, full democratic participation, education and the development of people's leadership capabilities, and coalition-building. The developmental method is often juxtaposed to Alinsky-style organizing, which is usually characterized as top-down and manipulative. For a first-hand view of Alinsky organizing  though it's never named as such  by a trained and seasoned practitioner, see Barack Obama's book, Dreams from My Father (Three Rivers Press, 1995 and 2004). In the middle section of the book, "Chicago," Obama describes his three years organizing on the streets and housing projects of South Chicago. He beautifully invokes his motives  improving young people's lives  but at the same time draws a murky picture of organizing. Questions abound: Who trained him? What was his training? Who paid him? What is the guiding ideology? What is his relationship to the people he calls "my leaders?" Are they above him or are they manipulated by him? Who are calling whose shots? What are the long-term consequences? It's a great piece to start a discussion with young organizers. While reading I've Got the Light of Freedom, I realized that much of what we had practiced in SDS was derived from SNCC and this developmental organizing tradition, up to and including the vision of "participatory democracy," which was incorporated in the 1962 SDS founding document, "The Port Huron Statement." Columbia SDS's work was patient, strategic, base-building, using both confrontation and education. I, myself, had been nurtured and developed into a leadership position through years of close friendship with older organizers. However, my clique's downfall came post-1968, when, under the spell of the illusion of revolution, we abandoned organizing, first for militant confrontation (Weatherman and the Days of Rage, Oct. 1969) and then armed urban guerilla warfare (the Weather Underground, 1970-1976). We had, in effect, moved backward from organizing to self-expression, believing, ridiculously, that that would build the movement. At the moment when more organizing was needed to build a permanent anti-imperialist mass movement, we abandoned organizing. This is the story I tell in my book, Underground. It's about good organizing (Columbia), leading to worse (Weatherman), leading to horrible (the Weather Underground). I hope it's useful to contemporary organizers, as they contemplate how to build the coming mass movement(s). -- Mark Rudd lives and teaches in Albuquerque, N.M. He can be reached at www.markrudd.com. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 22:06:21 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:06:21 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Human Ecology of Collapse Message-ID: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/human-ecology-of-collapse.html December 9, 2009 The Human Ecology of Collapse Part One: Failure is the Only Option by John Michael Greer The old legend of the Holy Grail has a plot twist that's oddly relevant to the predicament of industrial civilization. A knight who went searching for the Grail, so the story has it, if he was brave and pure, would sooner or later reach an isolated castle in the midst of the desolate Waste Land. There the Grail could be found and the Waste Land made green again, but only if the knight asked the right question. Failing that, he would wake the next morning in a deserted castle, which would vanish behind him as soon as he left, and it might take years of searching to find the castle again. As we approach the twilight of the age of cheap energy, we're arguably in a similar situation. It seems to me that a great deal of the confusion that grips the peak oil scene, and even more of the blind commitment to catastrophically misguided policies that reigns outside peak-aware circles, comes from a failure to ask the right questions. A great many people aware of the limits to fossil fuels, for example, have assumed that the question that needs answering is how to sustain a modern industrial society on alternative energy. Ask that, though, and you're back in the Waste Land, because any answer you give to that question is wrong. The question that has to be asked is whether a modern industrial society can exist at all without vast and rising inputs of essentially free energy, of the sort only available on this planet from fossil fuels, and the answer is no. Once that's grasped, other useful questions come to mind - for example, how much of the useful legacy of the last three centuries can be saved, and how - but until you get past the wrong question, you're stuck chasing the mirage of a replacement for oil that didn't take a hundred million years or so to come into being. Other examples could be cited easily enough. As the world's political leaders busy themselves in Copenhagen for a round of photo ops and brutal backroom politics, though, the unasked question that hangs most visibly in the air is why human societies, faced with choices between survival and collapse, so consistently make the choices that destroy them. It's implicit in most discussions of peak oil, climate change, and nearly any other global issue you care to name, that if we all just try hard enough we can overcome the crisis du jour and chug boldly on into the future. Those in the political mainstream tend to insist, in the face of the evidence, that replacing the people currently in charge of political or economic systems with somebody else will solve the problem. Those outside the political mainstream tend to insist, also in the face of the evidence, that swapping out current political or economic systems with others more to their liking will solve the problem. Nearly all the media coverage of the Copenhagen circus, mainstream or alternative, falls into these camps. While the mainstream right pounds its collective fist on an assortment of lecterns and insists that the polar bears would be just fine if the last round of elections had gone the other way, the mainstream left fills the air with pleas that Obama live up to the nearly messianic fantasy role they projected onto him - will somebody please explain to me someday how a head of state got given the Nobel Peace Prize while he was enthusiastically waging two wars? Meanwhile the socialists are insisting that it's all capitalism's fault and can be solved promptly by a socialist revolution, never mind the awkward little fact that the environmental records of socialist countries are by and large even worse than those of capitalist ones; other radicalisms of left and right make the same claim as the socialists, often with even less justification. Still, I think a great many people are beginning to realize that whatever results come out of Copenhagen, a meaningful response to the increasing instability of global climate will not be among them. James Hansen, among the most prestigious of global warming scientists, has announced to the media that he hopes the Copenhagen talks fail, because none of the options being taken to the talks would have any useful result; we'd be better off, he argues, to start over again from scratch. He's right about the first point, it seems to me, and wrong about the second, because if we start again from scratch, care to guess where we'll end up? Right back where we are now, face to face with the yawning gap between those things that are politically possible and those things that would actually deal with the crisis at hand. Those people who are not in positions of power, and thus don't have to face the consequences of political decisions, commonly insist that politicians can or should simply leap across chasms of this sort to deliver the goods to their constituents. Copenhagen offers a useful lesson on why such rhetoric is wasted breath. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that Obama agreed to cut US carbon emissions far enough to make a real impact on global climate change. Would those cuts happen? No, because Congress would have to agree to implement them, and Congress - even though it is controlled by a Democratic majority - has so far been unable to pass even the most ineffectual legislation on the subject. Suppose the improbable happened, and both Obama and Congress agreed to implement serious carbon emission cuts. What would the result be? Much more likely than not, a decisive Republican victory in the 2010 congressional elections, followed by the repeal of the laws mandating the cuts. Carbon emissions can't be cut by waving a magic wand; the cuts will cost trillions of dollars at a time when budgets are already strained, and impose steep additional costs throughout the economy. Those latter would be unpopular even if the consensus on climate change were accepted on faith outside the scientific community, which it isn't. Even those Congresspersons who would most like to see carbon emissions cuts made into law do think about their prospects of remaining in office now and again. Even between nations, a rough and ready version of the same pattern of checks and balances applies; any nation that accepts serious carbon emission cuts will place itself at a steep economic disadvantage compared to those nations that don't. Watch the way the competing power blocs at Copenhagen are trying to shove responsibility for emissions cuts onto one another, and you can see this at work. Remember the failed trade negotiations of the last decade, in which Europe and the US tried to browbeat the rising industrial powers of the Third World into accepting a permanent second-class position? They're at it again, using carbon emission allotments in place of trade treaties, and the Third World is once again having none of it. Notice that what's happening in all these cases is that the system is working the way it's supposed to work. Elected representatives, after all, are supposed to worry about what their constituents back home will think; the excesses of each party are supposed to be held in check by the well-founded worry that the other party can and will make political hay out of any missteps the party in power might happen to make. For that matter, national governments justify their existence by defending the interests of their citizens in international disputes. In most cases, these checks and balances are not only useful but vitally important; unchecked power in any aspect of human life pretty consistently turns into tyranny. In certain cases, though, these otherwise helpful protections turn into barriers that keep necessary decisions from being made. The belief that none of this matters, and that somebody or other could fix the problem if they wanted to, runs deep. This is why so much of the rhetoric on both sides of the climate debate focuses so obsessively on finding somebody to blame. Of course there has been reprehensible behavior on both sides. Business executives whose companies will bear a large share of the costs of curbing carbon emissions have funded some very dubious science, and some even more dubious publicity campaigns, in order to duck those costs; academics have either tailored their findings to climb onto the climate change bandwagon, or whored themselves out to corporate interests willing to pay handsomely for anyone in a lab coat who will repeat their party line; politicians on both sides of the aisle have distorted facts grotesquely to further their own careers. All this has been fodder for endless denunciation. Beneath all the yelling, though, are a set of brutal facts nobody is willing to address. Whether or not the current round of climate instability is entirely the product of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is actually not that important, because it's even more stupid to dump greenhouse gases into a naturally unstable climate system than it would be to dump them into a stable one. Over the long run, the only level of carbon pollution that is actually sustainable is zero net emissions, and getting there any time soon would require something not far from the dismantling of industrial society and its replacement with something much less affluent. Now of course we would have to do this anyway, since the world's fossil fuel supplies are depleting fast enough that production limits will begin to bite hard in the years and decades ahead, but this simply sharpens the point at issue. Even if it turns out to be possible to power something like an industrial society on renewable resources, the huge energy, labor, and materials costs needed to develop renewable energy and replace most of the infrastructure of today's society with new systems geared to new energy sources will have to be paid out of existing supplies; thus everything else would have to be cut to the bone, or beyond. Exactly how big the price tag would be is anybody's guess just now, but it's probably not far from the mark to suggest that the population of the industrial world would have to accept a Third World standard of living, and the population of the Third World would have to give up aspirations for a better life for the foreseeable future, for such a gargantuan project to have any chance of working. I encourage those who think this latter is a politically viable option to try to convince their spouses and friends to take such steps voluntarily. Any politician rash enough to propose such a project would be well advised to kiss his or her next election goodbye. Any president who even took a step in that direction - well, I doubt many people have forgotten what happened to Jimmy Carter. For that matter, I'm sure there must be climate change zealots who have given up their McMansions, sold their cars, and now live in one-room apartments in rat-infested tenements with six other activists so all their spare money can go to building a renewable economy, but I don't happen to know any who have done so, while I long ago lost track of the number of global warming bumper stickers I've seen on the rear ends of SUVs. Nobody, but nobody, is willing to deal with the harsh reality of what a carbon-neutral society would have to be like. This is what makes the blame game so popular, and it also provides the impetus behind meaningless gestures of the sort that are on the table at Copenhagen. It's a common piece of rhetoric these days to say that "failure is not an option", but this sort of feckless thoughtstopper misses the point as totally as any human utterance possibly could. Failure is always an option; when trying to prevent it will lead to highly unpleasant personal consequences, without actually having the least chance of preventing it, a strong case can be made that the most viable option for anyone in a leadership position is to enjoy the party while it lasts, and hope you can duck the blame when it all comes crashing down. Those who have their doubts about anthropogenic climate change can apply the identical logic to the industrial world's sustained nonresponse to the peaking of world oil production, or to any of half a dozen other global crises that result from the collision between an economy geared to infinite growth and the relentless limits of a finite planet. In each case, the immediate costs of doing something about the issue are so high, and so unendurable, that very few people in positions of influence are willing to stick their necks out, and those who do so can count on being shortened by a head by others who are more than willing to cash in on their folly. There's another way to understand the paradox that makes failure the only viable option, but it will involve a glance backwards over the history of the sustainability movement and the theoretical structure - systems theory - that once undergirded it. That glance, and its implications, will occupy the second part of this series. _____ John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. ? =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 22:09:16 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:09:16 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Political Economy of Collapse Message-ID: <9911C388FE7C40A2BDB825349B2E14B3@agingCHS072729> http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/political-ecology-of-collapse.html The Political Economy of Collapse Part Two: Weishaupt's Fallacy by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report December 16 2009 Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Nostalgia's a funny thing; you never know what's going to fill the place of Proust's madeleine and catapult you back to memories of some other time. A little over a year ago, I had a reminder of that while visiting the Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center {*} in Oakland County, Michigan. The path from the parking lot wandered through a lovely autumn woodland, then turned a corner and deposited me back in 1980. {*} http://www.uheac.org/ In those days I was passionately interested in the appropriate technology movement, to the extent of spending the better part of three years working part time on an organic farm, learning the uses of cold frames, a solar greenhouse, compost bins, and double-dug garden beds. Every clich? you can imagine about late-1970s communes was present and accounted for: wood smoke and mud, naked bodies in a creaky wood-fired sauna, goats and chickens in the pasture, and a handbuilt wind turbine that went whuppeta-whuppeta and churned out a trickle of twelve-volt current whenever the breeze picked up. The center at Upland Hills was a good deal cleaner, and the goats and the naked bodies were nowhere to be seen, but the esthetic was much the same. Their wind turbine sounded a silky pup-pup-pup atop an honest-to-Fuller octet truss tower, and the center itself was what all of us at the Outback Farm dreamed of inhabiting someday: a big comfortable earth-bermed shelter with passive solar heating and old-fashioned round photovoltaic cells soaking up the sunlight. When we went inside, I half expected to see a circle of scruffy longhairs sitting on pillows around the latest issue of Coevolution Quarterly, excitedly discussing the latest innovations from Zomeworks and the New Alchemy Institute. Nostalgia aside, there's a lot to be learned from the rise and fall of appropriate tech in the 1970s, and one of its lessons bears directly on the theme of this series of posts. For many of the people involved in it back then, appropriate tech was the inevitable wave of the future; nearly everyone assumed that energy costs would continue to rise as the limits to growth clamped down with increasing force, making anything but Ecotopia tantamount to suicide. A formidable body of thought backed those conclusions, and the core of that body of thought was systems theory. Nowadays, the only people who pay attention to systems theory are specialists in a handful of obscure fields, and it can be hard to remember that forty years ago systems theory had the same cachet that more recently gathered around fractals and chaos theory. Born of a fusion between ecology, cybernetics, and a current in contemporary philosophy best displayed in Jan Smuts' Holism and Evolution (1926), systems theory argued that complex systems - all complex systems - shared certain distinctive traits and behaviors, so that insights gained in one field of study could be applied to phenomena in completely different fields that shared a common degree of complexity. It had its weaknesses, to be sure, but on the whole, systems theory did exactly what theories are supposed to do - it provided a useful toolkit for making sense of part of the universe of human experience, posed plenty of fruitful questions for research, and proved useful in a sizable range of practical applications. As popular theories sometimes do, though, it became associated with a position in the cultural struggles of the time, and as some particularly unfortunate theories do, it got turned into a vehicle for a group of intellectuals who craved power. Once that happened, systems theory became another casualty of Weishaupt's Fallacy. Those of my readers who don't pay attention to conspiracy theory may not recognize the name of Adam Weishaupt; those who do pay attention to conspiracy theory probably "know" a great deal about him that doesn't happen to be true. He was a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria in the second half of the eighteenth century, and he found himself in an awkward position between the exciting new intellectual adventures coming out of Paris and the less than exciting intellectual climate in conservative, Catholic Bavaria. In 1776, he and four of his grad students founded a private society for enthusiasts of the new Enlightenment thought; they went through several different names for their club before finally settling on one that stuck: the Bavarian Illuminati. Yes, those Bavarian Illuminati. There were a fair number of people interested in avant-garde ideas in and around Bavaria just then, and. before too long, the Illuminati had several hundred members. This gave Weishaupt and his inner circle some grandiose notions about where all this might lead. Pretty soon, they hoped, all the movers and shakers in Bavaria - not to mention the other microkingdoms into which Germany was divided at that time - would join the Illuminati and stuff their heads full of Voltaire and Rousseau, and then the whole country would become, well, illuminated. They were still telling themselves that when the Bavarian government launched a series of police raids that broke the back of the organization. Weishaupt got out of Bavaria in time, but many of his fellow Illuminati were not so lucky, and a great deal of secret paperwork got scooped up by the police and published in lavish tell-all books that quickly became bestsellers all over Europe. That was the end of the Illuminati, but not of their reputation; reactionaries found that blaming the Illuminati for everything made great copy, not least because they weren't around any more and so could be redefined with impunity - liberal, conservative, Marxist, capitalist, evil space lizards, you name it. The problem with Professor Weishaupt's fantasy of an illuminated Bavaria was a bit of bad logic that has been faithfully repeated by intellectuals seeking power ever since: the belief, as sincere as it is silly, that if you have the right ideas, you are by definition smarter than the system you are trying to control. That's Weishaupt's Fallacy. Because Weishaupt and his fellow Illuminati were convinced that the conservative forces in Bavaria were a bunch of clueless boors, they were totally unprepared for the counterblow that followed once the Bavarian government figured out who the Illuminati were and what they were after. For a more recent example, consider the rise and fall of the neoconservative movement, which stormed into power in the United States in 2000 boldly proclaiming the arrival of a "new American century", and proceeded to squander what remained of America's wealth and global reputation in a series of foreign and domestic policy blunders that have set impressive new standards for political fecklessness. The neoconservatives were convinced that they understood the world better than anybody else. That conviction was the single most potent factor behind their failure; when mainstream conservatives (not to mention everybody else!) tried to warn them where their fantasies of remaking the Middle East in America's image would inevitably end, the neoconservatives snorted in derision and marched straight on into the disaster they were making for themselves, and of course for the rest of us as well. Systems theory was a victim of the same fallacy. The systems movement, to coin a label for the heterogeneous group of thinkers and policy wonks that made systems theory its banner, had ambitions no less audacious than the neoconservatives, though aimed in a completely different direction. Their dream was world systems management. Such leading figures in the movement as Jay Forrester of MIT and Aurelio Peccei of the Club of Rome agreed that humanity's impact on the planet had become so great that methods devised for engineering and corporate management - in which, not coincidentally, they were expert - had to be put to work to manage the entire world. The study that led to the 1973 publication of The Limits to Growth was one product of this movement. Sponsored by Peccei's Club of Rome and carried out by a team led by one of Forrester's former PhD students, it applied systems theory to the task of making sense of the future, and succeeded remarkably well. As Graham Turner's study "A Comparison Of The Limits to Growth With Thirty Years of Reality" (CSIRO, 2008) points out, the original study's baseline "Standard Run" scenario matches the observed reality of the last three and a half decades far more exactly than rival scenarios. It's not often remembered, though, that the Club of Rome followed up The Limits to Growth with a series of further studies, all basically arguing that the problems outlined in the original study could be solved by planetary management on the part of a systems-savvy elite. The same notions can be found in dozens of similar books from the same era - indeed, it's hard to think of a systems thinker with any public presence in the 1970s who didn't publish at least one book proposing some kind of worldwide systems management as the only alternative to a very messy future. It's only fair to stress the role that idealism and the best intentions played in all this. Still, the political dimensions shouldn't be ignored. Forrester, Peccei, and their many allies were, among other things, suggesting that a great deal of effective power be given to them, or to people who shared their values and goals. Since the systems movement was by no means politically neutral - quite the contrary, it aligned itself forcefully with specific ideological positions in the fractured politics of the decade - that suggestion was bound to evoke a forceful response from the entire range of opposing interests. The Reagan revolution of 1980 saw the opposition seize the upper hand, and the systems movement was among the big losers. Hardball politics have always played a significant role in public funding of research in America, so it should have come as no surprise when Reagan's appointees all but shut off the flow of government grants into the entire range of initiatives that had gathered around the systems theory approach. From appropriate tech to alternative medicine to systems theory itself, entire disciplines found themselves squeezed out of the government feed trough, while scholars who pursued research that could be used against the systems agenda reaped the benefits of that stance. Clobbered in its most vulnerable spot - the pocketbook - the systems movement collapsed in short order. What made this implosion all the more ironic is that a systems analysis of the systems movement itself, and its relationship to the wider society, might have provided a useful warning. Very few of the newborn institutions in the systems movement were self-funding; from prestigious think tanks to neighborhood energy-conservation schemes, most of them subsisted on government grants, and thus were in the awkward position of depending on the social structures they hoped to overturn. That those structures could respond homeostatically to oppose their efforts might, one would think, be obvious to people who were used to the strange loops and unintended consequences that pervade complex systems. Still, Weishaupt's Fallacy placed a massive barrier in the way of such a realization. Read books by many of the would-be global managers of the 1970s and you can very nearly count on being bowled over by the scent of intellectual arrogance. The possibility that the system they hoped to manage might, in effect, have been more clever than they were probably crossed very few minds. Yet that's how things turned out; at the end of the day, the complex system that was American society had reacted, exactly as systems theory would predict, to neutralize a force that threatened to push it out of its preferred state. Unfortunately that reaction slammed the door on resources that might have made the transition ahead of us less difficult. Set aside the hubris that convinced too many systems theorists that they ought to manage the world, and systems theory itself is an extremely effective toolkit of ideas and practices, and a good many of the things that moved in harmony with systems theory - 1970s appropriate tech being a fine example - are well worth dusting off and putting to use right now. At the same time, though, the process that excluded them needs to be understood, and not just because the same process could repeat itself just as easily with some new set of sustainability initiatives. The homeostatic behavior of complex systems also casts an unexpected light on one of the major conundrums of contemporary life, the location of political power in industrial society - the theme of the final part of this series. _____ John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. ? =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Dec 28 22:14:07 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:14:07 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Political Ecology of Collapse (Part 3) Message-ID: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/political-ecology-of-collapse-part.html The Political Ecology of Collapse Part Three: The Bomb at the Heart of the System by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (December 23 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society The outcome of the Copenhagen climate change talks last week could not have been better suited to illustrate the points I have been trying to make in the last two posts. After all the high hopes and overheated rhetoric, as I (and of course a great many other people) predicted some time ago, what remains in place as the dust settles is business as usual. The United States and China, who head the main power blocs in the negotiations and also generate more carbon dioxide than anyone else, minted a toothless accord that furthers nobody's interests but theirs, and proceeded to tell the rest of the world to like it or lump it. A few climate activists are still gamely trying to find grounds for hope in the accord; others are shrilly accusing Barack Obama of betraying the messianic expectations they projected onto him; and a certain amount of stunned silence, in response to the failure of climate activism to have the slightest effect on the proceedings, is also being heard. It's probably worth pointing out that the results would not have differed noticeably if John McCain had won last November's election. The consensus that has been fixed in place since Ronald Reagan's first term, in other words, still dominates American politics. Despite increasingly desperate efforts on the part of both mainstream parties to appeal to an increasingly disaffected electorate via increasingly overheated rhetoric, it takes a micrometer to measure concrete differences in policy between the parties. Each party has its captive constituencies, to which it makes appropriate noises come election time; Republicans claim they want to ban abortion, Democrats claim they want to protect the environment, but neither party ever gets around to turning any of this talk into action. The most popular explanation for all this relies on the sheer hypocrisy of politicians, and such a case is not too hard to make, not least because it's rare for politicians to be any more ethical than the people they represent. Some versions of the case insist that politicians are cynical beasts who are in it purely for the money, and find shilling for various corrupt interests more lucrative than serving the public. Other versions, in the ascendant these days, insist that politicians are puppets of some sinister elite pursuing a totalitarian agenda, and then try to find reasons why every turn of events furthers that agenda. Now of course it's tolerably easy to find examples that can be used to support these claims. Some politicians are blatantly corrupt and self-serving; others just as blatantly put the interests of their allies in the business world ahead of the people they are supposed to serve. It furthers many political narratives to portray the situation as an episode of Dudley Do-Right, with some wicked elite or other in the role of Snidely Whiplash, tying the American people to the train tracks, as Dudley Do-Right scoops up an armload of protest signs and position papers and gallops off to the rescue. Still, I'm by no means certain this is really all there is to the matter. The counterexample that comes to mind is Afghanistan, and specifically Obama's decision to send another 30,000 troops (and an undisclosed number of "civilian contractors", the modern military version of disposable temp labor) into that quagmire. To call this decision self-defeating is to understate matters considerably. Afghanistan is where empires go to die; the debacle of the Russian occupation a few years back was only the latest in a long and unbroken history of failed attempts to conquer Afghanistan. Not even Alexander the Great managed the trick, and whatever the personal qualities of the airbrushed machine politician in the Oval Office and the camo-clad bureaucrat who manages his war might be, I confess to a reasonable doubt that anybody in the future will call them Obama or McChrystal the Greater. Leave aside moral issues for a moment, and it's tolerably clear that only two strategies could prevent total US failure in Afghanistan. The first is to reinstate the draft, conscript half a million new soldiers, shift the US economy over to a wartime footing, and go into Afghanistan with the same overwhelming force the Chinese deployed successfully on similar terrain in Tibet. The other is to declare a victory and get out. Any other choice means the United States will keep on spending money it doesn't have and prestige it can't spare on a war it isn't going to win. I doubt that any of this is invisible to the experienced military planners in the Pentagon, or the politicians who give them their marching orders. Why, then, the futile gesture? The hard fact of the matter is that neither of the two potentially successful strategies is politically possible to an American government today. Exemption from forced military service was part of the price the American middle class exacted in exchange for their abandonment of the radicalism of the 1960s, and no politician is willing to risk the backlash that would follow an attempt to tamper with that bargain. Furthermore, it's by no means certain that America has the economic strength left to fight a real war at this point, and it's not hard to name hostile powers who would be happy to use any such opportunity to push us over the edge into national bankruptcy. Declaring a victory and getting out is a good deal more viable, and it's the option that Obama's successor in 2013 will likely be forced to embrace. Accepting it now, though, would offend many constituencies, not all of which have financial motives for supporting the war, and it would require America to give up on intervening in the Great Game of geopolitics now being played in central Asia - a goal many factions in the American political class are unready to abandon. Behind the decision to send an inadequate force to prop up a losing struggle, in other words, lies the complex nature of political power in contemporary America. A great many people nowadays seem to think that because they don't have the power to impose their agendas on the country, someone else must have that power, and the increasingly self-defeating decisions coming out of Washington must result from deliberate policy on the part of that someone else. Comforting as that belief may be, the facts don't support it. A century of political reforms have diffused power so broadly in American society that no one group has a monopoly on power, and any group of would-be leaders has to build alliances and garner support among a great many independent centers of power with agendas of their own. Now of course it's quite true, as the left is fond of pointing out, that a great many of these power centers are interested primarily in pursuing their own interests, and are perfectly willing to do it at the expense of the common good. It's also true that this indictment can be applied to the left as much as to the right. Still, behind the inevitable chicanery found across the political spectrum lies the insoluble dilemma in which the American political system has been caught since the 1970s - the inevitable failure of government by pork barrel in an age of decline. Like most of the nations that call themselves representative democracies these days, America operates by means of a system not too different from the one that graced, if that's the right word, the twilight years of the Roman Republic. The ultimate mandate for power comes from popular vote, and so every possible means is used to make sure elections come out as desired. Vote fraud is one such means; propaganda is another; but the most effective is to buy the loyalty of voting blocs with cold hard cash. From defense spending to entitlements to economic stimulus programs, that's the name of the game, and it pays off handsomely come election time. There are, however, at least two massive problems with this sort of pork-fed politics. First, the number of groups to be placated tends to rise as the size of the pork barrel increases. In today's America, any group that can organize and raise money effectively enough to influence elections can usually elbow its way to a place at the feeding trough. (That today's radicals of left and right alike are, by and large, inept at organizing and fundraising goes a long way to explain their insistence that power is being kept out of their hands by a malevolent elite.) It's not hard to respond to a changing world when the interests that have to sign on to policy changes are few and clearly defined, as they were fifty years ago, but it becomes much harder when power is diffused through scores of competing factions, and it takes an alliance of a dozen disparate interest groups to get anything done at all. This happens in the life of nearly all republics, and it plays an important role in the political breakdowns that afflict them at regular intervals. Still, another factor will be familiar to regular readers of this blog: the mismatch between growth and the limits of the environment that provides the basis for growth. In societies that use resources at a steady rate, those limits are always close at hand, and struggles between interest groups over the distribution of pork are recognized as zero-sum games, in which somebody has to lose for somebody else to gain; thus the multiplication of factions tends to be limited by the fixed size of the feeding trough. In a society that relies on rapidly expanding production of resources, on the other hand, this can be evaded for a time. The first two-thirds of the 20th century thus saw an explosion of factions that spanned the entire upper half of the American class structure, from the ultrarich to unionized labor. The result was a vast number of people who all expected to get financial benefits from the government. Yet the end of America's real economic expansion in the 1970s meant that these demands had to be paid out of a dwindling supply of real wealth. One result has been a drastic narrowing of the options available to politicians. A great many simple and necessary reforms that could be enacted without harm to anyone - for example, putting a means test on social security pensions - are completely off the table, because nobody can put together a governing coalition without the support of groups that oppose such measures. Equally, a great many ghastly policies - for example, deliberately inflating financial bubbles - have become political necessities, because they allow governments to get away with the pretense of paying off their supporters. Meanwhile any sector of society not organized enough to defend its interests can basically count on being thrown to the wolves. The rising spiral of crises that threaten the survival of industrial society might be expected to trump such matters. The problem here, of course, is that prophecies of imminent doomsday have been standard political theater in American public life for more than a century, and most people in politics have long since stopped listening to them. There are plenty of people in politics who still remember, for example, the widespread insistence that the energy crisis of the 1970s was supposed to be permanent; the fact that there were plenty of less shrill predictions that have proven to be much more accurate in retrospect is nothing like as memorable. Behind all of this lies the central political fact of the limits to growth: the reduction of First World nations to a Third World lifestyle that will be the inevitable result of any transition to a postpetroleum world, whether that transition is deliberate or unplanned. Metaphors about elephants in living rooms don't begin to touch the political explosiveness of this fact, or the degree to which people at every point on the political spectrum have tried to pretend that it just isn't so. Still, set aside delusions about miraculous new energy sources that show up basically because we want them to, and it's impossible to evade. Let's walk through the logic. The most reasonable estimates suggest that, given a crash program and the best foreseeable technologies, renewable sources can probably provide the United States with around fifteen percent of the energy it currently gets from fossil fuels. Since every good and service in the economy is the product of energy, it's a very rough but functional approximation to say that in a green economy, every American will have to get by on the equivalent of fifteen percent of his or her current income. Take a moment to work through the consequences in your own life; if you made $50,000 in 2009, for example, imagine having to live on $7,500 in 2010. That's quite a respectable income by Third World standards, but it won't support the kind of lifestyle that the vast majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, believe is theirs by right. That's the bomb ticking away at the heart of America's political system. When it goes off, the entire system of government by pork barrel will explode messily, and it's only in the fantasies of reformers that what replaces it will likely be an improvement. (My guess? Anything from a military coup followed, after various convulsions, by a new and less centralized constitution, to civil war and the partition of the United States into half a dozen impoverished and quarreling nations.) In the meantime, we can expect to see every possible short term expedient put to use in an attempt to stave off the explosion even for a little while, and any measure that might risk rocking the boat enough to set off the bomb will be quietly roundfiled by all parties. A meaningful political response to the growing instability of global climate is one such measure, and a meaningful political response to peak oil is another. No such project can be enacted without redirecting a great deal of money and resources away from current expenditures toward the construction of new infrastructure. The proponents of such measures are quick to insist that this means new jobs will be created, and of course this is true, but they neglect to mention that a great many more existing jobs will go away, and the interests that presently lay claim to the money and resources involved are not exactly eager to relinquish those. A political system of centralized power could overcome their resistance readily enough, but a system in which power is diffused and fragmented cannot do so. That the collapse of the entire system is a likely long-term consequence of this inability is simply one of the common ironies of history. _____ John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. ? =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 29 09:09:43 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:09:43 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Review] Gaza's Untold Story Message-ID: <983CF6C1C6CD431A94D1F2D5229EB4DA@agingCHS072729> http://www.countercurrents.org/alabbasi281209.htm Countercurrents.org 28 December, 2009 Gaza's Untold Story By Mamoon Alabbasi One year on since Israel's criminally-insane war on Gaza, many are still unaware of the roots of the 'conflict' and the plight of the Palestinian people. Israel would like to have us believe that its latest onslaught was a direct response to resistance rockets or even Hamas's democratic accession to power, forgetting that both of which came into existence as a response to Israeli policies. But even those of us who have seen the true light, and are no longer deceived by the barrage of 'flat earth news', sometimes forget - if we were ever aware of - the depth and complexity of the tragedy. And that is the gap in understanding that veteran American-Palestinian author Ramzy Baroud seeks to fill in his latest book "'My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London, 2010). In our preoccupation with the Goldstone report (among other UN probes), human rights groups assessments, war crimes allegations, high civilian casualties, UNRWA statistics, official statements here and there, we become overwhelmed with information that makes many of us lose sight of context. And many of those who do take a step back to get a clearer picture of why such things are happening tend to stop at 1967; Israel's illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. Yet for Palestinians, and for those in Gaza in particular, the tragedy goes back to 1948; dispossession. For those who are serious about achieving peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, the issue of Palestinian refugees must be duly addressed. Baroud's book provides an exceptional understanding of that very topic, beautifully combining the personal experiences of Palestinians (his family as one example, with a special focus on his father) with that of their collective history - in English. The book shows us an example of the human face to that suffering at a time we have grown accustomed to debating cold facts and figures, and interpretations of humanitarian and international law. These laws are meant to protect real people, and these statistics correspond to human beings - flesh and blood - who have their own dreams, aspirations, fears and even shortcomings. And these Palestinians are not demons (as some would like to have us believe) but nor are they angels who are above feeling human pain and hardship. As some of the book's pages cause you to burst into laughter, others would lead you to flood in tears as you interact with the true stories of his family, but Baroud's words of reason frequently resurface to the text to provide you with context and relevant collective history and background. This parallel of facts and feelings keeps you aware that these moving (sometimes comic but mainly tragic) stories are not meant for entertainment, but are part of history. Yet you could never understand the impact of this history if you did not try to relate to the book's real-life characters. Baroud relies on context to explain the moral superiority of the plight of Palestinians, but the book's characters invite everyone - even, no, especially Israelis - to step into their shoes to understand their legitimate grievances and systematic suffering. The book is a must-read for even those who are extremely familiar with the Palestinian question. But such narrative should not be confined to educated readers. Its universal message must reach a wider audience via film. Palestinians who died suffering in poverty and under oppression should not exit this world without having the last word - even if that last word is only heard after their death. Mohammed Baroud - of Beit Daras - can now rest in peace. There are millions more who are dying - or have already died - to be heard, in their struggle for freedom. Who will step forward to tell their stories? Let history begin and maybe someday Palestinians too would have their own 'Never Again' moment in the not-too-distant future. The book is available at Amazon.com and also through the publisher, Pluto Press. Mamoon Alabbasi is an Iraqi editor in London. He can be reached at: alabbasi at writing.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From jryan13 at mts.net Tue Dec 29 18:19:16 2009 From: jryan13 at mts.net (john ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:19:16 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] another timely article by Roberts Message-ID: <5B3EAF7789FC43FEA2056B20E5F52C96@DGQK64B1> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Israel Rules, Paul Craig Roberts, Dec 29, 2009.doc Type: application/msword Size: 37376 bytes Desc: not available URL: From david at parit.ca Tue Dec 29 19:07:19 2009 From: david at parit.ca (David Henry) Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:07:19 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Israel Rules, by Paul Craig Roberts Message-ID: <1262135239.15803.5.camel@localhost> >From FreshInk member John Ryan ?http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24278.htm Israel Rules By Paul Craig Roberts December 29, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- On Christmas eve when Christians were celebrating the Prince of Peace, the New York Times delivered forth a call for war. "There?s only one way to stop Iran," declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is "military air strikes against Iran?s nuclear facilities." Kuperman is described as the "director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin," but his Christmas eve call to war relies on disinformation and contradiction, not on objective scholarly analysis. For example, Kuperman contradicts the unanimous report of America?s 16 intelligence agencies, the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Russian intelligence with his claim that Iran has a nuclear weapon program. Astonishingly, it does not occur to Kuperman that readers might wonder how an academic bureaucrat in Austin, Texas, has better information than these authorities. Kuperman is so determined to damn President Obama?s plan to have other countries enrich Iran?s uranium for Iran?s nuclear energy program and medical isotopes that Kuperman commits astounding blunders. After claiming that Iran has a "bomb program," Kuperman claims that "Iran?s uranium contains impurities" and that Ahmadinejad?s threat "to enrich uranium domestically to the 20 percent level ... is a bluff, because even if Iran could further enrich its impure uranium, it lacks the capacity to fabricate the uranium into fuel elements." What was the New York Times op ed editor thinking when he approved Kuperman?s article? Iran, Kuperman writes, needs "90 percent enriched uranium" to have weapons-grade material, but cannot reach 20 percent or even make fuel elements for its nuclear energy. So, how is Iran going to produce a bomb? Yet, Kuperman writes that "we have reached the point where air strikes are the only plausible option with any prospect of preventing Iran?s acquisition of nuclear weapons. The sooner the United States takes action, the better." It could not be made any clearer that, as with the US invasion of Iraq, a military attack on Iran has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. An "Iranian nuke" is just another canard behind which hides an undeclared agenda. One wonders about Kuperman?s non-proliferation credentials. How does a wanton military attack on a country encourage non-proliferation? Aren?t America?s bullying, threats and acts of war more likely to encourage countries to seek nuclear weapons? At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the United States has wars ongoing in Iraq where the ancient Chaldean Christian community was destroyed -- not by Saddam Hussein but by the neoconservatives? illegal invasion of Iraq -- in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yeman, and Sudan. The US initiated a war, which it lost, between its puppet ruler in the former Soviet province of Georgia and Russia. The US, the world?s greatest supporter of terrorism, is the main financier of terrorist groups that stage attacks within Iran, and US money succeeded in financing protests against President Ahmadinejad?s re-election and in dividing the ruling Islamic clerics. It was American money, weapons, and diplomatic cover that enabled the Israeli war crimes against the Lebanese people during 2006 and against Palestinian civilians in Gaza during 2008-2009, crimes documented in the Goldstone Report. Iran has never interfered in US internal affairs, but the US has a long record of interfering in Iranian affairs. In 1953 the US overthrew Iran?s popular prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq and installed a puppet who tortured Iranians who desired political independence. Despite this and other American offenses against Iran, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly expressed Iran?s interest to be on friendly terms with the United States, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. The US wants war with Iran in order to expand US world hegemony. One might expect a non-proliferation expert to take history into account, but Kuperman fails to do so. Kuperman also has nothing to say about Israel?s, India?s and Pakistan?s nuclear weapons. Unlike Iran, none of these countries are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel, India, and Pakistan all developed their nuclear weapons in secret, and many experts believe Israel had American help, an act of treason. All three countries have been rewarded by Washington despite their perfidy. Why is Kuperman concerned about Iran, which submits to the IAEA inspections, but is unconcerned with Israel, a country that has never permitted a single inspection? The answer is that the Israel Lobby, the US military-security complex, and the "Christian" Zionists have succeeded in demonizing Iran. Every real expert knows that an Iranian nuclear weapon would have no function other than deterring an attack on Iran. Ever since the US lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons, after using them offensively and pointlessly against a defeated Japan, nuclear weapons have served no purpose other than deterrence. The US has no conflicting economic interests with Iran. Iran is simply a supplier of oil, an important one. A US attack on Iran, such as the one advocated by Kuperman, would most likely shut down oil flows to the West through the Strait of Hormuz. This might benefit refiners, who sell gasoline to the West and could charge enormous prices, but no one else would benefit. Adding to the war cry are congregations of fake Christians. A great number of them, organized by someone?s money under the banner, "Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran," has written to Congress demanding sanctions against Iran that amount to an act of war. The roll call http://www.clnfi.org/ includes the "Christian" Zionist John Hagee, who, according to reports, denigrates Jesus Christ and preaches to his illiterate congregation that it is God?s will for Americans to fight and die for Israel, the oppressor of the Palestinian people. Among the signatories of the "Christians" demanding an act of war against Iran, are Dr. Pat Robertson, president of Christian Broadcasting Network, Nixon-era criminal Chuck Colson, and Richard Land, president of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Southern Baptist Convention. Obviously, for southern baptists ethics means murdering Islamists, and religious liberty excludes everyone but "Christian" Zionists. It is a simple matter for an educated person to make fools of these morons who profess to be Christians. However, these morons have vast constituencies numbering in the tens of millions of Americans. There are, in fact, more of them than there are intelligent, informed, moral, and real Christian Americans. The votes of the morons will prevail. In the second decade of the 21st century, America?s Zionist wars against Islam will expand. America?s wars in behalf of Israel?s territorial expansion will complete the bankruptcy of America. The Treasury?s bonds to finance the US government?s enormous deficits will lack for buyers. Therefore, the bonds will be monetized by the Federal Reserve. The result will be rising rates of inflation. The inflation will destroy the dollar as world reserve currency, and the US will no longer be able to pay for its imports. Shortages will appear, including food and gasoline, and "Superpower America" will find itself pressed to the wall as a third world country unable to pay its debts. America has been brought low, both morally and economically, by its obeisance to the Israel Lobby. Even Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States and Governor of Georgia recently had to apologize to the Israel Lobby for his honest criticisms of Israel?s inhumane treatment of the occupied Palestinians in order for his grandson to be able to run for a seat in the Georgia state senate. http://www.counterpunch.org/amiri12252009.html This should tell the macho super-power American tough guys who really runs "their" country. From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 29 20:22:15 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:22:15 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Offensive PLay: How different are dogfighting and football? Message-ID: <43FB15F3A47143B4A1F5557F442AB3A5@agingCHS072729> (after this, you won't look at American "foot"ball in quite the same way again) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true#ixzz0b5x0jq5S The New Yorker October 19, 2009 ANNALS OF MEDICINE OFFENSIVE PLAY How different are dogfighting and football? by Malcolm Gladwell An offensive lineman can't do his job without "using his head," one veteran says, but neuropathologists examining the brains of ex-N.F.L. players have found trauma-related degeneration. One evening in August, Kyle Turley was at a bar in Nashville with his wife and some friends. It was one of the countless little places in the city that play live music. He'd ordered a beer, but was just sipping it, because he was driving home. He had eaten an hour and a half earlier. Suddenly, he felt a sensation of heat. He was light-headed, and began to sweat. He had been having episodes like that with increasing frequency during the past year-headaches, nausea. One month, he had vertigo every day, bouts in which he felt as if he were stuck to a wall. But this was worse. He asked his wife if he could sit on her stool for a moment. The warmup band was still playing, and he remembers saying, "I'm just going to take a nap right here until the next band comes on." Then he was lying on the floor, and someone was standing over him. "The guy was freaking out," Turley recalled. "He was saying, 'Damn, man, I couldn't find a pulse,' and my wife said, 'No, no. You were breathing.' I'm, like, 'What? What?' " They picked him up. "We went out in the parking lot, and I just lost it," Turley went on. "I started puking everywhere. I couldn't stop. I got in the car, still puking. My wife, she was really scared, because I had never passed out like that before, and I started becoming really paranoid. I went into a panic. We get to the emergency room. I started to lose control. My limbs were shaking, and I couldn't speak. I was conscious, but I couldn't speak the words I wanted to say." Turley is six feet five. He is thirty-four years old, with a square jaw and blue eyes. For nine years, before he retired, in 2007, he was an offensive lineman in the National Football League. He knew all the stories about former football players. Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend-"I need help, somebody help me"-before shooting himself in the head. There were men with aching knees and backs and hands, from all those years of playing football. But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again. "Lately, I've tried to break it down," Turley said. "I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I'd hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn't come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don't remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you'd get into a collision where everything goes off. You're dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field-fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you're seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions-boom, boom,boom-lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter. "Then, there was the time when I got knocked unconscious. That was in St. Louis, in 2003. My wife said that I was out a minute or two on the field. But I was gone for about four hours after that. It was the last play of the third quarter. We were playing the Packers. I got hit in the back of the head. I saw it on film a little while afterward. I was running downfield, made a block on a guy. We fell to the ground. A guy was chasing the play, a little guy, a defensive back, and he jumped over me as I was coming up, and he kneed me right in the back of the head. Boom! "They sat me down on the bench. I remember Marshall Faulk coming up and joking with me, because he knew that I was messed up. That's what happens in the N.F.L: 'Oooh. You got effed up. Oooh.' The trainer came up to me and said, 'Kyle, let's take you to the locker room.' I remember looking up at a clock, and there was only a minute and a half left in the game-and I had no idea that much time had elapsed. I showered and took all my gear off. I was sitting at my locker. I don't remember anything. When I came back, after being hospitalized, the guys were joking with me because Georgia Frontiere"-then the team's owner-"came in the locker room, and they said I was butt-ass naked and I gave her a big hug. They were dying laughing, and I was, like, 'Are you serious? I did that?' "They cleared me for practice that Thursday. I probably shouldn't have. I don't know what damage I did from that, because my head was really hurting. But when you're coming off an injury you're frustrated. I wanted to play the next game. I was just so mad that this happened to me that I'm overdoing it. I was just going after guys in practice. I was really trying to use my head more, because I was so frustrated, and the coaches on the sidelines are, like, 'Yeah. We're going to win this game. He's going to lead the team.' That's football. You're told either that you're hurt or that you're injured. There is no middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can't, and the line is whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads." Turley said that he loved playing football so much that he would do it all again. Then he began talking about what he had gone through in the past year. The thing that scared him most about that night at the bar was that it felt exactly like the time he was knocked unconscious. "It was identical," he said. "It was my worst episode ever." In August of 2007, one of the highest-paid players in professional football, the quarterback Michael Vick, pleaded guilty to involvement in a dogfighting ring. The police raided one of his properties, a farm outside Richmond, Virginia, and found the bodies of dead dogs buried on the premises, along with evidence that some of the animals there had been tortured and electrocuted. Vick was suspended from football. He was sentenced to twenty-three months in prison. The dogs on his farm were seized by the court, and the most damaged were sent to an animal sanctuary in Utah for rehabilitation. When Vick applied for reinstatement to the National Football League, this summer, he was asked to undergo psychiatric testing. He then met with the commissioner of the league, Roger Goodell, for four and a half hours, so that Goodell could be sure that he was genuinely remorseful. "I probably considered every alternative that I could think of," Goodell told reporters, when he finally allowed Vick back into the league. "I reached out to an awful lot of people to get their views-not only on what was right for the young man but also what was right for our society and the N.F.L." Goodell's job entails dealing with players who have used drugs, driven drunk and killed people, fired handguns in night clubs, and consorted with thugs and accused murderers. But he clearly felt what many Americans felt as well-that dogfighting was a moral offense of a different order. Here is a description of a dogfight given by the sociologists Rhonda Evans and Craig Forsyth in "The Social Milieu of Dogmen and Dogfights," an article they published some years ago in the journal Deviant Behavior. The fight took place in Louisiana between a local dog, Black, owned by a man named L.G., and Snow, whose owner, Rick, had come from Arizona: The handlers release their dogs and Snow and Black lunge at one another. Snow rears up and overpowers Black, but Black manages to come back with a quick locking of the jaws on Snow's neck. The crowd is cheering wildly and yelling out bets. Once a dog gets a lock on the other, they will hold on with all their might. The dogs flail back and forth and all the while Black maintains her hold. In a dogfight, whenever one of the dogs "turns"-makes a submissive gesture with its head-the two animals are separated and taken back to their corners. Each dog, in alternation, then "scratches"-is released to charge at its opponent. After that first break, it is Snow's turn to scratch. She races toward Black: Snow goes straight for the throat and grabs hold with her razor-sharp teeth. Almost immediately, blood flows from Black's throat. Despite a serious injury to the throat, Black manages to continue fighting back. They are relentless, each battling the other and neither willing to accept defeat. This fighting continues for an hour. [Finally, the referee] gives the third and final pit call. It is Black's turn to scratch and she is severely wounded. Black manages to crawl across the pit to meet her opponent. Snow attacks Black and she is too weak to fight back. L.G. realizes that this is it for Black and calls the fight. Snow is declared the winner. Afterward, Snow's owner collects his winnings; L.G. carries Black from the ring. "Her back legs are broken and blood is gushing from her throat," Evans and Forsyth write. "A shot rings out barely heard over the noise in the barn. Black's body is wrapped up and carried by her owner to his vehicle." It's the shot ringing out that seals the case against dogfighting. L.G. willingly submitted his dog to a contest that culminated in her suffering and destruction. And why? For the entertainment of an audience and the chance of a payday. In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport. "I was not aware of dogfighting and the terrible things that happen around dogfighting," Goodell said, explaining why he responded so sternly in the Vick case. One wonders whether, had he spent as much time talking to Kyle Turley as he did to Michael Vick, he'd start to have similar doubts about his own sport. In 2003, a seventy-two-year-old patient at the Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, died, fifteen years after receiving a diagnosis of dementia. Patients in the hospital's dementia ward are routinely autopsied, as part of the V.A.'s research efforts, so the man's brain was removed and "fixed" in a formaldehyde solution. A laboratory technician placed a large slab of the man's cerebral tissue on a microtome-essentially, a sophisticated meat slicer-and, working along the coronal plane, cut off dozens of fifty-micron shavings, less than a hairbreadth thick. The shavings were then immunostained-bathed in a special reagent that would mark the presence of abnormal proteins with a bright, telltale red or brown stain on the surface of the tissue. Afterward, each slice was smoothed out and placed on a slide. The stained tissue of Alzheimer's patients typically shows the two trademarks of the disease-distinctive patterns of the proteins beta-amyloid and tau. Beta-amyloid is thought to lay the groundwork for dementia. Tau marks the critical second stage of the disease: it's the protein that steadily builds up in brain cells, shutting them down and ultimately killing them. An immunostain of an Alzheimer's patient looks, under the microscope, as if the tissue had been hit with a shotgun blast: the red and brown marks, corresponding to amyloid and tau, dot the entire surface. But this patient's brain was different. There was damage only to specific surface regions of his brain, and the stains for amyloid came back negative. "This was all tau," Ann McKee, who runs the hospital's neuropathology laboratory, said. "There was not even a whiff of amyloid. And it was the most extraordinary damage. It was one of those cases that really took you aback." The patient may have been in an Alzheimer's facility, and may have looked and acted as if he had Alzheimer's. But McKee realized that he had a different condition, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), which is a progressive neurological disorder found in people who have suffered some kind of brain trauma. C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer's: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia. And C.T.E. appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise to nerve-cell breakdown and death. But C.T.E. isn't the result of an endogenous disease. It's the result of injury. The patient, it turned out, had been a boxer in his youth. He had suffered from dementia for fifteen years because, decades earlier, he'd been hit too many times in the head. McKee's laboratory does the neuropathology work for both the giant Framingham heart study, which has been running since 1948, and Boston University's New England Centenarian Study, which analyzes the brains of people who are unusually long-lived. "I'm looking at brains constantly," McKee said. "Then I ran across another one. I saw it and said, 'Wow, it looks just like the last case.' This time, there was no known history of boxing. But then I called the family, and heard that the guy had been a boxer in his twenties." You can't see tau except in an autopsy, and you can't see it in an autopsy unless you do a very particular kind of screen. So now that McKee had seen two cases, in short order, she began to wonder: how many people who we assume have Alzheimer's-a condition of mysterious origin-are actually victims of preventable brain trauma? McKee linked up with an activist named Chris Nowinski, a former college football player and professional wrestler who runs a group called the Sports Legacy Institute, in Boston. In his football and wrestling careers, Nowinski suffered six concussions (that he can remember), the last of which had such severe side effects that he has become a full-time crusader against brain injuries in sports. Nowinski told McKee that he would help her track down more brains of ex-athletes. Whenever he read an obituary of someone who had played in a contact sport, he'd call up the family and try to persuade them to send the player's brain to Bedford. Usually, they said no. Sometimes they said yes. The first brain McKee received was from a man in his mid-forties who had played as a linebacker in the N.F.L. for ten years. He accidentally shot himself while cleaning a gun. He had at least three concussions in college, and eight in the pros. In the years before his death, he'd had memory lapses, and had become more volatile. McKee immunostained samples of his brain tissue, and saw big splotches of tau all over the frontal and temporal lobes. If he hadn't had the accident, he would almost certainly have ended up in a dementia ward. Nowinski found her another ex-football player. McKee saw the same thing. She has now examined the brains of sixteen ex-athletes, most of them ex-football players. Some had long careers and some played only in college. Some died of dementia. Some died of unrelated causes. Some were old. Some were young. Most were linemen or linebackers, although there was one wide receiver. In one case, a man who had been a linebacker for sixteen years, you could see, without the aid of magnification, that there was trouble: there was a shiny tan layer of scar tissue, right on the surface of the frontal lobe, where the brain had repeatedly slammed into the skull. It was the kind of scar you'd get only if you used your head as a battering ram. You could also see that some of the openings in the brain were larger than you'd expect, as if the surrounding tissue had died and shrunk away. In other cases, everything seemed entirely normal until you looked under the microscope and saw the brown ribbons of tau. But all sixteen of the ex-athlete brains that McKee had examined-those of the two boxers, plus the ones that Nowinski had found for her-had something in common: every one had abnormal tau. The other major researcher looking at athletes and C.T.E. is the neuropathologist Bennet Omalu. He diagnosed the first known case of C.T.E. in an ex-N.F.L. player back in September of 2002, when he autopsied the former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster. He also found C.T.E. in the former Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, and in the former Steelers linemen Terry Long and Justin Strzelczyk, the latter of whom was killed when he drove the wrong way down a freeway and crashed his car, at ninety miles per hour, into a tank truck. Omalu has only once failed to find C.T.E. in a professional football player, and that was a twenty-four-year-old running back who had played in the N.F.L. for only two years. "There is something wrong with this group as a cohort," Omalu says. "They forget things. They have slurred speech. I have had an N.F.L. player come up to me at a funeral and tell me he can't find his way home. I have wives who call me and say, 'My husband was a very good man. Now he drinks all the time. I don't know why his behavior changed.' I have wives call me and say, 'My husband was a nice guy. Now he's getting abusive.' I had someone call me and say, 'My husband went back to law school after football and became a lawyer. Now he can't do his job. People are suing him.' " McKee and Omalu are trying to make sense of the cases they've seen so far. At least some of the players are thought to have used steroids, which has led to the suggestion that brain injury might in some way be enhanced by drug use. Many of the players also share a genetic risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases, so perhaps deposits of tau are the result of brain trauma coupled with the weakened ability of the brain to repair itself. McKee says that she will need to see at least fifty cases before she can draw any firm conclusions. In the meantime, late last month the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research released the findings of an N.F.L.-funded phone survey of just over a thousand randomly selected retired N.F.L. players-all of whom had played in the league for at least three seasons. Self-reported studies are notoriously unreliable instruments, but, even so, the results were alarming. Of those players who were older than fifty, 6.1 per cent reported that they had received a diagnosis of "dementia, Alzheimer's disease, or other memory-related disease." That's five times higher than the national average for that age group. For players between the ages of thirty and forty-nine, the reported rate was nineteen times the national average. (The N.F.L. has distributed five million dollars to former players with dementia.) "A long time ago, someone suggested that the [C.T.E. rate] in boxers was twenty per cent," McKee told me. "I think it's probably higher than that among boxers, and I also suspect that it's going to end up being higher than that among football players as well. Why? Because every brain I've seen has this. To get this number in a sample this small is really unusual, and the findings are so far out of the norm. I only can say that because I have looked at thousands of brains for a long time. This isn't something that you just see. I did the same exact thing for all the individuals from the Framingham heart study. We study them until they die. I run these exact same proteins, make these same slides-and we never see this." McKee's laboratory occupies a warren of rooms, in what looks like an old officers' quarters on the V.A. campus. In one of the rooms, there is an enormous refrigerator, filled with brains packed away in hundreds of plastic containers. Nearby is a tray with small piles of brain slices. They look just like the ginger shavings that come with an order of sushi. Now McKee went to the room next to her office, sat down behind a microscope, and inserted one of the immunostained slides under the lens. "This is Tom McHale," she said. "He started out playing for Cornell. Then he went to Tampa Bay. He was the man who died of substance abuse at the age of forty-five. I only got fragments of the brain. But it's just showing huge accumulations of tau for a forty-five-year-old-ridiculously abnormal." She placed another slide under the microscope. "This individual was forty-nine years old. A football player. Cognitively intact. He never had any rage behavior. He had the distinctive abnormalities. Look at the hypothalamus." It was dark with tau. She put another slide in. "This guy was in his mid-sixties," she said. "He died of an unrelated medical condition. His name is Walter Hilgenberg. Look at the hippocampus. It's wall-to-wall tangles. Even in a bad case of Alzheimer's, you don't see that." The brown pigment of the tau stain ran around the edge of the tissue sample in a thick, dark band. "It's like a big river." McKee got up and walked across the corridor, back to her office. "There's one last thing," she said. She pulled out a large photographic blowup of a brain-tissue sample. "This is a kid. I'm not allowed to talk about how he died. He was a good student. This is his brain. He's eighteen years old. He played football. He'd been playing football for a couple of years." She pointed to a series of dark spots on the image, where the stain had marked the presence of something abnormal. "He's got all this tau. This is frontal and this is insular. Very close to insular. Those same vulnerable regions." This was a teen-ager, and already his brain showed the kind of decay that is usually associated with old age. "This is completely inappropriate," she said. "You don't see tau like this in an eighteen-year-old. You don't see tau like this in afifty-year-old." McKee is a longtime football fan. She is from Wisconsin. She had two statuettes of Brett Favre, the former Green Bay Packers quarterback, on her bookshelf. On the wall was a picture of a robust young man. It was McKee's son-nineteen years old, six feet three. If he had a chance to join the N.F.L., I asked her, what would she advise him? "I'd say, 'Don't. Not if you want to have a life after football.' " At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It's a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so. In 2000 and 2001, four drivers in Nascar's ?lite Sprint Cup Series were killed in crashes, including the legendary Dale Earnhardt. In response, Nascar mandated stronger seats, better seat belts and harnesses, and ignition kill switches, and completed the installation of expensive new barriers on the walls of its racetracks, which can absorb the force of a crash much better than concrete. The result is that, in the past eight years, no one has died in Nascar's three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes. Last year, at Texas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell hit an oil slick, slammed head first into the wall at a hundred and eighty miles per hour, flipped over and over, leaving much of his car in pieces on the track, and, when the vehicle finally came to a stop, crawled out of the wreckage and walked away. He raced again the next day. So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing? Football faced a version of this question a hundred years ago, after a series of ugly incidents. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt called an emergency summit at the White House, alarmed, as the historian John Sayle Watterson writes, "that the brutality of the prize ring had invaded college football and might end up destroying it." Columbia University dropped the sport entirely. A professor at the University of Chicago called it a "boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport." In December of 1905, the presidents of twelve prominent colleges met in New York and came within one vote of abolishing the game. But the main objection at the time was to a style of play-densely and dangerously packed offensive strategies-that, it turns out, could be largely corrected with rule changes, like the legalization of the forward pass and the doubling of the first-down distance from five yards to ten. Today, when we consider subtler and more insidious forms of injury, it's far from clear whether the problem is the style of play or the play itself. Take the experience of a young defensive lineman for the University of North Carolina football team, who suffered two concussions during the 2004 season. His case is one of a number studied by Kevin Guskiewicz, who runs the university's Sports Concussion Research Program. For the past five seasons, Guskiewicz and his team have tracked every one of the football team's practices and games using a system called HITS, in which six sensors are placed inside the helmet of every player on the field, measuring the force and location of every blow he receives to the head. Using the HITSdata, Guskiewicz was able to reconstruct precisely what happened each time the player was injured. "The first concussion was during preseason. The team was doing two-a-days," he said, referring to the habit of practicing in both the morning and the evening in the preseason. "It was August 9th, 9:55 A.M. He has an 80-g hit to the front of his head. About ten minutes later, he has a 98-g acceleration to the front of his head." To put those numbers in perspective, Guskiewicz explained, if you drove your car into a wall at twenty-five miles per hour and you weren't wearing your seat belt, the force of your head hitting the windshield would be around 100 gs: in effect, the player had two car accidents that morning. He survived both without incident. "In the evening session, he experiences this 64-g hit to the same spot, the front of the head. Still not reporting anything. And then this happens." On his laptop, Guskiewicz ran the video from the practice session. It was a simple drill: the lineman squaring off against an offensive player who wore the number 76. The other player ran toward the lineman and brushed past him, while delivering a glancing blow to the defender's helmet. "Seventy-six does a little quick elbow. It's 63 gs, the lowest of the four, but he sustains a concussion." "The second injury was nine weeks later," Guskiewicz continued. "He's now recovered from the initial injury. It's a game out in Utah. In warmups, he takes a 76-g blow to the front of his head. Then, on the very first play of the game, on kickoff, he gets popped in the earhole. It's a 102-g impact. He's part of the wedge." He pointed to the screen, where the player was blocking on a kickoff: "Right here." The player stumbled toward the sideline. "His symptoms were significantly worse than the first injury." Two days later, during an evaluation in Guskiewicz's clinic, he had to have a towel put over his head because he couldn't stand the light. He also had difficulty staying awake. He was sidelined for sixteen days. When we think about football, we worry about the dangers posed by the heat and the fury of competition. Yet theHITS data suggest that practice-the routine part of the sport-can be as dangerous as the games themselves. We also tend to focus on the dramatic helmet-to-helmet hits that signal an aggressive and reckless style of play. Those kinds of hits can be policed. But what sidelined the U.N.C. player, the first time around, was an accidental and seemingly innocuous elbow, and none of the blows he suffered that day would have been flagged by a referee as illegal. Most important, though, is what Guskiewicz found when he reviewed all the data for the lineman on that first day in training camp. He didn't just suffer those four big blows. He was hit in the head thirty-one times that day. What seems to have caused his concussion, in other words, was his cumulative exposure. And why was the second concussion-in the game at Utah-so much more serious than the first? It's not because that hit to the side of the head was especially dramatic; it was that it came after the 76-g blow in warmup, which, in turn, followed the concussion in August, which was itself the consequence of the thirty prior hits that day, and the hits the day before that, and the day before that, and on and on, perhaps back to his high-school playing days. This is a crucial point. Much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions-on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them-and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player's real issue isn't simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It's not just the handful of big hits that matter. It's lots of little hits, too. That's why, Cantu says, so many of the ex-players who have been given a diagnosis of C.T.E. were linemen: line play lends itself to lots of little hits. The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that's thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage. People with C.T.E., Cantu says, "aren't necessarily people with a high, recognized concussion history. But they are individuals who collided heads on every play-repetitively doing this, year after year, under levels that were tolerable for them to continue to play." But if C.T.E. is really about lots of little hits, what can be done about it? Turley says that it's impossible for an offensive lineman to do his job without "using his head." The position calls for the player to begin in a crouch and then collide with the opposing lineman when the ball is snapped. Helmet-to-helmet contact is inevitable. Nowinski, who played football for Harvard, says that "proper" tackling technique is supposed to involve a player driving into his opponent with his shoulder. "The problem," he says, "is that, if you're a defender and you're trying to tackle someone and you decide to pick a side, you're giving the other guy a way to go-and people will start running around you." Would better helmets help? Perhaps. And there have been better models introduced that absorb more of the shock from a hit. But, Nowinski says, the better helmets have become-and the more invulnerable they have made the player seem-the more athletes have been inclined to play recklessly. "People love technological solutions," Nowinski went on. "When I give speeches, the first question is always: 'What about these new helmets I hear about?' What most people don't realize is that we are decades, if not forever, from having a helmet that would fix the problem. I mean, you have two men running into each other at full speed and you think a little bit of plastic and padding could absorb that 150 gs of force?" At one point, while he was discussing his research, Guskiewicz showed a videotape from a 1997 college football game between Arizona and Oregon. In one sequence, a player from Oregon viciously tackles an Arizona player, bringing his head up onto the opposing player's chin and sending his helmet flying with the force of the blow. To look at it, you'd think that the Arizona player would be knocked unconscious. Instead, he bounces back up. "This guy does not sustain a concussion," Guskiewicz said. "He has a lip laceration. Lower lip, that's it. Now, same game, twenty minutes later." He showed a clip of an Arizona defensive back making a dramatic tackle. He jumps up, and, as he does so, a teammate of his chest-bumps him in celebration. The defensive back falls and hits his head on the ground. "That's a Grade 2 concussion," Guskiewicz said. "It's the fall to the ground, combined with the bounce off the turf." The force of the first hit was infinitely greater than the second. But the difference is that the first player saw that he was about to be hit and tensed his neck, which limited the sharp back-and-forth jolt of the head that sends the brain crashing against the sides of the skull. In essence, he was being hit not in the head but in the head, neck, and torso-an area with an effective mass three times greater. In the second case, the player didn't see the hit coming. His head took the full force of the blow all by itself. That's why he suffered a concussion. But how do you insure, in a game like football, that a player is never taken by surprise? Guskiewicz and his colleagues have come up with what they believe is a much better method of understanding concussion. They have done a full cognitive workup of the players on the U.N.C. team, so that they can track whatever effect might arise from the hits each player accumulates during his four years. U.N.C.'s new coach, Butch Davis, has sharply cut back on full-contact practices, reducing the toll on the players' heads. Guskiewicz says his data show that a disproportionate number of serious head impacts happen on kickoffs, so he wonders whether it might make sense, in theory, anyway, to dispense with them altogether. But, like everyone else who's worried about football, he still has no idea what the inherent risks of the game are. What if you did everything you could, and banned kickoffs and full-contact practices and used the most state-of-the-art techniques for diagnosing and treating concussion, and behaved as responsibly as Nascar has in the past several years-and players were still getting too many dangerous little hits to the head? After the tape session, Guskiewicz and one of his colleagues, Jason Mihalik, went outside to watch the U.N.C. football team practice, a short walk down the hill from their office. Only when you see football at close range is it possible to understand the dimensions of the brain-injury problem. The players were huge-much larger than you imagine them being. They moved at astonishing speeds for people of that size, and, long before you saw them, you heard them: the sound of one two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man colliding with another echoed around the practice facility. Mihalik and Guskiewicz walked over to a small building, just off to the side of the field. On the floor was a laptop inside a black storage crate. Next to the computer was an antenna that received the signals from the sensors inside the players' helmets. Mihalik crouched down and began paging through the data. In one column, the HITS software listed the top hits of the practice up to that point, and every few moments the screen would refresh, reflecting the plays that had just been run on the field. Forty-five minutes into practice, the top eight head blows on the field measured 82 gs, 79 gs, 75 gs, 79 gs, 67 gs, 60 gs, 57 gs, and 53 gs. One player, a running back, had received both the 79 gs and the 60 gs, as well as another hit, measuring 27.9 gs. This wasn't a full-contact practice. It was "shells." The players wore only helmets and shoulder pads, and still there were mini car crashes happening all over the field. The most damaged, scarred, and belligerent of Michael Vick's dogs-the hardest cases-were sent to the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, on a thirty-seven-hundred-acre spread in the canyons of southern Utah. They were housed in a specially modified octagon, a one-story, climate-controlled cottage, ringed by individual dog runs. The dogs were given a final walk at 11 P.M. and woken up at 7 A.M., to introduce them to a routine. They were hand-fed. In the early months, the staff took turns sleeping in the octagon-sometimes in the middle, sometimes in a cot in one of the runs-so that someone would be with the dogs twenty-four hours a day. Twenty-two of Vick's pit bulls came to Best Friends in January of 2008, and all but five of them are still there. Ray lunged at his handlers when he first came to Best Friends. He can't be with other dogs. Ellen lies on the ground and wants her stomach scratched, and when the caregivers slept in the octagon she licked them all night long. Her face is lopsided, as if it had been damaged from fighting. She can't be with other dogs, either. Georgia has a broken tail, and her legs and snout are covered with scars. She has no teeth. At some point, in her early life, they had been surgically removed. The court-ordered evaluation of the Vick dogs labelled Meryl, a medium-sized brown-and-white pit-bull mix, "human aggressive," meaning that she is never allowed to be taken out of the Best Friends facility. "She had a hard time meeting people-she would pre?mpt anyone coming by charging and snapping at them," Ann Allums, one of the Best Friends dog trainers, said, as she walked around Meryl's octagon, on a recent fall day. She opened the gate to Meryl's dog run and crouched down on the ground next to her. She hugged the dog, and began playfully wrestling with her, as Meryl's tail thumped happily. "She really doesn't mind new people," Allums said. "She's very happy and loving. I feel totally comfortable with her. I can grab and kiss her." She gave Meryl another hug. "I am building a relationship," she said. "She needed to see that when people were around bad things would not happen." What happens at Best Friends represents, by any measure, an extravagant gesture. These are dogs that will never live a normal life. But the kind of crime embodied by dogfighting is so morally repellent that it demands an extravagant gesture in response. In a fighting dog, the quality that is prized above all others is the willingness to persevere, even in the face of injury and pain. A dog that will not do that is labelled a "cur," and abandoned. A dog that keeps charging at its opponent is said to possess "gameness," and game dogs are revered. In one way or another, plenty of organizations select for gameness. The Marine Corps does so, and so does medicine, when it puts young doctors through the exhausting rigors of residency. But those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff-and dogfighting fails this test. Gameness, Carl Semencic argues, in "The World of Fighting Dogs" (1984), is no more than a dog's "desire to please an owner at any expense to itself." The owners, Semencic goes on, understand this desire to please on the part of the dog and capitalize on it. At any organized pit fight in which two dogs are really going at each other wholeheartedly, one can observe the owner of each dog changing his position at pit-side in order to be in sight of his dog at all times. The owner knows that seeing his master rooting him on will make a dog work all the harder to please its master. This is why Michael Vick's dogs weren't euthanized. The betrayal of loyalty requires an act of social reparation. Professional football players, too, are selected for gameness. When Kyle Turley was knocked unconscious, in that game against the Packers, he returned to practice four days later because, he said, "I didn't want to miss a game." Once, in the years when he was still playing, he woke up and fell into a wall as he got out of bed. "I start puking all over," he recalled. "So I said to my wife, 'Take me to practice.' I didn't want to miss practice." The same season that he was knocked unconscious, he began to have pain in his hips. He received three cortisone shots, and kept playing. At the end of the season, he discovered that he had a herniated disk. He underwent surgery, and four months later was back at training camp. "They put me in full-contact practice from day one," he said. "After the first day, I knew I wasn't right. They told me, 'You've had the surgery. You're fine. You should just fight through it.' It's like you're programmed. You've got to go without question-I'm a warrior. I can block that out of my mind. I go out, two days later. Full contact. Two-a-days. My back locks up again. I had re-herniated the same disk that got operated on four months ago, and bulged the disk above it." As one of Turley's old coaches once said, "He plays the game as it should be played, all out," which is to say that he put the game above his own well-being. Turley says he was once in the training room after a game with a young linebacker who had suffered a vicious hit on a kickoff return. "We were in the cold tub, which is, like, forty-five degrees, and he starts passing out. In the cold tub. I don't know anyone who has ever passed out in the cold tub. That's supposed to wake you up. And I'm, like, slapping his face. 'Richie! Wake up!' He said, 'What, what? I'm cool.' I said, 'You've got a concussion. You have to go to the hospital.' He said, 'You know, man, I'm fine.' " He wasn't fine, though. That moment in the cold tub represented a betrayal of trust. He had taken the hit on behalf of his team. He was then left to pass out in the cold tub, and to deal-ten and twenty years down the road-with the consequences. No amount of money or assurances about risk freely assumed can change the fact that, in this moment, an essential bond had been broken. What football must confront, in the end, is not just the problem of injuries or scientific findings. It is the fact that there is something profoundly awry in the relationship between the players and the game. "Let's assume that Dr. Omalu and the others are right," Ira Casson, who co-chairs an N.F.L. committee on brain injury, said. "What should we be doing differently? We asked Dr. McKee this when she came down. And she was honest, and said, 'I don't know how to answer that.' No one has any suggestions-assuming that you aren't saying no more football, because, let's be honest, that's not going to happen." Casson began to talk about the research on the connection between C.T.E. and boxing. It had been known for eighty years. Boxers ran a twenty-per-cent risk of dementia. Yet boxers continue to box. Why? Because people still go to boxing matches. "We certainly know from boxers that the incidence of C.T.E. is related to the length of your career," he went on. "So if you want to apply that to football-and I'm not saying it does apply-then you'd have to let people play six years and then stop. If it comes to that, maybe we'll have to think about that. On the other hand, nobody's willing to do this in boxing. Why would a boxer at the height of his career, six or seven years in, stop fighting, just when he's making million-dollar paydays?" He shrugged. "It's a violent game. I suppose if you want to you could play touch football or flag football. For me, as a Jewish kid from Long Island, I'd be just as happy if we did that. But I don't know if the fans would be happy with that. So what else do you do?" Casson is right. There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else-neither considerations of science nor those of morality-can compete with the destructive power of that love. In "Dogmen and Dogfights," Evans and Forsyth write: When one views a staged dog fight between pit bulls for the first time, the most macabre aspect of the event is that the only sounds you hear from these dogs are those of crunching bones and cartilage. The dogs rip and tear at each other; their blood, urine and saliva splatter the sides of the pit and clothes of the handlers. . . . The emotions of the dogs are conspicuous, but not so striking, even to themselves, are the passions of the owners of the dogs. Whether they hug a winner or in the rare case, destroy a dying loser, whether they walk away from the carcass or lay crying over it, their fondness for these fighters is manifest. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 29 20:57:10 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:57:10 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Inside Report: How ALBA Fought for Humanity in Copenhagen Message-ID: http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=1468&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateandcapitalism%2FpEtD+%28Climate+and+Capitalism%29 Inside Report: How ALBA Fought for Humanity in Copenhagen December 28, 2009 Evo Morales: "I have heard many debates in the UN where presidents condemn climate change but they never say what causes it. We say clearly that it is caused by capitalism." By Ron Ridenour "Nobel War Prize winner walked in and out of a secret door, and that is the way capitalism and the United States Empire will end up leaving the planet, through a secret back door." So spoke Venezuela President Hugo Chavez from the plenary podium on the last afternoon, December 18, of the 12-day long Copenhagen climate conference (COP15). "While the conference was a failure, it, at least, led to more consciousness of what the problem is for all of us. Now starts a new stage of the struggle for the salvation of humanity, and this is through socialism. Our problem is not just about climate, but about poverty, misery, unnecessary child deaths, discrimination and racism-all related to capitalism," Chavez said at the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America (ALBA) press conference held at the Bella Centre immediately following Chavez' last remarks at the plenary. (ALBA is composed of Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, St. Vincent and Grenadines, and Venezuela. Honduras, also a member, was not present given the illegal coup d??tat against the legitimate President Manuel Zelaya.) Bolivia's President Evo Morales followed Chavez' remarks by saying: "Barack Obama said a while ago - the only delegate to walk in and out of the stage from a concealed door - that he came here not for more words but for action. Well, then you should act by using the money you are spending for wars against the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, for militarising Colombia with seven military bases to save lives, to save the planet our Mother Earth." Both presidents, the only heads of state representing eight of the nine ALBA countries present at COP15, denounced the failure of the Copenhagen conference in both form and content. Chavez: "There are no documents presented for consultation by all. The responsibility is a lack of political will by a few rich countries, including the host Denmark, headed by the US Empire." Morales: "There is profound difference between their document [the so-called `Copenhagen Accord'] and the peoples fighting for humanity and the planet. This group of friends led by Obama accept that temperatures can increase by 2 degrees Celsius by 2020. This will end the existence of many island states; it will end our snow-capped mountains. And Obama only seeks to reduce gas emissions by 50% in 2050. But we want and need 90 to 100% reduction, in order to save the planet. "Then they speak of spending crumbs for mitigation and adaptation. The third theme, which they are only just now debating, is how to set up a system of controls for monitoring agreements and what sanctions there will be if this is not done. That is why we want an International Climate Justice Tribunal that can sanction failure to comply with agreements, so that we can govern based on balance and achieve real solutions." President Morales was referring to one of the five questions - to be answered yes or no- that he proposes for a global referendum on climate change. The other four are: 1.Do you agree with re-establishing harmony with nature, recognising the rights of Mother Earth? 2.Do you agree with changing this model of over-consumption and waste that the capitalist system represents? 3.Do you agree that developed countries reduce and re-absorb their domestic greenhouse gas emissions so that the temperature does not rise more than 1 degree Celsius? 4.Do you agree with transferring all that is spent on wars to protecting the planet and allocate a budget for climate change that is bigger than what is used for defence? At the press conference, and on various other occasions during the three days of his attendance, Morales posed the problem and the solution to it thus: "The rich countries seek to divide the rest of us . by offering crumbs of money. Mother Earth can't be preserved with money alone. Europe's food almost entirely depends upon petrol. What happens when there is no petrol? This dependency on fossil fuel is a threat to humanity, so we have to change the structures of food. It is a structural problem of two forms of life: one way of living is the way of over-consumption and waste, the way of luxury, of egoism and individualism-capitalism. The other way is vivir bien - living well - food enough for all and living in harmony with others and our Mother Earth, in solidarity and complementarily." At the final press conference - for which I was one of two media consultants during this two weeks, along with Nick Buxton - for the ALBA countries, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela attended. Cuba's vice-president Esteben Lazo said that socialism offers greater protection for the Earth than does capitalism: Before our revolution, capitalism had nearly depleted all our forests. We have focused on replanting and now 20% of the land is covered by forests. We also educate our school children about ecology, and about the ALBA network. We are founded on principles of solidarity, of human rights and nature's rights. Democracy anecdotes Nick and I had rushed to put out a media advisory announcing the above press conference, about which we were informed only 90 minutes before that Morales would be attending rather than leaving Copenhagen earlier that day as he had planned. We wrote it in a blink and passed out 200 fliers. At the appointed time, the press room began to fill with media and delegates from several countries. Bolivia was the only state, of which I know, that insisted on allowing anyone to attend our press conferences, in accordance with Morales' practice of inclusiveness and transparency. The time allotted was 30 minutes. Morales did not arrive on time, which he usually does. We heard from a top Bolivian delegate inside the plenary that Evo had just gotten an opportunity to respond from the floor to the rich countries' secret document, now leaked. Fifteen minutes ticked by and he did not arrive. Another phone call informed us that Chavez would be following Evo and then they were both coming to the media hall. Oh, no! Chavez never talks briefly. We would lose the conference time and 100 people present would be disappointed. Use the "dead" time, my experience told me. I asked two Indigenous social movement delegates if they would take the podium and speak, perhaps about their movements and the five-point referendum. They agreed. I translated for them. They spoke of how this very act of taking the podium before their president's arrival illustrated how democratic the new Plurinational State of Bolivia actually is. Social movements work hand in glove with the government and their president - reelected less than two weeks before with a 64% majority. As the activists were speaking, about their movement and the referendum, in walked presidents Morales and Chavez followed by the Cuban, Ecuadorian and Nicaraguan leaders. The activists and I calmly walked off the stage and the leaders took our seats as we nodded to one another. Morales' entourage of ministers and ambassadors took their seats. They are known to us as Eugenio, Pablo, Roberto, Ivan, Ang?lica, David, Rene and not Your Honorable, Excellency, Minister, Ambassador. When speaking with or about their presidents, most common people call them Evo and Chavez. On other occasions - such as before 3000 persons at the ALBA People's Meeting held in a sports stadium on December 17, where Morales and Chavez spoke alongside top leaders from Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua - the leaders of the Bolivian and Venezuelan governments thoughtfully thanked their teams of paid workers and volunteers, and the organisers of political events. They also praised the activists inside and outside the Bella Centre conference. They applauded the 100,000 plus demonstrators who mobilised on December 12 - twice the size of the hitherto largest demonstration ever held in the Banana Republic of Denmark - and the 1500 activists arrested preventatively, nearly none of whom had performed an illegal act. Only two handfuls were eventually charged with any violation. Several hundreds had their hands handcuffed behind their backs and were forced to sit on the cold ground and asphalt for up to five hours before being bussed to makeshift cage cells. No water, no toilet. This is the treatment a "democratic" police state can render potential "terrorists" under their new terror laws, which they deem to be necessary to accompany their imperialist wars. In addition to these demonstrations, there were smaller ones attended by hundreds or thousand in several parts of the city everyday. Some were decidedly opposed to capitalism and its wars. I participated in one in front of the Yankee Embassy of Murder the day before its president was to receive the so-called Nobel Peace Prize. Evo Morales Evo Morales, 50, comes from the people's struggles. He was an amateur soccer player, a musician, a coco farmer and a union organiser and leader before entering politics. He is a man of dialogue with his people. I note one illustration. When he came out of a news conference, the Indian Youth Climate Network, a group of youth from India, wanted him to hear a song one of them had written about Bolivia. He stopped to listen to "I wish I was Bolivian," sung to the tune of "Homeward Bound" by Simon and Garfunkel. "Every day they are stalling and they are saying the same old things again, But one bright country stands apart, They're saying things close to my heart, They've got a plan with hope in hand, They're saying c'mon, let's just start. Bolivia, I wish I was Bolivian. Just one degree temperature rise, 300 ppm in the skies, 100 per cent emissions down by two thousand forty, Does anyone know the price of waiting? Fighting, hating, procrastinating, My future stands in front of me, While people here make history, I hope and pray that it will be, What the world's children wish to see, Bolivia, We've got to take the boldest steps, There's work to do; clean up the mess, Bolivia" The evening before, Morales attended one of the hundreds of side events organised by people's movements and NGOs. This one was about the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. He spoke briefly giving plenty of time for questions and comments from the floor. Anyone could speak and there was no formality or nervousness before the president. At one point, Evo Morales said that he couldn't always set in motion all that we wanted but it would be easier now, given that the Movement Towards Socialism, the president's party, had won so overwhelming in the presidential electoral campaign and also now controls both parliament houses. "Politics is a science of serving the people. I live to serve the people. Participating in politics is part of assuring our dignity, our traditional way of life. It is my duty to take your message to the heads of state here. If I make a mistake, let me know so that I can rectify it. "I don't think we'll make progress here. We must organise and mobilise all the more. Not just climate justice activists, but all of us: workers, farmers, media people, academics, everybody. That is the answer." Following this meeting, several Indigenous people told me that those are not empty words. "We always speak out in meetings with the president and we offer criticisms and make demands. He listens." Niels Boel, a writer for the daily Danish newspaper Information had one of two dozen bilateral interviews with Evo Morales. He wrote: "As the police fought against demonstrators . the world's greatest activist, Bolivia's President Evo Morales, got off with being chased by the press." While he did not go to jail this time, the world's first Indigenous president knows what prison and torture are all about. He was so treated under previous Bolivian presidents doing capitalism's bidding. As Boel wrote: "Solutions for Morales come only from people's organizations, which can overcome capitalism." And that is why I say this conference was a smashing success. Especially because of Morales and Chavez' anti-capitalist dialogue in those few days, and the many thousands carrying picket signs displayed during the massive march that damned the greedy economic system ("Change the system, not the climate"), capitalism is now on the agenda of many more people than in a long time. Even some of the mass media could not avoid headlining this message from the two "bad boys." "I have heard many debates in the UN where presidents condemn climate change but they never say - cowardly enough - what causes it. We say clearly that it is caused by capitalism," Morales said in closing. [Ron Ridenour worked with the ALBA countries' delegation at the Copenhagen climate talks. He has written widely on Latin America and other political developments. His website is at http://www.ronridenour.com. This article first appeared at Tlaxcala, the network for linguistic diversity, and is published here with the author's permission.] Post-note: Some institute calculated that the amount of carbon emissions from this two-week ordeal was greater than some of the island nations exude in a year. One of the wastes during this failed non-summit, non-climate conference was the amount of paper used by 30,000 delegates and 3000 journalists and technicians. The official figures published by the UN even on the first day stated that 8 million sheets of paper were provided. I guess that Nick and I used 2000 sheets of paper, which we distributed to let media people know of our news conferences. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 30 08:11:15 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:11:15 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Action Alert] Second anti-mining activist killed in El Salvador Message-ID: <0516B1BEE3854B67812044BD784BED39@agingCHS072729> <> ========= go to our webpage www.cispes.org if you're having trouble reading this email www.cispes.org | 202 521-2510| subscribe| suscribir en espa?ol Action Alert December 29, 2009 Second Caba?as Community Activist Slain in a Week Demand justice for the murdered activists and an end to impunity! Watch the Democracy Now! interview with CISPES executive director Alexis Stoumbelis Read our updated press release about the murders and distribute it to your media contacts Take Action! Email Salvadoran Attorney General and call Pacific Rim (see below) On December 26, Dora "Alicia" Sorto Recinos was murdered in El Salvador-the second anti-mining activist killed in less than a week in the small community of Trinidad in the department of Caba?as. Sorto Recinos was eight months pregnant and carrying her two-year old child when shot after doing laundry at a nearby river. The child, who was also shot in the leg is currently receiving medical attention. Sorto Recinos and her life partner, Jos? Santos Rodr?guez, were outspoken opponents of the El Dorado gold mine, which Pacific Rim, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company, is desperate to open despite widespread community and governmental opposition. The death toll for Caba?as anti-mining activists has risen to 3 in the past week: . Alicia Sorto Recinos was a member of the Environmental Committee of Caba?as, which has been extremely active in educating and mobilizing the local community against Pacific Rim's El Dorado gold mine; her life partner Jos? Rodr?guez is a current board member of the committee and has personally received a number of recent death threats and survived three separate attempts against his life. . Last week, the committee's vice-president, Ramiro Rivera, was gunned down in front of his daughter, despite his 24-hour police protection since being shot eight times in August. His neighbor Felic?ta Echeverr?a was also killed in the attack. . The first murder occurred last June, when anti-mining and FMLN activist Marcelo Rivera (no relation to Ramiro) was found tortured and killed in Caba?as. A common thread among the two most recent slayings is Oscar Menj?var. Currently awaiting trial for shooting Ramiro Rivera 8 times in August, he was previously arrested for attacking Jos? Rodr?guez with a machete. Menj?var's neighbors report that he was one of Pacific Rim Mining's paid "promoters," though Pacific Rim denies that he has ever been on payroll. Violence has become a harsh reality for Caba?as residents since the arrival of Pacific Rim. After community organizing efforts successfully blocked Pacific Rim's attempts to obtain gold mining permits, the company filed a lawsuit against the Salvadoran government under CAFTA, the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages (watch the Real News video here). In recent months, it has proven especially dangerous to oppose mining in Caba?as, with a steady stream of attacks, death threats and attempted assassinations and kidnappings against community leaders and anti-mining activists. Despite the overtly political overtones of these violent acts, whose frequency is only increasing, local police authorities and the former Attorney General's office have classified these cases as "common crimes". Salvadorans are fearful and outraged by the continued violence and by the inability or unwillingness of the police and the office of the Attorney General to protect community activists like Alicia Sorto Recinos, Ramiro Rivera and Marcelo Rivera. Community members believe that until these cases are thoroughly investigated for political motives and the perpetrators brought to justice, impunity against the mining resistance movement in Caba?as will continue, sending a message to the intellectual authors of these crimes that they can continue their wave of violence and murders without punishment. Act now and call on the Salvadoran Attorney General to carry out an exhaustive investigation of these murders and their motives AND demand that Pacific Rim recognize the social conflict surrounding the El Dorado mine and stop trying to mine in Caba?as! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ TAKE ACTION! 1) E-mail Rodolfo Delgado (radelgado at fgr.gob.sv), head of the Organized Crime unit of the Attorney General's Office and demand that the Attorney General's office: . Complete the recommendation of the Ombudsman in Defense of Human Rights Oscar Luna to create a special team with the National Civilian Police to investigate these murders and threats against environmental activists. . Investigate the cases exhaustively and impartially and bring the intellectual and material authors of the crimes to justice. [See sample e-mail text at the end of this alert.] Please copy Human Rights Ombudsman Oscar Luna to your email, via his front desk: heidybrizuela at pddh.gob.sv and forward a copy of your sent email to cispes at cispes.org. 2) Call Barbara Henderson, Vice President of Investor Relations at Pacific Rim Mining, using the talking points below. To call from the U.S. dial 1- (888) 775-7097, or from Canada (604) 689-1976, and then press '1'. SAMPLE SCRIPT: "Hello. I have been following Pacific Rim's El Dorado mine and am extremely disturbed by the recent news of two community members who were murdered this past week. These individuals were part of local organizations that have been actively opposing the El Dorado mine since 2004. I call on CEO and President Thomas Shrake and Pacific Rim's board of directors to recognize the social conflict the mine is causing and to make the moral decision to: Immediately withdraw from Caba?as and cease all efforts to mine gold from the El Dorado site. Immediately withdraw its lawsuit against the government of El Salvador. It is absolutely disgraceful for a company to sue a poor nation like El Salvador, especially when the Salvadoran people and government have every right to prevent cyanide gold extraction from destroying their lands and their communities. Cooperate fully with the official investigations surrounding the murders of Alicia Sorto Recinos, Ramiro Rivera and Marcelo Rivera, providing full disclosure on all the people the company has contracted in the region and any other monetary transactions it has conducted among community members, organizations and local government officials. Violence is tearing apart Caba?as, and the company has every obligation to offer its full support to bring to justice the perpetrators of these murdered community members, all of whom have openly opposed the El Dorado mine. Thank you." SAMPLE E-MAIL (English translation below): Jefe de la Divisi?n ?lite contra el Crimen Organizado Fiscal?a General de la Republica de El Salvador Fiscal Rodolfo Delgado Presente. Estimado Se?or Rodolfo Delgado: Como miembro de la comunidad internacional pro-derechos humanos, quiero expresar mi profunda preocupaci?n por lo m?s reciente hecho de violencia contra la comunidad ambientalista en Caba?as, el asesinato de Dora Alicia Sorto Recinos. Adem?s, quiero expresar la indignaci?n de la comunidad internacional pro-derechos humanos por la falta de justicia en los casos de asesinato y violencia pol?tica contra las comunidades opuestas al proyecto minero El Dorado de la empresa canadiense Pacific Rim. Hago un llamado para que la Fiscal?a tome los siguientes pasos para terminar con el ambiente de impunidad que permite estos asesinatos y intentos: 1) Cumplir la recomendaci?n del Procurador para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (PDDH) Oscar Luna para formar una comisi?n de trabajo especial con la Polic?a Nacional Civil (PNC) para investigar los atentados y amenazas en contra de defensores ambientales. 2) Investigar los casos de una manera exhaustiva e imparcial y llevar justicia a los autores intelectuales y materiales del crimen. El asesinato de Sorto Recinos parece otro hecho de violencia sistem?tica que ha traspasado en Caba?as desde el junio de este a?o: el secuestro y brutal asesinato del activista Gustavo Marcelo Rivera; las amenazas de muerte a periodistas de Radio Victoria, al director de la Asociaci?n de Desarrollo Econ?mico y Social Santa Marta (ADES) y a varios l?deres comunitarios del Comit? Ambiental de Caba?as; el sabotaje al sistema electr?nico de Radio Victoria; el intento de secuestro del Padre Luis Quintanilla; el asesinato de Ramiro Rivera la semana pasada; y, los m?s de tres intentos de quitarle la vida a Santos Rodriguez, compa?ero de vida de la se?ora Sorto Recinos. Es preocupante que la Fiscal?a, bajo la direcci?n de ?stor Escalante, adjudic? a priori estos cr?menes a la violencia com?n, ignorando las evidencias y antecedentes presentados que indican la naturaleza pol?tica de los eventos. La Fiscal?a, ahora bajo la direcci?n del Lic. Romeo Barahona, tiene la oportunidad de terminar con esta impunidad. Despu?s del asesinato de Marcelo Rivera en junio, m?s de cien organizaciones de los Estados Unidos y Canad? mandaron una carta a la Fiscal?a expresando su preocupaci?n grave con los atropellos a los derechos humanos. Tambi?n el Congresista Jim McGovern de los Estados Unidos expres? la misma preocupaci?n en reuniones con el Se?or Fiscal General, Romeo Barahona, y representantes de la Administraci?n del Se?or Presidente Mauricio Funes, durante su visita reciente a El Salvador. Tambi?n le estoy mandando una copia de este mensaje al se?or Procurador para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, Lic. Oscar Humberto Luna, quien ha mostrado un compromiso fuerte para proteger la seguridad y los derechos humanos de los l?deres sociales en Caba?as, adem?s de manifestar en su m?s reciente comunicado de prensa que existen evidencias suficientes para descartar que estas muertes sean producto de la delincuencia com?n. De quedar estos eventos en la impunidad, se estar?a generando un clima de temor e incertidumbre para los dem?s l?deres comunitarios, contrarrestando as? los avances logrados en el proceso de democratizaci?n del pa?s. Adem?s, mandar?a un mensaje a los autores intelectuales que pueden seguir su ola de violencia y asesinatos sin ning?n castigo. Agradezco de antemano sus gestiones para agilizar las investigaciones y espero que pronto se haga justicia en estos casos y se brinde protecci?n a las v?ctimas y reparaci?n a los familiares de los asesinados. [Tu nombre y lugar de residencia/ Your name and place of residence] ------------------ Chief of the Elite Division Against Organized Crime (DECO) Office of the Attorney General of El Salvador Attorney Rodolfo Delgado Presente. Dear Mr. Rodolfo Delgado: As a member of the international community in support of human rights, I want to express my profound concern over the most recent act of violence against the environmentalist community in Cabanas, the murder of Dora Alicia Sorto Recinos. Furthermore, I want to express the indignation of the international community in support of human rights for the lack of justice in the cases of murders and political violence against the communities opposed to the Canadian company Pacific Rim's mining project El Dorado. I call on the Attorney General's office to take the following measures to put an end to the environment of impunity that has permitted these murders and attempted murders: 1) Complete the recommendation of the Ombudsman in Defense of Human Rights Oscar Luna to create a special team with the National Civilian Police to investigate these murders and threats against environmental activists. 2) Investigate the cases exhaustively and impartially and bring the intellectual and material authors of the crimes to justice. The murder of Sorto Recinos appears to be the most recent act of the systematic violence that has been taking place in Caba?as since June of this year: the kidnapping and brutal murder of activist Gustavo Marcelo Rivera; the death threats against journalists from Radio Victoria, the director of the Association for the Economic and Social Development of Santa Marta (ADES), and other community leaders in Caba?as; the sabotage of Radio Victoria's electronic equipment; the murder of Ramiro Rivera last week; and more than three attempts against the life of Jos? Santos Rodr?guez, Sorto Recino?s life partner. It is worrisome that the Attorney General's office, under the direction of Astor Escalante, attributed these cases a priori to common crime, ignoring presented evidence that indicates the political nature of these events. The Attorney General, now under the direction of Lic. Romeo Barahona, has the opportunity to end this impunity. After the assassination of Marcelo Rivera in June, over 100 U.S. and Canadian social organizations sent a letter to the Attorney General's office expressing their deep concern over the human rights violations. U.S. Congressional Representative James McGovern also expressed the same concern in meetings with the Attorney General and with representatives of President Mauricio Funes' administration during his recent visit to El Salvador. I am also sending a copy of this letter to the Ombudsman in Defense of Human Rights Oscar Luna, who has shown a strong commitment to protecting the security and the human rights of social leaders in Cabanas in addition to expressing in his most recent press release that their exists sufficient evidence to demonstrate that these cases were not the product of common crime. If these events remain in impunity, it will generate an environment of fear and uncertainty for the other community leaders, undoing the many advances achieved in the process of democratizing the country. Furthermore, it will send a message to the intellectual authors that they can continue their wave of violence and murders without facing punishment. I thank you in advance for your efforts to facilitate the investigations and I expect justice is quickly brought to these cases and that protection is provided for the victims and reparations for the families of those murdered. [Your name and place of residence] ? 2009 CISPES - The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador CISPES National Office | ph. 202-521-2510 | 1525 Newton St. NW, Wash. DC 20010| cispes at cispes.org =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 30 16:11:24 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:11:24 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] UN expert repeats call for threat of sanctions against Israel over Gaza blockade Message-ID: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33363&Cr=palestin&Cr1 UN News Service UN expert repeats call for threat of sanctions against Israel over Gaza blockade 29 December 2009 The United Nations independent expert on Palestinian rights has again called for a threat of economic sanctions against Israel to force it to lift its blockade of Gaza, which is preventing the return to a normal life for 1.5 million residents after the devastating Israeli offensive a year ago. "Obviously Israel does not respond to language of diplomacy, which has encouraged the lifting of the blockade and so what I am suggesting is that it has to be reinforced by a threat of adverse economic consequences for Israel," Richard Falk, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, told UN Radio. "That probably is something that is politically unlikely to happen, but unless it happens, it really does suggest that the United States and the Quartet and the EU [European Union] don't take these calls for lifting the blockade very seriously and are unaffected by Israel's continuing defiance of those calls," he said, referring to the diplomatic Quartet of the UN, EU, Russia and US, which have been calling for a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), the main UN body tending to the needs of some 4 million Palestinian refugees, said today Gaza had been "bombed back, not to the Stone Age, but to the mud age," because UNRWA was reduced to building houses out of mud after the 22-day offensive Israel said it launched to end rocket attacks against it. "The Israeli blockade has meant that almost no reconstruction materials have been allowed to move into Gaza even though 60,000 homes were either damaged or completely destroyed. So we in UNRWA have been saying 'let's lift this senseless blockage,'" UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness told UN Radio. "We are the United Nations and we always hope that diplomacy will prevail, and it will prevail above the rationale of warfare. But if you look at what is going on in Gaza, and if you look at the continued blockade and the fact that that blockade is radicalizing a population there, then one has to have one's doubts." In a statement last week, Mr. Falk stressed that the "unlawful blockade" was in its third year, with insufficient food and medicine reaching Gazans, producing further deterioration of the mental and physical health of the entire civilian population. Building materials necessary to repair the damage could not enter Gaza, and he blamed the blockade for continued breakdowns of the electricity and sanitation systems due to the Israeli refusal to let spare parts needed for repair get through the crossings. Mr. Falk also deplored the wall being built on the borders between Gaza and Egypt. "I'm very distressed by that, because it is both an expression of complicity on the part of the government of Egypt and the United States, which apparently is assisting through its corps of engineers with the construction of this underground steel impenetrable wall that's designed to interfere with the tunnels that have been bringing some food and material relief to the Gaza population," he told UN Radio. "And of course, the underground tunnel complex itself is an expression of the desperation created in Gaza as a result of this blockade that's going on now for two and a half years, something that no people since the end of World War II have experienced in such a severe and continuing form." As a Special Rapporteur, Mr. Falk serves in an independent and unpaid capacity and reports to the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council. In a new policy brief, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), entrusted with promoting the integration of developing countries into the world economy, reported that more than 80 per cent of Gaza's population are now impoverished; 43 per cent unemployed; and 75 per cent lack food security. "In view of the eroded productive base, poverty is likely to widen and deepen unless reconstruction begins in earnest and without further delay," it warned. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 30 16:56:38 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:56:38 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Terrorism Still Less Deadly in US Than Lack of Health Insurance, Salmonella Message-ID: <95550F7BCA5A4359A40469D123CF0DD1@agingCHS072729> http://firedoglake.com/2009/12/29/terrorism-still-less-deadly-in-us-than-lack-of-health-insurance-salmonella/ Firedoglake December 29, 2009 Terrorism Still Less Deadly in US Than Lack of Health Insurance, Salmonella By: Blue Texan Since we still seem to be having a national freakout over some loser who got on a plane with a bomb in his underwear, which was apparently worthy of a presidential address, it might be a good idea to put the actual danger posed by terrorist attacks in some numerical perspective. If you count the Ft. Hood shooting as a terrorist attack, which even the likes of [blogger] Pantload doesn't, 16 people have died in the United States as result of terrorism in 2009. The other three deaths include the Little Rock military recruiting office shooting (1), the Holocaust Museum shooting (1), and Dr. George Tiller's assassination (1), the last two coming at the hands of right-wing extremists. On the other hand, 45,000 Americans died because they didn't have health insurance and 600 died from salmonella poisoning. Clearly, providing health care to all Americans is beyond our capabilities, so when do we launch the $700 billion-a-year War on Salmonella? Related posts:... (listed at original site) =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 30 18:35:30 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:35:30 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Disturbing questions in thwarted US plane bombing Message-ID: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/plne-d28.shtml Disturbing questions in thwarted US plane bombing By Barry Grey 28 December 2009 The nearly catastrophic attempt to blow up a US passenger jet during its final approach to Detroit Metro Airport on Christmas Day raises a number of serious questions. While many details of the attempted terror attack and the biography of the would-be suicide bomber remain sketchy, widely-reported facts that have been corroborated by US officials make clear that the near-destruction of the airliner was the result of a colossal and as yet unexplained security failure. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, was overpowered by other passengers and crew members when he attempted to set off an explosive device he had taped to his person and smuggled onto Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam. In November, or six months ago (press accounts differ), Abdulmutallab's father, a retired banker and former Nigerian government minister, told US Embassy officials in the Nigerian capital that he was concerned about his son's extreme religious views and activities. The Washington Post on Sunday quoted a "senior administration official" as saying the father had warned of his son's "radicalization and associations." Some press reports say the father also spoke with US intelligence officials and Nigerian security agencies. The family had evidently lost contact with Abdulmutallab, who six months ago said he was breaking off relations. Family members reportedly said they believed he had gone to Yemen, the birthplace of his mother. US officials say that as a result of the father's warning, Abdulmutallab was placed on a counter terrorism database in November, but they nevertheless had no actionable grounds for barring him from flying or subjecting him to any special pre-boarding search or questioning. The media is dutifully and uncritically parroting these explanations, but they strain credulity. Since 9/11, there have been innumerable reports of people being barred from flying by government security officials for no apparent reason. One of these was the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who in 2004 was placed on the Homeland Security Department's "no-fly" list and prevented from boarding a shuttle from Washington DC to Boston. Yet despite being identified as a potential terrorist threat by his own father, a highly placed former Nigerian official, Abdulmutallab was allowed to retain his multi-entry US visa, board a plane to the US, and smuggle explosives on board. The incident is all the more disturbing and suspicious, coming just weeks after President Obama announced a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and singled out Yemen and Somalia as alleged Al Qaeda bases where US military attack could be justified. This episode has the appearance of another in a series of ostensible security lapses which have more the character of deliberately turning a blind eye than mere incompetence. The case of Abdulmutallab seems to follow a well-established pattern dating back to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. A number of the hijack-bombers were known to US intelligence and security officials as Al Qaeda operatives, and were nevertheless allowed to enter the country, train as pilots, and eventually board the doomed airliners on 9/11. Warnings of impending terror attacks involving the hijacking of airplanes went unheeded. None of this has ever been explained. No one has been held accountable. Instead, numerous government investigations were carried out, culminating in the 9/11 Commission report, which whitewashed government agencies and officials. Notwithstanding Obama's pledge to investigate last week's attempted terror attack, the 9/11 pattern will likely be repeated. The latest episode occurs within days of US air attacks against insurgents in Yemen, which US officials and the media are increasingly portraying as a center of Al Qaeda activity nearly on a par with the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. The linking of Abdulmutallab to Yemen is an ominous sign that these attacks will increase, and the country may well become a new front in the expanding drive by the US to dominate oil-rich, strategic regions in the Middle East and Central Asia. This danger was underscored by statements from politicians and the media over the weekend. Jane Harman, the Democratic congresswoman from California who heads the House Homeland Security subcommittee, issued a statement declaring, "The facts are still emerging, but there are strong suggestions of a Yemen-Al Qaeda connection and an intent to blow up the plane over US airspace." The New York Times wrote in its news account Sunday, "If corroborated, Mr. Abdulmutallab's travel to Yemen for terrorist instruction and explosives underscores the emergence of that country as a major hub for Al Qaeda, perhaps beginning to rival the terror network's base in Pakistan." The attempted plane bombing is also being used for domestic propaganda purposes. Under conditions of popular opposition to the expanding war in Afghanistan, government officials and the media are already seeking to use it to cow and frighten the population so as to justify both foreign wars and increased attacks on democratic rights at home. Once again, Al Qaeda is being summoned up to make the American people more willing to accept restrictions on their personal freedoms. That a Nigerian national was involved in last week's attempted plane bombing underscores the global consequences of Washington's militarist policies. While nothing can justify terrorist attacks against civilians, Washington's neo-colonial wars are responsible for creating the conditions for new recruits for terrorist operations. What has been reported about Adbulmutallab's biography is evidence of this fact. The young student, from a privileged and wealthy family, seems to have been radicalized in tandem with the escalation of US military violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He left his family home in London's West End, broke off relations and disappeared during the period when it had become clear that the Obama administration was continuing and intensifying the warmongering policies of Bush. The author also recommends: Obama ordered US air strikes on Yemen [21 December 2009] =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 30 19:31:54 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:31:54 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Fidel_Castro_Ruz=3A_Humanity=27s_Right?= =?iso-8859-1?q?_to_Life?= Message-ID: <2656E01B31F542FDB774C415540BF095@agingCHS072729> http://www.juventudrebelde.co.cu/cuba/2009-12-28/humanity-s-right-to-life/ Juventudrebelde.co.cu 2009-12-28 | 17:25:02 EST The Newspaper of Cuban Youth Humanity's Right to Life The leader of the Cuban Revolution writes about the adverse effects of climate change and the embarrassing series of events that resulted in the failure of the Copenhagen Summit Climate change is already causing enormous damage and hundreds of millions of poor people are enduring the consequences. The most advanced research centers have claimed that there is little time to avoid an irreversible catastrophe. James Hansen, from the NASA Goddard Institute, has said that a proportion of 350 parts of carbon dioxide by million is still tolerable; however, the figure today is 390 and growing at a pace of 2 parts by million every year exceeding the levels of 600 thousand years ago. Each one of the past two decades has been the warmest since the first records were taken while carbon dioxide increased 80 parts by million in the past 150 years. The meltdown of ice in the Artic Sea and of the huge two-kilometer thick icecap covering Greenland; of the South American glaciers feeding its main fresh water sources and the enormous volume covering the Antarctic; of the remaining icecap on the Kilimanjaro, the ice on the Himalayan and the large frozen area of Siberia are visible. Outstanding scientists fear abrupt quantitative changes in these natural phenomena that bring about the change. Humanity entertained high hopes in the Copenhagen Summit after the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997 entered into force in 2005. The resounding failure of the Summit gave rise to shameful episodes that call for due clarification. The United States, with less than 5% of the world population releases 25% of the carbon dioxide. The new US President had promised to cooperate with the international effort to tackle a new problem that afflicts that country as much as the rest of the world. In the meetings leading to the Summit, it became clear that the leaders of that nation and of the wealthiest countries were maneuvering to place the burden of sacrifices on the emergent and poor countries. A great number of leaders and thousands of representatives of social movements and scientific institutions, determined to fight for the preservation of humanity from the greatest risk in history, converged in Copenhagen on the invitation of the organizers of the Summit. I'd rather avoid reference to details of the brutality of the Danish police force against thousands of protesters and invitees from social and scientific movements who traveled to the Danish capital. I'll focus on the political features of the Summit. Actually, chaos prevailed in Copenhagen where incredible things happened. The social movements and scientific institutions were not allowed to attend the debates. There were heads of State and Government who could not even express their views on crucial issues. Obama and the leaders of the wealthiest nations took over the conference, with the complicity of the Danish government. The United Nations agencies were pushed to the background. Barack Obama, the last to arrive on the day of the Summit for a 12-hours stay, met with two groups of invitees carefully chosen by him and his staff, and in the company of one of them met at the plenary hall with the rest of the high-level delegations. He made his remarks and left right away trough the back door. Except for the small group chosen by him, the other representatives of countries were prevented from taking the floor during that plenary session. The presidents of Bolivia and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela were allowed to speak because the Chairman of the Summit had no choice but to give them the floor in light of the strong pressures of those present. In an adjacent room, Obama brought together the leaders of the wealthiest nations, some of the most important emerging States and two very poor countries. He then introduced a document, negotiated with two or three of the most important countries, ignored the UN General Assembly, gave a press conference and left like Julius Caesar after one of his victorious wars in Asia Minor that led him to say: "I came, I saw, I conquered." Even Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had said on October 19: "If we do not reach a deal over the next few months, let us be in no doubt, since once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement in some future period can undo that choice. By then it will be irretrievably too late..." Brown concluded his speech with these dramatic words: "We cannot afford to fail. If we fail now we will pay a heavy price. If we act now, if we act together, if we act with vision and resolve, success at Copenhagen is still within our reach, but, if we falter, the Earth will itself be at risk and, for the planet, there is no Plan B." But later he arrogantly said that the United Nations could not be taken hostage by a group of countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Tuvalu. At the same time, he accused China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other emerging countries of being lured by the United States into signing a document that throws the Kyoto Protocol in the wastebasket without a binding agreement involving the United States and its wealthy allies. I find it necessary to recall that the United Nations Organization was born hardly six decades ago, after the last World War, when there were no more than fifty independent countries. Today, after the hateful colonial system ceased to exist thanks to the resolute struggle of the peoples, it has a membership of over 190 independent nations. For many years, even the People's Republic of China was denied admission to the UN while a puppet regime was its representative in that institution and in the privileged Security Council. The tenacious support of the growing number of Third World nations would prove indispensable to China's international recognition and become an extremely significant element for the acceptance of that country's rights at the UN by the United States and its NATO allies. It was the Soviet Union that made the greatest contribution to the heroic fight against fascism. More than 25 million of its people perished while the country was terribly devastated. It was from that struggle that it emerged as a superpower with the capacity to partly balance the absolute domination of the US imperial system and the former colonial powers to plunder the Third World countries unrestrictedly. Following the demise of the USSR, the United States extended its political and military power to the East, --up to Russia's heart-- and enhanced its influence on the rest of Europe. Therefore, what happened in Copenhagen came as no surprise. I want to insist on how unfair and outrageous were the remarks of the Prime Minister of the UK and the Yankee attempt to impose as the Summit Accord a document that was at no time discussed with the attending countries. During his press conference of December 21, Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez made a statement that cannot be disproved. I will quote from some of its paragraphs: "I would like to emphasize that no agreement of the Conference of the Parties was reached in Copenhagen, that no decision was made as to binding or nonbinding commitments or pertaining to International Law; that simply did not happen. There was no agreement in Copenhagen." "The Summit was a failure and a deception for the world [...] the lack of political will was left in the open..." "...it was a step backward in the actions of the international community to prevent or mitigate the effects of climate change..." "...the average world temperature could rise by 5 degrees..." Right then our Foreign Minister adds other interesting data on the likely consequences of climate change according to the latest scientific research. "...from the Kyoto Protocol until today the developed countries' emissions rose by 12.8%... and 55% of that volume corresponds to the United States." "The average annual oil consumption is 25 barrels for an American, 11 barrels for a European, less than 2 barrels for a Chinese and less than 1 barrel for a Latin American or Caribbean citizen." "Thirty countries, including those of the European Union, are consuming 80% of the fuel produced." The fact is that the developed countries signatories of the Kyoto Protocol increased their emissions dramatically. Now, they want to replace the adopted bases of the emissions from 1990 with those of 2005. This means that the United States, which is the main source of emissions, would be reducing its emissions of 25 years ago in only 3%. It is a shameful mockery of the world public opinion. The Cuban foreign minister, speaking on behalf of a group of ALBA member countries, defended China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other important emerging-economies states. He stressed the concept adopted in Kyoto that "common but differentiated responsibilities mean that the responsibility of the historical accumulators and the developed countries, who are the culprits of this catastrophe, differs from that of the small island states and the South countries, above all the least developed..." "Responsibility means financing; responsibility means technology transfer on adequate terms. But, at this point, Obama resorts to a game of words and instead of talking of common but differentiated responsibilities, he speaks of 'common but differentiated responses.'" "...he then leaves the plenary hall without taking the trouble of listening to anybody; he had neither listened to anybody before taking the floor." In a subsequent press conference, before departing from the Danish capital, Obama had said: "There has been a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen. For the first time in history, the largest economies have come to jointly accept responsibilities." In his clear and irrefutable presentation, our Foreign Minister said: "What does it mean that 'the largest economies have come to jointly accept responsibilities'? It means that they are placing a large part of the burden of financing the relief and adaptation of countries, mostly the South countries, to climate change on China, Brazil, India and South Africa. Because it must be said that in Copenhagen we witnessed an assault, a holdup against China, Brazil, India and South Africa, and against every other euphemistically called developing country." These were the resounding and undeniable words used by our Foreign Minister to describe what happened in Copenhagen. I must add that, when at 10:00 a.m. on December 19 our Vicepresident Esteban Lazo and the Cuban Foreign Minister had already left, a belated attempt was made to resurrect the Copenhagen cadaver as a Summit Accord. At that moment, practically every head of State had left and there was hardly any minister around. Again, the denunciation by the remaining members of the delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and other countries could defeat the maneuver. That was the end of the inglorious Summit. Another fact that should not be overlooked is that at the most critical moment of that day, in the wee small hours, the Cuban Foreign Minister, together with the delegations waging the honorable battle, offered UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon their cooperation in the ever harder struggle being fought as well as in future efforts necessary to preserve the life of our species. The environmental group Wild World Fund has warned that if emissions are not drastically reduced climate change will go unchecked in the next 5 to 10 years. But there is no need to prove the substance of what is said here that Obama did. The US President stated on Wednesday, December 23, that people are justified in being disappointed about the outcome of the Summit on Climate Change. In an interview with the CBS television network, the President said that "instead of a total collapse if nothing had been done, which would have been a huge step backward; at least we could remain more or less where we were..." According to the press dispatch, Obama is the target of most criticism from the countries that nearly unanimously feel that the result of the Summit was disastrous. Now, the UN is in a quandary since many countries would find it humiliating to ask others to adhere to the arrogant and antidemocratic accord. To carry on with the battle and to claim in every meeting, particularly in those of Bonn and Mexico, humanity's right to life, with the morale and the strength that truth provides, is in my opinion the only way to proceed. Fidel Castro Ruz December 26, 2009 8:15 p.m. Cuban Newspapers Online Prensa Latina News Agency |Cuban News Agency |Adelante (Camaguey Province) |Ahora (Holguin, Cuba) |Anti-Terroristas |Cubarte (trimesterly) |Cubasi (weekly magazine) |Cuba Socialista |Escambray (Sancti Spiritus Province) |Families for Justice |Granma (daily) |Granma Internacional (weekly) |Periodico 26 (Las Tunas Cuba) |Radio Habana Cuba |Sierra Maestra (Santiago de Cuba) |Trabajadores =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 30 19:42:19 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:42:19 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] A Library to Last Forever Message-ID: <32EE9F30FBFC4AAAA1BD6646772CD8AA@agingCHS072729> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/opinion/09brin.html OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR A Library to Last Forever By SERGEY BRIN Published: October 8, 2009 "THE fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and utility produced popular impressions which still exist." This quotation would hardly surprise anyone who follows electric vehicles. But it may be surprising to hear that in the year when it was written thousands of electric cars were produced and that year was nearly a century ago. This appeared in a 1916 issue of the journal Electrical World, which I found in Google Books, our searchable repository of millions of books. It may seem strange to look back a hundred years on a topic that is so contemporary, yet I often find that the past has valuable lessons for the future. In this case, I was lucky - electric vehicles were studied and written about extensively early in the 20th century, and there are many books on the subject from which to choose. Because books published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able to view them easily. But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down. Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon - a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available. Because books are such an important part of the world's collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting. The next year we were sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the project. While we have had disagreements, we have a common goal - to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a result, we were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books. There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. I would like to take this opportunity to dispel some myths about the agreement and to share why I am proud of this undertaking. This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers. Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders, giving them an incentive to step forward. Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks. I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort. But despite a number of important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the requisite resources. At least one such service will have to exist if there are ever to be one hundred. If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions. While new projects will not immediately have the same rights to orphan works, the agreement will be a beacon of compromise in case of a similar lawsuit, and it will serve as a precedent for orphan works legislation, which Google has always supported and will continue to support. Last, there have been objections to specific aspects of the Google Books product and the future service as planned under the settlement, including questions about the quality of bibliographic information, our choice of classification system and the details of our privacy policy. These are all valid questions, and being a company that obsesses over the quality of our products, we are working hard to address them - improving bibliographic information and categorization, and further detailing our privacy policy. And if we don't get our product right, then others will. But one thing that is sure to halt any such progress is to have no settlement at all. In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will "impress the necessity of something being done" to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection. I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world's foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it's an important step. Let's not miss this opportunity. Sergey Brin is the co-founder and technology president of Google. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 30 21:57:15 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:57:15 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Honduras] Death squads active after Obama accepts coup regime Message-ID: <0F065241C4EB44B389AB455B7A44C0EB@agingCHS072729> http://www.truthout.org/1230093 Uncle Sam's Signature by: Bruno Odent | L'Humanit? (France) 23 December 2009 Since the November 29 electoral farce, Honduras's putschist government has been pursuing its work of normalization. No question of behaving like vulgar Pinochets from another era in Chile. The effect on international public opinion would be unacceptable. Above all, the context has become more delicate in a continent living through a changed balance of power. Hence, this desire to be discreet, to make the situation that emerged from the June "golpe" against President Zelaya as mundane as possible. Yet, what comes naturally is returning at a gallop to bring citizens who resist to heel. The death squads are circulating once more. A week does not go by without atrociously mutilated corpses of militants from the various democratic organizations gathered together in the Resistance Front against the Coup d'?tat (FRCG) being found. The mutilations prove that they were tortured before being killed. President of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights Andres Pavon talks about a planned "wave of terror" that has already taken several dozen victims, and he accuses the government of wanting to tear apart the resistance. They murder; they torture; they trample democracy, and one strains to hear the least official voice be raised in France, in Europe, against these exactions. Quiet, we're murdering. Why so much complacency for the putschists? Why so much media disinterest, and, in consequence, so much solicitude to go along with the process of normalization of the "golpe" against President Zelaya, who is still taking refuge in the Tegucigalpa Brazilian embassy? Would there be some more "politically correct" coup d'?tat organizers, some more "politically correct" dictators than others? The answer to these questions naturally hinges on the issue that Manuel Zelaya's eviction represents. It clearly extends well beyond the borders of little Honduras. The president elected on a center-right ticket in November 2005 had not at that point aroused the least concern in Washington or in Western chancelleries. Except that, in the meantime, confronted with the poverty and the deterioration in the standard of living of the majority of his fellow citizens, he decided to get closer to the ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the peoples of Latin America) countries. In December 2008, he decreed an increase in the minimum wage to 202 euros from 126 [per month]. To the great relief of the banana plantations' agricultural workers. To the great dismay of the US-based transnational, Chiquita, a descendant of the famous United Fruit - contracting authority for every putsch that has peppered the country's modern history. Zelaya had also made an agreement with Venezuelan Hugo Chavez's Petrocaribe organization in order to reduce energy costs, thus squeezing the big American companies. Finally, in the summum of "political adventurism," he came to an agreement with Cuba to import cheap generic medicines that the poorest populations of his country were so cruelly lacking. While other countries in the region had turned to the left, the fear of a more pronounced swing by Honduras into the Latin American progressive "camp" became insistent. And then along came Zelaya, contemplating the convocation of a Constitutional Assembly to strengthen democracy and reinforce citizens' powers? For the Empire, that was the last straw ... Leading figures from the US State Department and ex-President Bush's entourage came to give support to the putschist Micheletti, whom they are still "advising" today. Obama, after a moment of hesitation, has followed. He even upped the ante by pushing for the installation of seven United States bases in Colombia, de facto ratifying the return to Cold War logic against progressive Latin America. Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher. ============= In Honduras, the Putschists Adorn Themselves With Legitimacy by: Cathy Ce?be, : L'Humanit? 24 December 2009 Porfirio Lobo was officially declared "president elect" after the November 29 election, the result of which was not recognized by a large part of the international community. Forty-two murders, 120 disappearances, 4,000 arbitrary detentions ... Human rights have savagely deteriorated since the June 28 putsch. Well-known analyst of Honduran political life and sociologist at the Francisco-Morazan Teaching University of Honduras Julio Navarro believes that de facto the regime has no choice but to hold talks with the resistance. Cathy Ce?be of L'Humanit?: Do you share the much-publicized idea that the November 29 elections have ended the Honduran political crisis? Julio Navarro: The authors of the coup d'?tat believed that elections would settle the crisis because the resistance movement was massive. Otherwise, who can believe that they would have executed this forcible coup to stay in power six months only? But the government of Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, elected by 33 percent of the population, has a legitimacy problem. That ought to favor dialogue with the forces the resistance represents. For now, "Pepe" Lobo's actions are moving away from that prospect ... Julio Navarro: Porfirio Lobo is not acting that way because he believes that, in time, the international community will digest the situation. I believe he's mistaken. He finds himself in a position all the more complicated in that his Party, the National Party, certainly has an absolute majority in the Congress, but the latter is controlled by close to 100 deputies (out of 128) that constitute the putschist parliamentary bloc. What are the sticking points for Honduran society? Julio Navarro: The rupture of the Constitutional order on June 28 and the Constitutional Assembly. If one looks at this country's antecedents, in 1924, in 1956, in 1965 and in 1982, four coups d'?tat led to a Constitutional Assembly. But this time will perhaps be the exception. The bloc constituted by the neoliberals, the nationalists, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats is opposed to that process. On the other hand, attention must be paid to other sectors of society. The military, for example, is in favor of a Constitutional Assembly in order to renegotiate its position. Management also needs it in order to redefine the division of wealth and the role of the State. The Honduran church, linked to Opus Dei, is also involved because it wants to keep control over family planning. The coup d'?tat highlights antagonistic conceptions of society. And with respect to social inequalities? Julio Navarro: They have not thrown the thousands of people demanding a better division of economic wealth into the street. Hence, the importance of the resistance which promotes the idea of a recasting of the state to transform the country and its economy structurally. Has Honduras been the laboratory for a new form of destabilization? Julio Navarro: In spite of the decisions by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the UN, the military never felt it was in danger because it has the support of the Pentagon. One may talk about a laboratory in the sense that the popular reaction was tested. The best place to do that was Honduras since that country sets off from the cultural given that public opinion has no tradition of vigilance. Now, if the Honduran people have given the lie to that prejudice, imagine elsewhere ... I do not, however, believe in a domino effect, especially in South America where governments have taken precautions by getting rid of the old generations of military. On the other hand, one must remain attentive to this relationship between the military and economic sectors. The day when they reconnect as in Honduras, where the private sector financed the coup d'?tat, then there will be danger. Whatever happens, the events in Honduras must first serve as a lesson to the region's presidents. They question the existence of the OAS given that its intentions have no effect. Finally, by its action, the United States leaves behind a damaged and distressing image. Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 31 16:25:52 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:25:52 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Review] "Once More Into the Breach" Message-ID: <08E02FFA50444E47AC6A1C42F9A7B91C@agingCHS072729> By nearly all accounts, the Middle East policies of President George W. Bush were disastrous. So glaring were the errors of judgment, and so steep the costs to American taxpayers and military families, that a breach opened in the wall of misinformation and prejudice that normally stands between critical analysis of US involvement in the Middle East and the public. Several writers have ventured into the breach to argue that Bush's policies, while extreme, were essentially continuations of decades-old approaches pursued by many presidents of both parties. Ussama Makdisi reviews two such titles, by the historian Rashid Khalidi and the journalist Patrick Tyler, in his essay, "Once More Into the Breach," now available in Middle East Report Online: http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/makdisi_interv.html =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 31 19:55:08 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:55:08 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Climate crisis will be the challenge of new decade Message-ID: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1231/1224261476380.html Irish Times December 31, 2009 Climate crisis will be the challenge of new decade by Ois?n Coghlan What will the decade ahead hold for the environment? Mankind has yet to meet the stark challenges posed by global warming, which will not go away THIS IS not how it was supposed to end. Internationally, this decade was supposed to give us a comprehensive global treaty to contain climate change. In Ireland, some of us allowed ourselves hope that a soft-landing for the Celtic Tiger would herald a "post-materialist" era where environmental and social considerations were given as much weight as economic ones in policymaking. Instead, the Copenhagen climate talks ended in confusion and recrimination and in Ireland the economic crash has driven us back to very understandable materialist concerns about budget cuts and job losses. The coming decade will see whether humanity is capable of overcoming a complex web of environmental problems that pose an existential threat to civilisation. Climate, the most urgent and most mainstream of these problems, epitomises the challenges. Politicians and scientists agree we must limit global warming to less than two degrees Celsius to prevent runaway climate change. Current pollution trends put us on a path to six degrees of warming this century, when four degrees or more would trigger the breakdown of civilisation as we know it. To be closer to two degrees than four we need to make global emissions start to decline before 2020. That is the challenge of the decade. When we are writing our reviews of the 2010s there will be no more telling benchmark of human progress. Are global greenhouse gas emissions lower in 2019 than they are now? Put another way, will we choose survival? To answer this most basic question successfully humankind will have to answer two subsidiary questions, one evolutionary, one political. As a species are we evolved to tackle a threat like climate change? It doesn't seem to trigger our fight-or-flight reflex in a meaningful way. For most of us it seems remote and abstract. The gases that cause it are invisible. And the ultimate source of the threat is not external - it is us, our current lifestyles, our historical choices and our future aspirations. However unwittingly, we are the root of the problem, and therefore the solution. If an army were massing on our borders, if an asteroid were hurtling towards Earth, no one would question the need to act. But as we set fire to the only home humanity has ever known, we struggle to perceive the threat and have so far failed to act decisively. The second question is a practical, political one. Can an international system of 192 nation states solve a global problem? The lesson of Copenhagen is no, at least not if we cling to our traditional approach to interstate negotiating, where short-term national advantage trumps long-term public interest. It is the tragedy of the commons writ large. For the vested interests in each state it makes sense for their country to keep polluting as much as possible and national negotiators act on that basis. Given the limited capacity of our common atmosphere to absorb that pollution, however, this approach will prove disastrous for humanity as a whole. As the decade progresses there are three signs that would indicate we are moving beyond this "mutual assured destruction" approach to climate change. We need to see all three. First, are any of the players acting unilaterally to cut their emissions, against their perceived short-term interests? The obvious candidate is the European Union, itself a unique political formation where national sovereignty is pooled and co-operation has replaced competition in crucial areas. The EU has made a unilateral commitment to action on climate change, but it is a weak one. When you account for the caveats and the loopholes it adds up to less than half our fair share. So, will we see EU climate policy start to reflect the union's pioneering nature? Will the EU move to cut its emissions by 40 per cent by 2020, in line with the science? The union could act on the courage of its convictions. Those advocating the abolition of slavery did not say they would only free half their slaves until their competitors freed theirs. The EU could also act based on its long-term economic interest. A low-carbon economy will build energy security, resilience and sustainable jobs for the rest of the century. China is acting to limit its future emissions, despite its determination not to be legally bound to do so. And the US is moving too, faster at state and company level than federal level. If the early years of this decade see these players significantly limit their emissions it will be both a sign of hope and an international confidence-building measure. Second, will the emerging transnational forces gain the strength and focus to push nation states towards a global deal? The run-in to Copenhagen saw supranational civil society coalition-building reach new heights, with the likes of 350.org, Avaaz and the tcktcktck campaign mobilising hundreds of thousands of people across the world. Friends of the Earth alone had 500 activists in Copenhagen, representing our two million supporters across 77 countries. On the business side, lobbyists for polluting interests still hold the upper hand - but this time more than 500 transnational corporations signed a Copenhagen communique most of which could just as easily have been written by non-governmental organisation campaigners. Third, will our governments manage to agree a new treaty that provides a global framework for action and "mutual assured survival" rather than destruction? This is the key test. Can we lift our eyes to the horizon long enough to put aside short-term national advantage? This past decade there has been much talk of the G8, the G20 and now the G2, China and the US. But the new treaty must institutionalise the G1: humanity, and our common cause to protect the only ecosystem that supports our existence. The coming decade will require you to decide where you stand, and soon. [Ois?n Coghlan is director of Friends of the Earth.] =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 31 22:34:16 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:34:16 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?One_Day_We=27ll_All_Be_Terrorists?= Message-ID: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_day_well_all_be_terrorists_20091228/ Dec 28, 2009 One Day We'll All Be Terrorists By Chris Hedges Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guant?namo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaida. As his case prepares for trial, his plight illustrates that the gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process. Hashmi would be a better person to tell you this, but he is not allowed to speak. This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements-who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism-have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org or www.freefahad.com. On Martin Luther King Day, this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can. The case against Hashmi, like most of the terrorist cases launched by the Bush administration, is appallingly weak and built on flimsy circumstantial evidence. This may be the reason the state has set up parallel legal and penal codes to railroad those it charges with links to terrorism. If it were a matter of evidence, activists like Hashmi, who is accused of facilitating the delivery of socks to al-Qaida, would probably never be brought to trial. Hashmi, who if convicted could face up to 70 years in prison, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 2? years. Special administrative measures, known as SAMs, have been imposed by the attorney general to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail. He also is denied access to the news and other reading material. Hashmi is not allowed to attend group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown. He must shower and go to the bathroom on camera. He can write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation in a cage. His "proclivity for violence" is cited as the reason for these measures although he has never been charged or convicted with committing an act of violence. "My brother was an activist," Hashmi's brother, Faisal, told me by phone from his home in Queens. "He spoke out on Muslim issues, especially those dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His arrest and torture have nothing to do with providing ponchos and socks to al-Qaida, as has been charged, but the manipulation of the law to suppress activists and scare the Muslim American community. My brother is an example. His treatment is meant to show Muslims what will happen to them if they speak about the plight of Muslims. We have lost every single motion to preserve my brother's humanity and remove the special administrative measures. These measures are designed solely to break the psyche of prisoners and terrorize the Muslim community. These measures exemplify the malice towards Muslims at home and the malice towards the millions of Muslims who are considered as non-humans in Iraq and Afghanistan." The extreme sensory deprivation used on Hashmi is a form of psychological torture, far more effective in breaking and disorienting detainees. It is torture as science. In Germany, the Gestapo broke bones while its successor, the communist East German Stasi, broke souls. We are like the Stasi. We have refined the art of psychological disintegration and drag bewildered suspects into secretive courts when they no longer have the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves. "Hashmi's right to a fair trial has been abridged," said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "Much of the evidence in the case has been classified under CIPA, and thus Hashmi has not been allowed to review it. The prosecution only recently turned over a significant portion of evidence to the defense. Hashmi may not communicate with the news media, either directly or through his attorneys. The conditions of his detention have impacted his mental state and ability to participate in his own defense. "The prosecution's case against Hashmi, an outspoken activist within the Muslim community, abridges his First Amendment rights and threatens the First Amendment rights of others," Ratner added. "While Hashmi's political and religious beliefs, speech and associations are constitutionally protected, the government has been given wide latitude by the court to use them as evidence of his frame of mind and, by extension, intent. The material support charges against him depend on criminalization of association. This could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of others, particularly in activist and Muslim communities." Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations can now become a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious. The first of those targeted have been observant Muslims, but they will not be the last. "Most of the evidence is classified," Jeanne Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College who taught Hashmi, told me, "but Hashmi is not allowed to see it. He is an American citizen. But in America you can now go to trial and all the evidence collected against you cannot be reviewed. You can spend 2? years in solitary confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guant?namo and Abu Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United States things will be fair. But what allowed Guant?namo to happen was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not only happening to Hashmi." Hashmi was, like so many of those arrested during the Bush years, briefly a poster child in the "war on terror." He was apprehended in Britain on June 6, 2006, on a U.S. warrant. His arrest was the top story on the CBS and NBC nightly news programs, which used graphics that read "Terror Trail" and "Web of Terror." He was held for 11 months at Belmarsh Prison in London and then became the first U.S. citizen to be extradited by Britain. The year before his arrest, Hashmi, a graduate of Brooklyn College, had completed his master's degree in international relations at London Metropolitan University. His case has no more substance than the one against the seven men arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower, a case where, even though there were five convictions after two mistrials, an FBI deputy director acknowledged that the plan was more "aspirational rather than operational." And it mirrors the older case of the Palestinian activist Sami Al-Arian, now under house arrest in Virginia, who has been hounded by the Justice Department although he should legally have been freed. Judge Leonie Brinkema, currently handling the Al-Arian case, in early March, questioned the U.S. attorney's actions in Al-Arian's plea agreement saying curtly: "I think there's something more important here, and that's the integrity of the Justice Department." The case against Hashmi revolves around the testimony of Junaid Babar, also an American citizen. Babar, in early 2004, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. In his luggage, the government alleges, Babar had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks, which Babar later delivered to a member of al-Qaida in south Waziristan, Pakistan. It was alleged that Hashmi allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call conspirators in other terror plots. "Hashmi grew up here, was well known here, was very outspoken, very charismatic and very political," said Theoharis. "This is really a message being sent to American Muslims about the cost of being politically active. It is not about delivering alleged socks and ponchos and rain gear. Do you think al-Qaida can't get socks and ponchos in Pakistan? The government is planning to introduce tapes of Hashmi's political talks while he was at Brooklyn College at the trial. Why are we willing to let this happen? Is it because they are Muslims, and we think it will not affect us? People who care about First Amendment rights should be terrified. This is one of the crucial civil rights issues of our time. We ignore this at our own peril." Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaida, also faces up to 70 years in prison. But he has agreed to serve as a government witness and has already testified for the government in terror trials in Britain and Canada. Babar will receive a reduced sentence for his services, and many speculate he will be set free after the Hashmi trial. Since there is very little evidence to link Hashmi to terrorist activity, the government will rely on Babar to prove intent. This intent will revolve around alleged conversations and statements Hashmi made in Babar's presence. Hashmi, who was a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun as a student at Brooklyn College, has made provocative statements, including calling America "the biggest terrorist in the world," but Al Muhajiroun is not defined by the government as a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is not illegal. And our complicity in acts of state terror is a historical fact. There will be more Hashmis, and the Justice Department, planning for future detentions, set up in 2006 a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Ill., where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists, among them Daniel McGowan, who was charged with two arsons at logging operations in Oregon. His sentence was given "terrorism enhancements" under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility "inhumane." All calls and mail-although communication customarily is off-limits to prison officials-are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. The highest-level terrorists are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colo., where prisoners have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation, replicating the conditions for most of those held at Guant?namo. If detainees are transferred from Guant?namo to the prison in Thomson, Ill., they will find little change. They will endure Guant?namo-like conditions in colder weather. Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves. The influx of non-Muslim American activists into these facilities is another ominous development. It presages the continued dismantling of the rule of law, the widening of a system where prisoners are psychologically broken by sensory deprivation, extreme isolation and secretive kangaroo courts where suspects are sentenced on rumors and innuendo and denied the right to view the evidence against them. Dissent is no longer the duty of the engaged citizen but is becoming an act of terrorism. Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009) and "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003). =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 31 22:42:09 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:42:09 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] U.S. Opens Third War Against Al Qaeda in Yemen Message-ID: <7C02470060EB49F59A7263F8F7525E07@agingCHS072729> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/world/middleeast/28yemen.html?_r=2&ref=global-home&pagewanted=all The New York Times December 28, 2009 U.S. Widens Terror War to Yemen, a Qaeda Bastion By ERIC SCHMITT and ROBERT F. WORTH WASHINGTON - In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen. A year ago, the Central Intelligence Agency sent several of its top field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country, according a former top agency official. At the same time, some of the most secretive Special Operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics, senior military officers said. The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over the next 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels. As American investigators sought to corroborate the claims of a 23-year-old Nigerian man that Qaeda leaders in Yemen had trained and equipped him to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day, the plot casts a spotlight on the Obama administration's complicated relationship with Yemen. The country has long been a refuge for jihadists, in part because Yemen's government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The Yemen port of Aden was the site of the audacious bombing of the American destroyer Cole in October 2000 by Qaeda militants, which killed 17 sailors. But Qaeda militants have made much more focused efforts to build a base in Yemen in recent years, drawing recruits from throughout the region and mounting attacks more frequently on foreign embassies and other targets. The White House is seeking to nurture enduring ties with the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and prod him to combat the local Qaeda affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, even as his impoverished country grapples with seemingly intractable internal turmoil. With fears also growing of a resurgent Islamist extremism in nearby Somalia and East Africa, administration officials and American lawmakers said Yemen could become Al Qaeda's next operational and training hub, rivaling the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the organization's top leaders operate. "Yemen now becomes one of the centers of that fight," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who visited the country in August. "We have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence," he said on "Fox News Sunday." American and Yemeni officials said that a pivotal point in the relationship was reached in late summer after separate secret visits to Yemen by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American regional commander, and John O. Brennan, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser. President Saleh agreed to expanded overt and covert assistance in response to growing pressure from the United States and Yemen's neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia, from which many Qaeda operatives had fled to Yemen, as well as a rising threat against the country's political inner circle, the officials said. "Yemen's security problems won't just stay in Yemen," said Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "They're regional problems and they affect Western interests." Al Qaeda's profile in Yemen rose sharply a year ago, when a former Guant?namo Bay detainee from Saudi Arabia, Said Ali al-Shihri, fled to Yemen to join Al Qaeda and appeared in a video posted online. Several other former Guant?namo detainees have also joined the group. Yemen's remote areas are notoriously lawless, but the country's chaos has worsened in the past two years, as the government struggles with an armed rebellion in the northwest and a rising secessionist movement in the south. Yemen is running out of oil, and the government's dwindling finances have affected its ability to strike at Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, there have been increasing Yemeni ties to plots against the United States. A Muslim man charged in the June 1 killing of a soldier at a recruiting center in a mall in Little Rock, Ark., had traveled to Yemen, prompting a review by the F.B.I. of other domestic extremists who had visited the country. A radical cleric in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, has been linked to numerous terrorism suspects, including Nidal Malik Hasan, the American Army major who faces murder charges in the shooting deaths of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November. In the latest issue of Sada al-Malahim, the Internet magazine of the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, the group's leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, urged his followers to use small bombs "in airports in the western crusade countries that participated in the war against Muslims; or on their planes, or in their residential complexes or their subways. Yemen escalated its campaign against Al Qaeda with major airstrikes on Dec. 17 and last Thursday that killed more than 60 militants. American officials have been coy about the role of the United States in the strikes, saying that they have provided intelligence and "firepower" for the efforts. Yemen's foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, said Sunday that Yemeni military cooperation with the United States and Saudi Arabia had increased in recent months as fresh intelligence confirmed Al Qaeda's greater assertiveness in the country. "There was intelligence that they were targeting the British Embassy and a number of government institutions as well as private schools," Mr. Qirbi said in a telephone interview. "The second reason is that they have become more vocal, trying to show that they can undertake terrorist activities in an open fashion. So the government had to respond to that." The recent airstrikes were planned for two or three months, Mr. Qirbi said, but could not take place until there was fresh intelligence about the location of the Qaeda operatives who were the targets. He called that intelligence - which included information provided by the United States - "the most important element" in the successful strike on the Qaeda members. Mr. Qirbi added that although the United States provided Yemen with military hardware, the airstrikes were carried out by the Yemeni military alone. Although the most important intelligence came from the United States and Saudi Arabia, other countries in the region have increased their financial assistance in recent months to help Yemen, said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "There was a fear inside and outside Yemen that Al Qaeda was taking new ground, establishing training centers, making some parts of Yemen no-go areas," Mr. Alani said. The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait in particular provided assistance, he said, because "they feel that sooner or later they will become targets too." In the past year, Al Qaeda has killed six intelligence officers in the provinces where it is based, part of an unmistakable campaign by the group to secure its sanctuary there, Mr. Alani said. The intelligence officers were trying to gather information on the group, and to disrupt its growing links with local tribes - a significant part of its strategy, Mr. Alani added. The airstrikes of the past two weeks have been successful but have come at a price, Yemeni officials said. "They have been hit hard, but they have not yet been disabled," said one high-ranking Yemeni official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic issues involved. "The problem is that the involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda. The cooperation is necessary - but there is no doubt that it has an effect for the common man. He sympathizes with Al Qaeda." As if to reaffirm that message, Al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate released a statement to Internet sites on Sunday that put strong emphasis on the American role in the recent raids, deriding the Yemeni government for claiming responsibility. Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 31 23:11:18 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:11:18 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Cause and effect in the "Terror War" Message-ID: <7659D34AE2964ACAB4395BC86D4BEDEF@agingCHS072729> http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/29/terrorism/index.html Salon.com Dec 29, 2009 Cause and effect in the "Terror War" What do we think is going to happen if we continuously invade, occupy and bomb Muslim countries and arm and enable others to do so? By Glenn Greenwald "In all their alleged allegedness, this Administration has an allergy to the concept of war, and thus to the tools of war, including strategy and war aims" -- Supreme Tough Guy Warrior Mark Steyn, National Review, yesterday. "The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.'s drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president's decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan" -- New York Times, December 4, 2009. "In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen" -- New York Times, yesterday. _______ Actually, if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we're fighting five different wars in Muslim countries -- or, to use the NYT's jargon, "five fronts" in the "Terror War" (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, "we will continue to use every element of our national power"). Add to those five fronts the "crippling" sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even "harsher" than the prior ones, and it's almost easier to count the Muslim countries we're not attacking or threatening than to count the ones we are. Yet this still isn't enough for America's right-wing super-warriors, who accuse the five-front-war-President of "an allergy to the concept of war." In the wake of the latest failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines, one can smell the excitement in the air -- that all-too-familiar, giddy, bipartisan climate that emerges in American media discourse whenever there's a new country we get to learn about so that we can explain why we're morally and strategically justified in bombing it some more. "Yemen" is suddenly on every Serious Person's lips. We spent the last month centrally involved to some secret degree in waging air attacks on that country -- including some that resulted in numerous civilian deaths -- but everyone now knows that this isn't enough and it's time to Get Really Serious and Do More. For all the endless, exciting talk about the latest Terrorist attack, one issue is, as usual, conspicuously absent: motive. Why would a young Nigerian from a wealthy, well-connected family want to blow himself up on one of our airplanes along with 300 innocent people, and why would Saudi and Yemeni extremists want to enable him to do so? When it comes to Terrorism, discussions of motive have been declared more or less taboo from the start because of the dishonest equation of motive discussions with justification -- as though understanding the reasons why X happens is to posit that X is legitimate and justifiable. Causation simply is; it has nothing to do with issues of morality, blame, or justification. Yet all that is generally permitted to be said in such situations is that Terrorists try to harm us because they're Evil, and we (of course) are not, and that's generally the end of the discussion. Despite that taboo, evidence always ends up emerging on this question. As numerous reports have indicated, the Al Qaeda group in the Arabian Peninsula has said that this attempted attack is in "retaliation" for the multiple, recent missile attacks on Yemen in which numerous innocent Muslim civilians were killed, as well as for the U.S.'s multi-faceted support for the not-exactly-democratic Yemeni government. That is similar to reports that Nidal Hasan was motivated to attack Fort Hood because "he was upset at the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan." And one finds this quote from an anonymous Yemeni official tacked on to the end of this week's NYT article announcing the "widening terror war" in Yemen -- as though it's just an afterthought: "The problem is that the involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda. The cooperation is necessary -- but there is no doubt that it has an effect for the common man. He sympathizes with Al Qaeda." As always, the most confounding aspect of the reaction to the latest attempted terrorist episode is the professed confusion and self-righteous innocence that is universally expressed. Whether justified or not, we are constantly delivering death to the Muslim world. We do not see it very much, but they certainly do. Again, independent of justification, what do we think is going to happen if we continuously invade, occupy and bomb Muslim countries and arm and enable others to do so? Isn't it obvious that our five-front actions are going to cause at least some Muslims -- subjected to constant images of American troops in their world and dead Muslim civilians at our hands, even if unintended -- to want to return the violence? Just look at the bloodthirsty sentiments unleashed among Americans even from a failed Terrorist attempt. What sentiments do we think we're unleashing from a decade-long (and continuing and increasing) multi-front "war" in the Muslim war? There very well may be some small number of individuals who are so blinded by religious extremism that they will be devoted to random violence against civilians no matter what we do, but we are constantly maximizing the pool of recruits and sympathy among the population on which they depend. In other words, what we do constantly bolsters their efforts, and when we do, we always seem to move more in the direction of helping them even further. Ultimately, we should ask ourselves: if we drop more bombs on more Muslim countries, will there be fewer or more Muslims who want to blow up our airplanes and are willing to end their lives to do so? That question really answers itself. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Dec 31 23:39:27 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:39:27 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Welcome_to_Orwell=27s_World_2010?= Message-ID: <38F4E094A5434D57BDAA7E510500D1BB@agingCHS072729> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24286.htm Welcome to Orwell's World 2010 By John Pilger December 30, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'." Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions and diffuse enemies". He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country." In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden". In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan's military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama's mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure America's control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go. Obama's most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda's attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power". The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace". Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania's reach. This is a known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbecks against Pashtuns. The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as "peace", and American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true. Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. "We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a "stable" Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands. That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA's "strategic hamlet program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong -- the Americans' catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban". Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance - these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds. The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it. "It was curious," wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world . people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who . were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world." www.johnpilger.com Links embedded in this article were provided by Information Clearing House. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ===============================