From fentona at shaw.ca Mon Dec 1 11:12:53 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 10:12:53 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Naomi Klein and the new new left Message-ID: <97065344-7022-40D8-A612-548324688E3C@shaw.ca> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/08/081208fa_fact_macfarquhar Profiles Outside Agitator Naomi Klein and the new new left. by Larissa MacFarquhar December 8, 2008 The marquee outside the Bloor Cinema, in Toronto, advertised ?The Last Mistress? at four, ?Naomi Klein?the Shock Doctrine? at seven, and ?Little Shop of Horrors? at nine-thirty. It was a warmish night. The falafel shop next door was doing a brisk business. A line of people holding tickets to the Naomi Klein event stretched to the end of the block and around the corner. Outside the entrance to the cinema, a middle-aged man and an elderly woman paced up and down selling copies of Socialist Action for a dollar. (The September issue included articles about capitalism?s contradictions, class war in Bolivia, and a commentary by Mumia Abu-Jamal?a regular feature.) ?We apologize for starting late, but it?s typical activist time, so I?m sure you?re used to it,? a young woman organizer said from the stage. The young woman wore a black necklace, black jeans, and black hoop earrings. She urged the audience to fight racism and poverty, and to work for education, international solidarity, justice for immigrants and refugees, and solidarity with Palestine and with the Mohawk of Tyendinaga and the Algonquin of Barriere Lake, on whose behalf the fund-raiser that night was being held. She squinted into the lights. ?I?m glad you can?t see the audience from here,? she said, ?because I don?t think I?ve ever spoken in front of eight hundred and fifty people except at a protest, and then you can always dissolve into a chant.? She consulted her notes. ?To a different audience?to those that hold capital and power in this society?Naomi Klein?s words and her ideas are seen as a serious threat,? she said. ?Her words are a source of inspiration . . . for those of us who were and are being radicalized by the anti- globalization, anti-colonial, and anti-poverty movements and the demands to change the system totally and completely.? Klein ascended the stage. ?It?s been an eventful few hours,? she said, smiling. The first bailout package announced by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had been voted down that afternoon by the House. ?The President went on television and informed us that there would be Armageddon, essentially, if they didn?t get this deal . . . but it didn?t work!? she went on, over rowdy clapping. She was wearing dark jeans tucked into tall brown boots, a crisp white shirt, and a long black blazer. She was dressed for a fox hunt. She looked terrific. She had spent the day curled up on the blue sofa in her living room, watching CNN while she waited restlessly to hear what would happen in Washington. She fortified herself with cups of coffee and a smoothie. She checked her iPhone for messages from an economist friend who was keeping her posted on what was going on behind the scenes. She followed the Dow as it pitched downward, thinking how ridiculous it was for Paulson to believe that he could control it. ?This is politicians acting like traders,? she said, staring at the television. ?A government shouldn?t play the market?it should govern.? The past couple of weeks had been a giddy time. Since her book ?The Shock Doctrine? was published last year, Klein, now thirty-eight, has become the most visible and influential figure on the American left? what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago. She speaks every few days, all over the world, and hundreds of people turn up to hear her. They visit her Web site and subscribe to her newsletter and send her passionate fan mail. She has become an icon?s icon: Radiohead and Laurie Anderson promote her books to their fans; John Cusack?s comedy ?War, Inc.? was inspired by her reporting from Baghdad. The Mexican film director Alfonso Cuar?n felt so strongly about ?The Shock Doctrine? that he made a short promotional film about it for free. Now, suddenly, she was in demand everywhere. The economic crisis had looked at first like a textbook enactment of her ?shock doctrine? theory, and everyone wanted her to go on TV and explain it. The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we?ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism?at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his ?Chicago School? acolytes?is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors?indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market?s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort?a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government. Friedman once observed that much of the time societies are too paralyzed by the ?tyranny of the status quo? to accept real reform, and that only a crisis can convince people that the way things are done needs to change. This idea is not particularly controversial. But from Friedman?s words Klein concludes that the Chicago School is ?a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain.? Worse, Friedmanites are impatient?sometimes too impatient to sit around praying for acts of God. Natural disasters are tricky to engineer, but coups and terror are always possible. ?Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era,? she writes, ?which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes??Pinochet?s in Chile, for instance, or the Argentinean junta??were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market ?reforms.? ? Klein first formulated her thesis in 2004, when she was reporting in Baghdad and noticed that Paul Bremer?s goal seemed to be to establish a perfect capitalist state in Iraq while its population was still reeling from the ?shock and awe? bombing. Then she noticed that soon after the tsunami in Sri Lanka the coastline that had been inhabited by fishermen was being sold off to hotels. Then she noticed that Friedman had suggested taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina to replace New Orleans?s disastrous public schools with charter schools. The pattern was striking. But now that a shock had shaken Washington itself, something slightly different seemed to be going on. On the one hand, the initial reaction to the economic crisis followed her theory? the shock (the bank failures and the market?s nosedive) had inspired the government to attempt to seize unprecedented power (seven hundred billion dollars with no strings attached), claiming that in such a crisis everyone should simply trust it to do the right thing, even though the actions it wanted to take would seem to enrich the wealthiest at the expense of everybody else. That was the textbook part. But the plan wasn?t working. Constituents wrote thousands of outraged letters, and bloggers wrote about how this felt familiar, like the aftermath of September 11th, and how the bailout was the economic equivalent of the Patriot Act. It was just as she had written at the end of the book: memory was shock?s antidote. (Another difference, of course, was that the government wanted to enact not Friedman-style reforms but the opposite: enormous interference in the market. Still, since the point of this interference was to bail out banks, this difference did not strike Klein as of much importance.) ?Americans remembered that they thought Rudy Giuliani was their daddy after September 11th, which was why they?re a little less inclined to say that Paulson and Goldman Sachs were going to take care of them this time,? Klein told the audience at the Bloor Cinema. ?I think actually their biggest mistake with the bailout was how short it was. It?s just two pages and three paragraphs, and so the weirdest thing happened: people read it.? Everyone laughed. ?It sounded like a coup.? She went on, ?It?s worth thinking about what the right has been doing for the past thirty-five years as a counter-revolution that has been waged against our victories.? The New Deal is usually told as a history of F.D.R., she said, but we don?t talk enough about the pressure from below. Neighborhoods organized, and when their evicted neighbors? furniture was put on the streets they moved it back into their homes. It was that kind of direct action that won victories like rent control, public housing, and the creation of Fannie Mae. The other thing that?s important to remember, she said, is that the organizers were a threat?of socialist revolution?and it was that which allowed F.D.R. to say to Wall Street, ?We have to compromise, or else we?ve got a revolution on our hands.? Now, these market shocks are opportunities for the same reason that the crash was in the thirties, because we are seeing the failures of laissez-faire before our eyes. ?It?s time to say, ?Your model failed,? ? she said. ?This is a progressive moment: it?s ours to lose.? Klein was born in 1970, but the political stories in which she places herself all begin in the thirties. The thirties and forties were the last time in America, she feels, that social movements were strong enough to force radical economic change in a progressive direction. They were also the last time that a certain kind of grand, bold political hope existed in her family?the last time before events combined to extinguish all thoughts, among Kleins, of utopia. Her paternal grandparents, Anne and Philip, met at the Jack London Club ?a leftist artists? club?in Newark, New Jersey, sometime in the thirties. (Philip?s older brother, Sol, was more committed?he moved to the Soviet Union after the revolution and never came back.) Philip wanted to be a painter, and in 1936 he got a job as an animator for Disney. He worked on ?Fantasia? and ?Snow White? and ?Pinocchio.? Disney animators had been trying to organize themselves in secret since the early thirties, but they didn?t pull it off until after the bonuses they were promised for ?Snow White? failed to materialize. In the late spring of 1941, they went on strike. Philip and Anne, ardent believers in the union, lived in a tent across the street from the studio, cooking over open fires and manning the picket line. Their first son, Michael, Naomi?s father, was then three, and lived with them in the tent part of the time. The strike was settled in September, but a few months after that Philip was fired for being an agitator. In 1942, he and Anne moved back to New Jersey, and he went to work in a shipyard. At the time they were ruining their lives for politics, Anne and Philip were experiencing the beginnings of a crisis of faith. Stalin had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: that was the first betrayal. Then came news of gulags in the Soviet Union. By the time of Khrushchev?s ?secret speech? of 1956, in which he denounced the cult of Stalin and its consequences, Philip and Anne, along with many others, had bitterly abandoned Communism. They held on to their core beliefs in social justice and racial equality, and taught their sons to believe in those things, but apart from brief forays?Anne took ten- year-old Michael canvassing for the Progressive Party in 1948, and marched on Washington in support of the Rosenbergs?they withdrew from politics. They began to spend time at Nature Friends (later Camp Midvale)?a retreat near Paterson, founded in the twenties as a place where workers of all races could congregate and enjoy nature. Nature Friends became their life. Philip built a house nearby, and Anne grew her own vegetables. They went to see leftist singers like Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie. Philip sought to revive his early ambition of becoming a painter, but all his figures looked like Disney cartoons. He tried sculpting in metal, and after a while this brought him a measure of satisfaction. In high school, Michael Klein was in the band and the student council and was the captain of the swim team, but he led a double life. He?d been sent to Socialist summer camp, and his real friends were other red-diaper babies who lived in New York, with whom he could discuss his home life without fear of exposure. It was difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists. One of his most vivid childhood memories was seeing buses arrive at Camp Midvale in the early fall of 1949 and disgorge dozens of bloodied people who had gone to a Paul Robeson concert and had been attacked with rocks and bats by a local mob. The electrocution of the Rosenbergs, in 1953, which left their two boys orphaned at the ages of six and ten, terrified Michael, who was not much older. Michael Klein never deviated from the beliefs of his parents, but, like them, he stayed away from political parties. In medical school, he protested against the Vietnam War and joined Physicians for Social Responsibility. When he was drafted, he didn?t sign the statement about not belonging to organizations with Communist ties, so the Army held a hearing to decide whether he was loyal enough to serve. Meanwhile, he had met a young activist filmmaker from Philadelphia named Bonnie Sherr, and got her pregnant. In the middle of his draft negotiations, she saw a documentary about American soldiers dropping napalm on civilian populations, commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She said, ?If a Canadian government agency can produce a film like this, we should get married and run away to Canada.? So they did. They ended up in Montreal. Michael worked as a pediatrician in a public hospital. Bonnie had studied film in California?the first film she shot was of C?sar Ch?vez?s first march in Sacramento. In Canada, she made a film in which welfare recipients interviewed one another about health care; she made a series of films about the community organizer Saul Alinsky; later, she made a film about women peace activists, at Greenham Common and in the Soviet Union. (?I had pretty simplistic political ideas about dialogue,? she says now. ?You know, an enemy is somebody whose stories you haven?t heard.?) In 1980, she set out to make a feminist film about sex, to be titled ?Celebration,? but instead made ?Not a Love Story,? about pornography. She was involved in a feminist film group at the National Film Board called Studio D. Her friends at Studio D were into solstices and female spirituality, and at one point she confided to her daughter that she wanted to be a witch. ?My mother was always saying things like that,? Klein recalled later in her mother?s memoir. ?She always wanted to be more of a hippie earth mother than she actually was. . . . The Joan Baez fantasy ran deep. It would resurface every few years, and she would learn to play ?Greensleeves? again.? Her parents? careers, so very Canadian, give Klein?s commitment to public institutions an emotional force, beyond her sense that profit distorts certain functions, such as health care. ?Both of my parents lived through a honeymoon period in the public sector,? she says. ?My mother and Studio D were always furious because they weren?t getting the resources they thought they deserved, but from the outside perspective it was, like, Oh, my God. You were allowed to have a women?s studio making films about social change within a huge public institution! And my father was able to do something similar within the health-care system, starting the birthing room at the hospital??he admitted midwives and alternative medicine, and waged a campaign against unnecessary surgical interventions in childbirth. ?It?s easy to deride the idea of government in America, where people?s association with the public sphere is the post office.? Naomi and her older brother, Seth, were brought up to be proud of the history of their family and of the left. ?I can?t tell you a time,? Seth Klein says, ?when I didn?t simultaneously know that I really liked Disney movies and that Walt Disney was a bastard.? When they drove to their cabin in Vermont on weekends, Bonnie and Michael would play tapes of a Pacifica Radio show that related American history through folk music?the story of McCarthyism through the Weavers, the civil-rights movement through the Freedom Singers. When Seth was little, he worried that all the good fights had already been fought, but Bonnie told him that she was sure he would find something that needed attending to, and from an early age he was on the lookout for what that thing might be?what fight would turn out to be his identity and his legacy. When he was in the sixth grade, his father took him to hear Helen Caldicott speak against nuclear weapons, and he decided that that was it. He started an anti-nuclear group, and after graduating he took a year off to travel around the country with the group, speaking to students. While Seth was the good activist child, Naomi always resented being dragged to demonstrations. She found her mother?s feminism repellent. ?She really didn?t like the way I dressed,? Bonnie says. ?My crowd at Studio D wore long skirts, schlumpy clothes.? Naomi recalled that when she was eight or nine she spent ?an entire journey through the Rockies conducting covert makeovers on everyone in the car. My father would lose the sandals and get a sharp, dignified suit, my mother a helmet hairdo and a wardrobe of smart pastel blazers, skirts and matching pumps.? She fought with her parents all the time. ?Since I was an impeccable liar and rarely got caught,? Naomi recalled, ?our fights were less about actual transgressions than about my silence, my sullenness and, as my dad was always fond of putting it, my ?refusal to be part of this family.? ? Naomi spent her adolescence in her room writing poetry or experimenting in the bathroom with makeup. Bonnie was appalled. She worried that Naomi was turning into a brat, thinking about clothes, spending time in front of the mirror. ?I think we were overly concerned about the kind of typical teen-age stuff she was into,? Bonnie says. ?She read Judy Blume! I was beside myself. I was a feminist?I wanted my daughter to be good at math.? ?They had imagined themselves to be breeding a new kind of post-revolutionary child,? Naomi wrote in her twenties. ?Hadn?t they diligently mushed their own baby food? Read Parent Effectiveness Training? Banned war toys and other ?gendered? play?? Bonnie says now, ?I think she thought, ?What?s wrong with having a good time?? And there was something in us?although I don?t like to admit it?something of the overearnest, you know? We were always fighting something. There were always people who were the bad guy.? In fact, it was worse than that. Naomi suffered from a kind of spiritual claustrophobia: she had glumly concluded that any path she chose in life?conformist or rebellious, lawyer or itinerant poet?would be equally hackneyed and ridiculous. And so even her parents? idea of a good time, which usually involved getting out into nature and attending to one?s bodily needs under artificially primitive conditions (?another ponchoed picnic?), was to her just more proof of their irredeemable cheesiness and the vast gulf between them and herself. ?All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper,? she wrote. ?That was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic guitar. . . . ? Soon after she graduated from high school, two catastrophic events erased her animus toward her parents and their politics. First, her mother had a severe stroke that initially left her quadriplegic. Naomi quit her job and spent most of the six months that Bonnie was in the hospital at her side. Then, during her first semester at the University of Toronto, a gunman killed fourteen women at the ?cole Polytechnique in Montreal, declaring, ?I hate feminists.? She decided to call herself a feminist from then on. Klein sat on a table, inside the MTV studios, in Manhattan. She swung her legs back and forth. She was wearing a long necklace and black high-heeled mini-boots. She may have made up with her parents, but in matters of style she stands firm against activism of the old school. She wears jeans, but she is groomed as flawlessly as an anchorwoman. She giggles, she makes jokes. She smiles a lot, especially onstage, though it is never clear whether she is smiling in amusement, politeness, irritation, or for some other reason. Her demeanor is friendly but guarded. While they were waiting for the interview to start, the interviewer, a young man in a black T-shirt, asked her what she?d been doing lately. She told him that she?d been working on the movie version of ?The Shock Doctrine,? which was being made by the director of ?Road to Guant?namo.? ?Did you see ?Road to Guant?namo??? she asked. ?No. I heard about it, though.? ?It?s excellent?it?s intercut between interviews with the Tipton Three??three young British men who were held in Guant?namo for two years??and they?re just, like, blokes, you know? The best moment in the film was when one of them suggests going to Afghanistan because they?ve got massive naans there. That was the reason.? The producer, a young man in jeans and an acid-lime polo shirt, appeared. ?We?ll be talking about China and the Olympics, about Darfur and intervention,? the interviewer said. ?But also about you personally ?how you became who you are?because it?s a young audience that looks up to each and every person on the program. The goal is to have them want to be like that person.? ?Are you going to ask me my favorite band?? she asked. ?We will, yes, I?m afraid.? ?I?m going to say M.I.A., just so you know.? ?That will definitely ingratiate you with the demographic,? the producer said. ?I?m sucking up, that?s why I?m here. D?you think I could get some tea?? Klein has been a person whom young people look up to since she found herself in charge of emotional teach-ins right after the Montreal massacre. She spent most of her time in college on politics and journalism; she was the editor-in-chief of the university paper, the Varsity. Then, after her third year, the Globe and Mail offered her a job, and she dropped out of school to take it. At the age of twenty- three, she took over as the editor of This Magazine, the Canadian equivalent of The Nation. But after a little more than a year she started to get discouraged about the state of the left?she felt that it had run out of things to say, apart from being outraged by people it disagreed with?and she decided to go back to school. When she arrived back at university in 1996, she discovered that everything had changed. During her previous stint as an undergraduate, she had spent all her time protesting the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the curriculum and the media; campus politics in 1989 had mostly meant identity politics. But students in 1996 weren?t interested in identity; what they talked about was economics. At the time, corporations were starting to make inroads into schools: soft- drink companies were negotiating exclusive deals; advertisements were appearing in bathrooms. There was a feeling in the air that corporations were getting too powerful?more powerful than governments, but not accountable to anyone except their shareholders. And, at the same time that big corporations were withdrawing physically from the United States and opening factories overseas, visually, even spiritually, they were everywhere, insinuating their logos into what had once been public space. Young activists found this especially objectionable, perhaps because one of the places into which corporations insinuated themselves most effectively was youth and activism, folding mutiny into advertising so deftly that resistance seemed futile. Klein dropped out of college again and started writing a book about the insidious new branding culture. She thought about how much she had loved shiny, plastic brand-name stuff when she was a kid?everyone had ?and she concluded that a movement was doomed to hippies-only irrelevance if it condemned the longing and the pleasure that brands could create. ?Soft drink and computer brands play the roles of deities in our culture,? she wrote later. ?They are creating our most powerful iconography, they are the ones building our most utopian monuments.? She discovered that an anti-corporatist movement was brewing all over the world, in response to sweatshops abroad and brand encroachment at home. By 1999, she had finished ?No Logo,? a book about brands and the new movement they had inspired. Then, in an extraordinary stroke of publishing luck, while ?No Logo? was at the printer?s, enormous crowds of protesters suddenly materialized outside a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. The protest seemed to come out of nowhere?or, at least, that was how it appeared to the bewildered old left?and there was ?No Logo? and Klein herself to explain it. Klein lives with her husband, Avi Lewis, in a small house in Toronto, on a quiet street. Lewis is a host of political talk shows and a maker of documentaries; this year he is covering the U.S. elections for Al Jazeera English. Their house is very tidy, free of any sort of clutter. It is furnished simply, as though on one quick trip to Crate & Barrel. It does not look lived in, and, indeed, most of the time it is not: both Lewis and Klein are on the road so much that they estimate they have spent no more than two months in Toronto since they moved in, a year ago. Nonetheless, the house is important to her. ?I come from such a line of wanderers that I wanted to stop wandering,? Klein says. ?In Montreal, the city I grew up in, there?s no trace of us.? (Klein?s parents moved to British Columbia after Bonnie?s stroke, because the weather made it easier to get around in a wheelchair; Bonnie has become a disability-rights activist. Seth also lives in British Columbia, working on poverty issues for a think tank.) ?I don?t like to go to the city I grew up in and feel like a stranger,? Klein says. ?This is Avi?s city, he goes back generations here, and that?s as close to roots as I?m going to get.? Although Klein and Lewis spend a lot of time apart, they make a point of preserving their dependence upon each other. Avi tries not to work when Naomi needs him. ?He feeds her and takes care of her while she?s writing,? Bonnie says. ?He edits things first.? He accompanies her on her book tours whenever he can. In 2002, Klein and Lewis concluded that their only hope of spending a long stretch together was to do a joint project, and they decided to make a film. They were tired of being against things all the time, and they were always being asked what they would suggest as an alternative, so they started travelling, looking for something that they could feel good about. They settled on Argentina, and ended up making ?The Take,? a moving documentary about a group of laid-off workers who broke into their shuttered factory and started it up again as a collective. At the time, Buenos Aires was in turmoil, and every now and again a protest they were documenting would turn violent and the police would start shooting, and there was an ongoing discussion about what to do. Lewis wanted to run; Klein wanted to stay. ?I was trying to dissuade the cowboys in our crew from putting themselves in danger,? Lewis says. ?I was, like, ?Just be safe, guys, it?s not our country, we?re here at best in a capacity of solidarity, it?s not the time to die.? But Naomi said, ?Here?s the principle: if something is happening and we?re the only ones witnessing it, we have a responsibility to posterity.? ? Klein and Lewis agree on most political issues, but Klein seems more ready to break things; more cynical; angrier. ?I think Avi is too quick to reject revolutionary movements,? she says. ?I think that incremental change makes sense in the Canadian context, but it doesn?t necessarily make sense in the mountains of Chiapas. I don?t fetishize guerrilla violence, but I think there are situations where people are justified in taking up arms. We?ve had fights about that.? Unlike Klein, the descendant of embittered ex-Communists, Lewis comes from a distinguished political family that has always been Socialist rather than Communist, and so has kept its political faith. ?My earliest memories are of conventions and election nights, seeing grownups crying or celebrating,? Lewis says. ?We understood in my family that we were part of a cause, a movement, and the Party, capitalized, was a big part of that.? The politics of the Lewis family have changed very little in the past hundred years. Avi Lewis?s great-grandfather Maishe Losz was the leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a secular Socialist party, in his small town just east of Bialystok. The Bund was anti-Bolshevik; it believed that revolution should be achieved through democratic processes, even if that meant compromise. Thus, the Bundist maxim: ?It is better to go along with the masses in a not totally correct direction than to separate oneself from them and remain a purist.? In 1921, fearing that he would be killed by the Red Army, Losz fled to Canada. Losz?s son David Lewis became the national leader of the Canadian democratic socialist party, the New Democratic Party. The N.D.P. never formed a national government, but it came to power in the provinces: in Canada, socialism was mainstream. David Lewis persuaded the Party to delete the eradication of capitalism from its manifesto, and he crushed movement dogmatism and indiscipline. (?When in heaven?s name are we going to learn that working-class politics and the struggle for power are not a Sunday-school class?? he asked.) David?s son Stephen, Avi?s father, also followed in the family tradition, and was elected the leader of the N.D.P. in Ontario at the age of thirty-two. (Avi?s mother, Michele Landsberg, is a journalist, who is well known in Canada for her feminism and her pugnacious left- wing politics?in her columns, conservatives are always ?jack- booted? or ?henchmen.?) When, in the late sixties, a faction called ?the Waffle? threatened to splinter the Party, Stephen Lewis crushed it, just as his father had crushed factions before. For Stephen and for David, loyalty to the Party was paramount. They would not permit the left to destroy itself. Stephen Lewis left office thirty years ago, and David Lewis died in 1981, but the Lewises are still well known and beloved in Canada. ?I live in that fantasy world in which you should say what you believe in and shouldn?t retreat because the electorate may not be receptive,? Stephen Lewis says. ?That may explain why my own leadership was one of remarkable futility, almost legendary futility.? Recently, Lewis spent five years as the United Nations special envoy for H.I.V. /AIDS in Africa, but his respite from campaigning has not made him quieter. ?I?m more fundamentalist now,? he says. ?I have no patience for capitalism at all. I see now that there is almost nothing that is positive in this ugly international system, and that?s why I embrace Naomi?s view of the way the world works. I?m actually tired of my rhetorical outbursts?I?d like to engage in physical aggression.? ?I think there is, for my parents? generation, a sense of defeat,? Avi Lewis says. ?They grew up in a postwar period when it seemed like the world was changeable?a welfare state had been built and had to be protected and extended. But their adult lives have encompassed a long deterioration of the standard of living for the majority of people on this continent, and as they?ve seen the gains of the sixties and seventies largely erased, they?ve started to feel more and more hopeless. Whereas Naomi and I grew up in a time when the backlash was already well under way, so we may be just as pessimistic, but we don?t feel defeated, because we never had the luxury of hope.? These days, Avi Lewis looks very much like the product of his family, but this was not always so. ?I rebelled furiously, but without rebelling in the most hurtful way, which would have been to rebel politically,? he says. ?I was a host on MuchMusic, which is our MTV. I knew that I wasn?t doing politics the way I was brought up to, and I was conflicted about that. My parents would ask me, ?Are you sure you know what you?re doing? I know you love music, and it?s cool for you to hang out with Bowie, and you sometimes get to do a one- hour special on music and politics in South Africa, which is sort of political, but are you sure you?re doing the most you can?? I was alienated from my own political inheritance. I had a tradition to fit into. I had a platform from the time I was four or five years old.? It was at this point that Lewis met Klein. They were both covering the Canadian elections in 1993?he for MuchMusic, she for CBC. When Lewis met Klein, he felt that she was freer of her family than he was of his, and this somehow relieved him of the urge to run away. ?I always got the feeling that Naomi was the author of her own politics,? Lewis says. ?And when I got close to her I started seizing the reins of my own political development.? To Klein?s and Lewis?s parents, it seems that the only difference between their children and their families is style. ?I remember Stephen?s father debating William F. Buckley when I was an undergraduate,? Michele Landsberg says. ?The place was packed to the rafters, and we went mad with joy when David trounced that snakelike William Buckley. Remembering David?s rhetoric, a lot of it was sentimental and heartfelt old Socialist lingo, talking about the poor working man in his tattered raincoat. Naomi would use more irony, because we?ve gotten past our romanticism about how we change the world.? But their parents never doubted what ought to be done to make the world better; Lewis and Klein are not so sure. ?Naomi takes the responsibility of young people listening to her and looking up to her really, really seriously,? Lewis says. ?Which is precisely why she refuses to say, ?Here?s the alternative, here?s what we all have to line up and fight for.? Suspicion of people who know what the answer is?that?s very characteristic of our generation, and that?s one of the reasons I?ve never gone into politics. It?s very difficult for both of us when people look to us for the kind of certainty that earlier generations had.? One of the few political leaders whom Klein really likes is Subcommandant Marcos, the head of the Zapatistas, in Mexico, who makes a fetish of his elusiveness and doubt. In ?No Logo,? Klein celebrated the anarchic formlessness of the anti-corporate protests?what she wryly termed ?laissez-faire organizing.? Her generation of activists was ?challenging systems of centralized power on principle, as critical of left-wing, one-size- fits-all state solutions as of right-wing market ones,? she wrote. ?It is often said disparagingly that this movement lacks ideology, an overarching message, a master plan. This is absolutely true, and we should be extraordinarily thankful.? These days, the movement long gone, she is not so sanguine about it. ?What I was responding to at the time was people on the left who I thought were opportunistically trying to impose their solutions,? she says. ?I was hoping that more of an articulation would emerge in a grass-roots way, but it?s not happening?I think because the entire discussion was severed on September 11th. The mainstream N.G.O.s became frightened of being associated with people who seemed quasi-terrorist, and then we started talking about war.? Lewis has never been as enamored as Klein of the movement?s lack of discipline, and she admits now that he may have been right. ?Seeing how easy it was for everything to evaporate, without institutions taking that energy and nailing it down?we were too ephemeral,? she says. ?It was that experience that made me feel like we need to be more tangible, whether it?s political parties or putting it in writing.? In the end, despite all his suspicion of leaders and certainty, Lewis loves and honors his family tradition. The N.D.P. regularly approaches him about running for office (as it does Klein), and he thinks seriously about doing so (she does not). During the recent election campaign in Canada, Klein advocated strategic voting?voting for either the Liberals or the N.D.P., depending on which had a better chance of winning in a particular district, to promote the greater goal of unseating the Tories. ?I don?t believe enough in the N.D.P. to really care,? she says. Avi tried to talk her out of it, while her father-in-law was appalled. ?I don?t have one minute?s use for strategic voting,? Stephen Lewis says. ?I just believe in the most intransigent of ways that you vote for your convictions.? But Klein doesn?t have much use for political parties. When she is asked about this, she explains that she has seen liberation movements betrayed by the politicians they fought to get elected, but her impatience appears to be rooted in something more than that: she seems to dislike parties and, indeed, governments, in a visceral way, almost the way that Milton Friedman does. In principle, she is a Keynesian, but she distrusts centralization, institutions, platforms, theories?anything except extremely small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives. Basically, she really, really doesn?t like being told what to do. It is clear, in ?The Shock Doctrine,? just how deeply she disdains the political. She tends to conflate very different right-wing groups? neoconservatives, crony capitalists, libertarians. (In the end, ?The Shock Doctrine? is not so much anti-Friedman as anti-corporate.) And in hunting down instances in which ideology has been used as a cover for enriching cronies and corporations, she slides into the position that politics is always and everywhere about enrichment. Her great strength?following the money; never taking ideology at face value but always questioning who benefits from it; helping to pull the left back to the economic analysis that it forgot during the era of ?the personal is political??is also a weakness. Her materialism is such that she sometimes seems scarcely to believe that politics exists at all. At one point, for instance, she argues that the Israeli ?lite lost interest in peace in large part because Israeli companies were doing a booming business in security technology, which benefits from war. She argues that the Chinese Communist Party cracked down on protesters in Tiananmen Square not in order to protect its power but in order to protect Deng Xiaoping?s economic-liberalization program (of which breach of orthodoxy, in fact, many in the Party were quite suspicious?a suspicion only reinforced by the pro-Western protests). ?I?m not a utopian thinker,? Klein says. ?I don?t imagine my ideal society. I don?t really like to read those books, either. I?m just much more comfortable talking about things that are.? The only time she has ever felt a whiff of utopia was in Buenos Aires, in 2002, when the political system had virtually disintegrated?during the time that she and Lewis were filming ?The Take.? ?That moment in Argentina was an incredible time because a vacuum opened up,? she says. ?They had thrown out four Presidents in two weeks, and they had no idea what to do. Every institution was in crisis. The politicians were hiding in their homes. When they came out, housewives attacked them with brooms. And, walking around Buenos Aires at night, there were meetings on every other street corner. Every plaza where there was a streetlight, people were meeting under it and talking about what to do about the external debt, I swear to God. Groups of one hundred or five hundred people. And organizing buying groceries together because they could get cheaper prices, setting up barters because the currency was worthless. It was the most inspiring thing I?ve ever seen.? Klein believes that change comes about only when social movements become so large and disruptive that politicians can no longer ignore them. This is another of her ongoing arguments with her in-laws: whether social movements can really change things. Stephen Lewis is as susceptible to their allure as the next new leftist?he drove down to Little Rock in 1957, when Orval Faubus called out the militia, to witness the civil-rights movement firsthand?but in the end he remains a politician. ?Naomi?s and Avi?s profound skepticism is not a skepticism I share, even though they have far more evidence than I do,? he says. ?There was a period when people like Avi and Naomi actually thought that the social movements could sort of take over. But you may have a green movement which has influence on carbon tax, you may have a campaign for nuclear disarmament which lowers the temperature over the arms race, but you never have an over-all gestalt which can do everything from day care to foreign aid and see it as part of an over-all pattern to change the world. That has to come through politics.? Both Klein and Lewis are skeptical about Barack Obama. ?I?ve been at rallies and seen him speak, and I feel that feeling that one feels,? Lewis says. ?It is thrilling. And it?s churlish not to allow yourself to be thrilled. We crave inspiration, and it?s a bleak life to always be dissecting things. But the main feeling that Obama creates in me is fear, because I see people fooling themselves. If you actually look at his policies, what they reflect is the triumph of the right-wing political paradigm since Reagan, and I think he could set things back dramatically, because for young people who are getting engaged in politics for the first time, for them to be disillusioned is very, very damaging.? Because Klein doesn?t expect much from any politician, she doesn?t spend time wishing Obama were more progressive. ?I don?t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ?Yes We Can? rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ?Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike?s,? ? she says. ?The ?Yes We Can? slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It?s very ?Just Do It.? When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We?re gonna end torture and shut down Guant?namo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He?s not really saying that, is he? He?s saying we?re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He?s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he?s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if people don?t like where Obama is they should move the center.? To this end, Klein has been taking every opportunity to call for the nationalization of the oil companies. ?It?s the job of the left to move the center,? she says. ?Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it?ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.? For someone who places so much weight on social movements, though, Klein can get dyspeptic when she finds herself in the middle of one. Activists are so earnest, so dedicated, so?like her parents. ?Marches depress me,? she says. ?Going for a walk and chanting? I get nothing out of it.? When she began participating in the anti- globalization movement, she understood that protests outside trade summits were the main way that the movement was making itself heard, but they still seemed a little comical to her. ?Is this really what we want?? she wrote in a column in the summer of 2000. ?A movement of meeting stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if they were the Grateful Dead?? The World Social Forum in Brazil ought to have been a place where she felt at home, but there was too much chanting, and Jos? Bov? went around with bodyguards to protect him from the paparazzi, and the activists kept accusing one another of racism and classism, and the cultural interludes were hard to take. ?A line of dancers appeared on stage, heads bowed in shame, feet shuffling,? she wrote, describing one. ?[Then] the people on stage began to run, brandishing the tools of their empowerment: hammers, saws, bricks, axes, books, pens, computer keyboards, raised fists. In the final scene, a pregnant woman planted seeds?seeds, we were told, of another world.? The only kind of protest she likes is the Yippie kind, theatrical enough to be entertaining and self-mocking enough to dilute the earnestness to a level that she can tolerate. At the protests in Quebec City during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, for example? when the officials surrounded themselves with a tall protective fence, a group of activists built a medieval-style wood catapult and lobbed Teddy bears over the top. ?Quebec City was just madness,? she says. ?It was one of those times when nobody knows what?s going to happen, and there are these breakthrough moments, these liberated moments, these moments of euphoria. It was mostly young people, and they were getting gassed, but they were still enjoying themselves tremendously, playing cat and mouse with the police. What I loved about it was that the whole city joined in?people working in caf?s on the main streets, and neighbors got buckets of water to wash out people?s eyes. It was like an alternative reality.? After the death of Milton Friedman, in 2006, the University of Chicago decided to set up an institute in his honor. The institute was opposed by many professors, who formed a group to protest it. Klein offered to debate someone from the institute?s board, but nobody would do it, so she agreed to go to Chicago and talk about her own objections to the project. The evening was sponsored in part by the Platypus Affiliated Society? a student-teacher reading group that focusses on the Frankfurt School and the Second International period of Marxism?and a few of Platypus?s members, tall, thin, pale young men, had set up a table out front. Platypus was founded on the idea that the left didn?t have a proper sense of its own history, especially the bad bits, and that a study of that history would help it emerge from the troubled state in which it found itself. (?Protest has devolved into an insular subculture of self-hatred, frustration, and anxiety derived from a pathological attitude towards social integration,? a typically morose editorial in the Platypus Review declares.) Given its emphasis on self- criticism, Platypus was not a natural constituency for Klein?s work, but because she was coming to the campus the group read ?The Shock Doctrine,? and also Hayek and Friedman. ?The conservatives engage the questions of freedom and utopia directly,? Ian Morrison, the editor of Platypus?s newsletter, said. ?We were very struck that Klein seemed to back away from utopianism, because we feel that the left has liquidated itself in part because it?s conceded talk about freedom to someone like Bush.? Platypus?s interrogation of the past has led it in a variety of directions. Several of its members also belonged to the new Students for a Democratic Society, a revival of the new-left group from the sixties. In August, Platypus participated in a historical re?nactment, in Grant Park, of the 1968 Democratic Convention, minus the police. ?As a group of young, largely inexperienced activists it was the only organizing framework we could find which emphasized active participation,? read a writeup of the event in the Platypus Review. ?Other forms seemed linguistically and ideologically flaccid. . . . We didn?t want to view our history?our radical history?as if from a riverbank, we wanted to jump in and splash around in it. . . . We debated, for instance, the ethics of nominating a live pig for the presidency: what should we feed it, and where would it stay?? The Platypus men filed into the front row of Assembly Hall, and Klein stood at the lectern. There was a good crowd, not just people from the campus. Three anarchists had driven up from St. Louis specially to see her. ?What we have been living since Reagan is a policy of liberating the forces of greed,? she declared. ?I don?t think the project has actually been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, I think that they won, and I think the poor are fighting back.? Klein never tempers her arguments in search of converts from the center; she rallies her base. She?s not interested in making the left part of the mainstream; she wants to convince the left that it doesn?t need the mainstream. ?Part of what makes us less strong than we should be,? she says, ?those of us who don?t believe that profit should govern every aspect of our lives, is that part of us accepts the narrative that neoliberal ideas have triumphed around the world because they were popular and our ideas failed.? For this reason, it is important to her, in ?The Shock Doctrine,? that there be virtually no exceptions?that is, instances where radical market reforms are enacted with the consent of a people. (In passing, she concedes Reagan and Sarkozy.) But some of her examples are less plausible than others. She argues that the Falklands War?a ten-week venture whose main impact on Britain was an outpouring of jingoistic glee?was ?a large enough political crisis,? creating sufficient ?disorder? to enable Margaret Thatcher to ?impose? her economic agenda. (It is true that, without the glee, Thatcher might not have won the next election, but ill-gotten popularity and traumatized regression are not the same thing.) Klein dismisses as a ?propaganda exercise? a referendum held by Boris Yeltsin in which a majority of voters supported his reforms, on the odd ground that it was nonbinding. She maintains that the war in Chechnya was waged not in order to crush secessionism but in order to protect Yeltsin?s economic policy. Thus, she concludes, it ?contributed significantly to the Chicago School crusade death toll.? ?Naomi is a pattern recognizer,? Lewis says. ?Some people feel that she?s bent examples to fit the thesis. But her great strength is helping people recognize patterns in the world, because that?s the fundamental first step toward changing things.? Throughout ?The Shock Doctrine,? Klein is at pains to portray Friedman as a quasi-Satanic figure. The first chapter of the book describes the horrifying psychiatric experiments performed in the nineteen-fifties by one Donald Ewen Cameron, in which subjects were tortured by electroshock. She characterizes this work as a metaphor for the economic shocks performed in Friedman?s name; the next chapter, about Friedman, is titled ?The Other Doctor Shock.? The promotional film that Klein made with Alfonso Cuar?n is even cruder? a pastiche of disturbing footage of patients receiving electroshock treatment, images of prisoners being tortured, and the sound of a child wailing in an echoey room. ?Unable to advance their agenda democratically, Friedman and his disciples were drawn to the power of shock,? Klein says in the voice-over, in the calmly terrorizing tone of a campaign attack ad. ?Friedman understood that, just as prisoners are softened up for interrogation by the shock of their capture, massive disasters could serve to soften us up for his radical free- market crusade.? Why does Klein place such emphasis on Friedman? Perhaps because she wants to draw a parallel between capitalism and Communism, to make their two histories look as similar as possible, and for that she needs not the messy, pragmatic, ad-hoc capitalism of corporations but the purist, utopian capitalism of the Chicago School. Violent autocrats of the free-market persuasion, though there have been many, have not soiled Friedman?s name in the way that Stalin soiled Marx; somehow, the misdeeds of a Pinochet or a Suharto or a Yeltsin are attributed to these men as individuals?to their lust for power, their greed, their drinking. But Klein holds capitalism guilty of all their sins. Friedman?s followers must no longer get away with shaking their heads when their advisees start killing people, she believes. They should feel themselves dupes, fellow-travellers, accessories: they should acknowledge their willed ignorance and complicity, as her grandparents and the Communists of their generation were forced to do. ?My grandparents were pretty hard-core Marxists, and in the thirties and forties they believed fervently in the dream of egalitarianism that the Soviet Union represented,? Klein told the audience in Chicago. ?They had their illusions shattered by the reality of gulags, of extreme repression, hypocrisy, Stalin?s pact with Hitler. . . . The left has been held accountable for the crimes committed in the name of its extreme ideologies, and I believe that?s been a very healthy process. . . . When you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories.? The day after the Chicago event, Klein taped an appearance on ?The Colbert Report,? then went directly to the airport for a flight to France. She came back and went on a speaking tour to Texas, Colorado, California, and Wisconsin, did two panels in New York, and then later flew to Chicago for its humanities festival and to Miami for the book fair. She spent a week in Poland. Everywhere she went, she stuck to her theme. ?The crash on Wall Street should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian Communism, an indictment of an ideology,? she says. It was clear to her that the past month had proved what she?d been saying for years. Now, if she could only speak often enough, to enough people, and explain things persuasively enough, maybe the left would stop wringing its hands and the right would start apologizing. It seemed unlikely, but she would try all the same. ? From fentona at shaw.ca Mon Dec 1 13:34:54 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 12:34:54 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Bush Quietly Passes Dozens of New Rules Message-ID: ENVIRONMENT-US: Bush Quietly Passes Dozens of New Rules Stephen Leahy http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=1869 UXBRIDGE, Canada, 1 Dec (IPS) - As the world community meets in Poland this week to find solutions to the climate crisis, the George W. Bush White House is chaining the United States' tiller to prevent a change of course by President-elect Barack Obama by passing new anti- environmental rules and regulations at a furious pace. Nearly a million hectares of public wildlands in Wyoming and Utah are being opened up to oil shale extraction, the Endangered Species Act is being gutted, as are regulations regarding factory farm operations, the Clean Air Act, and removing mountaintops to dig for coal and more, said a coalition of environmental groups. 'There are many last-minute changes and some are draconian,' said Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club, an environmental NGO. The White House can make such changes arbitrarily without approval or consultation with Congress, the Senate or the public. Known as 'midnight regulations', more than 60 were passed in November with the intent of tying the hands of the Obama administration. Some of these will be difficult to reverse, but many of the worst ones will almost certainly be overturned by Obama, Dorner told IPS. 'The Bush administration [officials] are not as clever as they think they are,' he said. There will be an entirely new atmosphere in the White House in 2009, says a coalition of 29 leading environmental and conservation groups. They met with the Obama transition team last week and presented a 345- page 'roadmap for presidential action on economic stimulus, energy, climate change, and other pressing environmental issues'. 'The new administration's priorities on energy, the economy, and the environment jibe well with our roadmap,' said Margie Alt, executive director of Environment America. President-elect Obama has said he wants to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them by an additional 80 percent by 2050. Most environmental groups favour tougher targets, originally recommended by 2,000-plus scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which would see the U.S. reduce its emissions by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 by the year 2020. However, there is broad agreement that the solution to the country's current economic crisis is to rapidly move towards a green economy powered by clean energy, said Frances Beinecke, executive director of the Natural Resources Defence Council. 'We can solve three problems at once -- the economy, energy security and the environment,' Beinecke told IPS. Five million new jobs can be created with investments in energy efficiency and renewable power generation. Introducing a carbon cap- and-trade system will generate the funds for investments in energy efficiency retrofits of buildings and clean energy sources like wind and solar, she said. The Obama administration is working on an economic stimulus package that is rumoured to exceed 500 billion dollars, and environmentalists expect that there will be a big green component with massive investment in mass transit, improving the country's antiquated energy infrastructure and more, said Beinecke. 'Twenty-five percent of the energy generated in America is lost during transmission,' noted Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. 'Building a smart electrical grid would be far more efficient and less prone to failure,' Knobloch said. Moreover, a new gird is needed to maximise the benefits of alternative energy generation. Building a smart grid would create quality jobs that can't be outsourced, he said. 'The best thing the government could do for people is to lower their energy use so they will save money in this economic downturn,' said Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. '[Otherwise] higher energy costs will return,' Schweiger told IPS. After eight years of neglect and exploitation, the United States' lands and waters -- and especially the Arctic -- are in need of enhanced protection. The coalition has proposed a 450-million-dollar Land and Conservation Fund to protect wilderness, create more parks and enhance recreational opportunities, he said. 'Nature needs help to adjust to climate change,' Schweiger stressed. Restoring and enhancing the health and diversity of natural landscapes and creating corridors for species to move as conditions change are crucial to protect the nation's natural capital. Water conservation and measures to protect the Arctic are urgently needed, he said. The coalition wants the leasing of oil and gas drilling permits in Arctic waters to be suspended immediately and a new precautionary approach taken for any industrial activity in the region, which is being hit first and hardest by climate change. 'We're confident that a new Obama administration will take us in the right direction,' said Dorner of the Sierra Club. 'Now is the time for change, and that change is the green economy.' (END/2008) From fentona at shaw.ca Mon Dec 1 16:04:38 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 15:04:38 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Native Rights Concerns Cloud 2010 Games Message-ID: CANADA: Native Rights Concerns Cloud 2010 Games By Jon Elmer http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44930 VANCOUVER, Dec 1 (IPS) - A coalition of indigenous elders, social justice activists and community organisers is voicing opposition to the upcoming Winter Olympics, promising to continue their protests up to and throughout the 2010 games. Taking advantage of a three-day media briefing hosted by the official Olympic body in late November, the Vancouver Organising Committee (VANOC), activists and native representatives invited the local and visiting international media to an office in the heart of the what is commonly known as Canada's poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside, to hear "the other side of the Olympic story". Rallying under the banner of "No Olympics on stolen native land", speakers representing nine native and community groups outlined connections between native poverty, dislocation and homelessness and the staging of the games in Vancouver and Whistler, 120 kms north of Vancouver. Arthur Manuel, a former chief in the Neskonlith Indian Band of the Secwepemc nation, accused the Canadian government of attempting to whitewash the structural violations of native sovereignty. "We are the poorest people in the country," Manuel said. "Not because this country is poor, but because [the government] continues to violate the human rights of the indigenous people, by not recognising our Aboriginal title and our treaty rights." Nearly all of the province of British Columbia -- including the land on which the Vancouver-Whistler Olympics will be staged -- is not subject to any treaty and the land has not been otherwise ceded or surrendered by its indigenous inhabitants, as Canada's highest court has recognised. Manuel cited Canada's refusal to sign on to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as evidence that the government does not intend to follow the principles of international law in dealing with native sovereignty. In September 2007, the U.N. declaration was passed 143 to four, with the United States, Australia and New Zealand joining Canada in opposition. James Louie, a member of the St'at'imc nation whose traditional lands encompass the rapidly expanding Whistler mountain and resort, said the expansion of infrastructure and development for the Olympics undermines the status of his people's case before the Organisation of American States treaty process. "Because we have no treaty with Canada, the imposition and encroachment of Whistler -- their hydro lines, their highways, their railroad, you name it, anything they do with our territory -- is illegal," Louie said. The Olympics have spurred a construction and development boom in Vancouver and Whistler in particular, and in British Columbia in general. Between July and September 2007, 843 major capital projects were planned or underway throughout British Columbia, valued at U.S. 108 billion dollars, according to the provincial government's ministry of economic development. A VANOC budget report last year pegged the operating costs for the games at 1.32 billion dollars. The provincial and federal governments have provided an additional 468 million dollars, primarily for venue construction, including ski hill development in St'at'imc territory. The official Olympics budget does not include major infrastructural projects undertaken by the government in preparation for the February 2010 games, including the 484-million-dollar expansion of the Vancouver-to-Whistler highway. Seislom, a Lil'wat elder who is also known as Glen Williams, addressed the legacy of the expansion around Whistler and its impact on the environment. "When my grandfather took me up Whistler mountain, the land was pure. Now it's polluted, it's desecrated. I ask myself the question: what will my grandchildren get from all of this?" According to VANOC, 20.5 million dollars in venue construction and 95,163 dollars in non-venue contracts have been awarded to Aboriginal businesses through an incorporated native society called the Four Host First Nations Society (FHFN). Several speakers challenged the role of FHFN in their communities. Seislom said the FHFN "choose not to recognise traditional, hereditary chieftainships" and instead only "recognise their own chieftainships in terms of corporate development, in terms of the Department of Indian Affairs, in terms of anything to do with money and power." Dustin Johnson, a Tsimshian activist and organiser, also questioned the legitimacy of the FHFN. "It is important to make a distinction between elected leaders under the Canadian Indian Act system and the traditional governments, the traditional leaders," he said. Canada imposed the Indian reserve and band council system through Indian Act of 1876, nine years after the country was founded. It wasn't until 1953 that the Act was amended to allow natives to organise around a land claim, which had previously been illegal. Johnson characterised the Four Host First Nation Society as a small group of "elite native capitalists who don't represent the majority of native people". "They'll paint the picture that they are trying to create economic development and self sufficiency, but it's really twisting the logic of what our people stand for: a lot of our people stand for sustainable development and protecting what little we have left of our lands and resources," Johnson said. Arthur Manuel criticised the government and the FHFN for spending millions showcasing native arts and culture while ignoring the structural causes of the poverty. "They are using that money for the purpose of disguising the violations of human rights of the indigenous people of this country." The BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition last week issued a report that showed BC for the fifth-straight year has the highest rate of child poverty in Canada, at almost 22 percent. The rate for native children is 40 percent but, the report notes, "the number would be significantly higher if the data had included children living on reserve." Recent statistics from the Canadian government's Department of Indian and Northern Affairs put the number of natives in BC at 122,000; about half live on reserves. In Vancouver, the largest urban centre to host a Winter Olympics, there is likely as many as 8,000 homeless people, according to researchers at Simon Fraser University's Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction, a disproportionate number of whom are native. The rates of child poverty and homelessness continue to increase. Laura Track, a lawyer with the Downtown Eastside's Pivot Legal Society, said that over 1,400 units of affordable housing have been lost since Vancouver was awarded the games in July 2003. Hundreds of tenants have been evicted from single-room occupancy hotels in the Downtown Eastside, as the Olympic-borne real estate development boom has deepened the homelessness crisis. Outgoing Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan, who presided over a sharp increase in homelessness during his tenure, has called the crisis "a civic, and provincial and national shame." Vancouver is anticipating as many as two million visitors during the XXI Winter Olympic Games to be held from Feb. 12-28, 2010. According to VANOC spokesperson Suzanne Walters, more than 10,000 members of the media are expected for the games, including 2,900 print and photo- journalists. (END/2008) From fentona at shaw.ca Mon Dec 1 21:09:37 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 20:09:37 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Coalition Government? Let's Not Give Away The Store References: <20bac157de41432b0f51be2103379662@socialistproject.ca> Message-ID: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 159 ... December 1, 2008 _________________________________________________ Coalition Government? Let's Not Give Away The Store John Riddell The Harper government's economic proposals, announced November 27, aroused a cry of outrage from unions and social activists across the country: "Throw the bums out." The Conservative plan for cutbacks, combined with and attacks on the rights of unions and women, showed clearly, as CLC President Ken Georgetti said, that the Conservative government aims "to make working people pay for a crisis they did not create." Efforts by the Liberals and NDP to forge an alternative government have won wide of support in progressive circles, where many see a coalition as the only way to bring the hated government down. Leaders of four major national unions and three influential progressive advocacy groups joined November 28 in an appeal to the Liberals and NDP to join in pursuing this goal, since "only a coalition government can provide the leadership Canada needs." These calls all assume that the coalition would be Liberal-led ? and none of them has raised any programmatic agenda for such a government. Is the prospect of a Liberal-led government really so appealing as to deserve a blank cheque? Have the advocates of coalition forgotten that it was the last Liberal government that originated most of the hated "Harper" policies, including the gutting of social services, attacks on civil liberties dressed up as "anti-terrorism" and Canada's disastrous war in Afghanistan? From all reports, the NDP is not calling for changes in those policies in its negotiations with the Liberals. The Globe and Mail noted November 29 that "a senior NDP official said that no policy issues are considered deal-breakers." The Liberals say they favour "an economic stimulus package," but its content is unknown. Certainly the Liberals will give government a much bigger role in managing the economy. Every major capitalist government is doing that ? and Harper will do it too, once he gets his signals straight. As Margaret Thatcher might say, "There Is No Alternative." Neoliberalism is in shambles; the economies are in utter crisis; government intervention is capitalism's only hope. But there is no assurance that increased government spending will be associated with social reform ? massive deficits were the hallmarks not only of Roosevelt, but also of Reagan and Bush. A Liberal "stimulus" package is most likely to combine massive handouts to big business with attacks on workers' wages and pensions. The aim of progressive policy must not be to enhance the power of capitalist governments but to increase that of working people. We cannot expect Stephane, Iggy and Bob to do any such thing, even if the NDP has a few Cabinet posts. The only force we can depend on is the pressure of independent popular and labour movements. In a situation of social and economic crisis, these movements can become an irresistible force. And here is the fatal weakness of the coalition government scheme. Locked inside a Liberal-dominated coalition, the NDP would be unable to campaign against capitalist attacks. Accepting responsibility for the anti-labour measures of such a government could rapidly discredit the NDP and end its ability to continue as the bearer of popular hopes for social change. At the same time, labour leaders' current pledges of unconditional support to a coalition will undermine the unions' ability to act independently in defence of workers' rights and needs. Tying ourselves down in this manner is particularly dangerous in the midst of an economic crisis that is unprecedented, and shifting rapidly in unpredictable ways. Here the Bloc Qu?b?cois sets a positive example: whatever parliamentary manoeuvres they wisely or unwisely engage in, they are determined not to enter a Liberal-led government. The best way to resist big business attacks and win immediate and specific gains is to stick to the path of independence from big business and its parties, and rely on the potential of popular movements. On such a course, and in present conditions, it is by no means excluded that we could prepare the ground for a Venezuelan-type outcome: a sweeping shift in power relationships in favour of working people, the poor and the oppressed, and their organizations. To move forward in this time of crisis, we must avoid falling into the deadly embrace of our enemies. As Muhammed Ali said, to be free to fight, you need to float like a butterfly ? and sting like a bee. ? John Riddell is co-editor of Socialist Voice (www.socialistvoice.ca). A version of this article was also published by Rabble. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Bullet is produced by the Socialist Project. Readers are encouraged to distribute widely. Comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome. Write to info at socialistproject.ca If you wish to subscribe: www.socialistproject.ca/lists/?p=subscribe The Bullet archive is available at www.socialistproject.ca/bullet For more analysis of contemporary politics check out 'Relay: A Socialist Project Review' at www.socialistproject.ca/relay From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Dec 1 22:56:44 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 00:56:44 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Jalal Al-e Ahmad: An Existentialist in Mecca Message-ID: April 13, 1986 A SKEPTIC IN MECCA By DONNE RAFFAT; DONNE RAFFAT IS THE AUTHOR OF ''THE CASPIAN CIRCLE'' AND ''THE PRISON PAPERS OF BOZORG ALAVI.'' LOST IN THE CROWD By Jalal Al-e Ahmad. Translated by John Green. Introduction by Michael Hillman. l57 pp. Washington: Three Continents Press. Cloth, $20. Paper, $9. EARLY in April 1964, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-1969), one of Iran's leading writers and social critics, undertook a hajj, or pilgrimage to the Moslem shrines in Saudi Arabia. Some three weeks later he returned to Teheran with a bleeding foot and a travel diary - now available in its first English-language edition as ''Lost in the Crowd'' - that ranks among his finest works. Why did Al-e Ahmad, a skeptic - indeed, a former member of Iran's Communist Tudeh Party - go on a hajj? He himself poses the question repeatedly. His older brother, a cleric and a representative of the Shiite religious leader Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Borujerdi, was buried in Medina: he is there to visit his grave. He is also there with other members of his family, who are fulfilling their duties as pious Moslems. But none of these reasons address the central issue he raises. ''What did I come on this journey to do?'' he writes. ''Visit shrines? Worship? Observe?'' He does all three, constantly taking notes. The result is a graphic, compelling account of his hajj experience, in a very readable translation by John Green, that also reveals why the travel diary, or safarnameh, has remained a major genre in Persian literature since the 11th century. Just arrived in Medina, Al-e Ahmad is critical and alienated. ''It's easy,'' he says, ''to be among the people and not be a part of them.'' He is offended by the filth, noise, traffic, inefficiency and blatant commercialism, all of which leads him to conclude there is ''no alternative but to internationalize these shrines, Mecca, Medina, Arafat, and Mina, to place them under the management of a joint council of Muslim nations, and to remove them from Saudi Arab control.'' Yet it is also here that his personal quest finds direction. In response to a man who asks him why he, a member of the Shiite minority within Islam, has been praying alongside Sunni Moslems, he declares, ''My dear sir . . . we came here to lose our-selves in the crowd. We didn't come here to reinforce our personalities and our isolation.'' But it is not until he reaches Mecca and undergoes the say, or ritual wandering before the Kaaba, that he fully experiences the ''great engulfing of the individual in the crowd.'' Here, ''utterly helpless'' amid the multitude, he is forced into continual contact with a host of eyes that ''aren't really eyes, but naked consciousnesses.'' ''Before today,'' he muses, ''I thought it was only the sun that could not be regarded with the naked eye, but I realized today that neither can one look at this sea of eyes.'' In that encounter the self, ''if it doesn't exist as a particle working to build a society, is not even a 'self.' It is absolutely nothing.'' The ''great engulfing'' never becomes for Al-e Ahmad a religious experience, though. If the self is temporarily lost in Mecca, it is shocked back into being in Mina, a small town between Mecca and Arafat in which ''all the streets end at a slaughterhouse, covered with mutilated carcasses.'' The stench and animal sacrifice nauseate the author: ''as it stands now,'' he writes, ''the Hajj is mechanized barbarism.'' HE stops again in Mecca, Medina and Jedda on his way out of the country, but his withdrawal has already occurred in his diary, his ''saving grace.'' The writing - for Moslem purists itself a form of sacrilege on the hajj - preserves and reintegrates the self, a process confirmed in his final notes on the flight back to Teheran. ''I mainly came on this trip looking for my brother - and all those other brothers - rather than to search for God,'' he writes. But that has led to ''a kind of awakening,'' a deepening personal skepticism about ideology, religious or political. ''In this way,'' he notes, ''I am smashing the steps of the world of certainty one by one with the pressure of experience, beneath my feet.'' Small wonder that his foot, at journey's end, is injured. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Dec 2 04:14:25 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:14:25 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Does Mr O Know? Message-ID: <49351891.70706@ashisuto.co.jp> Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) www.kunstler.com (December 01 2008) A lot of readers are twanging on me for refraining to castigate President-elect Obama for deeds yet undone. They're discouraged by the advisors and cabinet secretaries he's picked, ostensibly because the crew coming in are Washington "insiders", meaning they can't possibly see or do things differently. My own starting point for this is the belief that in the years just ahead any sociopolitical entity organized at the giant scale will flounder - this includes everything from the federal government to global corporations to factory farms to centralized high schools to national retail chains. So even expecting Mr Obama's government to act effectively may be asking too much in a situation that will require mostly local action. The meta-situation will be the overall decline of energy resources and the necessary downscaling of our activities. We are obviously in a transitional period between the old profligate energy economy and the new economy of relative scarcity. We have no idea how disorderly this transition will be, but there is certainly potential for tremendous instability in daily life. For a while, perhaps, the federal government may retain some ability to affect the way things go, or give the appearance of doing so. This raises the issue of what Mr Obama and his team really know about our energy predicament. The president-elect has made some noises - recently on the 60 Minutes show - that he understands something about the current price dislocations in the oil markets resulting from the larger financial turmoil. He alluded to the public's erroneous notion that current low-ish oil prices mean the oil problem is over. But does the incoming president know some of the following details? For instance, does Mr O know that global oil production appears to have peaked at around 85 million barrels a day, with poor prospects of ever getting beyond that? This single naked fact has broad ramifications, above all whether we can continue to think in terms of industrial "growth" as the benchmark for economic health. There are many interpretations of the current financial fiasco. Some of them are based on long-term technical wave theories. A more down-to-earth view suggests the shock of peak oil - though it doesn't exclude wave theories. Does Mr O know that world oil discovery has fallen to insignificant levels after peaking long ago in the 1960s? Does he know we are finding no more super-giant oil fields on the scale of Arabia's Ghawar or Mexico's Cantarell, which have supplied most of the world's oil for the past forty years and are now running down? Does he know that you can't produce oil that hasn't been discovered? Does Mr O know that virtually all the oil-producing nations have entered production decline. Surely someone has whispered in his ear about the IEA's projection that global oil production would fall 9.1 percent in the coming year. Does Mr O know that oil exports have been trending to decline at a steeper rate than oil depletion? That is, the exporting nations are losing their ability to send oil to the importers (like us) at a rate mathematically greater than the run-down in their production.They are using more of their own oil even while their production is going down. For example, Mexico is depleting overall at more than nine percent a year (with the Cantarell field alone running down at more than fifteen percent annually). Does he know Mexico's net exports are crashing? Mexico has been our number three leading source of imports. In a very few years they will not be able to send us any oil. A deluded American public has no idea that this is happening. Will Mr O explain it to them? Does Mr O know that the "old major" oil companies (Exxon-Mobil, Texaco, Shell, et al) produce less than ten percent of the world's oil now - the other ninety percent coming from the foreign nationals - and that blaming them for the situation is a waste of time. The foreign national companies are changing the landscape of the oil markets. They're making special contracts with "favored customers" rather than just putting their oil up for auction on the futures markets. One thing you can infer from this is that we're entering a period of national oil hoarding based on coming scarcity. The futures markets were based on relative abundance, and they will not operate very well in a climate of scarcity. Consider that the USA will probably not be among the "favored customers" for several oil producing nations. Figure that in with the coming loss of imports from Mexico (and Venezuela and Nigeria). Does Mr O know that the current drop in oil prices (due to massive financial deleveraging) has resulted in the cancellation or postponment of the very oil production projects that were hoped to offset the coming depletions? It's not worth it for an oil enterprise (private or foreign) to drill in deepwater or venture into arctic regions when oil is priced at $50-a-barrel - if it costs $80 to get the stuff out of the ground. It's not worth digging up tar sands in Canada at that price. This halt in activity is going to boomerang back on the US in a year or so, with depletions ongoing everywhere and no new oil to take its place. Does Mr O know that we're just as likely to see shortages as a resuming rise in oil prices here in the US during his coming term? Does Mr O know that the current re-inflation program being run by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve is so egregious that it may lead to loss of the dollar's legitimacy, to the renunciation of dollar holdings by other nations, to the down-rating of US Treasury debt instruments, and finally to an inability of the US to purchase foreign oil - which comprises two-thirds of all the oil we use every day? Does Mr O know that we are not going to run the US automobile and truck fleet on any combination of alt.fuels? Continuing it by other means is a fantasy that will only disappoint us. The motoring era is coming to an end. Heroic investments in highway infrastructure to create jobs will be a tragic waste of our dwindling capital. The pressure for Mr O to make these misinvestments will be enormous, perhaps insurmountable. There are probably not a thousand people in the US who agree with what I am saying - meaning the consensus to keep the cars running at all costs overwhelms reality at the moment. Does Mr O's concept of "change" include the possibility that we may have to live very differently in this society? Chances are, if Mr O knows any of these things he might be crucified in the polls and the media by acknowledging them. The only "change" that America really wants to hear about is evicting George Bush from the White House. They're sick of him and all the disturbance he has caused in their financial affairs. But beyond that, the American public is deathly afraid of the kind of changes we actually face - such as, the end of consumer culture, the gross loss of value in suburban real estate (which forms the bulk of the middle class's private wealth), the prospect of food and fuel scarcities, the need to re-localize our lives, the need to physically shape up to stop the costly and unnecessary drain on our medical resources, to grow more of our own food, to work harder at things that actually matter, and to save whatever we can for a difficult future. If Mr O introduces any of these themes into the national discourse, the public and the media and the bloggers will all dump on him for failing to prop up the wild party that American life became in recent decades. _____ My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers. http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/12/does-mr-o-know.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From mstainsby at resist.ca Tue Dec 2 09:14:10 2008 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:14:10 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Evo Morales: Save the Planet from Capitalism Message-ID: <49355ED2.9060306@resist.ca> Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism Sisters and brothers: Today, our Mother Earth is ill. From the beginning of the 21st century we have lived the hottest years of the last thousand years. Global warming is generating abrupt changes in the weather: the retreat of glaciers and the decrease of the polar ice caps; the increase of the sea level and the flooding of coastal areas, where approximately 60% of the world population live; the increase in the processes of desertification and the decrease of fresh water sources; a higher frequency in natural disasters that the communities of the earth suffer[1]; the extinction of animal and vegetal species; and the spread of diseases in areas that before were free from those diseases. One of the most tragic consequences of the climate change is that some nations and territories are the condemned to disappear by the increase of the sea level. Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system. In two and a half centuries, the so called ?developed? countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries. Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism mother earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger in the world. In the hands of Capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death ? and life itself. Everything, absolutely everything, can be bought and sold and under Capitalism. And even ?climate change? itself has become a business. ?Climate change? has placed all humankind before great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life. In the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the developed countries and economies in transition committed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% below the 1990 levels, through the implementation of different mechanisms among which market mechanisms predominate. Until 2006, greenhouse effect gases, far from being reduced, have increased by 9.1% in relation to the 1990 levels, demonstrating also in this way the breach of commitments by the developed countries. The market mechanisms applied in the developing countries[2] have not accomplished a significant reduction of greenhouse effect gas emissions. Just as well as the market is incapable of regulating global financial and productive system, the market is unable to regulate greenhouse effect gas emissions and will only generate a big business for financial agents and major corporations. The earth is much more important than stock exchanges of Wall Street and the world. While the United States and the European Union allocate 4,100 billion dollars to save the bankers from a financial crisis that they themselves have caused, programs on climate change get 313 times less, that is to say, only 13 billion dollars. The resources for climate change are unfairly distributed. More resources are directed to reduce emissions (mitigation) and less to reduce the effects of climate change that all the countries suffer (adaptation)[3]. The vast majority of resources flow to those countries that have contaminated the most, and not to the countries where we have preserved the environment most. Around 80% of the Clean Development Mechanism projects are concentrated in four emerging countries. Capitalist logic promotes a paradox in which the sectors that have contributed the most to deterioration of the environment are those that benefit the most from climate change programs. At the same time, technology transfer and the financing for clean and sustainable development of the countries of the South have remained just speeches. The next summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen must allow us to make a leap forward if we want to save Mother Earth and humanity. For that purpose the following proposals for the process from Poznan to Copenhagen: Attack the structural causes of climate change 1) Debate the structural causes of climate change. As long as we do not change the capitalist system for a system based in complementarity, solidarity and harmony between the people and nature, the measures that we adopt will be palliatives that will limited and precarious in character. For us, what has failed is the model of ?living better?, of unlimited development, industrialisation without frontiers, of modernity that deprecates history, of increasing accumulation of goods at the expense of others and nature. For that reason we promote the idea of Living Well, in harmony with other human beings and with our Mother Earth. 2) Developed countries need to control their patterns of consumption - of luxury and waste - especially the excessive consumption of fossil fuels. Subsidies of fossil fuel, that reach 150-250 billions of dollars[4], must be progressively eliminated. It is fundamental to develop alternative forms of power, such as solar, geothermal, wind and hydroelectric both at small and medium scales. 3) Agrofuels are not an alternative, because they put the production of foodstuffs for transport before the production of food for human beings. Agrofuels expand the agricultural frontier destroying forests and biodiversity, generate monocropping, promote land concentration, deteriorate soils, exhaust water sources, contribute to rises in food prices and, in many cases, result in more consumption of more energy than is produced. Substantial commitments to emissions reduction that are met 4) Strict fulfilment by 2012 of the commitments[5] of the developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least by 5% below the 1990 levels. It is unacceptable that the countries that polluted the planet throughout the course of history make statements about larger reductions in the future while not complying with their present commitments. 5) Establish new minimum commitments for the developed countries of greenhouse gas emission reduction of 40% by 2020 and 90% by for 2050, taking as a starting point 1990 emission levels. These minimum commitments must be met internally in developed countries and not through flexible market mechanisms that allow for the purchase of certified emissions reduction certificates to continue polluting in their own country. Likewise, monitoring mechanisms must be established for the measuring, reporting and verifying that are transparent and accessible to the public, to guarantee the compliance of commitments. 6) Developing countries not responsible for the historical pollution must preserve the necessary space to implement an alternative and sustainable form of development that does not repeat the mistakes of savage industrialisation that has brought us to the current situation. To ensure this process, developing countries need, as a prerequisite, finance and technology transfer. An Integral Financial Mechanism to address ecological debt 7) Acknowledging the historical ecological debt that they owe to the planet, developed countries must create an Integral Financial Mechanism to support developing countries in: implementation of their plans and programmes for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change; the innovation, development and transfer of technology; in the preservation and improvement of the sinks and reservoirs; response actions to the serious natural disasters caused by climate change; and the carrying out of sustainable and eco-friendly development plans. 8) This Integral Financial Mechanism, in order to be effective, must count on a contribution of at least 1% of the GDP in developed countries[6] and other contributions from taxes on oil and gas, financial transactions, sea and air transport, and the profits of transnational companies. 9) Contributions from developed countries must be additional to Official Development Assistance (ODA), bilateral aid or aid channelled through organisms not part of the United Nations. Any finance outside the UNFCCC cannot be considered as the fulfilment of developed country?s commitments under the Convention. 10) Finance has to be directed to the plans or national programmes of the different States and not to projects that follow market logic. 11) Financing must not be concentrated just in some developed countries but has to give priority to the countries that have contributed less to greenhouse gas emissions, those that preserve nature and are suffering the impact of climate change. 12) The Integral Financial Mechanism must be under the coverage of the United Nations, not under the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and other intermediaries such as the World Bank and regional development banks; its management must be collective, transparent and non-bureaucratic. Its decisions must be made by all member countries, especially by developing countries, and not by the donors or bureaucratic administrators. Technology Transfer to developing countries 13) Innovation and technology related to climate changes must be within the public domain, not under any private monopolistic patent regime that obstructs and makes technology transfer more expensive to developing countries. 14) Products that are the fruit of public financing for technology innovation and development of have to be placed within the public domain and not under a private regime of patents[7], so that they can be freely accessed by developing countries. 15) Encourage and improve the system of voluntary and compulsory licenses so that all countries can access products already patented quickly and free of cost. Developed countries cannot treat patents and intellectual property rights as something ?sacred? that has to be preserved at any cost. The regime of flexibilities available for the intellectual property rights in the cases of serious problems for public health has to be adapted and substantially enlarged to heal Mother Earth. 16) Recover and promote indigenous peoples practices in harmony with nature which have proven to be sustainable through centuries. Adaptation and mitigation with the participation of all the people 17) Promote mitigation actions, programs and plans with the participation of local communities and indigenous people in the framework of full respect for and implementation of the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The best mechanism to confront the challenge of climate change are not market mechanisms, but conscious, motivated, and well organized human beings endowed with an identity of their own. 18) The reduction of the emissions from deforestation and forest degradation must be based on a mechanism of direct compensation from developed to developing countries, through a sovereign implementation that ensures broad participation of local communities, and a mechanism for monitoring, reporting and verifying that is transparent and public. A UN for the Environment and Climate Change 19) We need a World Environment and Climate Change Organization to which multilateral trade and financial organizations are subordinated, so as to promote a different model of development that environmentally friendly and resolves the profound problems of impoverishment. This organization must have effective follow-up, verification and sanctioning mechanisms to ensure that the present and future agreements are complied with. 20) It is fundamental to structurally transform the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the international economic system as a whole, in order to guarantee fair and complementary trade, as well as financing without conditions for sustainable development that avoids the waste of natural resources and fossil fuels in the production processes, trade and product transport. In this negotiation process towards Copenhagen, it is fundamental to guarantee the participation of our people as active stakeholders at a national, regional and worldwide level, especially taking into account those sectors most affected, such as indigenous peoples who have always promoted the defense of Mother Earth. Humankind is capable of saving the earth if we recover the principles of solidarity, complementarity, and harmony with nature in contraposition to the reign of competition, profits and rampant consumption of natural resources. November 28, 2008 Evo Morales Ayma President of Bolivia From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 2 10:31:34 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 09:31:34 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks Message-ID: <486AE938-1120-486E-98DE-484E742F53E8@shaw.ca> Published on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by The Guardian/UK Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks by Jeremy Scahill Barack Obama has assembled a team of rivals to implement his foreign policy. But while pundits and journalists speculate endlessly on the potential for drama with Hillary Clinton at the state department and Bill Clinton's network of shady funders, the real rivalry that will play out goes virtually unmentioned. The main battles will not be between Obama's staff, but rather against those who actually want a change in US foreign policy, not just a staff change in the war room. When announcing his foreign policy team on Monday, Obama said: "I didn't go around checking their voter registration." That is a bit hard to believe, given the 63-question application to work in his White House. But Obama clearly did check their credentials, and the disturbing truth is that he liked what he saw. The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush's time in office to the present. Obama has dismissed suggestions that the public records of his appointees bear much relevance to future policy. "Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost," Obama said. "It comes from me. That's my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing." It is a line the president-elect's defenders echo often. The reality, though, is that their records do matter. We were told repeatedly during the campaign that Obama was right on the premiere foreign policy issue of our day - the Iraq war. "Six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so," Obama said in his September debate against John McCain. "Senator McCain and President Bush had a very different judgment." What does it say that, with 130 members of the House and 23 in the Senate who voted against the war, Obama chooses to hire Democrats who made the same judgement as Bush and McCain? On Iraq, the issue that the Obama campaign described as "the most critical foreign policy judgment of our generation", Biden and Clinton not only supported the invasion, but pushed the Bush administration's propaganda and lies about Iraqi WMDs and fictitious connections to al- Qaida. Clinton and Obama's hawkish, pro-Israel chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, still refuse to renounce their votes in favour of the war. Rice, who claims she opposed the Iraq war, didn't hold elected office and was not confronted with voting for or against it. But she did publicly promote the myth of Iraq's possession of WMDs, saying in the lead up to the war that the "major threat" must "be dealt with forcefully". Rice has also been hawkish on Darfur, calling for "strik[ing] Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets". It is also deeply telling that, of his own free will, Obama selected President Bush's choice for defence secretary, a man with a very disturbing and lengthy history at the CIA during the cold war, as his own. While General James Jones, Obama's nominee for national security adviser, reportedly opposed the Iraq invasion and is said to have stood up to the neocons in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, he did not do so publicly when it would have carried weight. Time magazine described him as "the man who led the Marines during the run-up to the war - and failed to publicly criticise the operation's flawed planning". Moreover, Jones, who is a friend of McCain's, has said a timetable for Iraq withdrawal, "would be against our national interest". But the problem with Obama's appointments is hardly just a matter of bad vision on Iraq. What ultimately ties Obama's team together is their unified support for the classic US foreign policy recipe: the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of US militarism to defend the America First doctrine. Obama's starry-eyed defenders have tried to downplay the importance of his cabinet selections, saying Obama will call the shots, but the ruling elite in this country see it for what it is. Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain", called Obama's cabinet selections, "reassuring", which itself is disconcerting, but neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign staffer Max Boot summed it up best. "I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain," Boot wrote. The appointment of General Jones and the retention of Gates at defence "all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign." Boot added that Hillary Clinton will be a "powerful" voice "for 'neoliberalism' which is not so different in many respects from 'neoconservativism.'" Boot's buddy, Michael Goldfarb, wrote in The Weekly Standard, the official organ of the neoconservative movement, that he sees "certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term." There is not a single, solid anti-war voice in the upper echelons of the Obama foreign policy apparatus. And this is the point: Obama is not going to fundamentally change US foreign policy. He is a status quo Democrat. And that is why the mono-partisan Washington insiders are gushing over Obama's new team. At the same time, it is also disingenuous to act as though Obama is engaging in some epic betrayal. Of course these appointments contradict his campaign rhetoric of change. But move past the speeches and Obama's selections are very much in sync with his record and the foreign policy vision he articulated on the campaign trail, from his pledge to escalate the war in Afghanistan to his "residual force" plan in Iraq to his vow to use unilateral force in Pakistan to defend US interests to his posturing on Iran. "I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel," Obama said in his famed speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last summer. "Sometimes, there are no alternatives to confrontation." ? 2008 Guardian News and Media Limited Jeremy Scahill pledges to be the same journalist under an Obama administration that he was during Bill Clinton and George Bush's presidencies. He is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army and is a frequent contributor to The Nation and Democracy Now! He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. From critical.montages at gmail.com Tue Dec 2 12:59:00 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 14:59:00 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Lost in the Desert Message-ID: Lost in the Desert by Yoshie Furuhashi To the peacemakers who want us to travel half the way with BHO. . . . In a book of Persian proverbs I find: ??? ?? ???? ?? ?????? ??? ?? ????? This one kills with a sword, That one, with cotton. Wisdom of the ages Abandoned by wanderers Lost in the desert To whom Even an old shoe Is a gift from God. Yoshie Furuhashi is editor of MRZine. She is indebted to Mojtaba Aghamohammadi for the two proverbs used in this poem. From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 2 13:10:29 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 12:10:29 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Podur: A break in the Conservative-Liberal coalition References: <49359044.4@killingtrain.com> Message-ID: http://www.killingtrain.com/node/666 A break in the Conservative-Liberal coalition Justin Podur December 2, 2008 In Canada, the Conservative minority government might just become the opposition in parliament this week, replaced by a Liberal-NDP coalition with support from the Bloc Quebecois from the outside. But it is far from a done deal. Something like this almost happened in 2005 when Paul Martin's Liberals were in power. The election that later (in 2006) brought Stephen Harper's Conservatives into power as a minority was deferred by a surprise event: a Conservative MP, Belinda Stronach, crossed the floor, left the Conservatives, and joined the Liberals. A surprise event could save Harper's government too. A week can be a long time in this kind of game. I have argued before that a better frame for understanding Canadian politics in recent years isn't alternating Liberal and Conservative minorities, but a stable Conservative-Liberal majority. Instability in this system is introduced by the Conservatives, who don't want to play by the same rules as their coalition partners. Conservatives and Liberals are in agreement on pro-US foreign policy and economic policies that favor investors and corporations over working people. Both have proven willing to persecute indigenous movements and stoke fears against Muslims. But Conservatives want to do this more brutally. And, perhaps because so much of their politics is based on fear and bigotry, they'll play those up against whoever is in front of them - including Liberals. There are two dimensions to the current (temporary) cracking of the Conservative-Liberal coalition: the real reason and the pretext. The beauty of the situation for the NDP and Liberals is that the Conservatives have already backed off of the real reason, but can't seem to back off of the pretext, which is all their opponents need. The real reason is the Conservatives' refusal to play by the rules. Temporarily secure in their private sector funding and the state of their party organization, they decided to try to defund their political opponents. When that united their opponents against them, they tried to back off of it. But their current campaign to stay in power is still based on the notion that huge parts of the country, the 18% that voted NDP and 10% that voted Bloc (the 7% that voted Green don't even exist in their estimation) are illegitimate. The Liberals, they say, are about to enter into a coalition with "separatists and socialists". Implicit in the accusation is that no political association with these parties is legitimate. The question can't but arise: what do the Conservatives think Canada should do with the "separatists and socialists" that live here? If you lump the NDP, Bloc, and Greens together, as the Conservatives would, you get 35% of the popular vote. Considerably less than the Conservative-Liberal 64%, admittedly, but their eagerness to demonize this huge chunk of the electorate (a favored tactic during Mike Harris's years in Ontario) is just more evidence of how the Conservatives view politics, and their political opponents. By trying to defund them, they showed the Liberals that when they feel strong enough, they won't even accept them as junior partner. Once their defunding proposal had united their opponents, they backed off of it. But the now-united opposition can't anyway campaign on something so self-interested as public funding for themselves. They can, however, accuse the Conservatives of being irresponsible economic managers. And Finance Minister Flaherty, who oversaw the pillage of Ontario's finances under the Mike Harris/Ernie Eves Common Sense Revolution, certainly presented an irresponsible economic package, based on avoiding deficits (which Harper later admitted he would run - and which Harris/Eves happily ran in Ontario, even as they slashed and privatized the public sector) and tax increases (which are, unfortunately, still a taboo, though the current US President-Elect managed to win despite acknowledging that it might be necessary to tax the wealthy) by plundering what is left of Canada's public assets. This is bad economics. If there is an economic crisis going on, with unemployment, spare capacity, and deflation, who will have the cash to buy public assets? How much cash would such one-time sales, which could only fetch extremely low prices, generate? If the assets are underperforming, why would the private sector want them? If they are not underperforming, why get rid of them when little else in the economy is working? Conservative economics is not about responsible management, however. The policies make sense if the purpose is to transfer public assets into the private domain and destroy the capacity for public services and governance (see Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", or more recently, Thomas Frank's "The Wrecking Crew", for more about this type of economics). There is just enough disagreement on this specific aspect of economic policy, and on climate change, to crack the Liberals and Conservatives now. The Conservatives can't back off of it completely, and this gives their opponents the pretext they need to continue. As for Harper's accusation that the opposition is being "undemocratic", it reveals a confusion about his mandate and the parliamentary system in which he operates. Canada is not the United States. In the US, the electorate votes for a President. In Canada, no one votes for a Prime Minister. They vote for a party. A minority government is one where no party won a clear mandate, and must therefore present policies that are non-partisan and have the backing of at least some of the opposition. Harper failed to do so. The accusation of "undemocratic" could be equally applied to the Conservatives, but would best be applied to the entire electoral system, since it lacks proportional representation. On the other side, a mutually suspicious coalition of liberals and social democrats can work if they agree on a minimum program. In India, the Left parties supported the Congress Party from the outside and allowed it to form a government based on some basic social democratic policies. When the Congress Party moved ahead with the Indo- US nuclear deal, the Left parties stopped supporting Congress, which still survived in power by finding other allies (and, quite possibly, buying votes). Back in Canada, Liberal-NDP coalition could move forward on a more sensible social democratic economic program. The NDP showed in 2006 that it is willing to bring the Liberals down if forced to do so. I believed then that the NDP was correct in their decision, even though Harper won the ensuing elections. The junior partner has no credibility in a partnership unless they show a willingness to walk away. If the Liberal-NDP coalition succeeds in ousting Harper, both parties would do well to take the right lessons from those days. Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. He can be reached at justin at killingtrain.com . From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 2 13:44:23 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:44:23 -0800 Subject: [R-G] The Bombai terror and the Kashmir question Message-ID: <200812022044.mB2KiNu0009333@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081202/2888fdf1/attachment.txt From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 2 15:03:44 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 14:03:44 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Media Avoids the Dirt: Mining companies get an easy ride in Canadian press Message-ID: November 27, 2008 http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2197 Media Avoids the Dirt Mining companies get an easy ride in Canadian press by Tim McSorley The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca When the media does cover mining, the vast majority of stories are based on economics, rather than on any of the issues raised on the signs at this demonstration against Canadian company GoldCorp. Photo: Allan Cedillo Lissner MONTREAL, QUEBEC?From developing on fresh-water-providing glaciers in the Andes, to invading First Nations lands in Ontario, to blowing off the tops of mountains in Virginia, mining maintains one of the poorest records for environmental and social policies of nearly any industry. ?Forestry can be incredibly destructive for the environment, to the ecosystem, however if it is done properly...the forestry industry can be a nice example of a regenerative, natural resource-based industry that preserves land and ecosystems and also produces economic benefits and jobs,? says Toby Heaps, Editor-in-Chief of Corporate Knights magazine. ?Mining? not so much in its present form,? he continues, adding that while practices can vary widely between companies, the last 30 years has shown the mining industry as both environmentally and socially destructive. While Canadian companies lead the way in the mining industry, with almost 10,000 projects worldwide, mining activists say that lack of coverage in the mainstream media means many Canadians remain ignorant of Canada's role in the global mining market. ?I think people aren?t really aware of the scale of the industry; that Canada?s mining sector is so active in so many parts of the world,? says Ian Thomson, Corporate Social Responsibility Program Co-ordinator for Kairos, a Canadian ecumenical social justice organization. ?Little is written [about mining development] unless it becomes a total disaster, so then you may get an article when there are family members who are murdered, or there is a huge spill of tailings or other toxic chemicals that impact a huge river system. It?s only when it reaches this horrendous scale that the media seems to think to pay attention.? Beyond a lack of reporting, Thomson also sees an underlying lack of analysis when it comes to journalists covering the industry. ?I think that what?s missing is there is a pattern here?that this isn?t just one or two isolated cases, but is the case where it?s just a heavily under-regulated industry,? he explains. ?A report was issued by the UN earlier this year, saying the problem is that there is this governance gap, where companies operate as multinationals but are regulated at a national level and that?s what leads to these conflicts and these violations.? A quick search through Canadian news database Proquest, which archives articles from all major English language dailies in Canada, seems to back up Thomson?s statements. While a search for articles on mining over the past year brings up over 6,000 pieces, a search for "mining and environment" brings up just under 300; similar results are achieved with "mining and community" or "mining and sustainable development." Overwhelmingly, the articles focus purely on economics, rather than the impact of the industry. Heaps and Thomson both point to growing cuts in foreign and investigative journalism for this lack of coverage. Over the last decade, media consolidation and the quest for higher profits have resulted in closures of foreign bureaus. CanWest Global, Canada?s largest media conglomerate, maintains only two foreign newspaper bureaus, down from eight, when the chain was still owned by Southam. Tighter deadlines in order to meet the demands of the internet has also contributed to increased pressure on journalists, says Thomson, and less coverage of stories outside large urban areas, where mining operations are located. But it isn?t just news media that has helped obscure the impacts of the mining industry; advertising has played significant role as well. Like many industries, mining has jumped on the corporate social responsibility bandwagon, attempting to reform their image through advertising campaigns vaunting their belief in a greener, cleaner and more equitable world. While some of the advertisements may be legitimate, it is difficult to distinguish which are real and which are simply window-dressing. One company that has attempted to reform its image over the last 10 years is aluminum giant Alcan (Rio Tinto Alcan, since it was acquired by fellow mining giant Rio Tinto last year). In the past, Alcan has been heavily criticized for its operations in central India, initiating huge bauxite mines without public consultation or environmental precautions. Concerns persist over its plans to expand hydroelectricity production for smelters in Iceland and the company has also been embroiled in a messy dispute over the future of its operations in Kitimat, B.C., where labour officials claim that the company is not meeting its promised levels of job creation. Throughout the fall, the company ran a massive publicity campaign in Alcan?s home province of Quebec. Featuring crystal-clear water, bright green forests and fields and a blue sky that you wish you could fly away into, the advert focuses on everything?sponsoring paralympians, research and technology, and job creation?except its environmental impact. It does state, in soothing tones as a lone deer trots across the screen, that it "produces respect for the environment," but it in no way quantifies how or what it does to minimize its environmental impact. "If an ad has a little girl running through a field, but also gives numbers on its accomplishments, that?s fine,? says Heaps. ?[But] if the purpose or the effects of that ad is to slow down progress [towards sustainability] in that company or give them a decoy for people who want to accelerate the progress [towards sustainability] of the company, then that?s a problem. Those are the key questions you need to ask yourself: what was the intent of the company with this ad, and was it to accelerate its move towards being more sustainable, or was it to slow it down or turn it back?? Consumers are becoming more wary of these advertising campaigns. Recently, advertising watchdogs in Canada, such as the Canadian Standards Association and the Competition Bureau?and in Britain, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)?have seen an upsurge in complaints about misleading ?green? advertisements, resulting in the Canadian government adopting stronger rules on green labeling and terminology, and the ASA taking more and more companies to task. But Thomson also warns that we cannot rely too much on the government to address the situation. He points to another story that has seen little coverage in Canada?the government?s complicity in mining activities. ?On many of the overseas trips [Prime Minister] Harper has taken, he has made sure to find the time to meet with mining executives,? says Thomson, adding that such meetings provide legitimacy to companies that are attempting to skirt social and environmentAL relations. In 2007, Harper met with Barrick Gold executives in Chile at the same time that residents of Pascua Lama were raising serious concerns about Barrick?s undertakings in their region; Harper refused their request for a meeting, entering Barrick's office through the back door. On other occasions, Canadian ambassadors, including Guatemala and the Philippines, have maneuvered in favour of mining companies facing difficulties in obtaining permits or facing criticism for the actions. For now, both Heaps and Thomson say that Canadians will need to look outside the mainstream press to find out what Canadian mining companies are up to. ?What we need to see is renewed investment and commitment to investigative journalism, to work a story over the long term,? says Heaps. ?That?s the only way to cover something like this.? Tim McSorley is Media Analysis Editor at The Dominion. From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 2 15:05:01 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 14:05:01 -0800 Subject: [R-G] While Mineral Resources Boomed, Canada Partied... Message-ID: <071FCBBE-59B5-4C59-8C79-2C636BA8BD3B@shaw.ca> November 29, 2008 http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2249 While Mineral Resources Boomed, Canada Partied ...and lost manufacturing jobs, narrowed economic base by Jim Stanford The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca [cc 2.0] In the mining sector average real wages (adjusted for rising consumer prices) have actually declined by seven per cent since 2002 ? a period of unprecedented corporate profitability. Photo: Dan Godin TORONTO, ONTARIO?We?ve all heard the story about the poor guy who won the lottery. He didn?t manage his new wealth very well: spending like a drunken sailor, giving it away to friends, sinking into debt. In the end, he said that winning the lottery was the worst thing that ever happened to him. Canada is blessed with incredible resource and mineral wealth. For a country, it?s kind of like winning the lottery. What could be better than to find out that the stuff buried beneath our feet is worth untold billions or even trillions of dollars on inflated global commodity markets? And that?s what it's felt like in the last few years. The global commodities boom began in earnest around 2003. And Canada was right in there, partying hard. During the last five years, global prices for minerals and other resource commodities have soared, even while mining sector employees faced a decline in real wages. Profits of Canadian mining companies, petroleum giants, and other resource firms expanded to untold levels. New investment and employment opportunities were created in some resource communities. Even governments rode a fiscal wave of new revenues thanks to the commodities boom ? using their share of resource profits to finance new initiatives (including expensive corporate tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited the resource companies whose profits were already sky-high). At the same time as the resource boom rolled on, however, there were some important, little-noticed structural changes occurring deeper down in Canada?s economy. We became significantly more dependent on the production and export of largely unprocessed natural resources (minerals, agricultural products, and especially energy) to pay our way in the economy, and in world trade. For example, unprocessed or barely processed resources now account for about 60 per cent of all our merchandise exports. Value-added merchandise (for which we process, manufacture, and add value to our resources) make up only 40 per cent. That?s a dramatic change from just 2000, when those ratios were reversed (value-added products were 60 per cent of our exports, and resources 40 per cent). Directly and indirectly, therefore, the resource boom substantially narrowed Canada?s economic base. Manufacturing has withered away, shedding over 400,000 jobs, hammered by the inflated value of our currency (which soared in line with oil prices and other commodity values). Other non-resource industries were also hurt by the overvalued loonie, including tourism and exportable services (like business services and transportation). Indeed, according to Statistics Canada data, our services trade deficit is now the worst ever. And excluding minerals and petroleum, Canada went from a $17 billion trade surplus in 2002, to a deficit that will exceed $30 billion this year. Unfortunately, it seems, we relied on the ?easy? money provided by record commodity prices to subsidize the erosion of our trade performance in other, higher-technology industries. Productivity was another casualty of the commodities boom. Productivity in the mining and energy sectors has declined (as companies chase increasingly marginal and hence expensive deposits), and the destruction of high-productivity manufacturing jobs has also hurt productivity badly. Statistics Canada reported recently that national productivity is now lower than it was at the beginning of January 2006 ? ironically, when Stephen Harper?s petroleum-friendly government came to power. The commodities boom has thus been associated with the longest sustained productivity slide in our postwar history. There have certainly been some trickle-down benefits from the resource boom. New jobs and incomes in mining and resource communities have been much-appreciated. Mining unions like the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) have fought hard to ensure that resource workers get a decent share of the unprecedented wealth they are producing, and in some cases we made significant forward progress during the boom. Across the resource industry as a whole, however, the distribution of the windfall gains resulting from the commodities bubble was anything but fair. The accompanying table summarizes the changes in several measures of corporate profitability and wages in the mining and petroleum industries in Canada during the boom. Corporate revenues soared, thanks to record global prices for oil and minerals. Operating profits more than doubled in the oil industry, and more than quadrupled in mining. Measured as a return on shareholders? equity, profit rates more than doubled. Wages grew, yes ? but not dramatically. Average hourly wages are up just five per cent in mining, and 15 per cent in petroleum. And the high cost of living in booming resource communities has eaten up those gains. Incredibly, in the mining sector average real wages (adjusted for rising consumer prices) have actually declined by seven per cent since 2002 ? a period of unprecedented corporate profitability. To be sure, Canada is blessed with abundant resource wealth. But we have clear choices regarding how to make the most of that wealth. We don?t want to end up like that poor fellow who now wishes he?d never won the lottery. In recent years we?ve had a helter-skelter approach to managing the boom, throwing caution to the wind; companies fell over each other to extract and export as much resource wealth as they could, while the getting was good. We even allowed foreign companies to grab much of the pie. Canada is the only major petroleum- and mineral-exporting country in the world that imposes virtually no limits on foreign ownership of our non- renewable resource base. No wonder, then, that foreigners came rushing in for a piece of this super-profitable action. Over $200 billion in new foreign investment flowed into Canada during 2006 and 2007 alone (almost all of it to take over existing companies, rather than building new ones ? and most of it in the resource sector). This inflow of hot foreign money accentuated the unsustainable run-up in the loonie, which did so much damage to the rest of our economy. In short, during this boom, big money flowed fast and furious ? for a while. But now the commodities bubble has clearly burst, and the boom is coming to an end. Global financial instability and the prospect of a recession in the US and other countries has suddenly knocked the stuffing out of resource prices (and our dollar). It turned out that putting all our eggs in the resource basket, and not worrying about extracting maximum value-added from those resources, may not have been the best economic strategy for the long-term, after all. Did we make the most of our non-renewable wealth? Or were we obsessed with short-term profits, ignoring the state of our true fundamentals: our technology, our productivity, and our capacity to add value to our resources through our work and our ingenuity? A better approach is to use our resource wealth carefully, as a strategic asset. Foster resource development, yes ? but with strings attached. We should require the use of Canadian-made inputs and services to mining, and the made-in-Canada downstream processing and manufacturing of our own resources. Attaching performance requirements to foreign takeovers (regarding Canadian value-added commitments) would also help. Our currency should be deliberately managed (through lower interest rates and restrictions on foreign investment) to prevent a resource boom from squeezing out other valuable export industries. There should also be binding mechanisms through which mining companies are regulated to ensure that they are not abusing workers or the environment. Canada partied hard while the commodities boom lasted. Now we?re likely to be stuck with a national hangover, reflected in our backsliding on productivity and non-resource exports, and the plunging value of Canada?s resource-heavy stock market. Let?s see if we can learn our lesson. Next time global commodities markets catch fire, let?s be a little more careful and deliberate about jumping into the flames. Let?s use our fortunate legacy of resource wealth to build a more diversified, value-added economy ? one that can prosper long after the resources are gone. Jim Stanford is economist with the Canadian Auto Workers, and an economics columnist for the Globe and Mail. He is author of the new book, Economics for Everyone. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 2 15:39:43 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:39:43 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Kafka has a rival (John Pilger) Message-ID: <200812022239.mB2Mdhrt027575@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081202/d2139e11/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 2 15:55:32 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:55:32 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Mumbai, the NYTs Revisionism, and Lessons Not Learned Message-ID: <200812022255.mB2MtWFK001487@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081202/ebbf4c35/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 2 16:48:24 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:48:24 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Gaza: Beyond the Blockade Message-ID: <200812022348.mB2NmOxU001435@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081202/30263881/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 2 17:09:50 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:09:50 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Palestinian Civil Society's Strategic Position Paper for the Durban Review Conference, Geneva, 20 - 24 April 2009 Message-ID: <200812030009.mB309oaT011454@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081202/5a16153a/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 2 17:23:47 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:23:47 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Shock as top Indian Army officer arrested over bomb attack Message-ID: <200812030023.mB30NlT6002471@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081202/d4a2c606/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Dec 2 20:49:42 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:49:42 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Anti-Empire Report Message-ID: <493601D6.5070502@ashisuto.co.jp> by William Blum www.killinghope.org (December 01 2008) Vote First. Ask Questions Later. Okay, let's get the obvious out of the way. It was historic. I choked up a number of times, tears came to my eyes, even though I didn't vote for him. I voted for Ralph Nader for the fourth time in a row. During the past eight years when I've listened to news programs on the radio each day I've made sure to be within a few feet of the radio so I could quickly change the station when that preposterous man or one of his disciples came on; I'm not a masochist, I suffer fools very poorly, and I get bored easily. Sad to say, I'm already turning the radio off sometimes when Obama comes on. He doesn't say anything, or not enough, or not often enough. Platitudes, clich?s, promises without substance, "hope and change", almost everything without sufficient substance, "change and hope", without specifics, designed not to offend. What exactly are the man's principles? He never questions the premises of the empire. Never questions the premises of the "War on Terror". I'm glad he won for two reasons only: John McCain and Sarah Palin, and I deeply resent the fact that the American system forces me to squeeze out a drop of pleasure from something so far removed from my ideals. Obama's votes came at least as much from people desperate for relief from neo-conservative suffocation as from people who genuinely believed in him. It's a form of extortion - Vote for Obama or you get more of the same. Those are your only choices. Is there reason to be happy that the insufferably religious George W is soon to be history? "I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis." That was said by someone named Barack Obama {1}. The United States turns out religious fanatics like the Japanese turn out cars. Let's pray for an end to this. As I've mentioned before, if you're one of those who would like to believe that Obama has to present center-right foreign policy views to be elected, but once he's in the White House we can forget that he misled us repeatedly and the true, progressive man of peace and international law and human rights will emerge ... keep in mind that as a US Senate candidate in 2004 he threatened missile strikes against Iran {2}, and winning that election apparently did not put him in touch with his inner peacenik. He's been threatening Iran ever since. The world is in terrible shape. I don't think I have to elucidate on that remark. How nice, how marvelously nice it would be to have an American president who was infused with progressive values and political courage. Just imagine what could be done. Like a quick and complete exit from Iraq. You can paint the picture as well as I can. With his popularity Obama could get away with almost anything, but he'll probably continue to play it safe. Or what may be more precise, he'll continue to be himself; which, apparently, is a committed centrist. He's not really against the war. Not like you and I are. During Obama's first four years in the White House, the United States will not leave Iraq. I doubt that he'd allow a complete withdrawal even in a second term. Has he ever unequivocally called the war illegal and immoral? A crime against humanity? Why is he so close to Colin Powell? Does he not know of Powell's despicable role in the war? And retaining George W Bush's Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, a man against whom it would not be difficult to draw up charges of war crimes? Will he also find a place for Rumsfeld? And Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a supporter of the war, to run the Homeland Security department? And General James Jones, a former NATO commander (sic), who wants to "win" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who backed John McCain, as his National Security Adviser? Jones is on the Board of Directors of the Boeing Corporation and Chevron Oil. Out of what dark corner of Obama's soul does all this come? As Noam Chomsky recently pointed out, the election of an indigenous person (Evo Morales) in Bolivia and a progressive person (Jean-Bertrand Aristide) in Haiti were more historic than the election of Barack Obama. He's not really against torture either. Not like you and I are. No one will be punished for using or ordering torture. No one will be impeached because of torture. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says that prosecuting Bush officials is necessary to set future anti-torture policy. "The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don't see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable." {3} As president, Obama cannot remain silent and do nothing; otherwise he will inherit the war crimes of Bush and Cheney and become a war criminal himself. Closing the Guantanamo hell-hole means nothing at all if the prisoners are simply moved to other torture dungeons. If Obama is truly against torture, why does he not declare that after closing Guantanamo the inmates will be tried in civilian courts in the US or resettled in countries where they clearly face no risk of torture? And simply affirm that his administration will faithfully abide by the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, of which the United States is a signatory, and which states: "The term 'torture' means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining information or a confession ... inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or any other person acting in an official capacity". The convention affirms that: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture". Instead, Obama has appointed former CIA official John O Brennan as an adviser on intelligence matters and co-leader of his intelligence transition team. Brennan has called "rendition" - the kidnap-and-torture program carried out under the Clinton and Bush administrations - a "vital tool", and praised the CIA's interrogation techniques for providing "lifesaving" intelligence. {4} Obama may prove to be as big a disappointment as Nelson Mandela, who did painfully little to improve the lot of the masses of South Africa while turning the country over to the international forces of globalization. I make this comparison not because both men are black, but because both produced such great expectations in their home country and throughout the world. Mandela was freed from prison on the assumption of the Apartheid leaders that he would become president and pacify the restless black population while ruling as a non-radical, free-market centrist without undue threat to white privilege. It's perhaps significant that in his autobiography he declines to blame the CIA for his capture in 1962 even though the evidence to support this is compelling {5}. It appears that Barack Obama made a similar impression upon the American power elite who vetted him in many fundraising and other meetings and smoothed the way for his highly unlikely ascendancy from obscure state senator to the presidency in four years. The financial support from the corporate world to sell "Brand Obama" was extraordinary. Another comparison might be with Tony Blair. The Tories could never have brought in university fees or endless brutal wars, but New Labour did. The Republicans would have had a very difficult time bringing back the draft, but I can see Obama reinstating it, accompanied by a suitable slogan, some variation of "Yes, we can!". I do hope I'm wrong, about his past and about how he'll rule as president. I hope I'm very wrong. Many people are calling for progressives to intensely lobby the Obama administration, to exert pressure to bring out the "good Obama", force him to commit himself, hold him accountable. The bold reforms of Roosevelt's New Deal were spurred by widespread labor strikes and other militant actions soon after the honeymoon period was over. At the moment I have nothing better to offer than that. God help us. The future as we used to know it has ceased to exist. And other happy thoughts. Reading the accounts of the terrorist horror in Mumbai has left me as pessimistic as a dinosaur contemplating the future of his grandchildren. How could they do that? ... destroying all those lives, people they didn't even know, people enjoying themselves on vacation ... whatever could be their motivation? Well, they did sort of know some of their victims; they knew they were Indians, or Americans, or British, or Zionists, or some other kind of infidel; so it wasn't completely mindless, not totally random. Does that help to understand? Can it ease the weltschmerz? You can even make use of it. The next time you encounter a defender of American foreign policy, someone insisting that something like Mumbai justifies Washington's rhetorical and military attacks against Islam, you might want to point out that the United States does the same on a regular basis. For seven years in Afghanistan, almost six in Iraq, to give only the two most obvious examples ... breaking down doors and machine-gunning strangers, infidels, traumatizing children for life, firing missiles into occupied houses, exploding bombs all over the place, pausing to torture ... every few days dropping bombs on Pakistan or Afghanistan, and still Iraq, claiming they've killed members of al-Qaeda, just as bad as Zionists, bombing wedding parties, one after another, twenty or thirty or seventy killed, all terrorists of course, often including top al-Qaeda leaders, the number one or number two man, so we're told; so not completely mindless, not totally random; the survivors say it was a wedding party, their brother or their nephew or their friend, mostly women and children dead; the US military pays people to tell them where so-and-so number-one bad guy is going to be; and the US military believes what they're told, so Bombs Away! ... Does any of that depress you like Mumbai? Sometimes they bomb Syria instead, or kill people in Iran or Somalia, all bad guys ... "US helicopter-borne troops have carried out a raid inside Syria along the Iraqi border, killing eight people including a woman, Syrian authorities say" reports the BBC {6} ... "The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials ... The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States", the New York Times informs us {7}. So it's all nice and legal, not an attack upon civilization by a bunch of escaped mental patients. Maybe the Mumbai terrorists also have a piece of paper, from some authority, saying that it's okay what they did ... I'm feeling better already. The mythology of the War on Terrorism On November 8, three men were executed by the government of Indonesia for terrorist attacks on two night clubs in Bali in 2002 that took the lives of 202 people, more than half of whom were Australians, Britons and Americans. The Associated Press {8} reported that "the three men never expressed remorse, saying the suicide bombings were meant to punish the United States and its Western allies for alleged atrocities in Afghanistan and elsewhere". During the recent US election campaign, John McCain and his followers repeated a sentiment that has become a commonplace - that the War on Terrorism has been a success because there hasn't been a terrorist attack against the United States since September 11 2001; as if terrorists killing Americans is acceptable if it's done abroad. Since the first American strike on Afghanistan in October 2001 there have been literally scores of terrorist attacks against American institutions in the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific, more than a dozen in Pakistan alone: military, civilian, Christian, and other targets associated with the United States. The year following the Bali bombings saw the heavy bombing of the US-managed Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, the site of diplomatic receptions and 4th of July celebrations held by the American Embassy. The Marriott Hotel in Pakistan was the scene of a major terrorist bombing just two months ago. All of these attacks have been in addition to the thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan against US occupation, which Washington officially labels an integral part of the War on Terrorism. Yet American lovers of military force insist that the War on Terrorism has kept the United States safe. Even the claim that the War on Terrorism has kept Americans safe at home is questionable. There was no terrorist attack in the United States during the 6 1/2 years prior to the one in September 2001; not since the April 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. It would thus appear that the absence of terrorist attacks in the United States is the norm. An even more insidious myth of the War on Terrorism has been the notion that terrorist acts against the United States can be explained, largely, if not entirely, by irrational hatred or envy of American social, economic, or religious values, and not by what the United States does to the world; ie, US foreign policy. Many Americans are mightily reluctant to abandon this idea. Without it the whole paradigm - that we are the innocent good guys and they are the crazy, fanatic, bloodthirsty bastards who cannot be talked to but only bombed, tortured and killed - falls apart. Statements like the one above from the Bali bombers blaming American policies for their actions are numerous, coming routinely from Osama bin Laden and those under him. {9} Terrorism is an act of political propaganda, a bloody form of making the world hear one's outrage against a perceived oppressor, graffiti written on the wall in some grim, desolate alley. It follows that if the perpetrators of a terrorist act declare what their motivation was, their statement should carry credibility, no matter what one thinks of their cause or the method used to achieve it. Just put down that stereotype and no one gets hurt. Sarah Palin and her American supporters resent what they see as the East Coast elite, the intellectuals, the cultural snobs, the politically correct, the pacifists and peaceniks, the agnostics and atheists, the environmentalists, the fanatic animal protectors, the food police, the health gestapo, the socialists, and other such leftist and liberal types who think of themselves as morally superior to Joe Sixpack, Joe the Plumber, National Rifle Association devot?es, rednecks, and all the Bush supporters who have relished the idea of having a president no smarter than themselves. It's stereotyping gone wild. So in the interest of bringing some balance and historical perspective to the issue, allow me to remind you of some forgotten, or never known, factoids which confound the stereotypes. * Josef Stalin studied for the priesthood. * Adolf Hitler once hoped to become a Catholic priest or monk; he was a vegetarian and was anti-smoking. * Hermann Goering, while his Luftwaffe rained death upon Europe, kept a sign in his office that read: "He who tortures animals wounds the feelings of the German people". * Adolf Eichmann was cultured, read deeply, played the violin. * Benito Mussolini also played the violin. * Some Nazi concentration camp commanders listened to Mozart to drown out the cries of the inmates. * Charles Manson was a staunch anti-vivisectionist. * Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, charged with war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, had been a psychiatrist specializing in depression; the author of a published book of poetry as well as children's books, often with themes of nature; and a practitioner of alternative medicine. I'm not really certain to what use you might put this information to advance toward our cherished national goal of becoming a civilized society, but I feel a need to disseminate it. If you know of any other examples of the same type, I'd appreciate your sending them to me. The examples above are all of "bad guys" doing "good" things. There are of course many more instances of "good guys" doing "bad" things. Notes 1. Washington Post, August 17 2008 2. Chicago Tribune, September 25 2004 3. Associated Press, November 17 2008 4. New York Times, October 03 2008 5. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), page 278; William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 23, "How the CIA sent Nelson Mandela to prison for 28 years" 6. BBC, October 26 2008 7. New York Times, November 09 2008 8. Associated Press, November 09 2008 9. See my article at: http://www.killinghope.org/superogue/terintro.htm William Blum is the author of:- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two (Common Courage Press, 1995) Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002) West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002) Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common Courage Press, 2004) Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website. To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 at aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area. Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite. Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned. http://www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer64.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 2 21:16:20 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 20:16:20 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Ratified Message-ID: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 163 ... December 2, 2008 __________________________________________________ Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Ratified Todd Gordon Not a government to fail to live up to its reactionary commitments, the Tories signed Canada's free trade agreement with Colombia on November 21st. The signing is the culmination of the Tory government's aggressive campaign to reach a trade deal with the human-rights troubled Andean country. Prime Minister Harper first announced his government's intention to get a deal with Colombia during his state visit there in July, 2007. Sixteen months and three high-level cabinet- minister visits later, andvoila!, mission accomplished. The Tories actually used the occasion of the recent Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings in Lima, Peru to sign the agreement. The signing of the trade deal at an international meeting that was dominated by discussions of what will likely be the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression speaks volumes about the Tory government and its neoliberal attitude to the economic meltdown: more, not less, free markets is the proper medicine to get us through our economic sickness (this was confirmed a week later when Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, followed his economic update by announcing no new spending or economic stimulus was planned). Harper arrogantly proclaimed in Lima: "In a time of Global economic instability free trade is more important than ever." The deal is part of a major rapprochement with Colombia, and as I've argued previously is actually part of a broader Canadian geo-strategic agenda in the Andean region. But rapprochement in general, and this trade deal in particular, come at a considerable human rights cost. Harper consistently downplays the scale of the human rights disaster in Colombia, and erroneously suggests that Colombian President, Alvaro Uribe, is part of the solution rather than the problem. "While there is no denying that Colombians continue to live with serious security challenges," Harper blithely stated in Lima, "the improvements we have seen over the last several years gives us much reason for optimism." A Deteriorating Human Rights Situation Harper's faith in Uribe is about as well warranted as his faith in free markets; and like his faith in free markets, it's based on ignoring all the evidence to the contrary. In actual fact, the human rights situation in Colombia is deteriorating. According to the International Centre for Trade Union Rights, by September, 2008 there had already been 40 unionists assassinated in Colombia, compared to 38 over the same period the year before. Less than a week after Canada concluded its trade negotiations on June, 7 of this year, union member, Favier Dario Pelaez Casta?o, was murdered. Death threats, illegal arrests and armed attacks have also increased "substantially" from the year before. The majority of these attacks on union activists are perpetrated by the various right wing paramilitary groups roaming Colombia. This allows trade deal apologists, to the extent they acknowledge human rights atrocities against unionists occurring in the country, to suggest that the Colombian government bears no responsibility. However, as a number of commentators have shown, paramilitaries have close ties to the Colombian military, and often operate with the military's at least tacit support. On top of this, the Uribe government has been embroiled in a scandal for several months now, in which the ties to paramilitaries of dozens of his political allies have been exposed. Indigenous peoples, whose land in large swaths of the country is much- coveted by Canadian oil and gas and mining companies for its subsurface riches, have also suffered greatly under the Uribe regime. The Centre for Indigenous Cooperation (CECOIN) reports that not only did the number of violations against indigenous communities increase in the first four years of Uribe's government, but those acts attributable to government security forces increased as well. From 1998-2002 there were 298 recorded cases of human rights violations against indigenous peoples committed by government forces. From 2002-2006, the years of Uribe's first term, there were 672 ? a significant increase. State-sponsored assassinations of indigenous activists also increased from 26 between 1998-2002 to 62 between 2002-2006. A little over a month before the signing of the trade deal in Lima, a mass protest of indigenous groups in Cauca, demanding the government fulfill previously-made promises around land, education and health, was met with a massive show of force by state security forces. The security forces attacked the protest, injuring more than fifty indigenous activists and killing one. That was the 11th indigenous person killed in Colombia in the three weeks leading up to and including the protests in Cauca. The military push into indigenous communities in Cauca has increased under Uribe, as the region has untapped (by foreign companies, that is) natural resources. Security forces often accuse indigenous activists of being guerrillas, and justify their killings on these grounds, despite the activists' explicit dissociation from guerrilla organizations. Tied to the attack on indigenous communities is the increase in displacement occurring across the country, as the military and paramilitaries clear regions of their human inhabitants, including along with indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians and poor peasants, for resource development. The war between guerrillas, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), on the one hand, and paramilitaries and the army, on the other, has also contributed to the displacement. More than 280,000 people were displaced over the first 6 months of 2008, 41% more than the same period in 2007. Disappearances have also increased significantly under Uribe. According to Colombia observer, Gary Leech, Colombia's Prosecutor's Office is investigating the disappearance of 1,015 people in the past year, which is more than four times the number of disappeared in 2007. Disappearances have increased for four years in a row, and the military's involvement is suspected in more than 90% of cases. As Leech starkly notes, the massive scale of disappearances "places the Uribe government on par with the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet during the darkest years of Chile's dirty war." A Human-Rights Friendly Trade Deal? While the Tories downplay the scale of the human rights problem in Colombia, they can't ignore it outright. And so to assuage their critics, they included a Labour Cooperation side agreement (not part of the actual trade deal), which they claim will ensure that Canadian trade and investment doesn't contribute to an already bleak rights situation in the country. The side agreement calls on the two countries to respect basic core labour standards (right to unionize, no child labour, no forced labour etc.). But, not surprisingly, there are a number of serious limits to this side agreement that should give us pause. For one thing, there's no standing body established beyond those that might already exist in the respective countries to oversee the side agreement's day-to-day implementation or to which workers can complain when their rights have been violated. In other words, Colombians will have to complain to bodies within the Colombian government, which presumably they can (theoretically at least) do now and which therefore sharply diminishes any efficacy the side agreement may have had given the government's rights record. There is a provision for either of the partner countries to request a ministerial "consultation" with each other if they feel obligations under the side agreement aren't being met (Part Three of the agreement). If unsatisfied with the response, the country that initiated the consultation can then call for the formation of a review panel to report on the claim that obligations aren't being followed. But we have to ask: if Canada signs a trade agreement with Colombia after purposefully downplaying the depth of latter's human rights problems, and after ignoring the implication of the government with which it signed the agreement in these problems, why would it complain about these problems after the agreement comes into force? Further, given the violence and intimidation that's regularly visited upon unionists in Colombia, what is the likelihood of them coming forward to tell their story, or doing so safely? And the punishment for failing to live up to obligations? Fines. As I noted in a previous article (referenced above), this amounts to a decriminalization of violence and intimidation. Moreover, it's not clear in the side agreement that the Colombian government will be held responsible for the actions of paramilitaries, who're responsible for a significant amount of the violence against union activists and retain a nominal independence from the government. Another major flaw of the Labour Cooperation side agreement is that it obviously doesn't cover indigenous peoples, who're victimized at staggering rates in the name of foreign investment and corporate interests. How can Canada talk meaningfully about addressing human rights concerns when the trade agreement totally ignores one of the most violated groups in Colombia? The Trade Deal Must Be Stopped The implication is obvious: the Labour Cooperation side agreement and the talk of human rights concerns in general are just window dressing. The real interest on the part of the Tories and Canadian capital is penetrating the Colombian market and gaining control over its subsurface riches. Canadian foreign investment into Colombia, for instance, has been steadily increasing in the last few years, and like all of Canada's post-1994 trade agreements, this one has a strongly pro-corporate investment clause as its centrepiece (modeled, in fact, on NAFTA's chapter 11). Canadian foreign investment is heavily concentrated in the mining and oil and gas industries, though Canadians also have a strong presence in printing, paper and footwear. In 2007, according to Statistics Canada Canadian companies had a combined direct investment stock of $739 million in Colombia, almost double from the year before. The Canadian embassy in Bogota estimates it at $3 billion, however, as a large chunk of Canadian investment is made through offshore financial centres where tax burdens and regulations are weak. More than $2 billion in investment is being planned over the next two years. If the agreement is successfully implemented, it will represent a major victory for Canadian capital: secure economic access to a country rich in resources before even the Americans finalize their own deal with it; stronger ties to an imperial client state in a region with powerful social movements and where left-leaning populist governments have made electoral gains (again, see my previous articles on this issue); and a clear victory (both ideological and material) for corporate profits over social considerations. The potential defeat of Harper's minority government may put a new twist on the trade agreement. Before his political misfire this week, Harper committed to having a vote on the agreement in Parliament, despite a vote not being technically necessary for it to be implemented. As for the minority coalition government that will likely replace the Tories, the NDP has criticized the agreement sharply, but the Liberals have a long track record of supporting investment in Colombia and didn't come out against the deal when the conclusion of negotiations was announced last June. The NDP has already conceded on its election pledge to rollback corporate tax cuts as part of its deal with the Liberals; how committed is it to its opposition to a trade deal with Colombia? As with all other matters related to the potential minority coalition ? indeed with electoral politics more generally ? we can't rely on the political parties, including the NDP, to do the right thing. We need to mobilize people to force the government, regardless of who's in power, to back down from the agreement. Todd Gordon is the author of Cops, Crime and Capitalism: The Law-and- Order Agenda in Canada. He's currently writing a book on Canadian imperialism. His articles have appeared on Znet, The Bullet and in New Socialist magazine. He is an assistant professor of Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto, and can be reached atts.gordon at utoronto.ca. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Bullet is produced by the Socialist Project. Readers are encouraged to distribute widely. Comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome. Write to info at socialistproject.ca If you wish to subscribe: www.socialistproject.ca/lists/?p=subscribe The Bullet archive is available at www.socialistproject.ca/bullet For more analysis of contemporary politics check out 'Relay: A Socialist Project Review' at www.socialistproject.ca/relay ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 2 22:02:30 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 21:02:30 -0800 Subject: [R-G] US to use Web 2.0 to win "war of ideas" Message-ID: <5B38BCA2-8D22-486E-880E-410E94BF5847@shaw.ca> US to use Web 2.0 to win "war of ideas": US image-maker December 1, 2008 WASHINGTON (AFP) ? The United States is embracing social networks and other Web 2.0 tools to win the "war of ideas" with Islamic militants and other extremist groups, a top US policy-maker said Monday. "In the war of ideas our core task in 2008 is to create an environment hostile to violent extremism," said James Glassman, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. "We do that in two ways -- by undermining extremist ideologies and by encouraging young people to follow productive paths that lead away from terrorism," Glassman said in a speech at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank. "The best way to achieve our goals in public diplomacy is through a new approach to communicating, an approach that is made far easier because of the emergence of Web 2.0 or social networking technologies," he said. "We call our new approach Public Diplomacy 2.0," said Glassman, who replaced Karen Hughes as the State Department's top image-maker after the confidante of President George W. Bush stepped down from the post late last year. "Al-Qaeda and other violent extremist organizations have exploited the Internet to their advantage but that advantage has rapidly diminished," he said. "New technology gives the United States a significant comparative advantage over the terrorists." Glassman said it was vital that the US government adapt its tools and its message to the Internet era. "In this new world of communications any government that resists new Internet techniques faces a greater risk -- being ignored," he said. "Our major target audiences, especially the young, don't want to see us lecture them, tell them what to think or how wonderful we are," he added. Glassman said the State Department and other government agencies were engaged in a variety of efforts to interactively engage the public. The State Department's Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau has a page on Facebook, he said, and "our digital outreach team goes on to blogs and websites in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and, we hope soon, in Russian. "Its members identify themselves as State Department representatives and they engage in the conversation, gently inform or correct distortions about US policies," he said. Glassman said the State Department's Farsi blogger had recently engaged in "an extended series of posts" on the blog of the media adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He said that in partnership with NBC Universal, the Director's Guild of America, and New York University, the State Department recently sponsored a YouTube video contest in which participants were asked to make a video answering the question "Democracy Is...?" He said the US government would also increase partnerships with the private sector such as a conference being held in New York this week bringing together youth online groups from around the world. Glassman cautioned that public diplomacy was "only one tool for achieving foreign policy and national security goals. "We never will say that soft power is a substitute for hard power but it is an essential complement," he said. Glassman said the State Department has an annual budget of some 900 million dollars for public diplomacy, about two-thirds of which goes for cultural and educational exchanges such as the Fulbright program. Glassman also said that 623,000 foreign students were enrolled in US universities in 2008, up seven percent over last year. "There are more foreign students in the United States than there ever were, even more than before 9/11," he said. From mstainsby at resist.ca Wed Dec 3 02:54:02 2008 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:54:02 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart Message-ID: <4936573A.1090505@resist.ca> Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart Why Americans Shouldn't Go Home By Tom Engelhardt On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, a record was set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since December 2001. American planes have, in fact, taken out two brides in the last seven months. And don't try to bury your dead or mark their deaths ceremonially either, because funerals have been hit as well. Mind you, those planes, which have conducted 31% more air strikes in Afghanistan in support of U.S. troops this year, and the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now making almost daily strikes across the border in Pakistan, remain part of George W. Bush's Air Force, but only until January 21, 2009. Then, they -- and all the brides and grooms of Afghanistan and in the Pakistani borderlands who care to have something more than the smallest of private weddings -- officially become the property of President Barack Obama. That's a sobering thought. He is, in fact, inheriting from the Bush administration a widening war in the region, as well as an exceedingly tenuous situation in devastated, still thoroughly factionalized, sectarian, and increasingly Iranian-influenced Iraq. There, the U.S. is, in actuality, increasingly friendless and ever less powerful. The last allies from the infamous "coalition of the willing" are now rushing for the door. The South Koreans, Hungarians, and Bulgarians -- I'll bet you didn't even know the latter two had a few troops left in Iraq -- are going home this year; the rump British force in the south will probably be out by next summer. The Iraqis are beginning to truly go their own way (or, more accurately, ways); and yet, in January, when Barack Obama enters office, there will still be more American troops in Iraq than there were in April 2003 when Baghdad fell. Winning an election with an antiwar label, Obama has promised -- kinda -- to end the American war there and bring the troops -- sorta, mostly -- home. But even after his planned 16-month withdrawal of U.S. "combat brigades," which may not be welcomed by his commanders in the field, including former Iraq commander, now Centcom Commander David Petraeus, there are still plenty of combative non-combat forces, which will be labeled "residual" and left behind to fight "al-Qaeda." Then, there are all those "advisors" still there to train Iraqi forces, the guards for the giant bases the Bush administration built in the country, the many thousands of armed private security contractors from companies like Blackwater, and of course, the 1,000 "diplomats" who are to staff the newly opened U.S. embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone, possibly the largest embassy on the planet. Hmmmm. And while the new president turns to domestic matters, it's quite possible that significant parts of his foreign policy could be left to the oversight of Vice President Joe Biden who, in case anyone has forgotten, proposed a plan for Iraq back in 2007 so filled with imperial hubris that it still startles. In a Caesarian moment, he recommended that the U.S. -- not Iraqis -- functionally divide the country into three parts. Although he preferred to call it a "federal system," it was, for all intents and purposes, a de facto partition plan. If Iraq remains a sorry tale of American destruction and dysfunction without, as yet, a discernable end in sight, Afghanistan may prove Iraq squared. And there, candidate Obama expressed no desire to wind the war down and withdraw American troops. Quite the opposite, during the election campaign he plunked hard for escalation, something our NATO allies are sure not to be too enthusiastic about. According to the Obama plan, many more American troops (if available, itself an open question) are to be poured into the country in what would essentially be a massive "surge strategy" by yet another occupant of the Oval Office. Assumedly, the new Afghan policy would be aided and abetted by those CIA-run UAVs directed toward Pakistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden and pals, while undoubtedly further destabilizing a shaky ally. When it comes to rising civilian casualties from U.S. air strikes in their countries, both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari have already used their congratulatory phone calls to President-elect Obama to plead for an end to the attacks, which produce both a profusion of dead bodies and a profusion of live, vengeful enemies. Both have done the same with the Bush administration, Karzai to the point of tears. The U.S. military argues that the use of air power is necessary in the face of a spreading, ever more dangerous, Taliban insurgency largely because there are too few boots on the ground. ("If we got more boots on the ground, we would not have to rely as much on airstrikes" was the way Army Brig. Gen. Michael Tucker, deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, put it.) But rest assured, as the boots multiply on increasingly hostile ground, the military will discover it needs more, not less, air power to back more troops in more trouble. So, after January 20th, expect Obama to take possession of George Bush's disastrous Afghan War; and unless he is far more skilled than Alexander the Great, British empire builders, and the Russians, his war, too, will continue to rage without ever becoming a raging success. Finally, President-elect Obama accepted the overall framework of a "Global War on Terror" during his presidential campaign. This "war" lies at the heart of the Bush administration's fantasy world of war that has set all-too-real expanses of the planet aflame. Its dangers were further highlighted this week by the New York Times, which revealed that secret orders in the spring of 2004 gave the U.S. military "new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States." At least twelve such attacks have been carried out since then by Special Operations forces on Pakistan, Somalia, most recently Syria, and other unnamed countries. Signed by Donald Rumsfeld, signed off on by President Bush, built-upon recently by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, these secret orders enshrine the Pentagon's right to ignore international boundaries, or the sovereignty of nations, in an endless global "war" of choice against small, scattered bands of terrorists. As reporter Jim Lobe pointed out recently, a "series of interlocking grand bargains" in what the neoconservatives used to call "the Greater Middle East" or the "arc of instability" might be available to an Obama administration capable of genuinely new thinking. These, he wrote, would be "backed by the relevant regional players as well as major global powers -- aimed at pacifying Afghanistan; integrating Iran into a new regional security structure; promoting reconciliation in Iraq; and launching a credible process to negotiate a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world." If, however, Obama accepts a War on Terror framework, as he already seems to have, as well as those "residual" forces in Iraq, while pumping up the war in Afghanistan, he may quickly find himself playing by Rumsfeld rules, whether or not he revokes those specific orders. In fact, left alone in Washington, backed by the normal national security types, he may soon find himself locked into all sorts of unpalatable situations, as once happened to another Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who opted to escalate an inherited war when what he most wanted to do was focus on domestic policy. Previews for a Political Zombie Movie Domestically, it's clear enough that we are about to leave the age of Bush -- in tone and policy -- but what that leave-taking will consist of is still an open question. This is especially so given a cratering economy and the pot-holed road ahead. It is a moment when Obama has, not surprisingly, begun to emphasize continuity and reassurance alongside his campaign theme of "change we can believe in." All you had to do was look at that array of Clinton-era economic types and CEOs behind Obama at his first news conference to think: been there, done that. The full photo of his economic team that day offered a striking profile of pre-Bush era Washington and the Washington Consensus, and so a hint of the Democratic world the new president will walk into on January 20, 2009. How about former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, those kings of 1990s globalization, or even the towering former Fed chief from the first Bush era, Paul Volcker? Didn't that have the look of previews for a political zombie movie, a line-up of the undead? As head of the New America Foundation Steve Clemons has been writing recently, the economic team looks suspiciously as if it were preparing for a "Clinton 3.0" moment. You could scan that gathering and not see a genuine rogue thinker in sight; no off-the-reservation figures who might represent a breath of fresh air and fresh thinking (other than, being hopeful, the president-elect himself). Clemons offers an interesting list of just some obvious names left off stage: "Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, James Galbraith, Leo Hindery, Clyde Prestowitz, Charlene Barshefsky, C. Fred Bergsten, Adam Posen, Robert Kuttner, Robert Samuelson, Alan Murray, William Bonvillian, Doug & Heidi Rediker, Bernard Schwartz, Tom Gallagher, Sheila Bair, Sherle Schwenninger, and Kevin Phillips." Mobilizing a largely Clintonista brain trust may look reassuring to some -- an in-gathering of all the Washington wisdom available before Hurricane Bush/Cheney hit town, but unfortunately, we don't happen to be entering a Clinton 3.0 moment. What's globalizing now is American disaster, which threatens to level a vulnerable world. In a sense, though, domestic policy may, relatively speaking, represent the good news of the coming Obama era. We know, for instance, that those preparing the way for the new president's arrival are thinking hard about how to roll back the worst of Bush cronyism, enrich-yourself-at-the-public-troughism, general lawlessness, and unconstitutionality. As a start, according to Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post, Obama advisers have already been compiling "a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues," including oil drilling in pristine wild lands. In addition, Obama's people are evidently at work on ways to close Guantanamo and try some of its prisoners in U.S. courts. However, if continuity domestically means rollback to the Clinton era, continuity in the foreign policy sphere -- Guantanamo aside -- may be a somewhat different matter. We won't know the full cast of characters to come until the president-elect makes the necessary announcements or has a national security press conference with a similar line-up behind him. But it's certainly rumored that Robert Gates, a symbol of continuity from both Bush eras, might be kept on as secretary of defense, or a Republican senator like Richard Lugar of Indiana or, more interestingly, retiring Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel might be appointed to the post. Of course, many Clintonistas are sure to be in this line-up, too. In addition, among the essential cast of characters will be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Michael Mullen, and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, both late Bush appointees, both seemingly flexible military men, both interested in a military-plus approach to the Afghan and Iraq wars. Petraeus, for instance, reportedly recently asked for, and was denied, permission to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. All these figures will represent a turn away from the particular madness of the early Bush years abroad, one that actually began in the final years of his second term. But such a national security line-up is unlikely to include fresh thinkers, who might truly reimagine an imperial world, or anyone who might genuinely buck the power of the Pentagon. What Obama looks to have are custodians and bureaucrats of empire, far more cautious, far more sane, and certainly far more grown-up than the first-term Bush appointees, but not a cast of characters fit for reshaping American policy in a new world of disorder and unraveling economies, not a crew ready to break new ground and cede much old ground on this still American-garrisoned planet of ours. Breathless in Washington Let's assume the best: that Barack Obama truly means to bring some form of the people's will, as he imagines it, to Washington after eight years of unconstitutional "commander-in-chief" governance. That -- take my word for it -- he can't do without the people themselves expressing that will. Of course, even in the Bush era, Americans didn't simply cede the public commons. They turned out, for instance, in staggering numbers to protest the President's invasion of Iraq before it ever happened, and again more recently to work tirelessly to elect Obama president. But -- so it seems to me -- when immediate goals are either disappointingly not achieved, or achieved relatively quickly, most Americans tend to pack their bags and head for home, as so many did in despair after the invasion was launched in 2003, as so many reportedly are doing again, in a far more celebratory mood, now that Obama is elected. But hard as his election may have been, that was surely the easy part. He is now about to enter the hornet's nest. Entrenched interests. Entrenched ideas. Entrenched ideology. Entrenched profits. Entrenched lobbyists. Entrenched bureaucrats. Entrenched think tanks. An entrenched Pentagon and allied military-industrial complex, both bloated beyond imagining and virtually untouchable, along with a labyrinthine intelligence system of more than 18 agencies, departments, and offices. Washington remains an imperial capital. How in the world will Barack Obama truly begin to change that without you? In the Bush years, the special interests, lobbyists, pillagers, and crony corporations not only pitched their tents on the public commons, but with the help of the President's men and women, simply took possession of large hunks of it. That was called "privatization." Now, as Bush & Co. prepare to leave town in a cloud of catastrophe, the feeding frenzy at the public trough only seems to grow. It's a natural reaction -- and certainly a commonplace media reaction at the moment -- to want to give Barack Obama a "chance." Back off those critical comments, people now say. Fair's fair. Give the President-elect a little "breathing space." After all, the election is barely over, he's not even in office, he hasn't had his first 100 days, and already the criticism has begun. But those who say this don't understand Washington -- or, in the case of various media figures and pundits, perhaps understand it all too well. Political Washington is a conspiracy -- in the original sense of the word: "to breathe the same air." In that sense, there is no air in Washington that isn't stale enough to choke a president. Send Obama there alone, give him that "breathing space," don't start demanding the quick ending of wars or anything else, and you're not doing him, or the American people, any favors. Quite the opposite, you're consigning him to suffocation. Leave Obama to them and he'll break your heart. If you do, then blame yourself, not him; but better than blaming anyone, pitch your own tent on the public commons and make some noise. Let him know that Washington's isn't the only consensus around, that Americans really do want our troops to come home, that we actually are looking for "change we can believe in," which would include a less weaponized, less imperial American world, based on a reinvigorated idea of defense, not aggression, and on the Constitution, not leftover Rumsfeld rules or a bogus Global War on Terror. Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published. [Note for TomDispatch readers: For those who want to follow issues of war and peace, especially in the "arc of instability," I want to recommend four sites that are sure to prove as invaluable in the Obama era as they have been (to me at least) during the Bush years: Juan Cole's never miss-able Informed Comment blog, AntiWar.com (which has recently added Jason Ditz's useful daily summaries of the latest news developments like this Iraqi one), Paul Woodward's sharp-eyed site The War in Context, and the always fascinating and provocative online newspaper, Asia Times. I check in with all of them daily.] Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 3 10:32:49 2008 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 11:32:49 -0600 Subject: [R-G] College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S. Message-ID: <5F32DB313AB34F75ABB565CEE8BBA83E@agingCHS072729> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html?_r=1&hp College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S. By TAMAR LEWIN Published: December 3, 2008 The rising cost of college - even before the recession - threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the annual report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Soaring College Tuitions Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families. "If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won't have an affordable system of higher education," said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education. "When we come out of the recession," Mr. Callan added, "we're really going to be in jeopardy, because the educational gap between our work force and the rest of the world will make it very hard to be competitive. Already, we're one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers." Although college enrollment has continued to rise in recent years, Mr. Callan said, it is not clear how long that can continue. "The middle class has been financing it through debt," he said. "The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt." But low-income students, he said, will be less able to afford college. Already, he said, the strains are clear. The report, "Measuring Up 2008," is one of the few to compare net college costs - that is, a year's tuition, fees, room and board, minus financial aid - against median family income. Those findings are stark. Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income. The share of income required to pay for college, even with financial aid, has been growing especially fast for lower-income families, the report found. Among the poorest families - those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent - the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families' median income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000. The likelihood of large tuition increases next year is especially worrying, Mr. Callan said. "Most governors' budgets don't come out until January, but what we're seeing so far is Florida talking about a 15 percent increase, Washington State talking about a 20 percent increase, and California with a mixture of budget cuts and enrollment cuts," he said. In a separate report released this week by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the public universities acknowledged the looming crisis, but painted a different picture. That report emphasized that families have many higher-education choices, from community colleges, where tuition and fees averaged about $3,200, to private research universities, where they cost more than $33,000. "We think public higher education is affordable right now, but we're concerned that it won't be, if the changes we're seeing continue, and family income doesn't go up," said David Shulenburger, the group's vice president for academic affairs and co-author of the report. "The public conversation is very often in terms of a $35,000 price tag, but what you get at major public research university is, for the most part, still affordable at 6,000 bucks a year." While tuition has risen at public universities, his report said, that has largely been to make up for declining state appropriations. The report offered its own cost projections, not including room and board. "Projecting out to 2036, tuition would go from 11 percent of the family budget to 24 percent of the family budget, and that's pretty huge," Mr. Shulenburger said. "We only looked at tuition and fees because those are the only things we can control." Looking at total costs, as families must, he said, his group shared Mr. Callan's concerns. Mr. Shulenburger's report suggested that public universities explore a variety of approaches to lower costs - distance learning, better use of senior year in high school, perhaps even shortening college from four years. "There's an awful lot of experimentation going on right now, and that needs to go on," he said. "If you teach a course by distance with 1,000 students, does that affect learning? Till we know the answer, it's difficult to control costs in ways that don't affect quality." Mr. Callan, for his part, urged a reversal in states' approach to higher-education financing. "When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better funded, we raise tuition as little as possible," he said. "When the economy is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least afford it. That's exactly the opposite of what we need." ============== Fresh Ink is an alternative news service Join us! https://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 3 10:35:04 2008 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 11:35:04 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Pentagon officials report strongest recruiting season in four years Message-ID: (who needs the draft when you have a recession, and when costs of higher education are unaffordable?) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28019406/ Associated Press Dec. 2, 2008 Soldiers choose war over bleak economy Pentagon officials report strongest recruiting season in four years FORT RILEY, Kan. - Sgt. Ryan Nyhus spent 14 months patrolling the deadly streets of Baghdad, where five members of his platoon were shot and one died. As bad as that was, he would rather go back there than take his chances in this brutal job market. Nyhus re-enlisted last Wednesday and in so doing joined the growing ranks of those choosing to stay in the U.S. military because of the bleak economy. "In the Army, you're always guaranteed a steady paycheck and a job," said the 21-year-old Nyhus. "Deploying's something that's going to happen. That's a fact of life in the Army - a fact of life in the infantry." In 2008, as the stock market cratered and the housing market collapsed, more young members of the Army, Air Force and Navy decided to re-up. While several factors might explain the rise in re-enlistments, including a decline in violence in Iraq, Pentagon officials acknowledge that bad news for the economy is usually good news for the military. In fact, the Pentagon just completed its strongest recruiting year in four years. "We do benefit when things look less positive in civil society," said David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. "What difficult economic times give us, I think, is an opening to make our case to people who we might not otherwise have." Retention rate rising The retention rate of early-career soldiers in the Army has risen steadily over the past four years and now stands 20 percentage points higher than it was in fiscal 2004. As for the Navy and the Air Force, early- and mid-career sailors and airmen re-enlisted at a higher rate in October than during the same period in 2007. The Marine Corps was not immediately able to provide comparative figures on re-enlistments. Alex Stewart joined the Army two years ago, when the factory where he worked as a welder started laying off. He was sent to Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division, which suffered 87 deaths last year, the highest total suffered by the 20,000-member unit since the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan began. When his hitch was up in earlier this year, the 32-year-old from Grand Rapids, Mich., didn't hesitate to re-up for five more years. "I want a stable life for my wife in a very shaky economy," Stewart said. "There were no other options." Stewart's new assignment will take him to Germany, where he will serve as a truck driver, though it is always possible he could be sent back into combat. ============== Fresh Ink is an alternative news service Join us! https://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Dec 3 10:47:22 2008 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 11:47:22 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Liberal and New Democrat Coalition Accord and Economic Policy Message-ID: <183C86C192AB40E899A4D5FB5B6278E4@agingCHS072729> (what a very general, bland document! Still, an interesting situation, and offering more possibilities than, say, the two-party system in the USA) December 1, 2008 An Accord on a Cooperative Government to Address the Present Economic Crisis This document outlines the key understandings between the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party of Canada regarding a new cooperative government. 1. Role of caucuses The Liberal and NDP caucuses will continue to meet as distinct caucuses. They will receive briefings and be consulted as appropriate. Both are entitled to offer advice to the government. The two caucuses may meet jointly as agreed from time to time to jointly address issues. The caucuses will sit next to each other on the government benches. 2. Cabinet Nothing in this Accord is intended to diminish or alter the power and prerogatives of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister will be the Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. The Minister of Finance will be appointed from the Liberal caucus. The cabinet will be composed of 24 ministers plus the Prime Minister. Eighteen of these ministers will be appointed from within the Liberal caucus. Six of these ministers will be appointed from within the NDP caucus, plus six Parliamentary Secretaries, sworn in as Privy Councillors, will also be named from the NDP caucus. In the event the Prime Minister chooses to appoint a larger cabinet, the NDP proportion will be maintained. The specifics of these cabinet appointments will be made by the Prime Minister in appropriate consultation with the Leader of the NDP. The rules and practices of cabinet confidentiality and solidarity will be strictly maintained. Normal processes of cabinet appointments and governance in the Canadian federal government will be respected. The cabinet is jointly and collectively accountable to Parliament for its work, including in daily question period. 3. A "no surprises" approach Within the limits of common sense and the needs of cabinet government, the two parties agree they will work together on a "no surprises" basis. Furthermore, upon its formation, the government will put in place a permanent consultation mechanism with the Bloc Qu?b?cois. 4. Appointments Both parties are committed to restoring the integrity, transparency and efficiency of the appointments process in the Public Service and in federal bodies like the Supreme Court, the Senate and Commissions like the CRTC. The Prime Minister will consult the Leader of the NDP as appropriate on appointments. 5. A standing managing committee of the Accord A standing managing committee of the Accord, chaired by the Prime Minister, will be struck. It will be composed of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the NDP, and such other persons as the leaders deem appropriate from time to time. The committee will meet regularly to ensure the good order of the Accord; to deal with key issues that have arisen; to consult on key appointments; and to resolve any disputes which might arise from the Accord (for example, by referring issues relating to the Accord to a trusted committee of experienced, distinguished Canadians). 6. Term of this Accord This Accord will expire on June 30, 2011 unless renewed. Agreed on December 1, 2008. Hon. St?phane Dion Leader, Liberal Party of Canada Hon. Jack Layton Leader, New Democratic Party of Canada --------------------------------------------- ============================================= A Policy Accord to Address the Present Economic Crisis Preamble The new Government is supported by parties that share a commitment to fiscal responsibility, a progressive agenda and a belief in the role of Government to act as a partner with Canadians and Quebecers. Where appropriate, these goals should be pursued in full partnership and consultation with the provincial and territorial governments. Fiscal Principles This policy accord is built on a foundation of fiscal responsibility. All three parties agree that the Canadian economy and the fiscal framework of the federal government have severely weakened since the last federal budget. As the Parliamentary Budget Officer concluded, due to the policy choices of the Conservative government, the starting point of the federal government is deficit. This new reality does not reduce the necessity to stimulate the economy consistent with the understandings arrived at by all nations in the G20. The following plan describes common goals and sets out an outline to provide active stimulus for the economy over the next two years, with a shared commitment to return to surplus within four years. Economic Stimulus Package The top priority of the new Government is an economic stimulus package designed to boost the domestic economy beginning with (but not limited to): . Accelerating existing infrastructure funding and substantial new investments, including municipal and inter-provincial projects (such as . transit, clean energy, water, corridors and gateways). This would certainly include addressing the urgent infrastructure needs of First Nations, M?tis and Inuit; . Housing construction and retrofitting; and . Investing in key sector strategies (like manufacturing, forestry and automotive) designed to create and save jobs, with any aid contingent on a plan to transform these industries and return them to profitability and sustainability. Rapid Support for those affected by the Economic Crisis The new Government is committed to ensuring that the federal government has the appropriate programs in place to assist those most affected by the economic crisis so that all citizens will be in a position to fully participate in the economic recovery to follow, including the following measures: . Facilitate skills training to help ensure Canadian workers are properly equipped to keep pace with the rapidly changing economy, while respecting provincial jurisdiction and existing agreements; . Amend the current law establishing a new crown corporation for employment insurance in order to guarantee that all revenue from EI premiums provides benefits and training for workers. Eliminate the current two week waiting period; . Lower the minimum required RRIF withdrawal for 2008 by 50 per cent; . Reform bankruptcy and insolvency laws to better protect pensions; and . Implement an income support program for older workers who have lost their jobs in order to help them make the transition from work to receiving retirement benefits. Other Priorities to Stimulate the Economy . Support for culture, including the cancellation of budget cuts announced by the Conservative government. . Support for Canadian Wheat Board and Supply Management . Immigration Reform . Reinstate regional development agency funding to non-profit economic development organizations. Families As finances permit, we are committed to moving forward with improved child benefits and an early learning and childcare program in partnership with each province, and respectful of their role and jurisdiction, including the possibility to opt out with full compensation. Working with our North American Partners We will work with our North American Partners to pursue a North American cap-and-trade market with absolute emission targets, using 1990 as the base year. Working with our International Partners The new Government is committed to working with the international community, particularly with G-20 partners, in pursuit of an effective new global financial architecture. Confidence Votes The Government will not request a dissolution of Parliament during the term of this agreement, except following defeat on an explicitly-framed motion of non-confidence presented by the Opposition; or any vote pertaining to the speech from the throne; or on a budget vote at on any stage in the House; or on any bill to implement a budget at any stage in the House; or on any motion in the House to concur in, restore or reinstate any Estimates; or on any supply bill at any stage in the House. The Bloc Qu?b?cois will neither move nor will it support any motions of non-confidence in the Government during the term of its support for this agreement, and will vote in favour of the Government's position with respect to all matters referred to in the immediately preceding paragraph. Term of this agreement The Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party of Canada will adhere to this agreement until June 30, 2011 unless renewed. The Bloc Qu?b?cois will adhere to this agreement until June 30, 2010 unless renewed. Agreed on December 1, 2008 Hon. St?phane Dion Leader, the Liberal Party of Canada Hon. Jack Layton Leader, the New Democratic Party of Canada Gilles Duceppe Leader, le Bloc Qu?b?cois _______________________________________________ ============== Fresh Ink is an alternative news service Join us! https://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Dec 3 10:56:54 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 09:56:54 -0800 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?Canada=92s_=93putsch=94=3A_Oppose_Conserva?= =?windows-1252?q?tive_power-grab!_No_support_to_Liberal-NDP_coalition!?= Message-ID: Canada?s ?putsch?: Oppose Conservative power-grab! No support to Liberal-NDP coalition! By Keith Jones 3 December 2008 http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/cana-d03.shtml Canada?s right-wing, minority Conservative government is preparing to cling to power illegally. Led by the neo-conservative ideologue Stephen Harper, the Conservatives are threatening to unleash a constitutional crisis and incite anti-Quebec chauvinism rather than allow the parliamentary opposition parties to form an alternate government. ?We will use all legal means to resist this undemocratic seizure of power,? declared Harper on Monday, after the opposition parties?the Liberals, New Democratic Party (NDP), and Bloc Qu?b?cois (BQ)? announced an accord to form a Liberal-NDP coalition government supported by the BQ. The Conservatives, who won the votes of barely one in five Canadians in the federal election held October 14, are accusing the opposition parties of attempting a ?putsch? and thwarting the will of the electorate. This is reactionary rot. It is the Conservatives who are acting undemocratically, and in manifold ways. ? Under Canada?s parliamentary system, the opposition parties have every right to form an alternate government, since they won a majority of the seats in the House of Commons in a general election held just seven weeks ago. If one includes the votes of the Green Party, which announced Tuesday that it too backs the Liberal-NDP coalition, 61.2 percent of voters cast their ballots October 14 for parties supportive of the coalition. ? So as to avoid defeat in a parliamentary non-confidence vote scheduled for next Monday, the Conservatives are reportedly preparing to prorogue or shut down parliament, which reconvened only on November 17, until late January, ? The Conservatives have announced that should they lose a non- confidence vote, Harper will ?advise? the Governor-General to dissolve parliament. In effect, the Conservatives are demanding that Canada?s unelected head of state deprive the opposition of its constitutional right to form a government. And should Governor-General Micha?lle Jean not capitulate to their anti-democratic demand, the Conservatives are threatening to unleash a wider political and constitutional crisis by attacking the democratic legitimacy of the Liberal-NDP coalition. ? With the support of much of the corporate media, the Conservatives have launched an aggressive drive to mobilize reactionary forces, denouncing the Liberals for aligning with ?socialists? and ?separatists,? references respectively to the NDP and BQ, against ?Canada?s government.? To oppose the coming to power of a ?socialist-separatist driven coalition,? the Conservatives have called ?Rallies for Canada? in the country?s major cities this coming Saturday. Their not so veiled purpose is to intimidate the Governor-General. In the last parliament the Conservatives repeatedly depended on the votes of the BQ to remain in office. Yet, in a transparent attempt to whip up anti-Quebec chauvinism, especially in western Canada, the Conservatives are implying that the proposed coalition government is all but treasonous, because it would put Canada?s government ?at the mercy of people committed to destroying our confederation.? ? Whatever Governor-General Jean ultimately decides, the very fact that the Conservatives are intent on making her demonstrably choose Canada?s government has the effect of giving greater legitimacy to, and expanding the power, of this reactionary office. Under Canada?s constitutional monarchy, the monarch?s representative, the Governor-General, is almost always legally required to follow the ?advise? of the Prime Minister?the head of the party or multi-party alliance with majority support in parliament?but wields, although this is not generally known, virtually unlimited ?reserve? powers. Through this archaic mechanism, the Canadian ruling class has given itself a means of short-circuiting parliamentary democracy in a period of acute crisis. Any use by the Governor-General of these powers establishes a reactionary precedent that can and will be invoked against working people in future political crises. ? The current crisis was precipitated by the fiscal and economic update the government tabled in parliament last Thursday. The update was chock full of right-wing and flagrantly anti-democratic measures. These included the abolition of a $1.95 per vote, annual subsidy to federal political parties?an action universally condemned in the corporate media as a brazen Conservative attempt to cripple the opposition by bankrupting them. The Conservatives also suspended the collective bargaining rights of federal workers, removing their right to strike until 2011. Last but not least, under conditions of a financial crisis and world recession that threaten working peoples? jobs and pensions, the Conservatives spurned calls for increased support to the unemployed and expanded public works initiatives, choosing instead to slash public spending. If a putsch is afoot in Ottawa, it is manifestly a right-wing putsch being carried out by Harper and his Conservatives. In opposing the Conservatives? unconstitutional and anti-democratic attempt to retain power, working people must give no political support to the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition government. The Liberals are the Canadian bourgeoisie?s traditional party of government. They have repeatedly used their opponents on the right as electoral foils, then in office imposed the policy prescriptions of the right, be it Trudeau?s three-year wage controls in the 1970s or the massive public spending and tax cuts imposed by the Chr?tien- Martin Liberal government of 1993-2006. Canada?s social-democratic party, the NDP, is a no less dependable prop of capitalist rule. When it has formed provincial governments, most notably in Ontario during the recession of the early 1990s, the NDP has come into headlong conflict with the working class, including slashing social spending, promoting ?workfare,? and breaking strikes and otherwise attacking workers? rights. The BQ?s sister party is the Parti Qu?b?cois. When the PQ last held office as Quebec?s provincial government (1994-2003), it carried out a program of social spending and tax cuts strikingly similar to that of its federalist Liberal rivals in Ottawa?a program designed to redistribute wealth from working people to the most privileged sections of society. None of the three opposition parties have questioned, let alone opposed, the Harper government?s commitment, without any public discussion, of tens of billions of dollars to prop up Canada?s big banks. Few details of the coalition agreement have been made public. But it is known that the Liberal-NDP government will not ?revisit? the Afghanistan issue, i.e., that the Canadian Armed Forces will continue to play a leading role in the Afghan counterinsurgency war through 2011. Also, the Liberal-NDP government will implement the Conservatives? five-year, $50 billion-plus program of corporate tax cuts. As for the promised massive economic stimulus package, it will be welcomed, no doubt, by the big manufacturers and politically promoted as a program to ?save jobs.? But Ontario?s Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty has let it be known that any federal-provincial assistance to the automakers will be used as a means to extort sweeping new contract concessions from autoworkers. The Canadian Auto Workers union, a strong ally of McGuinty and an early advocate of a federal NDP-Liberal coalition, has already announced its willingness to make further changes in workrules, that is, to impose speed-up and job cuts. To repeat, the working class must oppose the Conservatives? power- grab. The attempt of one of the major parties of the Canadian ruling elite, with considerable and quite likely preponderant big business support, to overturn long-established parliamentary and constitutional forms is a frontal attack on democratic rights. But in opposing the Conservative?s illegal attempt to block the opposition from forming a government, working people should extend no political support to the opposition parties or their alternate government. Rather the struggle to defend democratic rights and workers? jobs and living standards and against imperialist war is entirely dependent on the development of an independent political movement of the working class in opposition to the entire bourgeois order. In this respect, there are important parallels with the political and constitutional crisis that erupted in the United States over the outcome of the 2000 president elections. It was incumbent upon socialists to vigorously oppose the attempt of the Republican right, supported by the most powerful and rapacious sections of the US plutocracy, to steal the election on behalf of George W. Bush; but this opposition in no way implied any political support to the Democrat Al Gore. Ultimately Gore and the Democrats capitulated to the right, allowing Bush to assume the presidency unopposed after the right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court, in flagrant violation of the law and the democratic will of the American people, declared him president. From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Dec 3 10:59:39 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 09:59:39 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Thousands in Kosovo protest EU mission Message-ID: International Herald Tribune Thousands in Kosovo protest EU mission By Dan Bilefsky Tuesday, December 2, 2008 http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/europe/kosovo.php SARAJEVO: Several thousand demonstrators took to the streets of Pristina, Kosovo's capital, on Tuesday to protest the planned deployment of a European Union judicial mission that many ethnic Albanians fear will partition the new country. The protesters marched through the city center holding banners saying "No Partition" and "Kosovo Is Ours," witnesses said. Some chanted "Thaci is a traitor," referring to Kosovo's prime minister, Hashim Thaci. Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leadership declared independence from Serbia in February after nine years of being administered by the United Nations. At issue now is who will control the country. Under a six-point plan agreed to last week by the United Nations Security Council - and backed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Belgrade and the European Union - the 2,000-strong EU mission would be deployed under a UN mandate and would take a neutral position regarding Kosovo's independence. Pristina has rejected that element of the plan, arguing that it is an infringement on its sovereignty and insisting that the independence of Kosovo be respected. But Thaci has nevertheless agreed to cooperate fully with the mission, on the grounds that it will help preserve peace and stability across the territory. Albin Kurti, one of the organizers of the protest Tuesday, said that accepting the deployment of the EU mission was unacceptable because it would undermine Kosovo's hard-earned sovereignty. Opponents of the six- point plan say they are concerned that it calls for the creation of separate chains of command for Serbian and Albanian police forces operating in Kosovo; the police in the ethnic Albanian areas would report to the EU while Serb police officers in the Serb-dominated northern part of the country would report to the United Nations. Critics say that such an arrangement would entrench a de facto partition of the country by splitting it along ethnic lines. Pristina also worries that Belgrade would use the plan as a pretext to expand its authority over Kosovo. Since Kosovo declared independence, Belgrade has sought to broaden its influence in northern Kosovo by holding elections and by entrenching its sway over policies like education and health care. A small explosive device was thrown last month at the International Civilian Office that housed the EU's special representative. The police initially believed the attack could have been motivated by discontent with the deployment of the new EU mission. But they then arrested three Germans, thought to be intelligence operatives, in connection with the explosion. The three men - who media outlets in Germany describe as members of the German foreign intelligence agency, the BND - were later released by a UN panel of judges for lack of evidence. Germany was one of the first countries to recognize the independence of Kosovo. Berlin has said that suggestions that it was involved in attacks in Kosovo were absurd. Separately, Serbia indicated Tuesday that it was seeking changes to an agreement with NATO - signed on June 9, 1999 - that ended the Kosovo war. It called for the abolition of a no-flight buffer zone between Serbia and Kosovo created by NATO after Serbia's armed forces agreed to withdraw from the region. The Serbian general Zdravko Ponos said the accord, which prevents Serbian military flights over the zone and requires Serbian troops to get special approval from NATO to enter the territory, was outdated because NATO and Serbia were now military partners. NATO said that it was aware of the proposal but that no decision had been made. Pristina rejected it. From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Dec 3 11:01:27 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 10:01:27 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Susan Rice is Bad News for Africa Message-ID: <155BE946-89F5-4CEB-9C96-38537365EA79@shaw.ca> Susan Rice is Bad News for Africa by BAR executive editor Glen Ford http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=912&Itemid=1 "Rice revealed herself to be an apostle of George Bush's War on Somalia." If you believe that Barack Obama will pursue a policy in the Horn of Africa that is substantially different than that of George Bush, you are in for a deep disappointment. Only weeks after Ethiopia's U.S.- instigated invasion of Somalia almost two years ago, Susan Rice, Obama's choice for Ambassador to the United Nations, endorsed the aggression - an atrocity that has resulted in the displacement of 1.5 million Somalis and impending starvation of 3.5 million more. Rice is a proponent of so-called "humanitarian military intervention" - but supports a U.S. Somalia policy that created "Africa's worst humanitarian crisis," according to the United Nations. There is every reason to believe she will counsel the next president to continue George Bush's policies in the Horn of Africa. In January, 2007, while Ethiopian troops attempted to crush Islamists who had brought a brief period of relative peace and stability to Somalia, and U.S. air and sea forces pounded the countryside with missiles and bombs, Rice revealed herself to be an apostle of George Bush's War on Somalia (and the so-called War on Terror in general). Rice told the PBS News Hour that U.S. collaboration with the Ethiopian invaders was justified by what she called America's "counterterrorism imperatives," which she said "really are real in the context of Somalia." In Rice's words, "We have to go after the terrorist cells where we find them." The Bush regime gave no estimate of how many persons with ties to Al Qaida were operating on Somali soil, but the number appears to have been very small. The main goal of the Americans and their Ethiopian allies was to crush the government that had been created by Somali Islamists. The Islamic Courts regime, as Abukar Arman writes in the journal Global Politician, operated "schools, hospitals, and for six months before the occupation removed every checkpoint in Mogadishu and brought a semblance of peace." Two years after the invasion, the Islamists have retaken much of southern and central Somalia, and the Ethiopians appear poised to withdraw - after killing, starving and displacing millions in partnership with the United States. "On Darfur, Rice is more bellicose than Bush." The "humanitarian" component of Susan Rice's militarism is quite selective. She has long been a super-hawk on punishing Sudan for its behavior in Darfur. Back in October, 2006, Rice declared, "It's time to get tough" with the government in Khartoum." In a Washington Post column, she advised the Bush regime to give Sudan "an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the U.N. force within one week or face military consequences." (explain China and oil and Israel) On Darfur, Rice is more bellicose than Bush. She sees no contradiction in calling for military action against Sudan, supposedly to end a "humanitarian crisis" in Darfur, while simultaneously backing a savage U.S.-Ethiopian assault that causes an even larger humanitarian calamity in Somalia. Rice claims to seek safety for civilians in Darfur, while supporting a total absence of security for Somali civilians. Darfur is a military/political convenience for "real- politic" operatives like Susan Rice. As Bruce Dixon wrote in his November 2007 BAR article, "If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?" (See "Ten Reasons Why ?Save Darfur' is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa.") "Her sole concern is projection of U.S. power by any means - or pretext - that is available." Rice's behavior in Africa has always been morally inconsistent. She was a member of Bill Clinton's National Security Council during the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi minority. Later, she "swore" she would go "down in flames" if necessary to prevent future genocides. But after her promotion to Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, she failed to publicly advocate action against U.S. allies Uganda and by then Tutsi-ruled Rwanda - the main perpetrators in an ongoing war that his killed millions Susan Rice's brand of "humanitarian intervention" is a farce, a pretext to justify military aggression under the guise of preventing human suffering. She has amply demonstrated that her sole concern is projection of U.S. power by any means - or pretext - that is available. Rice embraces a policy that causes mass death and starvation in Somalia and ongoing genocide in Congo. Although she's no blood relative of Condoleezza Rice, on African issues she seems headed in the same direction as the current Secretary of State. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 3 15:51:09 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:51:09 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Somali Pirates to acquire Citigroup Message-ID: <200812032251.mB3Mp9U7016156@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081203/acf72256/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 3 15:53:06 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:53:06 -0800 Subject: [R-G] US moves to contain regional fallout from Mumbai attack Message-ID: <200812032253.mB3Mr6N9019439@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081203/54d03211/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 3 15:54:57 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:54:57 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Palestinian Civil Societys Position Paper for Durban II Conference Message-ID: <200812032254.mB3Mswmp023242@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081203/6c44024d/attachment.txt From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Dec 3 16:00:55 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 15:00:55 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Naomi Klein (on Canada): 'We can't lose this moment' Message-ID: <22BDD882-A5B0-4E55-85C8-91D261C7D413@shaw.ca> Naomi Klein: 'We can't lose this moment' By Kim Elliott | December 3, 2008 http://rabble.ca/news/naomi-klein-%E2%80%98we-cant-lose-moment Kim Elliott: As you outline so well in your book and in various interviews in the U.S. media, the current financial crisis holds the possibility of being one of those moments when the shock doctrine can best be applied. Can you comment on both the Harper government's economic and fiscal statement introduced last week, and on the Opposition's response to that - that is, the formation of a coalition - in the context of the shock doctrine? Naomi Klein: Yes, absolutely. What I think we are seeing is a clear example of the shock doctrine in the way the Harper government has used the economic crisis to push through a much more radical agenda than they won a mandate to do. At the same time we are seeing an example of what I call in the book a "shock resistance," where this tactic has been so overused around the world and also in Canada that we are becoming more resistant to the tactic - we are on to them - and Harper is not getting away with it. What I think is really amazing about this moment is whatever happens next - whether we end up with this coalition or not, we will have an extremely chastened Harper. So the attempted shock doctrine has failed. I think we can say that decisively. Just to be clear, what I mean by the shock doctrine, as you know, is the use of crisis to push through unpopular pro-corporate policies. This bundling of a whole package of policies: denying the right of public sector workers to strike, the attack on public financing of political parties, with the economic program - that is what failed, and people were offended by the opportunism of it. This is what so many of us were worried about during the election - the context of a Tory victory in an economic crisis, because we know that there is this pattern of using an economic crisis to push through policies that were nowhere during the campaign. KE: This coalition gives us lots of opportunities, but it also poses some risks if it is successful. I'd like to ask you about that. In an interview you had on Democracy Now!, you said that part of the reason that Obama was appointing a host of neo-liberal economists was because there was a lack of "intellectual honesty" among progressives about the real legacy of the Clinton years. Does the Canadian left, in a Liberal-led coalition, risk losing our understanding of the neo- liberal legacy of the Liberals, who during those same Clinton years were ripping up Canada's welfare state, cutting social spending etc? NK: I think it is really important to remember, and I've written about this in the book, and Linda McQuaig has written about it extensively, that it is the Liberals who actually implemented what I'm describing in Canada. They were elected on an economic stimulus platform in 1993, with a huge mandate. The Tories were wiped out in those historic elections. And then they caved to pressure from Bay Street, from the corporate media and from the right-wing think tanks in the face of the debt crisis. They turned around and broke their election promises when it came to NAFTA, when it came to job creation, and the famous 1995 Paul Martin budget came down which did so much damage to unemployment insurances (which makes it particularly interesting that a key piece of the agreement for the coalition is about strengthening unemployment insurance). So we need to have long memories about the Liberals, because they have done exactly what Harper has just done, in terms of using an economic crisis for a neo-liberal about turn. That said, what I find most exciting about what is going on right now - beyond just getting rid of Harper, which is exciting in and of itself - is that we have this opportunity to show what proportional representation (PR) would look like, because all of this talk that this is a coup is a joke. What is being proposed by this coalition is much closer to representative democracy than what we have right now, which is a government that has [slightly more than] 35 per cent of the popular vote in a turnout that was historically low, of 59 per cent of Canadian voters, which means that even though the Tories won more seats they had fewer actual votes than in the last election. I think it is really important to talk about democracy, about what it actually means in this period. In some ways I think it is even more important than talking about the policies, because our electoral system is broken. Because of the Tories' extraordinary opportunism and terrible calculation we now have an opportunity to see a better version of democracy and see more people represented in government. To me the best case scenario that could come out of this is, one, you get the coalition, and, two, the NDP uses this moment to really launch a national discussion about why we need PR and that that becomes one of the things that comes out of this crisis. Now, they don't have the mandate for that right now, but we could come out of this with a national referendum on proportional representation. People might actually like it, which would be really, really exciting. KE: That is a very exciting possibility, and I wanted to ask you, if this coalition is successful, what are the two or three key issues that the NDP should focus on, the kinds of issues that were not covered in the agreement? NK: They've put in writing what they've agreed to. I think it is going to maybe be up to the NDP to make sure that the EI improvements are protected. KE: I'm thinking of those issues that were not in the agreement like PR, or like withdrawal from Afghanistan - those issues that were not nailed down in the agreement. NK: Those issues weren't nailed down because there isn't agreement on them, and that I think it is not really about whether the NDP holds the line on these issues, but about how the NDP uses this platform. It is a historic opportunity, I think, to be very bold, not just because of what is happening in this country, but because of what is happening globally. Another important role for the NDP, beyond putting proportional representation on the agenda, withdrawal from Afghanistan, is also the terms of the bailout. The bailout for the auto industry is part of their agreement, but we don't know what the terms of that agreement are going to be, and that is going to be really important in terms of negotiating a progressive automobile industry bailout - a green auto industry bailout, if such a thing is possible. So that is a very important role that the NDP could play. I think the best analogy, in terms of the kinds of concerns you are raising in regards to the Liberals and neo-liberalism, of being the party that continued and deepened Mulroney's neo-liberal economic program, is to look at Gordon Brown. He was finance minister for Tony Blair, really the face of neo-liberalism in Britain. He is now overseeing what many are calling the death of New Labour, and the return to Keynesian economics in Britain. That is because he is fighting for his political life. That is because he was going down, until he started talking this way. That is really what is at stake for the Liberals, I think. This is also why I think the issue of political financing for political parties is so key. The reason there is a little more latitude in Canada on these issues is because our political process is not massively owned by corporations as it is in the United States. The way in which public financing for political parties has been presented in the press is "oh the politicians, they just got mad when they went after their money," right? This is another key point that I think is somewhat related to the issue of proportional representation. We need to be talking about our political process here, and the issue of public financing for political parties in elections is key to protecting and deepening democracy in Canada, and for keeping it out of corporate control. It is not for nothing that the Tories are attacking that. They see attacking public financing of political parties as a way to entrench their power. KE: Should this coalition become government, what should we as progressive movements be doing in terms of using this as an opportunity to promote these kinds of progressive agendas, to support the NDP in a predominantly Liberal caucus? NK: I think it is PR, I really think that is the way in. By pushing PR then it is not just about this one crisis. It is about leveraging this situation to have a more democratic system. It means that if the NDP does deeply disappoint us in this moment we could still end up with a better political system. KE: Should the coalition happen what do you see as the long-term fall- out in terms of western voters in Canada? NK: I really think that we need to fight back this strategy. We know what the talking points are from the right and from the West, and it is about playing up this idea of making a coalition with the Bloc, "with the separatists." What to me is so extraordinary is the temper tantrum being thrown in Alberta right now at the prospect of having to be ruled by a majority - by a coalition of parties representing the majority of the people in this country. I really do think it is worth asking who the real separatists are, because of course the undercurrent of everything they are saying is that they will take our oil. So who are the real separatists? KE: Do you agree then that we should be out there supporting the coalition? Attending rallies, mobilizing letter-writing campaigns? NK: Absolutely. Listen, we've been given a second chance, after these elections. What is exciting about it is that a lot of people did get involved in the election to try to beat the Tories. Maybe it started a little bit too late. We were surprised a bit by how quickly the election happened, but you saw a lot of people getting involved in things like voteforenviroment.ca and the Department of Culture. That was very much the spirit of it, it was anything but the Tories and it was kind of building a PR system without the cooperation of the political parties that got a lot of people excited during this election. It was about just doing an end-run around the political parties who were not cooperating to try to keep out the Tories. So, what is exciting about this political moment, and how people can get involved, is that this is building on that. The political parties caught up with the grassroots movement that was happening anyway with those initiatives like voteforenvironment.ca, Department of Culture, and people like Murray Dobbin who have been making these arguments pretty steadily outside of the political parties. Now it is happening, and it is happening thanks to Stephen Harper and his extraordinary arrogance and over-reaching. We can't lose this moment. I just want to emphasize this point: If even through smart tactics, Harper pulls this off, if he prorogues Parliament; if the Governor General lets him get away with it; if the Liberals lose their nerve over Xmas, then the Harper we will have in January will be a deeply chastened Harper. What everybody agrees with is that he made a massive error, that he massively overreached, and his own party, his own base agrees with that. Worst case scenario we dodged a bullet here. Best case scenario, we leverage his overreach, his attempt to use a crisis to push through his ideological pro-corporate agenda to have a deeper democracy in our country, and to prevent forevermore a situation where a party with 35 per cent of the vote is government. From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Dec 3 16:05:36 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 15:05:36 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Liberal-NDP coalition is no solution Message-ID: <40219793-AF87-4537-889B-BEF08CF7143A@shaw.ca> Liberal-NDP coalition is no solution By Sebastian Lamb | December 3, 2008 http://rabble.ca/news/liberal-ndp-coalition-no-solution There is no question that Stephen Harper's Conservatives are fervently committed to serving big business. Their cuts and attempts to hold federal government workers to pay increases below inflation and suspend their right to strike prove this yet again. But the fact that the Conservatives are aggressively right-wing doesn't mean that a coalition of the right-wing Liberals and the NDP is any kind of progressive alternative. The Liberals are one of the two historic parties of Bay Street. As Naomi Klein has put it, in the 1990s they "continued and deepened Mulroney's neo-liberal economic program." They did "exactly what Harper has just done, in terms of using an economic crisis for a neo- liberal about turn." They implemented NAFTA and supported the FTAA - the deal that drew tens of thousands of global justice protestors to Quebec City in 2001. They also sent Canadian troops to take part in the occupation of Afghanistan and passed repressive "national security" legislation. One reason for the Liberals' past success has been their skill at talking as if they actually care about working people, as if they weren't a party of big business. But that's what they are, and whether or not they're in a coalition with the NDP they will only govern in a way that's acceptable to most of the capitalist class. The coalition's document, "A Policy Accord to Address the Present Economic Crisis," makes this clear: "This policy accord is built on a foundation of fiscal responsibility." "Fiscal responsibility" means keeping government spending within the limits that major capitalists are willing to tolerate. Make no mistake: a Liberal-NDP government will be a government whose efforts to "manage the economy" during this worsening global economic crisis will be mainly geared to helping corporations, not employed and unemployed workers. In a coalition government with the Liberals, the NDP will be forced to support unacceptable measures. A Liberal-NDP coalition will also strengthen the most conservative elements in the NDP, those who want the NDP to embrace neoliberalism more enthusiastically than it has already and to pay even less attention to labour and community activists. Such a coalition will weaken the little that remains in the NDP of past efforts by activists in Canada to build a political party independent of Bay Street. There is also a real danger that many people could end up tolerating government policies that hurt working people because they come from a Liberal-NDP government rather than from the more blatantly pro- business Tories. We see this in the US, where many people swallow reactionary measures brought in by Democrats that they would reject if implemented by Republicans. What should we do? Relying on a Liberal-NDP government to deliver what people need is a recipe for disappointment. If a coalition government is formed (or if it isn't), everyone who believes that people shouldn't suffer because of a crisis we didn't create needs to mobilize. Now is the time to get organizing in unions, community groups and on campuses. Now is the time to start planning forums where people can come together and discuss campaigns that put demands on the federal government. We should build campaigns to demand genuine reforms such as a full- scale pro-worker overhaul of EI, the construction of non-profit housing and better public transit systems, the strengthening of public pensions, tough regulations to slash greenhouse gas emissions, status for all, and the nationalization of the banks. Vigorous efforts are needed to oppose every effort to scapegoat unions or immigrants for the crisis, and to call for the immediate withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan. In addition to such campaigns, there is also an opportunity for popular education about capitalism. The economic crisis has dealt a huge blow to confidence in the system. Many people are open to discussing the crisis, capitalism and alternatives. Supporters of radical social change shouldn't miss this opportunity. Sebastian Lamb is an editor of New Socialist, where this article first appeared. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 3 16:33:17 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:33:17 -0800 Subject: [R-G] The National Security Archive on Mexico's Tlatelolco Massacre Message-ID: <200812032333.mB3NXHtI029368@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081203/9495d838/attachment.txt From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Dec 3 16:47:35 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 15:47:35 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Somalia, the Third Front Revisited Message-ID: <4FE4D835-EDF6-4EFE-9533-ED131524863E@shaw.ca> Somalia, the Third Front Revisited December, 01 2008 By Matthew Blood http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/19831 Somalia today is approaching a cataclysm not seen since the early 1990s, and the U.S. role has added in no small part to the misery that once again engulfs the war-weary Horn of Africa nation. The brutal Ethiopian military occupation of Somalia that began on Christmas Eve 2006 has sustained heavy losses over the past 20 months. The conflict has strained Ethiopian resources and Addis Ababa is currently reviewing its overall strategy. What remains of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG), barring a massive new foreign military intervention, teeters on the edge of collapse. In its place an already powerful Islamist insurgency is strengthening rapidly. Warlordism, criminality, and piracy are reaching new heights. All the while, the Somali population remains under siege, caught between abuses on all sides as its society literally disintegrates. Underwriting a significant portion of the bloodshed has been a U.S. administration engaged in expansive warfare with a preference for covert military operations. Somalia has long been of strategic interest to U.S. policymakers. The country sits next to the strait of Bab al-Mandeb, a key oil transit waterway between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean?the second closest point between Africa and the Middle East. During the Cold War the dictatorship of General Siad Barre was the long-time recipient of generous amounts of U.S. military and economic largesse. In 1991, after years of unrest, rebellion, and protracted drought, Barre's regime collapsed into famine, war, and chaos. George H. W. Bush ordered U.S. forces into the country a year later in support of the United Nations relief program, culminating in the Battle of Mogadishu and the now-famous Black Hawk Down incident. At the time of the U.S. withdrawal and international disengagement, no single actor was strong enough to establish and maintain control. Somalia fractured along semi-permanent tribal lines and warlord fiefdoms that would come to define the country's social and political landscape. For more than a decade and a half, the territory was left to fester in ungoverned criminality and violence, only rarely making international headlines. September 2001 and the wars in the Middle East brought renewed U.S. focus to the Horn of Africa. For some time, a diverse group of Islamists, clan leaders, businesspeople, militia heads, and civic actors had been coalescing into what would in 2005 become the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a heterogeneous movement seeking to establish a semblance of law and order after years of chaos. The Courts proved to be well organized, disciplined, and effective civil administrators. They were popular with average Somalis, even the less devout, all of whom were desperate for relief from the criminal gangs and brutality that had long ruled their country. The Islamists also began to challenge the weak, faction-ridden TFG?the successor to 13 previous failed attempts at creating a central government?which had been confined to the provincial town of Baidoa, headed by President Abdullahi Yusuf, closely linked to Mogadishu's warlords. Alarmed at the Islamic Courts' growing strength and popularity, in early 2006 the CIA began supplying significant quantities of arms and money to a coalition of secular Mogadishu warlords under the name Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT). The CIA program had been a poorly conceived attempt to hunt down the small number of al-Qaeda affiliated individuals involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, then thought to be hiding in Somalia. But the operation failed disastrously and, according to reports, "the payoffs added to an anarchic situation that led many Somalis to turn to the Islamic Courts for protection" (Washington Post, May 13, 2007). The Islamists struck preemptively and decisively, routing the warlords and seizing control of Mogadishu within a matter of weeks. For six months in 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts proceeded to establish security and the provision of basic social services in much of Somalia for the first time in 15 years. The peace provided by the Islamists also came with more conservative social policies and a type of sharia law. For average Somalis, however, the security of the Courts brought a brief respite from their usual suffering. The Bush administration, seeing Somalia and the Islamic Courts through the lens of its war on terror and, having botched the earlier warlord program, began stepping up aid to long-time ally and neighboring Ethiopian autocrat Meles Zenawi. Zenawi has held power in Ethiopia since the early 1990s. During a crackdown against popular protests after fraudulent elections in 2005, Zenawi's security forces massacred nearly 200 people, injured 760 more, and arrested an additional 20,000, among them opposition leaders, foreign aid workers, and journalists. Nonetheless, since 2002, Ethiopia has received nearly $25 million in overt U.S. military assistance while at least 100 U.S. military personnel currently work inside Ethiopia in advisory positions as part of what the Pentagon characterizes as a "close working relationship" with the Ethiopian military. Less than two weeks before the invasion, in mid-December 2006, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer publicly declared, "The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals, east Africa al-Qaeda cell individuals." The claim was dubious and he provided no evidence. Horn of Africa specialist Ken Menkhaus noted in February 2007 that the Islamic Courts "movement as a whole was far from an al-Qaeda front. Only three foreign al-Qaeda operatives were said by the US to be in hiding in Mogadishu, a number far lower than those suspected of residing in neighboring Kenya." Assistant Secretary Frazer warned of "a risk Al Qaeda may take up bases in Somalia," but denied that the United States would take military action against the Courts. Similarly, then-UN Ambassador John Bolton told reporters in early December 2006: "The United States strongly believes that a sustainable solution in Somalia should be based on credible dialogue between the [TFG] and the UIC and we continue to work with our African and other partners toward that end." Behind the scenes, General John Abizaid, at the time U.S. Centcom commander, had already visited Addis Ababa to express some last minute reservations to Prime Minister Zenawi. The decision had been made, though, and ultimately Washington lent its support to the invasion. The Ethiopian military crossed the Somali border on December 24, 2006 and later reports indicated that "CIA agents traveled with the Ethiopian troops, helping to direct operations" (the London Independent, February 9, 2008). The United States provided important satellite intelligence and other battleground information from unmanned Predator drones. "A lot of what we taught them was used to fight that global War on Terror," observed a U.S. military advisor who had trained Ethiopian soldiers now fighting in Somalia. In terms of weaponry, he noted, "They got what they needed." U.S. Special Forces also conducted periodic operations inside Somali territory, possibly moving out of a rumored CIA base in eastern Ethiopia. The full extent and exact type of activity is not known, but reports of their movements have been confirmed by Somali officials. As TFG Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein explained to reporters in February 2008, "The presence of the CIA, the presence of [U.S.] troops, is not a big issue. We like that they are here. But right now they don't have a permanent military presence. They come in and out." U.S. warships moved into position off the coast of Somalia in anticipation of the invasion. Acting on intelligence from the ground, Washington ordered bombing raids targeting what it believed to be Islamic militants. U.S.-piloted AC-130 gunships and cruise missiles have blasted Somali territory at least a half dozen times since January 2007. The first of these air raids killed what turned out to be 70 Somali goat herders whom the Pentagon had initially claimed were Islamic fighters. After several other attempts, in May 2008, the bombings finally succeeded in killing the leader of the al-Shabaab militia, Aden Hashi Ayro. The strike also demolished the surrounding homes, killing ten others and leading to anti-U.S. protests. The Ethiopian military captured Mogadishu before New Year's Day 2007. The most powerful army in the region devastated organized UIC forces. But the remaining militants fled and quickly melted back into the larger civilian population. As predicted, the collapse of the Islamic Courts and the subsequent Ethiopian occupation led to a relentless Iraq-style insurgency?one that has been rapidly gaining strength. The insurgents have successfully used roadside bombs, hit-and-run attacks, and assassinations targeted at government officials to assault the TFG and its Ethiopian backers. Increasingly, they have routed Ethiopian and TFG military forces in direct confrontations, moving to capture and hold swathes of territory for extended periods of time. Ethiopian and TFG forces, for their part, responded with a ferocious campaign to root out militants in Mogadishu and surrounding areas. The vicious counterinsurgency has seen the regular shelling of densely populated urban neighborhoods. Distinctions between civilians and insurgents are often irrelevant to security forces that frequently prey on the Somali population. Looting, rape, torture, mutilation, and cutting the throats of victims are regular tactics of Ethiopian and TFG forces. These are the same methods the Ethiopian military has used to suppress another ongoing insurgency in the Ogaden desert. The most recent report from Amnesty International recounts episodes too horrific to quote here. Thus, Somalis are caught in the crossfire between Ethiopian and TFG security forces, insurgents, warlords, criminals, and U.S. gunships. The "more common complaint among ordinary Somalis," according to reporters, however, "is that the Ethiopians are 'indiscriminate' in their reprisals?and that this is why Mogadishu has been emptied of people." The human cost has been staggering. The forces of war and drought are rapidly converging on the Horn of Africa nation in a perfect storm against the Somali population. The civilian death toll since the invasion is fast approaching 10,000. More than a million people have fled their homes, including half of Mogadishu, and are now living in squalid, makeshift refugee camps. The food and fuel crisis that has affected international markets has combined with the disruption of fighting, looting, inflation, and a failure of the seasonal rains to push Somalia to the absolute brink. The country now stands on the verge of famine on a scale not seen since the early 1990s when an estimated 300,000 Somalis starved to death. Recent UN estimates hold that more than 3.25 million people, nearly half the population, are currently in need of food aid. International officials have long been calling the situation the most horrific humanitarian disaster on the African continent. As in Iraq, the war on terror in Somalia has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, sowing the increasing radicalization and anti-Westernization of an entire population of poor Third World people. In recent months there has been new evidence of foreign fighters inside Somalia? decidedly not the case when Jendayi Frazer declared two weeks prior to the invasion that Somalia was "now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals." While the leadership of the Islamic Courts was originally a mix of moderate and conservative Islamic actors, the insurgency no longer maintains this character. A peace agreement between the former moderate elements of the Courts, now called the Alliance for the Re- Liberation of Somalia, and the TFG has already concluded to no effect. The old leaders of the Courts no longer control the insurgency. Battle- hardened al-Shabaab militants, perhaps poised to succeed the Transitional Federal Government, espouse a far more radical and anti- Western Islamic ideology. For the moment, the intervention in Somalia appears to be coming full circle. In September two Somalis in their early 20s were arrested at a German airport on suspicion of planning terrorist attacks somewhere in the West. They were released due to insufficient evidence, but German intelligence officials believe the men were arrested too early. Somalia has indeed been a third front in the war on terror. A quiet front, but a front nonetheless. Six months after the Ethiopian invasion, Defense Department spokesperson Bryan Whitman told reporters, "The very nature of some of our operations, as well as the success of those operations, is often predicated on our ability to work quietly with our partners and allies." Now, almost two years into the occupation, few can still maintain delusions of success in the Horn of Africa. Perhaps most troubling is that the current episode must be seen against the background of the recent creation of AFRICOM and the larger militarization of U.S. foreign policy in Africa. What becomes of Somalia remains to be seen. What is certain is that the U.S. has taken a group of the world's most destitute, desperate, and brutalized people and brutalized them some more. We might expect to see angry young Somali bringing violence to the West in the future. Whether we know it or not, we have certainly brought it to them. This is the Bush administration's legacy and it will be with us for a long time to come. Z Matthew Blood is an independent journalist who has lived and traveled in sub-Saharan Africa. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 3 16:45:43 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:45:43 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Britains #1 peace expert praises Obamas foreign policy A-Team Message-ID: <200812032345.mB3Njhx3019566@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081203/84dd072c/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 3 17:51:00 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:51:00 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Obama pick for Attorney General defended Guantanamo policy Message-ID: <200812040051.mB40p1G5029335@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081203/56be0db7/attachment.txt From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Wed Dec 3 19:17:49 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 22:17:49 -0400 Subject: [R-G] I know it is last minute but...... Message-ID: <164236a30812031817l2157dd1dgde44590c756286aa@mail.gmail.com> Hey anthony, it is aaron again. I know it it a little last minute but tomorrow there is a big opportunity to dicuss this coalition with Canadains, many people will be gathering to celabrate this possible coalition either tomorrow night or on saturday. I believmany leftyies, anti-capitalists, anarchists are as a result of feeling the effects of an ebb in the,for lack of an better wors, the social justice movement and are willing to ecept reformist bullshit. We need to be at theese gathering to let people know that the only good thing about this coalition is that it has galvanised people. The problem is the leaders know that their followers are dunk with celebration and are will to say yes sir to whatever command they get. over the last 4 or five days we have seen 4 or 5 good anti-coalition articles and I want to pass out literature tomorrow at the celebration here in halifax. Whatare the chances of you taking all the good points in the article you have read thus far and putting them into a pamphlet that you could send out via email. I would do it but my non carring aditude toward grammer does not make me a good candidate and my computer is on the fritz which means I have limited access to the internet. Let me know what you think. P.s if the house get porouged, we will have more time to implement this stratagy but if we start with the gathering, we will hit many ndpers at once Aaron From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Dec 4 00:26:53 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:26:53 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The economy isn't everything Message-ID: <4937863D.9040903@ashisuto.co.jp> by Grace Lee Boggs The Michigan Citizen (October 19 2008) In these times of economic meltdown, when so many of us are losing our homes and our jobs and agonizing about how to pay our bills, the conventional wisdom is to insist that the economy is everything, and that you're stupid if you don't agree. That is why I'd like to share the email about the Dow that I received this week from my friend, Rosa Naparstek, who used to live in Detroit and now lives in New York. Rosa is an artist who helps us liberate our imaginations from the dominant culture and get to our human essence. In August she gave a very moving slide show presentation of her artwork at the Boggs Center. She called it "Childscapes" because it revealed how our inner landscapes form the emotional roots of the world we create personally and politically. In this email about the Dow, Rosa reminds us that life isn't only about the economy. We are, first and foremost, human beings who down through the ages have created our way of life according to who and what we are. Until the onset of capitalism only a few centuries ago, our relationships with one another and our communities, not the rapid growth of the economy, were what we valued. The current crisis provides us with the opportunity to reclaim those fundamental human values. "Last week", her email begins, "my sister and I went to Ellis Island , the portal of our entry into the United States in 1951. I remember standing on deck at the railing, holding my father's hand and cheering at the sight of the statue and land. I knew we had arrived for a new life and home. "My father was a socialist who brought me up to respect labor and recognize that capitalism was an exploitative form of human relationships. He was a scholar and also by trade an 'upper maker' (the top part of the shoe) who worked at Henry Ford's cutting upholstery. My mother worked there too, sewing the upholstery. She had been a seamstress. He wanted to teach me how to make shoes so that I could always earn a living. I told him I didn't need to; that I would go to college and be safe. "Now, after many professions, I find myself gathering things, the fruit of human labor, to put together in a form that honors the story behind them so that I too can finally say I have made something with my hands. "We are at an interesting juncture. The sky is falling. Crisis, danger and opportunity are palpable. Evolution takes a long time, but emergent realities can sometimes break through. "Many celebrated when 'communism' failed in what seemed 'not with a bang, but a whimper'. We won, we won! And now, who will say forthrightly that capitalism, unfettered markets and unaccountable profits, have failed, bringing us down with a global bang? "As much as I read and have read about economics now and in the past, I feel most of what we say about it is fiction. We do not live the truths in each theory. We live and create from the truth of who and what we are. "Socialism and communism are spiritual economic systems: to give according to our abilities and receive according to our needs. And, the final stage, the withering away of the state, is the stage when we no longer need external rules or laws because we have become our best and highest selves, and are unafraid to know that we are all one. "Laissez faire also has its theoretical validity, a belief in personal freedom, which after all is also the highest goal of 'the withering away of the state'. However, personal freedom unmoored from spiritual development can become greed and ruthless disregard of the other and the best in ourselves. "We can create an economy of caring and sharing and cooperating. The land is still here. The people, hands, minds are still here. It is an affair of the heart, giving and receiving." http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=77&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=6609&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 4 08:39:11 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 07:39:11 -0800 Subject: [R-G] By Supporting NGOs, is the Left Suppressing a Radical Politics in Haiti and Elsewhere? Message-ID: <309AA617-F273-4DAB-B7FB-909A7FA13CAE@shaw.ca> From: Kim Ives This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI LIBERTE newsweekly. For the complete edition with other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-421-0162, (fax) 718-421-3471 or e- mail at editor at haitiliberte.com. Also visit our website at . HAITI LIBERTE "Justice. Verite. Independance." * THIS WEEK IN HAITI * November 19-25, 2007 Vol. 2, No. 18 BY SUPPORTING NGOS, IS THE LEFT SUPPRESSING A RADICAL POLITICS IN HAITI AND ELSEWHERE? by Richard Pithouse By supporting NGOs, is the left suppressing a radical politics in Haiti and elsewhere? And is it possible to defend a popular movement without deifying its leader? Richard Pithouse reviews Peter Hallward's new book on the containment of popular politics in Haiti. The inequality of class, first universalized into a global Manicheanism in The Communist Manifesto, is not just complicated by gender, race and sexuality. There is also the fact that the globalization of capital has always been accompanied by the violent division of the world into different kinds of spaces meant to be inhabited by different kinds of people. The unequal allocation of rights and resources across these spaces has always been held to match unequal capacities for thought, speech and action. Attempts at building solidarity across these divisions have often been insufficiently attentive to their objective material differences or too willing to treat claims about subjective difference as objective. In the contemporary world the failure to attend to the objective difference of particular situations often results in the assumption that all struggles should aspire to the form that the anti- globalization movement has taken in the metropole. Amongst other problems this immediately renders the (usually) white Northern activist an automatic and universal expert on what a popular radicalism should really look like. A failure to attend to the subjective choices with which people confront particular situations often results in a reifying culturalism that sees struggle as a natural expression of cultural difference. It is inevitably complicit with some form of racism and often risks an inability to discern domination within a nation or movement. Peter Hallward is a philosopher who has thought about the question of solidarity across the divisions that structure domination with a rare combination of subtlety and militancy. The themes that link his work on contemporary post-colonial theory, French philosophy and Haitian politics include a consistent stress on the fact that everyone thinks and that thought is the subjective confrontation with specific objective situations. Hallward affirms the specificity of particular situations and affirms the subjectivity with which they are confronted and thereby 'maintains the relation between subjective and objective (and between subjects) as a relation in the strict sense.'I Hallward is committed to a prescriptive politics. He argues that genuinely political actions must elaborate universal principles (principles that hold for everyone), that for these principles to be meaningful they must be adhered to directly and immediately, that adhering to them is necessarily divisive and requires collective unity and a willingness to confront domination. In other words he proposes a politics of popular self-emancipation organized around popular intellectual work and consensual disciplined commitment. From the beginning his work has taken the view that, following Paulo Freire, 'true generosity consists in fighting to destroy the causes which lead to false charity.'I Damming the Flood is a richly detailed account of the popular Haitian movement Lavalas (the flood) in and out of power. There is a focus on how the movement was vilified and its president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, removed from office by the American military with considerable support from global civil society. Hallward's basic argument is that as Lavalas developed into a formidable force in the late 1980s it began to constitute a serious threat to the US-backed Haitian elite. They responded to the election of Aristide to the Presidency in December 1990 with an attempted coup in January 1991 and then a successful military coup in September 1991. It left 5000 dead. Aristide returned to office in November 2000 with 92 percent of the vote and disbanded the army at which point the Haitian elite, with strong support from elites in Canada, the US and France, began to wage an elaborate propaganda and destabilization campaign against the Lavalas government. This was supported by many NGOs, including those on the left, and was followed by a military attack after which Aristide was removed from the country by the US military in February 2004. Lavalas supporters were then subject to sustained repression by occupying United Nations forces at a cost of several thousand more lives. Nevertheless resistance has continued. Hallward takes the view that the objective constraints imposed on Aristide's administrations by imperial power were severe and that there was no prospect for fundamental transformation. Nevertheless there were important innovations by way of a higher minimum wage, a literacy program, a school building project, health care and so on. Even IMF statistics confirm clear progress in these areas. But Hallward's analysis breaks with the economism that typifies much contemporary leftism and he also takes the symbolic and political movement as significant. For instance he takes seriously the political ramifications of Aristide's choice to open up the swimming pool in the presidential palace to children from poor families. But the primary thrust of his assessment stresses that popular support for Aristide was never passive and was rooted in a network of grassroots organizations through which people could work for their own empowerment. Although Hallward doesn't make much of this it is noticeable that the practical action taken by Aristide's governments in support of the poor often found ways to combine material support with support for popular democratization. For instance housing was not reduced to the provision of houses but included the development of town squares in shack settlements. Hallward deals frankly with the problem of opportunism, a problem that every movement has to confront when it reaches the point of winning some access to or control over state resources. He also deals directly with the reality that any movement operating in a repressive environment in which its membership is generally criminalized is going to have to take on some of the judicial and security functions usually reserved for states with inevitable risks and inevitable condemnation. Nevertheless, he concludes that "Over the last twenty years, Lavalas has developed as an experiment at the outer limits of contemporary political possibility. Its history sheds light on some of the ways that political mobilization can proceed under the pressure of exceptional powerful constraints. ii Hallward's claims about a campaign of demonization against Lavalas are persuasive. It is instructive to set aside Hallward's arguments about this and instead apply Chomsky's propaganda model to the recent history of Haiti. By excluding highly disputed events and examining only those on which there is some agreement as to the basic facts, and comparing only those that can be as closely matched with others as is possible it quickly becomes evident that, for instance, violence attributed to Lavalas has been systematically treated in a very different way in the elite media and civil society to that of other actors such as the Duvalier's paramilitaries, the Haitian Military, the US Military, the anti-Aristide paramilitary groups, the United Nations and so on. But the fetishization of leaders of popular movements has a sorry history and it is worrying that some of the solidarity work with Haiti seems to be more interested in deifying Aristide rather than supporting ongoing popular struggles in Haiti. Hallward describes his book 'as an exercise in anti-demonization, not deification.'iii This seems fair - especially given that he is clear that Lavalas emerged from discussions amongst ordinary people in the shack settlements of Port-au-Prince and that its continued strength after Aristide's kidnapping is rooted in the ongoing practice of similar discussions and the modes of grassroots militancy that they have engendered. Aristide is an interesting theorist in his own right and his own thought provides as good a measure as any for measuring the value of mobilization. His political thought is rooted in liberation theology. For Aristide, who says that when we say God 'We mean the source of love; we mean the source of justice',iv liberation theology is 'the Christian impulse that does not separate belief from action, that exasperates conservatives, and annoys so many people on the left who dream of realizing the happiness of others ... without the others.'v He is clear that the political movement that twice bought him to power begins from and is sustained in the 'little church', or what liberation theology in Latin America calls 'base communities'. They are small groups that meet in their own neighborhoods to discuss, on their own time and in their own language, their ideas about politics and society. The fundamental principle in the little church is that 'All persons are human beings, and to be cherished.'vi The fundamental political task is to 'fan the fire of hope and to turn it into a tool for the people.'vii This theological politics is not unwilling to take a side. Aristide has long been clear that the preferential option for the poor should be 'total, unrepentant, intransigent' viii and that 'If they [elites] do not wish to share fraternally ... They must accept that it is they, not I and my colleagues, who are advocating war.'ix He's also made it very clear that as people assume political agency 'Liberation theology then gives way to a liberation of theology, which can also include a liberation from theology.'x Lavalas seems to have achieved, a form of organisation closer to that of a series of linked congregations rather than a party and rooted in the organisation of the poor by the poor in the languages that people speak, in the places where they live, in the modes that they choose and in the times when they are free to organise. This is a politics of popular self-emancipation. Hallward argues that although 'NGO administrators and left-leaning academics are often uneasy with what they see as a merely populist deviation'xi this popular power is necessary for any kind of meaningful challenge to domination. He has a point. As C.L.R. James noted in his history of the Haitian Revolution 'It is force that counts, and chiefly the organised force of the masses [.]. It is what they think that matters'.xii Lavalas took state power under extremely hostile circumstances and sought to subordinate the state to society by demobilising the military while continuing to mobilize society. When Aristide was first elected President in 1990 he declared that 'I will not be president of the government, I am going to be president of the opposition, of the people, even if this means confronting the very government I am creating.'xiii He held to this position and ten years later wrote that people should 'not confuse democracy with the holding of elections.'xiv The often hysterical demonization of Lavalas can easily be understood and slotted into a familiar pattern of imperial attempts to contain oppositional movement that includes the fate of Lumumba and Allende, the war against the Sandinistas and the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002. William Robinson provides a useful lens for this kind of analysis in the years after the Cold War. He argues that the US and its allies moved away from supporting dictators and that this shift was rooted in a recognition that support for dictators like Botha in South Africa, Marcos in the Philippines and the Duvaliers in Haiti had produced oppositional movements that were not only demanding the removal of dictators but also the popular democratisation of society. This recognition led to a shift in policy that saw the creation of liberal democracies as a more effective way of containing popular aspirations. There had been, Robinson argued, 'a reconceptualization of the principal target in intervened countries, from political to civil society, as the site of social control.'xv Robinson quoted Bill Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot as observing that 'Even after our [military] exit [from Haiti] in February 1996 we will remain in charge by means of USAID and the private sector.'xvi In South Africa and the Philippines this worked well enough as the new regimes were enthusiastic about demobilizing the movements that had brought them to power. But in Haiti the Lavalas project was to subordinate the state to society via ongoing popular democratization. This was unacceptable. The result was a return to political society as a key target of political control - a return to regime change. But there is another aspect to the demonization of Lavalas which may be more discomforting for some on the left. Hallward elaborates a consistent critique of NGOs. His criticism of racist ideas about enlightened white charity, the role of NGOs in promoting the agendas of foreign governments and his critique of the limits of the human rights project all cover familiar ground. But his criticism extends to the explicitly anti-neoliberal NGOs that position themselves on the left. He is completely skeptical of their political effectiveness in opposing domination arguing that: Rather than organize with and among the people, rather than work in the places and on the terms where the people themselves are strong... [they]... organize trivial made-for-media demonstrations against things like the uncontroversial evils of neo-liberalism or the high cost of living. Such protests are usually attended by tiny groups of 30 or 40 people - which is to say, by nobody outside the organizers' tiny circles.xviii But he sees their support for regime change as a very significant in offering an appearance of some kind of legitimacy for the coup. His explanation of why the left NGOs would oppose a movement with tremendous popular support centres around an interview with a women's rights activists who explains the NGO hostility to Lavalas in terms of class rivalry. 'Foreign observers underestimate,' she explains, 'the massive gap between elite (wealthy, French-speaking, internationally orientated) NGO professionals and grassroots (poor, Kreyol-speaking, neighbourhood-orientated activists).'xviii Aristide makes a similar point arguing that: Everything comes back, in the end, to the simple principle that tout moun se moun - every person is indeed a person, every person is capable of thinking things through for themselves. Those who don't accept this, when they look at the n gres of Haiti - and consciously or unconsciously, that's what they see - they see people who are too poor, too crude, too uneducated, to think for themselves. They see people who need others to make their decisions for them. It's a colonial mentality, in fact, and still very widespread among our political class. It's also a projection: they project onto the people a sense of their own inadequacy, their own inequality in the eyes of the master.xix There is a fundamental difference between forms of left politics that propose alternative policy arrangements or ways of being without developing any capacity to force the realisation of their goals and those that actively develop popular power and alternative modes of community and are willing and able to confront domination collectively and directly. The former can be called the expert left and the latter can be called the popular left. The expert left tends to operate in the languages of imperial power, to be dependent on state or donor funding, to require certification from bourgeois institutions as a condition of entry, to be located on the side of the razor wire where the police offer protection and to organise via international travel and the internet. It is not unusual for the expert left to be entirely unaware of the existence of a popular left even when it is a literal stone's throw away. Discourse in the wrong language, in the wrong place, in the wrong philosophical matrix and, most of all, in the mouths of the wrong people is often just invisible to the expert left.xx This lamentable fact is never innocent of class and can be deeply racialized. If the popular left reaches the point of being able to stage some sort of major interruption into bourgeois space it is not unusual for the elite left to be entirely unable to comprehend the rationality of that revolt. This is often predicated on an inability to comprehend the existence of grassroots intellectuals or grassroots political militants.xxi When the expert left is confronted with the concrete reality of the popular left via a direct demand for recognition and respect it is not unusual for the response to take the form of denial, paranoia, criminalisation and recourse to conspiracy theory in which the speech of grassroots militants can only be understood as manipulation by a rival elite.xxii In his essay on the Paris Commune Alain Badiou defines the left as 'the set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they are the only ones equipped to bear the general consequences of a singular political movement. Or, in more contemporary terms, that they are the only ones able to provide "social movements" with a "political perspective".'xxiii He concludes that the decision of the communards to take public affairs into their own hands was a decision to break with the left and that a political rupture, a rupture with the logic of representation, 'is always a rupture with the left.'xxiv Badiou also agues that after Lenin concluded that the slaughter of the communards necessitated the development of a centralised, disciplined project aimed at seizing state power the party has been the mode by which the left has sought to organise popular politics. But Badiou does not address the new form that the official left has taken in most of the world - the NGO. The party is not dead. On the contrary it retains considerable power in places like India and in South Africa. And there are countries, such as Haiti or Brazil, where the church is also a contender for influence over popular struggles. But while there is a large critical literature on vanguardism and clericalism the critical literature on NGOs generally criticises NGOs that work for directly imperial agendas - such as the NGOs that work with the World Bank, USAID and so on - while valorising the left NGOs that operate in spaces like the World Social Forum. But in most of the world it is precisely the left NGOs that assume the right to give direction to social movements and to monopolise the resources that can mediate the development of international solidarity. Most of the left texts that seek to offer a global picture of the contemporary moment are based on the experience and thinking of these NGOs rather than the experience and thinking of popular movements. Most attempts at international solidarity are organised through these NGOs. Hallward's book breaks decisively with this consensus and seeks direct engagement with popular politics. Damming the Flood is rich with empirical detail and nuanced insight. Its author has paid close attention to the realities of the situation confronted by grassroots militancy in Haiti as well as to the key choices made within that militancy. One of the clearest contributions of the book is the concrete development of Hallward's early theoretical work on the question of solidarity. An aspect of this that is developed with particular force can be formulated in terms of a choice confronting anyone wanting to develop solidarity across the brutal divisions of human existence: will that solidarity be with the expert left or the popular left?xxvi Richard Pithouse lives in Durban where he has studied and taught philosophy. He has been part of Abahlali baseMjondolo since the movement's inception Originally published in "Mute." FOOTNOTES i Peter Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific, Manchester: Manchester University Press,, 2001, p. 330. ii Hallward Absolutely Post-Colonial, p. 335. iii Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment London: Verso, 2007, Damming the Flood, p.314. iv Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.Xxxv. v Jean-Bertrand Aristide Eyes of the Heart Monroe: Common Courage Press, 2000, p.63. vi Jean Bertrand Aristide Dignity, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996, p. 103. vii Jean-Bertrand Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, New York: Orbis, 1990, p. 57. viii Aristide, Dignity, p.49. ix Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor, p.18. x Aristide In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, p.17. xi Hallward Damming the Flood Haiti, p.318. xii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.137. xiii C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins, New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 286. xiv William Robinson Polyarchy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 291 xv Aristide, Eyes of the Heart, p.36. xvi Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 68. xvii Robinson, Polyarchy, p. 311. xviii Hallward, Damming the Flood, p. 181-182. xix Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.184 xx Cited in Hallward, Damming the Flood, p.342. This kind of situation is not at all unique to Haiti. See, for instance, the comments on NGOs from The National Convention Against Displacement & SEZs held at Bhubaneswa in India in 2007 at http://sez.icrindia.org/2007/06/27/bhubaneshwar-sez-convention-draft-declaration-on-sezs-and-displacement/ In South Africa there has been an extraordinarily hysterical, vicious and entirely dishonest set of responses from within the NGO left to the polite rejection of their authority by the popular left. The paranoia and ruthlessness of the NGO left in the face of autonomous popular mobilisation has rivalled that of the state. For an early comment on this see the statement by the Western Cape Anti- Eviction Campaign at http://abahlali.org/node/3032 xxi Consider, for example, the inability of the letter campaigns in support of Amina Lawal in 2003 to comprehend that there was a project to defend Lawal within Nigeria and within Islam. See the statement against the letter campaigns at http://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd [157]=x-157-18546 xxii Emilio Quadrelli developed an excellent analysis of this in an essay on the 2005 revolt in the Paris banlieaus. Quadrelli's intervention simply contrasted interviews with grassroots militants with the pronouncements of the elite left who could see nothing but an inarticulate cry for help by the 'socially excluded'. See 'Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics' Mute, 30 May 2007 http://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-and-politics xxiii This is typical of all of the various forms of discourse by which a faction of the academic and NGO left in South Africa have tried to render explicit and constant rejection of their authority from popular movements as speech that does not count. xxiv Alain Badiou 'The Paris Commune: A political declaration on politics' in Polemics, London: Verso, 2006, p. 272. xxv Badiou, The Paris Commune, p. 289. xxvi This is not to suggest that NGOs and academics are necessarily separate from and opposed to popular mobilisation. On the contrary these relations are a matter of choice and it is in principle perfectly possible for the NGO and the academic to work to support the popular left from within its practices, spaces, languages and structures. But when this is achieved the resulting project remains an instance of the popular rather than the expert left. Similarly an NGO that secures a constituency (or the appearance thereof) for its projects via some form of patronage and clientalism remains an instance of the expert left. All articles copyrighted Haiti Liberte. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED. Please credit Haiti Liberte. From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 4 10:40:54 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 09:40:54 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Canada honoured for pro-Israeli support Message-ID: <7B050907-32D8-413E-944B-A20E5E5C7B5A@shaw.ca> Canada honoured for pro-Israeli support Steven Edwards Canwest News Service Wednesday, December 03, 2008 http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=1027946 CREDIT: Chris Wattie / Reuters UNITED NATIONS - Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon goes before a leading Jewish umbrella group in New York on Thursday to pick up an award acclaiming Canada's support for Israel, just as analysis shows the Conservative government has interrupted annual increases in its backing of Israeli positions at the United Nations. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is giving Prime Minster Stephen Harper and the wider Canadian government its first International Leadership Award, and Cannon will attend a dinner to receive it on behalf of the government. "We are giving (it) to express appreciation for their courageous stands on the Durban conference, on their support for Israel and their efforts at the UN against incitement and . . . the delegitimization (of Israel), where they have taken a role in the forefront," said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the conference. Canada under Harper's leadership was the first country to pull out of the UN's so-called Durban II "anti-racism" conference, which is billed as a review of the 2001 gathering in the South African city that critics say turned into a racist and anti-Semitic debacle. But this year marks the first since Harper became prime minister that Canada has not incrementally shifted its voting in the UN General Assembly towards Israeli positions on a raft of recurring Middle East- related resolutions. Islamic and a number of developing countries have long used what's called their "automatic majority" to push through the texts, which critics say are unfairly weighted against Israel on issues ranging from nuclear proliferation in the Middle East to the plight of Palestinians. In his address at the award presentation, Cannon is not expected to refer to the resolutions as he stresses Canada's commitment to Israel's survival as a state. "When it comes to the Middle East, and Israel's right to exist, there is no ambiguity or hesitancy in Canada's position," he is expected to say. "As Prime Minister Harper reminds all of us in his cabinet - 'Our position is clear: it is fair and principled.'" Jewish community activists say they are optimistic the annual incremental transfer of support is not ended. "We would have liked to have seen more (this year), but we have every faith that the shift will continue," said Karen Lazar, spokeswoman for B'nai Brith Canada, one of the groups that track UN voting patterns closely. In a related development, the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch has listed Canada top among the 47 member states of the UN Human Rights Council in voting to promote human rights. "But the bad news is that the Human Rights Council as a whole is in a state of crisis," says a statement accompanying the report, which the group presented to the Canadian parliament. "The council is dominated today by an alliance of repressive regimes, including China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia, that has acted systematically to undermine and erode core (human rights) principles and effective mechanisms." ? Canwest News Service 2008 From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 4 11:13:02 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 10:13:02 -0800 Subject: [R-G] NDP will not oppose Afghan war while in coalition Message-ID: <50E4CAB3-D062-4345-8CA1-39FB346F9B31@shaw.ca> NDP will not oppose Afghan war while in coalition By Murray Brewster, THE CANADIAN PRESS Wednesday, December 3, 2008 OTTAWA - New Democrats will stop opposing Canada?s war in Afghanistan while the party is in league with the Liberals, the NDP?s deputy leader declared Wednesday. It?s a significant concession for a party that has been the standard- bearer for the peace movement in Canada. "The NDP is putting aside its differences that have existed historically with the Liberals on such issues as Afghanistan," said Thomas Mulcair, the party?s only MP in Quebec. "Because we understand, in the interest of the Canadian population, the overarching principle is that we act on the economy and in the interest of Canadian families." In order to seal its coalition with the Liberals on Monday, NDP Leader Jack Layton gave up the party?s demand for a reversal of planned corporate tax cuts, but made no mention of the war. Asked this week whether their position on Afghanistan had changed, several New Democrat MPs laughed nervously and ducked the question. Political observers have said the fourth-place party, long-known as the conscience of Parliament, has to make key compromises to keep the coalition together. Mulcair declined to respond when asked whether the party?s election campaign promise to impose a moratorium on further oil sands development in Alberta was also being shelved. Liberal finance critic Scott Brison said the gravity of the economic crisis and the unravelling political situation has had a sobering effect on both coalition partners, as well as the Bloc Quebecois. "All three parties recognize the seriousness and as such we are putting aside our differences to focus on common ground," he said Wednesday. As his leadership was up for a vote at the NDP?s 2006 convention in Quebec City, Layton pushed through a motion calling for the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan. He soon became a target for the Conservatives in the House of Commons, who nicknamed him "Taliban Jack," ridiculing his call for peace negotiations with militants. Over the years, Layton has said Canada?s role should be focused on traditional peacekeeping and reconstruction rather than front-line combat. The NDP?s demand for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan was greeted with some sympathy by factions of the Liberal party, including at the time its newly minted leader Stephane Dion. Ending Canada?s combat mission by February 2009, as originally intended, became Dion?s middle-ground position - one that he eventually abandoned when the Liberals supported Prime Minister Stephen Harper?s extension of the mission until 2011. Steve Staples, of the Rideau Institute, said the policy shift wasn?t unexpected. "I suspect with the NDP helping make the decisions there will be more of an emphasis on diplomacy and efforts to end the war," said Staples, executive director of the left-leaning think-tank. The Conference of Defence Associations, a pro-military organization that?s often been at loggerheads with the NDP, welcomed the reversal but wondered whether it was political opportunism rather than a genuine conversion. "It?s difficult to understand that the NDP would all of sudden completely change its policy on our presence in Afghanistan," said the association?s executive director Alain Pellerin. From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 4 15:09:45 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 14:09:45 -0800 Subject: [R-G] BOOKS-US: Cloak-and-Dagger, Inc. Message-ID: <61D12A31-41E9-4802-9B4A-D097B2A11B70@shaw.ca> BOOKS-US: Cloak-and-Dagger, Inc. By Pratap Chatterjee* http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44990 VANCOUVER, Canada, Dec 4 (IPS) - When Barack Obama visits the Virginia headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in the not-too-distant future, he might want to scan the room to see how many of them sport green badges, the telltale sign that they are contractors and not federal employees. At the dozen or so other intelligence agencies scattered around the Washington area, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Pennsylvania Avenue or the Maryland-based National Security Agency, he is likely to find quite a number are from the private sector. A recent federal survey identified some 37,000 private employees in the intelligence sector who work side-by-side with civil servants as analysts, technology specialists and mission managers. About a quarter of this number are involved in the cloak-and-dagger activities of intelligence collection and operations. Indeed, well over half of the 66 billion dollars spent on intelligence in the United States is believed to go to private military contractors that range from the very well known Boeing and Lockheed to much more obscure companies like Anteon, LPA and Verint Systems. To learn about the 16 agencies that run the nation's spy operations, Obama might pick up a copy of Jeffrey T. Richelson's authoritative handbook on the intelligence agencies ("The U.S. Intelligence Community"), but if he wants to know what the green badgers do inside the agencies, he'll need a copy of Tim Shorrock's "Spies for Hire," released earlier this year by Simon and Schuster in hardback. A new updated paperback version will be available right after the new administration takes office this spring. "We Can't Spy...If We Can't Buy," was the catch-phrase on a PowerPoint slide presented by the Terri Everett, the senior procurement executive of the Director of National Intelligence that Shorrock uncovered last year that sums up the attitude of federal intelligence managers, beginning with the Bill Clinton administration. Shorrock, an investigative journalist who writes for magazines like The Nation, Mother Jones and websites like Salon, is a former business reporter who worked at the Journal of Commerce. He has dug through hundreds of websites and press releases to compile a guide of precisely what the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have bought for the spy community in the last two decades. "Spies for Hire" is rather like the best-selling book "Code Names" by William M. Arkin, a veritable encyclopedia of intelligence and military secrets, stuffed with details that make one's eyes glaze over. Yet it is the only guide that exists to the new alphabet soup of companies that work primarily out of places like Tyson's Corner in northern Virginia. Shorrock notes that private contractors have always been part and parcel of the U.S. intelligence community, notably in the field of reconnaissance, starting with the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s that Lockhheed built. Even today the bulk of the money spent on contractors is for delivering hardware like satellites. What is new is companies like Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego that have multi-million dollar contracts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency to create software that analyses the email and phone conversations of ordinary U.S. citizens. While these projects have alarmed civil rights groups, Shorrock notes also that if there's one generalisation to be made about them, it's that "they haven't worked very well, and some have been spectacular failures." Another new trend that Shorrock touches on, although not in detail, is the use of private contractors like CACI and L-3 to provide private interrogators and linguists to the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of whom have been accused of supervising torture, including participation in the torture at Abu Ghraib. "It's not just the secrecy, or the corruption, or the cronyism, or the lack of oversight that's wrong with intelligence contracting: it's also the extent of outsourcing itself and the way it's carried out," says Shorrock in his book. "The government has yet to spell out what intelligence functions are safe to outsource and which are not." What jobs are "inherently governmental"? Companies like Halliburton already do the bulk of the cooking and cleaning for the military at home and abroad, but is interrogation going too far? Interrogators that this reporter knows who have worked at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Camp Cropper and Guantanamo Bay say that they are often more qualified than the soldiers that they work with, and this is mostly true. Despite several well-publicised cases of alleged contractor abuse during interrogation, the vast majority of the cases of abuse documented by groups like Human Rights Watch in its "By the Numbers" report, the most detailed study to date, have mostly been conducted by military personnel and not contractors. Some private contractors have actually challenged government propaganda, like David Kay of SAIC who went into Iraq in 2003 to search for the weapons of mass destruction that Pres. Bush claimed Saddam Hussein had hidden. Kay returned in January 2004 to say Iraq did not have any such weapons. Yet the contract interrogators I have spoken to themselves point out the lack of supervision that they are given and the fact that the worst punishment that they are ever threatened with is being fired. The question then is who will do this oversight and decide what can be outsourced and what should not? Obama has already said that he will be extremely vigilant. "Under my plan, if contractors break the law, they will be prosecuted," he told students at the University of Iowa last year. "I've proposed tougher government reforms than any other candidate in this race -- reforms that would eliminate the kind of no-bid contracts that this administration has given to Blackwater," he said. But Shorrock's book demonstrates that the Obama administration is facing the very same conflicts of interest that the Bush administration did because most of the top-ranking officials in the intelligence industry today are already compromised by having crossed back and forth from public to private employment (at twice their government pay or more) and then back again. Take the case of Michael McConnell, the current director of national intelligence, who ran the National Security Agency before quitting to work for Booz Allen Hamilton for 10 years, and then returned to work for the Bush administration as the nation's spy chief, where he effectively oversees the agencies that provided most of the revenues of his former employer. McConnell also used to head the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, or INSA, a chamber of commerce for the intelligence contractors. Obama's first pick for the head of the CIA was John Brennan, a former CEO of The Analysis Corporation, a major intelligence contractor, who actually has the same job at INSA that Mike McConnell once held. Brennan has since dropped out of the running, but Obama observers would do well to refer to "Spies for Hire" to see what conflicts of interest his future intelligence choices might bring to the table. Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch. His new book "Halliburton's Army" from Nation Books will be in stores in February 2009. (END/2008) From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 4 15:37:35 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:37:35 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Avnery: Memo for Obama Message-ID: <200812042237.mB4MbZFl008375@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081204/30e8e3dd/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 4 15:36:33 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:36:33 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Against Israel's Boycott of Durban II: Position of the Union Juive Francaise pour la Paix Message-ID: <200812042236.mB4MaXmC006837@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081204/2f6ae6e3/attachment.txt From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 4 16:09:02 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 15:09:02 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Union leaders worry more jobs will be lost by suspension of Parliament Message-ID: Union leaders worry more jobs will be lost by suspension of Parliament 2 hours ago TORONTO ? Scores of Canadians who have managed to hold onto their jobs in the beleaguered auto and forestry industries could be unemployed in the coming weeks in the wake of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's successful bid to suspend Parliament, union leaders said Thursday. A spirited gathering of labour representatives in support of a Liberal- NDP coalition government turned sombre as word came in that Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean allowed the minority Conservatives to hold onto power, at least until January. The clearly deflated leaders of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers, Canadian Auto Workers, and United Steelworkers were calling on Jean to allow a confidence vote Monday that could have toppled the government. "To think that the Governor General can prolong this insane economic insecurity driven by Stephen Harper and (Finance Minister) Jim Flaherty is wrong-headed," said CAW president Ken Lewenza, who represents 250,000 members. "(The Governor General) made a very poor decision on behalf of Canadians," said Lewenza. "It's a sad day for democracy." With Parliament not expected to resume until late January, the unions are worried about what a delay in an economic stimulus package could mean for their members. "For us, it's total chaos because there's no government to talk to," said Dave Coles of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, which represents some 150,000 workers in the forest industry. "I think that not only will Canadians be disappointed, but many of them will lose their jobs as a result of (Harper's) action today." Coles and Lewenza said that they wanted the confidence vote to proceed as it likely would have resulted in a Liberal-NDP coalition government, which had promised an immediate economic stimulus program. Coles pointed to Thursday's announced closure of AbitibiBowater's Grand Falls, N.L., newsprint mill and the loss of 1,100 jobs as a sign of what's to come if industries don't get help from Ottawa sooner rather than later. "We may not have an industry left the way this is going," Coles said, pointing to several other plants slated to close in coming days. In recent weeks, job cuts in the forestry industry have slashed 30,000 members from ranks of the forestry union, Coles said. "There is no time to waste... We don't have eight weeks to wait." A Liberal-NDP coalition government backed by the Bloc Quebecois appears ready to act where the Harper Conservatives have failed, the unions argued. "Right now, we need all of our political leaders to work together for the good of the country and the economy," Ken Neumann, president of the steel workers' union which represents 280,000 workers, said in a statement. Neumann was unable to attend Thursday's press conference. The union leaders were also extremely critical of Harper's attacks on Quebec separatists and the Bloc Quebecois, and accused him of trying to divide the country and play politics at such a critical time. Quebecers are just as concerned about the economy as anywhere else in the country, Lewenza said. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 4 16:49:04 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:49:04 -0800 Subject: [R-G] 'Award to PM Harper by major American Jewish organization most deserving honour, ' says B'nai Brith Canada Message-ID: <200812042349.mB4Nn4SC001850@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081204/0b353b19/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 4 16:50:58 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:50:58 -0800 Subject: [R-G] IDF preparing options for Iran strike Message-ID: <200812042350.mB4Now9O004820@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081204/3d44f286/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 4 16:51:32 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:51:32 -0800 Subject: [R-G] From the global crisis to Canadas crisis Message-ID: <200812042351.mB4NpWjC005860@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081204/0844a5b2/attachment.txt From listsubs at aarons.f-m.fm Thu Dec 4 17:56:25 2008 From: listsubs at aarons.f-m.fm (Aaron Aarons) Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 16:56:25 -0800 Subject: [R-G] NDP will not oppose Afghan war while in coalition In-Reply-To: <50E4CAB3-D062-4345-8CA1-39FB346F9B31@shaw.ca> References: <50E4CAB3-D062-4345-8CA1-39FB346F9B31@shaw.ca> Message-ID: <20081205005630.D6F9522BAE@heartbeat2.messagingengine.com> In the tradition of imperialist-country social-democrats, defense of the national capitalist economy, that provides (or at least has been providing) substaintial crumbs of imperialist super-profits to their country's large labor aristocracy, takes precedence for these NDP leaders over any other principles. But maybe I should amend that to say that the attainment of positions in government for these leaders is a second principle that takes precedence over all the others, the lives of Afghans and the survival of the biosphere be damned. - Aaron P.S. I'm Bcc'ing this to a few members of Louis Proyect's "Marxism" mailing list, from which I was recently unceremoniously banned. Anybody who is curious about the list or about why somebody was banned can go to the archives at and look at my posts from Nov. 3 and before, and at Louis Proyect's ukase at . * * * * * * * From: Anthony Fenton Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 10:13:02 -0800 Reply-To: "Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion." NDP will not oppose Afghan war while in coalition By Murray Brewster, THE CANADIAN PRESS Wednesday, December 3, 2008 NDP will not oppose Afghan war while in coalition By Murray Brewster, THE CANADIAN PRESS Wednesday, December 3, 2008 OTTAWA - New Democrats will stop opposing Canada's war in Afghanistan while the party is in league with the Liberals, the NDP's deputy leader declared Wednesday. It's a significant concession for a party that has been the standard- bearer for the peace movement in Canada. "The NDP is putting aside its differences that have existed historically with the Liberals on such issues as Afghanistan," said Thomas Mulcair, the party's only MP in Quebec. "Because we understand, in the interest of the Canadian population, the overarching principle is that we act on the economy and in the interest of Canadian families." In order to seal its coalition with the Liberals on Monday, NDP Leader Jack Layton gave up the party's demand for a reversal of planned corporate tax cuts, but made no mention of the war. Asked this week whether their position on Afghanistan had changed, several New Democrat MPs laughed nervously and ducked the question. Political observers have said the fourth-place party, long-known as the conscience of Parliament, has to make key compromises to keep the coalition together. Mulcair declined to respond when asked whether the party's election campaign promise to impose a moratorium on further oil sands development in Alberta was also being shelved. Liberal finance critic Scott Brison said the gravity of the economic crisis and the unravelling political situation has had a sobering effect on both coalition partners, as well as the Bloc Quebecois. "All three parties recognize the seriousness and as such we are putting aside our differences to focus on common ground," he said Wednesday. As his leadership was up for a vote at the NDP's 2006 convention in Quebec City, Layton pushed through a motion calling for the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan. He soon became a target for the Conservatives in the House of Commons, who nicknamed him "Taliban Jack," ridiculing his call for peace negotiations with militants. Over the years, Layton has said Canada's role should be focused on traditional peacekeeping and reconstruction rather than front-line combat. The NDP's demand for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan was greeted with some sympathy by factions of the Liberal party, including at the time its newly minted leader Stephane Dion. Ending Canada's combat mission by February 2009, as originally intended, became Dion's middle-ground position - one that he eventually abandoned when the Liberals supported Prime Minister Stephen Harper's extension of the mission until 2011. Steve Staples, of the Rideau Institute, said the policy shift wasn't unexpected. "I suspect with the NDP helping make the decisions there will be more of an emphasis on diplomacy and efforts to end the war," said Staples, executive director of the left-leaning think-tank. The Conference of Defence Associations, a pro-military organization that's often been at loggerheads with the NDP, welcomed the reversal but wondered whether it was political opportunism rather than a genuine conversion. "It's difficult to understand that the NDP would all of sudden completely change its policy on our presence in Afghanistan," said the association's executive director Alain Pellerin. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Dec 4 19:32:54 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:32:54 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Whistling in the Wind Message-ID: <493892D6.4050904@ashisuto.co.jp> The new climate change report falls miles short of what we need. Here are some of the emergency measures it should have contained. by George Monbiot Published in the Guardian (December 02 2008) Lord Turner has two jobs. The first, as chair of the Financial Services Authority, is to save capitalism. The second, as chair of the Committee on Climate Change, is to save the biosphere from the impacts of capitalism. I have no idea how well he is discharging the first task, but if his approach to the second one is anything to go by, you should dump your shares and buy gold. His climate change report, published yesterday, is long, detailed and impressive {1}. It has the admirable objective of trying to cap global warming at two degrees or a little more. This, it says, means that greenhouse gas pollution in the UK should fall by 80% by 2050 and by 31% by 2020. But there's a problem. There is no longer any likely relationship between an 80% cut and two degrees of warming. This gets a little complicated, but please bear with me while I explain why Turner's proposal is about as likely to stop runaway climate change as the Maginot Line was to hold back the Luftwaffe. The 80% cut he recommends for the UK more or less matches a global target of 50% by 2050. A 50% global cut, the report says, would make roughly two degrees of warming a "central expectation" and would reduce the probability of four degrees (which it calls "extremely dangerous climate change") to less than one per cent {2}. Turner claims that to keep the temperature rise close to two degrees, the world's greenhouse gas emissions must peak in 2016 then fall by either three or four per cent a year. A 3% rate of decline is most likely to deliver a temperature rise of 2.2 degrees this century; a 4% annual cut would produce about 2.1% {3}. That's more or less consistent with his 2050 targets. So far so good. But a recent paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, using the same sources, comes to completely different conclusions {4}. It agrees that to deliver a reasonable chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere need to stabilise at a maximum of 450 parts per million, carbon dioxide equivalent (ppmCO2e). But it shows that to achieve this, global emissions of greenhouse gases from the parts of the system we can control need to peak by 2015, then fall by six to eight per cent a year between 2020 and 2040, leading to "full decarbonization sometime soon after 2050". Even this, it shows, relies on an optimistic reading of the current data. Turner's suggested cuts are more likely to produce four degrees of warming than two degrees. The difference between the two reports comes down to this: Turner assumes that greenhouse gases can rise to 500 ppmCO2e before falling back to 450 {5}. The other paper shows that this is a dangerous assumption. Not only does this mean that the cut comes too late, but far from falling back, the enhanced levels in the atmosphere are likely to trigger more emissions, as the biosphere starts producing more greenhouse gases than it absorbs. We cannot afford to overshoot {6}. Last week a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters produced what could be the first hard evidence that runaway global feedback has begun {7}. In 2007, methane levels in the atmosphere, which had previously levelled off, began rising again. The most likely reason is that the Siberian permafrost is melting, as a result of the runaway warming of the Arctic. This wasn't supposed to happen for another eighty years. The great global meltdown appears to have started, yet Turner proposes that we carry on with the old plan as if nothing has changed. We're still digging trenches, even as the sky fills with bomber planes. My reading of the new projections suggests that to play its part in preventing two degrees of global warming, the UK needs to cut greenhouse gases by roughly 25% from current levels by the end of 2012 - a quarter in four years. But how the heck could this be done? Here is a list of measures which could be enacted almost immediately. They require no economic or technological miracles; but they do demand that the government is brave enough to govern. 1. Immediately renegotiate the European Emissions Trading Scheme, imposing a lower cap on carbon pollution and the mandatory sale of all emissions permits to the industries covered by the scheme (at the moment over 90% are given away) {8}. 2. Use the money this raises for: a. A crash programme for training builders. As the major component of a green new deal, delivering jobs as well as carbon cuts, the government will immediately launch training schemes for tens of thousands of specialist builders, insulators, window-fitters, plasterers and decorators. b. A home improvement scheme like Germany's, but twice as fast. Every year between January 2010 and 2020, 10% of homes will be fully insulated and fitted with good windows or secondary glazing, at state expense. Landlords will have a legal obligation to join or lose their right to take tenants. Announce that when the scheme is complete, gas and electricity bills will be subject to an escalating tariff: the more you use, the more you will have to pay for every unit. 3. Announce that incandescent lightbulbs will no longer be sold in the United Kingdom by next April. Announce that no fridge or freezer with an energy rating below grade A++ and no other appliance rated below grade A will be sold from July. 4. Increase vehicle excise duty for the most polluting cars to GBP 3000 a year (from the current GBP 400). Use the money this raises to: a. Start closing key urban streets to private cars and dedicating them to public transport and cycling. b. Increase the public subsidy for bus and train journeys. Oblige the bus companies to sign contracts providing a wider range of services. Give us the integrated low-carbon transport we have long been promised, in which buses are scheduled to meet trains, trains and buses carry bicycles and safe cycle lanes connect with each other across entire cities. c. Train thousands of new coach drivers and public transport operators. Create coach lanes on all the motorways and start moving coach stations from the city centres to the motorway junctions, to enable coach travel to become as fast and efficient as car travel. Link them to city centres with dedicated bus lanes {9}. d. Scrap the airport expansion programme. Set a cap on the number of landing slots, which will fall every year until it reaches 5% of current capacity. 5. Stop the burning of moorland: because this exposes and oxidises peat, grouse shoots (which are mostly responsible) produce a staggering proportion of the UK's emissions {10}. 6. Stop all opencast coal mining and rescind planning permission for new works. Impose stonking taxes on the extraction of all fossil fuels. Is this enough? No. But it puts us on the right track. It's all a gamble from now on: the only reliable advice is that we shouldn't start from here. But two decades of procrastination ensure that only emergency measures now have a chance of preventing a climate disaster. What Turner's report - polite, measured and impressive as it is - proposes is more procrastination. www.monbiot.com References: 1. Committee on Climate Change, December 2008. Building a Low Carbon Economy: the UK's contribution to tackling climate change. http://hmccc.s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs/TSO-ClimateChange.pdf 2. Page xiv. 3. Page 21. 4. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, 2008. Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. Published online. doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138 http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf 5. Page xiv. 6. A forthcoming paper in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences also suggests that, above a certain level in the atmosphere, CO2 could take much longer to be absorbed than most studies assume, as the global sinks become saturated. See: Geoffrey Lean, 30th November 2008. Greenhouse gases will heat up planet 'for ever'. The Independent. 7. M Rigby et al, 2008. Renewed growth of atmospheric methane. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 35, L22805, doi:10.1029/2008GL036037. 8. Nature, 26th November 2008. United Kingdom auctions carbon emissions permits. Nature 456, 435. doi:10.1038/456435d 9. There's more on this proposal (and some of the others here) in George Monbiot, 2007. Heat: how to stop the planet burning. Penguin, London. 10. See Fred Pearce, 12th August 2006. Grouse-shooting popularity boosts global warming. New Scientist. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/12/02/whistling-in-the-wind/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 4 23:44:06 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 22:44:06 -0800 Subject: [R-G] U.S. to Raise 'Irregular War' Capabilities Message-ID: <869728DA-E80B-432D-BFC0-FB487F623B13@shaw.ca> U.S. to Raise 'Irregular War' Capabilities http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/03/AR2008120303495.html?nav=rss_nation/special By Ann Scott Tyson Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 4, 2008; A04 The Pentagon this week approved a major policy directive that elevates the military's mission of "irregular warfare" -- the increasingly prevalent campaigns to battle insurgents and terrorists, often with foreign partners and sometimes clandestinely -- to an equal footing with traditional combat. The directive, signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England on Monday, requires the Pentagon to step up its capabilities across the board to fight unconventionally, such as by working with foreign security forces, surrogates and indigenous resistance movements to shore up fragile states, extend the reach of U.S. forces into denied areas or battle hostile regimes. The policy, a result of more than a year of debate in the defense establishment, is part of a broader overhaul of the U.S. military's role as the threat of large-scale combat against other nations' armies has waned and new dangers have arisen from shadowy non-state actors, such as terrorists that target civilian populations. "The U.S. has considerable overmatch in traditional capabilities . . . and more and more adversaries have realized it's better to take us on in an asymmetric fashion," said Michael G. Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities, and a chief architect of the policy. Designed to institutionalize lessons the U.S. military has learned -- often painfully -- in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001, the policy aims to prepare the military for the most likely future conflicts and to prevent the type of mistakes made in the post-Vietnam War era, when hard-won skills in counterinsurgency atrophied. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has lobbied outspokenly for such a shift. "Think of where our forces have been sent and have been engaged over the last 40-plus years: Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and more," Gates said in a recent speech at the National Defense University. "In fact, the first Gulf War stands alone in over two generations of constant military engagement as a more or less traditional conventional conflict." Gates warned that, for the near future, the United States will face the greatest threats not from aggressor countries but from insurgents and extremist groups operating in weak or failing states. "We do not have the luxury of opting out because they do not conform to preferred notions of the American way of war," he said. The new, 12-page directive states that irregular warfare "is as strategically important as traditional warfare." Defined as "a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s)," irregular warfare "favors indirect and asymmetric approaches . . . to erode an adversary's power, influence, and will," the directive states. A major thrust of the policy is for U.S. troops to do less of the fighting themselves and instead build the capabilities of foreign militaries and security forces. Indeed, Vickers said he envisions that the Pentagon's primary vehicle for carrying out irregular warfare operations will be a global network -- already underway -- made up of the U.S. and foreign militaries and other government personnel in scores of countries with which the United States is not at war. The network is designed to wage "steady state" counterterrorism operations. The directive also requires the Pentagon to develop capabilities to conduct larger-scale irregular campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. The goal of the network, Vickers said in a recent speech, is ambitious: "to create a persistent, ubiquitous presence against our adversaries . . . and essentially to smother them over time." The directive "should have a big impact on resources" as well as military planning, Vickers said. Specifically, as irregular warfare is more manpower-intensive, it is likely to shift more resources toward training the Army and Marine Corps, which are undergoing significant growth, in skills such as language learning and advising foreign militaries, he said. The policy also supports continued growth in Special Operations forces -- elite troops such as Army Green Berets skilled in partnering with foreign forces and civil affairs soldiers who conduct nation-building. As irregular warfare is likely to be conducted by Special Operations forces, the policy directs the U.S. Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, to "develop capabilities for extending U.S. reach into denied areas and uncertain environments by operating with and through indigenous foreign forces or by conducting low visibility operations." In terms of equipment, the directive supports the expansion of intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance assets, as well as aviation assets for irregular warfare, Vickers said. From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Dec 5 00:19:47 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 02:19:47 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Grand Theft Nautical Message-ID: Now, finally a voice of capitalist reason in the Western media regarding Somalia. -- Yoshie December 5, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor Grand Theft Nautical By JOHN S. BURNETT TO the horror of many and the fascination of most, the Sirius Star, an enormous tanker transporting two million barrels of crude oil to the United States, was captured by pirates far off the African coast on Nov. 15. The tanker, owned by Aramco, the Saudi oil company, was carrying enough crude to supply New England with fuel oil for 10 days ? in the winter. It is seven times the size of the Titanic and longer than the Chrysler Building is tall. How, then, could a dozen pirates in two puny boats armed with rifles and a grenade launcher board a ship this size? Quite easily ? as I found out after spending weeks on a nearly identical ship on a passage from Saudi Arabia to Singapore five years ago. From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Dec 5 00:25:06 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 02:25:06 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Russian Warship to Pass through Panama Canal Message-ID: Russian warship to pass through Panama Canal: embassy 44 minutes ago WASHINGTON (AFP) ? A Russian warship was set Friday to sail through the Panama Canal for the first time since World War II in a symbolic challenge to US influence in the region. The large anti-submarine ship Admiral Chabanenko is scheduled to traverse the waterway from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, the Russian embassy in Panama said. "The only time such an event took place was in 1944 during the Second World War, when four Russian submarines passed through" the canal, said the embassy in a statement. At that time, when the waterway was under US control, both Russia and the United States were allied in the anti-Nazi coalition, the embassy added. The scheduled passage through the canel comes after Russian warships on Tuesday wrapped up two days of joint exercises with Venezuelan navy vessels. The arrival of the Russian ships at the invitation of Venezuela's fiercely anti-US president Hugo Chavez has been seen as a challenge to US power in Latin America, often described as America's "backyard. Russia has denied the exercises were aimed at any "third countries." Moscow announced the exercises after US President George W. Bush sent navy vessels to Georgia during the Russian-Georgian conflict in August, angering the Kremlin. Washington said the warships were delivering humanitarian aid. After passing through the canal the Russian ship and its 451 crew members will remain in Panama until December 11 at a former US naval base. "The main purpose (of the visit to Panama) is for the soldiers to rest and to replenish (ship) supplies," said the embassy. During its stay the Russian crew will also take part in soccer and volleyball competitions with the Panamanian navy. "The Russian vessel's friendly visit further raises Panama's international prestige as a great naval power and the Panama Canal as a truly neutral waterway," said the embassy. Panama's foreign minister Samuel Lewis Navarro said Thursday that "as we all know, the Panama Canal is open to all ships in the world," noting the canal's permanent Neutrality Treaty. The 169-meter (554-foot) Admiral Chabanenko, which carries out operations against piracy and international terrorism, belongs to Russia's Northern Fleet. It was part a flotilla of Russian warships, based in the Arctic port of Murmansk, that participated in joint exercises with the Venezuelan Navy that concluded on Tuesday. Located at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal, Chabanenko's temporary home the Rodman Naval Base hosted US military personnel until 1999 when it was given to Panama as part of the handover of the Panama Canal Zone. From hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org Fri Dec 5 07:25:13 2008 From: hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org (Hunter Gray) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 07:25:13 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Saami [Lapp] Message-ID: <001101c956e5$4da8d6e0$0400a8c0@computer> This is one of the earlier pieces on our Hunterbear website -- and my reposting it today stems from a couple of posts I made yesterday eve on the RBB list. The Saami are Fourth World tribal peoples, facing many of the same challenges as Native Americans, and also surviving socially and culturally through commitment and tenacity. The Saami origin lies in Northeastern Asia and, while the people now known as Native Americans moved -- over a long period of time into the Western Hemisphere via the Bering Straits -- the Saami people moved northward into the Arctic over a long period of time as well and eventually into extreme northern Russia, Finland, Norway, Sweden. Two people -- individual products, respectively, of each, Native and Saami -- happened to meet at Superior, Wisconsin in 1961, married, went South and far beyond, and produced four great offspring, and thus many grandchildren. [Their good friend, Joan Mulholland, a true world traveler who also keeps up with good bookstores, occasionally sends them welcome books on the Saami.] Saami Issues [People of the Arctic] [Hunter Gray] March 18, 2001 We very much appreciate Louis' posting of the New York Times piece, "I am a Sami." [The NYT is not exactly a best seller anywhere here in Idaho.] The article is certainly well meaning but we do feel obliged to round things out just a bit -- and give a little sharper perspective. My wife, Eldri, is of considerable Saami [another spelling] descent -- Norwegian and Finnish -- and while she is quite capable of speaking for herself et al., she's delegated this one to me since I'm quite at home on our Marxism list. The article indicates general ambiguity about the origins of the Saami, quotes an anthropologist who feels they have no Far Eastern origin, and gives the impression that they are light-skinned and blond. Vigorous dissents from this corner [and we are sure there will be from many others.] My wife and her people are rather dark, with conspicuously slanted dark brown or almost-black eyes, and often with broad faces [the children on her side have sometimes been mistaken for "nice little Koreans.''] This is essentially true of many, many Saami; and lends considerable credence to the most widely accepted account -- by a great many Saami [and by several anthros] -- of their initial geographical origin: the northern edge of the Lake Baikal region on the Siberian/Mongolian border and a migration that moved westward over centuries, undoubtedly mixing with many other peoples along the junket -- and certainly, in the more "European" sections of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, blending with those peoples. Traditional Saami still hold to a theology encompassing The Bear, and some extended family structures still have a delineated "family shaman." Originally from Northern Minnesota, and raised a liberal Lutheran, my wife also has a very culturally ingrained recognition of the "mysterious forces which cannot be codified in blackboard formulae" [my words.] Several members of her family have married Native Americans. What really matters, of course, is not the racial piece of it -- culture, of course, is always critical and the Saami are the Saami, whatever the colour shade, as the Rom are the Rom -- but the fact that the Saami, like Fourth World peoples everywhere, are maintaining essentially tribal societies and basic cultures, fighting for their inherent sovereignty and rights of self-determination and aboriginal title, holding on to land and other resources -- while endeavouring to make some sort of practical adjustment to the influences of urban/industrialism: e.g., using snowmobiles -- but for Saami purposes -- as a Navajo uses a pickup ["Navajo Cadillac."] Many years ago, I had the honour of taking the then Finnish ambassador to the U.N. on a full-day tour of Chicago -- with an emphasis on a number of low-income grassroots minority community organizational projects in which I was deeply involved. He was a very sensitive and decent person and aware of my wife's background. The subject of the Saami did not arise until -- after our tour was essentially completed and he had expressed considerable concern about the minority groups of Chicago -- I broached the "minority situation" of Finland. Gamely, he rose to the occasion, making no effort whatsoever to sugar-coat Finland's treatment of the arctic nomads. "I am glad you raised this so directly," he told me, "because we always have to be reminded." And the Saami are now reminding not only Finland and the other neighbouring countries -- but the world -- and are doing it with increased effectiveness. Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear] [A trenchant, informative link for the Saami: http://www.allthingsarctic.com/people/saami.aspx HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? and Ohkwari' Check out our Hunterbear website Directory http://hunterbear.org/directory.htm [The site is dedicated to our one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray: http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm See Apache County Tragedy: The Least and the Littlest: http://hunterbear.org/apache_county_tragedy2.htm And see Hunter's Movement Life Interview: http://hunterbear.org/HUNTER%20BEAR%20INTERVIEW%20CRMV.htm From fentona at shaw.ca Fri Dec 5 11:58:25 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 10:58:25 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Canada needs massive stimulus; Billionaire investor says gov't action needed to offset Message-ID: <632BACF1-B34F-4C88-AB43-035AEC0774F7@shaw.ca> Canada needs massive stimulus; Billionaire investor says gov't action needed to offset damaging greed Anonymous. The Times - Transcript. Moncton, N.B.: Dec 4, 2008. pg. C.2 (Copyright 2008 Times & Transcript (Moncton)) Canada needs a government that provides massive stimulus to diminish the recessionary harm to the economy caused by enormous greed, billionaire investor Stephen Jarislowsky said yesterday. In a speech to the Montreal Board of Trade, the investment guru said Canada must conduct massive infrastructure spending and be prepared to provide increased social support for the unemployed. While refusing to take sides on the political battle in Ottawa over who should form the federal government -- the Conservatives or the Liberal-New Democrat coalition that's seeking to replace them -- Jarislowsky said an election now would be "absolutely foolish." "What's needed now is a general coalition of all parties to deal with this economic problem," he told reporters following his speech. "We need to have plans for a very, very tough period ahead and the government should operate on that on a non-political basis." He said even spending $30 billion on stimulus would be totally insufficient, but declined to put his own price tag to maintain a stable economy. "Contrary to Mr. Harper, if you don't spend that kind of amount and if you don't print that enormous amount of money, you're going to deepen the recession. So it has to be done," Jarislowsky said. Jarislowsky said the global financial crisis, which he dubbed a balance- sheet depression, has been fuelled by extreme greed and that politicians, bankers, corporate boards and CEOs failed to learn lessons of the past. "I feel certain, especially today, that a disconnect with the past largely explains the disaster we are now facing," Jarislowsky said, noting that bad economic times are needed every three to four years to keep greed in check. In addition to criticizing U.S. President George W. Bush over the Iraq war, Jarislowsky said government officials deserve some of the blame for the economic crisis. He singled out former Federal Reserve chairman Allan Greenspan for trusting market forces that created a destructive housing bubble by making it too easy and too inexpensive to borrow. Housing prices far exceeded the long-term sustainable increases of inflation plus the productivity of a country, Jarislowsky said. Canada's housing mess may not be as deep as in the United States, but prices are 30 per cent overvalued, he said. Earlier Wednesday, the ReMax realtor organization said in its annual outlook that it expects Canadian housing prices will decline this year and next, resulting in a five per cent decline from 2007 levels by the end of 2009. Jarislowsky said Canada need not wait for the incoming U.S. administration to develop a realistic plan to combat various possible scenarios that may surface. Bailing out auto manufacturers like General Motors doesn't make sense unless it's accompanied by union wage concessions, he said. Supporting banks is necessary, however, to maintain public confidence in the institutions and avoid massive withdrawal of funds. From suzannedk at gmail.com Fri Dec 5 12:12:59 2008 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 20:12:59 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Against Israel's Boycott of Durban II: Position of the Union Juive Francaise pour la Paix In-Reply-To: <200812042236.mB4MaXmC006837@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> References: <200812042236.mB4MaXmC006837@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Message-ID: Fascinating that the USA is mentioned only once as joined with Israel against Durban11. The rest of the article focuses only on Israel. That is skewing informatioon so that it says what it is not. Real news. The full discussion of both deniers and the reasons they may be joined for intolerance, hate crimes, racial war. Suzanne de Kuyper On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:36 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > [1]http://www.alternativenews.org/news/english/against-israels-boycott > -of-durban-ii-position-of-the-union-juive-francaise-pour-la-paix-20081 > 202.html > > > 2 December 2008 > > > FRENCH JEWISH UNION FOR PEACE > > > Against Israels Boycott of Durban II: Position of the Union Juive > Francaise pour la Paix > > > In April 2009 the United Nations Review Conference, dubbed Durban II > after the 2001 World [2]Conference against Racism, Racial > Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, > South Africa, will be conducted in Geneva. This conference is intended > to review implementation of the recommendations taken seven years ago > concerning the fight of countries against racism and discrimination. > > > (20 November 2008) During its yearly conference, the [3]Union Juive > Francaise pour la Paix published a statement in response to the > decisions of the Israeli and American governments to boycott the > upcoming conference. Following is the translation of this document: > > > It is now official: the state of Israel calls for the boycott of the > fourth World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, > Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, to be held in Geneva on 24-28 > April 2009. > > > This conference is meant to coordinate various meetings to evaluate > the implementation of the 2001 Durban conference recommendations, so > that countries throughout the world can more effectively fight against > racism, racist discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance. At the end > of seven years, the UN official responsible since August of this year > to monitor the fight against racism came to the conclusion that > little, very little, has been done by countries. > > > The Foreign Minister of Israel justified the Israeli refusal to > participate in the upcoming conference by noting that The documents > prepared for the conference indicate that it is turning once again > into an anti-Israeli tribunal, singling out and delegitimizing the > state of Israel." The conference, she continued, "has nothing to do > with fighting racism. The minister called on other states to follow > Israels decision. > > > The UJFP calls upon all democratic organizations and peoples to > contact state institutions and the (French) President to ensure that > France will guarantee the existence of this conference and take an > active part in it. > > > The neoliberal social and economic model has resulted in > institutionalized violence: aggressive wars against nations, > destruction of the protections of human rights, a banalization of > racist phenomena in developed states through policies of persecution > of immigrants, state xenophobic policies, the legislation of laws > violating fundamental freedoms and as a result, we witness a phenomena > of religious and ethnic reactionaryism. > > > In the wake of these threats and heavy damages, and with no illusions > concerning the immediate results of this same conference, the UJFP > concludes that the conduct of the Fourth World Conference against > Racism is essential to provide a clear signal that the persecuted from > throughout the world are beginning to fight for the return of their > rights and provide a system of alternative values such as solidarity > amongst peoples, cooperation, the distribution of resources and the > right to development and growth. > > > The UJFP calls upon the State of Israel to give an account to the > international community on the numerous racist steps it takes against > its Arab citizens and the war crimes it has committed against the > Palestinian people over the last 60 years. > > References > > 1. > http://www.alternativenews.org/news/english/against-israels-boycott-of-durban-ii-position-of-the-union-juive-francaise-pour-la-paix-20081202.html > 2. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/racism/DurbanReview/index.htm > 3. http://www.ujfp.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > From suzannedk at gmail.com Fri Dec 5 12:21:17 2008 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 20:21:17 +0100 Subject: [R-G] BOOKS-US: Cloak-and-Dagger, Inc. In-Reply-To: <61D12A31-41E9-4802-9B4A-D097B2A11B70@shaw.ca> References: <61D12A31-41E9-4802-9B4A-D097B2A11B70@shaw.ca> Message-ID: Some more companies that work commercially for the inteligence commmunity are, I B M, Boeing, A T & T most of the big internatioalized drug makers like Phizer, then there is Norelco, Mann Tech. An interesting game to play is to follow the financial trajectory of all the companies Shorrock names as this the world financial market dies. So far, they do well. Suzanne de Kuyper Amsterdam On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Anthony Fenton wrote: > BOOKS-US: Cloak-and-Dagger, Inc. > By Pratap Chatterjee* > http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44990 > > VANCOUVER, Canada, Dec 4 (IPS) - When Barack Obama visits the Virginia > headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in the not-too-distant > future, he might want to scan the room to see how many of them sport > green badges, the telltale sign that they are contractors and not > federal employees. > > At the dozen or so other intelligence agencies scattered around the > Washington area, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation on > Pennsylvania Avenue or the Maryland-based National Security Agency, he > is likely to find quite a number are from the private sector. > > A recent federal survey identified some 37,000 private employees in > the intelligence sector who work side-by-side with civil servants as > analysts, technology specialists and mission managers. About a quarter > of this number are involved in the cloak-and-dagger activities of > intelligence collection and operations. Indeed, well over half of the > 66 billion dollars spent on intelligence in the United States is > believed to go to private military contractors that range from the > very well known Boeing and Lockheed to much more obscure companies > like Anteon, LPA and Verint Systems. > > To learn about the 16 agencies that run the nation's spy operations, > Obama might pick up a copy of Jeffrey T. Richelson's authoritative > handbook on the intelligence agencies ("The U.S. Intelligence > Community"), but if he wants to know what the green badgers do inside > the agencies, he'll need a copy of Tim Shorrock's "Spies for Hire," > released earlier this year by Simon and Schuster in hardback. > > A new updated paperback version will be available right after the new > administration takes office this spring. > > "We Can't Spy...If We Can't Buy," was the catch-phrase on a PowerPoint > slide presented by the Terri Everett, the senior procurement executive > of the Director of National Intelligence that Shorrock uncovered last > year that sums up the attitude of federal intelligence managers, > beginning with the Bill Clinton administration. > > Shorrock, an investigative journalist who writes for magazines like > The Nation, Mother Jones and websites like Salon, is a former business > reporter who worked at the Journal of Commerce. He has dug through > hundreds of websites and press releases to compile a guide of > precisely what the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have > bought for the spy community in the last two decades. > > "Spies for Hire" is rather like the best-selling book "Code Names" by > William M. Arkin, a veritable encyclopedia of intelligence and > military secrets, stuffed with details that make one's eyes glaze > over. Yet it is the only guide that exists to the new alphabet soup of > companies that work primarily out of places like Tyson's Corner in > northern Virginia. > > Shorrock notes that private contractors have always been part and > parcel of the U.S. intelligence community, notably in the field of > reconnaissance, starting with the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s that > Lockhheed built. Even today the bulk of the money spent on contractors > is for delivering hardware like satellites. > > What is new is companies like Science Applications International > Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego that have multi-million dollar > contracts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National > Security Agency to create software that analyses the email and phone > conversations of ordinary U.S. citizens. While these projects have > alarmed civil rights groups, Shorrock notes also that if there's one > generalisation to be made about them, it's that "they haven't worked > very well, and some have been spectacular failures." > > Another new trend that Shorrock touches on, although not in detail, is > the use of private contractors like CACI and L-3 to provide private > interrogators and linguists to the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, > some of whom have been accused of supervising torture, including > participation in the torture at Abu Ghraib. > > "It's not just the secrecy, or the corruption, or the cronyism, or the > lack of oversight that's wrong with intelligence contracting: it's > also the extent of outsourcing itself and the way it's carried out," > says Shorrock in his book. "The government has yet to spell out what > intelligence functions are safe to outsource and which are not." > > What jobs are "inherently governmental"? Companies like Halliburton > already do the bulk of the cooking and cleaning for the military at > home and abroad, but is interrogation going too far? > > Interrogators that this reporter knows who have worked at Abu Ghraib, > Bagram, Camp Cropper and Guantanamo Bay say that they are often more > qualified than the soldiers that they work with, and this is mostly > true. > > Despite several well-publicised cases of alleged contractor abuse > during interrogation, the vast majority of the cases of abuse > documented by groups like Human Rights Watch in its "By the Numbers" > report, the most detailed study to date, have mostly been conducted by > military personnel and not contractors. > > Some private contractors have actually challenged government > propaganda, like David Kay of SAIC who went into Iraq in 2003 to > search for the weapons of mass destruction that Pres. Bush claimed > Saddam Hussein had hidden. Kay returned in January 2004 to say Iraq > did not have any such weapons. > > Yet the contract interrogators I have spoken to themselves point out > the lack of supervision that they are given and the fact that the > worst punishment that they are ever threatened with is being fired. > > The question then is who will do this oversight and decide what can be > outsourced and what should not? > > Obama has already said that he will be extremely vigilant. "Under my > plan, if contractors break the law, they will be prosecuted," he told > students at the University of Iowa last year. > > "I've proposed tougher government reforms than any other candidate in > this race -- reforms that would eliminate the kind of no-bid contracts > that this administration has given to Blackwater," he said. > > But Shorrock's book demonstrates that the Obama administration is > facing the very same conflicts of interest that the Bush > administration did because most of the top-ranking officials in the > intelligence industry today are already compromised by having crossed > back and forth from public to private employment (at twice their > government pay or more) and then back again. > > Take the case of Michael McConnell, the current director of national > intelligence, who ran the National Security Agency before quitting to > work for Booz Allen Hamilton for 10 years, and then returned to work > for the Bush administration as the nation's spy chief, where he > effectively oversees the agencies that provided most of the revenues > of his former employer. McConnell also used to head the Intelligence > and National Security Alliance, or INSA, a chamber of commerce for the > intelligence contractors. > > Obama's first pick for the head of the CIA was John Brennan, a former > CEO of The Analysis Corporation, a major intelligence contractor, who > actually has the same job at INSA that Mike McConnell once held. > > Brennan has since dropped out of the running, but Obama observers > would do well to refer to "Spies for Hire" to see what conflicts of > interest his future intelligence choices might bring to the table. > > Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch. His new book > "Halliburton's Army" from Nation Books will be in stores in February > 2009. > > (END/2008) > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 5 12:21:50 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:21:50 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Israel's Message to Hamas: Accept Dictates or Stay Message-ID: <200812051921.mB5JLo3t020676@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081205/a722bfec/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 5 12:21:11 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:21:11 -0800 Subject: [R-G] A PLO of Shame Message-ID: <200812051921.mB5JLBVx018772@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081205/435d2e8f/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 5 12:23:40 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:23:40 -0800 Subject: [R-G] The Harper Dictatorship Message-ID: <200812051923.mB5JNeJK025442@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081205/a04b2a3c/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 5 12:24:39 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:24:39 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Mississippi 1955? No. Hebron 2008 Message-ID: <200812051924.mB5JOdZu026963@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081205/2745ffd1/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 5 13:25:54 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:25:54 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Al-Haq calls for immediate measures to stop settler violence Message-ID: <200812052025.mB5KPtYq015956@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081205/c06f1b01/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 5 15:24:03 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:24:03 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Four harsh truths about climate change Message-ID: <200812052224.mB5MO3rG013987@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081205/015c7ea3/attachment.txt From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Fri Dec 5 15:59:51 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 18:59:51 -0400 Subject: [R-G] What will you do on a sinking coalition ship?? Message-ID: <164236a30812051459g47afaa54ka802f6ae9e7e1cd5@mail.gmail.com> So the deputy leader of the NDP came out and said that their is nothing in a conservative budget that will stop the coalition from toppling the government. He said the new coalition would incorperate any goodies in the conservatives budget into their own. Weather we like it or not, we elected a conservative minority with a strong opposition that can work to keep the government on a tight leash. We did not elect the NDP and liberal mp's to the house to bully the conservatives and make a parlementary coup. Even though our imperialistic British parlimentary system allows for government to be toppled by coalitions forming out of the opposition that does not mean that it is either ethical or in the best interest of all Canadians. Our government is suppose to work for us and when the Deputy leader of the NDP says he doesn't care about what is in the budget the conservatives bring forward,that the government is being brought down regardless,The deputy leader of the NDP is showing us that this is about power not governing. The NDP are so drunk with power and the idea of being in power that they are unwilling to use this opportunity to work with the government we have to shift the left/right pendulum further to the left.Even though the NDP has purged most of it's pro peace pro working class ideas from their party, the fact remains: they still have alot of support from workers and the peace movement. In a parliament stucture we have now, the NDP has the ability to hold the rains of power without getting into bed with a pro war, pro imperialist, rascist, boss' party.There is still a chance for workers and the peace movement to have an independent voice in the parliament but only if the NDP Get out of this ill thought out coalition Why hasn't the Bloc joined the coalition and instead agreed to support it for a limited amount of time,essentially an accord, not a coalition.Simply put the Bloc are not going to sellout and send their citizens down shit creek without a paddle. The Bloc knows that by joining the coalition, they would be giving up an independent voice for sovereignty,weak as that may be, in the parliament. They were elected so that soverignists would have an independent voice in parliament. It is clear to me that the NDP has taken a straussian stance and has lost most of their ideas on the working class and the peace movement. Leo Strauss was a German born philosopher that believed the common person, the workers are incapable of organizing society and working together themselves for the betterment of society. He believed in telling noble lies Because the common person could not handle the truth and he believed that war was necessary to galvanize the citizens into one flag waving group so they could become easier to control. Maybe the New Democrats need to change there name to the new straussians. This coalition ship was born with holes in it and itt started sinking even before it had the chance to set sail. I believe that there will be 2 types of people to jump ship first: the ultra-right from the liberals will vote for the budget and possibly join the conservatives and any NDP members that have any dignity left and truly believe in democracy and that they have been sent to Ottawa to be a voice for the voiceless, will probably sit as independents come January. While I was away for the election, there were some activists and radicals that I have worked with in the past who worked tooth and nail to elect Megan Leslie. Megan Leslie has a history in organizing at the grassroots and has been a long-time advocate for people in poverty,working class people, the environment and for peace. I am not hear to judge the choice of grassroots activists who choose to campaign for Megan Leslie, but I do know that this choice of some anarchists and radicals to actively support parliamentary politics has been judges by some as being petty bourgeois and opportunist. It is sad when you see divisions open up between people you have worked with in the past and I think that now is an opportunity for Megan Leslie and those radicals and anarchist who supported her to mend those divisions.If Megan Leslie Stays on this quickly sinking, liberal lead coalition,once it sinks and she is sitting as a member of the NDP, an anti-working class party, anti-peace party and opportunist party, their will be many people in Halifax who will see her and her radical, anarchist campaigners as traitors to the cause of peace and of the working poor. With that being said, if Megan Leslie wishes to keep her dignity and do the right thing, she will get off this sinking ship and announce that she will either resign or sit as an independent. Megan if you are reading this, I beseech you to harken onto these works because the choices you make in the next month or so can benefit us all or damn us all to hell. In a world of growing inequalities, growing wars, growing climate change and global warming: in a world of growing oppression and exploitation of people, animals and the environment, in times like these we need good people to take responsibility and do something good. I truly believe that you are a good person and committed to positive change in this world and if you stay on this sinking coalition ship, it would be tantamount to doing nothing. We all know that bad things happen when good people do nothing. You must do something and I believe that the most positive thing you could do is denounce this coalition and sit as an independent when parliament sits in the new year. If you are the good person I believe you are, I think that you will find that this is the only honorable thing you can do. I cannot see how getting into bed with a pro war, pro imperialist anti-poor boss' party can be considered honorable. I know you have alot of pressure on you to tow the party line but I also know that if you sit as an independent in the next sitting of parliament, you will be an independent voice for peace,for the working poor and the environment and you will sit with dignity. That is something that myself and many others would applaud. sincerely, Reverend Aaron Doncaster From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Fri Dec 5 16:01:54 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 19:01:54 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Fwd: What will you do on a sinking coalition ship?? In-Reply-To: <164236a30812051459g47afaa54ka802f6ae9e7e1cd5@mail.gmail.com> References: <164236a30812051459g47afaa54ka802f6ae9e7e1cd5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <164236a30812051501l594aa358ja08b82e17ef3173b@mail.gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: aaron doncaster Date: Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 6:59 PM Subject: What will you do on a sinking coalition ship?? To: Leslie.M at parl.gc.ca, Angie Lewis , Amber < amberdawn at riseup.net> Cc: Tamara Lorincz , "Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion." , Jill Ratcliffe < jill_ratcliffe at hotmail.com>, Brad Fougere , Brian , James Babbitt , Joe Burke , cole webber , Capp < capplarsen at gmail.com>, David Parker CKDU So the deputy leader of the NDP came out and said that their is nothing in a conservative budget that will stop the coalition from toppling the government. He said the new coalition would incorperate any goodies in the conservatives budget into their own. Weather we like it or not, we elected a conservative minority with a strong opposition that can work to keep the government on a tight leash. We did not elect the NDP and liberal mp's to the house to bully the conservatives and make a parlementary coup. Even though our imperialistic British parlimentary system allows for government to be toppled by coalitions forming out of the opposition that does not mean that it is either ethical or in the best interest of all Canadians. Our government is suppose to work for us and when the Deputy leader of the NDP says he doesn't care about what is in the budget the conservatives bring forward,that the government is being brought down regardless,The deputy leader of the NDP is showing us that this is about power not governing. The NDP are so drunk with power and the idea of being in power that they are unwilling to use this opportunity to work with the government we have to shift the left/right pendulum further to the left.Even though the NDP has purged most of it's pro peace pro working class ideas from their party, the fact remains: they still have alot of support from workers and the peace movement. In a parliament stucture we have now, the NDP has the ability to hold the rains of power without getting into bed with a pro war, pro imperialist, rascist, boss' party.There is still a chance for workers and the peace movement to have an independent voice in the parliament but only if the NDP Get out of this ill thought out coalition Why hasn't the Bloc joined the coalition and instead agreed to support it for a limited amount of time,essentially an accord, not a coalition.Simply put the Bloc are not going to sellout and send their citizens down shit creek without a paddle. The Bloc knows that by joining the coalition, they would be giving up an independent voice for sovereignty,weak as that may be, in the parliament. They were elected so that soverignists would have an independent voice in parliament. It is clear to me that the NDP has taken a straussian stance and has lost most of their ideas on the working class and the peace movement. Leo Strauss was a German born philosopher that believed the common person, the workers are incapable of organizing society and working together themselves for the betterment of society. He believed in telling noble lies Because the common person could not handle the truth and he believed that war was necessary to galvanize the citizens into one flag waving group so they could become easier to control. Maybe the New Democrats need to change there name to the new straussians. This coalition ship was born with holes in it and itt started sinking even before it had the chance to set sail. I believe that there will be 2 types of people to jump ship first: the ultra-right from the liberals will vote for the budget and possibly join the conservatives and any NDP members that have any dignity left and truly believe in democracy and that they have been sent to Ottawa to be a voice for the voiceless, will probably sit as independents come January. While I was away for the election, there were some activists and radicals that I have worked with in the past who worked tooth and nail to elect Megan Leslie. Megan Leslie has a history in organizing at the grassroots and has been a long-time advocate for people in poverty,working class people, the environment and for peace. I am not hear to judge the choice of grassroots activists who choose to campaign for Megan Leslie, but I do know that this choice of some anarchists and radicals to actively support parliamentary politics has been judges by some as being petty bourgeois and opportunist. It is sad when you see divisions open up between people you have worked with in the past and I think that now is an opportunity for Megan Leslie and those radicals and anarchist who supported her to mend those divisions.If Megan Leslie Stays on this quickly sinking, liberal lead coalition,once it sinks and she is sitting as a member of the NDP, an anti-working class party, anti-peace party and opportunist party, their will be many people in Halifax who will see her and her radical, anarchist campaigners as traitors to the cause of peace and of the working poor. With that being said, if Megan Leslie wishes to keep her dignity and do the right thing, she will get off this sinking ship and announce that she will either resign or sit as an independent. Megan if you are reading this, I beseech you to harken onto these works because the choices you make in the next month or so can benefit us all or damn us all to hell. In a world of growing inequalities, growing wars, growing climate change and global warming: in a world of growing oppression and exploitation of people, animals and the environment, in times like these we need good people to take responsibility and do something good. I truly believe that you are a good person and committed to positive change in this world and if you stay on this sinking coalition ship, it would be tantamount to doing nothing. We all know that bad things happen when good people do nothing. You must do something and I believe that the most positive thing you could do is denounce this coalition and sit as an independent when parliament sits in the new year. If you are the good person I believe you are, I think that you will find that this is the only honorable thing you can do. I cannot see how getting into bed with a pro war, pro imperialist anti-poor boss' party can be considered honorable. I know you have alot of pressure on you to tow the party line but I also know that if you sit as an independent in the next sitting of parliament, you will be an independent voice for peace,for the working poor and the environment and you will sit with dignity. That is something that myself and many others would applaud. sincerely, Reverend Aaron Doncaster From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Dec 5 16:30:28 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 08:30:28 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Is There Such A Thing As Society? Message-ID: <4939B994.8060508@ashisuto.co.jp> by Aseem Shrivastava Countercurrents.org (November 12 2008) The question is far from rhetorical. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister during the 1980s, and one of the chief architects of the economic policies that lie discredited on the heap of economic history today, once dared to say that "there is no such thing as society". She added: "there are individual men and women and there are families". That's all. We live in a world of Robinson Crusoes, each maximizing private gains for themselves and their separate families. The sad part about such a view is its potential for becoming a self-fulfilling belief, especially when held widely by men and women in positions of power. It lacks the humility to leave the door open for the possibility that we may be consigning ourselves to the shallows of human nature in believing in our selfishness alone. The fact that there is such a thing as society is an obvious truth for most people in India and other poor countries, where bonds of community life still prevail in significant measure. Where such community living survives, our emotions tell us of the folly of the Thatcherite view. But for "developed" countries which have been outrun by capitalism for a century and more, the market has subjugated society itself. So it is hardly surprising that the British Prime Minister could say such a thing without fear of ridicule (which incidentally she did not escape from certain quarters). What's more, here in India for at least half a generation now, we have come to live in a world where a good many would nod in approval at the Thatcherite view without fear of ridicule either. What's to be ashamed of in something like self-interest, so much a part of our nature, after all. The world has obviously changed here too. And if that is indeed the essence of our true nature, there's nothing like a well-functioning free market capitalist economy to maximize each one's happiness. Social welfare, on this view, is little more than the sum total of the welfare of each. So, it is claimed, said the great grandfather of modern economics, Adam Smith himself. There's no such thing as a free market If only one lesson is to be drawn from the grave financial and economic crises sweeping the globe today it is this: there is such a thing as society, after all, well beyond families and individuals. The rise of market society had convinced many experts, especially economists that only individuals and their economic transactions with each other matter. What lay beyond the pale of such relationships were consigned to exceptional cases referred to in the jargon as "externalities" (where third parties are affected by what happens between two individuals) or "public goods" (whereby a good or service cannot be transacted without making it possible for third parties to avail of them, for instance, clean air). Who dares to see any truth in such a world-view after "the great financial crisis" of 2008? The cookie of free-market capitalism is crumbling rapidly precisely because externalities and public goods, far from being the exception, are actually the rule - even (especially?) in the realm of the economy. There is a systematic pattern here. In a capitalist economy what is individually rational is all too often socially irrational. Consider the latest example. The great financial crisis has forced each bank into a situation whereby it has to sell many of its assets in order to rescue a battered balance sheet. But the more the number of banks that do this, the faster is the decline in asset prices. And this only accelerates each bank's need to sell assets: as they see the value of their holdings decline sharply, they prefer to hold cash, contributing further to the vicious cycle of asset price deflation, apart from contributing to the massive credit squeeze by increasing the overall reluctance to lend. By acting in narrow self-interest fund managers could maximize short-term profits for their firm's shareholders for a while, but the damage that they caused to the system as a whole is so large in the long run that (almost) everyone is ending up on the losing side. The (global financial) system itself is a "public good" of sorts, whose survival everyone takes for granted, until the day of reckoning arrives and the pirates realize that they have all been milking a generous cow, which is now exhausted from their depredations. "You don't know what you've got, till it's gone", sang Joni Mitchell. The failure of "confidence", "trust" and other vanishing intangibles are being diagnosed as among the primary causes of the "systemic risk" which has all but overwhelmed the world's financial system. These are the forces which are making every important graph stoop. The numbers don't matter any more. They were always consequences and it's never more obvious than today. The ground reality is that no one is willing to lend, because trust has evaporated from all transactions involving credit and the future. Grain and raw materials are piling up at international ports awaiting letters of credit which fail to arrive. And with the vanishing of trust, hope - the other immeasurable intangible - is rapidly dying too. We all need a future, after all, to look forward to. Or else destructive despair sets in. When asked what determined investment in a capitalist economy, John Maynard Keynes had answered "animal spirits". Calculations and numbers are secondary. What we are looking at today is the enormous failure of an obstinate belief, widely held over the past generation among those who control the levers of economic policy in the citadels of global power: society (and hence government) is irrelevant, free markets are all that matter for prosperity. And it will come one day to one and all, if only "we" brave the pain in between and stay the course. Now we know, once again, that hubris never escapes nemesis. What is society? The question begs to be asked yet again. A moment's reflection would reveal that even the most famous and powerful of this world ultimately get to know at first hand at most just a few thousand people, some of whose names they might be able to recall on their death-beds. In other words, the human condition is such that our ordinary ignorance of the existence of others is almost infinite. What this means is that the vast majority of transactions and relationships one has in life is with people we do not know, or even do not see. A society, one might say, can be judged by the quality of its anonymous relationships. If there is good faith and trust, society lives well. If they are absent, it may not even survive in the long run. There is obviously such a thing as society, to be understood in terms of the quality of relationships we form, not just with our "loved ones", but also with those we meet only occasionally, or anonymously, or with those who live far away from us and who we may never meet. If globalization has changed human society in one profound respect it is this: we can no longer ignore how our words, actions and ways of living affect those who are not visible to us on an everyday basis. The victory of "free markets" has proved to be a pyrrhic one. In the very realm they were supposed to bring "efficiency" and "optimality", in finance, they have destroyed themselves. It is precisely the unregulated inner workings of free (unregulated) financial markets which are now threatening human society itself. Greed was "good", till just yesterday. So said Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street, back in the early 1990s, when this present age of financial buccaneers had just taken off. Today we are rapidly being sobered back to the ancient wisdom, which every Indian child has heard during childhood: lalach buri bala hai (greed is a bad habit). Money does not grow on trees any more, no matter how high the ladder one might take to them. Sometimes insiders reach important truths, having sipped some of the poison on offer. A decade ago, one of the world's richest financiers, George Soros had acknowledged publicly that "people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better ... What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values ... What used to be professions have turned into businesses ... The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor". Soros added: "The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. Unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests, our present system - which, however imperfect, qualifies as an open society - is liable to break down." This is now happening, and in a far more severe manner for men of Soros' tastes. We are seeing the rapid unravelling of the "greed is good" age and one hears desperate talk involving recycled concepts like "capitalism 2.0", "sustainable capitalism" et cetera. Intellectual despair has set in because a whole generation has been taught to ignore the evidence, or to massage the facts before examining them. Can we? The enormous crowd that felicitated President-Elect Barack Obama on his monumental victory the other evening roared "Yes we can!" The challenges that beset humanity today are of a nature, and of an order that require something fundamentally different from the mere positiveness implied in such an incredible statement of collective determination, delivered in an epoch-making moment. The rhetoric of "progress" has accustomed almost everyone to the language of "moving forward". But how do you move forward when you are approaching a steep environmental precipice under the business-as-usual scenario? The question is not so much "what is to be done?" as "what is to be undone?" The financial sector is busy "deleveraging". The consumers are reducing consumption and are worrying about how to pay their debts. As they rapidly lose markets - and loans - the corporations are also pruning their ambitions severely, restructuring and often just shutting down or going bankrupt. Cruel as it may sound to the millions being laid off by the month (a comment on the capitalist system), perhaps all this is a blessing in very thick disguise. It is one way that carbon emissions will be controlled. The excesses of the past have to be paid for, after all. Our era, like no other age in history perhaps, has the enormous obligation to undo most of its (mis)deeds just in order to enable the planet to remain inhabitable for our progeny. Their living standards are obviously going to be lower than ours. The future we had been trying to live off is now at the door. Life is not just about getting more and more rich. All science knows that life is given to humanity under certain very specific, delicately balanced, environmental and biological conditions. What has grown with the economic growth of recent decades are also crises which will ultimately destroy the conditions of human existence. We should read the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 as a shadow of the far more real ecological crisis which is lying in wait to overwhelm us. The facts are in. We are being asked to fundamentally change our way of life. Half-measures will not do. The great economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi in his famous book The Great Transformation had concluded back in 1944: "A market economy can exist only in a market society ... A market economy must comprise all elements of industry, including labor, land, and money. But labor and land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists. To include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market." We have become so used to the abiding realities of the day that we fail to notice that we are all victims of them. The latest financial episodes show that unrestrained capitalism is not even good for capitalists themselves. They are all suffering from unbearable stress and depression, and many of them from the onset of fatal diseases. The West has given us valuable notions of individual liberties, but none of collective freedoms. Social problems, however, do not have individual solutions. If society has allowed itself to be subjugated by the market an individual acting alone has little choice about following the rules of competitive survival in urban (or rural) jungles. But acting collectively, it is possible to decide whether we are going to continue being a society that serves the market, or whether we will finally make the market serve society. For markets are known, as we are learning every day, to be good slaves, but terrible masters. These are strange times indeed, when the high priests of the day, the economists, are eager to quote prophetic poets like WB Yeats, The Second Coming (1929), fearing an apocalypse, which has already happened a few times in the recent history of "modern" civilization. But they fear, perhaps rightly, that what may arrive may be something unimaginably worse than all catastrophes seen hitherto. Let us not just hope that they are wrong, let us live and act in ways which makes it so. Yes we can. But just you and I cannot. If we remember that our grandchildren may still have a chance. _____ Aseem Shrivastava is an independent writer. He can be reached at aseem62 at yahoo.com. http://www.countercurrents.org/aseem121108.htm TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 5 17:01:17 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:01:17 -0800 Subject: [R-G] EU: Israeli government must "stop considering itself above the law and start respecting it Message-ID: <200812060001.mB601Hoo022099@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081205/a9e51e7e/attachment.txt From mstainsby at resist.ca Fri Dec 5 21:04:09 2008 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:04:09 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Saami [Lapp] In-Reply-To: <001101c956e5$4da8d6e0$0400a8c0@computer> References: <001101c956e5$4da8d6e0$0400a8c0@computer> Message-ID: <4939F9B9.5050109@resist.ca> Hunter Gray wrote: > The Saami origin lies in Northeastern Asia and, while the people now > known as Native Americans moved -- over a long period of time into > the Western Hemisphere via the Bering Straits -- There are a lot of people in many nations across Turtle Island who would both challenge this as well as tune you out for saying it. Personally, I don't see western science as able to prove this sort of thing, and also fully am suspicious that this line is promoted and promulgated in order to undermine indigenous sovereignty, in particular among idiots who then say garbage like "See? Everyone here is an immigrant, no more 'native land claims'" nonetheless, a good friend of mine is Saami; definitely the whitest nation whose history is tied to the land! Thanks for posting this. From srobin21 at comcast.net Fri Dec 5 23:18:38 2008 From: srobin21 at comcast.net (Steven L. Robinson) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 22:18:38 -0800 Subject: [R-G] The memory of Aqsa Parvez and the future of feminism Message-ID: <0a1001c9576a$7ac328d0$54f2fea9@noir> The memory of Aqsa Parvez and the future of feminism By Sarah Ghabrial Rabble December 5, 2008 On December 10 of last year, a young Toronto woman was murdered in her home by her father. The force of this tragedy was deepened by details of the violence of her early death and by the dozens of photos that flooded print media, television, blogs and facebook groups of her beaming adolescent face. It soon emerged that the murder victim, Aqsa Parvez, born in Canada of Pakistani parents, had suffered abuse by her father for years, and that when he realized his inability to control her movement and choices, he decided instead to end her life. It is for reasons just like these that over 200 Canadian women lose their lives every year to domestic violence (and this figure pertains only to solved cases of spousal homicide). Aqsa's story is a profoundly Canadian one, disturbingly ordinary. One might expect that, like countless similar cases, Aqsa's murder would be casually buried beneath other stories deemed more 'news-worthy.' Instead, her case crowned headlines for weeks, and fed an endless loop of debate and controversy over the state of 'multiculturalism' in Canada. Genuine compassion or inquisitiveness regarding Aqsa's story dissipated all too quickly in the ensuing frenzy over the Canadian 'minority question.' The day after Aqsa's story broke, CityNews brandished a headline describing the "tradition and terror" behind the tragedy. A National Post columnist seeking to explain "the meaning of Aqsa Parvez" was quick to describe her death as an "honour killing" and elaborated on the "loathsome and barbaric" nature of the culture from which, according to this versions of the narrative, she was desperate to escape. There is no doubt that Aqsa was desperate to escape - from her abusive home and tyrannical father. But as a young woman of colour, living at dangerous intersections of race and gender, belonging and exclusion, her options for escape were sadly limited. Women like Aqsa matter little in the grand scheme of things - until their deaths provide convenient grounds on which to mount xenophobic vitriol against Canada's dark Others. Helen Yohannes, an esteemed Eritrean spoken word artist and Coordinator for the Respect in Action Youth Program at METRAC, described her concern over this widespread backlash, and the failure to instead step back and examine "domestic and gender-based violence, and the responsibility of schools, governments and communities to combat violence against young women of colour." Such questions, she remarks, were never even raised. Gender-based violence, says Yohannes, "is the outcome of patriarchy, racism, sexism, Islamophobia, poverty and homophobia. Unless all of these issues are properly acknowledged, the cycle of violence against women and children will continue." This week marks December 6, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. The issue became highlighted nearly 20 years ago, when a deranged anti-feminist walked into the ?cole Polytechnique in Montreal and selected and then shot down 14 young women. In memory of these young women, December 6 and the days preceding it remain a time to reflect on gender-based violence in Canada and to consider ways to prevent it. Violence against women is a problem so immense that it is almost lost (and too often forgotten) for its pervasiveness. No wonder, since solutions are still so narrowly devised. In the wake of the Montreal Massacre, any progress made in confronting gender-based violence is still blunted by failures to recognize the different kinds of systemic oppression, especially racism and poverty, that force and keep women in situations of increased exposure to violence. In Canada, there exists a strange paradox: a tendency to view women of colour and 'immigrant' women - especially Muslim women - as particularly weak and vulnerable, due to the supposedly more intrinsic patriarchy of 'their' cultures; and a concurrent, stubborn unwillingness in our legal, emergency response and, most importantly, education systems to put forward solutions that reach out to women in these positions, rather than further marginalize them. Perhaps it is easier to sit back in cold condescension, to better reinforce the racist assumptions that keep 'our' values liberal and 'theirs' backwards - notions that in turn keep this country solidly white and impenetrable. Eve Hoque, Assistant Professor in Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, at York University, notes that media representations surrounding Aqsa's story reflected a "white-settler national narrative of oppressive vs. liberating cultures; it reduced multiculturalism to how 'we' can tolerate 'them' and solve their problems." Such rhetoric was recently revived in an inflammatory Toronto Life article, against which Muslim feminists and their allies mounted wide public action, and which was subsequently defended by TL editor Sarah Fulford as bringing attention to confrontations between 'New' and 'Old World' values. As it happened, the week this debate was raging, two white Toronto women were killed by their husbands - one a police officer. "When cases like that occur, we think, oh, what went wrong there?" says Hoque, "it's confounding and inexplicable. But in Aqsa's case it's easily dismissed as an 'honour killing', testing the limits of toleration." The Montreal Massacre took place before the term 'multiculturalism' had earned its recent mint as a catch phrase for race-relations in Canada. The term became especially freighted and cumbersome after 9/11, and lately has begun to chafe. Feminism, meanwhile, has not enjoyed much sympathy in my own lifetime, but I see it rehabilitated, dusted off and soundly misused often enough in mainstream culture when the situation calls for it. When certain persons must be imprisoned without trial, when certain countries must be invaded, when certain communities must be ostracized, even the vilest patriarchs are all too happy to invoke 'feminism' - or their weak understanding of it. Conservative leaders seem to have few qualms about vilifying feminism as the source of all things anti-family and awful, and then raising a feminist flag to front an amorphous 'war on terror.' It would be almost funny if not for the perplexing ways in which so many feminists - inevitably white feminists - willingly participate in such posturing. The sound heard from mainstream feminist camps in the wake of Aqsa's murder was a combination of racist muttering and bewildering silence. For those who chose silence, perhaps they felt there was little they could say on the matter (if you can't say anything politically-correct, say nothing at all.) But there was everything to say. There was everything to say - to scream, to insist - about improving prevention methods to be more culturally-appropriate and accessible; about demanding more access to services and support for women currently attaining citizenship status; about criticizing shortages in safe and affordable housing; about rebuking police and emergency response systems that do more to visit violence on newcomer communities (including women) than to help them escape from it. To collude in simple notions of cultures clashing and to dismiss acts of violence as endemic only to certain communities, thereby 'proving' their inability to ever become 'true' Canadians, means accepting and abetting violence against women. To continue on this course means condemning more women to Aqsa's fate. It has been suggested in both academic and activist circles that feminism and multiculturalism are fundamentally at odds. When asked if multiculturalism was bad for women, Stanford liberal feminist academic Susan Moller Okin returned a now famous and pointed 'Yes.' Such a statement assumes that women are not agents in their culture; it assumes women experience one-dimensional identities and oppressions (either primarily gendered, primarily racialized, or classed, or religious, and so on). And it completely overlooks the existence of people like me: passionate feminists - from Middle-Eastern, 'new Canadian' families. The week that encompasses December 6 - 10 should be a time to remember all women who are affected by gender-based violence, who are most prominently women of colour (especially Aboriginal women) and women living in poverty. This is a period of mourning and remembrance, but even more, it is an opportunity to re-imagine feminist politics and action against gender-based violence along a number of fronts. ************* Sarah Ghabrial is a PhD candidate in History at McGill University, where she researches the development of politics of feminism, multiculturalism, immigration, and citizenship in the context of colonial and postcolonial pasts. She is also a co-founder of The Miss G_ Project for Equity in Education, a young feminist organization that works to combat all forms of oppression in and through education. http://www.rabble.ca/news/memory-aqsa-parvez-and-future-feminism This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm From fentona at shaw.ca Sat Dec 6 00:34:21 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 23:34:21 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Powergrab in Ottawa: Harper's Desperate Gambit Message-ID: Weekend Edition December 5 / 7, 2008 Harper's Desperate Gambit Powergrab in Ottawa By MIKE WHITNEY On Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper suspended Canada's parliament to avoid a challenge from opposition parties that were planning to oust him from power. The 3-party coalition -- the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois -- decided to remove Harper because of his strong opposition to a stimulus package that was designed to minimize the effects of the financial crisis. They also opposed his "proposed elimination of subsidies for political parties, a three-year ban on the right of civil servants to strike, and limits on the ability of women to sue for pay equity." Governor General Michaelle Jean helped Harper to hang on by using her constitutional authority to close the legislature for seven weeks. Now the country is in a furor. Harper is a far right conservative ideologue who served as president of the National Citizens Coalition (NCC), a conservative think-tank and advocacy group. The organization opposes national healthcare, favoring supports privatization and tax cuts. It has 40,000 members but the names are kept confidential. Its motto is "more freedom with less government." The Prime Minister has been a supporter of George Bush and the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is alleged to be a proponent of plans for a North American Union, which is an elitist scheme to end separate sovereignties by merging the three countries-- Canada, the US, and Mexico--into one superstate. The plan coincides with Harper's pro- corporate support for free trade. Harper's connection to extremist organizations may sound far fetched, until one one sees a video of him giving a speech that was also given by Australian PM John Howard prior to the war in Iraq. The speeches are identical -- word for word -- indicating that they must have been written by a third party somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon or a nearby think tank. The video dispels any illusion that Karzai, Abbas, and Siniora are the only sock-puppets working for Washington. According to Linda McQuaig of the Toronto Star: "Harper has already laid out an agenda that would fundamentally change this country - in ways most Canadians would oppose. While this agenda is not ?secret,? my guess is few Canadians know about it... Sometime in the dark of night last June 20, the Harper government posted a plan on the Department of National Defense's website - called Canada First Defence Strategy - to spend an eye-popping $490 billion over the next 20 years on the military.? It's hard to imagine an agenda with more profound consequences for Canadians, beginning with a dramatic reordering of national priorities. Public health care? Child poverty? While the election campaign has focused on economic issues, the military and its combat role in Afghanistan have actually been the centrepieces of the Harper administration. Harper has tried to reshape the way Canadians think about Canada, weaning us off our fondness for peacekeeping (and medicare, for that matter), and getting us excited about being a war-making nation, able to swagger on the world stage in the footsteps of the Americans." (Linda McQuaig, "Stephen Harper: Bulking up Pentagon North", the Toronto Star) Harper's nationally televised speech on Monday night was an eerily faithful reprise duplication of George Bush's many ponderous addresses from the Oval office. Wrapping himself in the Maple Leaf, Harper rattled off the familiar patriotic buzzwords and catchphrases : "We will use all legal means to resist this undemocratic seizure of power," Harper thundered, peering straight into the camera. Fortunately, Harper doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. Constitutional scholars unanimously agree that the parties have the right to deliver a "no confidence" vote and strip him of his power. Harper is just trying to brazen it out to buy some time. "The Canadian government has always been chosen by the people," said the Prime Minister. Not true, and Harper knows it. "He's appealing to people who learned their civics from American television," said Henry Jacek, a political scientist at McMaster University. Other scholars... say Harper's populist theory of democracy is more suited to a U.S.-style presidential system, than it is to Canadian parliamentary democracy. In Canada, there's no national vote for prime minister. People elect MPs in 308 ridings, and a government holds power only as long as it has the support of a majority of those MPs. "We have a rule that the licence to govern is having the confidence of the House of Commons," said Peter Russell, a former University of Toronto professor and adviser to past governors general. "I'm sorry, that's the rule. If they want to change it to having a public opinion poll, we'd have to reform and rewrite our Constitution." ("Harper Wrong on Democracy Experts Claim" CTV) Harper is just blowing smoke, but his challenge should be taken seriously just the same. Neocons do not go gently into that good night. Americans know that better than anyone. Mike Whitney lives in Washingon state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney at msn.com From fentona at shaw.ca Sat Dec 6 00:35:59 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 23:35:59 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq Message-ID: Weekend Edition December 5 / 7, 2008 This Old News Just In.... Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq http://counterpunch.com/scahill12052008.html By JEREMY SCAHILL The New York Times is reporting about an "apparent evolution" in president-elect Barack Obama's thinking on Iraq, citing his recent statements about his plan to keep a "residual force" in the country and his pledge to "listen to the recommendations of my commanders" as Obama prepares to assume actual command of US forces. "At the Pentagon and the military headquarters in Iraq, the response to the statements this week from Mr. Obama and his national security team has been akin to the senior officer corps' letting out its collective breath," the Times reported. "[T]the words sounded to them like the new president would take a measured approach on the question of troop levels." The reality is there is no "evolution." Anyone who took the time to cut past Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric of "change" and bringing an "end" to the Iraq war realized early on that the now-president-elect had a plan that boiled down to a down- sizing and rebranding of the occupation. While he emphasized his pledge to withdraw U.S. "combat forces" from Iraq in 16 months (which may or may not happen), he has always said that he intends to keep "residual forces" in place for the foreseeable future. It's an interesting choice of terms. "Residual" is defined as "the quantity left over at the end of a process." This means that the forces Obama plans to leave in Iraq will remain after he has completed his "withdrawal" plan. No matter how Obama chooses to label the forces he keeps in Iraq, the fact is, they will be occupation forces. Announcing his national security team this week, Obama reasserted his position. "I said that I would remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months, with the understanding that it might be necessary ? likely to be necessary ? to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq." While some have protrayed this as Obama going back on his campaign pledge, it is not. What is new is that some people seem to just now be waking up to the fact that Obama never had a comprehensive plan to fully end the occupation. Most recently, The New York Times: "On the campaign trail, Senator Barack Obama offered a pledge that electrified and motivated his liberal base, vowing to 'end the war' in Iraq," wrote reporter Thom Shanker on Thursday. "But as he moves closer to the White House, President-elect Obama is making clearer than ever that tens of thousands of American troops will be left behind in Iraq, even if he can make good on his campaign promise to pull all combat forces out within 16 months." For many months it's been abundantly clear that Obama's Iraq plan is at odds with his campaign rhetoric. Yet, Shanker writes, "to date, there has been no significant criticism from the antiwar left of the Democratic Party of the prospect that Mr. Obama will keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for at least several years to come." The Times is actually right about this, in a literal sense. There has seldom, if ever, been a public peep about Obama's residual force plans for Iraq from members of his own party, including from those who describe themselves as "anti-war." But, for those who have scrutinized Obama's plans and the statements of his advisors from the beginning, this is old news. Obama never defined "ending the war" as removing all U.S. forces from Iraq. Besides the counsel of his closest advisors ? many of whom are pro-war hawks ? Obama's Iraq plan is based on two primary sources: the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton "Iraq Study Group" and the 2007 Iraq supplemental spending bill, which, at the time was portrayed as the Democrats' withdrawal plan. Both envisioned a sustained presence of U.S. forces for an undefined period following a "withdrawal." In supporting the 2007 supplemental, Obama said it would put the U.S. "one signature away from ending the Iraq War." The bill would have redeployed U.S. forces from Iraq within 180 days. But that legislation, vetoed by President Bush, would also have provided for 20,000 to 60,000 troops to remain in Iraq as "trainers," "counter- terrorist forces," or for "protection for embassy/diplomats," according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies. The bill contained no language about how many "private contractors" could remain in Iraq. This helped shed light on what Obama actually meant by "ending the Iraq War." Other glaring clues to the actual nature of Obama's Iraq plan to anyone paying attention could be found in the public comments of his advisors, particularly on the size of the force Obama may leave in Iraq after his withdrawal is complete. Obama has refused to talk numbers, saying in October, "I have tried not to put a number on it." That has been the position of many of his loyal aides. "We have not put a number on that. It depends on the circumstances on the ground," said Susan Rice, Obama's nominee for UN ambassador, during the campaign. "It would be worse than folly, it would be dangerous, to put a hard number on the residual forces." But, Richard Danzig, President Clinton's former Navy Secretary who may soon follow Robert Gates as Obama's Defense Secretary, said during the campaign that the "residual force" could number as many as 55,000 troops. That doesn't include Blackwater and other mercenaries and private forces, which the Obama camp has declared the president-elect "can't rule out [and] won't rule out" using. At present there are more "contractors" in Iraq than soldiers, which is all the more ominous when considering Obama's Iraq plan. In April, it was revealed that the coordinator of Obama's Iraq working group, Colin Kahl, had authored a paper, titled "Stay on Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement," which recommended, "the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground)." Kahl tried to distance the views expressed in the paper from Obama's official campaign position, but they were and are consistent. In March, Obama advisor Samantha Power let the cat out of the bag for some people when she described her candidate's 16-month timetable for withdrawing U.S. "combat" forces as a "best case scenario." Power said, "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator." (After that remark and referring to Sen. Hillary Clinton as a "monster," Power resigned from the campaign. Now that Obama is president-elect, Power's name has once again resurfaced as a member of his transitional team.) The New York Times also raised the prospect that Obama could play semantics when defining his 16-month withdrawal plan, observing, "Pentagon planners say that it is possible that Mr. Obama's goal could be accomplished at least in part by relabeling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be 're-missioned,' their efforts redefined as training and support for the Iraqis." Compare all of the above with a statement Obama made in July: "I intend to end this war. My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war ? responsibly, deliberately, but decisively." Some may now accuse Obama of flip-flopping. The reality is that we need to understand what the words "end" "war" "residual" and "decisively" mean when we hear Obama say them. Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Dec 6 01:52:36 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:52:36 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Taking Evolution Seriously Message-ID: <493A3D54.3000301@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (December 03 2008) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Back in 1904, sociologist Max Weber proposed that the modern period was witnessing "the disenchantment of the world" - a process which traditional mythic ideas that wove meaning into human experience were being replaced by the alienating and dehumanizing worldview of materialist science. There's some truth to Weber's thesis, but I'm not sure he anticipated the inevitable backlash: the Procrustean stretching and lopping of scientific ideas in the popular imagination that has turned many of them into substitute myths. One example that has been much on my mind of late is the way the theory of evolution has been manhandled into a surrogate mythology. The reason it's been on my mind is simple enough: whenever I discuss peak oil at a lecture, book signing, or some other public setting, it's a safe bet that someone will raise a hand and ask what I think about the possibility that the approaching crisis is part of our transition to a new evolutionary level. I am always left wondering what to say in response, because this sort of question is almost always rooted in the notion that evolution is a linear movement that leads onward and upward through a series of distinct stages or levels - and this notion is a pretty fair misstatement of the way evolution takes place in nature. Few things in the history of ideas are quite so interesting as the way that new discoveries get harnessed in the service of old obsessions. When X-rays were first detected in 1895, for example, one of the first results was panic over the possibility that the new rays might make it possible to see through clothing; the New Jersey state legislature actually debated a bill to ban the use of X-rays in opera glasses. Wildly inaccurate as it was, this notion was rooted in profound fears about sexuality, and so it took many decades to dispel - when I was a child, ads in comic books still claimed to sell "X-ray glasses" that would let you see people naked. Something not that different happened to the theory of evolution, and thus nearly all of today's popular notions about evolution are shrapnel from the head-on collision between Darwin's theory and the obsessions of the era in which that theory emerged. Social class rather than sex was the driving force here; as religious justifications for the English caste system faltered, the manufacture of scientific justifications for social hierarchy became a growth industry, and by the time the ink was dry on the first copies of The Origin of Species (1859), evolution was already being drafted into service in this dubious cause. The resulting belief system was very nearly a parody of George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) in advance - all living things evolve, but some are more evolved than others. Now of course this is nonsense. A human being, a gecko, a dandelion, and a single-celled blue-green alga are all equally evolved - that is, they have all been shaped to the same degree by the pressures of their environment, and their ancestors have all undergone an equal amount of natural selection. We think of humans as "more evolved" than blue-green alga because Victorian Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer engaged in conceptual sleight of hand, transforming the amorphous outward surge of life toward available niches into a ladder of social status, with English gentlemen at the top level and everybody and everything else slotted into place further down. The concept of evolutionary stages or levels was essential to this conjurer's act, since it allowed social barriers between classes to be mapped onto the biological world. In nature, though, evolution has no levels, it just has adaptations. There is no straight line of progress along which living things can be ranked. Instead, evolutionary lineages splay outward like the branches of an unruly shrub. Sometimes those branches take unexpected turns, but these evolutionary breakthroughs can no more be ranked in an ascending hierarchy than organisms can. They move outward into new niches, rather than upward to some imagined goal. There are any number of examples from nature; the one I want to use here is the evolution of bats. The ancestors of the first bats were shrewlike, insect-eating nocturnal mammals, related to early primates, who scampered through the forest canopies of the Eocene around sixty million years ago. For animals that live in trees, the risk of falling is a constant source of evolutionary pressure, and adaptations that will help manage that danger will likely spread through a population; that's how sloths got their claws, New World monkeys got prehensile tails, and many animals of past and present got extra skin that functions as a parachute. If the extra skin bridges the gap between forelegs and the hindlegs, the most common adaptation, you get the ability to glide, like flying squirrels, colugoes, and the like; you've got a viable adaptation, and there you stop. If the extra skin is mostly on and around the forelimbs, though, you've just jumped through the door into a new world, because you can control your glide much more precisely, and you can put muscle into the movements - in other words, you can begin to fly. Once you can do better than a controlled fall, furthermore, the trillions of tasty insects flitting through the forest air are on your menu, and the better you can fly, the more you can catch. The result is ferocious evolutionary pressure toward improved flight skills, and in a few hundred thousand generations, you've got agile fliers. That's what happened to bats, as it happened some 200 million years earlier to the ancestors of the pterodactyls. By 55 million years ago, bats almost identical to today's insect-eating bats were darting through the Eocene skies. Sonar seems to have taken a while to evolve, and some offshoots of the family - the big fruit bats and flying foxes, for example - took even longer, but the basic adaptations were set and, to the discomfiture of countless generations of mosquitoes and moths, have remained ever since. As evolutionary breakthroughs go, the leap into flight was a massive success; bats are the second most numerous of mammal orders, exceeded only by the rodents, but it's impossible to fit the breakthrough that created them into any linear scheme. Applying an ecological concept to human social systems always takes tinkering, but there are good reasons to accept the idea that societies are capable of evolution; like populations of other living things, human communities face pressures from their environments, and adapt or perish in response. Here again, though, the evolutionary process moves outward in all directions rather than ascending an imaginary hierarchy of levels. Hunter-gatherer systems seem to have been the original form of human society, but other forms branched off as adaptations opened doors to possibilities that were likely as appealing at the time as the bug-filled night sky must have been to the first clumsily flapping proto-bats. Where large herbivores could be tamed, therefore, nomadic herding societies came into being; where many food plants could be raised in intensive gardens, tribal horticultural societies were born; where extensive fields of seed-bearing grasses offered the best option for survival, agrarian societies took shape. As it turned out, grains could be bred to yield large surpluses that could be transported and stored, and so the agrarian system opened the door to large-scale divisions of labor and the rise of cities. These in turn made complex material culture possible, and ultimately drove the creation of the machines that broke into the Earth's stockpiles of fossil carbon and gave the modern world its three centuries of exuberance. Thus industrial society is not "more evolved" than other societies, or for that matter "less evolved". It was simply the most successful adaptation to the evolutionary pressures that opened up once fossil fuel energy had been tapped, and it outcompeted other systems in something of the same way that an invasive exotic outcompetes less robust native organisms. As fossil fuels deplete and climate change unfolds, the balance of evolutionary pressures is shifting, and as the new reality of limits takes hold, selection will favor those systems that are better adapted to the new ecological constraints of global climate instability, energy scarcity, and resource shortage. The fact that those new systems are better adapted to new realities, however, does not free them from the human condition. This is where the rubber meets the road, because the people who ask me about the prospects of a new evolutionary level are rarely asking whether the societies of the future will be better adapted to an environment of resource scarcity. They are generally asking whether societies on the other side of an imagined evolutionary leap will be free from problems such as poverty, war, and environmental destruction. The best way to assess this, it seems to me, is to consider what happened the last time human social evolution yielded a breakthrough to a new way of living in the world: that is, the rise of industrial societies beginning around 1750. Agrarian societies suffered from poverty, war, and environmental destruction, and so did all the other "evolutionary levels" or, rather, adaptations, right back to the hunter-gatherers. Many hunter-gatherers among the First Nations in North America, for example, had sharp social inequalities, a busy slave trade, and a long history of fierce tribal wars. Their ecological relationships were less problematic, since those native societies that failed to find a balance with nature, such as the Mound Builders and the people of Chaco Canyon, collapsed long before 1492. Just as bats faced the same experiences of hunger, social squabbles, and the unfriendly attentions of predators as their ancestors, the societies that took up industrialism experienced poverty, war, and environmental destruction just like earlier societies, and it's hard to think of a good reason why the new societies that emerge in response to the evolutionary pressures of the deindustrial age should be exempt from the same troubles. Evolutionary adaptations can make things easier for living things - plenty of predators in the Eocene must have been discomfited when bats evolved the ability to flutter away to safety - but no living thing is exempt from the balances of the natural world. It's a mistake, in other words, to see evolution as a movement toward Utopia. When I've tried to explain any of the above in public, though, someone - and it's not always the same someone who asked the original question - usually insists that this may be how biological evolution works, but spiritual evolution is different. Some of my readers just now may have come up with the same objection. All I can say in response is I know of none of the world's great spiritual traditions that would approve the claim that people living extravagant lifestyles of wealth and privilege - this is, after all, a fair description of life in modern industrial societies from the standpoint of the rest of human experience - can expect a sudden leap to an even more comfortable and convenient life, just because they happen to want it, and would find it a useful way to avoid dealing with the consequences of their own shortsighted choices. This may seem unduly harsh. Still, the notion that an evolutionary leap will extract us from the mess we've made for ourselves is as much a distortion of the realities of the evolutionary process as any Social Darwinist screed. If people want to believe that a miracle will rescue them from the predicament of industrial society, they have every right to their faith, but it would confuse communication a little less to call it a miracle, instead of trying to wrap it in the borrowed prestige of Darwin's theory. Perhaps it's the bias instilled by my own Druid faith, furthermore, but it seems to me that if we are going to use evolution as a metaphor, we need to start by taking evolution seriously, rather than imposing our own fantasies on the very different stories that nature is telling us. _____ ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/12/taking-evolution-seriously.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org Sat Dec 6 05:20:39 2008 From: hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 05:20:39 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [Redbadbear] Re: Saami [Lapp] References: <001101c956e5$4da8d6e0$0400a8c0@computer> <4939F9B9.5050109@resist.ca> Message-ID: <008b01c9579d$0e9f9070$0400a8c0@computer> Your tone bothers me, Macdonald. There have been some disputes about the Bering Straits migration explanation for a long time -- but the evidence, some physical and some linguistic and some in symbolic legendry, and more -- in addition to the lack of any evidence of human habitation in the Western Hemisphere 'way 'way back in time -- is quite broadly convincing. I do have to say that I, personally, was "born" into issues of this sort and I've heard them batted back and forth for ages in Native and academic settings. Despite some implications in your message, I really don't think most Native people have any real problem at all with the Straits explanation, given its truly archaic -- super ancient -- timing. My own approach in teaching about this -- and I've done a great deal of that, including directly in the context of Native studies, is to present each basic view: Bering and very literal traditionalism. But I invariably say that the basic evidence supports the Bering Straits and those dimensions of literal traditionalism that relate to Origin are, in my opinion, best viewed symbolically. And, with that, there really is no conflict. [To move into another context, I see no conflict between Darwin and the Bible -- when the Bible is viewed symbolically.The two can go together very nicely.] The Bering matter has absolutely no moral or legal weight or authority in the matter of Native aboriginal title and claims -- which are, in every sense and every direction, valid to the core. The Federal courts, in fact, made that clear ages ago -- see that as a non-factor and a non-issue. The bona fide aboriginal title of American Natives is considered hard-rock solid. Transforming That into tangible claims gains is always, of course, an endless fight -- and a most critical one. On a minor note, I think it's pretty broadly recognized that some Vikings came into the coastal Maritimes in the 1200s and that shipwrecked Japanese fishermen occasionally wound up on the Pacific Northwest coast. [There is an interesting and not-hard-to-find work --replete with pertinent illustrations -- that you or others might find worthwhile: Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska [William Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell], Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. Drawing on many sources indeed, including many of those based in the then USSR, it's replete with maps -- including linguistic maps, all sorts of appropriate photos of people and their tangible cultures. It's a big book physically and runs to 360 pages. I'm glad you have a Saami friend. [I have a part Saami spouse.] As I noted in my little post on the matter, the Saami have done considerable mingling with non-Saami peoples -- especially in the Scandinavian setting. But in the outlying regions of Sweden and Norway, many Saami are relatively full-blooded and the Asian characteristics are obvious. This becomes much more the case when one gets into northern Finland and northern Russia. I hope this helps answer your concerns. Hunter [Hunter Bear] From: Macdonald Stainsby To: Hunter Gray ; Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. Cc: Redbadbear at yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, December 05, 2008 9:04 PM Subject: [Redbadbear] Re: [R-G] Saami [Lapp] Hunter Gray wrote: > The Saami origin lies in Northeastern Asia and, while the people now > known as Native Americans moved -- over a long period of time into > the Western Hemisphere via the Bering Straits -- There are a lot of people in many nations across Turtle Island who would both challenge this as well as tune you out for saying it. Personally, I don't see western science as able to prove this sort of thing, and also fully am suspicious that this line is promoted and promulgated in order to undermine indigenous sovereignty, in particular among idiots who then say garbage like "See? Everyone here is an immigrant, no more 'native land claims'" nonetheless, a good friend of mine is Saami; definitely the whitest nation whose history is tied to the land! Thanks for posting this. __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Links | Polls | Calendar MARKETPLACE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From kitchen basics to easy recipes - join the Group from Kraft Foods Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe Recent Activity Visit Your Group New web site? Drive traffic now. Get your business on Yahoo! search. Dog Fanatics on Yahoo! Groups Find people who are crazy about dogs. Y! Groups blog The place to go to stay informed on Groups news! . __,_._,___ From aaron at mylists.fastmail.fm Sat Dec 6 05:41:17 2008 From: aaron at mylists.fastmail.fm (Aaron Aarons) Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 04:41:17 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Against Israel's Boycott of Durban II: Position of the Union Juive Francaise pour la Paix In-Reply-To: References: <200812042236.mB4MaXmC006837@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <20081206124153.CF5B9452D9@heartbeat2.messagingengine.com> Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 20:12:59 +0100 From: "Suzanne de Kuyper" Fascinating that the USA is mentioned only once as joined with Israel against Durban11. The rest of the article focuses only on Israel. That is skewing informatioon so that it says what it is not. Real news. The full discussion of both deniers and the reasons they may be joined for intolerance, hate crimes, racial war. Suzanne de Kuyper Since the statement comes from a Jewish organization, it's not strange that they focus their criticism on the so-called "Jewish State". I'd be more concerned if they tried to minimize Israel's role in perpetuating racism. OTOH, I can't understand why the Israeli state (or the U.S. or Canada or almost any other state) would be even allowed to attend a conference against racism! Such a conference, to be anything but a sham, should be a conference of representatives of groups around the world that suffer racial, ethnic, caste, national or religious discrimination and oppression, not of the governments that oppress them. - Aaron P.S. It's nice to see some discussion on this discussion list. On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:36 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > [1]http://www.alternativenews.org/news/english/against-israels-boyc ott > -of-durban-ii-position-of-the-union-juive-francaise-pour-la-paix-20 081 > 202.html > > > 2 December 2008 > > > FRENCH JEWISH UNION FOR PEACE > > > Against Israels Boycott of Durban II: Position of the Union Juive > Francaise pour la Paix From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Dec 6 11:26:29 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 13:26:29 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Chicago Factory Occupied: UE Members in Chicago Need Our Help! Message-ID: Hopefully a first salvo of the fightback. -- Yoshie UE Members in Chicago Need Our Help! UE Local 1110 members in Chicago who work at Republic Windows and Doors, are now engaged in a battle with their employer as well as the giant Bank of America. The bank -- which has already been given $25 billion dollars in taxpayer bailout monies -- is refusing to extend credit to the company. The national Jobs with Justice coalition has taken up the fight on behalf of these UE members, launching a campaign to expose the shameful behavior by Bank of America -- as well as the many other outrages of the government bailout. To lend a hand, click here. Do your part today to support these fellow workers and push back against the Wall Street and big bank rip-off of taxpayers. Please participate in the Jobs with Justice Week of Action for a People's Bailout Now! To lend a hand please visit the main Jobs with Justice page. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Chicago Factory Occupied by Lee Sustar In a tactic rarely used in the U.S. since the labor struggles of the 1930s, the workers, members of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1110, refused to leave the plant on December 5, its last scheduled day of operation. "We decided to do it because this is money that belongs to us," said Maria Roman, who's worked at the plant for eight years. "These are our rights." Word of the occupation spread quickly both among labor and immigrant rights activists -- the overwhelming majority of the workers are Latinos. Seven local TV news stations showed up to do interviews and live reports, and a steady stream of activists arrived to bring donations of food and money and to plan solidarity actions. Management claims that it can't continue operations because its main creditor, Bank of America (BoA), refuses to make any more loans to the company. After workers picketed BoA headquarters December 3, bank officials agreed to sit down with Republic management and UE to discuss the matter at a December 5 meeting arranged by U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill), said UE organizer Leah Fried. BoA had said that it couldn't discuss the matter with the union directly without written approval from Republic's management. But Republic representatives failed to show up at the meeting, and plant managers prepared to close the doors for good -- violating the federal WARN Act that requires 60 days notice of a plant closure. The workers decided this couldn't go unchallenged. "The company and Bank of America are throwing the ball to one another, and we're in the middle," said Vicente Rangel, a shop steward and former vice president of Local 1110. Many workers had suspected the company was planning to go out of business -- and perhaps restart operations elsewhere. Several said managers had removed both production and office equipment in recent days. Furthermore, while inventory records indicated there were plenty of parts in the plant, workers on the production line found shortages. And the order books, while certainly down from the peak years of the housing boom, didn't square with management's claims of a total collapse. "Where did all those windows go?" one worker asked. Workers were especially outraged that Bank of America, which recently received a bailout in taxpayer money, won't provide credit to Republic. "They get $25 billion from the government, and won't loan a few million to this company so workers can keep their jobs?" said Ricardo Caceres, who has worked at the plant for six years. The members of Local 1110 have a history of struggle. In 2004, they decertified the Central States Joint Board -- a union notorious for corruption and sweetheart contracts with management -- and brought in UE, a far more democratic organization. In May of this year, Local 1110 mobilized for a contract by organizing a "practice" picket, and 70 workers used their lunch break to confront the boss with a petition listing their demands. The workers were able to turn back the company's effort to win major concessions and won solid pay increases. Now, management is trying to get revenge by pocketing money that belongs to the workers. UE officials and workers acknowledge that it will be difficult to stop the plant from closing. But they're determined to get the money owed to them -- and they believe that by fighting, they can set an example for other workers facing layoffs and plant closures as the recession deepens. Negotiations are set for Monday, December 8. Whatever happens, however, the workers have already sent a message to employers that if they violate workers rights and the law, they can expect a fight. "This is a message to the workers of America," said Vicente Rangel, the shop steward. "If we stand together, we will prevail until justice is done, and we get what we're due." What YOU Can Do If negotiations with Bank of America fail to resolve the issue, there will be a picket of BoA's Chicago headquarters at 231 S. La Salle on Tuesday, December 9 at 12 noon. Members of Local 1110 need your support. Make checks payable to the UE Local 1110 Solidarity Fund, and mail to: 37 S. Ashland, Chicago, IL 60607. Messages of support can be sent to leahfried at gmail.com. For more information, call UE at 312-829-8300. At the Jobs with Justice Web site, you can send a message of protest to Bank of America. Workers occupying the Republic Windows & Doors factory slated for closure are vowing to remain in the Chicago plant until they win the $1.5 million in severance and vacation pay owed them by management. The call to action was first published on the Web site of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) on 5 December 2008. Lee Suster's article was first published by SocialistWorker.org on 6 December 2008. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Dec 6 11:55:19 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 13:55:19 -0500 Subject: [R-G] CPJ: "Online Journalists Now Most Jailed" Message-ID: CPJ's 2008 prison census: Online and in jail Also: See capsule reports on journalists in jail as of December 1, 2008 New York, December 4, 2008--Reflecting the rising influence of online reporting and commentary, more Internet journalists are jailed worldwide today than journalists working in any other medium. In its annual census of imprisoned journalists, released today, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that 45 percent of all media workers jailed worldwide are bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors. Online journalists represent the largest professional category for the first time in CPJ's prison census. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At least 56 online journalists are jailed worldwide, according to CPJ's census, a tally that surpasses the number of print journalists for the first time. The number of imprisoned online journalists has steadily increased since CPJ recorded the first jailed Internet writer in its 1997 census. Print reporters, editors, and photographers make up the next largest professional category, with 53 cases in 2008. Television and radio journalists and documentary filmmakers constitute the rest. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Dec 6 12:08:44 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 14:08:44 -0500 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?Le_partenariat_Chine_-_Etats-Unis_se_r=E9?= =?windows-1252?q?=E9quilibre_au_profit_de_P=E9kin?= Message-ID: Le partenariat Chine - Etats-Unis se r??quilibre au profit de P?kin LE MONDE | 06.12.08 | 13h04 ? Mis ? jour le 06.12.08 | 13h04 SHANGHA? (Chine) CORRESPONDANCE R?unis ? P?kin les 4 et 5 d?cembre pour le dernier "Dialogue ?conomique strat?gique" de l'?re Bush, Am?ricains et Chinois ont promis d'agir ensemble pour pr?venir tout retour du protectionnisme et annonc? 20 milliards de dollars (15,7 milliards d'euros) de cr?dits pour favoriser les ?changes. C'est Henry Paulson qui a initi? il y a deux ans ce sommet bilat?ral destin? ? "int?grer" la Chine. Le secr?taire am?ricain au Tr?sor est un "ami" de la Chine qu'il conna?t en tant que pr?sident de Goldman Sachs et envers laquelle il a toujours privil?gi? une approche conciliatrice face ? une opposition d?mocrate davantage port?e sur l'affrontement. Il a ainsi d? mettre en sourdine les exigences r?p?t?es de r??valuation du yuan. L'heure n'est plus aux le?ons de d?r?gulation qui ont autrefois mis la Chine sur la d?fensive, mais ? une relation qui, crise oblige, est en train de se r??quilibrer en faveur du partenaire chinois : "Les deux pays sont devenus interd?pendants", a d?clar? le vice-premier Wang Qishan, chef de la d?l?gation chinoise. Si cette interd?pendance ne date pas d'aujourd'hui, la d?b?cle financi?re am?ricaine a redonn? plus de poids au financement de la dette publique am?ricaine. L'Am?rique a ni plus ni moins ?t? incit?e ? prendre toutes les mesures possibles de stabilisation de ses march?s financiers "afin d'assurer la s?curit? des actifs et des investissements chinois aux Etats-Unis", a d?clar? M. Wang. Les Am?ricains ont ?t? encourag?s ? augmenter leur taux d'?pargne par le gouverneur de la Banque de Chine, qui s'est envol? vers New York avant la fin du sommet pour rencontrer le successeur de M. Paulson, Timothy Geithner. Il y a quelques jours ? Hongkong, Lou Jiwei le pr?sident de la China Investment corporation, le fonds souverain chinois, avait d?clar? que la Chine remettait ? plus tard tout projet d'investissement dans la finance am?ricaine, car "nous n'avons pas le courage pour l'instant d'investir dans des institutions financi?res dont on ne sait quels probl?mes elles peuvent avoir", a-t-il dit ? une table ronde de la Clinton Global Initiative. EMERGENCE DE LA "CHIMERICA" La Chine d?tient 585 milliards de dollars en bons du Tr?sor am?ricains. Les participations chinoises dans Freddy Mac et Fanny Mae, ou encore le fonds Blackstone et la banque d'affaires Morgan Stanley sont ?quivalentes. Le rench?rissement du yuan (+ 20% par rapport au dollar depuis 2005) et la d?b?cle financi?re am?ricaine ont mis ? mal ces placements, qui ont indirectement servi ? financer 321 milliards de dollars d'exportations chinoises vers les Etats-Unis en 2007 (et probablement autant en 2008). Le destin commun aux deux pays fait l'objet d'un livre, The Ascent of Money : A Financial History of the World (paru en novembre chez Penguin Press). L'?conomiste am?ricain Niall Ferguson y retrace l'?mergence, depuis la fin de la guerre froide, d'un "nouveau continent" ? la croissance spectaculaire : la "Chimerica", un endroit o? les habitants de l'Ouest consomment ? qui mieux mieux les produits que fabriquent ceux de l'Est, les uns s'endettant d'autant que les autres th?saurisent. Ce "continent" doit ?tre remis ? flot - en faisant cro?tre la consommation des Chinois et l'?pargne des Am?ricains. Les grands argentiers de P?kin ont fait comprendre ? leurs interlocuteurs qu'ils n'avaient aucune intention de mettre en p?ril la stabilit? de leur croissance aujourd'hui chancelante en r??valuant brusquement le yuan. Dans quelles conditions se poursuivra le dialogue ? La balle, ont laiss? entendre les Chinois, est dans le camp de l'administration Obama. Brice Pedroletti From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Dec 6 16:21:13 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:21:13 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Tel Aviv turns right Message-ID: <200812062321.mB6NLDY0012214@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081206/5eb6de9b/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Dec 6 16:20:41 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:20:41 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Obama's 'Palestinian friend' laments catastrophic U.S. policy in Mideast Message-ID: <200812062320.mB6NKf0D011841@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081206/db76b5c1/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Dec 6 16:21:43 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:21:43 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Point of No Return for the Arctic Climate? Message-ID: <200812062321.mB6NLht9012589@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081206/79a3299e/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Dec 6 19:20:17 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2008 11:20:17 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Why it's best that people lose their jobs ... Message-ID: <493B32E1.3050707@ashisuto.co.jp> ... in this unsustainable economy by Jan Lundberg Culture Change Letter #214 (November 17 2008) People need to lose their jobs. It sounds crazy, but what if it's true? In this time of mounting tensions and rude awakenings, it is fortunate we can stress compassion and positive ideas. Yet, foremost we must be warned about our present course as an unsustainable society. Sudden, disruptive change is generally good to avoid, but sometimes we need to make an abrupt and wrenching move to save ourselves. Not being able to eat money is perhaps the best reason to prepare for the future hardening of economic and ecological reality. Whether we call our fate petrocollapse or financial collapse, we are about to find out that a closer relationship to our land and our neighbors is all that matters. Looking at what a typical job today really does for us or our community - besides generating cash for others to profit off of - helps open the mind to an alternative way of living without spinning our wheels. If we cannot head off the worst of a crisis with intelligent action, at least we can anticipate changes openly among ourselves. In so doing we counter the prevailing stupidity which is where the big money is. Bailing out the automobile industry is the next waste of money on a colossal scale. Recessions and depressions are just part of the economy's old-school "business cycle" as well as common sense: what goes up must come down. It is prudent to say it is better to deal with reality sooner rather than put it off. In today's world, what really has to change is our lifestyle. But as long as people can cling to a paycheck (or stock dividend), change is retarded and the lethal system of waste and exploitation lumbers on until it takes us down over the cliff. A slightly milder way of introducing the need to give up suicide and ecocide is to suggest exploring, "Why losing your job can be a good thing today". If we consider essential needs being met, most jobs are seldom directly applicable anymore to community resiliency. So, whether it is through employment or unemployment, we need to resurrect techniques of self-sufficiency. Here are additional reasons we need to lose jobs that prop up the climate-changing industrial system (the first three are like saying "Location, location, location" when one comes up with the three most important factors for lucrative property values): * The ecosystem is deteriorating rapidly. * The environment's going to hell in a hand-basket. * It's not nice to fool Mother Nature! (from a margarine commercial, 1970s) * Local economics that liberate people are being instituted and have great promise. * Entropy happens. "Everything made gets destroyed" (Bronwyn Lundberg). * Monotonous work is unhealthy, dispiriting, and such employment is slavery. * Employment takes time away from important survival tasks such as seed saving and seed sharing. * US society and its government have earned disdain by behaving as if they are fundamentally bad. We have a system of friendly fascism that white-washes issues of deadly pollution and toxicity. Supporting the system as a worker paying taxes is one thing, but being unable to bring about a better world is a killer. Culture Change has covered these points at length and for years. Here is all the reason we need for the first three bullet-points: (Bonn, 17 November 2008) - Two weeks ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland, the UN Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn has reported that greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries continue to rise. [UNFCCC Press Release] On the same island as the UN headquarters is a player that's like a wolf in sheep's clothing. We are reminded of corporate news media's real allegiances when we see an outrageous column in the New York Times on trying to preserve inappropriate, doomed car manufacturing jobs. Published Saturday, the column "'Drop Dead' Is Not an Option" tries to justify corporate socialism by saying auto manufacturer bailouts are just as right to do as it was to rescue insolvent New York City in 1975. To make the argument sound progressive and liberal, the "free market" ideology was attacked by the columnist. I for one was not fooled, and jumped on it with my letter below: Dear Editor, Bob Herbert's column in support of bailing out General Motors shows he knows nothing about and cares little for ecological health. There are no jobs on a dead planet. And, any jobs based on unsustainable depletion of resources are soon going to be lost. Oil has reached its global peak of extraction. While the automobile companies are still intact they should be forced to retool their factories to make bicycles. Losing our car fleet (imports too) will save 100,000 people a year in this country from crash deaths and fatal diseases from exhaust fumes. Approximately one million animals are killed by vehicles daily on US roads. Millions of acres of good farmland are destroyed by car-oriented urban sprawl. But those facts are not news or the basis of advertising revenue for corporations. A free press supports life and justice instead of ecocide, mayhem on the roads and dead-end jobs. Jan Lundberg Oil-industry analyst founder, Culture Change www.culturechange.org Post Office Box 4347, Arcata, California 95518 (215) 243-3144 Only once have I gotten a letter published criticizing car-ad revenue, and it was last year in the San Francisco Examiner; I was floored. We shall see if the Times runs this. In the Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog on November 14, none other than the status quo itself was handed a kind sacrifice, or a suggested gesture of same, by peak oilist Robert Hirsch. It is his report we have quoted so many times about the impossibility of mitigating peak oil (which I believe is upon us). TO THE PEAK OIL COMMUNITY: The world is in the midst of the most severe financial crisis in most of our lifetimes. The economic damage that has already been wrought is considerable, and we have yet to see the bottom or the turnaround. Against this background, I suggest that the peak oil community minimize its efforts to awaken the world to the near-term dangers of world oil supply. The motivation is simple: By minimizing our efforts in the near term, we may not add fuel to the economic fires that are already burning so fiercely. Bob Hirsch didn't bother including me on the recipient list; he knows where I stand. How does he think "the turnaround" can happen when cheap energy is gone, gone, gone? Remember folks, the cheaply produced petroleum is all depleted, and any low prices for recent fields' oil are subsidized prices. Economic growth can no longer be supported. Growth has stopped so we have lower nominal oil prices (without subsidies showing). The price of oil collapsed, to a degree, reflecting financial collapse and job losses. Peak is here, so economic fires have barely begun. The present economy and its unimaginative defenders are just running on hope. The addict hoping for a fix around the street-corner is running on hope. Continuing our overpopulation's burning of fuels and forests while imagining we are "greening" jobs in a consumer economy is running on hope. To unplug the global warming machinery is productive hope we can run with. Just as important is to start planting trees collectively, billions per day - Albert Bates, author of Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook (2006), calculates that excess atmospheric carbon dioxide can be removed in under a year. What are we waiting for, a GM paycheck? Retooling car factories for more than bicycles A Michigan peak oil meeting was just concluded, where Albert Bates spoke. He reported the following after he saw my letter to the Times: Lots of talk at this conference (Heinberg, me, others) about ideas for retooling GM: streetcars, light rail, wind turbines, HPVs. GM is crashing the economy of Michigan and the Governor here is pulling stings with Obama to make sure they can get back on Plan A as soon as possible, using funny money. Hard truth: They need to skip the whole GM rebuild scene and let China and India make cars for the world now. It is a dead industry. Want to assemble something? Assemble biochar kilns, wave power devices, solar powered tractors, algae oil presses. Fuck cars. If the USA has made its last car it is none too soon. We have more than we need. As they die, let them be recycled into parts and planters. Tackling anti-environment, liberal Democratic Party doctrine A new report in wide circulation, "A Pro-Growth, Progressive Economic Agenda", should sound a warning to truly progressive people. This was my reaction, sent to the authors and to Truthout.org that circulated the report: Growth is the problem. The Center for American Progress and other Democrats appear to have more reasonable policy ideas than the Bushies, but ecological reality and peak oil require that we abandon the idea of economic growth. Understandably, job losses seem like they need to be remedied by more jobs. But this leads nowhere if the cheap energy that created those jobs is gone. The Center for American Progress and other progressives including the Democrats stand for a national and global economy; that is in opposition to the wonderful alternative known as local economics which offers true sustainability. The article said, "the new administration has the opportunity to implement pro-growth, progressive economic policies to get the economy back on track". On track means more of the same: more manufacturing, toxic exposures, greenhouse gas emissions, and buying unneeded stuff. The notion of green jobs is highly questionable when it hinges on more consumer spending and creating energy systems for unnecessary, destructive machines. It's too late to preserve the status quo with a technofix even if peak oil were ten years into the future, as shown by the Hirsch Report on peak-oil mitigation submitted to the US Department of Energy in 2005. "(G)rowing middle-class incomes" are touted to be the "solution" but are really nothing more than the same old illusion of the bankrupt American Dream based on nuclear family over-consumption. The Center for American Progress decries "ineffective military spending" but this does not mean they want to slash military spending. (Objecting to the "conduct of the war" does not get our invading forces out of other countries that were not going to invade us.) It's the old order jiving us when the Center for American Progress says the nation "must focus on policies that both raise the economic tide and lift all boats - boosting productivity and our gross national product while fostering the shared prosperity that defines our nation's values". To justify trickle-down economics with the call for "green-collar jobs" is green-washing and not true progress. But it sure fits in with the goal of corporate profits at the expense of people and other species. For more on the above, see www.culturechange.org Conclusion What is it like to walk away from bad employment? Answer: always better than to wait for the axe to fall and finding oneself unprepared and lacking useful skills. When is it best to leave a job that only accommodates our overbuilt society? As soon as you can think of something more productive to do that you enjoy: now. Further Reading: "I community, do you? - Anti-work, pro-community", Culture Change Magazine issue 20 (never printed), by Jan Lundberg, Miguel Valencia, Susan Meeker-Lowry, 2002: culturechange.org "The right to be poor - and to thrive: Toward a Constitutional Amendment", Culture Change e-Letter #57, by Jan Lundberg, March 30 2004: culturechange.org References: The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Pozna?, 1-12 December 2008: unfccc.int "'Drop Dead' Is Not an Option" by Bob Herbert, New York Times, November 15 2008: nytimes.com "Peak Oil: Prominent Peaker Tells Allies to (Temporarily) Pipe Down", Wall Street Journal Online, by Neil King Jr: blogs.wsj.com The Conference on Michigan's Future: Energy, Economy & Environment, Thompsonville, Michigan, November 14 - 16 2008: futuremichigan.org Albert Bates' blog, The Great Change: peaksurfer.blogspot.com/ "A Pro-Growth, Progressive Economic Agenda" (third in a three-part series on "Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President".): pr.thinkprogress.org Employment is a crime so let me barter my own way Helping out each other every day and every way I'm all for culture change Police cars can fade away from Dream in D, album "Best of Redwood Dreams" by Depaver Jan http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=247&Itemid=1 TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Sat Dec 6 23:45:58 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 22:45:58 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Foreign Intervention Won the Venezuelan Elections by Eva Golinger Message-ID: <1D1B475F-6AE4-4362-9D25-C62F8E295543@shaw.ca> December 6, 2008...8:15 pm Foreign Intervention Won the Venezuelan Elections by Eva Golinger http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4010 Foreign Intervention Won The Venezuelan Elections Author: Eva Golinger Years of work penetrating communities and financing ?democracy? programs and projects with an anti-socialist vision in the communities of Petare, Sucre Municipality of Miranda State, and Catia, Libertador Municipality in Caracas, and in other zones where the vast majority of the population of Caracas and Miranda is located, allowed the opposition to retake control of these areas. The strategic political consultation, with its separatist vision and in favor of the infiltration of paramilitaries in Zulia and Tachira, allowed these areas that are of such importance to the security of the Venezuelan state to be controlled by an opposition that is subordinate to the agenda of Washington and the objectives of Plan Colombia that plague the region. It?s not just the 4.7 million dollars invested in the opposition?s campaign for the regional elections in 2008 by the United States Agency of International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and their affiliated agencies, but also the 50 million dollars, along with expert political consultation, donated by the US and used since 2000 to construct a solid base of the Venezuelan opposition, who, beginning in 2004, began to set their sights on infiltrating communities supportive of Chavez as well as students. Still, we can?t rule out or ignore the responsibility of certain politicians who used the revolution and the good faith of President Chavez to come to power and then abused it with their corrupt practices that hurt the people they represented. But the media campaign that blames the Pro-Chavez movement for crime and corruption in the in the country ? mainly in the large capital city of Caracas ? had a major impact, and the local and national government didn?t respond effectively. The short memory of those Venezuelans who forgot how the mayor-elect, Antonio Ledezma, governed as mayor of the Federal District in 1993 when he prohibited any protest or rally in the city. Or how Ledezma was one of those responsible for the deterioration of public services in the city, along with its infrastructure. As a result, the Chavista elected officials of 2000 and 2004 inherited a capital city in total ruin ? the historic center almost destroyed, streets full of potholes and buildings stained after being forgotten and abandoned for years. Could the same mayor who destroyed the city 15 years ago be the one to save it now? Only time will tell, but the odds are slim and the unfortunate short-term memory of some Caraque?os will make them to pay for their impulsive decision. The most strategic and populated states of the country, Carabobo, Miranda, Tachira, Zulia, and the metropolitan mayor of Caracas, have been handed like a prize to the same political players who, in the last seven years, have carried out attacks against Venezuelan democracy, including a coup d??tat (all of these new elected officials were top leaders in the coup d??tat of April 2002), the economic sabotage that almost destroyed the country and its petroleum industry in 2002-2003, and the numerous protests and attempts to destabilize since then that have tested the patience of Venezuelan society. Why then did these important regions fall back in the hands of coup- plotters? The answer is simple and complex at the same time. There is a lack of understanding within the revolution about the importance and about the impact of subversion and the interference of foreign agencies in the country. We aren?t just talking about the financing of opposition political parties ? something that should be strictly prohibited by law ? but a complex web of different actors, entities, front groups, and agencies that have managed to infiltrate the ranks of the pro- Chavez movement, and have been able to snag and remove political parties like PPT (Homeland for All) and Podemos (We can), which previously sided fully with the revolution. This web ? which I call the Empire?s Spider Web ? also penetrates communities and barrios and promotes alternative projects and programs to those proposed by President Chavez that may be more attractive in the short term, providing instant satisfaction to these needy sectors. These foreign agencies, like the aforementioned USAID and the NED, and others such as Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Germany), FAES (Spain), FOCAL (Canada), Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Germany), among others, have been working in Venezuela for years, advising and financing parties such as Primero Justicia (Justice First), Un Nuevo Tiempo (A New Era), and Podemos to help them create political platforms and strategies that reflect the needs and wants of the Venezuelan people, but maintain a hidden agenda that promotes a neo-liberal, anti-socialist vision. Remember that we are in a battle of ideas and in this war without a battlefield all weapons within reach are employed to neutralize the enemy. The work of these agencies has also been extremely effective with the NGOs and within right-wing student groups, such as S?mate, Cedice, Hagamos Democracia, Sinergia, ?White Hands? student movement, and others. With this help, these groups have taken over sectors of society that have been neglected by the revolution, if not forgotten entirely. The ability and effectiveness of foreign interference, like an imperial fist, cannot be underestimated. The strategy of ?promoting democracy? in countries like Venezuela is more dangerous than a military invasion. Why? Its detection is difficult and the cover-up is almost perfect ? it is hidden behind NGOs and programs with noble- sounding names and missions that claim to help communities and improve the country, but in reality they aim to destabilize and implement an agenda against the sovereign interests of the nation. Its web is immense and it is seen in Venezuelan society through the mainstream media, the touching speeches of spokesmen such as Yon Goicoechea, who try to trick Venezuelans with poetic and comforting phrases, and the complaints of human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, Inter American Press Society, and the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States (OAS). This is the most dangerous foreign interference that the Bolivarian Revolution faces. Its deadly web extends across the country after the results of November 23. The people and national government need to act now to neutralize this growing threat to their future. The fact that the new United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV, Spanish acronym) won 17 governors races with nearly six million votes is an important step for the strengthening of the revolution. It also shows the revolutionary commitment of the majority of Venezuelans. Despite this, the strategic victory of the opposition forces can?t be denied or discounted, and its recovery of these regional governments should be a wake up call for the revolutionary citizens and the Venezuelan government. They will use these spaces to introduce and promote their individualist, anti-socialist vision, shrouded in the message of ?democracy and liberty.? And they will open up their regions even more to the imperial web. The border area is in serious risk. The Venezuelan ?half moon? could further strengthen with Zulia and Tachira in the hands of the most reactionary right-wing political players in the country. Its time for strong actions to combat the interference of foreign agencies in the country. If they aren?t neutralized now, they will embed their followers so deeply in the country that they will be here for good. Eva Golinger is a lawyer, researcher and writer, and author of The Chavez Code, Bush vs. Chavez: Washington?s War against Venezuela, and The Empire?s Web: Encyclopedia of Interventionism and Subversion (in Spanish), which was published in Venezuela in November 2008. Contact her at evagolinger at gmail.com. Translated by Erik Sperling http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4010 From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Dec 7 09:51:41 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2008 11:51:41 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Somalia: Now What? Message-ID: December 7, 2008 News Analysis Situation in Somalia Seems About to Get Worse By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN NAIROBI, Kenya ? Somalia's transitional government looks as if it is about to flatline. The Ethiopians who have been keeping it alive for two years say they are leaving the country, essentially pulling the plug. For the past 17 years, Somalia has been ripped apart by anarchy, violence, famine and greed. It seems as though things there can never get worse. But then they do. The pirates off Somalia's coast are getting bolder, wilier and somehow richer, despite an armada of Western naval ships hot on their trail. Shipments of emergency food aid are barely keeping much of Somalia's population of nine million from starving. The most fanatical wing of Somalia's Islamist insurgency is gobbling up territory and imposing its own harsh brand of Islamic law, like whipping dancers and stoning a 13-year-old girl to death. And now, with the government on the brink and the Islamists seeming ready to seize control for the second time, the operative question inside and outside Somalia seems to be: Now what? "It will be bloody," predicted Rashid Abdi, a Somalia analyst at the International Crisis Group, a research institute that tracks conflicts worldwide. "The Ethiopians have decided to let the transitional government sink. The chaos will spread from the south to the north. Warlordism will be back." Mr. Rashid sees Somalia deteriorating into an Afghanistan-like cauldron of militant Islamism, drawing in hard-core fighters from the Comoros, Zanzibar, Kenya and other neighboring Islamic areas, a process that seems to have already started. Those men will eventually go home, spreading the killer ethos. "Somalia has now reached a very dangerous phase," he said. "The whole region is in for more chaos, I'm afraid." Most informed predictions go something like this: if the several thousand Ethiopian troops withdraw by January, as they recently said they would, the 3,000 or so African Union peacekeepers in Somalia could soon follow, leaving Somalia wide open to the Islamist insurgents who have been massing on the outskirts of Mogadishu, the capital. The transitional government, which in reality controls only a few city blocks of the entire country, will collapse, just as the 13 previous transitional governments did. The only reason it has not happened yet is the Ethiopians. The government has been a mess for the past few weeks ? many would argue for the past few years ? with the president and the prime minister bitterly and publicly blaming each other for the country's crisis. More than 100 of the 275 members of Parliament are in Kenya, refusing to go home, saying they will be killed. Western diplomats, United Nations officials and the Ethiopians seem to be turning against the transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, a cantankerous former warlord in his 70s who has thwarted just about every peace proposal. "Yusuf has gone from being seen as the solution to being seen as the problem," said a senior Western diplomat in Kenya, speaking on condition of anonymity in accord with diplomatic protocol. But Mr. Yusuf's clan still backs him, and Western diplomats said he might soon flee to his clan stronghold in northeast Somalia. Most analysts predict that the war-weary people of Mogadishu would initially welcome the Islamists, out of either relief or fear. In 2006, Islamist troops teamed up with clan elders and businessmen to drive out the warlords who had been preying upon Somalia's people since the central government first collapsed in 1991. The six months the Islamists ruled Mogadishu turned out to be one of the most peaceful periods in modern Somali history. But today's Islamists are a harder, more brutal group than the ones who were ousted by an Ethiopian invasion, backed by the United States, in late 2006. The old guard included many moderates, but those who tried to work with the transitional government mostly failed, leaving them weak and marginalized, and removing a mitigating influence on the die-hard insurgents. On top of that, the unpopular and bloody Ethiopian military operations over the past two years have radicalized many Somalis and sent hundreds of unemployed young men ? most of whom have never gone to school, never been part of a functioning society and never had much of a chance to do anything but shoulder a gun ? into the arms of militant Islamic groups. The most militant group is the Shabab, a multiclan insurgent force that the United States classifies as a terrorist organization. Just a few weeks ago, the Shabab kidnapped a man it accused of being a spy and slowly sawed off his head with a dull knife, videotaping the whole episode. Somalia is nearly 100 percent Muslim, but most Somalis are moderate Muslims. Many analysts expect that the militant Islamic wave will soon crest because Somalis will inevitably chafe under strict Islamist law, especially when the Islamists try to take away their beloved khat, the ubiquitous, mildly stimulating leaf that Somalis chew like bubble gum. Then, many analysts say, the Islamist groups could slug it out among themselves, with Ethiopia and other neighboring countries backing rival factions, and with clan warlords jumping in. Osman Mohamed Abdi, vice chairman of the Somali Youth Development Network, a nonprofit group in Mogadishu, called this possibility the "worst man-made catastrophe." Two possibilities could avert this bloodbath, but both are long shots. Ethiopia could delay its pullout until a larger peacekeeping force arrived. But with both Darfur and now Congo needing peacekeepers, there are few volunteers for lawless Somalia. Or the transitional government could share power with the Islamists. There is a piece of paper called the Djibouti Agreement, recently signed in neighboring Djibouti, that paves the way for moderate Islamists to join the transitional government. But the problem with the Djibouti Agreement, Mr. Rashid of the International Crisis Group said, is that "the interlocutors have no power on the ground." A collapse of the government and the human disaster that would almost surely follow would be strike three for American efforts in Somalia. The United States failed disastrously in its peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s. (Remember "Black Hawk Down"?) In 2005 and 2006, the C.I.A. paid some of Somalia's most reviled warlords to fight the Islamists. That backfired. In the winter of 2006, the United States took a third approach, encouraging Ethiopia to invade and backing them with American airstrikes and intelligence. "The Bush administration made a major miscalculation," said Dan Connell, who teaches African politics at Simmons College in Boston. He compared the situation to America's involvement in Lebanon in the 1980s, "when a regional ally, Israel, pulled us into a failed state in a quixotic effort to transform a hostile neighbor into a pliant ally." That only radicalized the population, he said, adding that in Somalia, "Again, we will be in its sights." From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Dec 7 10:17:19 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2008 12:17:19 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar on Abdulkarim Soroush Message-ID: December 7, 2008 Idea Lab Who Wrote the Koran? By MOHAMMAD AYATOLLAHI TABAAR For more than two decades, Abdulkarim Soroush has been Iran's leading public intellectual. Deeply versed in Islamic theology and mysticism, he was chosen by Ayatollah Khomeini to "Islamicize" Iran's universities, only to eventually turn against the theocratic state. He paid a price for his dissidence. Vigilantes and other government-supported elements disrupted his widely attended lectures in Iran, beat him and reportedly nearly assassinated him. In a country where intellectuals are often treated like rock stars, Soroush has been venerated and reviled for his outspoken support of religious pluralism and democracy. Now he has taken one crucial step further. Shuttling from university to university in Europe and the U.S., Soroush is sending shock waves through Iran's clerical establishment. The recent controversy began about eight months ago, after Soroush spoke with a Dutch reporter about one of Islam's most sensitive issues: the divine origin of the Koran. Muslims have long believed that their holy book was transmitted word for word by God through the Prophet Muhammad. In the interview, however, Soroush made explicit his alternative belief that the Koran was a "prophetic experience." He told me that the prophet "was at the same time the receiver and the producer of the Koran or, if you will, the subject and the object of the revelation." Soroush said that "when you read the Koran, you have to feel that a human being is speaking to you, i.e. the words, images, rules and regulations and the like all are coming from a human mind." He added, "This mind, of course, is special in the sense that it is imbued with divinity and inspired by God." As Soroush's words spread thanks to the Internet, Iran's grand ayatollahs entered the battlefield. In their rebuttal, the clerics pointed to the Koranic verses that state "this is a book we have sent down to you (O Muhammad)." They ask, Don't these verses imply that God is the revealer and Muhammad the receiver? They also point out that there were times when Muhammad waited impatiently for the revelation to come to him and that in more than 300 cases the prophet is commanded to tell his people to do one thing or another. This demonstrates, the argument goes, that the commands are coming from elsewhere rather than from the heart or the mind of the prophet himself. Soroush, in turn, responds by saying that the prophet was no parrot. Rather, Soroush told me, he was like a bee who produces honey itself, even though the mechanism for making the honey is placed in him by God. This is "the example the Koran itself sets," says Soroush, citing the Koran: "And your Lord inspired to the bee: take for yourself among the mountains, houses . . . then eat from all the fruits . . . there emerges from their bellies a drink . . . in which there is healing for people." Soroush has been described as a Muslim Luther, but unlike the Protestant reformer, he is no literalist about holy books. His work more closely resembles that of the 19th-century German scholars who tried to understand the Bible in its original context. Case in point: when a verse in the Koran or a saying attributed to Muhammad refers to cutting off a thief's hand or stoning to death for adultery, it only tells us the working rules and regulations of the prophet's era. Today's Muslims are not obliged to follow in these footsteps if they have more humane means at their disposal. Soroush's latest views have not endeared him to the powerful conservative wing of Iran's establishment. Some have accused him of heresy, which is punishable by death. There have been demonstrations by clerics in Qom, the religious capital of Iran, against his recent work. But Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, unexpectedly warned against feeding the controversy. He said those who are employing "philosophy or pseudo-philosophy" to "pervert the nation's mind" should not be dealt with "by declaring apostasy and anger" but rather countered with the "religious truths" that will falsify their arguments. In Iran today, many opponents of the government advocate the creation of a secular state. Soroush himself supports the separation of mosque and state, but for the sake of religion. He seeks freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Thus he speaks for a different ? and potentially more effective ? agenda. The medieval Islamic mystic Rumi once wrote that "an old love may only be dissolved by a new one." In a deeply religious society, whose leaders have justified their hold on power as a divine duty, it may take a religious counterargument to push the society toward pluralism and democracy. Soroush challenges those who claim to speak for Islam, and does so on their own terms. Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar is an adjunct lecturer at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Dec 7 10:26:15 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2008 12:26:15 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Helene Cooper: "South Asia's Deadly Dominoes" Message-ID: December 7, 2008 South Asia's Deadly Dominoes By HELENE COOPER WASHINGTON ? The Mumbai attacks may have begun with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani guerrilla group known in the West mostly for its preoccupation with Kashmir. But by the time the crisis finally ends, foreign policy experts say, the fallout may have expanded to include the United States, NATO, Afghanistan and Iran. Once again, South Asia is showing itself to be vulnerable to contagion. President-elect Barack Obama during the campaign laid out an intricate construction for what might happen in South Asia with the right American push. He advocated increasing American troops in Afghanistan and pressing Pakistan to do more to evict foreign fighters and to attack training camps for radical terrorists along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Such actions, Mr. Obama said, would help prevent the Taliban and Al Qaeda from using Pakistani soil as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan or on the United States or other Western targets. Seldom did Mr. Obama mention or include India in his roadmap to peace in South Asia. During an interview with Time magazine, Mr. Obama did hint at trying to make a diplomatic push to mediate the Kashmir issue. But most of his South Asia focus has been on Afghanistan and Pakistan. The trouble, South Asia experts say, is that just about every issue in the region is somehow interconnected, and they all have a tendency to set each other off. The Mumbai attacks killed 163 civilians and members of the security forces, , and terrorized India's most populous city for more than three days. But when the dust had cleared, "there was a lot more wreckage than just that," said Teresita C. Schaffer, a South Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Strategically, the Mumbai massacres have brought into stark relief just how tenuous are American hopes for any kind of calm in Pakistan and Afghanistan, let alone victory over militant forces in the region. Forget worrying about the hunt for Osama bin Laden along their shared border, and the battle against a resurgent Taliban. After Mumbai, it is suddenly all anyone can do just to keep Indians and Pakistanis from war. "Step back and consider the situation the Mumbai attackers have created," said George Friedman, chief executive of Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company. Mr. Friedman laid out a frightening domino theory of possible repercussions of Mumbai. Warning: it gets scary fast. 1. India's already weak government decides it has to retaliate against Pakistan or risk falling. India didn't retaliate after the deadly bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul July 7. But many Indians view the Mumbai attacks the same way Americans viewed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the Indian government is under enormous pressure to retaliate, perhaps by bombing training camps in Pakistan. Seven years ago, when gunmen attacked India's Parliament in New Delhi, the Indian government moved forces close to the Pakistani border and brought its nuclear forces to a higher alert level, prompting a similar response from Pakistan and an intense crisis between the two nuclear rivals. Since then, the Indian government has been more restrained. But you can't expect that restraint to dissolve were a firm link between the Mumbai attack and Pakistan's intelligence service to emerge. 2. Pakistan responds by withdrawing forces from western Pakistan, where they can fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban, to the India-Pakistan border. Pakistan security officials have already warned that if the situation with India worsens, they will shift troops from western areas, and pointedly noted during a news conference that such a step would likely upset the United States because it would mean resources were being moved from the fight against Islamic militants along the Afghan border. The Americans have been pressing Pakistan for more military action against the militants, not less. While part of Pakistan's threat was "half designed to scare the daylights out of the United States," part of it was serious, Ms. Schaffer said. "The serious part of it is, as far as the Pakistan Army is concerned, India is still the existential threat. If it looked as if India was going to take some kind of military action, there would be a re-deployment so fast it would make your head spin." 3. Taliban forces, freed from having to watch out for Pakistani troops, are strengthened along the Afghan border; Qaeda operatives are more secure. A resurgent Taliban that is freed from having to fight a two-front war will turn its full attention to American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has already said he wants to send two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, where violence has climbed ? allied military deaths there have reached 267 this year, the most ever. The American military plan for the war in Afghanistan assumes some help from Pakistani troops on the border. It also assumes that the United States can continue to use Pakistan for logistical support for the Afghanistan war. 4. The United States' situation in Afghanistan goes from bad to worse. For the American military effort in Afghanistan to succeed, the Pakistani military needs to establish control of the lawless territory between the two countries. It is virtually impossible, South Asia experts say, to envision a scenario where American soldiers themselves could establish control of the border regions, with their mountainous terrain and a local population that is sympathetic to Islamist militants. So America is seeking a greater willingness from Pakistani leaders to go after Qaeda and Taliban operatives along the border; a Pakistani government that is distracted by a new flare-up with India would not figure into those plans. 5. Iran, watching Pakistan and India rattling their nuclear sabers, concludes that it is in a better position to insist on pursuing its nuclear program. Mr. Obama has said he will do whatever he can to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, including breaking with years of American foreign policy and sitting down with Iran's leaders, if necessary. But for decades, some Iranians have argued that their country needs a nuclear weapons capacity to match the influence of, or deter, neighbors like India, Pakistan and Israel ? not to mention Russia and China. Foreign policy experts say that persuading Iran's leaders to stop their current uranium enrichment program before it makes such a goal attainable would only get harder if they could point to a nuclear standoff taking place between Pakistan and India. The Mumbai attacks, said Mr. Friedman, of Stratfor, "could leave Obama's entire South Asia strategy in shambles." Turkish officials have stepped in to try to help, summoning Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, and Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, to Istanbul for talks. A senior Turkish official involved in the talks expressed optimism that diplomacy could somehow avert a further ratcheting up of tensions in South Asia. Speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules, the diplomat said that the Mumbai terrorists "wanted to create a problem for the whole region, because they knew this could radicalize the population more." But, he said, none of that has to happen ? if the Indian government resists the domestic pressure to hit back at Pakistan. "It would be too much," he said, "to start a war just to keep a government in place." From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 7 14:39:58 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:39:58 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Obama's Victory and What It Means to Us Message-ID: <200812072139.mB7LdwoJ020790@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081207/491fb8a6/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 7 14:47:04 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:47:04 -0800 Subject: [R-G] The Canadians who have died in Afghanistan died for nothing Message-ID: <200812072147.mB7Ll4qM026370@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081207/040183ab/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 7 14:49:45 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:49:45 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Canadian goals in Afghanistan receding into the distance Message-ID: <200812072149.mB7LnjXe028665@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081207/4050a049/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 7 14:51:02 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:51:02 -0800 Subject: [R-G] War criminal lauds Obama's "new" US national security team Message-ID: <200812072151.mB7Lp2Kr029868@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081207/2f5fba7f/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 7 15:14:04 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2008 14:14:04 -0800 Subject: Will You Continue To Ignore Gazaâs Suffering, Mr Obama? Message-ID: <200812072214.mB7ME4x3018636@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081207/66184032/attachment.txt From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Dec 7 16:50:05 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2008 18:50:05 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Militants in Pakistan Destroy NATO Trucks Message-ID: December 8, 2008 Militants in Pakistan Destroy NATO Trucks By JANE PERLEZ ISLAMABAD, Pakistan ? More than 100 trucks loaded with supplies for American forces in Afghanistan were destroyed Sunday by militants in Peshawar, the city that serves as an important transit point for the Afghan war effort. It was the third major attack by Taliban militants on NATO supplies in Pakistan in less than a month, and served to expose the vulnerability of the route from the port of Karachi through Peshawar and over the border into Afghanistan. The United States relies on the route for an overwhelming proportion of its supplies for the war in Afghanistan. The damaged trucks were loaded with American war materiel, including Humvees, destined for the Afghan National Army, said Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for United States forces in Kabul. The militants overwhelmed the rudimentary security system at two parking lots where the trucks were parked in the heart of Peshawar. They easily disarmed security guards at about 2:30 a.m., then threw grenades and fired rockets at the loaded trucks. "We were unable to challenge such a large number of armed men," said Muhammad Rafiq, a security guard. He estimated that about 200 militants were involved in the attack. Pakistani security forces apparently fired artillery at the attackers. "There was artillery and rapid exchange of fire," said a retired police official, Hidyatullah Arbab, who heard the firing from his home. "Peshawar is becoming a battleground." Colonel Julian said the loss of equipment would have a minimum impact on the overall war effort. "It's a very insignificant loss in terms of everything transported into Afghanistan." But critics of the war effort in Afghanistan have argued that the United States needs to more urgently shape the Afghan Army into an effective fighting force. The loss of supplies to the Afghan army would be a setback in that endeavor. About 80 percent of supplies for the war move from Karachi through Pakistan and onto Afghanistan. Peshawar is the last staging point before the border about 40 miles away, about an hour's journey. From fentona at shaw.ca Sun Dec 7 19:04:15 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2008 18:04:15 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Riots test Greek government Message-ID: <652E37D4-E549-45E8-8248-07B026C552B5@shaw.ca> Riots test Greek government Mon Dec 8, 2008 12:32am GMT http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKTRE4B603Z20081208?sp=true By Dina Kyriakidou ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek demonstrators vowed another wave of protests on Monday, two days after police shot dead a 15-year-old boy sparking riots that left dozens injured across the country. Thousands of youths clashed with police and rampaged through Athens and other cities this weekend, burning scores of cars and shops in the worst protests to erupt in Greece in years. Pressure on the conservative government showed no sign of easing. The Greek Communist Party called a mass rally in central Athens for Monday evening and the socialist PASOK opposition, which has risen to top spot in opinion polls recently, said Greeks must denounce the government. "We must answer the government's policies en masse and peacefully," the PASOK youth branch said in a statement. University professors, who had planned to join a nationwide workers' strike against pension reforms and economic policies on Wednesday, said they would now stage a three-day walkout starting Monday. Blogs popular with high school students urged them to stay away from class. Ignoring the government's appeals for calm, leftist demonstrators and anarchists staged running battles with police after the teenager's killing, which shocked the nation. "Justice has taken over," Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos told reporters after an urgent government meeting on Sunday. "Raw violence directed at social peace and the property of innocent people is inconceivable." The minister submitted his resignation but it was rejected by Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, who has seen his government's popularity eroded in the face of scandals and as the world economic crisis bites. The shooting touched a raw nerve among Greek youth, whose anger has been fanned by the growing gap between rich and poor in recent years. Violence at student rallies and fire bomb attacks by anarchist groups are common. POLICEMAN CHARGED Two police officers have been charged over the shooting -- one with premeditated murder and the other with abetting him. A police statement said one officer fired three shots after their car was attacked by a group of 30 youths in the bohemian Athens district of Exarchia. A police official said the officer had described firing warning shots, but witnesses told TV he took aim at the boy, identified as Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Just hours after his death, protesters clashed with police in Athens and the violence spread across the country, as far as the northern city of Thessaloniki and the tourist islands of Crete and Corfu, leaving 34 people injured. Police detained 20. For most of Sunday, protesters chanting "Cops, Pigs, Murderers" rained petrol bombs down on rows of Athens riot police, while helicopters hovered overhead and tear gas choked the city. More than 30 shops and a dozen banks were torched in the capital's busiest commercial districts ahead of the busy Christmas period. The mayor of Athens postponed the launch of holiday festivities. In Thessaloniki, more than 1,000 protesters clashed with police, set fire to a bank and smashed several stores. Rioters also clashed with police in the western city of Patras. About 200 protesters rioted outside police headquarters in Crete's second city of Chania. On Corfu, protesters smashed up four cars and two shops, and an 18-year-old woman was injured. From fentona at shaw.ca Sun Dec 7 21:49:16 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2008 20:49:16 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Angry laid-off workers occupy factory in Chicago Message-ID: http://www.dailymail.com/News/200812060436 Angry laid-off workers occupy factory in Chicago By RUPA SHENOY Associated Press Writer CHICAGO (AP) -- Workers who got three days' notice that their factory was shutting its doors have occupied the building and say they won't go home without assurances they'll get severance and vacation pay. About 250 union workers occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in shifts Saturday while union leaders outside criticized a Wall Street bailout they say is leaving laborers behind. Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give 60 days' notice required by law before shutting down. During the two-day peaceful takeover, workers have been shoveling snow and cleaning the building, Fried said. "We're doing something we haven't done since the 1930s, so we're trying to make it work,'' she said, referring to a tactic most famously used in 1936-37 by General Motors factory workers in Flint, Mich., to help unionize the U.S. auto industry. Fried said the company can't pay its 300 employees because its creditor, Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America, won't let them. Crain's Chicago Business reported that Republic Windows' monthly sales had fallen to $2.9 million from $4 million during the past month. In a memo to the union, obtained by the business journal, Republic CEO Rich Gillman said the company had "no choice but to shut our doors.'' Bank of America received $25 billion from the government's financial bailout package. The company said in a statement Saturday that it isn't responsible for Republic's financial obligations to its employees. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Dec 8 03:44:09 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:44:09 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Five Stages Of Collapse Message-ID: <493CFA79.2000701@ashisuto.co.jp> by Dmitry Orlov Energy Bulletin (November 13 2008) Hello, everyone! The talk you are about to hear is the result of a lengthy process on my part. My specialty is in thinking about and, unfortunately, predicting collapse. My method is based on comparison: I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and, since I am also familiar with the details of the situation in the United States, I can make comparisons between these two failed superpowers. I was born and grew up in Russia, and I traveled back to Russia repeatedly between the late 80s and mid-90s. This allowed me to gain a solid understanding of the dynamics of the collapse process as it unfolded there. By the mid-90s it was quite clear to me that the US was headed in the same general direction. But I couldn't yet tell how long the process would take, so I sat back and watched. I am an engineer, and so I naturally tended to look for physical explanations for this process, as opposed to economic, political, or cultural ones. It turns out that one could come up with a very good explanation for the Soviet collapse by following energy flows. What happened in the late 80s is that Russian oil production hit an all-time peak. This coincided with new oil provinces coming on stream in the West - the North Sea in the UK and Norway, and Prudhoe Bay in Alaska - and this suddenly made oil very cheap on the world markets. Soviet revenues plummeted, but their appetite for imported goods remained unchanged, and so they sank deeper and deeper into debt. What doomed them in the end was not even so much the level of debt, but their inability to take on further debt even faster. Once international lenders balked at making further loans, it was game over. What is happening to the United States now is broadly similar, with certain polarities reversed. The US is an oil importer, burning up 25% of the world's production, and importing over two-thirds of that. Back in mid-90s, when I first started trying to guess the timing of the US collapse, the arrival of the global peak in oil production was scheduled for around the turn of the century. It turned out that the estimate was off by almost a decade, but that is actually fairly accurate as far as such big predictions go. So here it is the high price of oil that is putting the brakes on further debt expansion. As higher oil prices trigger a recession, the economy starts shrinking, and a shrinking economy cannot sustain an ever-expanding level of debt. At some point the ability to finance oil imports will be lost, and that will be the tipping point, after which nothing will ever be the same. This is not to say that I am a believer in some sort of energy determinism. If the US were to cut its energy consumption by an order of magnitude, it would still be consuming a staggeringly huge amount, but an energy crisis would be averted. But then this country, as we are used to thinking of it, would no longer exist. Oil is what powers this economy. In turn, it is this oil-based economy that makes it possible to maintain and expand an extravagant level of debt. So, a drastic cut in oil consumption would cause a financial collapse (as opposed to the other way around). A few more stages of collapse would follow, which we will discuss next. So, you could see this outlandish appetite for imported oil as a cultural failing, but it is not one that can be undone without causing a great deal of damage. If you like, you can call it "ontological determinism": it has to be what it is, until it is no more. I don't mean to imply that every part of the country will suddenly undergo a spontaneous existence failure, reverting to an uninhabited wilderness. I agree with John Michael Greer that the myth of the Apocalypse is not the least bit helpful in coming to terms with the situation. The Soviet experience is very helpful here, because it shows us not only that life goes on, but exactly how it goes on. But I am quite certain that no amount of cultural transformation will help us save various key aspects of this culture: car society, suburban living, big box stores, corporate-run government, global empire, or runaway finance. On the other hand, I am quite convinced that nothing short of a profound cultural transformation will allow any significant number of us to keep roofs over our heads, and food on our tables. I also believe that the sooner we start letting go of our maladaptive cultural baggage, the more of a chance we will stand. A few years ago, my attitude was to just keep watching events unfold, and keep this collapse thing as some sort of macabre hobby. But the course of events is certainly speeding up, and now my feeling is that the worst we can do is pretend that everything will be fine and simply run out the clock on our current living arrangement, with nothing to replace it once it all starts shutting down. Now, getting back to my own personal progress in working through these questions, in 2005 I wrote an article called "Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century". Initially, I wanted to publish it on a web site run by Dale Alan Pfeiffer, but, to my surprise, it ended up on From The Wilderness, a much more popular site run by Michael Ruppert, and, to my further astonishment, Mike even paid me for it. And ever since then, I've been asked the same question, repeatedly: "When? When is the collapse going to occur?" Being a little bit clever, I always decline to give a specific answer, because, you see, as soon as you get one specific prediction wrong, there goes your entire reputation. One reasonable way of thinking about the timing is to say that collapse can occur at different times for different people. You may never quite know that collapse has happened, but you will know that it has happened to you personally, or to your family, or to your town. The big picture may not come together until much later, thanks to the efforts of historians. Individually, we may never know what hit us, and, as a group, we may never agree on any one answer. Look at the collapse of the USSR: some people are still arguing over why exactly it happened. But sometimes the picture is clearer than we would like. In January of 2008, I published an article on "The Five Stages of Collapse", in which I defined the five stages, and then bravely stated that we are in the midst of a financial collapse. And ten months later it doesn't seem that I went too far out on a limb this time. If the US government has to lend banks over 200 billion dollars a day just to keep the whole system from imploding, then the term "crisis" probably doesn't do justice to the situation. To keep this game going, the US government has to be able to sell the debt it is taking on, and what do you think the chances are that the world at large will be snapping up trillions of dollars of new debt, knowing that it is being used to prop up a shrinking economy? And if the debt can't be sold, then it has to be monetized, by printing money. And that will trigger hyperinflation. So, let's not quibble, and let us call what's happening what it looks like: "financial collapse". So here are the five stages as I defined them almost a year ago. The little check-mark next to "financial collapse" is there to remind us that we are not here to quibble or equivocate, because Stage 1 is pretty far along. Stages 2 and 3 - commercial and political collapse, are driven by financial collapse, and will overlap each other. Right now, it is unclear which one is farther along. On the one hand, there are signs that global shipping is grinding to a halt, and that big box retailers are in for a very bad time, with many stores likely to close following a disastrous Christmas season. On the other hand, states are already experiencing massive budget shortfalls, laying off state workers, cutting back on programs, and are starting to beg the federal government for bail-out money. Even though the various stages of collapse drive each other in a variety of ways, I think that it makes sense to keep them apart conceptually. This is because their effects on our daily life are quite different. Whatever constructive ways we may find of dodging these effects are also going to be different. Lastly, some stages of collapse seem unavoidable, while others may be avoided if we put up enough of a fight. Financial collapse seems to be particularly painful if you happen to have a lot of money. On the other hand, I run across people all the time, who feel that "Nothing's happened yet". These are mostly younger, relatively successful people, who have little or no savings, and still have good paying jobs, or unemployment insurance that hasn't run out yet. Their daily lives aren't much affected by the turmoil on the financial markets, and they don't believe that anything different is happening beyond the usual economic ups and downs. Commercial collapse is much more obvious, and observing it doesn't entail opening envelopes and examining columns of figures. It is painful to most people, and life-threatening to some. When store shelves are stripped bare of necessities and remain that way for weeks at a time, panic sets in. In most places, this requires some sort of emergency response, to make sure that people are not deprived of food, shelter, medicine, and that some measure of security and public order is maintained. People who know what's coming can prepare to sit out the worst of it. Political collapse is more painful yet, because it is directly life-threatening to many people. The breakdown of public order would be particularly dangerous in the US, because of the large number of social problems that have been swept under the carpet over the years. Americans, more than most other people, need to be defended from each other at all times. I think that I would prefer martial law over complete and utter mayhem and lawlessness, though I admit that both are very poor choices. Social and cultural collapse seem to have already occurred in many parts of the country to a large extent. What social activity remains seems to be anchored to transitory activities like work, shopping, and sports. Religion is perhaps the largest exception, and many communities are organized around churches. But in places where society and culture remain intact, I believe that social and cultural collapse is avoidable, and that this is where we must really dig in our heels. Also, I think it is very important that we learn to see our surroundings for what they have become. In many places, it feels as if there just isn't that much left that's worth trying to save. If all the culture we see is commercial culture, and all the society we see is consumer society, then the best we can do is walk away from it, and look for other people who are ready to do the same. There is nothing particularly deep or magical about the five stages I chose, except that they seem convenient. They correspond to the commonly distinguished aspects of everyday reality. Each stage of collapse also corresponds to a certain set of beliefs in the status quo, that is about to go by the wayside. It is always an impressive thing to observe when reality shifts. One moment, a certain idea is seen as preposterous, and the next moment it's being treated as conventional wisdom. There seems to be a psychological mechanism involved, where nobody wants to be seen as the last fool to finally get the picture. Everybody starts pretending that they've thought that way all along, or at least for a little while, for fear of appearing foolish. It is always awkward to ask people what caused them to suddenly change their minds, because with the fear of looking foolish comes a certain loss of dignity. The most compelling example of lots of minds suddenly going "snap" is, to my mind, the sudden demise of the USSR. It happened with Boris Yeltsin standing atop a tank, and being asked the question: "But what will become of the Soviet Union?" And his answer, pronounced with maximum gravitas was: "Henceforth I shall only refer to it as the FORMER Soviet Union". And that was that. After that, whoever still believed in the Soviet Union appeared as not just foolish, but actually crazy. For a while, there were a lot of crazy old people parading around with portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Their minds were too old to go "snap". Here in the US, we are yet to experience any of the really major, earth-shattering realizations, the ones that look preposterous immediately before and completely obvious immediately after they occur. We have had minor tremors, mostly relating to financial assumptions. Is real estate a good investment. Will private retirement allow you to retire? Will the government bail us all out? All the major realizations are yet to come, or, as my die-hard Yuppie friends keep telling me, "Nothing's happened yet". But by the time something does happen, it will have been too late for us to start planning for it happening. It doesn't seem all that worthwhile for us to sit around waiting for the happy event of everybody else feeling foolish all at the same time. Arrogant though that may seem, we may be better off accepting their foolishness before they do, and keeping a safe distance ahead of the prevailing opinion. Because if we do that, we may yet succeed in finding ways to cope. We may learn to dodge financial collapse by learning to live without needing much money. We may create alternative living arrangements and informal production and distribution networks for all the necessities before commercial collapse occurs. We may organize into self-governing communities that can provide for their own security during political collapse. And all of these steps put together may put us in a position to safeguard society and culture. Or we can just wait until everyone starts agreeing with us, because we wouldn't want them to look foolish. The important dynamic, when it comes to financial collapse, is obvious by now. It's the collapse of credit pyramids, "the whole house of cards" as President Bush put it. The technical term is "deleveraging", and the response is the bailout. The federal government will be bailing out the banks and the insurance companies, the auto companies, and state governments. Call it the bail-out treadmill: we are borrowing faster and faster just to keep from falling down. The treadmill is actually a good metaphor. Imagine what would happen if you went to a gym, got on a treadmill machine, and just kept punching up the speed, as high as it will go. What happens is you trip and fall, and find yourself flying backwards. It is instructive to ask the question, Who are we borrowing this bail-out money from? People will tell you that we are borrowing it from "the taxpayer". But it's not as if federal tax receipts have automatically shot up by a few trillion over the past couple of months, and so this begs the question, Who is "the taxpayer" going to borrow this money from in the meantime? From other Americans? No, because our savings rate has been abysmally low for quite some time now, and what little we have saved is in housing equity, which is dwindling, and in stocks and bonds, through mutual funds and 401ks and such, which are down by a third or so. The value of these investments is crashing, and if we dumped these investments to raise the cash to fund this new debt, that would just make them crash even faster. In effect, we'd only be moving money from one pocket to another. So, really, the bailouts have to be financed by foreigners. And what if these foreigners decide not to trust us with any more of their savings? Then our only recourse is to "monetize" the debt: to print money. And so the next question is, how much money would we have to print? The purpose of the bailouts is to provide liquidity to insolvent companies, to avoid deleveraging. To understand what that means, we have to understand that for every actual dollar within the economy, in the sense of it not being borrowed, there are over thirteen dollars of borrowed money, which only exists while the debt can be rolled over. If our credit is maxed out while the economy is growing, that's bad enough, but the US economy is shrinking because of the recent oil shock. A smaller economy cannot carry as much debt, and this is part of the reason why we have deleveraging. Once the process of debt going sour gets started, it is hard to stop, and if deleveraging were to run its course, we would be down over 1300%. To monetize that much debt would require over 1300% inflation. And once that gets started, it becomes very hard to stop. And, that, believe it or not, is actually the good news. Because most of our debt is denominated in our own currency - the US dollar - the US will not have to declare sovereign default, like Russia was forced to do in the 1990s. Instead, we can inflate our way out of national bankruptcy, by printing a lot of dollars. We will repay our national debt, but we will do so in worthless paper money, bankrupting our international creditors in the process. There is sure to be plenty of pain for everyone, especially everyone who is used to having plenty of money, because their money will no longer make the world go around. Once the US has to start earning foreign currency in order to pay for imports, you can be sure that imports will become quite scarce. Here are before and after snapshots of the most salient characteristics of financial collapse, as they will affect the vast majority of the population. Here, I am assuming that commercial and political collapse are slower in arriving, and that government is still there to step in with emergency aid of various sorts, and that a market economy of some sort continues to function. It could come down to everyone walking around with their little food stamps debit cards, and the only place they can use them that's within walking distance is McDonalds, but I am assuming some semi-stable period during which other adjustments can occur before other stages run their course. The adjustments would have to do with major aspects of the living arrangement, from where we live to how we grow food to how we relate to each other. With money scarce and not particularly potent, other ways of winning the cooperation of others would need to be evolved in a hurry. The financial realm can be seen as a complex system of fences: your bank account is fenced off from my bank account. This arrangement allows you and me to not worry too much about each other, provided each of us has enough to live on. Though this is largely a fiction, we can fancy ourselves to be independent economic players on a level playing field. But once these conceptual fences become irrelevant, because there is nothing behind them, we become each others' burden, in an immediate sort of way, that would come as a shock to most people. The indignity of such physical interdependence would be psychologically devastating to many people, raising the human toll from financial collapse beyond what you'd expect from a problem that really only exists on paper. This is going to be particularly hard for a nation brought up on the myth of rugged individualism. Commercial collapse, when it arrives, will again cause much more of a psychological crack-up than you'd expect from a purely organizational problem. The quantities of immediately available goods and services right before and right after the collapse would remain about the same, but because market psychology is so ingrained in the population, no other ways of coping would be considered. Hoarding would become widespread, with looting as the obvious antidote. There would be an instant, huge black market for all sorts of necessities, from shampoo to vials of insulin. The market mechanism works well in some cases, but it doesn't work at all when key commodities become scarce. It leads to profiteering, hoarding, looting, and other pernicious effects. There is usually a knee-jerk reaction to regulate the markets, by imposing price controls, or by introducing rationing. I found it quite funny that the recent clamoring for re-regulating the financial markets was greeted with cries of "Socialists!" Failing at capitalism doesn't make you a socialist, any more than getting a divorce automatically make you gay. If by the time commercial collapse is upon us, there is still enough of the political system left intact to implement rationing and price controls and emergency distribution schemes, then we should count these among our blessings. Such heavy-handed governance is certainly not a crowd-pleaser during times of plenty, when it's also unnecessary, but it can be quite a life-saver during times of scarcity. The Soviet food distribution system, which was plagued with chronic underperformance during normal times, proved to be paradoxically resilient during collapse, allowing people to survive the transition. If prior to commercial collapse the challenge is finding enough money to afford the necessities, afterward the challenge is getting people to accept money as payment for these same necessities. Many of the would-be sellers will prefer to be paid in something more valuable than mere cash. Customer service comes to mean that customers must provide a service. Given that most people won't have much to offer, other than their now worthless money, should they still have any, most purveyors of goods and services decide to take a holiday. With the disappearance of the free and open market, even the items that still are available for sale come to be offered in a way that is neither free nor open, but only at certain times and to certain people. Whatever wealth still exists is hidden, because flaunting it or exposing it just increases the security risk, and the amount of effort required to guard it. In an economy where the vast majority of manufactured items is imported, and designed with planned obsolescence in mind, it will be difficult to keep things running as imports dry up, especially imports of spare parts for foreign-made machinery. The pool of available equipment will shrink over time, as more and more pieces of equipment become used as "organ donors". In an effort to keep things running, entire cottage industries devoted to refurbishing old stuff might suddenly come together. It is sometimes hard to discern political collapse, because politicians tend to be quite good at maintaining the pretense of power and authority even as it dwindles. But there are some telltale signs of political collapse. One is when politicians start moonlighting because their day job is no longer sufficiently gainful. Another is when regional politicians start to openly defy orders from the political center. Russia experienced plenty of each of these symptoms. One thing that makes political collapse particularly hard to spot is that the worse things get, the more noise the politicians emit. The substance to noise ratio in political discourse is pretty low even in good times, making it hard to spot the transition when it actually drops to zero. The variable that's easier to monitor is the level of political embarrassment. For instance, when Mr Nazdratenko, the governor of the far-east Russian region of Primorye, stole large amounts of coal, made strides in the direction of establishing an independent foreign policy toward China, and yet Moscow could do nothing to reign him in, you could be sure that Russia's political system was pretty much defunct. Another telltale sign of political collapse is actual disintegration, where regions declare independence. In Russia, that was the case with Chechnya, and it led to a prolonged bloody conflict. Here, we might have a "Reconquista" where former Mexican territories become ever more Mexican, the South might rise again. New England, California, and the Pacific Northwest might decide to go their separate ways. Once the interstate highway system is no longer viable and the remaining domestic airlines are extinct, there is not much to keep the two coasts together. What once united the country was the construction of the continental railroad, but railroads have been too neglected to hold it together now. A country consisting of two halves tied together via Panama Canal is de facto at least two countries. Yet another thing to watch for is foreign incursions into domestic politics. When foreign political consultants start stage-managing elections, as happened with Yeltsin's reelection campaign, you can be sure that the country is no longer in charge of its own political system. In the US, there is a gradual surrender of sovereignty, as sovereign wealth funds buy up more and more US assets. That sort of thing used to be considered akin to an act of war, but these are desperate times, and they are allowed to do so without so much as a nasty comment. Eventually, they may start making political demands, to extract the most value out of their investments. For instance, they could start vetting candidates for public office, to make sure that we remain friendly to their interests. Lastly, the power vacuum created by the collapse of legitimate authority tends to be more or less automatically filled by criminal syndicates. These often try to commandeer the political establishment by getting their heads elected or appointed to political offices. Examples include Russian oligarchs, such as Boris Berezovsky, who got himself elected to Duma, the Russian parliament, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who thought he could use his oil wealth to buy his way into the political establishment. Luckily for Russia, Berezovsky is in exile in England, and Khodorkovsky is in jail. A great many people in the US insist that they do not need government help, and that they would do just fine if only the government would leave them alone. But this is really just a pose; there is a great deal that government does to make their lives possible. In the United States, the federal government keeps many people alive through programs such as Medicaid, Social Security, and food stamps. Local governments provide for trash removal and water and sewer line maintenance, road and bridge repair, and so on. Police departments try to defend people from each other. When all of that starts to unravel, it is likely to do so from the bottom, not from the top. Local officials are more accessible than remote Washington bureaucrats, and so they will be the first to be overwhelmed by the anger and confusion of their constituents, while Washington remains unresponsive. One likely exception may have to do with the use of federal troops. It seems almost a given that troops repatriated from the more than 1000 foreign military bases will see action right here at home. They will be reassigned to domestic peacekeeping duties. Aside from the big government programs, there is little available in the US to help those in need. Again, Americans make a big show of their philanthropy, but, compared to other developed countries, they are in fact quite stingy when it comes to helping those in need. There is even a streak of political sadism, which, for example, shows up in people's attitudes toward welfare recipients. This sadism can be seen in the so-called welfare reform, which has forced single mothers to work jobs that barely cover the cost of daycare, which is often substandard. Aside from the government, there are charities, many of which are church-based, and so they have the ulterior motive of recruiting people to their cause. But even when a charity does not make any specific demands, its real purpose is to reinforce the superiority of those who are charitable, at the expense of those who are the recipients. There is a flow of forced gratitude from the beneficiary to the benefactor. The greater the need, the more humiliating is the transaction to the beneficiary, and the more satisfying it is to the benefactor. There is no motivation for the benefactor to provide more charity in response to greater need, except in special circumstances, such as immediately following a natural disaster. Where the need is large, constant, and growing, we should expect charities to matter very little when it comes to satisfying it. Since neither government largesse nor charity is likely to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, we should look for other options. One promising direction is a revival of mutual help societies, which take membership contributions and then use them to help those in need. At least in theory, such organizations are vastly better than either government aid or charities. Those who are helped by them do not have to surrender their dignity, and can survive difficult times without being stigmatized. To make it intact through times of great need, the only reasonable approach, it seems to me, is to form communities that are strong and cohesive enough to provide for the well-being of all of their members, that are large enough to be resourceful, yet small enough so that people can relate to each other directly, and to take direct responsibility for each other's well-being. If this effort fails, then the outlook becomes dire indeed. I would like to emphasize, once again, that we must do all we can to avoid this stage of collapse. We can allow the financial system, and the commercial sector, and most of the government institutions to collapse, but not this. What makes this particularly challenging is that the existence of finance and credit, of consumer society, and of government-imposed law and order has allowed society, in the sense of direct, mutual help and of freely accepting responsibility for each others' welfare, to atrophy. This process of social decay may be less advanced in groups that have survived recent adversity: immigrant and minority groups, or people who served together in the armed forces. The instincts that underlie this behavior are strong, and they are what helped us survive as a species, but they need to be reactivated in time to create groups that are cohesive enough to be viable. Culture can mean a great many things to people, but what I mean here is a specific very important element of culture: how people relate to each other face to face. Take honesty, for instance: do people demand it of themselves and others, or do they feel that it is acceptable to lie to get what you want? Do they take pride in how much they have or in how much they can give? I took this list of virtues from Colin Turnbull, who wrote a book about a tribe in which most of these virtues were almost entirely missing. Turnbull's point was that these personal virtues are also all but destroyed in Western society, but that for the time being their absence is being masked by the impersonal institutions of finance, commerce, and government. I believe that Turnbull has a point. Ours is a cold world, in which the citizens are theoretically expected to fend for themselves, but in reality can only survive thanks to the impersonal services of finance, commerce, and government. It only allows us to practice these warm virtues among family and friends. But that is a start, and from there we can expand this circle of warmth to encompass more and more of the people who matter to us and we to them. In his amazing book about the legacy of European colonialism, Exterminate all the Brutes (1997), Sven Lindqvist makes the stunning observation that violence renders one unrecognizable. The aggressor, whether active or passive, becomes a stranger. The violence does not have to be physical. One subtle type of mental violence that abounds in our world is the act of refusing to acknowledge someone's existence. We may believe that it makes us safer to walk past people without making eye contact. That is certainly true if our look is blank and indifferent, and it is then better to avert one's gaze than to look, and in effect to say: "I do not recognize you". That definitely does not make you any safer. But if your look says "I see you, you are OK", or even "I recognize you", then the effect is quite the opposite. Dogs understand this principle perfectly well, and so should people. When I was doing a radio tour to promote my book, a lot of the AM radio motor-mouths who interviewed me would sum up the interview with something like "So this is all doom and gloom, isn't it". And then I would have maybe fifteen seconds for a rebuttal. So here is my standard fifteen second rebuttal: "No, my message is actually quite hopeful. I want to let people know that they can find ways to lead happy, fulfilling lives even as this doomed system crumbles all around them." Here, I can give you a longer answer. I believe that the financial pyramid scheme and globalized consumerism are done. But I think that having no government at all is not an option. Forget entitlements, forget military bases on foreign soil, forget the three-ring circus that passes for representative democracy here, but we will still need agencies to print passports, to control the nuclear stockpile, as well as many other mundane but essential services that only a central government can provide. For most other needs, local self-government may be the best we can do, but that may not be bad at all. Commercial collapse need not be final. It is quite possible that a new economy will arise spontaneously, one without all the frills and the waste, but able to provide for most of the basic needs. In the places that are socially and culturally intact, this is almost inevitable, as people take charge and start doing what's necessary without waiting for official sanction. As far as social and cultural collapse, as I already mentioned, to some extent they have already happened, but this is being masked, for the time being, by the availability of finance, commerce, and government. But they can be undone, not everywhere, of course, but in quite a few places, because the instincts are there, and a dire common predicament can be the catalyst that changes society, bringing it closer to the human norm. Knowing what to expect can provide us with peace of mind, even in the midst of collapse. Wallowing in nostalgia over the good old days, or denying that sweeping changes are before us - these responses are definitely unhealthy. If we know what's coming, we can start ignoring the things that we will not be able to rely on. If we do enough of this, we may find ourselves in a different world, quite possibly a better one, rather quickly. Here is a personal example. Some years ago, I decided to give up the car, finding it quite impractical, and started bicycling instead. It wasn't that easy at first, but once I got used to it, a strange thing happened to my perception: I started seeing cars quite differently. On the way to work in the morning, I would ride along a stretch of highway, which was always packed with cars. When you are driver, you see it as normal, because you are part of this herd of mechanized insects. But what I saw was sheet metal boxes with people imprisoned inside them, strapped down to a chair inside a tiny padded cell, and most of these poor crazies were just pictures of misery: an angry, desperate, lonely mob, condemned to move about in circles. And then I would happily pedal away, through a park and around a pond, and leave that horrible, dying world behind. And so it is with a great many things. We can wait until the lifestyle that is killing the planet and is making us crazy and sick is no longer physically possible, or we can opt out of it ahead of time. And what we replace it with can be difficult at first, but quite a lot better for us in the end. So let us summarize our findings. Financial collapse is already quite far along, and is guaranteed to run its course. Bailouts can make insolvent institutions look solvent for a time by providing liquidity, but one thing they cannot provide is solvency. For instance, no matter how much we bail out the auto companies, making any more cars will still be a bad idea. Similarly, no matter how much money we give to banks, their loan portfolios, loaded down with houses built in places that are inaccessible except by car, will still end up being worthless. By continuously nationalizing bad debt, the country will make itself into a bad credit risk, and foreign lenders will walk away. Hyperinflation and loss of imports will follow. Commercial collapse is likewise guaranteed to happen. One key import is oil, and here the loss of imports will cause much of the economy to shut down, because in this country nothing moves without oil. But it should be possible to come up with new, far less energy-intensive ways to provide for the basic needs. Political collapse is guaranteed as well. As tax receipts dwindle, municipalities and states will no longer be able to meet the minimal maintenance requirements for existing infrastructure: roads, bridges, water and sewer mains, and so forth. Municipal services, including police, fire departments, snow removal and garbage collection, will also be curtailed or eliminated. The better-organized communities may be able to find ways to compensate, but many communities will become impassable and uninhabitable, generating a flood of internal refugees. Currently, the political class couldn't be farther from understanding what is about to happen. I listened in on one of the recent presidential debates (I don't have a television set, but I caught a chunk of it on NPR). It struck me that the two candidates spent most of the time arguing over ways of spending money that they don't have. For me, listening to them was a waste of time that I didn't have. I suspect that my book, would sell better if McCain got elected; nevertheless, I choose to remain selflessly apolitical. National politics is a distraction and a waste of time. Actually, I should be gratified. A while ago I proposed a whimsical Collapse Party. The Collapse Party platform featured planks such as the freeing of prisoners to whittle down the prison population before a general amnesty becomes necessary due to lack of funds, a jubilee - forgiveness of all debts - to wipe the slate clean of all these bad loans, and a few others. Elsewhere, I proposed that it is a good idea to stop making new cars - just run down the ones we already have, and we'll run out of cars just as we run out of gas. I am happy to report that this has been banner year for the Collapse Party. Without fielding a single candidate, we managed to push through much of our agenda: many states are releasing prisoners due to the fiscal crisis, the federal government is now involved in avoiding foreclosures, a huge credit card debt write-off is in the works (not quite a jubilee, but still ...) and now automakers are ready to consolidate or declare bankruptcy. Next year, perhaps we will repatriate troops and shut down overseas military bases, also in line with the Collapse Party platform. Continuing with our recap, I see social collapse as avoidable, but not in all places. In many places, the task is to reconstitute society before the first three stages run their course, and it may already be too late. But this is where we need to make a stand, if only to be remembered for something more than the sum total of our mistakes. Lastly, cultural collapse is something that's almost too horrible to contemplate, except that in some places it seems to have already happened, and is being masked by the various institutions that still exist, for the time being. But I believe that a lot of people will come around and remember their humanity, the better parts of their natures, when dire circumstances force them to rise to the occasion. Also, there are some intact pockets of culture here and there that can be used as a sort of cultural seed stock. These are communities and groups that have seen some adversity in recent times, and have some social cohesion left over from the experience. They may also be those who made certain conscious decisions, to simplify their living arrangements in order to lead saner, more fulfilling lives. We must do all we can to avert this final stage of collapse, because what is at stake is nothing less than our humanity. I hope that, if you have been following along, by this point this slide is self-explanatory. Collapse is not one monolithic thing. Each kind of collapse requires a response, be it jumping clear ahead of time, sitting it out, or opposing it with all you got. At this point, if anyone in this room got up and tried to tell us what to do to avoid financial collapse, we would probably find that quite funny. On the other hand, if we stand by and let social and cultural collapse unfold, then what's the point of any of this? That's all. Thank you for listening. _____ This article is a talk that was originally given by Dmitry Orlov at the Community Solutions Conference in Michigan in November 2008. http://www.countercurrents.org/orlov131108.htm TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org Mon Dec 8 10:57:57 2008 From: hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org (Hunter Gray) Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:57:57 +0000 Subject: [R-G] A weird day and very weird stuff Message-ID: NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR: [December 8 2008] About 3 am It's very early in the morning here -- I arose shortly after midnight -- and I am staying up at least until 5 am Mountain Time to call our grandson/son, Thomas [well into his final year of Med School], to make certain he's awake in Minneapolis. [That's at his request.] Sky, who awakened with me, has now given up and returned to slumberland, in the fashion of the great Cloudy. Issues abound in the world like the needles of a vast forest of Ponderosa Pine but, with all due respect to those challenges, I'm going to kill a little time and recite the high points of the most difficult day -- yesterday -- that we've ever had computer wise and website wise. As is generally known to our List readership, we've had no end of problems in that vein [as we once did with our conventional postal mail.] Not everyone in these parts is a friend. There are more than 3,000 known pages in my FBI files -- and several hundred in those once held by the old Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. Early on, I posted a very small number of representative pages from these witch-hunting days on our website, and they're visited with some regularity. Our problems yesterday began late in the morning when I decided to give a cluster of four website pages, each containing several FBI reports and such, more prominence in our website directory/index. Before I did that, I decided to add a little comment to one of those from the Albuquerque FBI office which, via a Gallup agent, sought in 1979 to confuse me with a mentally disturbed war veteran [apparently named John R Satter] in a quite denigrating context. When a few years later, via FOIA, I secured those documents, I wrote an angry letter to the FBI Special Agent in charge of my "collection" and a long and cold two page letter to William Webster, FBI Director. Mr Webster did not respond but, before long, I received word from the FBI that that stuff had been removed from my file as a corrective measure. A small but welcome victory. When I tried to publish the page with my background info on the Albuquerque effort to defame and discredit me and some matters related to that, the computer began -- even for it -- a significant number of glitch/freezeups which necessitated a manual shut-down and subsequen turn-on. When, with much difficulty, I got it [and the other three pages with minor additions published], I relaxed. But in due course, something told me to check the pages for accuracy. I did and the two page letter to Director Webster had disappeared into thin air. I am, frankly, at my peak best in any crisis -- and this was obviously one. I was joined by the faithful Maria. It proved impossible to pull the Webster letter from our Front Pages photo arrangement and, after many attempts, we scanned the original and placed it on the page. When we tried to publish the page, which should have gone routinely, we couldn't. Then the power went off in our house -- no inclement weather outside [and this is a rare occurrence even amidst the worst storms.] Eventually, that came back on but, although two other computers in our bailiwick [one used by Maria's youngest, Samantha], returned to normalcy right away, it was fifteen minutes before mine did. We called our website's server. After a Kafkaesque half hour, during which he gave us various numbers to install on our front pages username and password, we finally got the Webster letter published and the heading/link to the little cluster of pages up high on our index/directory. But when we went to the internal page that lists our several hundred URLs, we found that it was now jam-packed with "new things" that were really quite old -- all sorts of titles from old documents/ "saved" emails. Josie's first resume was listed. None of these had any content but to say that it was cluttering in nature is understatement for sure. When I would click a heading, I'd get our most current Outlook Express. To get into our web page listing, we had each time a long cumbersome password ritual. The regular WebPages were fine and the published website was normal. Another person at our website tech could, in the end, offer no explanation. Maria and I gave up on him, politely. We decided that, in some mysterious fashion, the old superfluous material with our previous server which had disappeared when we republished our website with the new one [July 2006] had somehow returned. By this time it was 6 pm. It was reasonable for me to say F___k it, for now. When I awoke at 12:30 am, and checked things, it had all returned to normal. [There have been a couple of freezeups while writing this very letter.] It seems reasonable to deduct that the last tech man brought someone in who, while we slept, straightened things out. Josie's old resume title et al are gone, the regular pages remain just fine, and there is no cumbersome password etc ritual. If anyone is interested in the little FBI sample, here's the basic link: http://hunterbear.org/witch_hunt_continuesthe_southern.htm I should add that it proceeds in atypical fashion for our usually linear website. The link will take you to the last page initially and you can see the other three pages by simply doing a "previous" for three or so times, simply moving backward. The reason for this is simply that the final page in the cluster -- Witch Hunt Continues -- has been for many years the lead or almost the lead URL when you Google-in Southern Conference Educational Fund. Thus it's a well established link to our website and worth using. As I say, there are 3,000 or so pages in my known FBI files -- plus perhaps a hundred they refuse to release on grounds of "national security." This sampling is, again, a tiny representative cluster. So, in awhile, I'll call our good Thomas -- maybe sack out after that. But crises bring out my best, and I feel fine. When I called and awakened Thomas the other morn, he was barely with the world. I asked him a test question, "Who won the battle of Little Big Horn?" There was only a very brief pause. Then he came to -- with, "We did." So I gave him a mental "A." Solidarity, Hunter [Hunter Bear] HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? and Ohkwari' Check out our Hunterbear website Directory http://hunterbear.org/directory.htm [The site is dedicated to our one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray: http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm See our Community Organizing Course [with new material] http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm And see Hunter's Movement Life Interview: http://hunterbear.org/HUNTER%20BEAR%20INTERVIEW%20CRMV.htm From FENTONA at shaw.ca Mon Dec 8 12:39:02 2008 From: FENTONA at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 11:39:02 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Taliban in 72 percent of Afghanistan, think-tank says Message-ID: <5A6A98B2-EC25-4253-9EB9-85D1ACF6CBB7@shaw.ca> Taliban in 72 percent of Afghanistan, think-tank says Mon Dec 8, 2008 6:00am EST http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4B70YB20081208?sp=true By Jon Hemming KABUL (Reuters) - The Taliban hold a permanent presence in 72 percent of Afghanistan, a think-tank said on Monday, but NATO and the Afghan government rejected the report, saying its figures were not credible. The findings by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) come in the wake of a series of critical reports on Western-led military and development efforts to put an end to the seven-year Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. The U.S. government is conducting a wide-ranging review of strategy aimed at countering the Taliban guerrilla and bombing campaign which analysts agree has grown in both scale and scope in the last year. But while the trends in the ICOS report reflected prevailing sentiment on Afghanistan, many of its findings appeared flawed and contained some glaring errors, security analysts said. "The Taliban now has a permanent presence in 72 percent of the country," ICOS, formerly known as the Senlis Council, said in the report, adding that the figure had risen from 54 percent last year. ICOS is an independent think-tank and research organization based in Brazil that has researchers in the region. The report defines a permanent presence as an average of one or more insurgent attacks per week over the entire year. According to ICOS, a "permanent presence" then would include many areas of the country where the Taliban traditionally launch a large number of attacks in the spring and summer "fighting season," before melting away during the harsh winter months. "We don't see the figures in this report as being credible at all," said NATO spokesman James Appathurai. "The Taliban are only present in the south and east which is already less than 50 percent of the country." The Afghan government also rejected the report and said "in addition to the questionable methodology of the report and its conceptual confusion, the report has misinterpreted the sporadic, terrorizing and media-oriented activities of the Taliban." CLOSING ON KABUL? At least 4,000 people have been killed in fighting in Afghanistan this year, around a third of them civilians, according to United Nations figures. In the traditional Taliban heartlands of the mainly ethnic Pashtun south and east, NATO-led and U.S.-led coalition forces are engaged in daily clashes with militants fighting to overthrow the Afghan government and drive out foreign troops. But the insurgents generally shy away from massed attacks against Afghan and international troops, preferring "shoot and scoot" ambushes, backed by roadside and suicide bomb attacks. The Taliban, said Appathurai, "don't control any areas where Afghan and international forces are present. Whenever Afghan or international forces patrol into an area they simply run away." "So the idea that the Taliban control large swathes of the country is simply impossible," Appathurai said. ICOS said the Taliban are "closing a noose" around the Afghan capital, Kabul, "establishing bases close to the city from which to launch attacks ... Using these bases, the Taliban and insurgent attacks in Kabul have increased dramatically." While the Taliban have built up a presence in provinces just to the south, west and east of Kabul in the last year, the number of insurgent attacks inside the city has actually gone down this year, the U.N. says. That is largely due to a much stronger and highly visible police presence in the city in response to a series of high-profile suicide attacks in Kabul last year. ICOS said Kabul was "virtually Taliban-free a year ago" and said in the city there were "no police checkpoints at night and few in the day." An ICOS map of Kabul also showed the area occupied by the U.S. embassy, the sprawling NATO headquarters and the Afghan presidential palace as one of "high Taliban/criminal activity." (Additional reporting by Golnar Motevalli; Editing by Paul Tait) From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 8 13:05:59 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:05:59 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Will You Continue To Ignore Gaza's Suffering, Mr Obama? Message-ID: <200812082005.mB8K5xYX028103@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081208/1d17f3d3/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 8 13:37:06 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:37:06 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Zbigniew Brzezinski: Israel's push for Iran strike may hurt U.S. ties Message-ID: <200812082037.mB8Kb6gb024376@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081208/4c121a0c/attachment.txt From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Mon Dec 8 14:09:29 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 17:09:29 -0400 Subject: [R-G] statement from greece Message-ID: <164236a30812081309l2a9fef6tf5615f4f477ca5a7@mail.gmail.com> Mon, 12/08/2008 - 13:54 ? land and autonomy The Anti-imperialist Component (Greece) informs the progressive public opinion: 1. Yesterday evening, Saturday 6 December, a member of the Police Special Forces shot in cold blood and killed a 15 year old boy in the center of Athens. 2. Dozens of eye witnesses who came forward and spoke to the Media confirm that this was a cold blood murder, as there were no incidents going on. The attempt of the Greek government to lie to the public opinion, claiming that the kids attacked the police, finally failed: Tonight, Sunday 7 December, even the mainstream Media are openly calling the government's claims "a blatant lie". 3. The police murder comes after years of increasing state terror against the youth and the working people, who goes always unpunished and is always covered and justified by the neoliberal government of K. Karamanlis. During the last year, dozens of demonstrators and other citizens or immigrants have been arrested, tortured and wounded by the police. 4. The Greek government tried to disorientate and calm the people by organizing a theater of "resignations" of the Interior Minister and the head of the Greek Police, who were right away "refused" by the Prime Minister. 5. Thus, the Greek government bears the full political responsibility for the murder of the 15 year old boy, which was anything but an exceptional incident. The Greek government armed the hand of the murderer. It is the Greek government who trains the policemen and teaches them: "You are the State and you are untouchable, you are over the laws". 6. Since yesterday evening thousands of youth and working people are expressing all over Greece their indignation and their fully justified anger against this government of thiefs and murderers. Dozens of demonstrations are taking place almost continuously in Athens, Thessaloniki, Patra and many other Greek cities. 7. All the left organizations (with the shameful exception of the Communist Party of Greece, which only issued a statement...) are taking part in this revolt under the slogan: "Down with this government of murderers and thiefs!". 8. Yesterday, Sunday 7 December, the demonstration organized in Athens by the Left forces gathered thousands of people. It was attacked by the police with exceptional brutality, but the state terror did not manage to smash the march. Today afternoon we are organizing a new demonstration. The protest continues everywhere. Similar is the situation all over Greece. 9. The murderers and their instigators, the neoliberal government of K. Karamanlis, shall pay dearly for all their crimes! The state terror shall not pass! The people's struggle shall be victorious! Athens, 8 December 2008 Anti-imperialist Component From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 8 14:50:24 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:50:24 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Olmert slams Hebron settler pogroms against Arabs Message-ID: <200812082150.mB8LoO9m025306@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081208/25cbec10/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 8 15:15:46 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:15:46 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Report warns of Taliban noose around Afghan capital Message-ID: <200812082215.mB8MFkpq004681@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081208/f3aa37cd/attachment.txt From fentona at shaw.ca Mon Dec 8 15:28:46 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 14:28:46 -0800 Subject: [R-G] fw: Harper checkmated? References: Message-ID: Saturday, December 6, 2008 http://www.davidorchard.com/online/2do-index.html Harper checkmated? by David Orchard At the Prime Minister's request, the newly minted 40th parliament of Canada has been prorogued, closed until January 26th, creating a situation unprecedented in Canadian history ? a government has avoided defeat by dismissing the nation's lawmakers. Over the next seven weeks, we will see a wave of propaganda and mobilization, amply funded, from the Conservative Party attacking the opposition leaders. This spending will take place outside the election writ period and thus, like the attacks on Liberal leader St?phane Dion over the past two years, will be subject to no spending limits whatsoever. At the end of January, on the date that he has chosen, Mr. Harper will meet Parliament and present a budget. If his budget and/or throne speech fail to pass the House, Mr. Harper will seek ? perhaps successfully ? to dissolve parliament and go to a general election. He will have the momentum of seven weeks of wall-to- wall campaigning, without bothersome election spending restrictions, at his back. If the Conservatives receive a couple of percentage points more of the vote (or if, for example, the Green Party takes one or two percentage points more), Mr. Harper may well receive the majority he has been desperately seeking. With a majority, Mr. Harper will be able to move rapidly to do many of the things he has been restrained from doing so far ? whether this means emasculating the opposition parties by removing democratic, proportional, public funding, completing the destruction of the Canadian Wheat Board, or undermining Aboriginal and women's rights. If the Liberals and the NDP enter the next election competing against each other as usual ? something Mr. Harper is counting on ? they will divide once again the votes of progressive Canadians (the majority) and may well leave themselves, and our democracy, badly damaged. One thing Mr. Harper may not have counted on is that, instead of falling apart, the coalition may solidify and take the initiative. This could happen if the NDP and the Liberals (and, hopefully, the Greens as well) make a concrete agreement not to run against each other in any riding in the country. If the opposition parties took this step, they could win a solid majority of the seats in the election Mr. Harper is hoping to take the country into shortly. A clear agreement not to run against each other, made ahead of the election, would also have a salutary effect on Mr. Harper's actions in the House of Commons and may well cool his ardour for another election. Professor John Ryan of Winnipeg has written a paper, "Canada needs a Liberal-NDP-Green coalition," in which he asks, how is it that a little more than a third of the voting electorate can decide who forms our government? Proportional representation would give Canada a more representative government than our current first-past-the-post voting system, but in the meantime the opposition parties have the power to stop Mr. Harper and create a more democratic Parliament. By forming an electoral coalition, in which the Liberals, NDP and Greens maintain their distinctive identities, but agree not to run against each other, Professor Ryan estimates the coalition could end up with almost twice as many seats as the Conservatives, and the will of the population would be much more accurately reflected in the House of Commons. Last election saw a record number of Canadians abstain from voting. Many people, the young among them, are appalled at a system which regularly elects a prime minister and a governing party that most Canadians have voted against. Some ask, "Why should I waste my vote?" The coalition formed in the House of Commons this past week has galvanized a great deal of interest and hope for an end to vote splitting on the centre-left. Cooperation between the Liberals and the NDP in the past has given Canada some of its most progressive legislation, including national medicare, the Canada pension plan, a new flag and the establishment of Petro-Canada. A Liberal-NDP electoral coalition that would see the Conservatives reduced to winning approximately one third of the seats in the House, i.e. roughly the percentage of their vote nationally, would re- energize all those Canadians who long for a more representative Parliament, one that more accurately reflects their views inside the House of Commons, rather than leaving them outside as a "wasted vote." David Orchard is an author and fourth-generation farmer. He was the Liberal candidate in Desneth?-Missinippi-Churchill River in the last election and farms at Borden and Choiceland, Saskatchewan. He can be reached at tel 306-961-7122, davidorchard at sasktel.net,www.davidorchard.com From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 8 15:54:24 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:54:24 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Pakistan militants torch 100 NATO vehicles destined for Afghanistan Message-ID: <200812082254.mB8MsOli008765@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081208/1e85e449/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Dec 8 17:10:19 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:10:19 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] How Iraq War Sucked Billions Out Of Rhode Island Economy Message-ID: <493DB76B.80605@ashisuto.co.jp> by Sherwood Ross Countercurrents.org (November 14 2008) Apart from the tragic human cost, Americans are wising up to the fact it's not just Iraq that's suffering economically from this war. Sixty-seven percent of respondents to a New York Times/CBS News poll April 2 said the Iraq war had contributed "a lot" to our economic problems and 22 percent more said it contributed "some", while only ten percent said "not much" or "not at all". President Bush's war is, in fact, driving up the price of oil and the cost of oil-dependent activities as trucking and agriculture, hitting Americans at the checkout counter as well as the gas pump, sucking jobs out of the economy, depressing wages and emptying family bank accounts. Rhode Island taxpayers, for example, will be parted from $622 million this year to finance the war, according to the National Priorities Project of Northampton, Massachusetts, which tracks the impact of federal spending on states and localities. The total bill just to Rhode Island since Bush invaded Iraq is $2.1 billion. Spent in Rhode Island, that same money instead might have bought health care for 713,083 people for a year or paid for a year's worth of scholarships for 270,844 students or hired 30,286 elementary school teachers or provided 3.5 million homes with a year's worth of renewable electricity, the Priorities Project said. As for the full $572 billion Bush spent on the military last year - that's 44 cents out of every tax dollar - it breaks down to $1,800 for every resident of America, writes economist Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts in the March 31 issue of The Nation. President-elect Obama is familiar with these costs. He earlier put the cost of the war to each American household at about $1,200 a year. Whichever figure you use, we're talking big bucks. Economist Pollin asserts that money spent at home on education, health care, energy conservation and infrastructure "creates between fifty and 100 percent more jobs than the same money going to Iraq". So the $138 billion funneled just into Iraq last year cost American workers one million jobs, he says. And, for comparison purposes, that $138 billion could have instead provided Medicaid-level health insurance for all 45 million uninsured Americans, Pollin said, as well as built 400 schools and hired 30,000 more K-12 teachers. What's more, "channeling hundreds of billions of dollars into areas such as renewable energy and mass transportation would create a hothouse environment supporting new technologies", he asserted. As for the lost one million jobs, there's more tragedy here than meets the eye. Putting a million people to work would have reduced unemployment to close to four percent. When it gets down that low, Pollin says, good help becomes harder to find so employers raise wages and improve working conditions, meaning American workers would be better off generally. In recent years, US workers made heady productivity gains for employers, yet few of the fruits fell into their pay envelopes. America, especially after World War One, had a fierce "isolationist" streak. There were millions of rock-ribbed Republicans, particularly in the Midwest, who didn't want any part of Europe's wars. Now President Bush can easily induce interventionist congressional Republicans and Democrats alike to spend for an endless war that is benefiting defense contractors and oil producers and few others. Imagine if the benefits to Rhode Island of the $2 billion taken from this state (under false pretenses, I might point out) and squandered in Iraq were put back into the hands of the people of Rhode Island and devoted instead to modernizing factories and implementing new technologies, to lifting the skill levels of the work force to make it more entrepreneurial and competitive! Imagine the benefits to America! _____ Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist and public relations consultant who covers military and political topics. He worked formerly for the Chicago Daily News and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodr1 at yahoo.com This essay first appeared in The Providence Journal. http://www.countercurrents.org/ross141108.htm TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Dec 9 04:01:14 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:01:14 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] People Get Ready Message-ID: <493E4FFA.3000208@ashisuto.co.jp> Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) www.kunstler.com (December 08 2008) In the twilight of the Bush days, in the twilight of the twilight season, a consensus has formed that we are headed into a long, dark passage leading we know not where. Even CNBC's Lawrence Kudlow has been reduced to searching for stray "mustard seeds" of hope on hands and knees in a bleak and tortured financial landscape. Half the enterprises in the land are lined up for some kind of relief bailout and a blizzard of pink slips has cut economic visibility to zero. The broad American public voted for "change" but they thought that meant a "changing of the guard". Out with the feckless Bush; in with the charismatic Obama ... and may this American life now continue just as it ever was. The change actually coming will be much more than they bargained for, namely our transition from a wealthy society to a hardship society. The sharp break is a product of our years-long failure to reckon with the energy realities of our time. We're still confused about that, but it's hard, otherwise, to ignore the massive disappearance of capital, asset values, livelihoods, domiciles, comforts, and necessities. The price of oil is suddenly down to an astounding $40-odd per barrel. Those of us studying the Peak Oil story have said that the "bumpy plateau" years of peak production would be expressed in tremendous price volatility, and for exactly the reasons now evident - that the high-price phase would mangle advanced economies, that they would fall back in paralysis, then respond anew to oil price collapses by straggling up again, only to be crushed again when a resumption in demand for oil drove the price back up. What was not so generally anticipated was the wholesale destruction of global finance in the first phase of this period. This has now occurred so comprehensively that we know the banking business will never be the same again. It has also accelerated other plot-lines in the story. One affects the global oil industry itself: a lack of capital to go forward with the new oil projects that were designed to mitigate the present depletions in old oil fields. The result of this quandary is as likely to be oil shortages in 2009 as much as an extremely sharp snap-back in oil prices. The oil markets themselves are changing in the face of financial disruption. Between pirates lurking off the Horn of Africa, and a shortage in letters-of-credit that enable the shipping of anything for delivery between nations, the allocation system is impaired. This affects poorer nations the most, and when they don't get their oil shipments, conditions in these nations get worse. People lose incomes. Ethnic strife ramps up. All this will make it harder to move oil from the places where it is produced to the importing countries. So much artificially-generated pixel "money" is being pumped into the system now that it will eventually overtake the quantity of capital currently vanishing in the form of exposed securities swindles, unwinding bad debt, and imploded worthless counter-party contracts. The pixel money will express itself as super or hyper inflation, lagging from six to eighteen months from the time it was actually introduced in the form of bailouts. For the moment, money is moving into the presumed safety of US Treasury paper. Personally, the safety of this is not something I would presume. But in the current deflationary stage its hard to find any other place to park cash, and when asset values are crashing everywhere, cash is king. Gold is physically unavailable in the form that non-millionaires usually buy it in, ounce and half-ounce coins. President-elect Obama has announced his intention to kick off a massive "stimulation" program when he hits the White House "running" in January. Early indications are that it will be directed at things like highway repair. If so, we will be investing long-term in infrastructure that we probably won't be using the same way in ten years. But I doubt there is any way around it. The American public can't conceive of living any other way except in a car-centered society. Anyway, some parts of our highway-bridge-and-tunnel system are already so decrepit that they pose a menace right now, and the clamor to direct "stimulation" there is already very strong - backed by all the fraternities of engineers. Stimulus aimed at perpetuating mass motoring will be a tragic waste of our dwindling resources. We'd be better off aiming it at fixing the railroads (especially electrifying them), refitting our harbors with piers and warehouses in preparation to move more stuff by boats, and in repairing the electric grid. Unfortunately, our tendency will be to try to rescue the totemic touchstones of everyday life, things familiar and comfortable, regardless of whether they have a future or not. The ominous forces gathering out there will defeat these efforts and everyday life will reorganize itself some other way consistent with the single greatest trend: the force of contraction. Every sign we see is pointing in that direction, from the inability of the earth's ecology to support more human beings, to the dwindling of mineral and energy resources, to the destruction of farmland, to mischief in the climate. We just don't know how badly things will fall apart in the meantime, or how kind (or cruelly) people will act in the process. Mr Obama would be most successful if he could persuade the public how much more severe the required changes are than they currently realize, and inspire them to get with program of retrofitting American life to comply with these realities. _____ My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers. http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/12/people-get-ready.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From aaron at mylists.fastmail.fm Tue Dec 9 07:01:25 2008 From: aaron at mylists.fastmail.fm (Aaron Aarons) Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 06:01:25 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Saami [Lapp] In-Reply-To: <4939F9B9.5050109@resist.ca> References: <001101c956e5$4da8d6e0$0400a8c0@computer> <4939F9B9.5050109@resist.ca> Message-ID: <20081209140141.24CCE255EC@heartbeat2.messagingengine.com> >Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:04:09 -0700 >From: Macdonald Stainsby > >Hunter Gray wrote: >> The Saami origin lies in Northeastern Asia and, while the people now >> known as Native Americans moved -- over a long period of time into >> the Western Hemisphere via the Bering Straits -- > >There are a lot of people in many nations across Turtle Island who would both challenge this as well as tune you out for saying it. > >Personally, I don't see western science as able to prove this sort of thing, and also fully am suspicious that this line is promoted and promulgated in order to undermine indigenous sovereignty, in particular among idiots who then say garbage like "See? Everyone here is an immigrant, no more 'native land claims'" The argument that "everyone here is an immigrant" can, of course, be applied to every place in the world except for some place in Africa where -- depending on how you define "humans" -- the first humans evolved. I would think that radical anti-capitalists would also be radical egalitarians, and not think that anybody deserves more of the earth or its benefits more than anybody else, regardless of where their ancestors came from and whether their ancestors were better or worse than the other's ancestors at displacing, enslaving and killing people, and manufacturing pieces of paper asserting their right to continue doing so. - Aaron From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Dec 9 08:51:42 2008 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 09:51:42 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Saami [Lapp] References: <001101c956e5$4da8d6e0$0400a8c0@computer> <4939F9B9.5050109@resist.ca> <20081209140141.24CCE255EC@heartbeat2.messagingengine.com> Message-ID: <34FFE621E4DA47A68276C9A3214B5F90@agingCHS072729> >I would think that radical anti-capitalists would also be radical >egalitarians, and not think that anybody deserves more of the earth or its >benefits more than anybody else.... Uh, you're missing a lot here. There are certain *classes* of people who consider the entire earth fair game for conquest, for pillage and for destruction. For rape and murder. For profit. Their actions have left communities and entire nations destitute, homeless, raped, and without resources for future generations. And they roam around a lot.... There are other classes of people who actually lived sustainably on this land -- who were in fact stewards of the land -- who did not commit such monstrous crimes. And they were stewards of the land before the invaders came 'round.... Richard ----- Original Message ----- From: "Aaron Aarons" To: "Richard Menec" Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008 8:01 AM Subject: Re: [R-G] Saami [Lapp] > >Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:04:09 -0700 >>From: Macdonald Stainsby >> >>Hunter Gray wrote: >>> The Saami origin lies in Northeastern Asia and, while the people now >>> known as Native Americans moved -- over a long period of time into >>> the Western Hemisphere via the Bering Straits -- >> >>There are a lot of people in many nations across Turtle Island who would >>both challenge this as well as tune you out for saying it. >> >>Personally, I don't see western science as able to prove this sort of >>thing, and also fully am suspicious that this line is promoted and >>promulgated in order to undermine indigenous sovereignty, in particular >>among idiots who then say garbage like "See? Everyone here is an >>immigrant, no more 'native land claims'" > > The argument that "everyone here is an immigrant" can, of course, be > applied to every place in the world except for some place in Africa > where -- depending on how you define "humans" -- the first humans evolved. > I would think that radical anti-capitalists would also be radical > egalitarians, and not think that anybody deserves more of the earth or its > benefits more than anybody else, regardless of where their ancestors came > from and whether their ancestors were better or worse than the other's > ancestors at displacing, enslaving and killing people, and manufacturing > pieces of paper asserting their right to continue doing so. > > - Aaron > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 9 12:29:39 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:29:39 -0800 Subject: [R-G] The man who would tear down 'scaffolding' of Zionism Message-ID: <200812091929.mB9JTdah008904@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081209/fe76f33e/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 9 13:37:44 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:37:44 -0800 Subject: [R-G] The End Message-ID: <200812092037.mB9KbiUh008024@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081209/fc73d628/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 9 13:57:22 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:57:22 -0800 Subject: [R-G] EU, Israel to strengthen ties despite objections Message-ID: <200812092057.mB9KvMW1008468@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081209/4e9fe1b4/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 9 13:59:39 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:59:39 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Defence says witness in Omar Khadr trial withdrawn to cover up abuse Message-ID: <200812092059.mB9KxdSk012113@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081209/d51602f5/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 9 14:02:49 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:02:49 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Triumph of business Liberals: Michael Ignatieff will lead the party Message-ID: <200812092102.mB9L2nl4016528@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081209/cc6c2ce0/attachment.txt From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Tue Dec 9 15:58:54 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 18:58:54 -0400 Subject: [R-G] police provoke at the funeral Message-ID: <164236a30812091458n2bf58cfas7b3af8c4750448fa@mail.gmail.com> 2cops intruded the little boys funeral and provoked *09.12.2008 17:59* From eye witness on TV: 2 cops with motorcycles intruded the funeral and started provoking the people. When ten people from the funeral attempted to push them away they were attacked from a hidden riot police squad. From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 9 17:37:44 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 16:37:44 -0800 Subject: [R-G] World oil demand to fall for first time in decades Message-ID: <562E7DA4-05CF-446F-A28E-762625238ECA@shaw.ca> World oil demand to fall for first time in decades Tue Dec 9, 2008 4:25pm EST By Tom Doggett http://ca.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE4B84PY20081209?sp=true WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Global oil demand will contract for the first time since the early 1980s as world economic growth slows to a near standstill, the U.S. government said on Tuesday. The forecast for 2008 and 2009 is bad news for energy companies and oil producing nations that depend on robust prices, but could benefit cash-strapped consumers by sending gasoline and heating costs lower, according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration report. World oil demand is projected to fall by 50,000 barrels per day in 2008 and 450,000 barrels per day next year, the EIA said, led by a 1.2 million bpd contraction in top consumer the United States this year a 200,000 bpd drop in 2009. The report marked the first major forecast for shrinking energy demand tied to the current global financial crisis. The lower forecast came as the EIA revised down its projection for 2009 global economic growth to 0.5 percent next year, from the 1.8 percent projection it made in its previous report issued in November. "The current global economic slowdown is now projected to be more severe and longer ... leading to further reductions of global energy demand and additional declines in crude oil and other energy prices," the EIA said. The last time world petroleum demand fell was in 1983, part of four years of straight declines in oil consumption that began in 1980, the agency said. The weak economy and lower petroleum demand has already caused U.S. crude oil prices to sink from a record $147 a barrel in July to $43 on Tuesday -- a slump that has rattled energy producing nations like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela, and triggered massive cutbacks in investment in oil projects like those in Canada's oil sands. "The increasing likelihood of a prolonged global economic downturn continues to dominate market perceptions, putting downward pressure on oil prices," the EIA said. Demand still is expected to grow next year in emerging economies such as China, which helped drive the six-year rally in oil prices to record highs. Still, the latest EIA report revised demand from this group down by 40,000 bpd. PRICE DROP The EIA slashed its 2009 forecast for crude oil prices to $51 a barrel from $63.50 a barrel in its previous forecast. "I don't think they are done revising. I think next month will be lower. I'm having a hard time seeing GDP growth anywhere -- we may see pockets of growth -- but not worldwide or regionally," said Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover, based in New Canaan, Connecticut. Meanwhile, the World Bank said on Tuesday that the world financial crisis will sharply slow world economic growth next year, ending the five-year global price boom for crude oil and other commodities. The weaker energy prices could mark a bright spot for consumers who have been hard hit by the financial turmoil. The EIA said it cut its winter heating oil forecast to $2.53 a gallon from $2.75 a gallon, and its 2009 gasoline price forecast to $2.03 a gallon from $2.37. Average U.S. gasoline price are currently running about $1.70 a gallon, down from a record $4.11 this summer. "We've lowered the bar for gasoline demand so much that it's going to take years for it to recover to the type of demand numbers that we had in the past," said Phil Flynn, analyst at Alaron Trading in Chicago. (Editing by Christian Wiessner) From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Dec 9 18:14:10 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:14:10 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Past and Future Message-ID: <493F17E2.3030600@ashisuto.co.jp> by William Greider www.thenation.com (November 24 2008) A year ago, when Barack Obama said it was time to turn the page, his campaign declaration seemed to promise a fresh start for Washington. I, for one, failed to foresee Obama would turn the page backward. The president-elect's lineup for key governing positions has opted for continuity, not change. Virtually all of his leading appointments are restoring the Clinton presidency, only without Mr Bill. In some important ways, Obama's selections seem designed to sustain the failing policies of George W Bush. This is not the last word and things are changing rapidly. But Obama's choices have begun to define him. His victory, it appears, was a triumph for the cautious center-right politics that has described the Democratic party for several decades. Those of us who expected more were duped, not so much by Obama but by our own wishful thinking. Let us stipulate that these are all honorable people, smart and experienced veterans of Washington combat. But they represent the Democratic party that mainly sees itself as managerial - making government work better. The long era of conservative dominance has taught them to keep their distance from big reform ideas that promise fundamental change of the system. Their operating style is incremental and cautiously practical. They conscientiously avoid (or actively block) propositions that sound too liberal or radical. Alas, Obama is coming to power at a critical moment when incrementalism is irrelevant. The system is in collapse. Financial chaos won't wait for patient deliberations. Events have confronted Obama with a fearful symmetry between past and present, illustrated by his choice of economic advisers. On Friday, we learned that Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve, would become his new treasury secretary and Larry Summers, who held the same position in the Clinton administration, would be the White House overseer of economic policy. On Monday, Geithner was busy executing the government's massive rescue of Citicorp - the very banking behemoth that Geithner and Summers helped to create back in the Clinton years, along with Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, Clinton's economics guru. Now Rubin is himself a Citicorp executive and his bank is now being saved by his old protege (Geithner) with the taxpayers' money. The connections go way beyond irony. They raise very serious questions about where the new president intends to lead and whether he has the nerve to break from the weak and haphazard strategy of the Bush administration. It has dumped piles of public money on the largest financial institutions and demanded little or nothing in return, hoping for the best. Geithner has been a central player in the deal-making, from Bear Stearns to AIG to Citi. The strategy has not only failed, it has arguably made things worse as savvy market players saw through the contradictions and rushed out to dump more bank stocks. On Wall Street, Geithner is known as a highly competent technocrat, well versed in the financial complexities. But he has also been seen as a weak and compliant regulator of Wall Street firms, someone who did not seem the storm coming. Occasionally, Geithner would anguish publicly about the accumulating time bombs like credit derivatives and urge bankers to do something, but he did not use his supervisory powers to compel action. In bailout negotiations with Wall Street titans, Geithner and the Federal Reserve were spun around like a top more than once. No wonder the stock markets rallied explosively when they heard Geithner would be their new boss in Washington. They think he is their guy. Summers may be a brilliant economist - everyone says so - but he, too, is a club member in good standing and now manages a huge hedge fund while he advises Obama. The president-elect needs to get a "second opinion" - someone from outside the financial club who can explain the flaws in the rescue strategy preached by Bush's treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner at the New York Fed. Their approach has clearly been designed to preserve what's left of the Wall Street establishment and maintain the supremacy of the largest financial firms while the taxpayers pick up their losses. That model has failed and too many smart people know why. The bailouts have been too little too late and aimed at an impossible objective - persuading private capital investors to believe in the phony assurances proffered by the bankers. AIG, the insurance giant taken over by the feds, has turned into a bloody hemorrhage. Citigroup will be another and may soon be joined by other major banks demanding the same favorable terms. Wasting more public money on insolvent mastodons is the least of it. The real scandal is it doesn't work. It can't work because the black hole is too large even for Washington to fill. Government should take over the failing institutions or force them into bankruptcy, break them up and sell them off or mercifully relieve everyone, including the taxpayers. Stock markets rallied again with the salvage of Citigroup. But not everyone in Wall Street was cheering. Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, the bank monitoring firm that has repeatedly been right about the banks when the government officials were wrong, had harsh words for the deal. "Pretending that Citi is going to be a going concern I think is silly", Whalen said. "We should be thinking about breaking this company up and redistributing the assets into stronger hands". Will Timothy Geithner or Larry Summers advise the next president to face reality and throw in the towel? One hopes so, because Whalen warns: "By embracing Geithner, President-elect Obama is endorsing the ill-advised scheme to support AIG directed by Hank Paulson et al at Goldman Sachs and executed by Tim Geithner ... This scheme to stay AIG's resolution cannot possibly work and, when it does collapse, Barack Obama and his administration will wear the blame". Barack Obama is too smart and perceptive to let this happen to his yet-unborn presidency. Maybe he should find out what Whalen knows. _____ William Greider, a prominent political journalist and author, has been a reporter for more than 35 years for newspapers, magazines and television. Over the past two decades, he has persistently challenged mainstream thinking on economics. For seventeen years Greider was the National Affairs Editor at Rolling Stone magazine, where his investigation of the defense establishment began. He is a former assistant managing editor at the Washington Post, where he worked for fifteen years as a national correspondent, editor and columnist. While at the Post, he broke the story of how David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director, grew disillusioned with supply-side economics and the budget deficits that policy caused, which still burden the American economy. He is the author of the national bestsellers One World, Ready or Not (1998), Secrets of the Temple (1989), Who Will Tell The People (1993), and - due out in February from Rodale - Come Home, America. In the award-winning Secrets of the Temple, he offered a critique of the Federal Reserve system. Greider has also served as a correspondent for six Frontline documentaries on PBS, including "Return to Beirut", which won an Emmy in 1985. Greider's most recent book is The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to A Moral Economy (2004). In it, he untangles the systemic mysteries of American capitalism, details its destructive collisions with society and demonstrates how people can achieve decisive influence to reform the system's structure and operating values. Raised in Wyoming, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, he graduated from Princeton University in 1958. He currently lives in Washington, DC. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081208/greider_web TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Tue Dec 9 18:50:27 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 21:50:27 -0400 Subject: [R-G] autonomous call for solidarity with greek revolt Message-ID: <164236a30812091750o12c77f6dob07d4d4daeb4f21a@mail.gmail.com> Autonomous Call for Solidarity with Greek Revolt Tuesday, December 09 2008 @ 03:27 PM CST Contributed by: Anonymous Views: 26 [image: Announcements] Rebels, Anarchists, and Revolutionaries: Greece's cities burn with the fires of revolt! The agents of state repression shot and killed one of us, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, in Athens on December 6th. From Athens to London, Salonika to Berlin, and spreading amongst many other areas of Greece and Europe, the rebels refuse to submit to the complicity of fear and the pacification of democratic falsehoods. Scores of shops, cars, government buildings, and even the Athens' christmas tree is burning with the anger of revolt! The insurrectionary impulse is spreading in a hail of rocks, molotovs, and destruction of all that has for so long prevented our realization. Autonomous Call for Solidarity with Greek Revolt Rebels, Anarchists, and Revolutionaries: Greece's cities burn with the fires of revolt! The agents of state repression shot and killed one of us, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, in Athens on December 6th. From Athens to London, Salonika to Berlin, and spreading amongst many other areas of Greece and Europe, the rebels refuse to submit to the complicity of fear and the pacification of democratic falsehoods. Scores of shops, cars, government buildings, and even the Athens' christmas tree is burning with the anger of revolt! The insurrectionary impulse is spreading in a hail of rocks, molotovs, and destruction of all that has for so long prevented our realization. In North America we can no longer idle ourselves as spectators of revolt. The architecture of control and centers of economic exploitation are being attacked in Greece with a furiousness not seen in decades. These targets are everywhere, in all lands. We make an anonymous call on rebels everywhere, now is the time to intensify the solidarity of attack. Our contribution to the struggle in Greece must realize itself without hesitation against the machinery of control that confronts us. There is no time to waste watching from the sidelines as consumers of mediated revolt. The targets are everywhere! We must be the revolt we want to see! Let's make our attack spread from Greece to North America, from Europe to the world! From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Dec 10 02:52:31 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:52:31 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Threat of Nuclear War Grows Message-ID: <493F915F.1060205@ashisuto.co.jp> by Edward S Herman Z Magazine (November 01 2008) Global Research (November 04 2008) In this Kafkaesque age everything is stood on its head - the champion violator of international law and sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states is gung ho for respecting state sovereignty and territorial integrity (of Georgia, but not Pakistan); primary terrorist and ethnic cleansing states (the United States and Israel) invade, bomb, and torture, but wax indignant at retail terrorism that flows largely in response to their wholesale terror; and these same two states, brimming over with nuclear arms and increasingly threatening to use them, are aghast that Iran might want and someday be able to make a nuclear weapon. These two states are mainly responsible for the steadily rising probability that nuclear weapons will again be used in the not too distant future. Both have a stock of nuclear weapons and up-to-date delivery systems: that of the United States is of course gigantic, but Israel's is substantial (estimated as between sixty and 200 ready bombs). Israel has developed its nuclear capability outside the authority of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, with the collusion of the Western powers, which have been so aggressive in denying any similar rights to Iran (except during the period of the rule of the Western-imposed dictator, the Shah). This weapons accumulation and refusal to accept the NPT has entailed no penalty for Israel - no threats, no sanctions, no refusal to assist its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Israel has threatened to use its nuclear weapons, earlier against the Soviet Union, today against Iran. Its threat of an attack on Iran, which is in itself a violation of the UN Charter, has not been treated at all critically in the West - in contrast with the horror at Ahmadinejad's fuzzy condemnations of Israel, which have never included any expressed threat to literally attack Israel. The United States has also steadily violated both the letter and spirit of the NPT. It had agreed in signing on to this treaty in 1968 to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Not only has it not done this, it has made them officially a core part of national defense strategy and in recent years has worked steadily to make them more usable in warfare. It has also withdrawn its NPT promise not to use nuclear weapons against any state that signs on to the NPT and promises not to develop nuclear weapons. The United States has also violated the spirit of the NPT by helping and supporting Israel's development of a nuclear weapons capability, of turning a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear development during years when it was serving as a useful client, and now recently agreeing to assist India's nuclear program despite that country's refusal to join the NPT. Pakistan and China of course resent this US support of a nuclear India, clearly based on political expediency and weakening further any control over nuclear weapons proliferation. The End of Soviet Nuclear Containment One important reason for Israel's and the US's greater openness on the possibility of using nuclear arms is that the countries they threaten, with the exception of Russia, have no nuclear retaliatory capability. In earlier years the Soviet Union, with its own large nuclear weapons arsenal, was a barrier to nuclear threats, especially to countries which were allied with the Soviets. Its termination diminished the containing force that had previously put some limits on US and Israeli violence. A country like Iran would surely respond to a nuclear attack, but it couldn't do so with a comparably devastating weapon. The stream of attacks in recent years by the two primary aggressor states has been grounded heavily in the imbalance of power and weakness and limited ability to respond on the part of the victims (Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Iraq). A nuclear capability on the part of potential victims would enhance their power of self defense - a terrifying threat to aggressor states. Russia could respond, but it is substantially weaker in its retaliatory potential than the Soviet Union: it is smaller and militarily less formidable in the wake of its economic disaster of 1992-1998, substantial cutbacks in military expenditures, and national demoralization. It has made some recovery in recent years with higher energy prices and a stronger and more independent government, and the short war with Georgia indicates that it is now prepared to resist the West's (mainly US's) political and military encirclement and possible attempts at further dismantlement. But it is still vulnerable and justifiably worried about a US first strike capability, enhanced by the planned placement of US anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, with perhaps others to follow. With God-instructed politicians in command in the United States, a manageable (or ignorable) populace, and with its overweening power, aggressive nuclear attack and/or misreadings that set off trigger-alerts are more likely than in the recent past. Not only are the Russian triggers more alert and sensitive as a US first strike potential and threat grows, Russia has also warned that it is elevating its tactical nuclear weapons to potential use where it is threatened by advanced electronic technology that it cannot match. During the years after 1990, with its devastating economic and political setbacks, it fell further behind the United States in its weaponry, and feels obligated to offset this - or at least talk and threaten to offset this - with the formidable weaponry it still possesses. Deteriorating Moral Environment Another important reason for the growing probability of nuclear warfare is the deteriorating moral environment. This has resulted in good part from militarization and war itself, both of which get people habituated to the resort to force and a steady diet of killing, which are normalized. Militarization and war also contribute to justifying the development and use of outlandish weapons, allegedly needed to "defend" the home country and clients from the threat of demonized enemies. Enlightenment values erode and disappear quickly in such a moral environment; mass killing becomes acceptable and even laudable - the large-scale killing of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the basis of celebration in the United States. One measure of the deteriorated moral environment is in fact the open acceptance of aggressive war as an appropriate policy option even in the absence of a military attack or serious threat. This was notorious in the case of the 2003 attack on Iraq, and is equally obvious in the case of the ongoing threats to attack Iran. Pugnacity and a willingness - even eagerness - to use force is a political necessity, at least for satisfying the establishment media and major election funders. What the public thinks on this is less clear - the public usually drags it feet in the war-making process, often preferring diplomacy and reliance on the UN, and has to be managed into a proper frame of mind, although once the bombs start falling patriotic zeal takes over. Writing during World War I, Thorstein Veblen pointed out, that "once a warlike enterprise has been entered upon, it will have the cordial support of popular sentiment even if it is patently an aggressive war". Furthermore, "The higher the pitch of patriotic fervor, the more tenuous and more threadbare may be the requisite moral sanction. By cumulative excitation some very remarkable results have latterly been attained along this line" (in his chapter "On the Nature and Uses of Patriotism", in An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace [1917]). The Democrats are deemed by the establishment to be less trustworthy as war-makers than the Republicans - they are supposedly weak on "national security". This causes their politicians and aspiring political nominees to lean over backwards to demonstrate their bomb-worthiness. For both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all options were "on the table" in dealing with that gigantic threat that Iran might be able to defend itself some time in the future, and Obama has compensated for his Iraq war foot-dragging by promising an escalation in Afghanistan and maybe Pakistan. He also chose Joe Biden as his running mate, for his "experience" (he's been wrong lots of times) and known foreign policy pugnacity. Biden has recently proclaimed that he is a "Zionist", and in fact virtually every Democratic politician has appeared before AIPAC to pledge allegiance to the state of Israel. This steady genuflection, and the financial dependence of the Democrats on organized Zionist money, has been a further factor in moral degradation. It has completely stymied any political opposition to Israeli ethnic cleansing in Palestine and the war against Lebanon in 2006, and as Israeli leaders wanted the Iraq attack and are eager for a war with Iran, the Democratic Party went along with the Iraq war, dragged its feet in extrication even after the antiwar vote of 2006, and has demonized Iran and helped set the stage for war there. It has been pointed out by Michael MccGwire that of the two first class global threats, nuclear war and global warming, the first could be eliminated with small costs (actually, its elimination would release large resources for human improvement and welfare), whereas combating global warming will be quite expensive. But eliminating the nuclear warfare threat, and in the process, demilitarizing, would be contrary to the interests of the Pentagon and rest of the military-industrial complex, and those special interests that benefit from or thrive on permanent warfare. At the moment these real special interests are in command. Whether the financial crisis and permanent war setbacks will change the situation and allow a move toward a decent and rational world order remains to be seen. _____ Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor at yahoo.com www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor at yahoo.com (c) Copyright Edward S Herman, Z Magazine, 2008 (c) Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10813 TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From aaron at mylists.fastmail.fm Wed Dec 10 07:30:43 2008 From: aaron at mylists.fastmail.fm (Aaron Aarons) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:30:43 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Saami [Lapp] In-Reply-To: <34FFE621E4DA47A68276C9A3214B5F90@agingCHS072729> References: <001101c956e5$4da8d6e0$0400a8c0@computer> <4939F9B9.5050109@resist.ca> <20081209140141.24CCE255EC@heartbeat2.messagingengine.com> <34FFE621E4DA47A68276C9A3214B5F90@agingCHS072729> Message-ID: <20081210143047.6327432007@heartbeat2.messagingengine.com> >From: "Richard Menec" >Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 09:51:42 -0600 >Subject: Re: [R-G] Saami [Lapp] > >>I would think that radical anti-capitalists would also be radical >>egalitarians, and not think that anybody deserves more of the earth or its >>benefits more than anybody else.... > >Uh, you're missing a lot here. There are certain *classes* of people who consider the entire earth fair game for conquest, for pillage and for destruction. For rape and murder. For profit. Their actions have left communities and entire nations destitute, homeless, raped, and without resources for future generations. And they roam around a lot.... > >There are other classes of people who actually lived sustainably on this land -- who were in fact stewards of the land -- who did not commit such monstrous crimes. And they were stewards of the land before the invaders came 'round.... > >Richard I don't know if we disagree or not. My argument is that descendants of the pillagers don't deserve the benefits of pillage in the sense of having more rights than surviving descendants of those who were pillaged. I also believe that people living on the land, provided they don't occupy a disproportionate share (in terms of its ability to feed and sustain people) of such land, should be left to live where they are without being pillaged or otherwise imposed upon, and should receive their share of the material benefits that have accrued to the rich of the world at least partly as a consequence of their past oppression. That means respecting the rights of both indigenous peoples and peasant farmers, but not of landlords and capitalists. In general, I believe that treating all people as equals regardless of their origins is the only way of living together on the planet. We also all need to learn to live sustainably, regardless of how many generations we are removed from our own indigenous roots -- whatever that may mean for those whose ancestors have moved voluntarily or been displaced over and over again over the millennia since all our ancestors left Africa. I'm not sure how clear I've been in writing this as I am about to fall asleep, but I hope that the discussion will continue. There is far too little discussion on this "discussion" list. - Aaron From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Dec 10 10:10:41 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:10:41 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Israeli policies condemned Message-ID: <80644031-8738-4C5C-842A-B4EE45024791@shaw.ca> Dec 10, 2008 Israeli policies condemned http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/World/Story/STIStory_312662.html GENEVA - THE UN expert on human rights in the Palestinian territories said on Tuesday Israel's policies against their people amounted to a 'crime against humanity.' In a statement, Richard Falk called on the United Nations to make an 'urgent effort' to 'implement the agreed norm of a responsibility to protect' a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.' He went on: 'In a similar vein, it would seem mandatory for the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.' Mr Falk said that 'such a flurry of denunciations by normally cautious UN officials has not occurred on a global level since the heyday of South African apartheid', continuing: 'And still Israel maintains its Gaza siege in its full fury, allowing only barely enough food and fuel to enter to stave off mass famine and disease.' Israel allowed dozens of trucks filled with humanitarian supplies into the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the fifth such shipment permitted to enter the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory in the past month. The military also allowed in diesel fuel for Gaza's sole power plant and for the UN refugee agency, which provides aid to hundreds of thousands of Gazans. Israel has sealed off the territory from all but limited aid since the Islamist Hamas movement - which is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state - seized power in Gaza in June 2007. Israel also opened Gaza to foreign journalists for the second time in a month. After a surge in violence on Nov 4, Israel tightened the blockade and has said it can not open the crossings because of the danger to its staff at the terminals from mortar and rocket fire by Gaza militants. -- AFP From critical.montages at gmail.com Wed Dec 10 10:18:34 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:18:34 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Oversupply Fears Hurt European Bond Auctions Message-ID: Oversupply fears hurt European bond auctions By David Oakley Published: December 10 2008 00:00 | Last updated: December 10 2008 00:00 Governments faced fresh concerns over raising debt in the capital markets on Tuesday as Austria and the Netherlands saw weak demand for their bonds. The Dutch government failed to raise as much as it had targeted for three bonds ? maturing over five, six and seven years, respectively ? while the Austrian government saw one of the weakest auctions in years for 12-year paper. The difficulties highlight potential problems because of the vast pipeline of government and government-backed debt following the announcements of big fiscal packages to stimulate economies and bail out banks. Analysts stress sovereign bond issuance is not under serious pressure at the moment because of low interest rates and deflation fears, which have depressed yields to historic lows, and are the main drivers of the market. However, there has also been some switching out of bonds into the more stable stock markets this week, which has also put upward pressure on yields. Riccardo Barbieri, a strategist at Bank of America, said: "It was not the best time to tap the market as yields have been rising this week and we have seen the equity markets stabilise. There are concerns about supply, although it must be remembered that yields are at historic lows in many countries." Analysts warn, however, that these early signs of stress, just after many governments have unveiled big fiscal stimulus programmes, are a harbinger of potential problems next year when record volumes of debt are due to be issued. More than $1,000bn of government debt is expected to be raised in Europe in 2009, while close to $2,000bn is forecast in the US. This supply could start forcing yields substantially higher, undermining the finances of many governments as their interest rate costs rise. This could lead to curbs in public spending as debt stocks rise. Martin Weber, at Goldman Sachs, said: "Supply is a significant worry for the government bond markets, although the European markets are solid and deep enough to cope. But the relative supply pressures will have an effect on perfomance and prices. We have already seen significant cheapening in secondary spreads and ahead of certain bond auctions and this dynamic is likely to continue." The Austrian government was forced to pay 13 basis points more than comparable 12-year bonds for its ?1.1bn issue, while the Dutch government only managed to raise a total of ?2.46bn for the three bonds being sold after indicating that it wanted between ?2.5bn and ?3.5bn. The Netherlands is considered one of the strongest and safest credits, which does not usually run into problems meeting debt targets. It also took the Dutch Debt Agency nearly an hour to sell the desired amount, much longer than in past auctions. The UK, however, had fairly strong demand for its ?1.25bn offering of index linked bonds, due to mature in 2032. From critical.montages at gmail.com Wed Dec 10 10:32:59 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:32:59 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Global Oil Demand to Collapse + Russia to Unveil Oil Output Cut Proposals Message-ID: Global oil demand to collapse By Javier Blas in London and Krishna Guha in Washington Published: December 10 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 10 2008 02:00 Global oil demand will collapse next year and commodities will not return to the highs they reached this summer in the foreseeable future, two authoritative reports said yesterday as they forecast a long, painful worldwide recession. The stark conclusions came as the World Bank's chief economist predicted that the world faced "the worst recession since the Great Depression". The US energy department said global oil demand would drop this year and next - the first two consecutive years' fall in 30 years. "The increasing likelihood of a prolonged global economic downturn continues to dominate market perceptions, putting downward pressure on oil prices," it said, forecasting that demand would drop 50,000 barrels a day this year and a hefty 450,000 b/d in 2009. US oil demand will drop next year to the lowest level in 11 years. Meanwhile, the World Bank's Global Economic Prospects report said the commodities boom of the past five years - which drove up prices 130 per cent - had "come to an end". The World Bank's analysis contrasts with the prevalent view held among natural resources companies - and most Wall Street analysts - that the ongoing price drop is a correction within an upward trend. "As the rapid decline of commodity prices since mid-2008 attests, the current boom is best understood as yet another cycle in a long history of commodity prices cycles," the World Bank said. Although it ruled out a return to the torrid high prices of this summer, it said commodities prices would not fall back to the 1990s depressed levels. Oil prices would stay low next year but would return to about $75 a barrel within the next three years, it said, while food would trade 60 per cent higher than in 2003, but about half below this year's record. "Over the longer run, the price of extracted commodities should fall," the bank said; because of slower population and income growth, world demand for raw materials would ease. Andrew Burns, the leading author of the report, dismissed the idea - widely supported among the industry and international bodies such as the International Energy Agency - that the credit crunch could result in higher prices when the economy recovered as companies cancelled supply expansion projects. "I don't see the likelihood of supply side pressures in the next four to five years," he said, adding that any future pick-up in demand would first have slowly to absorb the build-up in dormant production capacity as the industry, from mining companies to the Opec oil cartel, cut its production in response to weaker demand. "First, we would absorb the idle capacity," he said, adding that the cushion would give companies time enough to invest in new supply when demand recovers. The bank said that even without counting on technological miracles, "the supply of commodities is likely to increase rapidly enough over the long run to meet anticipated increases in demand at prices that are lower than current levels". Justin Lin, the World Bank's chief economist, said the current downturn was likely to see simultaneous recessions in most of the industrialised world, these recessions were likely to last longer than in the early 1980s, and the decline in growth would be more universal around the world than in past episodes in recent decades. Crop crunch, Page 10 Analysis, Page 11 Lex, Page 16 Commodities, Page 4 Russia to unveil oil output cut proposals 1 hour ago MOSCOW (AFP) ? Russia said Wednesday it would announce proposals to reduce its oil output by December 17, signalling the energy superpower's readiness to cooperate with OPEC to prop up falling crude prices. "OPEC has serious plans in relation to a reduction" in oil production quotas, Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko told reporters, referring to the possibility of the cartel reducing its output quota. "We are preparing our own proposals that we will announce no later than December 17," the energy minister said. "All the decisions that OPEC countries are preparing will be very significant," he said, speaking on the sidelines of a meeting between the presidents of Russia and Argentina. The 13-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is due to hold its next meeting on December 17 at which it is widely expected to cut production in an effort to bolster prices which have fallen from record highs above 147 dollars in July. The cartel, which pumps 40 percent of world crude, has called on non-members to play a role in reducing output to stem the sharp slide in crude prices of the last five months. At the beginning of December, Algerian Energy Minister Chakib Khelil, the current president of OPEC, urged Russia, Norway and Mexico to join or cut their crude production to show solidarity with the group. Russia is not an OPEC member but ranks alongside Saudi Arabia, de facto leader of the cartel, as the world's largest oil exporter. Shmatko said that figures from oil companies showed in the past three months that extraction of oil in Russia was becoming less attractive and profitable. "This can lead to the fact that we will have some reduction in production," he said. However he said the most important issue was whether non-OPEC oil exporters would agree with the cartel's requests for them to act in a coordinated fashion to keep prices stable. Russia has in the last months called for greater cooperation with OPEC. Any closer cooperation would vastly increase the market power of the cartel, which frustrated Western countries earlier this year by refusing to hike production when oil prices were soaring to at record levels. Shmatko said last month that Russia would coordinate with OPEC to defend its interests amid the falling oil prices, which threaten the strong growth rates recorded by Russia over the last years. Russia enjoyed stellar growth of 8.1 percent in 2007 and 7.4 percent in 2006 on the back of soaring commodity prices, especially for oil and gas. OPEC is widely expected to announce another production cut of up to 2.0 million barrels per day at the meeting in Oran, Algeria on December 17. OPEC had already agreed to reduce output by a total of 2.0 million barrels per day in September and October but the cuts have had only a fleeting impact on the market. On Tuesday, OPEC member Libya called for a "substantial" reduction in output at the December meeting. But investors are concerned these cuts will have little effect amid plummeting demand. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 10 13:02:08 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:02:08 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Feiglin's manifesto: Israel should quit UN, cut off water to PA Message-ID: <200812102002.mBAK28ue001088@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081210/78af475e/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 10 13:31:07 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:31:07 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Israel's Message-ID: <200812102031.mBAKV7Iu016761@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081210/ece9c4aa/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 10 13:32:26 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:32:26 -0800 Subject: [R-G] World stability hangs by a thread as economies continue to unravel Message-ID: <200812102032.mBAKWQAH018539@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081210/3d4643ac/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 10 13:32:02 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:32:02 -0800 Subject: [R-G] The Georgian Dogs Of August Message-ID: <200812102032.mBAKW2SQ018058@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081210/47b38c1c/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Dec 10 13:32:55 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:32:55 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Economic Crisis and the Poor: Probable Impacts, Prospects for Resistance Message-ID: <200812102032.mBAKWtV1019557@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081210/2f1a1f43/attachment.txt From news at ckut.ca Wed Dec 10 13:52:16 2008 From: news at ckut.ca (CKUT Community News Collective) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:52:16 -0500 Subject: [R-G] The December 2008 Edition of Groundwire is ready for download! Message-ID: <49402C00.8080809@ckut.ca> The December 2008 Edition of Groundwire is ready for download! Groundwire is a project by the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA), providing grassroots coverage of local issues with progressive perspectives on national and international news. Click here to download: http://www.ncra.ca/business/admin_ncra/progex/programFiles/544/GW_December_Edition.mp3 On this month's Groundwire: FEATURES: The Algonquin of Barriere Lake took to the highway for a blockade the second time this fall - A look at the cost of the Canadian Security Certificate program - Nova Scotia province cuts Halifax's only shelter of last resort for the homeless - Queen's University Teaching Assistants and Teaching Fellows cast ballots to unionize. HEADLINES: After 5 and half years of waiting, the public portion of the Secret Trial against Adil Charkaoui is scheduled for December 8th - The Iacobucci inquiry has found that Canadian officials have indirectly contributed to the torture of its citizens abroad - Indigenous residents of the Fort Chipewyan community are demanding a moratorium on oil sands development - Stephen Harper signs the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia at APEC summit in Peru - Hundreds of feminists gathered in Montreal for the Pan Canadian young feminist gathering in October. Thanks to Gretchen King, Tariq Jeeroburkhan, David Koch, Jane Kirby, Courtney Kirkby, David Parker, Christopher Currie, Pierre Loiselle, Erica Butler, Erin Ashley, Candice Cascanette, Stephen Kelly, Melissa Albiani, Leanne Arnison. Featuring submissions from: CKDU, Halifax, NS; CFRC, Kingston, ON; CKUT, Montreal, QC. This month's edition of Groundwire was produced by CKDU 88.1 FM campus community radio in Halifax. To reach us by email, send your feedback to groundwire at ncra.ca. Groundwire is aired on the following stations: CFRO, Vancouver, BC; CJSR, Edmonton, AB; CKUT, Montreal, QC; CFRC, Kingston, ON; CJSF, Burnaby, BC; CKLN, Toronto, ON; CKDU, Halifax, NS; CKXU, Lethbridge, AB; CHMA, Sackville, NB; CHRY, Toronto, ON; CFMU, Hamilton, ON; CFUR, Prince George, BC; CJLY, Nelson, BC; CORT, Cortes Island, BC; CFRU, Guelph, ON; CHUO, Ottawa, ON; CHMR, St. John`s NL; CHSR, Fredericton, NB; CFMH, St. John, NB; C99, Membertou, NS; GABR, Gabriola, BC; CFBX, Kamloops, BC; CJAM, Windsor, ON. ------- groundwire.ncra.ca groundwire at ncra.ca From critical.montages at gmail.com Wed Dec 10 17:27:14 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:27:14 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Tariq Ali: Diary Message-ID: Diary Tariq Ali If cheating in bed was always settled by the bullet, many of us would be dead. Gerald Martin's new biography of Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez reveals that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was based on the murder of the novelist's friend Cayetano Gentile in Sucre in 1951. He had seduced, deflowered and abandoned Margarita Chica Salas. On her wedding day Margarita's husband was told that she was no longer a virgin. The bride was sent back to her family home. Her brothers then found Gentile and chopped his body into pieces. M?rquez blamed the socio-moral dictatorship of the Catholic Church. But of course it is usually women who are killed for breaking codes of sexual conduct. There have been several recent cases in Britain. Banaz Mahmod, a 20-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered in Surrey at the behest of her father because she'd left an arranged marriage and her father didn't approve of her new boyfriend. Iraq has lately seen a spate of such murders. Last month acid was thrown at three women in Basra who were talking to a male friend. Yet Iraq once had the highest proportion of women integrated into every level of society of any Arab country. And then there is Pakistan. In 2005 Pervez Musharraf pushed through legislation making honour killing a capital offence yet official statistics admit to 1261 honour killings in 2006 and half that number again the following year. The actual figures are probably much higher, since many deaths go unreported. 'Women are considered the property of the males in their family irrespective of their class, ethnic or religious group, and the owner of the property has the right to decide its fate,' Tahira Shahid Khan of Shirkat Gah, a group that campaigns for equal rights for women, reported in 1999. Domestic violence too, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, is 'considered normal . . . A sample survey showed 82 per cent of women in rural Punjab feared violence resulting from their husbands' displeasure over minor matters; in the most developed urban areas 52 per cent admitted being beaten by their husbands.' Consider the following. A man dreams his wife has betrayed him. He wakes up and sees her lying next to him. In a fury he kills her. This really happened in Pakistan and the killer escaped punishment. If dreams are to be treated as justification for an honour killing, what woman is safe? Since the police and the judicial system regard murder in the family as a private affair, most cases don't get to court even if they're reported. Society, it's said, needs to protect its foundations. So mostly we rely on the information collected by the Human Rights Commission and on courageous lawyers like Hina Jilani and Asma Jehangir, two sisters both of whom have received numerous death threats. In 1999, Hina Jilani was in her office with Samia Sarwar, a mother of two from Peshawar seeking a divorce from her husband, when Sarwar's mother burst into the room with two armed men in tow and had her daughter shot dead. In 1989 Samia Sarwar had married a first cousin. For six years he beat her and kicked her. But after he threw her downstairs when she was pregnant with their second child, she went back to her parents' house. The minute she told them she wanted a divorce they threatened to kill her. Yet they were educated and wealthy people. One widely reported murder this year was that of Tasleem Solangi, the 17-year-old daughter of a livestock trader in the Khairpur District of Sindh. She wanted to go to university and become a doctor like her uncle, but instead agreed to marry a cousin in order to settle a protracted family dispute over property. Her mother, Zakara Bibi, tried to stop her, but Tasleem was determined. Her father-in-law, Zamir Solangi, came to collect her and swore on the Koran that no harm would befall her. A month after the marriage, Zakara had a message from her daughter: 'Please forgive me, mother. I was wrong and you were right. I fear they will kill me.' On 7 March, they did. She was eight months pregnant. The Koran-swearer accused her of infidelity and said the baby was not his son's. She went into labour, her child was born and instantly thrown to the dogs. She pleaded for mercy, but the dogs were set on her as well and the terrified girl was then shot dead. On this occasion at least there was an inquiry. Her husband was charged with Tasleem's murder and is currently awaiting trial. Another case much discussed this year is that of five women in Baluchistan who were buried alive in Baba Kot village, about 250 miles east of Quetta, the Baluch capital. Three of the women were young and wanted to marry men they'd chosen for themselves; two older women were helping them. Three male relatives have been arrested. According to the local police chief, the brother of two of the girls has admitted that he shot three of the women and helped bury them, though they weren't even dead. The trial date is awaited. Traditionalists have always considered love to be something that brings shame on families: patriarchs should be the ones to decide who is to be married to whom, often for reasons to do with property. If you fall in love, the 18th-century Urdu poet Mir Hassan explained (more than once), you will be burned by its fire and perish. That is what happened in the Punjabi city of Wah in late October. Now Wah has half a million inhabitants and Pakistan's largest ordnance factories, but it was once an idyllic village almost floating on water. The streams and lakes that surrounded it attracted the Mughal emperor Jehangir, who stopped there on his way home from Kashmir, and is said to have exclaimed 'Wah!' or 'Wow!', thus giving the village its name. Before that it had been called Jalalsar after one of my forebears, Sardar Jalal Khan, a leader of the Khattar tribe around 800 years ago. His successors wanted to please the emperor and agreed to the name change. I can't imagine that the decision was taken without a fierce struggle (one faction is said to have been deeply hostile to the arriviste Mughals), but those speaking sweetnesses to power won the day. Jehangir built a beautiful, domed rest-house in Wah, surrounded on all sides by flowing water. In 1639, his son Shah Jehan supervised the landscaping of beautiful water gardens and pavilions. More than half a century ago, I used to play hide and seek here with my cousins. The pavilions were ruins by then, which made them even more magical on a moonlit night. A cousin swore that the ghosts of the Mughals could be seen in the mist on a winter night, but nobody believed her. The caretaker was extremely sharp-tongued, although when talking to my uncles and aunts, he masked his intelligence in language of exaggerated humility. We were never deceived and threatened to expose him if he gave us a hard time. Other ghosts lurk there now. A mile and a half from the old village, my youngest maternal uncle, Sardar Ghairat Hyat Khan, built himself a house and moved out of the decaying manor house we'd all shared. My Kashmiri great-grandmother, Ayesha, moved with him. Before she became completely blind she was the best cook in the world and my visits were always rewarding. Shortly before I left Pakistan for Britain I went to say goodbye to her. She said: 'I feel a moustache. Is it really you?' 'No,' I replied trying to make my voice deeper, 'I am a stranger here, but I was told your bakarkhanis tasted like heaven.' Bakarkhanis are a crumbly, Kashmiri version of the croissant. I've not been to his house for a long time but I'm told it's in a state of disrepair and crumbling like the bakarkhanis. In the last week of October, my uncle's granddaughter, Zainab, barely 18 years old, was shot dead by her brothers, Inam and Hamza Ahmed. Zainab apparently had a lover and despite repeated warnings refused to stop seeing him. She was on the phone to him in her grandfather's house when her brothers pumped seven bullets into her body. I don't know whether her mother, Ghairat's oldest daughter Roohi, whom I last saw when she was about ten, was part of the plot. Whether or not she was involved, I find it deeply shocking that my uncle allowed the young woman's body to be buried that same day without at least insisting that a First Information Report be lodged at the local police station, let alone demanding an autopsy. Zainab deserved at least that. I am told that Ghairat is old and frail, that he was angry and wanted to ring the police, but was talked out of it by his daughter and other members of his immediate family, who collectively recoiled at having to accept the consequences of what they had witnessed. Perhaps his faith in a just and merciful Allah was not as strong as he used to claim. Whatever the reason, it's unacceptable. The body should be exhumed, the murderers arrested and put on trial, as the law requires. Tariq Ali's latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. Other articles by this contributor: In Princes' Pockets ? Saudi Oil Pakistan at Sixty ? The Trouble with Pakistan Daughter of the West ? the Bhuttos Mullahs and Heretics ? A Secular History of Islam Bitter Chill of Winter ? Kashmir The General in His Labyrinth ? Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Wed Dec 10 19:39:39 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:39:39 -0400 Subject: [R-G] solidarity with our greek comrades is needed now more then ever Message-ID: <164236a30812101839k2753015cg88efcd55528f59be@mail.gmail.com> International Resistance *This is a list of incidents, neglected news, that rarely makes the headlines. As an overview of social conflict, class struggle, eco-war, self-organisation, etc. it could never be anything but a partial listing, but it is merely a collection of moments defined by their participants. * * * *7,8,9 December, Germany* - After the police murder of a Greek comrade in Athens, solidarity actions widen in all Germany: from big city to small towns,many are taking the streets these days. Here a short report about what was going on until now - more to come within the next days. Our solidarity does not know any border - acab everywhere! *Enraged individuals* --- *Sunday 7.12* *Berlin*: spontaneous demonstration with 200 people in the district of Kreuzberg. *Hamburg*: spontaneous demonstration with over 100 people. *Koln*: paintbombs against the Greek consulate. *Dresden*: a courthouse get its windows smashed and graffitis in solidarity with Greek comrades spaypainted. *Monday 8.12* *Berlin*: occupation of the greek consulate by a group of 30 anarchists, a banner reading "Alexander Grigoropoulos, 16 years old, murdered by the State!" was hanged from the consulate's balcony, leaflets have been thrown on the streets and distributed, while about 70 solidarious people held a rally in front of the building. Nobody got stopped by the cops and the action finished in the evening. Pictures: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,594983,00.html *Hamburg*: meeting with over 70 people to discuss further moments of solidarity, spontaneous demonstration with 100 people afterwards, the banner reading "solidarity is a weapon - revolt an argument - we remember Alexander!" Pictures of both demos (sunday/monday) : http://de.indymedia.org/2008/12/235472.shtml *Dresden*: 50 people gather for a spontaneosu demonstration. Bremen: about 100 people demonstrate. *Koln*: 250 take the streets towards the greek consulate, speeches in greek and german are made about the situation, fireworks exploded against the cops, some chairs fly against some shop windows. Pictures: http://de.indymedia.org/2008/12/235255.shtml *Potsdam*: 60 people gather for a spontaneous demonstration, distribute flyers and explode fireworks in front of the local police station screaming "police murders". *Schnerverdingen*: 25 people take the streets and distribute flyers Dresden: 30 people take the streets through the local christmas market, creating chaos by pulling down trashbins and other material on the streets, when passing in front the police station they smashed one of the cop car parked on its front. *Tuesday 9.12* *Leipzig*: spontaneous demonstration with 200 comrades, also in solidarity to Timo, a german comrade currently under trial in Thessaloniki and the acquittance of the cops who burned the african refugee Oury Jallo in Dessau in 2005, acquittance just happened on the 8.12, cops try to stop the demo without succeding. *Jena*: 30 anarchists take the streets and smash a bank. Dortmund: 60 people take the streets. *Frankfurt*: 150 take the streets towards the greek consulate, some smashed banks on the end. *Rostock*: 150 take the streets, the banner reading "policemen are murders - Greece is everywhere - Genoa, Athens, Dessau", several fireworks have been exploded against the police. *Konstanz*: 30 people take the streets. *Hannover*: 70 people make a spontaneous demonstration to the greek consulate and distribute flyers Pictures: http://de.indymedia.org/2008/12/235382.shtml On Friday (12.12) there is going to be a demonstration in Berlin in solidarity with the MG-defendants under trial: surely another occasion for showing solidarity... *9 December, Bristol, UK* - Bristol police station attacked in rage over killing of Alexis, 16 year old anarchist of Athens, Greece. *"As police repression in Greece escalates, we, a few of many anarchists in Bristol, feel compelled to act in solidarity with Greek anarchists. We see those struggling against police repression abroad as allies in the fight against state repression throughout the world. All repressive state institutions are targets.* *Last night, Newfoundland Road police station was attacked. Missiles were launched at their vehicle compound, damaging bodywork and windscreens, rendering around eight police vehicles inoperable, at least for the day. A message of solidarity was sprayed on the station.* *We urge anarchists who feel a sense of solidarity with greek anarchists to take immediate action, by whatever means necessary."* From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Dec 10 19:47:09 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:47:09 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The End of the US Piano Industry Message-ID: <49407F2D.701@ashisuto.co.jp> by Jeffrey A Tucker LewRockwell.com (December 10 2008) Today the highest-price good that people buy besides their houses is their car, and this reality leads people to believe that we can't possibly let the American car industry die. We couldn't possibly be a real country and a powerful nation without our beloved auto industry, which is so essential to our national well-being. What about the time before the car? Between 1870 and 1930, the biggest ticket item on every household budget besides the house itself was its piano. Everyone had to have one. Those who didn't have one aspired to have one. It was a prize, an essential part of life, and they sold by the millions and millions. Americans before 1850 mostly imported their pianos. American manufacturing was nearly nonexistent. After 1850, that changed dramatically. The Gilded Age saw a vast increase in popularity. By 1890, Americans fed half the world market for pianos. Between 1890 and 1928, sales ranged from 172,000 to 364,000 thousand per year. It was a case of relentless and astounding growth. They were used in classrooms everywhere in times when music education was considered to be the foundation of a good education. They were the concert instruments in homes before recorded music and iPods. They were essential for all entertainment. American buyers couldn't get enough, and private enterprise responded. There was the great Chickering piano made by a company founded in 1823 and which later led the world in beauty and sound. There was Hallet and Davis in Boston, J and C Fischer in New York, as well as Strich and Ziedler, Hazelton, William Knabe, Weber, Mason and Hamlin, Decker and Sons, Wurlitzer, Steck, Kimball in Chicago, and, finally Steinway. The American piano industry was the greatest in the world, not because the Americans came up with any new and great manufacturing techniques, though there were some innovations, but because the economic conditions made it most favorable to be manufactured here. It was widely believed that spending money on a piano wasn't really spending. It was an investment. The money you paid would be embedded right there in this beautiful and useful item. You can always sell it for more than you paid for it, and this was generally true. So people would make great sacrifices for these instruments. With the growth of this manufacturing came an explosion of shops that served the piano market all up and down the industry. Piano tuning was a big-time profession. Retail shops with pianos opened everywhere, and the sheet-music business exploded with them. Ever notice how in big cities the music stores are typically family owned and established forty, fifty, and even 100 years ago? This is a surviving remnant of our industrial past. All of this changed in 1930, which was the last great year of the American piano. Sales fell and continued to fall when times were tough. The companies that were beloved by all Americans fell on hard times and began to go belly up one by one. After World War II the trend continued, as ever more pianos began to be made overseas. In 1960, we began to see the first major international challenge to what was left of the US market position. Japan was already manufacturing half as many pianos as the US. By 1970, a revolution occurred as Japan's production outstripped the US, and it has been straight down ever sense. By 1980, Japan made twice as many as the US. Then production shifted to Korea. Today China is the center of world piano production. You probably see them in your local hotel bar. And what happened to the once-beloved and irreplaceable American piano industry? Only Steinway survives to make luxury instruments few can afford. The rest moved overseas under new ownership or were completely wiped out. Does any one care that much? Not too many. Have we been devastated as a nation and a people because of it? Not at all. It was just a matter of the economic facts. The demand went down and production costs for the pianos that were wanted were much cheaper elsewhere. Now, a piano aficionado reading this will say: buddy, you are crass. Listen to the sound of an older model Chickering and you can tell the difference. It was warm and wonderful, nearly symphonic. It is mellow and perfect for the best repertoire. By comparison, this new Chinese piano is sharp and angular and pointed. It sounds like a marimba. You can't play Schubert or Brahms on such junk. No one wants to hear that thing. Bring back the old days when pianos made sounds that sounded like real music! Well, you can still get that old Chickering sound, even from a piano made in New York. You can buy a Steinway. Of course you have to pay $50,000 plus and even as much as $120,000, but they are there. You say that is unaffordable? Says you. It is all a matter of priorities. You can forego your house and live in a tiny apartment and still own the most gorgeous instrument money can buy. In any case, it makes no economic sense for you to demand a magnificent piano at a very low price when reality does not make that possible. In the same way, many people will bemoan the loss of the US car industry and wax eloquent on the glory days of the 1957 Chevy or what have you. But we need to deal with the reality that this is in the past. Economics demands forward motion, a conforming to the facts on the ground and a relentless and realistic assessment of the relationship between cost and price, supply and demand. We must learn to love these forces in society because they are the only things that keep rationality alive in the way we use resources. Without them, there would be nothing but waste and chaos, and eventual starvation and death. We simply cannot live outside economic reality. Let's say that FDR had initiated a bailout of the piano industry and the even taken it over and nationalized it. The same firms would have made the same pianos for decades and decades. But that wouldn't have stopped the Japanese industry from taking off in the 1960s and 1970s. Americans would have far preferred them because they would be cheaper. American pianos, because they would be state-owned, would fall in quality, lower and lower to the point that they would become like a Soviet car in the 1960s. Of course you could set up tariff barriers. That would have forced American pianos on us. Except for one thing: demand would have still collapsed. The pianos still have to have a market. But let's say you find a workaround for that problem by requiring everyone to own a piano. You still can?t make people play them and value them. In the end you have to ask: is it really worth trillions in subsidies, vast tariffs, impositions all around, just to keep what you declare to be an essential industry alive? Well, eventually, as we have learned in the case of pianos, this is not essential. Things come and things go. Such is the world. Such is the course of events. Such is the forward motion of history in a world of relentless progress generated by the free market. Thank goodness that FDR didn't bother saving the US piano industry! As a result, Americans can get a huge range of instruments from all countries in the world at any price they are willing to pay. Today government is even more arrogant and absurd, and it actually believes that by passing legislation it can save the US car industry. It can subsidize and pay for uneconomic activities, and pay ever more every year. The government can also pay millions of people to make mud pies because mud pies are deemed to be an essential industry. You can do this, but at what cost and what could possibly be the point? Eventually, even the government will have to accord itself to the reality that economics reminds us of on a daily basis. _____ Jeffrey Tucker [jatucker at mindspring.com] is editorial vice president of www.Mises.org. Copyright (c) 2008 http://www.lewrockwell.com/tucker/tucker115.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org Thu Dec 11 05:59:14 2008 From: hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org (Hunter Gray) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:59:14 -0700 Subject: [R-G] If you encounter problems re our website, let us know Message-ID: <002e01c95b90$477ecb80$0400a8c0@computer> NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR: DECEMBER 11 2008 Let us know if you encounter problems with the movement pace of our Lair of Hunterbear Website -- or anything else therein. Our good Finnish friend, Jyri, who is aware of our situation here in Idaho, including our computer hassles, has just written in part: "Hunter, There is something wrong with the site, at least occasionally. Sometimes it works normally and sometimes it freeezes or moves very slowly. I've noticed this using two different computers with different Internet connections. " On Monday, I reported on the previous day's [Sunday] obviously weird and, at least to a large extent, externally malicious problems we faced and dealt with re some of our work on our Hunterbear website. These have been endemic since the intiation of the site at the beginning of 2000 -- and even with our predessor trial balloon -- a small Microsoft freebee arrangement which we launched in 1999 called "Red Wobbly." I've reported on these things occasionally. There are frequent assaults on our site which our full scale Norton consistently reports as "blocked." But our Norton protection does not seem able to deal pervasively with what are most likely hostile local efforts "under color of law." This-all is set in the context of a wide variety of harassment efforts that began for us even before we actually moved in here at Pocatello Idaho in July 1997. Among several other things, these thrusts involved many obvious efforts to delay and even impair our postal mail. These obvious efforts appear less focused on slick "intelligence gathering" and much more on simply creating difficulties. Last Sunday's problems occurred when I began to do a little feathering out of our website pages containing FBI surveillance material from earlier activist periods of mine. [Our activism continues and it's probable that my FBI files etc are now much larger than those represented by our Freedom of Information Act retrievals of some years ago.] Last Sunday's problems, focusing on our work on the FBI stuff, featured -- as I reported -- the bizarre theft of both sections of a vigorous letter of protest that I had written in 1984 to then FBI Director, William Webster, about a 1979 effort by the Albuquerque [Gallup] New Mexico FBI office to confuse me with an obviously deranged character named John R Satter -- maybe a real person, maybe simply an invention. The Webster letter and the related material had been on our site since we began Hunterbear in 2000 -- but was not to the fore. [All of it is now.] The two parts of the letter disappeared in the midst of my efforts to re-publish the slightly expanded page. We were able, eventually, to succeed in rescanning my file copy of the Webster letter and republishing it. The poisonous 1979 material was, as I've noted, ostensibly corrected by the FBI. But the denigrating Albuquerquw/Gallup report, minus the FBI correction, was stolen from my office years later at the University of North Dakota and, as we later learned, surreptitiously used against me and my activist work. We have very good reason to believe that that poisonous page -- again, unaccompanied by the FBI correction -- has been used here for the same defamatory purposes. Hence, our move, among other things, to give all of this a conspicious place in our website Directory/Index. And that may explain why the contextual Webster letter was in some fashion, "seized." For reference, our basic link to the FBI stuff relating to me is http://hunterbear.org/witch_hunt_continuesthe_southern.htm [now a little expanded.] [There are other FBI pages sprinkled about our site -- but that is the main cluster.] So, to come to the point, we are asking that -- should you all happen to notice any problems in physically navigating our Hunterbear website, please let us know. Don't make any special effort -- but, again, if you should happen to spot odd difficulties, tell us. In the meantime, the Hunterbear website is consistently drawing a quite substantial number of visitors on a daily basis. We fight on -- always have and always will. Glad that I have two fine watch-dogs, a consistently protective cat, and a couple of loaded firearms always at hand. Solidarity, Hunter [Hunter Bear] HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? and Ohkwari' Check out our Hunterbear website Directory http://hunterbear.org/directory.htm [The site is dedicated to our one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray: http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm See our Community Organizing Course [with new material] http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm And see Hunter's Movement Life Interview: http://hunterbear.org/HUNTER%20BEAR%20INTERVIEW%20CRMV.htm From suzannedk at gmail.com Thu Dec 11 07:58:19 2008 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:58:19 +0100 Subject: [R-G] World oil demand to fall for first time in decades In-Reply-To: <562E7DA4-05CF-446F-A28E-762625238ECA@shaw.ca> References: <562E7DA4-05CF-446F-A28E-762625238ECA@shaw.ca> Message-ID: The fall in oil prices will effect the biggest ports that make their bread and butter on accepting and sending oil onward to other countries, such as the Rotterdam port in the Netherlands, the home of the International Criminal Court. Rotterdam port may be the boggest in the Western world for oil transport. Antwerp, in Belgium, is the largest and busiest for container goods shipping in Europe, Belgium being the home of the main Parlement of the 27 countries of the EU. The "Global War on Libeerty" by Jean-Claude Paye, held back fom publication by the Bush administration for thee years, never advertised or distibuted in large, sometimes no any, amounts, explains a great many of the earth shaking changes hitting all of us. Including oil. Suzanne de Kuyper Amsterdam, the Netherlands On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 1:37 AM, Anthony Fenton wrote: > World oil demand to fall for first time in decades > Tue Dec 9, 2008 4:25pm EST > By Tom Doggett > http://ca.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE4B84PY20081209?sp=true > > WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Global oil demand will contract for the first > time since the early 1980s as world economic growth slows to a near > standstill, the U.S. government said on Tuesday. > > The forecast for 2008 and 2009 is bad news for energy companies and > oil producing nations that depend on robust prices, but could benefit > cash-strapped consumers by sending gasoline and heating costs lower, > according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration report. > > World oil demand is projected to fall by 50,000 barrels per day in > 2008 and 450,000 barrels per day next year, the EIA said, led by a 1.2 > million bpd contraction in top consumer the United States this year a > 200,000 bpd drop in 2009. > > The report marked the first major forecast for shrinking energy demand > tied to the current global financial crisis. > > The lower forecast came as the EIA revised down its projection for > 2009 global economic growth to 0.5 percent next year, from the 1.8 > percent projection it made in its previous report issued in November. > > "The current global economic slowdown is now projected to be more > severe and longer ... leading to further reductions of global energy > demand and additional declines in crude oil and other energy prices," > the EIA said. > > The last time world petroleum demand fell was in 1983, part of four > years of straight declines in oil consumption that began in 1980, the > agency said. > > The weak economy and lower petroleum demand has already caused U.S. > crude oil prices to sink from a record $147 a barrel in July to $43 on > Tuesday -- a slump that has rattled energy producing nations like > Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela, and triggered massive cutbacks in > investment in oil projects like those in Canada's oil sands. > > "The increasing likelihood of a prolonged global economic downturn > continues to dominate market perceptions, putting downward pressure on > oil prices," the EIA said. > > Demand still is expected to grow next year in emerging economies such > as China, which helped drive the six-year rally in oil prices to > record highs. Still, the latest EIA report revised demand from this > group down by 40,000 bpd. > > PRICE DROP > > The EIA slashed its 2009 forecast for crude oil prices to $51 a barrel > from $63.50 a barrel in its previous forecast. > > "I don't think they are done revising. I think next month will be > lower. I'm having a hard time seeing GDP growth anywhere -- we may see > pockets of growth -- but not worldwide or regionally," said Peter > Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover, based in New Canaan, Connecticut. > > Meanwhile, the World Bank said on Tuesday that the world financial > crisis will sharply slow world economic growth next year, ending the > five-year global price boom for crude oil and other commodities. > > The weaker energy prices could mark a bright spot for consumers who > have been hard hit by the financial turmoil. > > The EIA said it cut its winter heating oil forecast to $2.53 a gallon > from $2.75 a gallon, and its 2009 gasoline price forecast to $2.03 a > gallon from $2.37. > > Average U.S. gasoline price are currently running about $1.70 a > gallon, down from a record $4.11 this summer. > > "We've lowered the bar for gasoline demand so much that it's going to > take years for it to recover to the type of demand numbers that we had > in the past," said Phil Flynn, analyst at Alaron Trading in Chicago. > > (Editing by Christian Wiessner) > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 11 10:40:29 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:40:29 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Canadian military goes global with new supply bases Message-ID: Canadian military goes global with new supply bases http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/551818 OTTAWA ? Canada's military is locked into the Afghan mission until 2011, but is preparing for the next war or peacekeeping mission by establishing a series of supply depots around the world, The Canadian Press has learned. Germany this week became the first country to agree to host a small detachment of Canadian military and civilian supply clerks, who will share space with the U.S. forces at an air base in Spangdahlem. Ottawa is also negotiating with other NATO allies and plans to approach governments in Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, the Caribbean and South America for similar ventures. "We've learned a lot through transformation and the operations of the past few years," Gen. Walter Natynczyk, the country's top military commander, said in a recent interview. The supply depots, essentially small warehouse operations located in strategic regions, would allow for the stockpiling of equipment and ammunition for future missions. Natynczyk said if the Canadian military is to play a role in hot spots around the world - as Defence Minister Peter MacKay recently suggested - then "we need significant bilateral relations with countries (where) we can pre-position combat supplies and equipment." The plan envisions both sea and air bases, staffed in some cases by as many as half a dozen Canadians, located in friendly countries but close to potential trouble spots. The depots could be used as jumping off points for military or humanitarian missions, said a senior defence official who spoke on background. Critics have long complained the Afghan war has hamstrung the Canadian army, tied up resources and prevented it from undertaking other armed interventions - or peacekeeping assignments. New Democrats, for example, have lobbied for an intervention to stop the genocide in Sudan's Darfur region. But military officers have said that such missions can work only if there staging points from which troops can deploy or be supplied. Natynczyk's predecessor, Gen. Rick Hillier, often warned the army didn't have the manpower to carry out two simultaneous operations in different parts of the globe. But documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act show the bigger problem has been establishing a supply train to sustain a tandem operation when the country has virtually no overseas military bases. "The CF lacks sufficient capability to constantly maintain the operational level support task because of policy decisions that resulted in these capabilities not being assigned or funded," said a November 2006 draft report prepared for National Defence headquarters. The cost-cutting abandonment of bases in Germany by the Mulroney government as part of its peace dividend in the early 1990s has particularly hampered the military's ability to quickly deploy missions abroad. Canada does maintain a secret base in the Middle East, through which much of the Afghan war supplies are funnelled. But the camp - an air base - has limited capacity. Since the closure of Canada's Cold War bases in Europe, supplies and equipment for troops in the field on UN peacekeeping missions have been shipped directly from Canada. It's a costly process, often complicated by the use of civilian cargo ships. On one occasion, a contract dispute after the war in Kosovo saw a shipping company refuse to deliver the army's vehicles and the Canadian navy put in the embarrassing position of having to seize the vessel on the high seas. There have also been ad hoc supply-base agreements, such as with tiny country of Qatar, to provide naval support during the first Gulf War. The reorganization of the Canadian Forces, championed by Hillier, saw the creation of a specific headquarters dedicated solely to supporting overseas missions - the Canadian Operational Support Command. One of its first tasks was to develop a list of potential countries where Canada could station forward-supply bases, similar in scope and size to "FedEx depots," said a senior defence official. From suzannedk at gmail.com Thu Dec 11 10:45:35 2008 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:45:35 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Israeli policies condemned In-Reply-To: <80644031-8738-4C5C-842A-B4EE45024791@shaw.ca> References: <80644031-8738-4C5C-842A-B4EE45024791@shaw.ca> Message-ID: Israeli policies are fully supported by the United States., economically, politically. U S foreign policies are driven by the theocratic state of Israel, S,M. de Kuyper On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 6:10 PM, Anthony Fenton wrote: > Dec 10, 2008 > Israeli policies condemned > > http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/World/Story/STIStory_312662.html > > GENEVA - THE UN expert on human rights in the Palestinian territories > said on Tuesday Israel's policies against their people amounted to a > 'crime against humanity.' > > In a statement, Richard Falk called on the United Nations to make an > 'urgent effort' to 'implement the agreed norm of a responsibility to > protect' a civilian population being collectively punished by policies > that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.' > > He went on: 'In a similar vein, it would seem mandatory for the > International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and > determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders > responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for > violations of international criminal law.' > > Mr Falk said that 'such a flurry of denunciations by normally cautious > UN officials has not occurred on a global level since the heyday of > South African apartheid', continuing: 'And still Israel maintains its > Gaza siege in its full fury, allowing only barely enough food and fuel > to enter to stave off mass famine and disease.' > > Israel allowed dozens of trucks filled with humanitarian supplies into > the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the fifth such shipment permitted to enter > the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory in the past month. > > The military also allowed in diesel fuel for Gaza's sole power plant > and for the UN refugee agency, which provides aid to hundreds of > thousands of Gazans. > > Israel has sealed off the territory from all but limited aid since the > Islamist Hamas movement - which is pledged to the destruction of the > Jewish state - seized power in Gaza in June 2007. > > Israel also opened Gaza to foreign journalists for the second time in > a month. > > After a surge in violence on Nov 4, Israel tightened the blockade and > has said it can not open the crossings because of the danger to its > staff at the terminals from mortar and rocket fire by Gaza militants. > -- AFP > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 11 12:18:12 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:18:12 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Tar sands leaking 11 million litres of tailings water a day: report Message-ID: December 10, 2008 Tar sands leaking 11 million litres of tailings water a day: report By Travis Lupick http://www.straight.com/article-175373/tar-sands-leaking-11-millionlitres-tailings-day-report The first comprehensive report on water pollution from Alberta?s tar sands estimates that 11 million litres of contaminated water is leaking into the environment every day. The report shines new light on how tar-sands pollution is regulated and describes current practices as a ?monitoring mess?. Matt Price, the report?s author, charges that monitoring and reporting on tailing-pond leakage is handled behind closed doors and is a classic case of the fox guarding the hen house. ?You?ve got an industry-funded and industry-dominated body monitoring industry activities,? Price told the Straight in a telephone interview. Prepared by Environmental Defence, a Toronto-based group, the report calculates that over four billion litres of contaminated water leaked from tailing ponds in 2007 alone. ?Should proposed projects go ahead on schedule, by 2012, this annual leakage rate would increase five-fold to 72 million litres a day?, the report says. Titled ?11 Million Litres a Day: The Tar Sands? Leaking Legacy?, the report explains that oil companies operating in the tar sands extract bitumen?a form of petroleum?from a mixture of sand, silt, and clay. Hot water is used to separate the bitumen, and then unwanted materials are dumped into tailing ponds. Toxic substances are present in the waste streams. According to the report, tailing water produced by the tar sands is ?widely acknowledged? to be harmful to human health. Price explained that tar-sands tailing ponds leak because their walls are simply made out of materials extracted from the earth, without any industrial liners. According to the report, tailing-pond leakage is monitored at two levels. Companies are required to self-monitor leakage into groundwater by drilling wells and supplying their findings to the government of Alberta. As well, the federal and provincial governments have delegated much of the responsibility for monitoring surface-water quality to a multi-stakeholder body called the Regional Aquatic Management Program. But according to the report, RAMP is ?funded and dominated by the tar sands companies? and many independent stakeholders which once participated in the organization have since distanced themselves. Environmental Defence?s report charges the federal government with failing to enforce the Fisheries Act, which prohibits the deposition of harmful substances in any place where it could enter water systems frequented by fish. Environment Canada responded to an interview request via e-mail and stated that specifics could not be commented on until a review of the report was complete. Alberta Environment did not respond to an interview request. Price stressed his deep concern about the potential long-term effects of tailing-pond leakage. ?It is kind-of what we?ve termed a ?slow- motion oil spill?,? he said. According to the report, Environmental Defence?s study used industry information from project applications to calculate conservative estimates for overall tar sands leakage rates. Calculations were conducted by the Pembina Institute. On October 28, the Vancouver-based Ethical Funds Company called for the suspension of new oil sands development pending the completion of conservation and land use planning.The group?s report warned that a ?heady mix of litigious, liability, regulatory, and reputational risks? are in store for any company involved in Alberta oil sands development. From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 11 12:45:14 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:45:14 -0800 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?Canada=3A_=93Progressive_coalition=94_rall?= =?windows-1252?q?ies_fail_to_denounce_constitutional_coup?= Message-ID: Canada: ?Progressive coalition? rallies fail to denounce constitutional coup By Carl Bronski and Eric Marquis 10 December 2008 http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/cana-d10.shtml Toronto demonstrationAbout 3,000 people gathered in Toronto?s Nathan Phillips Square last Saturday to support the parliamentary coalition formed last week between the Liberals, the Canadian ruling class? traditional party of government, and the social democrats of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in an effort to unseat the minority government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The Toronto rally was one of several organized in cities across Canada in recent days by Liberal, NDP, and Green Party supporters and by the trade union bureaucracy. In Montreal, at a rally Saturday that was attended by about one thousand, these were joined by supporters of the regionally-based, pro-Quebec independence Bloc Quebecois. The rallies occurred after a tumultuous week in Canadian politics, culminating with Harper, whose government faced imminent defeat on a non-confidence vote sparked by its parsimonious economic and fiscal update, prevailing upon Governor-General Micha?lle Jean to close parliament for seven weeks in order to buy his government more time to drive a wedge between the coalition partners. Never before had parliament been prorogued (suspended) so as to prevent MPs from voting out a government. Supporters of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) distributed a statement at the rallies titled ?Canada?s constitutional coup: A warning to the working class.? (See: Canada?s constitutional coup: A warning to the working class.) The statement explained that ?the suspension of parliament and of the MPs? right to defeat and replace the sitting government strikes at the most fundamental democratic right?the right of the people to choose their own government.? While calling on workers to oppose this constitutional coup, the SEP statement added that workers should give no political support to the ?progressive coalition??the alternate government to be formed by the Liberals and NDP and supported from the ?outside? by the Bloc Quebecois. Noting that the leaders of the three opposition parties had failed to denounce Governor-General Jean?s proroguing of parliament as an attack on democratic rights, the statement declared, ?The class character of the coalition?its subservience to big business?is underscored by its tepid reaction to [the Dec. 4] constitutional coup.? At neither rally Saturday did opposition leaders denounce last week?s coup and the archaic, anti-democratic institution that made it possible, the office of the governor-general. At the Toronto rally, contingents from the NDP and the trade unions mixed with well-heeled supporters of the big business Liberal Party, flag waving nationalists and supporters of various middle class radical tendencies. There was a large group of officials from the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union, who had been meeting at the nearby Sheraton Hotel where they were preparing a campaign to convince auto workers that further contract concessions will be required to secure a government ?bailout? of the Detroit-based Big Three. The CAW bureaucracy is one of the biggest backers of the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition, calculating that this formation will be more amenable to a coordinated and structured down-sizing of the auto industry than Harper?s Tories. It is an open secret that many within Harper?s Conservative caucus, especially from western Canada, favour allowing one or more of the automakers to go bankrupt, viewing this as the best way to reduce auto workers? wages, benefits, and working conditions and press for like concessions from workers in other industries. Both Liberal leader St?phane Dion and NDP chief, Jack Layton, addressed the gathering. But even as Dion was denouncing Harper for creating ?an economic, parliamentary and national unity crisis all in the same week,? members of his own party were actively conspiring to relieve him of his position. John Manley, a former deputy prime minister under Jean Chr?tien, that very morning had used the pages of the Globe and Mail to undermine Dion and the coalition. ?As a Liberal, I believe the first step for my party,? stated Manley, ?is to replace St?phane Dion as leader with someone whose first job is to rebuild the Liberal Party, rather than leading a coalition with the NDP.? At the rally itself, supporters of Bob Rae, a contender for the Liberal leadership, were actively organizing in the crowd to ensure that their man would be well-placed should Dion be forced from his position prior to his announced May 2009 departure date. Rae, who as the NDP premier of Ontario in the early 1990s imposed massive public spending cuts, a wage- and job-cutting ?social contract? and onerous tax hikes, is the most vocal proponent of the coalition within the Liberal Party. He is currently fighting a rearguard action to prevent fellow Liberal and coalition sceptic Michael Ignatieff from seizing the reins of power from Dion as early as this week. Rae, who represents a central Toronto constituency, was conspicuously absent from the rally, choosing instead to attend a pro-coalition event in Winnipeg two nights before. Dion, flanked by grim-faced Toronto Liberal MPs and erstwhile supporters Ken Dryden and Gerard Kennedy, took less than ten minutes to address the crowd. Taking extreme care not to mention, even for a moment, the grave constitutional questions raised by Governor-General Jean?s acquiescence to Harper?s padlocking of the Canadian parliament, Dion restricted his speech to a series of political attacks on Harper combined with extremely vague proposals for more government spending to address the economic crisis. After all, there have already been open disputes within his Liberal caucus over how large any economic stimulus package should be. It was left up to NDP leader Jack Layton to pick up Dion?s slack. Clearly pressing his advantage against Dion, the lame-duck coalition leader, Layton spoke energetically for over twenty minutes. But he also took care not to criticize the governor-general?s decision to prorogue parliament. Layton did go to some length in spelling out the type of spending proposals he would expect the coalition to pursue, highlighting, for instance, the timid suggestion that the two-week waiting period before laid off workers receive employment insurance payments be waived. Layton, who up until last month, had stuck doggedly to his election promise not to allow a budget deficit, was unable to produce any dollar figure for his spending proposals. A World Socialist Web Site reporter also visited the pro-Harper ?Rally for Canada? demonstration held at Queen?s Park in Toronto almost simultaneously with the pro-coalition protest. The pro-Conservative rally promoted the anti-democratic claim that the opposition parties do not have the legal and constitutional right to form an alternate government. It was attended by no more than four hundred flag-waving people and was addressed by a Conservative member of the Ontario legislature and a teenage Facebook organizer for the Tories. Clearly, the Conservative Party machine considered any further rallies unnecessary after the governor-general had ceded to their demand that parliament be prorogued so that the opposition could not vote non- confidence in the government. Saturday?s pro-coalition demonstration in Montreal was dominated by Quebec?s three major labor federations?the F?d?ration des travailleurs du Qu?bec (FTQ), the Centrale des syndicats nationaux (CSN), and the Centrale des syndicats du Qu?bec (CSQ)?and their affiliates. There were also delegations from the Quebec Women?s Federation, l?Union des artistes, Greenpeace, and one of the province-wide student federations, the F?d?ration ?tudiante universitaire du Qu?bec (FEUQ). Qu?bec Solidaire, the self-proclaimed left, Quebec sovereignist party, did not send an official delegation, but numerous of its partisans and candidates in the December 8 Quebec election were present. Following in the wake of the Bloc Qu?b?cois (BQ) and its sister party at the provincial level, the Parti Qu?b?cois, Qu?bec Solidaire has officially lent its support to a Liberal-led coalition government. In Quebec, support for the monarchy and the ?Queen?s representative,? the governor-general, is even less than elsewhere in Canada. But none of the three official representatives who addressed the rally?the Liberal Denis Coderre, Thomas Mulcair of the NDP, or BQ leader Gilles Duceppe?condemned the governor-general?s actions, let alone the institution. The nationalist character of the demonstration was most clearly expressed in Duceppe?s speech. The BQ leader made much of the attempt of Harper and the Conservatives to whip up anti-Quebec sentiment? which, to be sure, was utterly reactionary and in keeping with the Conservative government?s attack on democracy. Duceppe concluded his speech by calling for Quebec independence. From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Dec 11 13:12:08 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:12:08 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Peace activists get suspended sentences, probation for protest at military factory Message-ID: <0DCA8633-3586-4307-8B85-084EBAF217AF@shaw.ca> Peace activists get suspended sentences, probation for protest at military factory December 10, 2008 Bob Mitchell Staff Reporter http://www.thestar.com/News/Ontario/article/551623 Ten peace activists were given suspended sentences today after being found guilty of trespassing on the property of a Burlington company that makes military guidance systems for missiles. Justice of the Peace Ken Dechert also placed the accused, most of whom are either senior citizens or middle-aged men and women, on a year's probation that prevents them from staging a similar demonstration. "It's an outrageous decision," said Matthew Behrens, who was among those found guilty of trespassing two years ago on the property of a company known as L-3 Wescam on the North Service Rd., which makes hi- tech optical surveillance equipment for military purposes, including operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "By putting us on probation, the judge has sent a message that this company has the right to violate international law and trespass on the rights and lives of others in Afghanistan and Iraq and if you speak out, you will go to jail," Behrens said outside the courtroom. Five of the 10 accused appeared in court today. After Dechert delivered his nearly two-hour judgement, all of the defendants asked that no punishment be given to them, including one woman who stood and sang a British peace song. ". . . you can't shut my mouth when I sing," Kirsten Jones, 71, of Toronto sang, referring to the fact the protesters said they only wanted to speak with company executives to get them to stop manufacturing military weaponry the day of their arrests. In convicting them, Dechert ruled that their "justification defence" for their actions of Nov. 20, 2006 didn't override the company's legal right to prohibit people on its property. At their trial earlier this year, various defendants testified that they "honestly believed" they had an obligation under either international law or God's will to seek a non-violent way of trying to convince the company to stop producing weaponry. Even though they were told in advance not to cross a spray-painted line on the company's property, they did so in an attempt to speak with company officials, court heard. Halton Police arrested them after they sat on the ground and refused to leave the premises. It was their belief the production of the hi-tech optical military surveillance systems used in unmanned drones made Wescam a party to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was their defence that based on the terms of the Nuremberg principles, they had the right under international law to defy the wishes of the company. Dechert could have imposed a fine of up to $2,000 but he told the defendants that he didn't think a fine would "serve any purpose" as a punishment. He said there was no doubt their reasons for trespassing were driven by their "strong moral" and in some cases "religious convictions" but, nevertheless, they broke the law. While Dechert believed "they honestly believed" they had a "moral obligation," they didn't have any "legal interest" in the property that would allow them to defy the company's right to prohibit them from entering the property. Behren described today's decision as being "dangerous" in the sense that if Wescam decided they didn't want "Jews on their property" they could order them removed because their rights as "legal land owner" trumped other rights. Behrens said the peace activists have tried to meet with company executives for six years without any success. "The probation order effectively says we can't have a dialogue with Wescam because the minute we set foot on their property, whether we're carrying a picket sign or not, we will be booted off and charged," he said. Today's verdict came more than two years after their arrests and on the 60th anniversary of Human Rights Day. Dechert noted there was no damage done to any property and nobody was injured and "true to their peaceful convictions" they didn't struggle when arrested. About 40 people actually participated in the noon-hour protest that day. Some of the defendants are members of a group known as Homes not Bombs, a collection of peace and social justice groups and individuals from across southern Ontario. Court heard today how one of the defendants, David Milne, 61, of Bellville said at trial how he was "compelled by God" to seek a meeting with company executives the day of the protest. Also convicted today were Gail Lorimer, Francis Barningham, Margaret Panter, Behrens, Daniel Hilton, David Marshall, James Smith and Thomas York. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 11 15:18:01 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:18:01 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Study: US arms sales undermine global human rights Message-ID: <200812112218.mBBMI1DG012848@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081211/0a83adbd/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 11 15:48:44 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:48:44 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Invoking the Holocaust to Defend the Occupation Message-ID: <200812112248.mBBMmi8x029949@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081211/c4355d93/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 11 15:50:12 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:50:12 -0800 Subject: [R-G] One Thriving Sector: The Business of War Message-ID: <200812112250.mBBMoCkq002797@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081211/720587c1/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 11 15:49:35 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:49:35 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Afghan attention deficit disorder Message-ID: <200812112249.mBBMnZlV001257@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081211/81e40981/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Dec 11 15:49:09 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:49:09 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Israels Hitler to Join the Knesset Message-ID: <200812112249.mBBMn9UW000513@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081211/2fd81801/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Dec 11 18:00:36 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:00:36 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Agent Orange's toxic legacy lingers on Message-ID: <4941B7B4.2020202@ashisuto.co.jp> www.russiatoday.com (November 17 2008) More than thirty years after it ended, the Vietnam War is still having a devastating impact on the lives of ordinary people. Up to five million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange, a deadly herbicide sprayed by the US Army over wide areas. The chemical killed tens of thousands but has left a tragic legacy of birth defects and disabilities in those born long after the war. Almost eighty million litres of the poisonous herbicide was sprayed by the US military during the war in Vietnam. The aim was to destroy the jungle that provided cover for the Vietnamese army. But the powerful weed killer contained one of the world's most toxic chemicals - dioxin. Cancer, birth defects, psychiatric disorders and diabetes are just a few of the diseases caused by it. Vu Tan Kim was a soldier during the war. He says when the chemical was sprayed on their base, they didn't know how dangerous it was. Only after his daughter was born he was told by doctors the dioxin he was exposed to had affected his genes. His daughter is blind, her arms and legs are deformed and she is mentally handicapped. "If I had my leg cut or went blind, that's ok. But here my blood was poisoned and even though the war ended in Vietnam, every time I come home I feel very sad when I see my daughter", he says. He says the one dollar a day he gets from his government is not enough and that it's the US who should compensate. However, America's constitution protects those who were responsible at the time, so the victims took the companies who developed Agent Orange to court. But the judge, who had previously awarded millions of dollars to American veterans who suffered from the poison, threw the case out. Nguyen Trong Nhan is a leading official of the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA). He says that, despite having little faith in America's legal system, the battle continues and they hope to win their appeal. Da Nang International Airport is now a gateway for millions of tourists. What they don't know is that it's also one of Vietnam's three toxic hot spots. The American military stored unused dioxin at this former airbase. Lev Fedorov, Doctor of Chemical Science says: "Local people here are still being chronically poisoned. The dioxin that was sprayed on the territory doesn't' go anywhere. It's very resistant." Residents nearby were warned only last year that vegetables grown here and fish caught in the lake are poisonous. _____ To learn more, please click http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/33361/video . NOTE: The story contains images which you might find disturbing. http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/33361 TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From suzannedk at gmail.com Thu Dec 11 19:45:28 2008 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:45:28 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Study: US arms sales undermine global human rights In-Reply-To: <200812112218.mBBMI1DG012848@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> References: <200812112218.mBBMI1DG012848@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Message-ID: The United States does demand respect or you go to prison at the same time it arms the world and foments wars. That is now U.S. law. Read "Global War on Liberty" by Jean-Claude Paye. S.M. de Kuyper Amsterdam the Netherlands On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:18 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > Associated Press > December 10, 2008 > > > Study: US arms sales undermine global human rights > > > By Barry Shweid > > > Washington The U.S. arms trade is booming sales reached $32 billion > last year and more than half of the purchasers in the developing world > are either undemocratic governments or regimes that engaged in human > rights abuses, a private think tank reported Wednesday. > > > Timed to the 60th anniversary of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of > Human Rights, the report by the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan > policy institute, named 13 of the top 25 arms purchasers in the > developing world as either undemocratic or engaged in major human > rights abuses. > > > The 13 listed in the report were Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, United > Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, Colombia, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman, > Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia. > > > Sales to these countries totaled more than $16.2 billion over 2006 and > 2007. > > > The total "contrasts sharply with the Bush administration's > pro-democracy rhetoric," the report said. > > > Also, the report said that 20 of the 27 nations engaged in major armed > conflicts were receiving weapons and training from the United States. > > > "U.S. arms transfers are undermining human rights, weakening democracy > and fueling conflict around the world," the report said. > > > At the State Department, a spokesman said U.S. policy on sale or > transfer of U.S. munitions is well-established. > > > The decision to approve any sale or transfer is made only after a > careful review within the government that takes into account a > country's need for an item, its human rights record and whether the > arms transfer supports U.S. foreign policy and national security > goals, said Jason Greer, a spokesman for the Bureau of > Political-Military Affairs. > > > He also said, "We consult closely with Congress on such matters." > > > William D. Hartung, the lead author of the report, said, "The United > States cannot demand respect for human rights and arm human rights > abusers at the same time." > > > U.S. arms sales grew to $32 billion in 2007, more than three times the > level when President Bush took office in 2001, the report said. > > > The United States is the world's largest arms supplier. U.S. exports > range from combat aircraft to Pakistan, Morocco, Greece, Romania and > Chile to small arms and light weapons to the Philippines, Egypt and > Georgia. > > > In 2006 and 2007, the United States sold weapons to more than 174 > states and territories. At the beginning of the Bush administration > there were 123 arms clients, the report said. > > > On the Net: > > > * New America Foundation: [1]http://www.newamerica.net > > References > > 1. > http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.newamerica.net&usg=AFQjCNFE7MQgOQ46-hasszLjctPUWqsggA > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Dec 12 02:11:46 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:11:46 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] NATO Still Killing People in Kosovo Message-ID: <49422AD2.1010702@ashisuto.co.jp> Back in 1999 NATO carried out a 78-day shelling of Serbia and Kosovo. They allegedly used depleted uranium which continues to kill people. www.javno.com (November 11 2008) Nine years after NATO's bombing of Serbia, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is still taking lives in Kosovo, Serbia's Pressonline reported. The NATO allegedly used shells with depleted uranium which are still today causing an increase in the number of cancer patients. Prior to 1999, the number of Serbs who suffered from malignant tumours was three times lesser, according to the statistics of Serb hospitals. In Kosovo's Kosovska Mitrovica in 2005 there were 38 percent more cancer patients than in 2004. In those two years, a total of 3,500 cancer cases in Kosovo Albanians were diagnosed. Globally, six people out of a thousand suffer from malignant tumours on average. In the Kosovska Mitrovica hospital, there are 200 cancer patients to 1,000 people. After 2000, groups of experts in atomic energy tested water, food, air, plants and animals to establish the damage caused by radiation from NATO shells. Beta and Gamma radiation was higher than the permissible level and radiation was discovered in the soil, water, plants and animals. After it gets into the soil, it takes some 250 years for depleted uranium to degrade. The conclusions of the studies were that the environment on 100 locations in Kosovo was not safe for animals or people, but no bans or moving of the population was carried out. European peace troops stationed in Kosovo knew there was great danger of radiation in these areas. Italian military experts concluded in 2005 that 34 soldiers had died from leukaemia and various malignant tumours. Since then 150 soldiers from Kosovo were sent home. In mid-2000 NATO published a map with 112 marked locations that had been shelled with depleted uranium. Over the 78 days of NATO bombing, a total of 31,000 shells with depleted uranium, weapons banned by international treaties, were dropped in Kosovo. http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=204500 TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Fri Dec 12 09:07:20 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:07:20 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Uprising in Greece: Protests, Riots, Strikes Enter 6th Day Following Fatal Police Shooting of Teen Message-ID: <8E9ECC10-54EF-498B-AACC-7A3555549E5C@shaw.ca> http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/11/greek_uprising_protests_riots_strikes_enter December 11, 2008 Uprising in Greece: Protests, Riots, Strikes Enter 6th Day Following Fatal Police Shooting of Teen Protests, riots and clashes with police have overtaken Greece for the sixth straight day since the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy in Athens Saturday night. One day after Wednesday?s massive general strike over pension reform and privatization shut down the country, more than a hundred schools and at least fifteen university campuses remain occupied by student demonstrators. A major rally is expected Friday, and as solidarity protests spread to neighboring Turkey, as well as Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Denmark and the Netherlands, dozens of arrests have been made across the continent. We speak to a student activist and writer from Athens. [includes rush transcript] AMY GOODMAN: Protests, riots and clashes with police have overtaken Greece for the sixth straight day since the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy in Athens Saturday night. One day after Wednesday?s massive general strike over pension reform and privatization shut down the country, more than a hundred schools and at least fifteen university campuses remain occupied by student demonstrators. A major rally is expected on Friday. And as solidarity protests spread to neighboring Turkey, as well as Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Denmark and the Netherlands, dozens of arrests have been made across the continent. On Wednesday, two police officers involved in Saturday?s shooting were arrested, and one was charged with murder. But anger remains high over the officers? failure to express remorse at the student?s death. The police officers claim the bullet that killed Alexandros Grigoropoulos was fired in self-defense, and the death was an accident caused by a ricochet. The unrest this week has been described as the worst since the end of the military dictatorship in 1974 and could cost the already weakened Greek economy an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars. It?s also shaken the country?s conservative government that has a narrow one- person majority in Parliament. The socialist opposition has increased calls for the prime minister to quit and call new elections, ignoring his appeals for national unity. I?m joined now on the telephone by a student activist and writer from Athens. He?s with the Greek Socialist Workers Party. He?s a graduate student in political philosophy at Panteion University in Athens. We welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you lay out for us exactly when this all began and how the protests have escalated and what they?re about right now, Nikos Lountos? NIKOS LOUNTOS: Yes, Amy. I?m very glad to talk with you. So, we are in the middle of an unprecedented wave of actions now and protests and riots. It all started on Saturday evening at around 9:00 p.m., when a policeman patrolling the Exarcheia neighborhood in Athens shot and murdered in cold blood the fifteen-year-old schoolboy Alexis. The first response was an attempt to cover up the killing. The police claimed that they had been attacked. But the witnesses all around were too many for this cover-up to happen. So, all the witnesses say that it was a direct shot. So even the government, in just a few hours, had to claim that it will move against the police, trying to calm the anger. But the anger exploded in the streets. In three, four hours, all the streets around Athens were filled with young people demonstrating against the police brutality. The anti-capitalist left occupied the law school in the center of Athens and turned it into headquarters for action. And on Sunday, there was the first mass demonstration. Thousands of people of every age marched towards the police headquarters and to the parliament. And the next day, on Monday, all this had turned into a real mass movement all around Greece. What was the most striking was that in literally every neighborhood in every city and town, school students walked out of their school on Monday morning. So you could see kids from eleven to seventeen years old marching in the streets wherever you could be in Greece, tens of thousands of school students, maybe hundreds of thousands, if you add all the cities. So, all around Athens and around Greece, there were colorful demonstration of schoolboys and schoolgirls. Some of them marched to the local police stations and clashed with the police, throwing stones and bottles. And the anger was so really thick that policemen and police officers had to be locked inside their offices, surrounded by thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys and girls. The picture was so striking that it produced a domino effect. The trade unions of teachers decided an all-out strike for Tuesday. The union of university lecturers decided a three-day strike. And so, there was the already arranged, you know, the strike you mentioned for Wednesday against the government?s economic policies, so the process was generalizing and still generalizes. AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos, when you have this kind of mass protest, even with the beginning being something so significant as the killing of a student, it sounds like it?s taken place in like a dry forest when a match is thrown, a lit match, that it has caught on fire something that has been simmering for quite some time. What is that? NIKOS LOUNTOS: Yeah, that?s true. Everybody in all of this, that even the riots, the big riots?you may have seen the videos?they are a social phenomenon, not just the result of some political incident. There were thousands of angry young people that came out in the streets to clash with the police and smash windows of banks, of five- star hotels and expensive stores. So, that?s true. It was something that waited to happen. I think it?s a mixture of things. We have a government that?s?a government of the ruling party called New Democracy, a very right-wing government. It has tried to make many attacks on working people and students, especially students. The students were some form of guinea pigs for the government. When it was elected after 2004, they tried? the government tried to privatize universities, which are public in Greece, and put more obstacles for school students to get into university. The financial burden on the poor families if they want their children to be educated is really big in Greece. And the worst is that even if you have a university degree, even if you are a doctor or lawyer, in most cases, young people get a salary below the level of poverty in Greece. So the majority of young people in Greece stay with their families ?til their late twenties, many ?til their thirties, in order to cope with this uncertainty. And so, this mixture, along with the economic crisis and their unstable, weak government, was what was behind all this explosion. AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos is a Greek activist and writer. Nikos, the protests have been picked up not only in Greece, but around the world. We?re talking about the Netherlands, talking also about Russia and Italy and Spain and Denmark and Germany. What does it mean to the workers and the students in Greece now? How significant is that? Has that changed the nature of the protests back in Greece? NIKOS LOUNTOS: It?s very good news for us to know that many people around the world are trying to show their solidarity to us. And I think it?s not only solidarity, but I think it?s the same struggle against police brutality, for democracy, against war, against poverty. It?s the same struggle. So it?s really good news for us to hear about that. I think you should know that the next Thursday will be the next day of action, of general action. Every day will have action, but next Thursday will be a day of general action. The students will be all out. And we?re trying to force the leaders of the trade unions to have a new general strike. So I could propose to people hearing me now that next Thursday would be a good day for solidarity action all around the world, to surround the Greek embassies, the consulates, so generally to get out in the streets and express your solidarity to our fight. And I think workers and students in Greece will really appreciate it. AMY GOODMAN: What about the issue of civil liberties overall in Greece? Has this been a matter of controversy over time? NIKOS LOUNTOS: Yeah. This government has a really awful record on civil liberties. It all began during the Olympics of 2004, aided also by the so-called anti-terrorist campaign started by George Bush after 9/11. During the Olympic Games, we had the first cameras in the streets of Athens. And there are now proofs that many phones were tapped illegally at that period, among them the phones of the leaders of the antiwar movement here in Greece, such as the coordinators of the Stop the War Coalition. And then came the biggest scandal of all. In 2005, tens of Pakistani immigrants were abducted from their homes by unknown men. They were hooded and interrogated and then thrown away after some days in the streets of Athens. The Greek police, along with the British MI5, had organized these illegal abductions in coordination with the then- Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf. During the student movements and the workers? strikes all these years, hundreds of beatings and more police brutality have covered up. Just one month ago, a Pakistani immigrant called Mohammed Ashraf was murdered by riot police in Athens when the police dispersed the crowd of immigrants waiting to apply for a green card. And the immigrants in Greece in general are mainly from regions hit by war?Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan. And they are treated in awful conditions by the Greek state and police. Many people have died by shells in the borders or in the DMZ, trying to get into Greece and then Europe. So it?s really an awful record for the government on civil liberties. AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos, finally, as we travel from Sweden to Germany, one of the things we?re looking at is the effect of the US election on the rest of the world. In a moment, we?ll be joined by the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, the largest magazine in Europe. When President-elect Obama was elected, their headline was ?President of the World.? What is the effect of the election of Barack Obama on people you know in Greece? What has been the reaction? NIKOS LOUNTOS: Well, you know, all these years we had a slogan here in the antiwar movement and the student movement that George Bush is the number-one terrorist. So, many people were happy when they learned that these will be the final days of George Bush and his Republican hawkish friends like John McCain. But, of course, people in Greece have experienced that having a different government doesn?t always mean that things will be better. If the movement doesn?t put its stamp on the changes, changing only persons will have no meaning. But people have appreciated the change in the US administration as a message of change all over the world. AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Greek activist and writer. He?s with the Socialist Workers Party in Greece and a graduate student in political philosophy at Panteion University in Athens. From fentona at shaw.ca Fri Dec 12 09:20:29 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:20:29 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Benicio Del Toro leads the charge for 'Che' Message-ID: <9BF90B57-3888-4BB8-845A-8B728061A9D6@shaw.ca> http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-benecio11-2008dec11,0,1153252.story Benicio Del Toro leads the charge for 'Che' Benicio Del Toro has made a career of playing men on society's outskirts. Now as the revolutionary 'Che,' he shows his power. By Mark Olsen December 11, 2008 In films as varied as "The Usual Suspects," "Basquiat," "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas," "Traffic" and "Things We Lost in The Fire," Benicio Del Toro seems drawn to play the eccentric outsider. Now in director Steven Soderbergh's "Che" -- which opens for a one- week run on Friday in Los Angeles and New York -- Del Toro plays 1950s and '60s revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Following Guevara from Mexico to Cuba to New York to Bolivia, the film -- which will screen as a single 4-hour unit during its short run, and be broken into two separate films for the wider release in January -- has a broad sweep, but also an eye for the specific, becoming perhaps the ultimate expression of Del Toro's physical, enigmatic screen presence. The project began with the 41-year-old Del Toro, who took an interest in Guevara's book "The Bolivian Diary" and pursued the idea with producer Laura Bickford. This was just before his turn in the 2000 film "Traffic" (Bickford produced and Soderbergh directed), which earned Del Toro an Academy Award for supporting actor. Related * Oscar watch: Best actor contenders Photos: Oscar watch: Best actor contenders Ads by Google Jewish Chick Flick with Marla Sokoloff, Idina Menzel Ronald Guttman, and Tovah Feldshuh www.TheTollboothMovie.com Che See Che Trailer & Pictures with Free Movie Toolbar Movie.alottoolbars.com Che Guevara 1,000+ Che Guevara Pictures Shop, Compare and Save at Pronto. Picture.Pronto.com Del Toro's work in "Che" appears to be a rare and a truly fortuitous match of actor and role. "It certainly seemed that way to me immediately," said Soderbergh of the way in which Del Toro suited the part. "I had the same sensation I had when I was working with Julia Roberts on 'Erin Brockovich,' the right person in the right role at the right time." Despite the film's controversial reception following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival -- Variety called it "defiantly nondramatic" and "a commercial impossibility" -- Del Toro, who also has a producing credit on the film, was awarded the best actor prize. Sean Penn, who led the festival jury, later called Del Toro's work "one of the first tour de force performances in film history that doesn't rely on the close-up." Keeping it true Del Toro's tall, broad frame is frequently shot by Soderbergh in a full-body shot, so that the actor works with his shoulders and hips as much as his eyes, while allowing other actors equal visual weight within the frame. "When Che wrote he was very honest; that's one of the first things that really moved me," said Del Toro. "My first attraction toward Che was a book of letters he wrote to his family. There was an honesty in that, where he could be very self-critical, but also with a witty nod. "The approach of the movie is to be true, factually true from what we gathered, but also true to him." Del Toro believes the film will have a life beyond whatever it may (or may not) make at the box office during its initial theatrical releases. It recently played to cheers in Havana and protests in Miami. "One day, the movie will pop up and they'll shake hands with it," he says. "I remember the first time I heard [ Miles Davis' landmark 1970 album] 'Bitches Brew,' I was like, 'I can't listen to that'. And then one time I was driving and one of the songs came on and everything changed. This movie, at some point it will change someone's mind, what they thought it was." Transforming man Before shooting the final sections of the film that portray Guevara's time in Bolivia at the end of his life, Del Toro dropped some 35 pounds. For Guevara's arrival in Bolivia in disguise, he shaved the top of his head rather than wear a bald cap. For his role in "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas" (1998) as the fictional sidekick Dr. Gonzo (based on writer Hunter S. Thompson's friend and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta), Del Toro put on 40 pounds. It seems only fitting that following the release of "Che" he will next be seen in a new version of " The Wolf Man," perhaps the ultimate story of personal transformation. "I wish I could stay home," he said of what draws him again and again to roles that require severe physical transformation and deep emotional commitment. "I wish I could be asleep right now. But why do I do it? That's the way the cookie crumbles for me, I'm that kind of actor. Do I invite it? Maybe. At the same time it invites me. "It's just who I am." Olsen is a freelance writer. calendar at latimes.com From fentona at shaw.ca Fri Dec 12 09:27:34 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:27:34 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Bank of Canada warns of possible debt, mortgage defaults if conditions worsen Message-ID: Bank of Canada warns of possible debt, mortgage defaults if conditions worsen December 11, 2008 - 13:53 Julian Beltrame, THE CANADIAN PRESS http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=n121161A OTTAWA - Mortgage and consumer debt defaults could rise "significantly" if the global financial crisis deteriorates and triggers a widespread and deeper recession that cuts household income and makes it harder to pay the bills, the Bank of Canada warns. In a sobering assessment of the financial crisis, the central bank concludes that significant risks remain for both the global economy and Canada if credit conditions don't begin to improve. Continued Below "With household balance sheets under pressure from weak equity markets, softening house prices, slowing income growth, and record- high debt-to-income ratios, a severe economic downturn could result in a substantial increase in default rates on household debt," the bank writes in its December financial systems review released Thursday. The Bank of Canada says the number of "vulnerable households" - the three per cent with a debt-to-income ratio above 40 per cent - could double by the end of next year under this pessimistic scenario. The central bank notes that this would be a worst-case scenario. The "most likely outcome" is for global markets and credit conditions in Canada to gradually improve, it states. This is partly because central banks and governments around the world have leaped into action with extraordinary measures such as liquidity injections, asset swaps, cash infusions and credit guarantees to backstop financial institutions. But the central bank's top officials also warn that the crisis is far from over and that there is "a significant risk of mutually reinforcing weakness in the financial sector and in the real economy." The Canadian economy is now in recession and is expected to shrink or grow only marginally in 2009, pushing the jobless rate to well above seven per cent, with little recovery until 2010. Given the uncertainties, the bank officials outline five potential risks for the world and Canada that includes tighter lending conditions as banks are forced to restore their cash reserves, thereby creating a deeper and more prolonged recession. For Canadians, the repercussions of a deepening recession will be profound, including more unemployment, lower income growth and more home defaults from crushing debt loads, the bank says in its worst- case assessment. And while Canadians' access to credit has not tightened significantly during the financial crunch, this could change if the crisis persists, the bank says. "The continued reluctance of lenders to enter the market, owing to uncertainty over their future funding needs and existing risk exposure, risks delaying the return of confidence and more normal financial conditions," the bank says. "(This) could aggravate the adverse feedback loop between the financial system and the real economy." The risk assessment is noteworthy for its predominantly gloomy outlook - although it remains a hypothetical one - and for the fact it was written by the bank's governing council headed by governor Mark Carney, rather than by lower-rank bank staff as is usually the case. The global credit crunch has dried up lending to companies by banks and made it more difficult in many countries for ordinary borrowers to get money for lines of credit, consumer and car loans and mortgages. In the United States, millions of Americans have lost their homes in the last two years with the collapse of the sub-prime, or high-risk mortgage market, which led to sharply higher interest rates for homeowners with poor credit and produced widespread foreclosures. In Canada, however, the housing sector has been more stable, but the jump in home prices that led to soaring values in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and other cities has begun to reverse, with dropping values in previously hot markets. Statistics Canada reported Thursday that new home sales fell for the first time in a decade in October, dropping 0.4 per cent from September. Some economists warn that falling prices could lead to a housing slump and more defaults, although foreclosures are usually a last resort and banks try to cushion the blow by renegotiating easier repayment terms. Canadian banks are among the best-capitalized in the world but would not emerge unscathed, the central bank's analysis concludes. Much as has happened in the United States, the officials say household debt woes could be a channel of contagion spreading through the banking system and further restrict the availability of credit. Banks are somewhat insulated by mortgage insurance, but the Bank of Canada says a severe economic downturn would nonetheless put pressure on their capital ratios. The central bank does caution that the vulnerability of Canada's housing sector should not be overstated. It notes that lending practices in Canada have been far more conservative than those in the U.S. and that subprime mortgages account for about five per cent of the market as opposed to 14 per cent in the U.S. As well, although debt is high, low interest rates means that at present most households are able to comfortably manage their financial obligations. From fentona at shaw.ca Fri Dec 12 09:33:11 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:33:11 -0800 Subject: [R-G] U.S. at disadvantage in Afghan insurgent hotbed Message-ID: U.S. at disadvantage in Afghan insurgent hotbed Jason Motlagh, Chronicle Foreign Service Thursday, December 11, 2008 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/11/MNQH14DRPH.DTL (12-11) 04:00 PST Jalrez Valley, Afghanistan -- Creeping out from a lonely hilltop outpost of dirt-filled blast barriers and razor wire, more than 40 U.S. armored vehicles turn onto Afghanistan's Highway One in blackout mode, switching off headlights to foil Taliban lookouts. Their destination: the Jalrez Valley, an ambush-ready stretch of fruit orchards and rocky slopes that cuts through restive Wardak province, 25 miles southwest of Kabul, the capital. In the past year, the Taliban and other insurgent groups in Wardak have increased their attacks by 58 percent, the U.S. military says. And with deadly frequency, the militants use the valley to launch attacks on Kabul and a national highway that is the economic lifeline to the southern part of the country. As a result, they have made alarming gains in Wardak. A shadow Taliban government collects taxes and runs roadside checkpoints, according to intelligence reports and residents, while fighters - many of them foreign - are largely free to train and stash arms and kidnap victims with little interference. The surging Taliban, the weakness of Afghan security forces, and the prospect of mass voter intimidation ahead of next year's national elections have forced the U.S.-led coalition to pay closer attention to Wardak, and in particular, the Jalrez Valley. Firebase set up In the spring, Lt. Larry Kay of the U.S. Army's 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry arrived in the valley to set up a firebase. For the next six months, he says, he never had a day off, beating back 27 attacks in June alone. Of the 70 men in his company, 30 have been wounded and two have been killed. "The (insurgents) are very aggressive and highly trained, always ready to exploit a weakness," said Kay, who is from Deerfield Beach, Fla. "You will not have an advantage in Jalrez." In late November, more than 400 battalion troops embarked on a disruptive operation into the Jalrez Valley from their base in western Paktika province. The long trip got off to a rough start. In neighboring Ghazni province, an improvised explosive device blew up under an Afghan police Ford Ranger pickup at the front of the convoy, killing two and wounding four. The $270 million U.S.-funded highway that connects Kabul with the southern city of Kandahar looked like a vehicle graveyard - lined with burned-out delivery trucks scarred by bomb blasts. It was still dark when the convoy reached the Jalrez Valley. Moving into defensive positions, American forces established a command perimeter in the village of Eshma-Kheyl in case of an insurgent attack. "It's almost too quiet," said Capt. Spencer Wallace of McComb, Miss., while scanning the rows of adobe compounds. "They knew we were coming." As other platoons moved house-to-house to check for Taliban fighters, Wallace assembled a small group of tribal elders for a mini-shura, or meeting, in one of the elders' carpeted living room. In the Pashtu language, he exchanged pleasantries with the bearded men, noting that it was the first time that his troops had entered the valley without coming under fire. Village elder Zabiullah Ameri then assured Wallace that his village supports the Afghan government and welcomed the Americans as brothers. "Why, then, are there so many attacks against us in this valley?" Wallace asked. "We are like a soccer ball. Everyone who comes through wants to kick us," said another elder who wore a white head wrap. "We don't know who is our enemy and who is our friend." The elders then guaranteed security of the U.S. troops in Eshma-Kheyl, although they said they could not vouch for neighboring villages. "It's the same language all the time: 'There's no enemy here,' " Wallace later said. "People are just waiting to see which way the wind blows ... We don't hold that against them, understanding it as a characteristic of where they feel trapped." Later that day, intelligence reports indicated that several men in the area were known to harbor Taliban militants. Baker Company then fanned out to red-flag suspected safe houses and search for weapons caches. In a home owned by a man named Wazir, they found a book of telephone numbers and black-and-white photos that appeared to be of Taliban fighters. A plate of half-eaten rice suggested Wazir had left in a hurry. Word soon arrived that a weapons cache of old grenades and rocket- propelled grenade fuses had been found in a shed at the edge of an apple orchard astride the paved valley road. Most had been destroyed, though some items were given to cash-strapped Afghan soldiers supporting the U.S. operation. "Counterinsurgency is about achieving effects on the battlefield every day," said Lt. Col. Tony Demartino, the operation commander. "If you're always looking for gold rings, you're gonna continue to miss buckets of brass rings." Moments later, the crack of artillery in the distance interrupted what had been a quiet day. Alpha Company, which had been assigned to protect the southern ridge, had been targeted by two errant rockets. Rolling clouds and a flurry of snow signaled a fight was brewing, yet a nervous calm held. The soldiers spent the night in Eshma-Kheyl, officers sleeping on a villager's living room floor, the soldiers in their vehicles. The next morning brought a change of plans, and several unexpected visitors. The 1st Battalion had planned to distribute food and winter clothes before returning to base at noon. But villagers panicked after an F-15 fighter jet flew low over the valley at about 500 feet. When an Afghan general who had been contacted by Demartino arrived, U.S. officers put him in charge of handing out cooking oil, flour and sweaters. The general arrived with the new governor of Wardak province, Muhammad Halim Fedayi, who had decided to pay his first visit to the valley. Governor uncomfortable The governor, visibly ill at ease being so deep inside an insurgent stronghold, said a quick prayer to the crowd and pledged to do more to assert the state's authority. Demartino then proposed that the governor make an impromptu visit to the district center a few miles down the road as a symbolic gesture. He agreed and stopped there for less than 10 minutes surrounded by U.S. and Afghan soldiers. "Everybody appreciates a bit of security," said Maj. Rob Fouche. Meanwhile, some locals worried that any short-term presence by U.S. troops might do more harm than good. "We are scared because someone might tell the Taliban that we talked with the Americans and they will kill us," said Delawar, 34, a truck driver from Eshma-Kheyl. Muhammad Hosseini, a Jalrez Valley native who recently returned after spending five years in Manchester, England, lamented how dangerous the area has become. U.S. forces "are here now but they will be gone soon," he said. "The Taliban will be back." E-mail Jason Motlagh at foreign at sfchronicle.com. This article appeared on page A - 21 of the San Francisco Chronicle From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Dec 12 11:52:33 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:52:33 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Means of Political Production Message-ID: The LA Times article below says that the Obama campaign collected "13 million e-mail addresses, hundreds of trained field organizers and tens of thousands of neighborhood coordinators and phone bank volunteers." That's a great deal of political assets, which the Democratic Party establishment owns and controls, not its grassroots organizers and volunteers, some of whom are already becoming frustrated by Obama. Some leftists say, especially during the crunch time of election campaigns, that the base of the DP is different from that of the GOP, so we have to "work with" Democrats. They have a point there. But in reality what has happened is not leftists "working with" Democrats to win them effectively over to the work of building a left-wing alternative but more people, including a good number of leftists, "working for" the DP than before, re-injecting social capital into a bankrupt political party, rather than the working class accumulating our own political assets to build a Left. Once again, the question is the ownership of means of production, in this case means of political production! -- Yoshie Role for Barack Obama's volunteer network still in flux Talks upcoming on how to mobilize movement; volunteer base 'hungry' for work on issues By Peter Wallsten | Washington Bureau December 5, 2008 WASHINGTON ? James Dillon, a onetime Republican activist who grew disgusted with politics, was so inspired by Barack Obama's candidacy that he joined the campaign's massive volunteer army, hosting house parties and recruiting supporters. But beyond influencing the November election, Dillon thought he was joining a new political movement that would be mobilized for big goals?to end poverty or help distressed homeowners, or maybe end U.S. reliance on oil. So Dillon, a Florida real estate developer, was discouraged by the suggestion that arrived by e-mail last week from Obama's campaign manager: "Excited about the much anticipated First Dog?" it read, referring to the Obama daughters' quest for a new puppy. "Support your local animal shelter to give animals in your area a chance." Amid Obama's transition to power, a spirited and often secretive debate has broken out among top campaign staff members over how to refashion the broad network of motivated volunteers into a force that can help Obama govern. With 13 million e-mail addresses, hundreds of trained field organizers and tens of thousands of neighborhood coordinators and phone bank volunteers, the network is now one of the most valuable assets in politics. Obama's team may choose to deploy it to elect other Democratic officials, or to lobby Congress for his toughest legislative goals, or even to apply pressure on local and state policymakers across the country. This weekend, hundreds of field staffers and some key volunteers are planning a marathon closed-door summit in a Chicago hotel to begin negotiating details of what the network might look like when Obama takes office in January. A group of field organizers from battleground states has been enlisted to draw up a plan. But while aides sort out the details, the Obama team's early hints about how the network should be used?as well as its tight-lipped planning process?have struck some supporters as missteps. Among the critics is Marshall Ganz, a legendary figure in the field of community organizing who from his post at Harvard University helped train Obama's campaign organizers and volunteers. Ganz has publicly questioned the campaign for not conducting a more open deliberation over how to sustain the network. "Is this really what 'building on the movement to elect Barack Obama' is going to look like?" Ganz asked. "I can't believe this was put out by the same people who trained organizers in how to do house meetings in the campaign over the past two years." Of the reference to the "First Dog," Ganz concluded: "Give me a break." The campaign has taken some steps to open the process. It distributed surveys asking supporters for guidance on the next steps. It has used the network to call for donations to help victims of California wildfires. And, at campaign manager David Plouffe's urging, some 1,500 volunteers will hold house parties this month at which volunteers will be asked to help plan for the future. Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman, said the deliberations have been inclusive. He said the campaign has received about 500,000 responses to the e-mail survey while holding "hundreds of conference calls, individual one-on-one calls, online surveys, and conversations with field organizers, allied groups and volunteer supporters." The campaign's "host guide" for the upcoming house parties contained the suggestion that volunteers begin revving up the new Obama movement with community service projects such as helping the Humane Society. The guide suggested that volunteers try other forms of community engagement, as well, such as helping with holiday food or toy drives, or helping the Red Cross or the Salvation Army. Some volunteers were hoping for bigger goals. "I'm not trying to discourage anyone from helping animals, but there are a lot of people hurting right now," said Dillon. "If this movement is going to sustain itself, it has to have as grand a mission as electing Barack Obama." Temo Figueroa, a former top Obama field organizer, said the volunteer base is "hungry" to be engaged on the most important issues. "I don't think e-mails or YouTube videos from the president-elect are going to be enough," Figueroa said. "These people want to continue to be a part of whatever agenda comes out of the White House, and they want to be active participants in this government that they feel they have ownership of." Among the questions to be sorted out by Obama's aides: Who will lead the network, will it become part of the Democratic Party infrastructure, and should it focus on local service projects or more lofty national goals. Some Democratic officials believe that Obama should make his network available to other Democratic candidates and house it at the Democratic National Committee. Plouffe has used the campaign e-mail list for at least one partisan purpose: raising money to help retire the DNC's debt. But Dillon, a GOP anti-tax organizer in New York before moving to St. Petersburg, Fla., said he hoped the grass-roots network would be separated from the party. "The notion that we are going to have to sanitize this thing because, God forbid, we step on a local Democratic Party official's toes or step onto his turf is going to turn people like me off," he said. pwallsten at tribune.com From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 12 15:00:03 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:00:03 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Chicago workers to rest of country: "Don't let it die!" Message-ID: <200812122200.mBCM034g021707@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081212/4c53a44c/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 12 15:04:44 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:04:44 -0800 Subject: [R-G] U.S. economy in freefall Message-ID: <200812122204.mBCM4i9h011426@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081212/fe41313d/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 12 15:35:30 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:35:30 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Somali Pirates to acquire Illinois Senate Seat Message-ID: <200812122235.mBCMZU3u019984@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081212/54b5ed6d/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 12 16:20:32 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:20:32 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Criminal Complaint Filed At The Hague Message-ID: <200812122320.mBCNKWOk029862@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081212/b5c56649/attachment.txt From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Dec 12 17:13:07 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:13:07 -0500 Subject: [R-G] =?iso-8859-1?q?Amir_Khadir=2C_=22the_first_=28and_only=29_m?= =?iso-8859-1?q?ember_of_the_National_Assembly_for_Qu=E9bec_solidai?= =?iso-8859-1?q?re=22?= Message-ID: New perspectives for Qu?bec solidaire By Pierre Beaudet December 9, 2008 The election of Amir Khadir in the Mercier downtown district of Montreal did not come about as a surprise nor as a gift. The victory comes after three previous attempts since the late 1990s. Indeed Mercier is a 'natural' place for the left since it integrates very popular neighborhoods with middle classes mixed between various nationalities and ethnicities. It's also a site of historical struggles around housing, community rights, feminist and trade union struggles, that is, when they were factories (they are all gone now). Back in the 1970s by the way, one of the most progressive PQ leader and poet, Gerald Godin, was elected right there after defeating no one else than the Liberal Prime Minister of the time, Robert Bourassa. Later, Mercier was also the incubator of left-oriented urban politics with the RCM who ran against the local establishment. Last but not least, Mercier was the stronghold of the radical left, also in the 1970s, who organized several ?comit?s d'action politique? that rock the boat in social movements. By the way, Mercier is adjacent from the Parc Extension area where Fred Rose became the one and only Communist to be elected in the House of commons, back in 1948 Amir becomes the first (and only) member of the National Assembly for Qu?bec solidaire. His co-spokesperson, Fran?oise David, the former President of the F?d?ration des femmes du Qu?bec, came second in another popular neighborhood, with over 30% of the popular vote. All in all, QS has almost doubled its vote since the last general election (2003), leaving far behind the Green Party. For sure with a voice in the Assembly, it will be able to speak louder. During this electoral campaign, QS was cut out form mainstream media except for the few odd interviews. For the last year, QS has concentrated on two dimensions, its program first and its local organization second. The program is left-Keynesian, calling for a strong public sector, the nationalization of a few selected sectors, higher social standards, and additional political demands like the change of the electoral system and the convening of a national constituent assembly that would propose a process leading to sovereignty. The organizational part was first to recruit about 5000 members and then to set up strong structures in Mercier and a few other districts where the possibility of winning was real. Since its inception, QS has tried to reconcile itself as a political party intervening on the political scene with the necessity to battle with the people. Initially, the priority was the latter: the majority saw the first challenge as becoming 'institutional' to a certain extent, and not competing against the dynamic social movements. Now I suppose the trend will be more balanced. Having a political vehicle to intervene in the public political debates in necessary, but certainly not sufficient. QS cannot be a substitute to social movements, but it can be part and parcel of the 'war of position' that is to be conducted in the Parliament and in the streets. "Discours de victoire d'Amir Khadir pour Qu?bec solidaire": "Point d'Amir": From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Dec 12 17:21:05 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:21:05 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Ecuador Defaults on Sovereign Bonds Message-ID: Ecuador defaults on sovereign bonds By Naomi Mapstone in Lima Published: December 12 2008 21:56 | Last updated: December 12 2008 23:51 Rafael Correa, Ecuador's leftist president, announced the country's second foreign debt default in a decade yesterday, saying the debt was illegitimate and describing bondholders as "real monsters". Ecuador's refusal to meet the $30.6m payment on the country's Global 2012 bond, despite the fact that it has $5.65bn in cash reserves, sent dollar-denominated debt prices down sharply. "I gave the order not to pay the interest and to go into default," Mr Correa said. "We know very well who we are up against - real monsters." The president said he was prepared to face international litigation over the decision. The 2012 bonds, along with Ecuador's Global 2015 and 2030 bonds, come under the jurisdiction of Manhattan's southern district court. Mr Correa said Ecuador will offer bondholders a restructuring deal, but analysts say many bondholders have hedged their positions following several previous default threats and are now likely to accelerate payment of the $30.6m coupon payment and seek the full principal amount of $510m. Ecuador also plans to take its case to court. It argues that $3.8bn in foreign debt negotiated by previous administrations is illegitimate, saying it was authorized without executive decree. Alberto Bernal, Head of emerging market macroeconomic Strategy at Bulltick Capital Markets, said the move was a prelude to a decision to exit dollarisation. "Dollarisation is popular in Ecuador. Yet president Correa does not believe in dollarisation, and he needs further tools to pump the economy, because he will never receive the support of the private sector to generate employment," Mr Bernal said. "We think that a 60 per cent to 70 per cent devaluation is likely to take place at some point in the near future, unless oil prices recover fast." Ecuador abandoned the sucre for the dollar in 2000 after the collapse of its banking sector, which effectively leaves Mr Correa with no monetary policy of his own. Until the onset of the global financial crisis, Ecuador was awash with cash generated by the commodities boom. Oil accounts for more than half of its total exports and the sharp fall in prices has hit the Open nation hard. Remittances, which accounted for 7 per cent of gross domestic product last year, have also slumped as workers in the US and Europe are laid off. Mr Correa, a US ?trained economist and a close ally of Hugo Ch?vez, Venezuela's president, has pledged an ambitious programme of social spending or on the implementation of a new constitution. "The big problem with dollarisation is that if you don't take it seriously, and you keep a loose fiscal policy as we have seen in the past few years, you have to provide an alternative for an overappreciated and uncompetitive economy," a former Ecuadorean minister told the FT. "If we didn't have the commodities boom we could have very easily seen a collapse of the real sector and the financial sector in Ecuador much earlier." Ramiro Crespo, of Quito-based Analytica Securities, said Mr Correa was engaging in dangerous game of brinkmanship that could leave it isolated. "The new constitution grants the rights to everything," Mr Crespo said. "Now all Ecuadoreans have a right to a pension even though they didn't contribute during their working life to a fund. If you consider all the things written in the constitution, Ecuador is technically broke. It has cash but too many promises." From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Dec 12 17:28:08 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:28:08 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Socialism's Comeback Message-ID: <200812130028.mBD0S87c002439@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081212/1d62ce7b/attachment.txt From fentona at shaw.ca Fri Dec 12 21:34:35 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:34:35 -0800 Subject: [R-G] First Read of a Leaked Handbook: The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems Message-ID: http://counterpunch.com/price12122008.html Weekend Edition December 12 / 14, 2008 First Read of a Leaked Handbook The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems By DAVID PRICE Human Terrain Systems, one of the U.S. military?s key counterinsurgency efforts to stabilize the occupation of Iraq, appears to suddenly be under serious attack by groups that once offered it support. This latest round of attacks comes not from progressive anthropologists like me or my fellow members of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists; these attacks come from groups with far more centralized power and access to documents and media than any of us academic critics. I don?t know who is behind these attacks but they may be coming from within the belly of the Pentagon or within Human Terrain itself. On Thursday December 11, two apparently separate attacks were launched. One attack came in the form of publication of a fierce editorial in the pages of the British scientific journal Nature. It declared that the ?the US military's human-terrain programme needs to be brought to a swift close.? This position is all the more devastating when contrasted with an editorial supporting the principles of Human Terrain and other forms of military-funded anthropological work published by Nature just five months ago. A second attack came the same day with the leak and web distribution on Wikileaks.com of the UNCLASSIFIED Human Terrain Systems Handbook. These two attacks, whether coordinated or independent, further destabilize already shaky support for the poorly designed Human Terrain Systems program. I don?t pretend to understand why these attacks are now converging now, but it is no secret that some divisions in the Pentagon oppose the ?hearts and minds? strategy of counterinsurgency, and it is possible that some of these actors are working to undermine Human Terrain by leaking this document and sewing seeds of discontent in public discourse for their own reasons; reasons quite separate from my own and having to do with their favoring the use of brute military force over soft counterinsurgency. The Human Terrain program is the brainchild of anthropologist Montgomery McFate, whose longtime interest in supporting the suppression of insurgent groups through the adoption of counterinsurgency tactics led to the formation of Human Terrain Systems based at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas and run through BAE Systems contractors. Human Terrain Teams (HTT) are designed to supplant or complement roles that Civil Affairs units have traditionally played in assessing the needs and conditions of occupied populations. As the recently leaked Handbook states, ?Human Terrain Teams bring another aspect of the population: the average persons? perspective, when the HTT incorporates the ?grass-roots? perspective with government and tribal perspectives.? These Human Terrain Teams are designed to incorporate military-embedded anthropologists and other social sciences who interview members of local populations in war zones, often with armed Team members, sometimes wearing uniforms. Because of the complex ethical issues involved in conducting ethnographic fieldwork for occupying military forces in war zones, the Human Terrain Program is viewed by most anthropologists as being highly problematic. In November 2007, the American Anthropological Association?s Executive Board produced a statement condemning the Human Terrain program for its inattention to basic anthropological ethical concerns for voluntary informed consent and the well-being of studied populations. In the last half year, American journalist John Stanton has written a series of damaging expos?s published here on the CounterPunch site, in Pravda and elsewhere detailing a failures of Human Terrain management and the program?s overall inefficiency in the field. Stanton?s work draws largely on unidentified disgruntled Human Terrain personnel and paints a picture of fiscal mismanagement, poor field supervision, lack of training before sending social scientists into life-threatening situations, and a non-working ?reach-back system? that was supposed to connect deployed field Human Terrain personnel with personnel located at HTS headquarters at Ft. Leavenworth. Nothing seems to be working right at Human Terrain. During the past year two Human Terrain social scientists have been killed and last month saw an attack on, and severe burning of, a third Human Terrain social scientist. Murder charges were recently filed against Human Terrain Team member Don Ayala. Ayala is accused of executing a detained man believed to have attacked and burnt his Human Terrain Team colleague). Many have tried to dismiss John Stanton and his work because it appears in alternative press sources but bastions of mainstream journalism have been giving the Human Terrain program a free ride since its inception, so I would not look to these sources to publish critical reports. That Nature has turned against Human Terrain is big news. Inside the Leaked Handbook The recently leaked (unclassified) Human Terrain Team Handbook (September 2008) reflects Human Terrain?s vision that by aiding in the more sensitive occupation of populations, Human Terrain Teams are reducing violence. The Handbook states that, ?the end-state of Human Terrain Team support is to provide the unit the reasons why the population is doing what it is doing and thereby providing non-lethal options to the commander and his staff.? This statement expresses the Handbook?s internal logic that: anthropologically based non-lethal subjugation = good; lethal subjugation = bad. The Handbook ignores more traditional political and ethical considerations of anthropologists? responsibilities following a logic more aligned with notions that subjugation of other cultures = bad. Such traditional anthropological considerations are outside the logical scope of the Handbook; it takes anthropologically aided subjugation as an acceptable goal from the outset. The Handbook claims that Human Terrain personnel produce ?expert human terrain & social science advice based on a constantly updated, user- friendly ethnographic and socio-cultural database of the area of operations that leverages both the existing body of knowledge from the social sciences and humanities as well as on the ground research conducted by the team.? But as John Stanton?s reporting clarifies, the needed software and the ?tactical overwatch reach-back links? at the Ft. Leavenworth Reachback Research Center has never worked as planned with failed software systems and personnel reportedly unable to use the system. The Handbook describes how a Human Terrain ?toolkit? can be used to make subjects living in military occupied areas understandable to the U.S. military forces occupying them. This toolkit is used in ways designed to make populations (to borrow from James Scott?s Seeing Like a State) ?legible? and thus controllable. The Handbook states that: ?HTTs will use the Map-HT Toolkit of developmental hardware and software to capture, consolidate, tag, and ingest human terrain data. HTTs use this human terrain information gathered to assist commanders in understanding the operational relevance of the information as it applies to the unit?s planning processes. The expectation is that the resulting courses of actions developed by the staff and selected by the commander will consistently be more culturally harmonized with the local population, which in Counter-Insurgency Operations should lead to greater success. It is the trust of the indigenous population that is at the heart of the struggle between coalition forces and the insurgents.? Human Terrain social scientists? mission is thus expressed in terms of engineering the ?trust of the indigenous population.? The Handbook clarifies how Human Terrain Systems envision its role as a tool by occupying military forces:, ?the HTT will research, interpret, archive, and provide cultural data, information, and knowledge to optimize operational effectiveness by harmonizing courses of action within the cultural context of the environment, and provide the commander with operationally relevant, socio-cultural data, information, knowledge and understanding, and the embedded expertise to integrate that understanding into the commander?s planning and decision-making processes.? Like many other contemporary articulations of anthropologists? working with the military, the Handbook acts if its project is somehow separate from larger neo- imperial missions of invasion and occupation. Consistent with claims by McFate and others supporting Human Terrain Systems, the Handbook insists that Human Terrain Teams should not engage in ?Lethal Effects Targeting.? But the Handbook remains silent on how the supposedly non-classified collected Human Terrain data will be protected from the ?unintended? uses by others. It does state that ?the commander has an intelligence section for lethal targeting; what they require is a section that can explain and delineate the non-lethal environment (e.g. tribal relationships and local power structures), as well as the second and third order effects of planned lethal and non-lethal operations.? Human Terrain Systems appears to naively believe that it can control the uses to which its data is put by others. In a similar state of denial, the Handbook includes the admonition that personnel should: ?avoid direct involvement in tactical questioning. Tactical questioning is a function of the intelligence world and designed to elicit primarily lethal-targeting information. It would also endanger relationships with the local population if HTTs are seen being involved with the ?interrogating? of friends/family.? This statement pretends that the world of the intelligence community is neatly compartmentalized and could not possibly have access to HTT reports, and that by insisting that HTT personnel avoid ?direct involvement? with the intelligence community somehow means that whatever passive involvement they have is acceptable. The Handbook does not address the possibility that as Human Terrain Personnel collect information reporting identities of cooperative and compliant individuals or groups as ?not? Taliban or ?not? sympathetic to al-Quaida, those occupying the negative space of these composite pictures risk becoming targets. The academic lineages exposed in the leaked Handbook are enlightening. In particular, the Handbook draws heavily from and cites the work of American anthropologist and research methods guru H. Russell Bernard (Disclosure: I have known Russ Bernard for over twenty years, he was a member of my doctoral dissertation committee, I consider him a friend.) and anthropologist James Spradley?both highly regarded anthologists and research methodologists. The Handbook recommends several specific ethnographic tools, some of which are found in many anthropologists? toolkits including: ?The core software components (Analyst Notebook, ArcGIS, Anthropac, UCINet and NetDraw) allow the team to conduct network analysis, Modeling and Pattern analysis and geo-spatial analysis that place those people and events in place and time.? The Handbook includes sample interview forms that can be used to catalog members of occupied populations in remote databases. There are discussions of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis written at a high school or middle school level of sophistication, describing such techniques as producing ethnographic field notes or conducting structured and unstructured interviews. James Spradley?s 1979 ?Taxonomy of Ethnographic Questions? and his ?Elements in the Ethnographic Interview? are cited and reproduced in full. The Handbook includes a list of an interesting knowledge-tree of local concerns that military occupiers should be aware of?this list includes such items as knowledge of local archaeological resources, hand gestures, shortages of water, electricity and other resources. The list provides a matrix to be used by anyone wishing to inventory items needed when attempting to establish full spectrum dominance over a given occupied people. The inclusion of these specific methodologies, toolsets, interview and inventory sets is an artifact of Human Terrain Systems? focus on neo- positivist notions that social control of the human landscape can be achieved by the recording of, and then manipulation of key variables in these environments. At a theoretical level, the Human Terrain project is reliant on a form of social engineering where the anthropologists working inside the program seem to believe they are reducing harm for the studied occupied populations, but the program itself is designed to manipulate these populations as studied objects? objects to be controlled for what has been determined as ?their own good.? The most startling methodological revelation in the Handbook comes when the current Human Terrain project connects itself to past anthropological efforts to catalog disparate cultural traits in George Peter Murdock?s Human Relations Area File, a project with financial roots firmly planted in anthropologists? efforts to catalog cultures during the Second World War. The Handbook states that, ?As part of the research, we will eventually use the Organization of Cultural Materials schema in order to contribute our research results to an existing database of cultural practices and social systems known as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) housed at Yale University. This practice allows us to provide significant, abundant, and contemporary socio-cultural information that others around the world may use in their own research. This practice will also allow us to tie into the HRAF database and compare the existence of one social practice, symbolic system, or historical process in our area of operations with others elsewhere in the world. Such cross-cultural analysis enables us to get closer to explaining causation and make weak assertions of what will likely happen in the population in the near future.? With this statement Human Terrain comes full circle and connects to World War II projects using anthropological data to inform military interactions with occupied peoples, yet there is no expressed awareness of the many failures of the HRAF project, or of the problems faced by World War Two users of Murdock?s data. Instead, the Handbook blindly marches towards a high-modern world of imagined social engineering where handheld data units provide occupiers with the sort of specific data readings that Captain Kirk, Science Officer Spock and their red shirted human terrain ensigns had in the original Star Trek series. But this project isn?t exploring where no [hu]man has gone before, it is only a broken high tech version of colonial projects that many anthropologists hoped had become part of a shameful disciplinary past. In a few places the Handbook makes fleeting suggestions that issues of research ethics are being dealt with by someone or something else. Without explanation, the Handbook states that ?an accompanying document is written outlining how the research will comply with the protection of human research subjects according to 45 CFR 46 to ensure the research falls within accepted ethical guidelines.? The Handbook also claims that, ?the results of our research provide non-target data that suggests Courses of Action to the commander and his staff. Our research is performed in the same manner in which academic social scientists conduct their research and is similarly rooted in theory and complete with ethical review boards.? It is difficult to evaluate the claims of non-targeting. In his forthcoming book American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, anthropologist Roberto Gonz?lez quotes U.S. Army, Lt. Colonel Gian Gentile, scoffing at suggestions that such cultural data would not be used for targeting in active war situations, responding to similar claims by Human Terrain anthropologist Marcus Griffin: ?Don?t fool yourself. These Human Terrain Teams whether they want to acknowledge it or not, in a generalized and subtle way, do at some point contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy in the Civil War in Iraq.? That the Handbook claims HTT?s research is ?complete with ethical review boards? is news to me, and I await further clarification for how this claim is actually being implemented. I remain skeptical that this has in fact been implemented in any meaningful way. Human Terrain Systems is a failed attempt to approach problems of subjugation or occupation with tools and understanding of cultural nuance and culturally appropriate manipulation. Many anthropologists like myself oppose these methods on ethical and political grounds. The ethical problems of voluntary informed consent, and protection of research participants in such battle settings are ignored by Human Terrain, as is the political reality that anthropology is being used to aid and abet the forced occupation and subjugation of others. Human Terrain supporters like McFate argue that it represents a nonviolent alternative to the use of force, but these supporters fail to address the larger political context of supporting conquest and subjugation, instead choosing poses in which they present themselves as if it is they who are actually ?insurgents? working within and against the military as they try and teach the military to use less- lethal means of achieving conquest. The leaked Handbook shows that this is not insurgency against the military; it is a betrayal of what might have been anthropology?s promise to represent those we study in ways that reflect not only who they are, but their own self interests. David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists. He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, just published by Duke University Press. He can be reached at dprice at stmartin.edu From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Dec 13 06:30:21 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:30:21 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Postscript to "The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis" Message-ID: <4943B8ED.10602@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Bellamy Foster Monthly Review (April 2008) Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis - the roots of which were explained in this article. Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world. We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history of capitalism. More than a mere financial panic, what is taking place is a major devaluation of capital of still undetermined dimensions. Marx explained that capital was invariably over-extended in a boom and that in the crisis that followed a part of that capital was devalued, enabling the rest to return to profitability and to the process of accumulation and expansion. However, we are now to some extent in uncharted territory: a phase of monopoly-finance capital that is in many ways unprecedented. Even at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes explained that after a crisis modern capitalism might return to profitability without a return to full employment, full utilization of existing capacity, and strong growth. Our experience of the last half-century has shown that capitalism at its core was able to avoid stagnation only by vast military expenditures and, when that proved insufficient, by an enormous inflation of asset values and speculation, ie "financialization". This growth multiplied by the boom psychology on the way up (the "wealth effect") turned out to also have a contracting multiplier effect on the way down. These factors help to explain why the economic crisis in the real economy is so severe at present, and why there is no chance of an immediate restarting of the growth process. Many people first woke up to the seriousness of the crisis only on September 18 2008, when US Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson told Congress that the US financial sector was within days of a complete meltdown and that a $700 billion bailout for the banks was urgently needed. Since then (and indeed even before) vast amounts of government dollars have been poured into the financial structure (all told the financial exposure of the US government alone in the entire crisis has exceeded $5 trillion at this writing), including direct injection of capital into major banks and partial nationalizations {1}. Yet, still there is little sign of the crisis abating. Insolvency is spreading through the economy from consumers to banks, to non-financial firms, back to consumers, in a vicious cycle. The fact that the economy in recent decades was being lifted mainly by financialization makes the problem all that much more severe. The entire world economy is now affected. Already one economy in the European sphere itself - Iceland - has experienced a meltdown, requiring rescue from outside, and some have called Iceland the "canary in the coalmine". Over this last neoliberal epoch, the United States and its European allies have forced upon the entire globe a model of the free flow of capital across borders. The result today is the free flow of catastrophe. Only by the imposition, first, of capital controls and the establishment, second, of non-market based "South-South" cooperation can "emerging" economies avoid becoming the worse victims of the crash. In these dire economic circumstances we should of course be careful not to fall into an exaggerated frame of mind. It is important to remember that a breakdown of capitalism as a whole will not occur by mere economics alone. Given time to work things out on its own terms the system will no doubt recover - though a full recovery could be many years away, if possible at all. The real historical issue before us is to what extent the world's population is willing to wait for this crisis to be resolved on capitalist terms, so that the whole irrational process of exploitation and boom and bust can gain steam again - or whether they shall decide to insert themselves into the process to say Enough! It is this political insertion from below that the powers that be most fear. From their Olympian position at the top of the system they know perhaps better than anyone else that the conditions exist for the possible renewal of socialism on a global scale. Capitalism has reached its limits as a progressive force and its famous "creative destruction" has turned into a destructive creativity in which both the world's people and the planet are now in jeopardy. Indeed, for the world's population and the earth taken a whole there is today no real alternative - to socialism. _____ 1 "Government's Leap into Banking Has Its Perils", New York Times (October 18 2008). John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. This postscript was written for the Portuguese translation of "The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis" that will appear in Revista Outubro, Brazil. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/foster251008p.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Dec 13 06:58:32 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 08:58:32 -0500 Subject: [R-G] China Data Spark Deflation Worries Message-ID: DECEMBER 12, 2008 China Data Spark Deflation Worries By ANDREW BATSON BEIJING -- The collapse in global and local commodity prices drove China's consumer-price inflation to its lowest rate in nearly two years in November. It is now more likely inflation in China will be in negative territory or close to it by early next year, adding to pressure on the government to shore up demand to bolster China's weakening economy. [Easing inflation charts] The consumer-price index in November was 2.4% higher than a year ago, down from October's 4.0% reading and far below this year's peak of 8.7%. Wholesale prices have also fallen, reflecting the global correction in prices for food, fuel and raw materials. The World Bank's index of agricultural commodities fell 7.2% in November from October and its index of metal and mineral prices fell 13%. November marked the fourth consecutive month-on-month fall in China's consumer-price index. Nonfood inflation, China's closest equivalent to a measure of core inflation, dropped to 0.6% year-on-year in November, the lowest level since January 2007, after a 1.6% reading in October. With the rapid price declines in recent months, by early 2009, when the consumer-price index will be calculated relative to the peak prices early this year, headline inflation could be negative. That has raised the specter of deflation, or a sustained period of falling prices. Deflation, which can be highly difficult for governments to reverse, would add a further drag to China's economy. Qu Hongbin, chief China economist for HSBC, now expects inflation to average minus 0.2% in 2009, a reversal from his previous forecast of a 2.5% rise. "This means that the central bank will have to maximize its efforts to ease policy in the coming quarters," he said. He predicted interest rates will be lowered by two percentage points by mid-2009. At the start of this year, China's government, like many, was focused on taming inflation, which was running at decade-high levels, thanks mainly to surging food prices. The recent trend seems to show a reversal in prices, rather than contracting demand. Economists worry about deflation because of its potential for creating a self-reinforcing negative spiral: If consumers expect prices to fall, they will put off purchases, which depresses demand and further lowers prices. Write to Andrew Batson at andrew.batson at wsj.com From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Dec 13 07:10:46 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:10:46 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Slowdown In China Gets Worse, Increasing Global Woes + China Data Spark Deflation Worries Message-ID: DECEMBER 11, 2008 Slowdown In China Gets Worse, Increasing Global Woes By ANDREW BATSON and GORDON FAIRCLOUGH BEIJING -- Sudden declines in China's imports and exports show the country's economic slowdown is entering a new and more serious phase, exacerbating the global slump while jolting Chinese companies and workers used to years of soaring sales and salaries. The surprising reversal adds to concerns over whether the Chinese economy -- on track to surpass Germany this year as the world's third-largest and the only one in the top tier still expanding -- can help support growth and stave off deeper financial pain elsewhere around the world. China's customs agency said Wednesday that November's exports fell 2.2% from a year earlier, the first decline since June 2001. That marked a major shift from a 19.2% gain in October and a nearly 26% rise in 2007. Imports suffered an even steeper drop, down 17.9% in November from a year earlier. They had risen 15.6% in October and more than 20% last year. The import figure signals weakness in domestic consumption, bad news for companies that export to China, and also falling demand for manufacturing components -- which spells trouble for China's future exports as well. Chinese producers of low-end goods such as toys and textiles have been struggling all year. But now, sales of higher-end machinery and electronics are declining as the U.S. economy has deteriorated sharply. China is the third-largest export market for the U.S., and has been a major buyer of commodities. But its imports of iron ore fell 7.9% in November. Crude oil imports were down 1.8% to their lowest level this year, contributing to weakening global oil demand. "The most striking real economic fact of the past several months is not continued U.S. economic weakness, but that China's economy has slowed much more quickly than anyone had forecast," Australia's central bank Governor Glenn Stevens said this week. [On the Decline charts] Stimulus Package China's leaders last month announced a 4 trillion yuan ($584 billion) stimulus package, and on Wednesday wrapped up an annual economic-policy conference by reaffirming their determination to support growth by any means available. But some economists think China could be entering a sustained period of falling export orders, with the U.S., European and Japanese economies all now contracting. The World Bank expects the volume of global trade to shrink in 2009 for the first time since 1982. That poses an especially difficult transition for Chinese firms and consumers. In the coastal city of Yuyao, Ningbo Wanglong Group says that years of rapid expansion have made it one of the world's largest producers of preservatives for food and feed. But export orders have declined rapidly since September. "We've never experienced this before. We don't know what happened," said Zhou Hong, a sales manager. He said shipments to overseas distributors have plunged by roughly 50% to 60% in recent months. The company hasn't yet laid off any of its 1,500 employees, but has had to halve production and offer clients discounts of around 50%. "So far we don't know what else we can do," Mr. Zhou said. China's economy is slowing particularly sharply because the export decline is combining with slackening domestic demand. Housing sales have dropped and prices are declining in most major cities. New construction has dried up, which saps demand for steel, cement and copper. Consumers are holding off on other big purchases: Car sales dropped 10.3% from a year earlier in November, the third monthly decline this year. Many economists are forecasting China's economic growth to slow to around 7.5% next year, which is below the government's traditional 8% target and would be the lowest since 1999. Growth this year is likely to average just over 9%, ending five straight years of double-digit gains. Economists' worst-case scenarios for China involve a quarter or two of growth around 5% next year, far from the outright contractions typically associated with a recession in the U.S. and other advanced economies. But it does looks like China is headed for what some economists call a "growth recession," a period of weak expansion and rising unemployment. The slowdown is translating into fewer jobs, and increasing strains between workers and employers. China doesn't publish reliable data on unemployment; few economists take seriously the official jobless rate of 4%. But there have been growing numbers of layoffs and factory closures. Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have returned to their hometowns to wait out the slowdown. Zhou Tianyong, an economist at the Central Party School, a Communist Party institute in Beijing, estimates that the actual unemployment rate this year is around 12% and could rise to 14% next year. For most of Geely Group's short history as an auto maker, its biggest challenge was figuring out ways to expand quickly enough to meet exploding demand from China's increasingly affluent middle class. Now Geely managers are negotiating an abrupt U-turn. Zhang Xiaodong, a company spokesman, said Geely has suspended plans to start mass production of a sports car and halted development of two large sedans. Geely's sales were down 6% in October and up 1% for the first ten months of the year, after growing more than 40% in 2005 and 2006 and 7% last year. Survival Rate Yale Zhang, a Shanghai-based auto analyst with CSM Worldwide, said China's auto makers "are used to a high-growth environment. They don't know how to survive at a single-digit growth rate." Although the slowdown is taking the sharpest toll on low-paid manufacturing workers, it's also spreading concern among prosperous white-collar families. Well-educated urbanites have been able to hop from job to job in recent years, extracting steep raises once a year or more. Average urban incomes are up 14.7% so far in 2008, the seventh straight year of double-digit gains. Li Hua, a 31-year-old human-resources executive with a Shanghai sports retailer, says she used to get calls from headhunters almost weekly. She changed jobs twice in the last few years. But in October, the job market started to change. Her own company canceled its recruitment plans, and a friend got laid off from a new job with little severance. "Now what I'm thinking is to just work hard. No complaints, no asking for a raise," said Ms. Li. "We should all feel lucky we still have a job and are doing fine." ?Ellen Zhu in Shanghai contributed to this article. Write to Andrew Batson at andrew.batson at wsj.com and Gordon Fairclough at gordon.fairclough at wsj.com DECEMBER 12, 2008 China Data Spark Deflation Worries By ANDREW BATSON BEIJING -- The collapse in global and local commodity prices drove China's consumer-price inflation to its lowest rate in nearly two years in November. It is now more likely inflation in China will be in negative territory or close to it by early next year, adding to pressure on the government to shore up demand to bolster China's weakening economy. [Easing inflation charts] The consumer-price index in November was 2.4% higher than a year ago, down from October's 4.0% reading and far below this year's peak of 8.7%. Wholesale prices have also fallen, reflecting the global correction in prices for food, fuel and raw materials. The World Bank's index of agricultural commodities fell 7.2% in November from October and its index of metal and mineral prices fell 13%. November marked the fourth consecutive month-on-month fall in China's consumer-price index. Nonfood inflation, China's closest equivalent to a measure of core inflation, dropped to 0.6% year-on-year in November, the lowest level since January 2007, after a 1.6% reading in October. With the rapid price declines in recent months, by early 2009, when the consumer-price index will be calculated relative to the peak prices early this year, headline inflation could be negative. That has raised the specter of deflation, or a sustained period of falling prices. Deflation, which can be highly difficult for governments to reverse, would add a further drag to China's economy. Qu Hongbin, chief China economist for HSBC, now expects inflation to average minus 0.2% in 2009, a reversal from his previous forecast of a 2.5% rise. "This means that the central bank will have to maximize its efforts to ease policy in the coming quarters," he said. He predicted interest rates will be lowered by two percentage points by mid-2009. At the start of this year, China's government, like many, was focused on taming inflation, which was running at decade-high levels, thanks mainly to surging food prices. The recent trend seems to show a reversal in prices, rather than contracting demand. Economists worry about deflation because of its potential for creating a self-reinforcing negative spiral: If consumers expect prices to fall, they will put off purchases, which depresses demand and further lowers prices. Write to Andrew Batson at andrew.batson at wsj.com From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Dec 13 07:32:29 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:32:29 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Somalia: No Volunteers for Coalition; US Navy Commander Questions Land Attacks on Pirates; Etc. Message-ID: Somalia: No Volunteers for Coalition December 13, 2008 World Briefing | Africa Somalia: No Volunteers for Coalition By REUTERS The United Nations has been unable to put together a multinational military force to stabilize Somalia, which diplomats said means the lawless country might be left to fend for itself. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said that Somalia's problems are beyond the capabilities of United Nations peacekeepers and will require a force of about 10,000 troops "with full capability to defend itself against hostile threats." United Nations officials have been lobbying countries to join an international coalition, but so far, diplomats on the Security Council say, none have been willing. Navy commander questions land attacks on pirates By LOLITA C. BALDOR ? 21 hours ago MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) ? The commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet expressed doubt Friday about the wisdom of launching attacks against Somali pirates on land ? a proposal the U.S. is circulating to the U.N. Security Council. U.S. Vice Adm. Bill Gortney told reporters that striking pirate camps presents problems because it is difficult to identify them and the potential for killing innocent civilians "cannot be overestimated." In a wide-ranging interview at his 5th Fleet headquarters, Gortney said that such strikes are an effort to go for an easy military solution to a problem. He says the better solutions are to improve the security, stability and government in Somalia, and to clear up legal hurdles so that militaries that capture pirates can detain them and bring them to trial. Currently, most foreign navies patrolling the Somali coast have been reluctant to detain suspects because of uncertainties over where they would face trial, since Somalia has no effective central government or legal system. The draft U.N. Security Council resolution proposes that all nations and regional groups cooperating with Somalia's U.N.-backed government in the fight against piracy and armed robbery "may take all necessary measures ashore in Somalia." Bush administration officials in Washington say that while the proposal would give the U.S. military more options in confronting the pirates, it does not mean the U.S. is planning a ground assault. Gortney said that progress is being made in the broad international effort to stem the recent spike in pirate attacks on commercial vessels off the coast of Somalia. He said he is seeing progress in efforts to change the legal requirements so that navies can detain and send captured pirates to trial. And, he said more shipping companies are adding security personnel. Since the end of August, Gortney said, there have been 50 instances where coalition ships have disrupted potential pirate attacks, throwing guns overboard and sinking small skiffs. But in many instances they had to release the people on the ships because of the legal hurdles. NATO ends anti-piracy mission off Somalia www.chinaview.cn 2008-12-13 00:38:41 BRUSSELS, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- NATO completed its mission on Friday to escort World Food Program (WFP) shipments to Somalia and to deter piracy in the Gulf of Aden, said the alliance. Four NATO warships provided escort on eight occasions which resulted in the safe delivery of 30,000 tons of humanitarian aid to Somalia, and conducted deterrence patrols in the area most susceptible to criminal acts against merchant shipping, said the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. "The decision to run this mission has set a valuable precedent for our alliance," said General John Craddock, Supreme Allied Commander Europe. "With little time to plan, NATO has completed a very successful mission. We have demonstrated that we can react, and quickly, in times of crisis." The WFP has said more than 2 million Somalis could go hungry without the NATO protection. Since the NATO mission started on Oct.24, 2008, no pirate attacks have been launched against ships loaded with WFP food. The NATO mission has been replaced by a European Union (EU) operation codenamed Atalanta. The EU naval operation, the first of its kind, will run for 12 months. NATO, meanwhile, is considering its long-term strategy on the piracy issue and stands ready to consider further requests for the use of its naval assets in this regard, the alliance has said. Piracy remained rampant despite the presence of NATO ships and that of a dozen from other countries, such as Denmark, France, India, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Since Oct. 24, pirates assaulted 32 vessels and captured 12 off the coast of Somalia. Every day, over 50 merchant vessels sail through the Gulf of Aden, which is a key trade route linking the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal. Indian Navy repulses attack, arrests 23 pirates off Somali coast By Praful Kumar Singh New Delhi, Dec 13 (ANI): Leading the fight against piracy Indian naval warship, INS Mysore, deployed in the Gulf of Aden attacked two boats of pirates and arrested 23 sea brigands today after receiving signals from an Ethiopian ship that they were trying to hijack it. Out of 23 arrested pirates, 12 are reportedly from Somalia and 11 from Yemen. Twelve AK 47 guns, three rifles, two grenades along with other ammunitions were seized from the pirates. MV Gibe, a merchant vessel flying the Ethiopian flag, send emergency signals around noon for help after which the Indian warship patrolling in the Somali waters launched the rescue operation. Marine commandos were dispatched in a helicopter after INS Mysore received a distress call from the cargo vessel that the pirates had fired on the merchant vessel with their small arms. The INS Mysore intervened and warded off the attack on the merchant vessel carried out by the pirates who came in two speedboats, Navy spokesperson said here. The spokesperson said that the Navy flew its Marine Commandos on helicopters to the scene of the pirate attack and rescued the ship. MV Gibe was later escorted to safety, he added. Last month INS Tabar, armed with supersonic BrahMos (PJ-10) anti-ship cruise missiles, sank a mother ship of pirates off the Somali coast after an exchange of fire. The attack took place about 150 nautical miles off Aden and INS Mysore was about 13 nautical miles away from the merchant vessel when it picked up the SOS call. The Indian Navy has been conducting anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden since October 23 as a sizeable portion of our country's trade flows through the area and there has been a quantum increase in the number of piracy attacks in this region over the last few months. The Navy carries out these patrols in coordination with the Ministry of Shipping and is intended to protect Indian merchant vessels from being attacked by pirates and also to instill confidence in our large seafaring community. (ANI) From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Dec 13 07:57:38 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:57:38 -0500 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?EU_Slims_Stimulus_Goal=2C_Targets_=91About?= =?windows-1252?q?=92_EU200_Billion_=28Update5=29_+_Germany_against?= =?windows-1252?q?_the_Rest_of_the_World?= Message-ID: EU Slims Stimulus Goal, Targets 'About' EU200 Billion (Update5) By Mark Deen and James G. Neuger Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- European Union leaders trimmed a proposed stimulus package to halt the slide into a recession, as Germany warded off calls by France and Britain for deficit- boosting programs. EU leaders pledged economy-boosting steps worth "about" 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, dropping an earlier target of investing "at least" that amount, according to a statement at a summit today in Brussels. The figure is equal to 200 billion euros ($266 billion). The accord papers over bickering between German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who resisted a bigger rescue package, and countries such as France and Britain that want Europe's largest economy to shoulder more of the burden in reviving growth. "Germany is living up to its responsibilities," Merkel said. "Europe has a common strategy for tackling this deep crisis. Of course, the governments have different instruments which they can use." Europe's caution contrasts with President-elect Barack Obama's call this week for the biggest U.S. infrastructure investments since the 1950s, with a price tag tabbed by lawmakers at $500 billion to $700 billion. Obama said concerns about the deficit will take a back seat in the short term. Waiting for Obama "When next month a new president takes office in America who is also committed to fiscal action, we'll be able to show that Europe and America can work together," U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said. "We will continue to reject the do-nothing approach." Europe's economic straits worsened today with a report that industrial production plunged the most in 15 years in October as orders weakened and business investment slumped. Output in the euro region fell 5.3 percent from a year earlier. "I don't think that it will be wise to speculate about a second European stimulus package," Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the panel of euro region finance ministers, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. "We have to observe closely the profile of the crisis and hopefully beginning elements of recovery in the second half of 2009." Interest-Rate Cycle Mindful of the European Central Bank's independence from political control, the EU statement didn't press the ECB to ease interest rates further after last week's reduction of 75 basis points to 2.5 percent, the biggest cut in the 10-year life of the euro. In an interview with Germany's Boersen-Zeitung newspaper, ECB council member Axel Weber cautioned against reducing rates below 2 percent, becoming the latest policy maker to signal the bank may be nearing the end of its rate-cutting cycle. Central bankers share Merkel's concern that extra spending would bust Germany's budget, set to be in balance for the first time in 39 years in 2008. While Merkel shunned calls to boost Germany's planned two-year 32 billion-euro program of construction investment and tax breaks, she said the government will consider in January whether new steps are necessary. Officials from Germany, France and the U.K. played down concerns that flared on the eve of the summit that policy makers in Europe's three largest economies are at loggerheads over the stimulus plan. "I've openly fought against this notion that Germany thinks in a less European manner," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. "We're all smart enough to know that not every medicine is suitable for different structures." 'Not Cross' Merkel is "not cross at all," U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on BBC Radio4 today. "You've got a widespread recognition that whatever the national differences, this is a time for fiscal stimulus." The plan depends on national governments kicking in 170 billion euros, with 30 billion euros to come from central EU budgets. Spending plans announced before the summit came up to only half the total. France has committed 26 billion euros, pushing its budget deficit above the EU limit of 3 percent of gross domestic product in 2009, EU forecasts show. Britain has pledged 20 billion pounds ($29.6 billion) and plans to run a deficit amounting to 8 percent of output next year. The unexpected spending "will temporarily deepen the deficits," the statement said. It said the EU "reaffirms its full commitment to sustainable public finances" and urged governments to "swiftly" return to budget-balancing policies. France failed, meanwhile, to win EU approval to reduce value- added tax at restaurants, an initiative successive German governments have blocked since at least 2002. A new deadline of March was set to overhaul the sales-tax system. Carmakers The 27 leaders also agreed that industries like carmaking and construction deserve support. The leaders backed plans by the European Investment Bank to double annual lending to carmakers to about 4 billion euros in 2009-10 to promote clean technologies. Carmakers in October had sought 40 billion euros in loans to help cope with tighter fuel-emissions standards and to offset the impact of $25 billion in lending to American rivals that the U.S. government was considering at the time. To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Deen in London at markdeen at bloomberg.net; James G. Neuger in Brussels at jneuger at bloomberg.net Last Updated: December 12, 2008 09:39 EST Rescue Packages Germany against the rest of the world By Jan Dams and Joachim Wittman 13.December 2008, 15:08 German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck vilifies Britain's financial stimulus plan in an interview with American magazine Newsweek, saying that making VAT cuts won't solve the problem, but rather will build a national debt that will take at least a generation to pay off. The problem? Everyone seems to be against Germany's solution. The tone seems to be getting bitter in the discussion about what is the correct reaction to the global economic downturn. After Britain invited French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso for talks ahead of the EU summit, and didn't invite German Chancellor Angela Merkel, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck hit back. "Are you really going to buy a DVD player because it now costs ?39.10 instead of ?39.90?" he asks, taking a gibe at British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in an interview with American magazine Newsweek. Brown has cut the interest rate from 17.5 percent to 15 percent to relieve the financial burden slightly for the British population in addition to stimulating the nation's economy. Yet, in Steinbrueck's opinion, all Brown's plan can achieve "is raise Britain's debt to a level that will take a whole generation to work off". Steinbrueck's comments are the best proof for the differences in opinion between Germany and its partners. The French and the British want to stimulate the economy with public funds, but Germany refuses to abide. This causes irritation not only because Germany, as Europe's leading economy, should lead the stimulus-movement, but also because the global export champion had made profits from the boom of the others. Paul Krugman, the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, referred to Steinbrueck as dumb, saying that a refusal to cooperate with debt-financed stimulus packages can cause severe damage. Steinbrueck's interview also left a sour taste in Britain, where the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) described it as an "unusual break of diplomatic customs". A Treasury spokesman said: "There is a broad international consent over the fact that a fiscal stimulus is now the correct step for the economy." Unofficially one is disgruntled about the attack ? mainly because it was made in the run-up to the EU summit where an all-European economic stimulus package is to be decided upon. Steinbrueck "represents a minority opinion" the BBC quoted a source close to the government as saying. In reality Steinbrueck was, as he often is, bold: The British were complaining about the Europeans overspending and criticized their budgets; yet "are now tossing around billions. "The switch from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism is breathtaking," he said. The SPD politician's critique towards Brown is also causing resentment in the British Labour Government because it coincides with what the conservative opposition says. The Tories are opposed to a value-added tax (VAT) cut and warn of a national debt that could reach at least eight percent of the gross domestic product in 2010 or 2011. Steinbrueck continues to receive support from Angela Merkel. She promised remedial measures for the economy to the other EU members, and said ahead of the summit with the other EU leaders that the nation is aware of its responsibility. "Germany will continue to look to see what we would possibly still have to do," she said. Yet, like so often in recent times, she disappoints expectations by rebuking arrangements the coalition had already made. But the German plan is not good enough for the rest of Europe. Even the "five wise men", Germany's council of economic experts, have labelled the German stimulus package as insufficient and a mingle-mangle of too many individual measures. Germany is giving just 10 billion euros over two years for additional investments ? that equates to not even one percent of the nation's economic performance. But Germany isn't only feeling the pressure to do more from the outside: President Horst Koehler (in the S?ddeutsche Zeitung newspaper) called for new, concentrated action against the crisis to be taken by the government, economics, trade unions and banks. Koehler also called for an international financial summit to analyse the origins of the global crisis. There have already been many international talks on the subject; unfortunately they haven't achieved much. Translated by Carolin Wittek From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Dec 13 08:04:21 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 10:04:21 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Japan Unveils New Economic Stimulus Measures Message-ID: Much of the money will still go to the financial sector! DECEMBER 12, 2008, 8:38 P.M. ET Japan Unveils New Economic Stimulus Measures By HIROKO TABUCHI TOKYO -- Japan unveiled a slew of new economic stimulus measures Friday amid signs the recession in the world's No.2 economy is rapidly getting worse. The move followed a 5.6% drop in the benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average and a spike in the yen to a new 13-year high after the bailout plan to aid U.S. auto makers fell apart in the Senate. News on Friday that auto maker Mazda Motor Corp. will slash production by 100,000 vehicles through March and shed 200 temporary workers in Japan exacerbated concerns of more pain ahead for Japan's export-led economy. Electronics maker Sharp Corp. also said it would close some manufacturing lines in Japan and fire temporary workers. The measures come as a new government report said Japan will likely face a protracted recession, with its exporters hurt by faltering growth in overseas markets. Revised gross domestic product data released earlier this week showed Japan's economy shrank 0.5% in the July-September period from the previous quarter, worse than initially estimated. In a note published Friday, Yamakawa Tetsufumi, a Tokyo-based economist at Goldman Sachs, said he expects Japan's economy to stay in recession until the second half of 2010. "The economy has worsened far beyond our expectations," Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso told a nationally televised press conference. "This is a once-in-a-century global slump. Japan isn't going to escape from this big tsunami, but we can respond to it in a way that minimizes the damage." The new measures, which follow about ?6.8 trillion in spending announced so far this year, includes a loan program for laid-off temporary workers, a particularly heated issue in Japan. Nonregular workers, who make up a third of the country's work force and have no security and few benefits, were hired en masse in recent years to keep labor costs low amid intense global competition. But companies are now letting them go to cut costs amid the deepening recession. The latest stimulus package also includes measures to help businesses raise liquidity by selling their short-term debts to a government-backed bank. Under the new scheme, the bank will buy up to ?3 trillion in commercial paper from struggling companies as they head into the year-end season, when fund demand intensifies. The plan also expands a bank rescue scheme to ?12 trillion from ?2 trillion. Mr. Aso, however, didn't make clear how much fresh spending the plan involved, or whether it overlapped with previous stimulus plans. He said the entire package would be worth ?23 trillion. Meanwhile, parliament has yet to approve the budget that would fund these plans. [Further Measures] Japan's exporters have also been battered by a rapidly strengthening yen, which erodes the value of their overseas earnings. Late Friday in Tokyo, the dollar was trading at ?90.48, after falling to below ?89 earlier in the day. Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa called the dollar's dip "shocking," but dismissed speculation Japan would intervene in currency markets, saying Friday he "wasn't considering such a move." Meanwhile, the collapse of the U.S. bailout plan could add to the country's woes. Japanese auto makers like Toyota Motor Corp. rely on some of the same suppliers and dealers as their U.S. counterparts, so a wave of failures in the American auto industry is also bad news for Japan. Toyota shares plummeted 10% to ?2,760 in Tokyo. The new stimulus measures are the latest signs that economic woes have forced Japan to all but abandon a drive to pare down its massive public debt, started by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Mr. Aso has suggested he will call off plans to balance the government's annual budget by 2012. Japan's debt -- which has ballooned to more than 180% of its GDP, according to estimates by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- is bad news for a country that faces surging social security costs as its population rapidly ages. Economists also warn of a return to the runaway government spending of the 1990s, when Japan unsuccessfully tried to spend its way out of a long economic slump. ?Yuka Hayashi and Yoshio Takahashi contributed to this article. Write to Hiroko Tabuchi at hiroko.tabuchi at wsj.com From fentona at shaw.ca Sat Dec 13 11:31:57 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 10:31:57 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Fwd: Artists Against Apartheid: radio broadcast References: <60279.132.216.18.140.1229192544.squirrel@bureau.koumbit.net> Message-ID: <7BF491D2-DFCC-4FC9-A1CE-959906432601@shaw.ca> * Artists Against Apartheid: radio broadcast ------------------------------- MONDAY DECEMBER 15th 12h00 - 14h00 live broadcast on CKUT Radio, 90.3fm tune-in globally via live stream at www.ckut.ca ------------------------------- http://www.tadamon.ca/post/2078 Throughout the past year in Montreal multiple artists have come together for Artists Against Apartheid, an ongoing concert series uniting artists in solidarity with the growing international movement against Israeli apartheid. CKUT radio presents a special radio broadcast featuring live performances recorded at the Artists Against Apartheid concert series throughout this past year, recordings that are being broadcast for the first time live on CKUT community radio in Montreal. Broadcast will feature performances from groundbreaking artists from different front-lines within Montreal?s internationally celebrated music scene; featuring live performances from the celebrated hip-hop ensemble Nomadic Massive, jazz saxophonist Matana Roberts, cellist Rebecca Foon from Silver Mt. Zion, composer Antoine Bustros, hip-hop artist Vox Sambou, the Kalmunity Vibe Collective, Balkan musician Lubo Alexandrov, poet Kaie Kellough and others? As a cultural initiative Artists Against Apartheid occurs as Israel?s military occupation over the Gaza Strip and West Bank intensifies, in violation of international law and multiple U.N. resolutions. Palestinian citizens face an entrenched system of racial discrimination and segregation, resembling the defeated apartheid system in South Africa. A matrix of Israeli-only roads, electrified fences, and over 500 military checkpoints and roadblocks erase freedom of movement. In response to apartheid policies imposed on the Palestinian people by Israel multiple artists are coming together in Montreal through the ongoing Artists Against Apartheid concert series, presenting a cultural force in solidarity with the ongoing Palestinian struggle for freedom. This radio broadcast is presented on CKUT radio within Tadamon!?s ongoing political campaigns operating in Canada, including the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli apartheid state and the campaign to challenge the listing of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization by the Canadian government. * Tadamon!: challenging Hezbollah?s listing as a ?Terrorist? group in Canada http://www.tadamon.ca/campaigns/de-listing-hezbollah * Tadamon!: boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli apartheid http://www.tadamon.ca/campaigns/boycott-divestment-and-sanctions-against-israeli-apartheid Tadamon! Montreal: tel: 514 664 1036 email: info[at]tadamon.ca From fentona at shaw.ca Sat Dec 13 14:16:40 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 13:16:40 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Haiti: The forgotten occupation Message-ID: http://socialistworker.org/2008/12/12/the-forgotten-occupation Analysis: Emmanuel Santos The forgotten occupation Emmanuel Santos explains why an extended UN presence has only meant more suffering for the people of Haiti. December 12, 2008 MORE THAN 9,000 military and civilian personnel from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH, by its French initials) will remain in the country until October 2009, following the UN Security Council's unanimous vote on October 15 to extend its mandate. MINUSTAH troops have occupied Haiti since 2004 when a U.S.-backed coup overthrew democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The brutal Brazilian-led UN military occupation has resulted in the death, imprisonment or disappearance of thousands of Aristide supporters. Human rights organizations and the independent media have reported sexual assaults committed against women and children. Brazilian leaders hope that their country's role in the occupation will lead to a future seat in the UN Security Council, where it can play a bigger political role as the region's emerging power. Other South American countries that help maintain the occupation in Haiti include Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Colombia. On October 31, Bolivia sent a contingent of 200 troops. Israel, the main U.S. ally in the Middle East, has played a role in maintaining the occupation by flying in Jordanian troops. The U.S. also has military and civilian personnel on the ground. The vote to extend the UN mandate came after warnings from the top UN envoy in Haiti, Hedi Annabi, who, according to Reuters, said that ignoring the plight of the Caribbean country and leaving its population hungry and angry could lead to a new wave of social unrest-- an allusion to popular protests over rising food prices in April that ousted former Prime Minister Jacques-?douard Alexis. But UN concerns about political stability in Haiti are only a justification for the ongoing presence of a 9,000-strong "peacekeeping" military force that keeps the popular movement in check by targeting left-wing activists and criminalizing the poor. In fact, Brazilian military forces are carrying out counterinsurgency operations in Haiti similar to those used in Brazil to repress the poor in the favelas and activists from the Landless Peasants Movement. MINUSTAH troops conduct raids in the poorest neighborhoods under the pretext of disarming criminal gangs. But those so-called "gangs" are ordinary Haitians who are being punished by the U.S. and its allies for daring to oppose the occupation. Thus, disarming criminal gangs serves to justify UN military presence there. Already, several massacres have been committed since its arrival. Meanwhile, the Bush administration and its allies continue to spread anti-Aristide propaganda to deflect criticism by human rights organizations that accuse MINUSTAH of systematic human rights violations. Even Haitian-American singer Wyclef Jean justifies the UN occupation by propagating the idea that it is fighting against dangerous gangs. In 2004, Jean supported the coup against Aristide. Jean was also executive producer of Ghost of Cit? Soleil, a propaganda film that portrays Aristide supporters as ruthless gangsters. Jean's role in demonizing Aristide and his supporters legitimized the UN occupation in the eyes of some Hollywood progressives and others. But local and international NGOs also played a role in legitimizing the occupation on the grounds that it would bring order by disarming streets gangs--in particular, Canadian NGOs, which led the charge against Aristide in the days leading to the February 2004 coup that ousted him. Canada's involvement in Haiti is part of a commitment to serve U.S. interests, just as it has in Iraq and Afghanistan. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A COMBATIVE grassroots movement exploded in April changing the political landscape in Haiti and weakening both President Ren? Pr?val and his Lespwa (Hope) Party. Pr?val's coalition was suffering, as some of the 22 National Assembly members from Lespwa joined Concertation des Parlementaires Progressistes (CPP, Coalition of Progressive Parliamentarians), a new legislative bloc that rejects neoliberal policies. After the senate rejected two of Pr?val's candidates for prime minister, the government was paralyzed for four months. The impasse ended in July, when the senate confirmed Mich?le Pierre-Louis as prime minister. Pierre-Louis is the founder of FOKAL, an NGO funded by financial speculator George Soros. But the confirmation of Pierre-Louis didn't represent a departure from politics as usual in Haiti. In November, Pierre-Louis was criticized by Haitian labor activists after she made a visit to the Dominican Republic to attend a small economic summit, but didn't extend her visit to meet with Haitian immigrants after several immigrants were killed in a wave of racist attacks the month before. Furthermore, discontent is mounting against the UN occupation and the Pr?val/Pierre-Louis government for failing to deliver on any of its 2006 election campaign promises. To mark the four-year anniversary of the UN occupation, protests were held in several countries on the eve of Brazilian President Luis In?cio Lula da Silva's visit to Haiti on May 28. Solidarity activists in Brazil, Mexico and the U.S. marched to demand the immediate withdrawal of MINUSTAH from Haiti. The biggest demonstrations took place in Brazil, where labor and left-wing activists marched in several cities. The occupation of Haiti is unpopular among Brazilians. Over the past four years, Brazil has spent more than 464 million Reals ($290 million) on the occupation, a major sum for a country where more than 40 million people live below the poverty line. Meanwhile, the movement against the high cost of living continues in Haiti. On August 25, several hundred people gathered in La Savane, a poor area in the town of Les Cayes, to demand lower food and gas prices. A rapid response by MINUSTAH forces and Haitian police dispersed the crowd with tear gas. On October 14, several hundred people gathered in front of the Commerce and Industry Ministry to protest the high cost of living and call for an end to the MINUSTAH occupation. The protest was organized by Soleil in Action Coalition, known as Aba Satan (Down with Satan)--a key player in the events leading to the April rebellion. It plans similar actions in the future. Meanwhile, Lavalas activists and supporters are holding weekly vigils for activists who have been jailed and disappeared since the February coup. During Lula's visit, Haitian police from the elite CIMO unit brutally dispersed a vigil of protesters demanding a prompt investigation into the disappearance of human rights activist Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine. Pierre-Antoine disappeared in 2007 after attending a meeting with human rights activists from Canada and the U.S. Haitian activists, along with international supporters, have in the past organized successful campaigns to free human rights activists, Lavalas leaders and former Aristide collaborators. In July 2006, former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune was released after spending two years in jail. In August 2006, Annette Auguste, a folk singer and activist popularly known as So Anne, was also released. Presently, a local and international campaign is underway to free Ronald Dauphin, an Aristide supporter arrested by right-wing paramilitaries during the 2004 coup. Five years later, he has yet to be convicted for any crime. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - DESPITE THE repression carried out by MINUSTAH, Haitian National Police and right-wing death squads since 2004, ordinary people continue the fight to return the democratically elected president from his forced exile in South Africa. While it's true that Aristide implemented neoliberal policies, he remains popular among the majority of Haitians. Four years after the coup, Fanmi Lavalas (FL or Lavalas), the center-left populist party founded by Aristide 12 years ago, is still a mass political organization. Although it is split into two different wings internally, its grassroots supporters are united in confronting the UN occupation by organizing nationwide demonstrations. This is a testament to the determination of ordinary Haitians, who also face one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes on the planet after four hurricanes struck the country in less than two months. Soon after, the agricultural sector collapsed, depriving workers and peasants of one of their main sources of income in a country where the unemployment rate is 80 percent. But the destructive effects of nature could have been avoided had there been more investment on infrastructure, health care and food subsidies. Haiti is more vulnerable today because the occupation has rolled back many of its democratic freedoms. During the coup, schools and hospitals were destroyed by right-wing paramilitaries, as they entered the country from neighboring Dominican Republic, where they received training and arms from the Dominican government and the U.S. The government's response to the crisis hasn't been enough--largely due to Haiti's dependence on outside powers. In the agriculture department, for instance, some 800 NGOs control part of the budget, undermining the state's ability to deal with the crisis. And even though Haiti is facing a crisis of indescribable proportions, it hasn't stopped paying back its foreign debt. As of this writing, Haiti's payments amount to $1 million a week. Activists worldwide are pressing the World Bank to forgive Haiti's $1.7 billion foreign debt, but so far, it has refused. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PRIOR TO the recent devastation, independent journalists revealed a plan to demolish Cit? Soleil, a poor neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, to extend the UN military base. The U.S. is funding the base extension. Haiti Libert? reporter Kim Ives explains the importance of this military base for the U.S.: First, as Port-au-Prince's largest, poorest and most pro-Aristide slum, it has been a hotbed of anti-occupation resistance for the past four years. Although most of the popular organizations carrying out armed struggle were dismantled in early 2007, unrest still continues there, particularly with Haiti's (and the capitalist world's) worsening economic crisis. Hence, military domination of this important northern flank of Haiti's capital is critical. As in the past, the military occupation of Haiti is part of a larger plan to keep the region under U.S. dominion. Haiti shares the Windward Passage with Cuba, a strait that has great importance for the U.S., and the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. In the early 1990s, Haiti's election of Aristide under a populist platform gave hope to millions of people at a time when most governments in the region were implementing neoliberal policies. A series of U.S.-backed regimes and interventions to derail the movement for change followed. The 2004 coup against Aristide and the subsequent military occupation legitimized the Bush administration's "regime change" doctrine in the region, making Venezuela and Bolivia future targets of U.S. intervention. Solidarity with the Haitian people should be part of a broader anti- imperialism that calls for an end to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine as well as an immediate withdrawal of the UN from Haiti and elsewhere. At the same time, activists must point out Aristide's role in accepting neoliberal policies that impoverished the poor, while supporting ordinary people's struggles to return him to complete his term. Demanding immediate cancellation of Haiti's foreign debt is also important, because it could free up needed resources to feed people. In the long term, however, it will take the unity of workers and peasants in the entire region to free Haiti from the yoke of foreign intervention and exploitation. = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = What else to read Watch an interview [1] with Yves Engler, co-author of the book Canada in Haiti: The War on the Poor Majority on Canada's role in February 2004 coup. Listen to an interview [2] with American physician Dr. John Carrol on the health crisis in Cit? Soleil. Read news and analysis on Haiti at the Haiti Information Project [3] Web site. The International Socialist Review [4] has carried extensive coverage of the food crisis in Haiti and globally, including Sharon Smith's "The revolt over rising food prices." [5] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [6] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org. ? [1] http://citizen.nfb.ca/damage-done-canada-and-coup-haiti ? [2] http://citizen.nfb.ca/node/2027&dossier_nid=1142 ? [3] http://www.teledyol.net/HIP/about.html ? [4] http://www.isreview.org ? [5] http://www.isreview.org/issues/59/feat-food.shtml ? [6] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Dec 13 15:23:21 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:23:21 -0800 Subject: [R-G] This is anti-Semitism? Message-ID: <200812132223.mBDMNLE4024546@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081213/439a6339/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Dec 13 15:22:43 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:22:43 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Israeli Arabs should live in Palestinian state: Livni Message-ID: <200812132222.mBDMMhuY023753@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081213/c98f1484/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Dec 13 15:24:31 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:24:31 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Workers of America: Wake Up! We All Need a Union! Message-ID: <200812132224.mBDMOVKu025225@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081213/538647cd/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Dec 13 15:23:50 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:23:50 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Instead of Auschwitz Message-ID: <200812132223.mBDMNovh024817@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081213/7b57fc8d/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Dec 13 15:25:08 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:25:08 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Capitalist Fools Message-ID: <200812132225.mBDMP8rD025742@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081213/a0003c56/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Dec 13 15:33:27 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:33:27 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Labor Victory in Chicago Message-ID: <200812132233.mBDMXRBI001909@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081213/42dfabbe/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Dec 13 18:43:47 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 10:43:47 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The US Imperial Triangle and Military Spending Message-ID: <494464D3.2060005@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W McChesney Monthly Review (October 2008) The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the post-Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged US national defense spending has increased by almost sixty percent in real dollar terms to a level in 2007 of $553 billion. This is higher than at any point since the Second World War (though lower than previous decades as a percentage of GDP). Based on such official figures, the United States is reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as accounting for 45 percent of world military expenditures. Yet, so gargantuan and labyrinthine are US military expenditures that the above grossly understates their true magnitude, which, as we shall see below, reached $1 trillion in 2007. {1} Externally, these are necessary expenditures of world empire. Internally, they represent, as Michal Kalecki was the first to suggest, an imperial triangle of state-financed military production, media propaganda, and real/imagined economic-employment effects that has become a deeply entrenched, and self-perpetuating feature of the US social order. {2} Many analysts today view the present growth of US militarism and imperialism as largely divorced from the earlier Cold War history of the United States, which was commonly seen as a response to the threat represented by the Soviet Union. Placed against this backdrop the current turn to war and war preparation appears to numerous commentators to lack a distinct target, despite concerns about global terrorism, and to be mainly the product of irrational hubris on the part of US leaders. Even as insightful a left historian as Eric Hobsbawm has recently adopted this general perspective. Thus in his 2008 book On Empire Hobsbawm writes: Frankly, I can't make sense of what has happened in the United States since 9/11 that enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy ... Today a radical right-wing regime seeks to mobilize "true Americans" against some evil outside force and against a world that does not recognize the uniqueness, the superiority, the manifest destiny of America ... In effect, the most obvious danger of war today arises from the global ambitions of an uncontrollable and apparently irrational government in Washington ... To give America the best chance of learning to return from megalomania to rational foreign policy is the most immediate and urgent task of international politics. {3} Such a view, which sees the United States as under the influence of a new irrationalism introduced by George W Bush and a cabal of neoconservative "political crazies", and consequently calls for a return from "megalomania to rational foreign policy", downplays the larger historical and structural forces at work that connect the Cold War and post-Cold War imperial eras. In contrast, a more realistic perspective, we believe, can be obtained by looking at the origins of the US "military ascendancy" (as C Wright Mills termed it) in the early Cold War years and the centrality this has assumed in the constitution of the US empire and economy up to the present. {4} The Permanent War Economy and Military Keynesianism In January 1944 Charles E Wilson, president of General Electric and executive vice chairman of the War Production Board, delivered a speech to the Army Ordnance Association advocating a permanent war economy. According to the plan Wilson proposed on that occasion, every major corporation should have a "liaison" representative with the military, who would be given a commission as a colonel in the Reserve. This would form the basis of a program, to be initiated by the president as commander in chief in cooperation with the War and Navy departments, designed to bind corporations and military together into a single unified armed forces-industrial complex. "What is more natural and logical", he asked, "than that we should henceforth mount our national policy upon the solid fact of an industrial capacity for war, and a research capacity for war that is already 'in being'? It seems to me anything less is foolhardy". Wilson went on to indicate that in this plan the part to be played by Congress was restricted to voting for the needed funds. Further, it was essential that industry be allowed to play its central role in this new warfare state without being hindered politically "or thrown to the fanatical isolationist fringe [and] tagged with a 'merchants-of-death' label". In calling, even before the Second World War had come to a close, for a "continuing program of industrial preparedness", for war, Charles E Wilson (sometimes referred to as "General Electric Wilson" to distinguish him from "General Motors Wilson" - Charles Erwin Wilson, president of General Motors and Eisenhower's secretary of defense) was articulating a view that was to characterize the US oligarchy as a whole during the years immediately following the Second World War. In earlier eras it had been assumed that there was an economic "guns and butter" trade-off, and that military spending had to occur at the expense of other sectors of the economy. However, one of the lessons of the economic expansion in Nazi Germany, followed by the experience of the United States itself in arming for the Second World War, was that big increases in military spending could act as huge stimulants to the economy. In just six years under the influence of the Second World War the US economy expanded by seventy percent, finally recovering from the Great Depression. The early Cold War era thus saw the emergence of what later came to be known as "military Keynesianism": the view that by promoting effective demand and supporting monopoly profits military spending could help place a floor under US capitalism. {5} John Maynard Keynes, in his landmark General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, in the midst of the Depression, argued that the answer to economic stagnation was to promote effective demand through government spending. The bastardized Keynesianism that came to be known as "military Keynesianism" was the view that this was best effected with the least negative consequences for big business by focusing on military spending. As Joan Robinson, one of Keynes's younger colleagues, critically explained in her iconoclastic lecture, "The Second Crisis of Economic Theory", before the American Economic Association on December 27, 1971: The most convenient thing for a government to spend on is armaments. The military-industrial complex [thus] took charge. I do not think it plausible to suppose that the cold war and several hot wars were invented just to solve the employment problem. But certainly they have had that effect. The system had the support not only of the corporations who make profits under it and the workers who got jobs, but also of the economists who advocated government loan-expenditure as a prophylactic against stagnation. Whatever were the deeper forces leading to the hypertrophy of military power after the world war was over, certainly they could not have had such free play if the doctrine of sound finance had still been respected. It was the so-called Keynesians who persuaded successive Presidents that there is no harm in a budget deficit and left the military-industrial complex to take advantage of it. So it has come about that Keynes' pleasant daydream was turned into a nightmare of terror. {6} The first to theorize this tendency toward military Keynesianism under monopoly capitalism, was the Polish economist Michal Kalecki (most famous, as Robinson pointed out in the above-mentioned lecture, for having discovered the essentials of Keynes's General Theory before Keynes himself). In a 1943 essay on "The Political Aspects of Full Employment" and in subsequent essays, Kalecki argued that monopoly capital had a deep aversion to increased civilian government spending due to its intrusion on the commodity market and the sphere of private profit, but that this did not apply in the same way to military spending, which was seen by the vested interests as adding to rather than crowding out profits. If absorption of the massive economic surplus of large corporate capital through increased government spending was the key to accumulation in post-Second World War US capitalism, this was dependent principally on military expenditures, or what Kalecki in 1956 labeled "the armament-imperialist complex". This resulted in a "high degree of utilization" of productive capacity and "counteracted the disrupting influence of the increase in the relative share of accumulation of big business in the national product". {7} For Kalecki this new military-supported regime of accumulation that came to characterize US monopoly capital by the mid-1950s established a strong political-economic foundation for its own rule "based on the following [imperial] triangle": 1. Imperialism contributes to a relatively high level of employment through expenditures on armaments and ancillary purposes and through the maintenance of a large body of armed forces and government employees. 2. The mass communications media, working under the auspices of the ruling class, emits propaganda aimed at securing the support of the population for this armament-imperialist set-up. 3. The high level of employment and the standard of living increased considerably as compared with before the war (as a result of the rise in the productivity of labor), and this facilitated the absorption of this propaganda to the broad masses of the population. Mass communication occupied a central place in this imperial triangle. An essential part of Kalecki's argument was that "the mass communication media, such as the daily press, radio, and television in the United States are largely under the control of the ruling class". As none other than Charles E (General Electric) Wilson, then defense mobilization director, put it in a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 26 1951, the job of the media was to bring "public opinion, as marshaled by the press" to the support of the permanent war effort (italics added). {8} The result by the mid-1950s was a fairly stable militarized economy, in which intertwined imperial, political-economic, and communication factors all served to reinforce the new military-imperial order. Kalecki observed that US trade unions were "part and parcel of the armament-imperialist set-up. Workers in the United States are not duller and trade union leaders are not more reactionary 'by nature' than in other capitalist countries. Rather, the political situation in the United States, is simply, in accordance with the precepts of historical materialism, the unavoidable consequence of economic developments and of characteristics of the superstructure of monopoly capitalism in its advanced stage." All of this pointed to what Harry Magdoff was to call the essential "one-ness of national security and business interests" that came to characterize the US political economy and empire. {9} Many of Kalecki's ideas were developed further by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in 1966 in Monopoly Capital. Baran and Sweezy argued there were at least five political-economic-imperial ends propelling the US oligarchy in the 1950s and 1960s toward the creation of a massive military establishment: (1) defending US global hegemony and the empire of capital against external threats in the form of a wave of revolutions erupting throughout the world, simplistically viewed in terms of a monolithic Communist threat centered in the Soviet Union; (2) creating an internationally "secure" platform for US corporations to expand and monopolize economic opportunities abroad; (3) forming a government-sponsored research and development sector that would be dominated by big business; (4) generating a more complacent population at home, made less recalcitrant under the nationalistic influence of perpetual war and war preparation; and (5) soaking up the nation's vast surplus productive capacity, thus helping to stave off economic stagnation, through the promotion of high-profit, low-risk (to business) military spending. The combined result of such political-economic-imperial factors was the creation of the largest, most deeply-entrenched and persistent, "peacetime" war machine that the world had ever seen. {10} Like Kalecki, Baran and Sweezy argued that the US oligarchy kept a "tight rein on civilian [government] spending", which, they suggested, "had about reached its outer limits" as a percentage of national income "by 1939", but was nonetheless "open-handed with the military". Government-pump priming operations therefore occurred largely through spending on wars and war preparations in the service of empire. The Pentagon naturally made sure that bases and armaments industries were spread around the United States and that numerous corporations profited from military spending, thus maximizing congressional support due to the effects on states and districts. {11} For members of the US oligarchy and their hangers-on, the virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing military spending and economic growth represented by military Keynesianism was something to be celebrated rather than held up to criticism. Harvard economist Sumner Slichter explained to a banker's convention in October 1949, that as long as Cold War spending persisted a severe economic depression was "difficult to conceive". The Cold War "increases the demand for goods, helps sustain a high level of employment, accelerates technological progress and thus helps the country to raise its standard of living ... So we may thank the Russians for helping make capitalism in the United States work better than ever". Similarly, US News and World Report told its readers on May 14 1950 (a month before the outbreak of the Korean War): Government planners figure they have found the magic formula for almost endless good times. They are now beginning to wonder if there may not be something to perpetual motion after all. Cold war is the catalyst. Cold war is an automatic pump primer. Turn a spigot, and the public clamors for more arms spending. Turn another, the clamor ceases. Truman confidence, cockiness, is based on this "Truman formula". Truman era of good times, President is told, can run much beyond 1952. Cold war demands, if fully exploited, are almost limitless. In the same vein, US News and World Report was to declare in 1954: "What H-bomb means to business. A long period ... of big orders. In the years ahead, the effects of the new bomb will keep on increasing. As one appraiser puts it: 'The H-bomb has blown depression-thinking out the window'." In 1959 David Lawrence, editor of US News and World Report, indicated that he viewed with equanimity the suggestion that the United States "might conceivably strike first in what has become known as 'preemptive' rather than 'preventive' war". Henry Luce, the media mogul at the head of the Time-Life empire, who coined the term "the American Century", observed in November 1957 in Fortune that the United States "can stand the load of any defense effort required to hold the power of Soviet Russia in check. It cannot, however, indefinitely stand the erosion of creeping socialism and the ceaseless extension of government activities into additional economic fields" beyond the military. This was directly in line with Kalecki's and Baran and Sweezy's contention that the system was tight-fisted where civilian spending was concerned and open-handed with the military. Remarking on the success of military Keynesianism in promoting economic prosperity, the influential Harvard economist Seymour Harris wrote in the The New York Times Magazine in 1959: "If we treat the years from 1941 to the present as a whole, we find again that a period of record prosperity coincided with a period of heavy military outlay ... About one dollar out of seven went for war and preparation for war, and this expenditure was undoubtedly a stimulus to the economy". {12} A military Keynesian view was close to the heart of the major US planning document of the Cold War, NSC-68, issued in April 1950 shortly before the Korean War by the US National Security Council and signed by President Truman in September 1950, but not declassified until 1975. Drafted by Paul Nitze, then head of the policy review group in the state department, the main intent of NSC-68 was to construct a rollback strategy against the Soviet Union. It called for a vast increase in military spending above its already high levels, and considered the possibility that "in an emergency the United States could devote upward of fifty percent of its gross national product" to the military effort as in the Second World War. "From the point of view of the economy as a whole", NSC-68 declared, the program [of military expansion] might not result in a real decrease in the standard of living, for the economic effects of the program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes. One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency [full capacity], can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living. After allowing for price changes, personal consumption expenditures rose by almost one-fifth between 1939 and 1944, even though the economy had in the meantime increased the amount of resources going into Government use by $60[-]$65 billion (in 1939 prices). {13} US militarism was therefore motivated first and foremost by a global geopolitical struggle, but was at the same time seen as essentially costless (even beneficial) to the US economy, which could have more guns and more butter too. It was thus viewed as a win-win solution for the US empire and economy. By the time that President Eisenhower (who played a role in this military expansion) raised concerns about what he dubbed the "military-industrial complex" in his farewell address of January 17 1961, it was already so firmly established as to constitute the permanent war economy envisioned by Charles E (General Electric) Wilson. As Eisenhower's secretary of defense, Charles Erwin (General Motors) Wilson (best known for having created a major flap by saying that "what is good for General Motors is good for the country"), observed in 1957, the military set-up was then so built into the economy as to make it virtually irreversible: "so many Americans are getting a vested interest in it: Properties, business, jobs, employment, votes, opportunities for promotion and advancement, bigger salaries for scientists and all that ... If you try to change suddenly you get into trouble ... If you shut the whole business off now, you will have the state of California in trouble because such a big percentage of the aircraft industry is in California". {14} Hence, the concern that Eisenhower voiced in his farewell address about a "permanent armaments industry of vast proportions" and the fact that "we annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations" {15} was a belated recognition of what had already become an established fact. The need for the gargantuan military-industrial complex that the United States developed in these years was not so much for purposes of economic expansion directly (though military Keynesianism pointed to its stimulating effects) but due to the reality, as Baran and Sweezy emphasized, that the capitalist world order and US hegemony could only be maintained "a while longer", in the face of rising insurgencies throughout the world, through "increasingly direct and massive intervention by American armed forces". {16} This entire built-in military system could not be relinquished without relinquishing empire. Indeed, the chief importance of US military power from the early Cold War years to today has been that it is used - either directly, resulting in millions of deaths (counting those who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, as well as dozens of lesser conflicts), or indirectly, as a means to intimidate. {17} The most important left analysts of these developments in the 1950s and 1960s, Kalecki, Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff, insisted - going against the dominant US Cold War ideology - that the cause of US military spending was capitalist empire, rather than the need to contain the Soviet threat. The benefits of military spending to monopoly capital, moreover, guaranteed its continuation, barring a major social upheaval. The decade and a half since the fall of the Soviet Union has confirmed the accuracy of this assessment. The euphoria of the "peace dividend" following the end of the Cold War evaporated almost immediately in the face of new imperial requirements. This was a moment of truth for US capitalism, demonstrating how deeply entrenched were its military-imperial interests. By the end of the 1990s US military spending, which had been falling, was on its way up again. Today, in what has been called a "unipolar world", US military spending for purposes of empire is rapidly expanding - to the point that it rivals that of the entire rest of the world put together. When it is recognized that most of the other top ten military-spending nations are US allies or junior partners, it makes the US military ascendancy even more imposing. Only the reality of global empire (and the effects of this on the internal body politic) can explain such an overwhelming destructive power. As Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert Kaplan proudly proclaimed in 2005: "By the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice". {18} The Labyrinth of US Military Spending The most direct way of measuring the extent of the US commitment to the military-imperialist complex over the post-Second World War period is through an examination of US military spending itself. This is not, however, easily accomplished. US military expenditure is a labyrinth presenting numerous dead ends. What is treated by almost all analysts as a reliable data source for such expenditures is the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Historical Tables, generated along with the federal budget. In the Historical Tables for Fiscal Year 2009, Department of Defense spending (OMB Table 3.2, line 051) is listed as $529.8 billion for 2007; while adding in atomic energy defense activities and defense-related activities brings total national defense (line 050) to $552.6 billion. This number can be considered acknowledged military spending, since it is what is usually reported as US national defense spending and used (with only small differences) by NATO and SIPRI. {19} However, there is another, fuller accounting of US national defense spending included in the US National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), a source which constitutes the final word on the totals for the US economy as a whole (see Table 1). The National Income and Product Accounts give $662 billion as the total for national defense spending for 2007, or over $100 billion more than the OMB figures. Much of the difference is explained by the fact that the NIPA numbers for national defense, as opposed to the US budget figures, take account of the following: government consumption of fixed capital, cash payments to amortize the underfunded liability for military and civilian retirement benefits (which in the budget accounting are included elsewhere as "intergovernmental transactions"), and expenditures recorded on a delivery (accrual) rather than cash basis (as in the budget). {21} Table 1. US Military spending, 2007 (in billions of dollars) (See http://www.monthlyreview.org/081001foster-holleman-mcchesney.php ) The NIPA figures thus capture far more accurately than the OMB data the economic resources directed to the military, emphasizing "full cost budgeting". As economist and peace researcher Jurgen Brauer observes: "For the United States, the NIPA numbers are the most comprehensive and conceptually complete national defense outlays data we have, since they are expressly based on economists' national income accounting framework rather than on politicians' need to review and pass budget requests". {22} Adopting the NIPA figures for national defense spending, however, only partly solves the problem of developing an accurate assessment of US military spending. It still remains to add to this the military spending concealed in other economic categories, and not captured by total NIPA national defense spending. Drawing on other lines in the National Income and Product Accounts, it is necessary to add to the NIPA national defense figures all or part of: economic grants to foreign governments; space; medical payments to military retirees and dependents at non-military facilities; veterans' benefits; and the net interest payments on the national debt attributable to military spending. All of the above items are recognized in NATO and SIPRI definitions of military spending, except veterans' benefits and net interest payments, which are excluded as "legacy costs". Yet, since legacy costs are an important part of military expenditures (and some other legacy costs are included in the basic data) we incorporate veterans' benefits and the net interest payments attributable to past wars and military expansions here, in line with estimates of military spending provided by other analysts. This makes more sense as we are concerned with the social, economic, and imperial legacy of the rise of a US military establishment over more than half a century. {23} Our figures, provided in Table 1 show that actual US military spending in 2007 came to $1 trillion. This contrasts with SIPRI's clearly understated estimate (in relation to countries other than the United States as well) for all the world's nations in 2007 of $1.3 trillion. {24} The above estimate of total US military spending in 2007 is in the same ballpark as those that have been derived by some other critics of US military spending - through the alternative, very arduous process of adding up the many different components of military spending hidden in the budget. In a June 2007 article for Monthly Review, economist James Cypher, adopting a budget-based approach, arrived at an estimate of US military expenditures for 2006 amounting to $929.8 billion. More recently Chalmers Johnson, author of the anti-empire trilogy Blowback (2000), Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis (2007), has contended that when all military spending elements of the US 2008 fiscal year budget are added up the total comes to "at least $1.1 trillion". {25} Our method above has also been used to develop estimates of actual military spending levels as a percentage of GDP for the post-Second World War era as a whole. {26} According to these figures, total military spending as a share of GDP in 2007 was 7.3 percent, the highest level since 1997. In contrast, acknowledged national defense spending as presented by the Office of Management and Budget, misleadingly shows military spending as a percentage of GDP at four percent in 2007. (See Table 1.) It is crucial to track military spending as a proportion of total federal government expenditures. In doing so, we follow the accepted practice of excluding social security, medicare, and other transfer payments from our measure of federal expenditures, since transfer payments are self-financing, hence do not draw on the income-tax based general fund or contribute to the national debt. Actual military spending as a percentage of federal spending minus transfer payments (see Chart 1) declined every year from the end of the Reagan era in 1988, when it stood at 68 percent, to 2003, when it reached a half-century low of 49 percent. Since then it has changed direction and has risen again to 52 percent. This naturally closely parallels, although at a higher level, the path for acknowledged national defense spending as a percentage of federal spending (also depicted in Chart 1). Acknowledged national defense spending in 2007 was only 29 percent of federal expenditures (minus transfer payments), grossly misrepresenting the share of military spending in federal outlays. Chart 1. Actual and acknowledged military spending as percentage of federal expenditures (minus transfer payments): See http://www.monthlyreview.org/081001foster-holleman-mcchesney.php The US Imperial Triangle Today What does the foregoing tell us in relation to our original question? Is it reasonable to argue, as Hobsbawm and others have, that the expansion of US militarism and imperialism in the present period is the result of "a group of political crazies", who have come to power in Washington and constructed a "radical right-wing regime" abounding in "megalomania"? As an explanation of the current phase of US empire this is clearly inadequate. Despite the often neoconservative nature of the Bush administration's top operatives, they have had the broad backing of the greater part of the establishment in the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, the War on Terrorism as a whole, the huge military buildup, et cetera. To be sure, if a Democratic administration under Al Gore had come into power in 2000 it is not at all certain that the United States would have gone to war with Iraq, in addition to Afghanistan, though an attempt would have been made to uphold US imperial interests. The Bush administration from the first was distinguished by the particularly bellicose group of neoconservatives at its helm. But in pursuing their belligerent ends they hardly lacked solid backing within the circles of power. Strong support was extended by both political parties, Congress, the judiciary, the media, and the corporations generally. Disagreements were largely about troop levels, the amount of force to be applied, relations to allies, dates of withdrawal (partial or whole), distribution of forces between the major "theaters", et cetera. More fundamental questions, even the use of torture, were avoided. Major dissent has mainly come from the bottom of the society. All of this suggests that expanded militarism and imperialism is deeply entrenched at present, at least within the top echelons of US society. It reflects a general concern to expand US hegemony as part of an imperial grand strategy, including rolling back insurgent forces and "rogue states" around the world, and keeping junior partners in line. The war in Iraq is best viewed as an attempt to assert US geopolitical control over the entire Persian Gulf and its oil - an objective that both political wings of the establishment support, and which is part of the larger aim of the restoration of a grand US hegemony. {27} The vast scale of US military spending - encompassing more than fifty percent of the federal budget (excluding social security, medicare, and other transfer payments) and constituting seven percent of the entire GDP - is thus externally rooted in the needs of the US imperial grand strategy, which continually strains the US system to its limits (as measured by the budget and trade deficits). US imperialism has been transformed in recent decades by the absence of the Soviet Union, giving the United States more immediate power (particularly in the military realm), coupled, paradoxically, with signs of a secular decline in US economic hegemony. It is this dual reality of a temporary increase in US power along with indications of its long-term decline that has led to urgent calls throughout the power elite for a "New American Century", and to attempts by Washington to leverage its enormous military power to regain economic and geopolitical strength, for example, in the Persian Gulf oil region. In recent years, the United States has enormously expanded its military bases and operations around the world with bases now in around seventy countries and US troops present in various capacities (including joint exercises) in perhaps twice that number. Washington is thus not just spending money on the military and producing destructive weapons, or engaging in wars and interventions. It is also building a lasting physical presence around the world that allows for control/subversion/rapid deployment. {28} As a further reason not to dismiss the new surge in US militarism and imperialism as merely the "megalomania" of a few, our argument points back to Kalecki's imperial triangle, as constituting the principal dilemma facing opponents of imperialism. The creation of a huge military establishment to serve the US empire was also understood, in military-Keynesian terms, as a quasi-full-employment strategy aimed at combating economic stagnation. With the help of the media (which, as General Electric Wilson insisted, had the task of "marshalling" public opinion in support of the permanent war economy), the distinctive foundations of post-Second World War US capitalism were laid. The growth of the antiwar movement in response to the Vietnam War, and the end of the Cold War, represented setbacks for the imperial triangle, which showed up in terms of temporary drops in military spending as a percentage of GDP. Each time, in the late 1970s/early 1980s and again in the late 1990s/early 2000s, such temporary lulls in military spending have been followed by a military resurgence. {29} For Kalecki the weak link in the imperial triangle was clearly the mass media propaganda system, which had the job of selling the permanent war economy to a population that could conceivably opt for other more rational, just, and egalitarian courses. Unlike the Korean War or the Vietnam War, the Iraq War (like the Gulf War before it) was preceded by a massive antiwar movement in the United States, demonstrating the willingness of perhaps a majority of the population to seek another way, opposed to militarism and imperialism. It was the monopoly media, far more concentrated than in Luce's day and now virtually indistinguishable from monopoly-finance capital (becoming simply its public voice), that came to the rescue of US war capitalism in its moment of need, giving credence to its obvious lies. "The press", as one of us has written, "was [soon] eating out of the Bush administration's bowl". {30} In a period of economic stagnation, financial crisis, declining hegemony, impending environmental collapse, and new populist insurgencies, Washington, representing the US oligarchy as a whole, was once again able to enlist the media monopoly in the marshaling of public opinion in support of the imperial project through the promotion of war hysteria. What made this possible was the prior existence of a well-oiled, privatized propaganda system designed to limit the range of legitimate debate in the mainstream media. In this system even the outer reaches of the quite timid liberal punditocracy were strictly walled-in to fit within the proscribed boundaries of elite debate. Today fundamental dissent toward the existence of the military-imperial system, no matter how thoughtful or well-informed, is decidedly off-limits, except for periodic ridicule. Ours is decidedly a "military-industrial-media complex". {31} Nevertheless, the imperial triangle is now increasingly confronted with its own contradictions. As Baran and Sweezy foresaw more than four decades ago in Monopoly Capital, the US military system faced two major internal obstacles. First, military spending tended to be technologically intensive and hence its employment stimulating effect was decreasing. "Ironically", they observed, "the huge military outlays of today may even be contributing substantially to an increase of unemployment: many of the new technologies which are byproducts of military research and development are also applicable to civilian production, where they are quite likely to have the effect of raising productivity and reducing the demand for labor". Second, expansion of "weapons of total destruction" and the devastating effects of the use of more powerful weapons, could be expected to generate a growing rebellion against the permanent war economy at all levels of society, as people perceived the dangers of global barbarism (or worse, annihilation). {32} Today the enormous weight of Washington's war machine has not prevented it from being stretched to its limits while becoming bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although still capable of great destruction, the United States is significantly limited in its ability to deploy massive force to achieve its ends whenever and wherever it wishes. The dream of Pax Americana, first presented by John F Kennedy at the height of the Cold War, has turned into the nightmare of Pox Americana in the years of waning US dominance. The role the media monopoly has assumed in recent years in the promotion of war propaganda has contributed to the rapid growth of a media reform movement, which is now challenging the concentration of communications in the United States. {33} There is no doubt that a society that supports its global position and social order through $1 trillion a year in military spending, most likely far exceeding that of all the other countries in the world put together, unleashing untold destruction on the world, while faced with intractable problems of inequality, economic stagnation, financial crisis, poverty, waste, and environmental decline at home, is a society that is ripe for change. It is our task to change it. Notes 1. Office of Management and Budget, Budget for Fiscal Year, 2009, Historical Tables, Table 3.2; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2008: Summary, http://yearbook2008.sipri.org/files/SIPRIYB08summary.pdf, 10-11; SIPRI, Military Expenditure Database (United States), http://milexdata.sipri.org/result.php4. SIPRI data on US military expenditures (drawn on here for estimates of increases in real military spending and for international comparison) are only marginally (about 5 percent) higher than the acknowledged national defense figures contained in the Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables, and are clearly based on these. While the Office of Management and Budget lists $552.6 billion in total national defense for the United States spending in 2007, SIPRI provides a figure of $578.3 billion. It should be noted that SIPRI data, athough based on the same or similar nominal figures as the acknowledged US national defense spending, registers a higher rate of increase in US military expenditures than "reported in official US data because of the method of conversion into constant dollars. While SIPRI uses the consumer price index (CPI) for price conversion for all countries, the US official figures are converted using military-specific deflators. Thus, the SIPRI data show the trend in the purchasing power of the military budget had it instead been spent on typical consumer goods and services, while the US official data show the trend in its purchasing power for military goods and services. The nominal change is the same for the two series". SIPRI Yearbook, 2007, 275. 2. Michal Kalecki, The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 96. 3. Eric Hobsbawm, On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 57-59. 4. C Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 198. It should be noted that Hobsbawm is not alone in promoting what can be called the "cabal theory". See the discussion of this in John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 13, 18, 107-08, 117-20. 5. "WPB Aide Urges US to Keep War Set-Up", New York Times; January 20 1944; Charles E Wilson, "For the Common Defense", Army Ordnance 26, no 143 (March-April 1944): 285-88; Fred J Cook, "Juggernaut: The Warfare State", special issue, The Nation, October 28 1961, 285; Johnathan Feldman, Universities in the Business of Repression (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 149-50. Charles E (General Electric) Wilson did not literally use the term "permanent war economy", widely attributed to his January 19 1944, speech. Rather, he spoke, of a "program of industrial preparedness" for war that would be "permanent and continuing". On the end of the Second World War and military spending see Robert L Heilbroner, The Making of Economic Society (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), 160. 6. Joan Robinson, Contributions to Modern Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 8-9. For an account of the role of military Keynesianism in successive US administrations see Lynn Turgeon, Bastard Keynesianism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). 7. Kalecki, Last Phase, 75-83, 95-97; Kalecki's analysis of military spending derived originally from his analysis of the importance of armament expenditures in Nazi Germany's economy and then the basic argument was extended to the role military spending was to play in post-Second World War capitalist economies. 8. Ibid.; Cook, "Juggernaut", 292. 9. Kalecki, Last Phase, 97; Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 185. 10. These five reasons, presented in essentially this order, were provided by Baran and Sweezy to account for the growth of militarism in their classic chapter on "Militarism and Imperialism" in Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 178-217. It is worth noting that their argument was geared primarily to military spending for empire and turned to its macroeconomic benefits in absorbing surplus and staving off long-run stagnation only at the end. The same structure to the argument on military spending (empire first, economy second) can be seen in Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 198-212. Hence, critics, such as Larry Griffin, Joel Devine, and Michael Wallace, who later attempted empirically to test the Monopoly Capital argument, which they characterized as a "'naive' model ... which suggests that the degree to which national output is absorbed by military spending should be dependent on aggregate economic conditions such as unemployment", were clearly attacking a "na?ve model" of their own devising. Ironically, after rejecting this naive model, these same authors ended up concluding that in the face of declining monopoly profits the US state intervenes to absorb surplus through increases in military expenditures - a view much closer to Baran and Sweezy's own argument, but lacking its emphasis on empire over macroeconomics. See Larry J Griffin, Joel A Devine, and Michael Wallace, "Monopoly Capital, Organized Labor, and Military Expenditures in the United States, 1949-1976", American Journal of Sociology 88 supplement (1982): S113-S153. 11. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 159, 161, 177, 208-11. Baran and Sweezy's contention more than four decades ago that civilian government purchases had about reached their outer limit as a percentage of GDP by 1939 was to be borne out in subsequent developments. In 1939 civilian government purchases were 13 percent of GDP; from 1960 to the present they have averaged 14 percent of GDP (and were also 14 percent in 2006). Economic Report of the President, 2008, 224, 250. 12. The foregoing quotes from Slichter, Luce, US News and World Report, Lawrence, and Harris are all taken from Cook, "Juggernaut", 285, 300-01. See also Fred H Cook, The Warfare State (New York: Collier Books, 1962); Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 207-13 13. US National Security Council, NSC-68, April 1950, "Section D: The Remaining Course of Action"; James M Cypher, "The Basic Economics of 'Rearming America'", Monthly Review 33, no 6 (November 1981): 12-13; Noam Chomsky, "The Cold War and the Superpowers", Monthly Review 33, no 5 (November 1981): 4-5. 14. Charles Erwin Wilson quoted in Cook, "Juggernaut", 277, 299. 15. Eisenhower, quoted in Cook, "Juggernaut", 276-79. 16. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 205. 17. The classic argument on how nuclear weapons were continually used by the United States as direct threats to achieve its ends was made by Daniel Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny", in E P Thompson and Dan Smith, ed, Protest and Survive (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), i-xxviii. 18. Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts (New York: Random House, 2005), 3. 19. Jurgen Brauer, "United States Military Expenditure", in Wolfram Elsner, ed, Arms, War, and Terrorism in the Global Economy Today (Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 2007), 61-66. 20. The design format of this table was adapted from Cypher, "Basic Economics of 'Rearming America'". 21. Benjamin A Mandel and Mary L Roy, "Federal Budget Estimates for Fiscal Year 2007", Survey of Current Business (Bureau of Economic Analysis), March 2006, 13. 22. Jurgen Brauer, "Data, Models, Coefficients: The Case of United States Military Expenditure", Conflict Management and Peace Science 24 (2007), 58; also Brauer, "United States Military Expenditures", 67. 23. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook, 2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 365; Brauer, "United States Military Expenditure", 66, and "Data, Models, Coefficients", 56. Note: We have not included Homeland Security in our figures, in line with SIPRI and NATO's exclusion of civil defense programs. 24. SIPRI Yearbook 2008: Summary, 10-11. 25. James Cypher, "From Military Keynesianism to Global Neoliberal Militarism", Monthly Review 59, no 2 (June 2007): 45-48; Chalmers Johnson, "Why the US Has Really Gone Broke", Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2008. 26. The complete set of data is not provided in this article, but follows the above method throughout. 27. For this general argument see Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), especially 107-20. 28. Foster, Naked Imperialism, 55-66; Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 151-85. 29. The military resurgence after periods of relative decline arose in both cases at the tail end of Democratic administrations: Carter in the late 1970s and Clinton in the late 1990s, and gathered momentum in the Republican administrations that followed: Reagan in the 1980s and George W Bush at the beginning of the 2000s. 30. Robert W McChesney, The Political Economy of the Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 105, 108. 31. Norman Soloman, "The Military-Industrial-Media Complex", Extra, July-August 2005, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627. 32. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 213-17. 33. See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W McChesney, "Preface", in Foster and McChesney, ed, Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 7-10; McChesney, Political Economy of the Media, 491-500. _____ John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Hannah Holleman is a doctoral student at the University of Oregon. Robert W McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include The Political Economy of Media (Monthly Review Press, 2008), Communication Revolution (New Press, 2007), The Problem of the Media (Monthly Review Press, 2004), and Rich Media, Poor Democracy (University of Illinois, 1999). The authors would like to thank Fred Magdoff and R Jonna for their help. All material (c) copyright 1949-2008 Monthly Review http://www.monthlyreview.org/081001foster-holleman-mcchesney.php TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Sat Dec 13 22:08:04 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 21:08:04 -0800 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?Demo_through_Athens=92_entertainment_distr?= =?windows-1252?q?ict=2C_tens_of_arrests=3B?= Message-ID: <164236a30812132108m25f79680gbb335c2e00df2097@mail.gmail.com> #20, 04.20: Demo through Athens' entertainment district, tens of arrests; streetfighting around the Polytechnic lasts until the early hours; sit-in protest at Syntagma square tear-gased Sunday, December 14, 2008 04.20 am. A spontaneous demonstration that started off from the point of Alexandros' death headed for the areas of Gazi and Psiri, i.e. Athens' main entertainment district. On its way back to the Eksarhia area, at Omonia square, the demo was attacked and at least 25 (some claim as many as 40) people are now detained. The vast majority of those detained are underaged! Meanwhile, there were heavy clashes between the police and demonstrators in the areas surrounding the Athens Polytechnic campus. They were thrown a lot of molotov cocktails and seemed to have little space in which to respond. Earlier on in the evening, a peaceful gathering at Syntagma square, called by bloggers, was attacked by police at 1.30am, with tear gas - their single aim being to disperse this crowd. It is very hard to keep up with the days events; I will mention some of Athens IMC's article titles to give you an idea of the level of activity we are dealing with: "Banks smashed on Panormou street, Athens" | "Eksarhia residents kick out riot police from the neighborhood" | *Rumours that a 68-year old died from inhaling tear gas *| 700 high schools occupied by their students across the country | Eksarhia police station was attacked by approx. 100 people | barricades all over the Eksarhia neighbourhood on the night marking one week since the assassination of Alexandros. More detailed descriptions of tonight's events and the (much promised) summary of thoughts on what has happened so far, tomorrow. From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Thu Dec 11 16:06:48 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:06:48 -0800 Subject: [R-G] A description of the situation in Athens 5 days after the riots erupted Message-ID: <164236a30812111506s46171ed9oc35badafb6bb47fc@mail.gmail.com> Feel free to spead far and wide!! A description of the situation in Athens 5 days after the riots erupted We are the image of the Future (slogan in an Athens wall) Update 11/12 Today 22 police stations attacked by students mainly all across Athens. Big Demo in the center some Anarchists, mostly leftist and other people from the city. Many anti-cop slogans, slogans against authority in general, against the lawyer of the cop, a well known bastard that helps drug dealers and big mafia... The city center does not really work. Most of the shops are burned or destroyed. In riots also traffic lights were destroyed and that s to say really great because it is your decision when you walk and when the cars go...It is so beautiful to see the city center burned down... In Patission street two universities still occupied. The polytechnic university, a symbol of social fights in Greece, cannot be really controlled by the people there. Highschool kids, or (even younger age 10 years old!) come there to fight with police. Also many immigrants! Some junkies and hooligans join also....It is fun because some really young kids age 9 -10 ,come in the occupied universities and tell the people. " Hey mister, please teach us how to make a molotov-cocktail..." Also there are hardcore riots with the police and in the gardens of the university girls and boys kiss and pet each other... The streets around are burned. Athens' silicon valley, Stournari street with many shops with computers and electronic equipment is totally destroyed, looted. Some computers were looted , most were burned and destroyed. "Plaisio" a big computer store with three floors is burned completely. Anarchists, autonomists mainly gather in the Athens university of Economics, which is some blocks away...There is a place of conversations, food (it's fun because when the food is over we go to the Supermarkets near, loot , give some to the people who are in the street and the rest we use in the university. There also exists a media center,( a blogspo is created) a radio station is in progress, and a big room to print leaflets and brochures. The law school is also occupied by leftists, which become a bit more radical (as radical as a leftist can become)... Exarcheia, the district were the murder happened, is still barricated. There is a big burned car in the middle of Mpenaki street in the entrance of the district. In the roads down from the occupations on the night some times it is dangerous because nazis and policemen work together and try to prevent immigrants from attacking and looting... The next days would so how things will go.We expect occupations of schools and universities. The workers are not on strike, syndicates and the communist party sabotage us a lot...Damn, after so many years it is still the same...And you know you have to sabotage production to destroy capitalism... Many people are arrested and the government wants to make use of the anti-terror laws, like in France for the Tarnac 9. I think now everybody can see for whom these laws are made for. The enemy within... We can say that some parts of the center have a certain autonomy...and for sure the police will not go in... Comrades in all the world, if you want to express your solidarity, which we need a lot keep on the fights in your countries and make them stronger. They are really afraid for us, believe us you can not imagine, here now we can see it clearly. Resurrection, like we read in the books really exists, we can assure you , we live it... It is Beautiful! In one night "reality", "normality" died... It will happen to your countries soon. Make plans Be ready *Athens Comrades* From fentona at shaw.ca Sun Dec 14 10:20:50 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 09:20:50 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Quebec Elections: Liberals win bare majority in record-low turnout Message-ID: <33A3046A-E0F9-4F36-AE10-143C1F1A60C1@shaw.ca> Quebec Elections: Liberals win bare majority in record-low turnout December 14, 2008 By Guy Charron http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19949 11 December 2008 -- Held under conditions of the biggest global economic crisis since the Great Depression, Monday's Quebec election was marked by the lowest voter turnout in at least 80 years (57 percent) and the near annihilation of the right-wing populist Action- d?mocratique du Qu?bec (ADQ). The Liberals?who have held power since 2003, but were reduced to a minority government in an election 20 months ago?secured a parliamentary majority, but only barely. With a 42 percent share of the popular vote, the Liberals won 66 of the 125 seats in the National Assembly, while the Parti Qu?b?cois (PQ), with 35 percent of the popular vote, reclaimed official opposition status. Liberal Premier Jean Charest called the elections in early November claiming that Quebec needed a majority government to confront the financial crisis and looming recession. His real motivation was fear? fear that the economic crisis would rapidly undermine popular support for his government. Even as the election campaign unfolded, reports emerged that the Caisse de d?p?t et placement du Qu?bec [the Quebec pension plan] had suffered massive losses due to the financial crisis. Charest, with the support of former PQ Premier Bernard Landry, denounced opposition calls for the government to reveal the extent of the Caisse's losses, because he well knew the hemorrhaging of the Caisse's balance sheet would give credence to opposition claims that the government might soon have to increase taxes, or even slash pension benefits to compensate for the Caisse's losses. In their campaign for a parliamentary majority, the Liberals received strong backing from the Quebec elite. It calculates that a government assured of holding office till 2013 will be better able to implement public spending cuts, health care privatization, and other socially regressive measures in the face of popular opposition. The size and scope of the collapse of the ADQ, which, as a result of the March 2007 election, had become the official opposition and narrowly missed forming a minority government, shocked, even stupefied, the professional political analysts. Twenty months ago these pundits had claimed that the surge in support for the ADQ was a "revolt" of the "real, true blue," i.e. traditionally conservative, Quebec. In reality, the ADQ's strong showing in the 2007 elections was the result of a protest vote, born of the frustration and anger of working people, particularly in rural Quebec and the outer suburbs of Montreal, over stagnating living standards and deteriorating public services. To be sure, the ADQ's founder-leader Mario Dumont waged in 2007, as in 2008, a right-wing populist campaign?a campaign that in the 2007 election was largely directed against immigrants and religious minorities. Dumont's success in the 2007 election was largely due to the support he received from sections of the establishment, especially the tabloid press. Big business has long used the ADQ, which was born of a nationalist split-off from the Liberals, as a means of pushing the Liberals and PQ further right. In the current campaign Dumont tried to revive his chauvinist campaign over the so-called "reasonable accommodation" issue, but found no support from the populace or press. On Monday, the ADQ polled 16.35 percent of the vote and won just 7 seats, as compared with almost 31 percent of the vote and 41 seats in the 2007 election. Even more revealing is the freefall in the number of votes won by the ADQ. Whereas in 2007 the ADQ won 1,224,000 votes, on Monday it won substantially less than half that number, about 530,000. So devastating was the ADQ's showing that Dumont announced his resignation as party leader in his election night speech. Given the role Dumont has played in the ADQ since its founding in 1994 (his name is even part of the party's official name, Action d?mocratique du Qu?bec/?quipe Mario Dumont), his resignation places a question mark over the party's continued existence, at least as a significant player in Quebec politics. The unprecedented low voter turnout suggests that many who voted for the ADQ in 2007 chose simply not to vote in this year's election. The October 14 federal election, it should be noted, also saw the lowest voter turnout in a century. The lack of interest in official politics is a distorted and confused expression of growing popular disaffection with a political set up in which the parties, whatever their election rhetoric, end up implementing the same right-wing policies on behalf of big business?the dismantling of public and social services, further limits on workers and democratic rights, and tax cuts skewed to benefit the most privileged layers of society. A further factor in the ADQ's collapse bears mention. The corporate elite turned against it, having concluded after witnessing the ADQ as official opposition, that it was too untested and volatile to be trusted with a share of power. Newspaper editorialists lamented that the ADQ's social conservatism and immigrant-baiting cut across its promotion of a right-wing "free-market" agenda that directly articulates the needs of big business. The press' coverage of the ADQ made clear that the Quebec elite wanted to see it returned to the status of a third-party?although not necessarily, as now is the case, one bereft of official status in the National Assembly?and the PQ restored as Quebec's official opposition. While the most powerful sections of Quebec and Canadian capital are opposed to the PQ's call for an independent Quebec, they recognize that the PQ has "proven itself" during its four governmental terms as a party ready to impose the demands of big business in the face of popular opposition and, indeed, is particularly adept at doing so, precisely because of its close and longstanding ties to the trade union bureaucracy. The seats the ADQ lost Monday were divided almost equally between the Liberals and the PQ. The PQ won most of the ADQ seats in the outer suburbs of Montreal and the Laurentian region north of Montreal. The Liberals captured ADQ seats in the Quebec City region and Eastern Townships. The PQ, which since the 1970s has alternated with the Liberals as Quebec's governing party, was clearly ecstatic at regaining official opposition status and especially at the unexpectedly large number of seats it captured Monday, 51. Opinion polls published in the weeks and days immediately prior to the election had indicated that the PQ would take a share of the popular vote on the order of 30 percent, not the 35 percent share it captured Monday. Unquestionably, the key factor in the unanticipated strong PQ showing was a popular reaction against the campaign that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his minority Conservative government had mounted in the preceding week to stigmatize an attempt by the federal opposition parties to form an alternate government as illegitimate and a "separatist coalition." This campaign openly appealed to and fanned anti-Quebec prejudice. It culminated in a "constitutional coup," in which the un-elected and unaccountable Governor-General shut down parliament for seven weeks so as to prevent the opposition from defeating the Conservative government on a non- confidence vote. Monday's election results were also a blow to Harper and his Conservatives in another sense. The Conservatives have developed close ties to the ADQ and during the course of the campaign Dumont came to the defence of the Harper government, denouncing the proposal for a Liberal-NDP coalition supported by the PQ's sister party at the federal level, the Bloc Qu?b?cois, as bad for Quebec. The rout of the ADQ leaves the Conservatives further isolated in Canada's second most populous and only majority French-speaking province. That said, the PQ's "resurgence" is far less impressive when one scrutinizes the vote totals. The PQ polled just 14,000 votes more than in the last election, when it had its worst showing since its first- ever election in 1970. The same, mind you, could be said of the Liberals. While they won 66 seats Monday, they did so with essentially the same number of votes (1.3 million) as in 2007, when they received their lowest-ever share of the popular vote. There was one other significant development in Monday's election. Qu?bec solidaire (QS), which describes itself as Quebec's left sovereignist or pro-Quebec independence party, won its first-ever seat, although its share of the province-wide popular vote remained less than 4 percent. Amir Khadir, an Iranian-born doctor and one of QS's two co-leaders, was elected in the Montreal riding of Mercier, defeating a prominent p?quiste (PQer) in what had long been considered a PQ bastion. Press reaction to Khadir's election was highly favourable, with such right-wing mouthpieces as the Montreal Gazette declaring that QS represents a legitimate current of opinion in Quebec that merits representation in the National Assembly. This reaction reveals that the establishment has already taken the measure of Qu?bec solidaire. The axis of QS's politics is to pressure the PQ to prevent it from moving too far right and to advocate limited social reforms within a "fiscally responsible" framework. (See: "Qu?bec solidaire: Quebec's "left" party in the orbit of the big business PQ") The lack of popular enthusiasm for the Quebec election campaign is largely bound up with the fact that apart from the PQ's advocacy of independence there is virtually nothing that distinguishes the policies of the two traditional parties of government. Both have presided over a massive erosion of the quality of public services. The lamentable state of Quebec's public health care system did emerge as a campaign issue, leading the Liberals and p?quistes to trade accusations as to who is responsible for hospital emergency-room overcrowding and months-long waiting lists for urgently needed medical operations and procedures. The PQ closed hospitals and imposed massive budget and job-cuts during its last two terms in office (1994-2003); the Liberals, for their part, have promoted health care privatization. PQ leader Pauline Marois defended the PQ government's elimination of thousands of health care jobs as part of its socially regressive "zero- deficit" campaign, insisting that she would do the same if similar conditions arose. Marois also declared that in a period of crisis it would be irresponsible to rule out public spending cuts. Another measure of the right-wing tenor of the PQ campaign was Marois' suggestion that the PQ might form a coalition with the ADQ, which advocates wholesale health care privatization and other neo-liberal measures, in a minority parliament. As the campaign progressed, the corporate media became increasingly critical of the politicians for trying to generate popular enthusiasm for their flagging campaigns with promises of limited social spending increases, rather than "preparing" the population for the "sacrifices" that the economic crisis will require. Typical was an editorial signed by Andr? Pratte, La presse's chief editorial writer. "The party leaders speak of increasing public spending so as to make our social programs more generous," protested Pratte. "Are they unconscious of the gravity of the crisis? Or do they act this way because that's what voters want?" The media is also troubled by the results of the election. The Liberals have only a tiny parliamentary majority and actually won the vote of less than one in four Quebecers. The elections, moreover, clearly demonstrated popular opposition to privatization and fiscal conservatism as represented by the ADQ and mass alienation from the parties of the elite and the official political process. Alain Dubuc, one of Quebec's most influential commentators, summed up some of the establishment's fears in a column published in La presse, Quebec's most important daily, Tuesday. A government, wrote Dubuc, "that wants to build for the future, must be able to launch reforms, to shake things up, to demonstrate audacity, to be an agent of change. And therefore to sometimes be unpopular. It is there that the Liberals' weak majority could become an obstacle." However, the Liberals will be able to count on the support of the trade union-supported PQ and the ADQ rump in imposing the burden of the economic crisis on working people. Both Marois and Dumont have pledged to cooperate with the Charest Liberal government in responding to the crisis. From hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org Sun Dec 14 10:26:43 2008 From: hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org (Hunter Gray) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:26:43 +0000 Subject: [R-G] Thoughts on Higher Powers Message-ID: North Dakota, and specifically Fargo, are "in the news", prominently featured because of the current blizzard which is presently levying a fairly typical assault for the season and region. About the only times the state makes CNN and MSNBC is when the "weather" strikes in horrific fashion or, say, beause of an especially sanguinary but rare event [like the Gordon Kahl/Posse Comitatus shootout with U.S. Marshals back in early '83 at Medina, ND]. At this point, the national media folks are agog at 40 below windchills -- but flat -- flat -- 30s/40s below [again, I'm not talking windchills] can often occur in North Dakota, eastern Montana, and western Minnesota during this time of the year. The storm that's hitting them passed through North Idaho and Montana, giving us down here only a few inches and 5 above this morning. As I've noted before, the Mohawk fur hunters [and their St Francis Abenaki colleagues] chose wisely when they picked this very specific setting in Southeastern Idaho for their annual winter camp back in the 1820s and 1830s. But hereabouts, dealing with steep hills [and even some cavalier and reckless "other drivers"], we all have 4 Wheel Drive and take things slow and steady. Even with that great Tech, we sometimes just hole up and wait things out. John [Beba] and his family crew are right now in the midst of the Fargo maelstrom. Mack et al should escape it, being down in Nebraska, and Thomas and Mimie -- in Minneapolis -- are probably beyond its reach. Each semester in each regular academic year I taught at the University of North Dakota [summer sessions were no problem], saw me regularly tell each and every student of mine that if, in their honest opinion, it was too dangerous weather-wise to come to my class or any tutorial, then DON'T try to make it. I added, always, that "nothing you can learn from me is more important than your physical well-being or that of your vehicle." I may have been the only prof who made that statement -- at least so my students told me. I, myself, always made class for those who got there. These times always remind us that there are higher powers -- and if you don't buy the idea of a Creator [as I do], then at least one is forced into a recognition that Nature trumps. One of my treasured insights into that Mystery known as Chicago was hearing some angry folks in the old Mayor Daley's home ward of Bridgeport looking up at the sky and its snow falling during an early spring storm and asking, angrily, "How the Hell could the Mayor let this happen?" Well, that's non-Indians for you. Solidarity, Hunter [Hunter Bear] HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? and Ohkwari' Check out our Hunterbear website Directory http://hunterbear.org/directory.htm [The site is dedicated to our one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray: http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm See our Community Organizing Course [with new material] http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm And see Hunter's Movement Life Interview: http://hunterbear.org/HUNTER%20BEAR%20INTERVIEW%20CRMV.htm From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 14 12:29:04 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:29:04 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Major U.S. Power Figures Linked to Charity that Funds Settlers' Militias Message-ID: <200812141929.mBEJT44F022935@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081214/43ead65f/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 14 12:27:28 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:27:28 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Beware of Obama's Groundhog Day Message-ID: <200812141927.mBEJRSma021397@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081214/3b21e831/attachment.txt From fentona at shaw.ca Sun Dec 14 12:33:09 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:33:09 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Legalizing Terror: The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement References: Message-ID: <32D65D0E-C1A5-4DF6-9142-81DC194F8BCB@shaw.ca> Legalizing Terror: The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Earlier this year, Canada reached a free-trade agreement with Colombia, and will likely try to ratify it some time in 2009. Colombia has the worst human rights record in the Western Hemisphere and a record of military belligerence towards its neighbours. Watch the discussion of what's involved in the agreement, its impact on the people of Colombia and organizing against it. Speakers: Jasmin Hristov, author of Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Ph.D. candidate York University Todd Gordon, writer on Canadian imperialism and Canada's free trade agreement with Colombia, member of New Socialist Group Iliam Burbano, CUPE international solidarity activist Video recorded Dec 3, 2008. ======================== Presentation by Jes?s Erazo, a Colombian union leader (Sintracarbon) talks about working conditions and their opposition to the Colombia- Canada Free Trade Agreement. Video recorded Dec 7, 2008. ========================= Both videos available on Left Streamed website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( Left Streamed Production ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Produced by the Left Streamed Collective. Viewers are encouraged to distribute widely. Comments on the video and suggestions are welcome - write to info at socialistproject.ca For more analysis of contemporary politics check out 'Relay: A Socialist Project Review' at www.socialistproject.ca/relay ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 14 12:31:57 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:31:57 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Khadr buried under rubble during attack, lawyer says Message-ID: <200812141931.mBEJVvZV025070@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081214/f11be88f/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 14 12:33:20 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:33:20 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Advisors' advice for getting Obama's ear: Keep Canadian troops in Afghanistan Message-ID: <200812141933.mBEJXKFc026375@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081214/1b710380/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Dec 14 12:35:05 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:35:05 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Iraqi journalist hurls shoes at Bush during Baghdad news conference Message-ID: <200812141935.mBEJZ5pF027293@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081214/7c435382/attachment.txt From fentona at shaw.ca Sun Dec 14 13:27:48 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:27:48 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Iraqi journalist hurls shoes at Bush during Baghdad news conference In-Reply-To: <200812141935.mBEJZ5pF027293@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> References: <200812141935.mBEJZ5pF027293@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <676F3F7D-F7DE-4021-BAA2-2323CF0EE0AE@shaw.ca> Here is the video of the shoe-toss http://video.google.ca/videosearch?q=bush+shoes +&hl=en&emb=0&aq=f#q=bush%20shoes%20iraq&hl=en&emb=0 On 14-Dec-08, at 11:35 AM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > McClatchy Newspapers December 14, 2008 > > > Iraqi journalist hurls shoes at Bush during news conference > > > Adam Ashton > > > Baghdad ? An Iraqi television journalist hurled two shoes at > President > Bush on Sunday during a joint news conference Bush was holding with > Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to mark the signing of a > U.S.-Iraq security agreement. > > > Bush had just finished his prepared remarks in which he said the > security agreement was made possible by the U.S. surge of troops to > Iraq last year, when the journalist, Muthathar al Zaidi, pulled his > shoes off and hurled them at the president. "This is a goodbye kiss, > you dog," Zaidi shouted. > > > Bush dodged the shoes and was not struck. Bodyguards quickly > wrestled > Zaidi to the floor and hauled him, kicking and screaming, from the > room. Two other Iraqi journalists were briefly detained after one of > them called Zaidi's actions "courageous." > > > Bush shrugged off the incident. "I didn't feel the least bit > threatened by it," he said. > > > Zaidi works for an Iraqi satellite television station based in > Cairo. > Friends said he covered the U.S. bombing of Baghdad's Sadr City area > earlier this year and had been "emotionally influenced" by the > destruction he'd seen. They also said he'd been kidnapped in 2007 > and > held for three days by Shiite Muslim gunmen. > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Dec 14 22:26:52 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:26:52 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Dissensus and Organic Process Message-ID: <4945EA9C.6080400@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (December 10 2008) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society In bringing up the vexed relationship between evolution as it happens in nature, on the one hand, and the ways the concept of evolution has been redefined in current ideologies on the other, last week's Archdruid Report post dipped a tentative toe into some very deep and murky waters. Over a century or more, ideas and metaphors from the natural sciences have become potent factors in the public life of the western world; terms such as "natural", "organic", and, yes, "evolution" have been caught up by any number of players in the scrimmage of contemporary culture, and more often than not have come out much the worse for wear. There's no shortage of ingenious ways to misuse concepts such as these, but one in particular has had a pervasive presence in our collective dialogue. Perhaps the best way to show it at work is to track the use of natural concepts in one of the towering creative minds of the twentieth century, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Full disclosure probably requires me to admit up front that I'm a fan of Wright's work, and not only because he was one of the handful of first-rate creative talents to have been influenced by the modern Druid tradition. In his quest for an organic architecture - notice the concept lifted from the life sciences - he reshaped the vocabulary of space and form in ways that are still being explored by architects today, and he also produced rather more than his share of stunningly beautiful buildings. Still, there are few geniuses whose works are without flaws, and Wright was not one of them. Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog {1} fame has set out the case for the prosecution in his useful book How Buildings Learn (1994). To begin with, Brand points out, all Wright's roofs leak. This may seem like a small thing, but since the basic purpose of shelter is to keep weather out, and it's not actually that difficult to design a watertight roof, Wright's failure to accomplish this fundamental requirement is not a good sign. More generally, Wright paid close attention to the esthetic qualities of building materials, but not always to their structural strength; the results included a fair number of splendid buildings that could not hold up to normal wear and tear, or in some cases, the simple force of gravity. Thus a great many Wright buildings have had to be torn down since his time, and others linger on as museums, struggling to raise the money to meet their huge maintenance costs. Similar concerns run through every aspect of his work; the chairs he designed were beautiful, for instance, but many of them are acutely uncomfortable to sit in. The problem with Wright's work, essentially, is that he applied his core concept of organic architecture in too one-sided a way. The way he structured space resonates intensely with the nature of the site, the purpose of the building, and the esthetic of the materials he used; so far, so good. The difficulties arose because he handled at least two other aspects of the building process in a profoundly inorganic way. The first of these, as mentioned already, was his cavalier attitude toward the structural qualities of materials, and more generally to the "substance" side of Aristotle's famous form/substance dichotomy. The rain that leaked through Wright's roofs, and the dampness that pervaded his famous house Fallingwater - it had a stream running through the middle of it, complete with waterfall - and made its first owner refer to it as "Rising Mildew", are substances as relevant to the architect as the material forming the beams that support the floors. An architecture that embraced substance in an organic way would arguably shape form according to the physical potentials and weaknesses of the relevant substances, just as Wright's forms were shaped by the esthetics of the substances he used. The second aspect is subtler, and the book by Stewart Brand mentioned above is perhaps the best guide to it. A building is a pattern in space and in substance, but it is also a pattern in time, following its own trajectory from the first work on the site to the last swing of the wrecking ball. Successful buildings adapt to the people who live in them or use them, just as the people adapt to the buildings; Brand argues that in this sense, buildings "learn". Many of Wright's buildings - though there were important exceptions - were distinctly slow learners, and some proved to be wholly unteachable. Admittedly, in Wright's day as now, the architect's job mostly ended when the blueprints were handed over to the builder; additionally, of course, creative minds in his milieu were expected to be prima donnas, and his income and reputation depended at least in part on playing that role. Most of today's fashionable architects suffer from the same fixation on form over substance and process, without the benefit of Wright's sure esthetic touch. All this may seem far removed from the questions that have become central to this blog - the twilight of the industrial age and the birthing of constructive responses to its end - but the same three dimensions just considered - form, substance, process - apply to design in any context, from a mud hut to an alternative currency. Mud huts aside, most modern design that tries to be organic focuses, as Wright did, on organic form, and much of it neglects substance and process. Thus, for example, you get plans for "renewable" energy systems that may use sun or wind, but can't be made or maintained without petroleum products and massive energy inputs, and power equally unsustainable machines or lifestyles. These same concerns apply even more stringently to plans for social change. Plenty of proposals for allegedly "natural" or "ecological" societies, communities, and institutions have been floated over the last three decades or so, and most of them are natural in the same sense that Wright's architecture is organic: they represent one person's best shot at grasping the natural potentials of a situation. Very often, though, these proposals fail to address issues of substance or process. Substance in a social context refers, among other things, to the people who will presumably take up the new social system, but who inevitably bring to it attitudes and behavior patterns from other social contexts and the evolution of our species; it's notorious, and also true, that most Utopian schemes would work wondrously well if human beings could just stop behaving like human beings. Process in a social context, in turn, refers to the way that the new system is to be designed, set in motion, and adapted to meet changing needs, but there is another dimension as well: how the new system is to deal with competition from other social systems. When this has been addressed at all, it has too often been phrased in simplistic and stereotyped terms, as by insisting that lifeboat communities have plenty of guns so they can fight off the marauding hordes that feature so largely in contemporary survivalist fantasy. The history of Utopian communities in North America offers a useful corrective; most of the successful communes of the nineteenth century, for example, went under once the founding generation died off and the younger generations found communal life less appealing than the seductions of mainstream culture. The same thing could easily happen in a generation or so to any number of the communities being planned so eagerly today, since a future in which the inhabitants of such communities have no other options is probably the least likely of all the possibilities before us. I've critiqued the Transition Town movement in these essays, but the value of organic process is one thing that this movement has grasped at least as well as anybody in the peak oil movement just now. Those who are still trying to impose plans based on some ideology or other on the fluid potentials of the future might learn a few things from this source. Still, it's possible and, I think, useful, to go further still in the same direction. One potentially valuable way of doing so is the process of dissensus. I've borrowed that term from postmodern theorist Ewa Ziarek, who introduced it in a book on ethical theory in 2001. As most of my readers likely guessed at first glance, dissensus is the opposite of consensus, and it comes into play when consensus, for one reason or another, is either impossible or a bad idea: when, that is, irreducible differences make it impossible to find any common ground for agreement on the points that matter, or when settling on any common decision would be premature. This latter, I suggest, is a fair description of where we stand as we face the future that will follow the end of the industrial age. There's an interesting dichotomy in our knowledge of the future: history can give us a fair idea of the type of events that we will encounter, but neither it nor anything else can give us the details. When housing prices started zooming upwards a few years back, quite a number of people compared that to other speculative bubbles and correctly predicted that an enormous crash would shake the world economy when the bubble popped - but neither they nor anyone else could have known in advance when the crash would come or what the details of its downward course would be. The twilight of the industrial age puts us in a similar place. Looking at what's happened to previous civilizations that overshot the limits of their resource base, it's not hard to recognize the parallels and predict the onset of the familiar process of decline and fall. That process has some constant features, and it's probably safe to predict that those will occur this time too: for example, mass migration is a very common consequence of the fall of civilizations, and recent warnings about tidal flows of environmental refugees in the not too distant future suggest that it may be a safe bet to assume that the same thing will happen in our future. What nobody can anticipate are the details: what will set any particular migration in motion, what its scale, route, and final destination will be, and above all what the timing will be. Lacking those details, a consensus plan is not a good idea. If you knew today, let's say, that the region containing your ecovillage was going to have much less rain in the future, you would make one set of choices; if you knew that the same region was going to have much more rain in the future, you would make another, and so on. If you knew that a million refugees from climate change will be coming through your town, your plans would be very different from the ones you would make if you knew that your town would be far from the migration routes. Since these things can't be known in advance, though, whatever consensus you reach has a very real chance of being exactly the wrong choice. This is where dissensus comes to the rescue. In a situation of uncertainty, encouraging people to pursue different and even opposed options increases the likelihood that somebody will happen on the right answer. Dissensus, it deserves to be said, is not simply a lack of consensus. Like consensus itself, it has its own methods and process, its own values and style; the Thelonious Monk CD playing in my study as I type these words might also serve as a reminder that where dissensus is encouraged, and individuals pursue their own visions rather than submitting to a socially based consensus, the results can include dazzling creativity. Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom I began this essay, was a master of dissensus; great artists usually are. Yet the greatest master of dissensus is arguably Nature itself. Those first inch-long vertebrates who darted about in shallow seas half a billion years ago, after all, did not come to some sort of genetic consensus about where evolution was going to take them, nor did the evolutionary process itself push them in one direction. Some of their offspring became fish, some amphibians, some reptiles, some birds, and some mammals, and a few of the latter are either typing this essay or reading it. Evolution is dissensus in action, the outward pressure of genetic diversification running up against the limits of environment and, now and then, pushing through to some new adaptation: the wings of bats, the opposable thumbs of primates, the cultural evolution of human beings. As we enter a future of new limits and unpredictable opportunities, this is arguably the kind of organic process we need most. _____ {1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog _____ ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/12/dissensus-and-organic-process.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Sun Dec 14 22:28:53 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:28:53 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Taliban Raids on NATO Convoys Crippling - Analysts Message-ID: PAKISTAN/AFGHANISTAN: Taliban Raids on NATO Convoys Crippling - Analysts By Zofeen Ebrahim http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45107 KARACHI, Dec 14 (IPS) - While NATO and United States forces have downplayed raids in Peshawar by pro-Taliban militants, destroying hundreds of their military vehicles and supply containers destined for Afghanistan, analysts here believe that the damage is significant. On Saturday the militants destroyed 11 trucks and 13 containers in the latest of a series of attacks over the past week designed to disrupt supply lines to NATO and U.S. troops fighting the ?war on terror? in Afghanistan Saturday?s raid defied increased security for some 13 supply terminals around Peshawar, ordered after a major raid last weekend in which hundreds of trucks and containers were torched. After that raid, the U.S. military in Afghanistan had played down the damage in a statement that said it would have only "minimal effect on our operations??. U.S. military spokeswoman in Kabul Lt. Col. Rumi Nielsen-Green was quoted saying: "It's militarily insignificant.?? But analysts here think otherwise and say that if the attacks continue they will impact plans to double the strength of NATO troops in Afghanistan from the present 67,000 -- nearly half of them from the U.S. "More troops mean more supplies," said Ikram Sehgal, a noted defence analyst. Sehgal does not buy the U.S. dismissal of the attacks as insignificant. "If I?m hurt bad, I?m not going to own up. It is a significant loss whether they (U.S.) admit it or not. It will create horrendous problems." If troop deployment is increased as planned then an estimated 70,000 containers of supplies will have to be shipped to Afghanistan annually. "If the supply lines are cut off, it will have a choking effect on the troops," said Brig. Mehmood Shah, former home secretary of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) that borders Afghanistan. Already NATO has begun looking for alternative supply routes to Afghanistan, even through Belarus and the Ukraine. Contractors engaged in moving the containers are jittery at the possible loss in business. Kifayatullah Jan, manager at the Port World Logistics, a contractor that has been ferrying NATO supplies, said last week?s attack on their terminal, in which 106 containers were torched, "must have cost the U.S. millions??. "And if the loss to the U.S. is insignificant, for us it may mean we close shop," said Jan, talking to IPS from Peshawar over telephone. "We can?t do business if the government cannot provide us protection," he said. According to Jan, the company and its drivers receive regular threats from militants to "stop transporting supplies to the Americans or face the consequences." In March, insurgents torched 40-50 NATO oil tankers near Torkham. In April, a military helicopter valued at 13 million US dollars was hijacked. And in July, there were sporadic attacks on the convoys. Last month, some 60 Taliban fighters hijacked a convoy of trucks in broad daylight as it was travelling through the Khyber pass. Talk of alternative supply routes have been going on since September. According to the Washington Post, the U.S. defence department was seeking safer but longer routes through Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia due to "strikes", "border delays", "accidents and pilferage" in Pakistan. "The Iran route is out. And they simply cannot airlift the supplies because it would be far too costly. But the supplies can come from the north," suggested Sehgal. "The supplies can pass through the northern route by rail through Russia and the Central Asian nations to northern Afghanistan," agreed Mehmood Shah, but added: " It?s a poor alternative and will take very long to reach southern Afghanistan.?? About 75 percent of supplies, including food, fuel, equipment and vehicles meant for the allied forces in Afghanistan pass through Pakistan?s Khyber Pass, after being offloaded from ships at the southern port city of Karachi. A second overland route connects Pakistan?s Quetta city with Kandahar in Afghanistan. Pakistan represents the shortest land route to Afghan cities like Kandahar and Kabul. In last week?s attack on the Port World terminal, the security guards on duty watched helplessly as around 300 militants blasted their way into two transport terminals and torched vehicles. "These included APC jeeps, trucks, lifters and fire brigades," said Jan. "They came through the main gate which they destroyed using a rocket-propelled grenade and set fire to 106 vehicles including 80-90 Humvees. They also shot dead one of the guards.?? "I was in my village near Charsadda, less than a hour from Peshawar, when the guards telephoned me around 3:15 am. There was no way the dozen or so of our guards could confront the militants who were armed with sophisticated weapons,?? Jan said. According to Shah, the attackers were criminal elements and not necessarily the Taliban as they latter have still not entered the settled area. "However, they all work hand-in-glove. And for all we know, they may have carried out the attack at the behest of the Taliban." However, Rahimullah Yusufzai, resident editor of English daily, The News thinks otherwise. An expert on the Taliban he said: "These recent attacks show that militants are slowly moving into the settled area; that they have gained strength, and are not afraid," he said. "It also shows how weak the government is and that it cannot protect anyone." Yusufzai told IPS that the earlier hijackings of convoys on the highways were only possible if the drivers, and perhaps even the contractors, were in collusion with the Taliban. Terming these depots as "soft" targets, Sehgal said it is easier to attack such passive locations than intercept convoys that are protected by Pakistan?s Frontier Constabulary (FC) militia. While past attacks have been limited to pilfering and sale of the loot in the local markets, the latest attacks were intended to disrupt supplies. "This means they want to sever the supply lines to make it unsustainable for the deployed forces," said Sehgal. Yusufzai observed that the Taliban were adopting the age-old strategy of cutting off supply lines from the south. "It also signifies that the capacity and numbers of the militants have grown despite the army?s claim of annihilating entire villages in the tribal areas." "This war on terror has unleashed more horrors than one can imagine. The Pakistan army, by its own act has steered civilians towards militancy. In a bid to capture one Talib, entire villages have turned into Talibans," said Yusufzai. (END/2008) From fentona at shaw.ca Sun Dec 14 22:38:21 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:38:21 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Greece seeks tear gas from Israel Message-ID: Greece seeks tear gas from Israel Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:29:01 GMT http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=78348§ionid=351020606 Unrest in Greece Greece has asked Israel to provide it with emergency supplies of tear gas as the clashes continue in Athens between the youths and police. Police officials say they urgently seek more tear gas from Israel and Germany as they run out of the gas amid ongoing riots. Police sources said their riot squads had fired 4,600 tear gas canisters this week as rioters torched hundreds of banks and shops and occupied their campuses, where police are forbidden by law from entering. The violence was sparked a week ago after police shot dead a 15-year- old boy. Groups of youths have raided stores in the residential and shopping district of Nea Smyrni, south of central Athens. MSH/RA From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Dec 15 01:07:03 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:07:03 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Muntadar al-Zeidi, Iraqi Reporter, Throws His Shoes at Bush Message-ID: "U.S. President Visits Baghdad: Iraqi Journalist Throws Shoes at Bush," Al Jazeera, 14 December 2008: Associated Press BUSH NOTEBOOK: Bush ducks shoes in Baghdad 4 hours ago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The shoe attack came as Bush and al-Maliki were about to shake hands. The assailant ? later identified as television correspondent Muntadar al-Zeidi ? leapt from his chair and hurled his footwear at the president, who was about 20 feet away. "This is a farewell kiss, you dog," he yelled in Arabic. "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq." The crowd descended on al-Zeidi, who works for Al-Baghdadia television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, Egypt. He was wrestled to the ground by security officials and then hauled away, moaning as they departed the room. Later, a trail of fresh blood could be seen on the carpet, although the source was not known. In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt. When U.S. Marines toppled Saddam Hussein's statue on Firdos Square in 2003, the assembled crowd whacked it with their shoes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Al-Baghdadia's Baghdad manager told the AP he had no idea what prompted his reporter to go on the attack. "I am trying to reach Muntadar since the incident, but in vain," said Fityan Mohammed. "His phone is switched off." The station issued a statement on the air Sunday night asking the Iraqi government to release al-Zeidi "to spare his life." "The station calls on journalists all over the world to express their solidarity for the release of al-Zeidi," it said. From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Mon Dec 15 12:09:43 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:09:43 -0800 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?=93These_days_are_ours=2C_too=94?= Message-ID: <164236a30812151109w1f130b7y4c370f73d760be03@mail.gmail.com> Irregular updates on the situation in Greece, in English Skip to content - About - Athens riot map - This blog in French - This blog in German "These days are ours, too" Monday, December 15, 2008 (The following text was distributed at the student picket outside the police headquarters today by people from Athens' Haunt of Albanian Migrants. I wanted to translate and upload it here because it shows something very important: that ties of solidarity are being formed and strengthened across different sectors of the Greek society - a wonderful thing!) *These days are ours, too* Following the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos we have been living in an unprecedented condition of turmoil, an outflow of rage that doesn't seem to end. Leading this uprising, it seems, are the students - who with an inexhaustible passion and hearty spontaneity have reversed the whole situation. You cannot stop something you don't control, something that is organised spontaneously and under terms you do not comprehend. This is the beauty of the uprising. The high school students are making history and leave it to the others to write it up and to classify it ideologically. The streets, the incentive, the passion belongs to them. In the framework of this wider mobilisation, with the student demonstrations being its steam-engine, there is a mass participation of the second generation of migrants and many refugees also. The refugees come to the streets in small numbers, with limited organisation, with the spontaneity and impetus describing their mobilisation. Right now, they are the most militant part of the foreigners living in Greece. Either way, they have very little to lose. The children of migrants mobilise en mass and dynamically, primarily through high school and university actions as well as through the organisations of the left and the far left. They are the most integrated part of the migrant community, the most courageous. They are unlike their parents, who came with their head bowed, as if they were beging for a loaf of bread. They are a part of the Greek society, since they've lived in no other. They do not beg for something, they demand to be equal with their Greek classmates. Equal in rights, on the streets, in dreaming. For us, the politically organised migrants, this is a second french November of 2005. We never had any illusions that when the peoples' rage overflew we would be able to direct it in any way. Despite the struggles we have taken on during all these years we never managed to achieve such a mass response like this one. Now is time for the street to talk: The deafening scream heard is for the 18 years of violence, repression, exploitation and humiliation. These days are ours, too. These days are for the hundreds of migrants and refugees who were murdered at the borders, in police stations, workplaces. They are for those murdered by cops or "concerned citizens." They are for those murdered for daring to cross the border, working to death, for not bowing their head, or for nothing. They are for Gramos Palusi, Luan Bertelina, Edison Yahai, Tony Onuoha, Abdurahim Edriz, Modaser Mohamed Ashtraf and so many others that we haven't forgotten. These days are for the everyday police violence that remains unpunished and unanswered. They are for the humiliations at the border and at the migrant detention centres, which continue to date. They are for the crying injustice of the Greek courts, the migrants and refugees unjustly in prison, the justice we are denied. Even now, in the days and nights of the uprising, the migrants pay a heavy toil - what with the attacks of far-righters and cops, with deportations and imprisonment sentences that the courts hand out with Christian love to us infidels. These days are for the exploitation continuing unabatedly for 18 years now. They are for the struggles that are not forgotten: in the downs of Volos, the olympic works, the town of Amaliada. They are for the toil and the blood of our parents, for informal labour, for the endless shifts. They are for the deposits and the adhesive stamps, the welfare contributions we paid and will never have recognised. It is for the papers we will be chasing for the rest of our lives like a lottery ticket. These days are for the price we have to pay simply in order to exist, to breathe. They are for all those times when we crunched our teeth, for the insults we took, the defeats we were charged with. They are for all the times when we didn't react even when having all the reasons in the world to do so. They are for all the times when we did react and we were alone because our deaths and our rage did not fit pre-existing shapes, didn't bring votes in, didn't sell in the prime-time news. These days belong to all the marginalised, the excluded, the people with the difficult names and the unknown stories. They belong to all those who die every day in the Aegean sea and Evros river, to all those murdered at the border or at a central Athens street; the belong to the Roma in Zefyri, to the drug addicts in Eksarhia. These days belong to the kids of Mesollogiou street, to the unintegrated, the uncontrollable students. Thanks to Alexis, these days belong to us all. * * *18 years of silent rage are too many. * *To the streets, for solidarity and dignity!* *We haven't forgotten, we won't forget - these days are yours too* *Luan, Tony, Mohamed, Alexis? * From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Dec 15 16:47:46 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 08:47:46 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Change You Won't Believe Message-ID: <4946ECA2.7010405@ashisuto.co.jp> Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) www.kunstler.com (December 15 2008) The peak oil story has not been nullified by the scramble to unload every asset for cash - including whomping gobs of oil contracts - during this desperate season of bank liquidation. The main implication of the peak oil story is that we won't be able to generate the kind of economic growth that defined our way of life for decades because the primary energy resources needed for it will be contracting. Just as global oil production peaked, our economy evolved into a morbid hypertrophy, and the chief manifestation of it was the suburban sprawl-building fiesta that has now climaxed in the real estate bust. By the early 21st century, when so much American manufacturing had been swapped out to Asia, there was no business left except sprawl-building - a manifold tragedy which wrecked the banks that financed it, and left the ordinary people mortgaged to it with ruinous liabilities. That economy is now in its death throes. The "normality" it represents to so many Americans is gone and can't be brought back, no matter how wistfully we watch it recede. Even so, it was obviously not good for the country. The terrain of North America has been left scarred by unlovable objects and baleful futureless vistas that, from now on, will shed whatever pecuniary value they once had. It represents the physical counterpart to the financial mess that has been left to the young generations to clean up - and the job will take a very long time. We have to, so to speak, get to place mentally where we can face the kinds of change that are now necessary and unavoidable. We're not there yet. It's not clear whether the elected new national leadership knows just how severe the required changes will really be. Surely the public would be shocked to grasp what's in store. Probably the worst thing we can do now would be to mount a campaign to stay where we are, lost in raptures of happy motoring and blue-light-special shopping. The economy we're evolving into will be un-global, necessarily local and regional, and austere. It won't support even our current population. This being the case, the political fallout is also liable to be severe. For one thing, we'll have to put aside our sentimental fantasies about immigration. This is almost impossible to imagine, since that narrative is especially potent among the Democratic Party members who are coming in to run things. A tough immigration policy is exactly the kind of difficult change we have to face. This is no longer the 19th century. The narrative has to change. The new narrative has to be about a managed contraction - and by "managed" I mean a way that does not produce civil violence, starvation, and public health disasters. One of the telltale signs to look for will be whether the Obama administration bandies around the word "growth". If you hear them use it, it will indicate that they don't understand the kind of change we face. It is hugely ironic that the US automobile industry is collapsing at this very moment, and the ongoing debate about whether to "rescue" it or not is an obvious kabuki theater exercise because this industry is hopeless. It is headed into bankruptcy with one hundred percent certainty. The only thing in question is whether the news of its death will spoil the Christmas of those who draw a paycheck from it, or those whose hopes for an easy retirement are vested in it. But American political-economy being very Santa Claus oriented for recent generations, the gesture will be made. A single leaky little lifeboat will be lowered and the chiefs of the Big Three will be invited to go for a brief little row, and then they will sink, glug, glug, glug, while the rusty old Titanic of the car industry slides diagonally into the deep behind them, against a sickening greenish-orange sunset backdrop of the morbid economy. A key concept of the economy to come is that size matters - everything organized at the giant scale will suffer dysfunction and failure. Giant companies, giant governments, giant institutions will all get into trouble. This, unfortunately, doesn't bode so well for the Obama team and it is salient reason why they must not mount a campaign to keep things the way they are and support enterprises that have to be let go, including many of the government's own operations. The best thing Mr Obama can do is act as a wise counselor companion-in-chief to a people who now have to leave a lot behind in order to move forward into a plausible future. He seems well-suited to this task in sensibility and intelligence. The task will surely include a degree of pretense that he is holding some familiar things together and propping up some touchstones of the comfortable life. But the truth is we are all going to the same unfamiliar new territory. The economy we're moving into will have to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent with energy resource reality. I'm convinced that farming will come much closer to the center of economic life, as the death of petro-agribusiness makes food production a matter of life and death in America - as opposed to the disaster of metabolic entertainment it is now. Reorganizing the landscape itself for this finer-scaled new type of farming is a task fraught with political peril (land ownership questions being historically one of the main reasons that societies fall into revolution). The public is completely unprepared for this kind of change. We still think that "the path to success" is based on getting a college degree certifying people for a lifetime of sitting in an office cubicle. This is so far from the approaching reality that it will be eventually viewed as a sick joke - like those old 1912 lithographs of mega-cities with Zeppelins plying the air between Everest-size skyscrapers. The crucial element in the transformation underway will be emotion. The American experience for a few generations has produced an adult population with very childish instincts, increasingly worse each decade. For instance, the desperate power fantasies among the younger tattooed lumpenproles - those with next-to-zero real economic power - suggest a certain unappetizing playing-out of resource competition when the supply of Cheez Doodles and Pepsi starts to dwindle. But even the heretofore gainfully employed middle classes are pretty lost in fantasies at least of comfort an convenience. For years now, I have wondered how their sense of grievance and resentment will be expressed when the supermarket shelves run bare and the cardboard signs get taped over the local gas pump and the cable TV gets cut off for non-payment. You wonder, to put it bluntly, how far gone we really are. _____ My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers. http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/12/change-you-wont-believe.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 15 16:57:09 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:57:09 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Gaza's civilian population being collectively punished - UN Special Rapporteur Message-ID: <200812152357.mBFNv933005513@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081215/ec5d837e/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 15 16:57:39 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:57:39 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Obama's atomic umbrella: U.S. nuclear strike if Iran nukes Israel Message-ID: <200812152357.mBFNvd5u006068@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081215/0d971aac/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 15 16:58:14 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:58:14 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Obama's Victory and What It Means to Us Message-ID: <200812152358.mBFNwEq8007287@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081215/f7165203/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 15 17:13:44 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:13:44 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Rumsfeld responsible for torture, report says Message-ID: <200812160013.mBG0DiWe029715@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081215/e5a1d7d6/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 15 18:05:00 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:05:00 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Nasrallah organizing mass rallies against Gaza siege Message-ID: <200812160105.mBG15087029421@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081215/c0ab07f0/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Dec 15 18:16:24 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:16:24 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Israel blocks UN rights official from entering country Message-ID: <200812160116.mBG1GOW7011124@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081215/7a1b6529/attachment.txt From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Mon Dec 15 22:26:52 2008 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:26:52 -0800 (PST) Subject: [R-G] Friends Digest Vol. 2, No. 15 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <463743.28875.qm@web111504.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> '``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'* "Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor--never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell--not to respond to [his] plight, not to relieve... solitude by offering a spark of hope is to exile [him] from human memory. And in denying [his] humanity, we betray our own. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment."-- Elie Wiesel, 1999. *'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'* * January 20: Inauguration Day * Eight years ago, on January 20, then President Bill Clinton left office without taking action to free Leonard Peltier. On this Inauguration Day, folks around the country will celebrate change. We encourage you not only to celebrate what we hope will be a new beginning for all, but to actively work for Leonard's freedom. A shout out to supporters in the Mid-Atlantic region: Plan to attend festivities in Washington, DC, during the 4-day celebration there. Create a presence for Leonard... Along the parade route, on the Mall, adjacent to the National Museum of the American Indian. Carry signs, wear shirts. Take a clipboard or two along. Why? Carry a sheaf of spare clemency letters with you. See . Educate people face-to-face and get one signature per letter. Because personal letters often are more effective, also carry spare paper and pens. Encourage folks to write their own brief letters. They can use your sample letter as a guide. Leave notes, flowers, and tobacco ties inside the National Museum of the American Indian. An inscription for Leonard Peltier is located at Panel 2.04 (line 28) on the Honor Wall inside the museum. What can the rest of us do? Host an Inaugural party of your own to celebrate new hope for Leonard Peltier. Gather with friends, family members, and people in your community to educate others about Peltier's case. Show "Incident at Oglala," or read from "Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance". Motivate everyone to get and stay involved. The incoming Administration has announced that one day of the four-day Inauguration celebration will be a Day of Service. So, take ACTion. Some ideas: +Chalk It Up--Assemble your group of supporters, hand out chalk, and spread out around your town. Write slogans in support of Leonard's freedom on sidewalks, e.g., "Free Peltier NOW. You can add a web address, too: whoisleonardpeltier.info, for example. (CAUTION: We recommend that you consult graffiti ordinances in your area and use only chalk because such markings are not permanent.) Also leaflet nearby to generate more awareness. Select handouts at . +Personal Touch--Instead of signing a petition or writing letters of support, try a more personal approach in communicating your message. Make a big sign that says "I Stand with Obama on Freeing Peltier." Take a photograph of each person in your group--with the sign being held by the supporter or hung as a background for the photo. Make certain that the supporter's face and the sign's message are clearly visible, and make certain to record the name and address of the person photographed. (That information can and should be written on the back of the photo once it is developed.) If we all do this, tens of thousands of photographs can be assembled and delivered to the White House in the months ahead. But, for now, let's stockpile the photos for delivery to the White House en masse. And don't stop there. Keep collecting photos! You can find other ideas at . Don't hesitate. Start planning your Inauguration activities now. Also remember that the 33rd anniversary of Leonard's arrest is February 6. It's never too soon to begin planning events/actions for that date. Recommit yourself to the Struggle and to bringing attention to Leonard's case. But don't restrict yourself only to commemorative occasions. Make Leonard's freedom a 24/7/365 endeavor. Friends, our time is now. Stand up. Move your lips and agitate your tongues. Make a noise. Whatever it takes. Do it and keep doing it until Leonard is free! * Op-Ed * Read "12,000 Days" at . * Raffle for Freedom * First Place, Painting by Leonard Peltier Second Place, Poster-size Lithograph of Painting Third Place, "Incident at Oglala" DVD, "Songs for Leonard Peltier" CD, and T-Shirt Cost: $5 ea. or 5 tickets for $20. Send checks or money orders (be sure to indicate it's for raffle tickets) to: LP-DOC, Box 7488, Fargo, ND 58106. The drawing will be held at the end of December. * Last Call * Remember to ship your gift for a child at the Pine Ridge and/or Turtle Mountain. Mail gifts to: Tamara Patneaud PO Box 308 Rolla, ND 58367 701-278-6121 Rosyln Jumping Bull Box 207 Oglala, SD 57764 605-867-2231 * Remember Leonard, Too * This season is a difficult time for all prisoners. You are all working hard for Leonard's freedom, we know, as well as being busy with your lives and preparing to spend the holidays with friends and family. But with a simple gesture, you can bring comfort and joy to someone who is very far from home and missing his family and friends. Let's all take a minute out of this day to each send a holiday card, newsy letter, or note of encouragement... The address: Leonard Peltier #89637-132 USP-Lewisburg US Penitentiary PO Box 1000 Lewisburg, PA 17837-1000 *'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'* "Never cease in the fight for peace, justice, and equality for all people. Be persistent in all that you do and don't allow anyone to sway you from your conscience." -- Leonard Peltier *'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'* ----- Please circulate to family and friends and otherwise widely post our listserv announcements. Also frequently visit our Blog at or receive our blog postings by Web feed (download a free newsfeed reader at ): Atom: RSS: Or register to receive e-mail announcements. It's easy. Go to our homepage at . Scroll down the page until you see "Join Us" on the left sidebar. Enter your e-mail address in the text box. Then point to and click on "Subscribe". Or send a blank e-mail message to . You also can Bookmark our home page and/or blog. Click on the Bookmark button provided at each of these sites to use any program you wish by which to save the sites to your list of browser favorites. Visit us often to learn more about efforts to win Leonard's freedom and find out what you can do to help. We encourage other sites to link to our Web site and blog. No prior permission is required. Feel free to use one of our banner ads at to link to our resources. Visit us on MySpace (); Facebook (); and Bebo (), too. ----- Time to set him free... Because it is the RIGHT thing to do. Friends of Peltier http://www.FreePeltierNow.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- To subscribe, send a blank message to freepeltiernow-on at mail- list.com To contact the list owner, send your message to freepeltiernow-list- owner at mail-list.com mail-list.com 1302 Waugh Dr. #438 Houston, Texas 77019 USA From suzannedk at gmail.com Mon Dec 15 22:28:32 2008 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:28:32 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Rumsfeld responsible for torture, report says In-Reply-To: <200812160013.mBG0DiWe029715@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> References: <200812160013.mBG0DiWe029715@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Message-ID: The book "Torture Team" by Queen's Councilor, legal expert to the U N, law professor in London University, Phillipe Sands, gives full responsibility to the decision to torture to Presiden G. W. Bush even more than to D. Rumsfeld. The book has been out some time. It does not skew the facts in such a way as protect the President of the United States. All may find this book tragicly interesting, informative in juxtaposition to this recent two year study. Also the book "Global War on Liberty" by Jean-Claude Paye, in french "le fin d'Etat de la Droit" which is study of the end of the state of human rights set up behind the managed chaos of terror war. How the E U agreements with the U S supercede Human Rights law, how and why and when this was done. How this compares with the suspending of the Weimar Republic laws in the time of Hitler. S.M de Kuyper Amsterdam On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 1:13 AM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > [1]http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_11196088 > > > Salt Lake Tribune 12/11/2008 > > > Rumsfeld responsible for torture, report says > > > > Genesis of decision to use coercive techniques was memo signed by > President Bush, declaring that Geneva Convention did not apply to > captured al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. > > > > By Joby Warrick > > > > Washington A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former > Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration > officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at > Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials > led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere. > > > The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his > deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh > interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects, > rejecting the Bush administration's contention that the policies > originated lower down the command chain. > > > "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to > the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the panel > concludes. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States > government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, > redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and > authorized their use against detainees." > > > The report, released by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, > R-Ariz., and based on a nearly two-year investigation, said that both > the policies and resulting controversies tarnished the reputation of > the United States and undermined national security. "Those efforts > damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save > lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral > authority," it said. > > > The panel's investigation focused on the Defense Department's use of > controversial interrogation practices, including forced nudity, > painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and > use of dogs. The practices, some of which had already been adopted by > the CIA at its secret prisons, were adapted for interrogations at > Guantanamo Bay and later migrated to U.S. detention camps in > Afghanistan and Iraq, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. > > > "The Committee's report details the inexcusable link between abusive > interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva > Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody," > McCain, himself a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, said in a > statement. "These policies are wrong and must never be repeated." > > > White House officials have maintained the measures were approved in > response to demands from field officers who complained that > traditional interrogation methods weren't working on some of the more > hardened captives. But Senate investigators, relying on documents and > hours of hearing testimony, arrived at a different conclusion. > > > The true genesis of the decision to use coercive techniques, the > report said, was a memo signed by President Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, > declaring that the Geneva Convention's standards for humane treatment > did not apply to captured al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. As early as > that spring, the panel said, top administration officials, including > National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, participated in meetings > in which the use of coercive measures was discussed. The panel drew on > a written statement by Rice, released earlier this year, to support > that conclusion. > > > In July 2002, Rumseld's senior staff began compiling information about > techniques used in military survival schools to simulate conditions > that U.S. airmen might face if captured by an enemy that did not > follow the Geneva conditions. Those techniques - borrowed from a > training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or > SERE - included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and were loosely > based on methods adopted by Chinese communists to coerce propaganda > confessions from captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean war. > > > The SERE program became the template for interrogation methods that > were ultimately approved by Rumsfeld himself, the report says. In the > field, U.S. military interrogators used the techniques with little > oversight and frequently abusive results, the panel found. > > > "It is particularly troubling that senior officials approved the use > of interrogation techniques that were originally designed to simulate > abusive tactics used by our enemies against our own soldiersand that > were modeled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to > elicit false confessions from U.S. military personnel," the report > said. > > > Defenders of the techniques have argued that such measures were > justified because of al-Qaida's demonstrated disregard for human life. > But the panel members cited the views of Gen. David Petraeus, now the > head of U.S. Central Command, who in a May, 2007 letter to his troops > said humane treatment of prisoners allows Americans to occupy the > moral high ground. > > > "Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human > dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right," wrote > Petraeus, who at the time was the top U.S. commander in Iraq. > "Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy." > > > Associated Press > > References > > 1. http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_11196088 > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org Tue Dec 16 08:01:11 2008 From: hunterbadbear at hunterbear.org (Hunter Gray) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 08:01:11 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Ghosts / and a kind of personal report Message-ID: <003301c95f8f$24035510$0400a8c0@computer> NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR: [December 16 2008] I wrote this piece, GHOSTS, at a point where -- almost exactly five years ago -- my Life Fires had dimmed low, 'way low. I lived in a "border" atmosphere, characterized by periods of semi-trance and intermittent sleep, both of these characterized by dreams which often, in their sharp clarity could be tagged as "Visionary." My Systemic Lupus, which had almost carried me away for good three times, had been diagnosed conclusively by a dozen medics. The last one in this entourage was a solemn rheumatologist who had pronounced it, in funereal tones, as "a very, very serious case." I had been advised by some docs that it was time to "divest" myself of my possessions. In that period I had to be physically assisted in getting into and out of chairs and even my bed. I used a "walker" to get about. And, despite my fickleness regarding organized religion, I had received Last Rites from the Church. Five years after that foreboding epoch the weather outside is about as bleak and gloomy as it was then. But I survive -- extremely grateful for the consistent support of family members and friends -- including furry friends -- and, I should add, Spirits. I've resisted the now increasingly seen as problematic chemo drugs, as well as the behavioral practice of many Lupus victims to ritualistically visit their primary physician two or three times a month. My mind remains sharp, clear. When I awoke very early this morning, sleepy, and realized that the current five gallon bottle of mountain water had expired, I loaded a new one [and they are damn heavy] with no difficulty whatsoever. Sometimes, especially in the mornings, I even feel something somewhat -- somewhat -- akin to the status quo ante bellum of years ago. Following a change of medicine, my weight two years ago returned to normal. I look very much like I have for much of my adult life. There continue to be problems, family members remain properly concerned, and, certainly -- we can take nothing for granted. But I fight, always, to the very Four Directions. As I have noted before, most of the people around us here in Idaho are very friendly. But there are some, covert locals, who are not. The former renew my faith in Humanity. The latter bring forth my most flint-like dimensions -- and, through an obviously intriguing alchemy, are for me Good Medicine. To sum up in succinct fashion, I haven't for a moment given up on the Sycamore Trek: another journey, and a very physical one, through my Great Canyon. Nialetch/Onen Hunter [Hunter Bear] In the mountains of Eastern Idaho GHOSTS [THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 20, 2003] HUNTER GRAY/HUNTER BEAR http://hunterbear.org/ghosts.htm INTRODUCTORY NOTE: As a boy, I shot my huge Coming of Age Bear -- deep in the vast Sycamore Canyon wilderness area in Northern Arizona. At that point, I then became a man. The fiery spirit of the Bear and its abundantly fine qualities -- intelligence, courage, stamina, instinct -- are with me always and have served me very well and faithfully on my swift and rocky River of No Return. __________________________________________________ I was suddenly but gently aware that I was standing at the edge of a large stand of tall, slim jackpine timber. I was in a very strange half-light that I had never before experienced. I dream little -- at least in any recollective sense -- at any time. But this was no dream of any kind. I had gone to sleep that night in our 'way far up home on the far western edge of Pocatello, Idaho. I knew precisely where I now was: several yards from our old and quite isolated and remote -- and almost roadless -- family hunting camp on the very edge of the vast and beautiful Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Area southwest of my hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona. Through eternity, the always flowing Sycamore Creek continues to cut at glacial pace -- deeper and deeper. I was looking from the Canyon's east rim directly west: down at the western slope which then rose sharply to its rim -- in contrast to our eastern area which had some substantial sloping regions in its upper setting. Then I looked across that western rim and the widespread cedar plains that dominated that side. I looked southwest -- looking over a dozen mountain ranges that stretched very far off toward the Colorado River -- and the California border. And then I was looking south: many, many miles down the Great Canyon into Sycamore Basin and its vast, and cedar-sprinkled open reaches -- bounded by small mountains and high ridges. And then beyond, directly south into the Verde Valley with its sprinkling of small towns and scattered, often downright hardscrabble folk. And then up above the Valley -- up the slopes of Mingus Mountain -- where a handful of lights signaled the tenacious existence of the once fabulous copper mining town of Jerome. It had been a ghost town since the early 1950s -- and it was still legend. Now the Great Canyon pulled suggestively -- and it pulled south. And then, suddenly, I knew I was in Borders -- a complex of them. And I was also at Choices. I had to go south -- directly down into the innards of Sycamore and then southward 'way, 'way through the Canyon -- into the Verde Valley. I had done that before -- a long time ago. I was extremely ill with a sudden-striking and mysterious illness called Systemic Lupus -- and the very worst and deadly form of that particular version of the oft lethal disease. It had struck only a very few months ago: widespread rashes, fever, extreme weakness, body pain, swelling -- all sorts of deep disorders. It has no cure. And the destructive variant with which we are dealing -- what my doctors call "a very serious case" -- attacks and threatens lungs, liver, blood vessels, kidneys, and a number of other critical organs with a bloody passion. In less than four months, I've been in the Pocatello mountain hospital three times -- and have come extremely close to dying at each beginning point in those week long stays. This Lupus could and will attack literally Anytime -- with virtually no warning. Early on, even before Lupus had been specifically diagnosed, our immediate family gathered to do my Will in my hospital room: Eldri [my spouse of 43 years], myself, Maria [school staff] and her two children -- Samantha [13] and our grandson/son Thomas [21], Josie [just graduated from Idaho State in Social Work]. Our two oldest sons, Beba [John ] a writer; and Peter, a newspaper editor; each worn to the bone from travel exertion arrived on schedule: Beba had come from Fargo to Lincoln, picked up Peter, and they had driven a thousand miles to Idaho. It's the Will of a Native family: solidarity, consensus, communalism. While a surprised -- and in some instances discomfited hospital staff watched and listened surreptitiously -- we took it point by point. The family was the executor committee and could choose its spokesperson when the time came; our home -- very new, relatively large, big yard area, best view in Pocatello , rapidly climbing value -- would remain in the full hands of the family with Maria authorized to use it throughout her life and the others able to use it at will; our big historical and contemporary Native arts and crafts collection would remain forever in the group and nothing could be taken nor sold. [Beba subsequently drew up an intricate codicil which provides for very careful loans to reputable exhibits and institutions; same basically for my quite large collection of Western American and Western Canadian radical labor material.] There is more, of course -- but mostly on a share and share alike basis. Once Eldri and I are both gone, and the Will then locks in with total finality, no changes can be made in any dimension of it save by bona fide family consensus. But it's a very close and tight outfit indeed. Back home, I typed it up, and all signed via notary plus witnesses. And Eldri and I did a Living Will which provides for moderate efforts to resuscitate. After that there were more very close brushes with Death, twelve physicians, twenty pills a day. But before we ended that meeting, Beba raised a final point: looking at me, he asked, "What do we do with you?" "Cremation," I said slowly. "And the ashes?" he continued. "In the end there's only one place," I said. Heads nodded. And that -- our historic and long ago hunting camp, to which as a Teen we had brought the huge Black coming-of -age bear which I had a lifelong mandate to kill and did -- is where I now stood. Now I began walking slowly --- still in half-light -- down the trail into the Great Canyon. And there I hoped to travel all the way down the Canyon and into and through the Basin to the Verde Valley. And Jerome glittered on Mingus Mountain. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------- Jerome, Arizona. July 10, 1917. Two hundred thugs armed with Winchester 44/40s, pickaxe handles, and baseball bats designated themselves a "Loyalty League" with the blessing of United Verde Copper Company. The great I.W.W.-led copper strike, [Industrial Workers of the World -- Wobblies] -- from Butte to the Mexican border -- necessitated by wartime inflation and static wages, had just begun. The so-called vigilantes rounded up 75 key Jerome strikers in the early morning hours of that terrible day, beat them badly, placed them in United Verde boxcars, and took them far westward to Kingman, Arizona on the California border. When many tried to return, they were jailed at the Yavapai County seat of Prescott. Two days later, on the Mexican border at Cochise County, 1200 strikers and sympathizers were rounded up by hundreds of Loyalty League vigilantes with the full backing of the Phelps Dodge Copper corporation and local lawmen -- and taken by boxcars to Columbus, New Mexico where they were dumped in the desert with neither food nor water. In the early morning of August 1, 1917 at Butte, Montana, a major I.W.W. leader, organizer, and copper strike coordinator -- the Cherokee, Frank H. Little -- was hideously murdered by gunmen employed by massive Anaconda Copper. Blood dark clouds gathered in the Western copper country where memories are very long indeed. They are still there -- now, to this very day. There was much, much more anti-labor and anti-radical brutality across the West -- and eventually the country itself. No one was ever punished for these atrocities. And then the Federal government itself rounded up 150 leaders of the I.W.W. quickly convicting them [along with Gene Debs, the socialist], of the completely spurious charges of "Espionage" and "Sedition." That was long before my time, of course, But the historic, always remembered Jerome Deportation was -- along with the racist brutality and economic exploitation of Flagstaff and many regional environs -- a key factor in my own eventual radicalization at barely 21. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- The half-light didn't change -- but I had no difficulty seeing and navigating. The Canyon was more than 30 miles long, north to south, and I was taking most of it all the way down to its very end. But for me now time and distance were meaningless. For a few moments, I studied myself. I was big, very muscular, much hair. I wore my traditional J.C. Penney wide-brimmed hat, Levis, worn blue Western shirt, heavy and steel toed logging boots cut slightly long ago by a mis-aimed double-bitted axe blow. I carried my old 30/30 Winchester lever action, with its curved butt plate and long octagon barrel. On my left hip, I packed a large hunting knife. And I had energy! -- energy I had not had since the hideous disease had struck many weeks before. Almost 50 years earlier, in May 1955, I had taken this very route over a major junket of several leisurely days. [I know of no contemporary person in those days -- and maybe even to this day -- who ever made that trip.] I was a basically healthy kid -- but there were problems. The Army, in which I had just served a full stretch -- very honorably by its standards -- had left marks. I had a brand-new I.W.W. card. This was fine by my parents, but they still hoped [and Mother pushed ] for a "respectable" career to which I was resistant. That far off trip through Sycamore -- coming home to my very special setting -- was in large part to organize my own thinking. In the course of that Great Trek , I explored some vasty side canyons coming down off the western rim. I saw ancient Indian ruins in cliff settings -- the location of which I would never reveal. The entire journey featured all sorts of wild game -- much of it not afraid of me at all -- and I saw hundreds of elk antlers, seasonally shed in winter grazing areas. At one point, I saw huge bear tracks -- very fresh -- under Sycamore trees which had been clawed eight feet or so up. This was grizzly sign -- even though no grizzlies were supposed to exist anywhere in Arizona by that time. At another point, resting on a knoll above Sycamore Creek, I heard a noisy crashing sound coming in toward me through the brush. I waited. Suddenly, a huge jet black long-horn bull emerged noisily, limping from an old wound on one back thigh evidenced by old lion or bear claw scars. He drank from the creek. When he had finished, I asked him quietly, "How are you doing today?" He jerked his head up -- had never, I'm sure, seen a human creature before -- and looked directly at me. Then he turned and plunged back into the brush. He was a direct descendant of many generations of purely wild cattle, stemming from Spanish gold mining operations in the latter 1700s. Eventually, when the geology had shifted into the Great Verde Fault, I found rose quartz -- gold-bearing quartz -- but I would never reveal the location of that, ever. In due course, at the lower end of the Great Canyon, I emerged into the land of our two old hermit friends -- Joe Dickson, a retired hard-rock miner and Jerry Greaves, a former merchant seaman. They lived in the Old Packard Ranch and I spent a day with them, telling what I'd seen. They were a bit disappointed that I had not cut the sign of the Lost Spanish Mine, somewhere in the vastnesses of Sycamore, guarded -- according to legend -- by the ghost of a black-robed Spanish priest. And when I soon "came out" in the comparatively "civilized" Verde Valley, I was very much together. Not long thereafter, I went with my family to Mexico where Dad painted and lectured -- and I spent the month studying that fascinating nation's radicalism and Native and union movements. And then to sociology at the University of Arizona and eventually to Arizona State University -- fine enough. But almost immediately I fortunately connected with radical and democratic -- and consistently embattled -- industrial unionism. My organizing career all over the country in Native rights, labor, civil rights and liberties, social justice in general, has been -- no false modesty -- successful. I still keep going. Now I was at the bottom of the Canyon, turning south, downward. Sycamore Creek's familiar running and rippling and splashing noises were old and friendly music. And so was everything else I experienced-- almost all of which I remembered with the most intricate clarity -- as I walked, slowly but strangely down, down Sycamore, mile after mile after mile. Again, time and distance meant nothing for me here, I was extremely happy and I liked my thinking. And then I was suddenly awake -- in my bed on the far western frontier of Pocatello. It was dawn and the half light was gone. I was weak, utterly weak and felt generally like Hell. My one-half Bobcat, Cloudy, nuzzled me, Eldri was cooking breakfast and my daughter, Maria, handed me a huge cup of super strong black coffee. My head, as always was very clear. "If you had to choose," my newspaper son Peter asked a few days ago, "between physical health on the one hand and your thinking and writing ability on the other, which would you take?" "My mind always," I replied. And what I do know is that it's critical to keep fighting -- and to always remember that if one lives with grace he/she should be prepared to die with grace. How much time do I have? Maybe lots, maybe not much. But I'd like, too, within the now somewhat narrowed borders of my canyon-of-life, to help others do some good things as well. Let me know. In the mountains of southeastern Idaho. Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear] AFTER WORD: And then soon, deep down within me, I sensed a kind of stirring, a Change. I grew stronger, much more optimistic, began to do some walking in the high hills and ridges that immediately overlook our 'way far up home and sprawl ever-upward into mountains. There are still many challenges with this deadly and mysterious malady -- this predator that has such a strong preference for Natives and certain other groups. But I look up at the Sun and Sky and Listen to the Wind. For most of my life, the long and gigantic canyon has always been in my mind and inner being. I realized, while still very young that when I even briefly and segmentally dreamed of it, important and significant things invariably happened with me soon thereafter. But now since the Experience, every facet of the Canyon Journey -- every detail I saw of that vasty full and wonderfully intricate and complex corner of the great Creation -- can immediately and vividly be recalled full flow and in total at any point I so wish. And that is very often. I have never been afraid of death. I plan to do much more in my life -- much more indeed -- before the eventual trip into the Fog and Deep Canyon, up over the High Mountains, and Far Beyond to the Shining Sun in the Turquoise Sky that glows forever down on the Headwaters of Life. And when that Journey finally comes the great Bear will accompany me. And so I keep going, keep fighting. Nialetch/Onen In the mountains of Eastern Idaho HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? and Ohkwari Check out our Hunterbear website Directory http://hunterbear.org/directory.htm [The site is dedicated to our one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray: http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm See http://www.hunterbear.org/witch_hunt_continuesthe_southern.htm And see Hunter's Movement Life Interview: http://hunterbear.org/HUNTER%20BEAR%20INTERVIEW%20CRMV.htm From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Tue Dec 16 08:18:02 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:18:02 -0800 Subject: [R-G] a small analysis on the greece riots Message-ID: <164236a30812160718l7a3e90dbk98ddde525eee7699@mail.gmail.com> "We are in Civil War: With the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society" The above statement is not a statement from radical anarchist group, this ispart of a comunique from the association of employees of the suburb of Agios Dimitrios in Athens. the city hall in the suburb of Dimitrios in greece, has been occupied since last week and it has become a centre for popular assemblies with young and old alike participating in open and democratic discussions about the situation in greece. It all started On Saturday 6th of December at around 10pm, two Greek policemen were in patrol in a central street by Exarchia square, in the center of Athens. They had a verbal argument with some young people who were there. During the argument, one of the cops pulled his gun and shot a 16-year-old guy twice. The victim was moved to Evangelismos Hospital to be found dead. According to eye-witnesses, the cop had been swearing against the young man, showing his genitals, before shooting him. As a result of this shooting, Greece has become a battle ground between the people and the state with hundreds of demonstrations happening across the country.Battles aganist the cops are happening on a daily basis with dozens of police stations across the country being attack,some being totally destroyed. There is no sign of these abaiting,if anything these protests are spreading across europe With revolts like the one in greece, there are stages that the populace go through, I have broken them down into 4 stages that I believe are the 4 stages of a radical left revolt/revolution. The initial revolt with rioting and property destruction, the second stage of building popular assembilies and horizontal stuctures of organising, the third stage of networking all the existing assembilies and horizontally based organizing structures together and finally the last stage of uses those networked organizations to make the existing power structure/governing structures in society irrelavent.Often these stages can overlap which is happening in greece as assemblies are being started, assembilies are networking together and rioting is still happening. There are dozens of universities that have been occupied and some say as many as 700 high schools. There have also been city halls that have been occupied. Manny of the occupied buildings have become decentralized centers to futher discuss and coordinate the revolt. Many of the popular assembilies that have poped up around the country are not just discussing how to continue street battles with the cops and fascists, who are more often then not working together, but they are also discussing the problems that led to this situation. Yes it was the shooting of alexandros that started it all but that was just the last quantitative step that lead to a qualitative break with the status quo.Facsit police, corrupt polititions, anti-imigrant policies and an adherence to the washington consensus by the government when implementing right-wing reforms:these were all issues with the people before the shooting of Alexandros But there is more to it then that. To get to the ultimate core of the issue in greece,we have to go back some 67 years to "operation marita" When nazi Germany and facsist italy occupied greece during world war II. The occupation had a profound influence on the ruling class of Greece, In the sense that they became willing collaborators whith the facsist occupiers. To the ruling class of Greece at the time, it was better to colaorate with the facsists then to join forces with the working class and defeat the facsists. when given a choice of building a united front with workers or supporting facsism,the ruling class in most societies will choose the latter then the former. With the "liberation" of greece, the only change Greece saw was a change of the facsist gaurd. Instead of the german and italian fascists they now had cia facsists working with Greece facsists to "protect" against the new threat, which was the soviets After world war II ended, Greece decended into civil war which pit ulta nationalists and facists against ther communist led resistence. when the communist lost, the communist party was band and the conservatives ruled with an irion fist until the military junta took power in 1967 and ruled until 1974 when a popular uprising, much like the one we see today led to the downfall of the junta.With the downfall of the Military junta, we saw bourgeois democracy develop in greece. Although their was a bourgeois democracy,the fact was that a large part of the ruling class was still facsist and they were just waiting to implement fascism So in conclusion, It is my belief that this current rebellion is a continuation of the uprising in 72 which led to the defeat of the military Junta.Even though the uprising put to death the military Junta in Greece, I believe it failed to eradicate facsism from it's country and just like a virus, Fascism began to infect more and more people in Greece,specifically in the ruling class.over the past 5 - 10 years in greece you have seen a massive groth in facsism and it came to a head when a known facsist cop shot dead Alexandros.. It may have taken some 35 years or so for the anti-facsists to re organize, but the fact is they have and lets hope That this time they kill the ugly beast of facsism once and for all. Some anarchist in Halifax From critical.montages at gmail.com Tue Dec 16 12:05:56 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:05:56 -0500 Subject: [R-G] The Shoes Heard round the World Message-ID: Some commentators say that a defiant use of shoes is an Arab thing, and others say that it's a Muslim thing, but the idea has an undeniable universal appeal, and it might ecumenically catch on across cultures and religions. As the POTUS spoke nonsense into the void, His final insult to Iraqis unfurled, There the embattled journalist stood, And fired the shoes heard round the world.* Muntadar al-Zeidi's shoes are the Lexington and Concord of creative anti-imperialist resistance in the age of YouTube. * With an apology to Emerson. Yoshie From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 16 12:59:58 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:59:58 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Bush=Dog Slur Sparks Outrage Among Dog Lovers Message-ID: <200812161959.mBGJxwgQ020717@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081216/935490fa/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 16 13:30:46 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:30:46 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Obama and Daschle Should Opt for Single-Payer Message-ID: <200812162030.mBGKUkmd006802@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081216/4f9dee4f/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 16 13:31:21 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:31:21 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Detroit's Problem: It's Health Care, not the Union Message-ID: <200812162031.mBGKVLRi007490@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081216/3e701600/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 16 13:32:27 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:32:27 -0800 Subject: [R-G] UN Security Council: Israel-PA peace process is irreversible Message-ID: <200812162032.mBGKWRZL009203@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081216/d4ecf91c/attachment.txt From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Dec 16 16:57:34 2008 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:57:34 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Message to the UC Berkeley Community on the Current Economic Situation Message-ID: <200812162357.mBGNvY8e001895@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20081216/8eaa97b1/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Dec 16 18:34:45 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:34:45 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] At Last, A Date Message-ID: <49485735.1020309@ashisuto.co.jp> For the first time, the International Energy Agency has produced a date for peak oil. And it's not reassuring. by George Monbiot The Guardian (December 15 2008) Can you think of a major threat for which the British government does not prepare? It employs an army of civil servants, spooks and consultants to assess the chances of terrorist attacks, financial collapse, floods, epidemics, even asteroid strikes, and to work out what it should do if they happen. But there is one hazard about which it appears intensely relaxed. It has never conducted its own assessment of the state of global oil supplies and the possibility that one day they might peak and then go into decline. If you ask, it always produces the same response: "global oil resources are adequate for the foreseeable future". {1} It knows this, it says, because of the assessments made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its World Energy Outlook reports. In the 2007 report, the IEA does appear to support the government's view. "World oil resources", it states, "are judged to be sufficient to meet the projected growth in demand to 2030? {2}; though it says nothing about what happens at that point, or whether they will continue to be sufficient after 2030. But this, as far as Whitehall is concerned, is the end of the matter. Like most of the rich world's governments, the United Kingdom treats the IEA's projections as gospel. Earlier this year, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the UK's Department for Business, asking what contingency plans the government has made for global supplies of oil peaking by 2020. The answer was as follows: "the Government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans specifically for the eventuality of crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020". {3} So the IEA had better bloody well be right. In the report on peak oil commissioned by the US Department of Energy, the oil analyst Robert L Hirsch concluded that "without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs" of world oil supplies peaking "will be unprecedented". {4} He went on to explain what "timely mitigation" meant. Even a worldwide emergency response "ten years before world oil peaking", he wrote, would leave "a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked". {5} To avoid global economic collapse, we need to begin "a mitigation crash program twenty years before peaking". {6} If Hirsch is right and if oil supplies peak before 2028, we're in deep doodah. So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA radically changed its assessment. Until this year's report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as "doomsayers". "The IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern", he wrote. "Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future". {7} In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world's existing oilfields of 3.7% a year {8}. This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered. But the new report, published last month, carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7%, which means a much greater gap to fill {9}. More importantly, in the 2008 report the IEA suggests for the first time that world petroleum supplies might hit the buffers. "Although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil ... is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period". {10} These bland words reveal a major shift. Never before has one of the IEA's energy outlooks forecast the peaking or plateauing of the world's conventional oil production (which is what we mean when we talk about peak oil). But that is as specific as the report gets. Does it or doesn't it mean that we have time to prepare? What does "towards the end of the projection period" mean? The agency has never produced a more precise forecast - until now. For the first time, in the interview I conducted with its chief economist Fatih Birol, it has given us a date. And it should scare the pants off anyone who understands the implications. Fatih Birol, the lead author of the new energy outlook, is a small, shrewd, unflustered man with thick grey hair and Alistair Darling eyebrows. He explained to me that the agency's new projections were based on a major study it had undertaken into decline rates in the world's 800 largest oil fields. So what were its previous figures based on? "It was mainly an assumption, a global assumption about the world's oil fields. This year, we looked at it country by country, field by field and we looked at it also onshore and offshore. It was very very detailed. Last year it was an assumption, and this year it's a finding of our study." I told him that it seemed extraordinary to me that the IEA hadn't done this work before, but had based its assessment on educated guesswork. "In fact nobody had done this research", he told me. "This is the first publicly available data". {11} So was it not irresponsible to publish a decline rate of 3.7% in 2007, when there was no proper research supporting it? "No, our previous decline assumptions have always mentioned that these are assumptions to the best of our knowledge - and we also said that the declines [could be] higher than what we have assumed". Then I asked him a question for which I didn't expect a straight answer: could he give me a precise date by which he expects conventional oil supplies to stop growing? "In terms of non-OPEC [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel]", he replied, "we are expecting that in three, four years' time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline ... In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view". Around 2020. That casts the issue in quite a different light. Mr Birol's date, if correct, gives us about eleven years to prepare. If the Hirsch report is right, we have already missed the boat. Birol says we need a "global energy revolution" to avoid an oil crunch, including (disastrously for the environment) a massive global drive to exploit unconventional oils, such as the Canadian tar sands. But nothing on this scale has yet happened, and Hirsch suggests that even if it began today, the necessary investments and infrastructure changes could not be made in time. Fatih Birol told me "I think time is not on our side here". When I pressed him on the shift in the agency's position, he argued that the IEA has been saying something like this all along. "We said in the past that one day we will run out of oil. We never said that we will have hundreds of years of oil ... but what we have said is that this year, compared to past years, we have seen that the decline rates are significantly higher than what we have seen before. But our line that we are on an unsustainable energy path has not changed." This of course is face-saving nonsense. There is a vast difference between a decline rate of 3.7% and a rate of 6.7%. There is an even bigger difference between suggesting that the world is following an unsustainable energy path - a statement almost everyone can subscribe to - and revealing that conventional oil supplies are likely to plateau around 2020. If this is what the IEA meant in the past, it wasn't expressing itself very clearly. So what do we do? We could take to the hills, or we could hope and pray that Hirsch is wrong about the twenty-year lead time, and begin a global crash programme today of fuel efficiency and electrification. In either case, the British government had better start drawing up some contingency plans. www.monbiot.com References: 1. Eg DECC Press Office, 28th October 2008. Statement emailed to Duncan Clark at the Guardian. 2. International Energy Agency, 2007. World Energy Outlook 2007, page 43. IEA, Paris. 3. BERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request, Ref 08/0091. 4. Robert L Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, February 2005. Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. US Department of Energy, page 4. http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf 5. ibid, page 59. 6. ibid, page 65. 7. International Energy Agency, 2005. Resources to Reserves: Oil and Gas Technologies for the Energy Markets of the Future, page 3. IEA, Paris. 8. International Energy Agency, 2007, ibid, page 84. 9. International Energy Agency, 2008. World Energy Outlook 2008, page 43. IEA, Paris. 10. ibid, page 103. 11. This interview is broadcast on the Guardian's website today. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/12/15/at-last-a-date/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 16 19:09:16 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:09:16 -0800 Subject: [R-G] For Bush's staff, upbeat talking points on his tenure Message-ID: <16332430-1582-4045-906F-5B7C5A986137@shaw.ca> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bush9-2008dec09,0,3087216.story From the Los Angeles Times For Bush's staff, upbeat talking points on his tenure Administration officials get a memo from the White House suggesting what to say about the last eight years: President Bush upheld 'the honor and the dignity of his office,' for one. By Peter Nicholas December 9, 2008 Reporting from Washington ? In case any Bush administration officials have trouble summing up the boss' record, the White House is providing a few helpful suggestions. A two-page memo that has been sent to Cabinet members and other high- ranking officials offers a guide for discussing Bush's eight-year tenure during their public speeches. Titled "Speech Topper on the Bush Record," the talking points state that Bush "kept the American people safe" after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts, curbed AIDS in Africa and maintained "the honor and the dignity of his office." The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success. It mentions none of the episodes that detractors say have marred his presidency: the collapse of the housing market and major financial services companies, the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina or the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. In a section on the economy, speakers are invited to say that Bush cut taxes after 2001, setting the stage for years of job growth. As for the current economic crisis, the memo says that Bush "responded with bold measures to prevent an economic meltdown." The document is otherwise silent on the recession, which claimed 533,000 jobs in November, the highest number in 34 years. A copy of the memo was obtained by The Times' Washington bureau. A spokesman for Bush said Monday that the White House routinely sends out suggestions to officials and allies on ways to talk about the administration's record. "What we have in mind with these documents is we feel the president's many accomplishments haven't been given the attention they deserve and in some cases have been purposely ignored," said Carlton Carroll, a White House spokesman. No one is required to recite the talking points laid out by the White House, Carroll said. The memo closes with a reference to Bush's 1999 memoir, "A Charge to Keep": "Above all, George W. Bush promised to uphold the honor and the dignity of his office. And through all the challenges and trials of his time in office, that is a charge that our president has kept." One accomplishment cited is passage of the No Child Left Behind law, Bush's attempt to improve education. "He promised to raise standards and accountability in public schools -- and delivered the No Child Left Behind Act," the talking points read. On the presidential campaign trail this year, Democratic candidates found that any criticism of No Child Left Behind was a surefire applause line. President-elect Barack Obama promised to revamp the program, contending that it elevated test-taking at the expense of a well- rounded education. Nicholas is a writer in our Washington bureau. peter.nicholas at latimes.com From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 16 19:12:36 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:12:36 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Canada has hand in Mexican bloodshed Message-ID: <090B8DBF-1A34-4762-9DF7-BBC5B7CD866A@shaw.ca> Canada has hand in Mexican bloodshed Dan Gardner Ottawa Citizen Tuesday, December 16, 2008 http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/news/editorial/story.html?id=8585133a-11fb-4995-a94d-d3e334265e15&p=2 On Dec. 6, at least 18 people were killed in the struggle to control the Mexican drug trade. They included 10 suspected traffickers and a soldier who died in a wild gunfight and two men whose severed heads were put in buckets and left near the residence of a state governor. As horrible as it was, it was a day like any other. Last Monday, Mexico's attorney general told reporters the record-high rate of drug-related murders in 2007 had doubled in 2008. As of Dec. 2, it stood at 5,376. Canadians will be dimly aware that drug-related violence is soaring in Mexico. We read the occasional story and see a picture now and then of a sheet drawn over a corpse that was somebody's son. But there's little analysis or concern here. Why would there be? To us, this is just more bloodshed far away. It has nothing to do with us. Or so we think. In truth, the government of Canada is at least partly responsible for the tragedy unfolding in Mexico. To understand the connection, we need a bit of historical background. In the 1970s, North American hipsters rediscovered cocaine. Demand creates supply, as economists say, and production of coca -- the little bush whose leaves are the source of cocaine -- surged in the Andean regions of Bolivia and Peru, where coca has been grown since time immemorial. Colombians became the chief middlemen in the burgeoning trade, smuggling cocaine by sea and air, through the Caribbean, into Florida. Miami boomed. It was the era of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian cartels and Miami Vice. Ronald Reagan revived Richard Nixon's "War on Drugs." The U.S. government threw everything it had -- DEA, FBI, Coast Guard, Navy -- at the smugglers. And it worked. The lines of supply were severed. But supply always finds a way to demand. That's Economics 101. Ronald Reagan acknowledged as much in an unguarded moment. Colombian traffickers shifted operations west, to Mexico. At first, Mexican gangsters were junior partners but increasingly they bought the Colombians' shipments and took them over the border themselves. The Americans responded by attacking the source -- coca crops in Peru and Bolivia -- and by going after the Colombian heads of the major smuggling rings. Once again, they succeeded. Coca production in Peru and Bolivia declined. Pablo Escobar was shot dead. The Medellin and Cali cartels were wiped out. And once again, it made no difference. Coca production soared in Colombia, more than compensating for losses in Peru and Bolivia. And the dismantling of the big smuggling operations caused many, smaller, decentralized groups to spring up. The cocaine kept on coming. Volumes grew so steadily that the retail price of cocaine on North American streets plummeted. At the end of the 1990s, the American government poured billions of dollars into "Plan Colombia," which called for stepped-up destruction of drug crops and more attacks on traffickers. The U.S. also pushed Mexico to go after that country's growing cartels. Mexico did just that. All the big names -- the Mexican Pablo Escobars -- are now dead or in prison. And that is why Mexico is going through hell today. Removing the bosses removed the control they had over the trade. Now it's a free- for-all as gangsters battle for market share. Those pictures of Mexican corpses aren't images of failure. In the War on Drugs, that's what victory looks like. Fine, the reader might say. The whole thing is a bloody fiasco. But this has nothing to do with Canada. In fact, it has everything to do with Canada because, on the international level, Canada is very much a soldier in the War on Drugs. In 1988, the American government drafted a new international convention on drug prohibition and took it to the United Nations. Canada saluted and signed. In 1998, American officials dominated a United Nations special assembly that produced new commitments on drug policy. Canada saluted and signed. When American officials asked other governments to contribute money to Plan Colombia, Canada saluted and kicked in. The Canadian military is involved in drug interdiction. Canadian police and other officials stationed around the world fight the War on Drugs every day. Very simply, this country has never done anything but aid and abet the drug policies issuing from Washington D.C. Those policies have done absolutely no good. The War on Drugs has cost hundreds of billions of dollars but there's more cocaine than ever before. And more corpses. In 2000, I went to Mexico City and Tijuana to look at the Mexican drug trade. I met with Jesus Blancornelas, a brave editor who had narrowly escaped assassination by gangsters annoyed by his newspaper's frank coverage. The corruption goes to the core of Mexican society, Blancornelas told me. And the violence will only get worse. People called it "Colombianization." Jesus Blancornelas died in 2006. The gangsters who tried to kill him are all dead or imprisoned. But everything has unfolded as he -- and many others -- said it would. Eventually, order will be restored in Mexico. Either new bosses will win control and rein in the violence. Or officials will succeed in driving the trade into some other unfortunate country. But the trade will not be defeated. Of that we can be certain. And so the misery will continue, thanks in part to the complicity of Canadian politicians and officials too foolish or cowardly to admit that drug prohibition is a catastrophic mistake. Dan Gardner is an Ottawa Citizen columnist. E-mail: dgardner at thecitizen.canwest.com ? The Windsor Star 2008 From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Dec 16 19:13:35 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:13:35 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Kerry named head of foreign relations panel Message-ID: <2DA2A505-D966-4D47-8242-9B7D3D9B6434@shaw.ca> Kerry named head of foreign relations panel By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | December 16, 2008 http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2008/12/16/kerry_named_head_of_foreign_relations_panel/ WASHINGTON - Senator John F. Kerry was named chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, pledging to use his stewardship of the influential panel to strengthen American interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, help end the war in Iraq, and craft solutions to the climate change crisis. The Massachusetts Democrat is already on an extended tour of trouble spots that will probably consume the foreign policy attention of President-elect Barack Obama. Kerry met yesterday with leaders in Pakistan and India, trying to ease tensions between the two nuclear powers over the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. He next goes to Afghanistan, where Obama wants to deploy thousands of additional troops to fight the war on terrorism. The first stop on Kerry's itinerary, which began over the weekend, was the Republic of Georgia, the front line in Russia's more aggressive stance against the West. On Sunday, he and Obama talked about a global warming conference in Poland that Kerry attended. "We have a big agenda ahead of us, just as our country faces big challenges across the globe," Kerry said in a statement from Islamabad, Pakistan. Kerry, who has sat on the committee for 24 years and first came to public notice when he testified before the panel in opposition to the Vietnam War, was elevated to the chairmanship by Senate majority leader Harry Reid after he lost out to Hillary Clinton to be Obama's secretary of state. Kerry is set to take over for the outgoing chairman, Vice President- elect Joe Biden, at a crucial time. Aides said the stops on his foreign trip highlight some of the core issues he will have to deal. Over the weekend Kerry met in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi with Prime Minister Grigol Mgaloblishvili and President Mikheil Saakashvili, who are still reeling from the Russian invasion of their territory in August and are seeking membership in the NATO alliance. Yesterday, Kerry met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi before traveling to Islamabad to meet with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and other leaders. Kerry had tough words for his Pakistani hosts, saying that the government must shut down terrorist training camps like those believed to be have been used by the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks last month. "It's imperative to comply and terrorist camps should be shut down," Kerry told reporters after holding talks with the Indian external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, according to local media reports. Speaking of the spate of attacks that killed nearly 200 people in India's financial center, Kerry added: "We know it was all planned in Pakistan and we are very, very confident that evidence will be presented at the right time." Today, Kerry is to meet with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and visit US troops from Massachusetts who are serving there, according to his Senate office. The Senate Foreign Relations chairmanship remains among the most prized in the Senate. It is responsible for vetting international treaties, conducting the confirmation hearings for presidential nominees for the State Department, and overseeing the State Department budget. The panel also helps set policy for foreign aid and arms control programs and authorizes military training for allied nations. Kerry, in his statement yesterday, cited two legendary chairmen of the committee, one from each political party, in promising to seek bipartisan policies. "Whether it was under the Republican chairman [Arthur] Vandenberg or the great Democratic chairman William Fulbright, this committee has always stood for the best of American foreign policy," Kerry said. Kerry has been preparing to take leadership of the committee for several weeks. Last week, he met with Clinton to iron out any issues that might arise during her confirmation hearing. Kerry also appointed a new spokesman for the committee: Frederick L. Jones II, a former career foreign service officer and spokesman for the National Security Council under President Bush. Bryan Bender can be reached at bender at globe.com From critical.montages at gmail.com Tue Dec 16 21:33:29 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:33:29 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Dollar Message-ID: Has the tide turned against the dollar? Dollar falls on concern over new data By Peter Garnham Published: December 17 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 17 2008 02:00 The dollar fell to a 10-week low against the euro yesterday after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by more than expected. The Fed said it was establishing a new target range of 0 per cent to 0.25 per cent for its main Fed funds lending rate. Analysts had expected the central bank to lower rates by 50 basis points to 0.5 per cent. The central bank said it would "employ all available tools" to promote the resumption of sustainable economic growth, adding that weak economic conditions were likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the interest rates for some time. The dollar was already under pressure after weak US economic data in the session. Figures showed that home construction in the US fell more than expected in November, while consumer prices also dropped more than forecast. Michael Woolfolk, at Bank of New York Mellon, said both sets of data fed into the sell-off in the dollar that has gathered pace in recent sessions on worries over the health of the US economy and the cost of the US government's plans to alleviate the financial crisis. Late in New York, the dollar had fallen 1.7 per cent to Y89.10 against the yen, as US rates dropped below those of Japan for the first time since 1993. The dollar fell 3.1 per cent to SFr1.1223 against the Swiss franc and lost 2.6 per cent to $1.4060 against the euro and lost 1.8 per cent to $1.5580 against the pound. The euro received a boost, rising to a fresh record high against the pound, after hawkish comments from Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank. Mr Trichet said the ECB could not cut interest rates forever, strongly hinting that the central bank might keep rates on hold at its policy meeting in January. The German government announced that a second fiscal stimulus package would be conditional upon large companies pledging not to cut jobs. Steve Malyon, at Scotia Capital, said that while eurozone economic data were getting bleaker by the day, the region's key policymakers - the ECB and the German government - were showing far less urgency than their transatlantic peers in dealing with the economic slowdown. "While we would remain long of the euro for now, this could come back to haunt the single currency in the months to come," he said. The euro rose 1.1 per cent to ?0.9042 against the pound. The Norwegian krona dropped to a record low against the euro as investors awaited a decision on interest rates from the country's central bank due today. The central bank was expected to cut interest rates by 100bp to 3.75 per cent after a sharp contraction in the Norwegian economy in the third quarter. The krona fell 1.6 per cent to NKr9.5705 against the euro. Dollar under pressure as Fed meets By Peter Garnham Published: December 16 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 16 2008 02:00 The dollar dropped to a two-month low against the euro yesterday and lost ground elsewhere as concerns grew over the health of the US economy and the impact of costly US government plans to combat the current crisis. The dollar came under pressure ahead of the Federal Reserve's policy meeting, which started yesterday. The central bank was expected to cut its main Fed funds interest rate by 50 basis points to 0.5 per cent after the meeting closed today. Figures showed US industrial production fell 0.6 per cent last month after a 1.6 per cent jump in October. Data from the US Treasury showed net foreign inflows into US long-term debt securities tumbled to $1.5bn in October from $65.4bn in September. Maurice Pomery, of IDEAGlobal, said that, although trading was very illiquid, a broad-based dollar sell-off was taking place. "Concerns have arisen for investors as to just how bad things are in the US and what the cost of all the actions of the Fed and the US Treasury will mean for the economy in the longer term," he said. He added that an interest rate cut from the US would largely be symbolic and was, in any case, really a blunt instrument. "Expect much more money being thrown at the economy in the form of stimulus and continuing quantitative easing," said Mr Pomery. "If the Fed buys Treasuries and floods the system with money, then the danger is that, at some point, the dollar collapses," he added. Analysts said the dollar was also failing to benefit from safe-haven flows that had kept it supported. Nizam Idris, of UBS, said the tide seemed to have turned round in recent sessions, with bad US economic news now hurting the dollar rather than helping it grow stronger. "Repatriation flows from risk deleveraging, which helped the dollar earlier this quarter, are no longer a dominant force," he added. By midday in New York, the dollar fell 2.3 per cent to $1.3679 against the euro. The dollar also suffered elsewhere, dropping 1.6 per cent to SFr1.1580 against the Swiss franc, losing 0.8 per cent to Y90.56 against the yen and falling 2.5 per cent to $1.5320 against the pound. Sterling continued its slide against the euro early in the session, hitting a record low and breaching the ?0.90 level against the single currency for the first time. The pound dropped to a low of ?0.9022 after a survey showed another sharp fall in UK house prices over the last month. As the dollar weakened, the resulting price action helped sterling recoup its losses against the euro, sending the pound 0.4 per cent higher to ?0.8895. www.ft.com/currencies Dollar loses ground ahead of FOMC meeting By Dave Shellock Published: December 16 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 16 2008 02:00 The dollar came under further pressure yesterday and US stocks lost ground as investors fretted about the outlook for the economy and looked ahead to today's interest rate decision from the Federal Reserve. On the currency markets , the dollar fell to a two-month low against the euro as continued uncertainty about the fate of the US car industry was compounded by data showing a 0.6 per cent drop in industrial production last month. "With domestic demand falling sharply, overseas demand in a state of collapse, and inventory-to-shipments ratios rising across many industrial sectors, further weakness in production in the months ahead looks all but certain," said Rob Carnell, economist at ING. "This is yet another reason for the Fed to explore unorthodox monetary means to stimulate the economy, as we believe they will hint at in [today's] FOMC statement." Steve Malyon, currency strategist at Scotia Capital, added: "The intense focus on the auto bail-out has not been kind to the dollar. It has returned the market's focus to the surrounding malaise in the US economy and the certainty that things will get much worse before they get better." The Federal Reserve is widely expected to cut rates today by at least 50 basis points to 0.5 per cent, with futures contracts indicating a 74 per cent chance that borrowing costs could be lowered to 0.25 per cent. Ben Bernanke, Fed chairman, suggested earlier this month that the central bank may consider buying longer-term Treasury or agency securities on the open market to keep yields from rising. Adding to the pressure on the dollar yesterday were Treasury data showing that foreign demand for long-term US securities slumped in October. "Long-term capital flow was therefore not the main driver behind the strong US dollar rally in October - which caused the euro/dollar to fall by almost 10 per cent," said Kasper Kirkegaard at Danske Bank. "Rather, we expect the strong dollar performance to have been driven mainly by a squeeze in offshore US dollar funding and the accelerated decline in the oil price," he said. Meanwhile, there were grim economic releases elsewhere yesterday. In China, industrial production slowed by more than expected in November, and local reports in Russia claimed that output there had slumped last month. Japan's quarterly Tankan survey showed business sentiment suffering its sharpest fall since 1974 to hit its lowest level for nearly seven years. However, Japanese equities put on a brave face as investors focused on hopes that a rescue plan for American carmakers could be revived. The Nikkei 225 Average rose 5.2 per cent. The mood was far less sanguine in Europe and the US, however, as President George W. Bush said a bailout of the ailing car industry was not imminent. By midday in New York, the S&P 500 index was down 1.2 per cent, while the FTSE Eurofirst 300 index fell 0.3 per cent. Financials were hurt by concerns about quarterly earnings, and writedowns linked to Bernard Madoff's alleged fraud. Government bonds rallied as US and European equities lost traction. By midday in New York, the yield on the 10-year US Treasury was down 4 basis points at 2.54 per cent, while the 10-year German Bund yield fell 10bp to 3.19 per cent. UK gilts outperformed as the 10-year yield shed 12bp to 3.45 per cent - close to its record low. Credit spreads widened on both sides of the Atlantic, with the investment-grade iTraxx Europe index up 2.5bp at 205.5bp and its US counterpart, the CDX North America index, rose 4 bp to 266bp. In the money markets , interbank lending rates continued to soften ahead of today's US rate decision, with overnight index swap spreads - seen as a gauge of bank' willingness to lend to each other - also easing. Three-month dollar Libor fell to 1.87 per cent - the lowest since September 2004. In commodities , the US oil price briefly pushed back above $50 a barrel amid speculation that Opec might sanction a larger-thanexpected cut in output at a meeting tomorrow. The rise in the oil price, and the dollar's weaker tone, helped push gold above $840 an ounce to a two-month high. Angst as Asian central banks buy dollars By Raphael Minder in Hong Kong Published: December 16 2008 17:48 | Last updated: December 16 2008 17:48 With plunging exports and economic contraction overtaking inflation and liquidity as concerns, Asian central banks are starting to buy dollars, raising devaluation worries. Patrick Bennett, Asian currency strategist at Soci?t? G?n?rale, said there was evidence that central banks in Singapore, Malaysia, India and South Korea had started dollar buying "in the last couple of days". HSBC has highlighted "a shift to depreciation policy", notably in Thailand and Taiwan, which recently bought dollars for the first time since August 2007 and April of this year respectively. The Asian Development Bank gave warning last week that "we need to avoid unnecessary and excessive interventions in the foreign currency markets, especially to depreciate domestic currencies". Writing in this week's FT, Michael Pettis, finance professor at Peking University, expressed caution about "a grave risk" that Asian countries would seek to force overcapacity adjustment on to trading partners through currency depreciation and other trade-related measures. As the global financial crisis drove a flight from risk over the past six months, many Asian nations aggressively deployed reserves to slow their currencies' slide against the dollar, which had aggravated the inflationary impact of high prices for fuel and other commodities. October saw record depletions of the reserves built up over a decade-long economic surge in South Korea, India, Singapore and Indonesia. Mr Bennett said, "The fact that they are now coming in to provide liquidity against their currency strengthening is recognition that external demand is slowing rapidly and the best response to that is allowing some weakening in their currencies." The shift follows an abrupt slump in Asian exports, notably for China, which endured in November its first monthly fall in seven years. The combined dollar value of exports from China, Taiwan and South Korea has fallen 22 per cent over the past three months, according to Goldman Sachs. Intra-Asian trade is crumbling, with exports from Taiwan and Korea to China down respectively 44 per cent and 37 per cent from their summer peak. Lee Jong-wha, head of the Asian Development Bank's office of regional economic integration, said there were worrying signs policymakers would be pushed into devaluation to support ailing exporters. From suzannedk at gmail.com Wed Dec 17 02:40:08 2008 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:40:08 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Great Depression of 1930s lessons seem never read in 2008 Message-ID: <8C204756-288E-494C-AFD7-1C03A503B050@gmail.com> I would be interested if anyone can suggest why one of the biggest tools of repairing the financial world in 1930s , outlawing monopolies, establishing nationally guaranteed local banks in every state, the setting up of small local town banks that serve the local loaning among customers they know, whose probity can be judged first hand? Instead, the prior monopolizing of banking is a vast feature in this recession and is being increased at a formerly criminal pace causing the recession to deepen into a depression. As a Great Depression lead Roosevelt banker might have exclaimed "These policies will destroy all the markets!" Populations will not invest with banks if those banks have no human face, i.e., they make the investor anonymous as they are so huge as to be anonymous themselves, and cause the investors' money to vanish. Roosevelt set up banking accountability, human interaction, visibility, as well as the regulatory framework to keep that framework. These brought stability. I do not ever hear or read any discussion about those archives, about the present introduction of successful past-proven fiscal repairs. Would that such discussions start before the Financial Times of London newspaper's prediction of seven months ago comes into being, to wit, the removal of the USD as the single global denomination to a basket of global funds in tandem, such as the yen, the euro, the dollar. Removal of the USD sole majesty is quite immanent. That currency is shown to be unstable and seems to be set up to remain unstable. At times it seems that this disaster was set up, as crazy as that sounds. This world situation as caused by stumbles on a stray banana skin, is equally absurd. The Roosevelt successful regulation has been deliberately being destroyed since his death. He was considered a traitor to his class, vilified and demonized by the wealthy in both parties, but particularly the Republican Party. The carefully organized destruction of rules, regulations and the laws that supported them has been effectuated successfully for generations. At least sixty years. This president under the screen of vast wars of choice, regular suppression and manipulation of news, has amiably completed the process. It has been his delight. Habeous Corpus is no more in the U S, torture is policy as it is policy to deny it. These changes affect directly the world's view of the U S capability of any probity at all. For instance Chinese head bankers are sure that the U S will never honor it's debts to their country. They will never publicly proclaim this again. It will just happen. It would help our now small world would we talk about these, I think, the more the merrier. Suzanne de Kuyper From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Tue Dec 16 22:45:37 2008 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:45:37 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Tuesday (12/16): reports from Greece Message-ID: <164236a30812162145u3ed3b489t9187539a24fab560@mail.gmail.com> Tuesday (12/16): reports from Greece The highschool students in Arta, Chania, Koridallo (Athens) demonstrated today. There was also a gathering of students outside the courtrooms in Athens in solidarity with the arrestees. It was made known today that the ministry of education has started investigations on schools to find and punish teachers that support the students and accompanied them to demonstrations. The students themselves are threatened by some teachers and principals that there will be punishments if they occupy their schools etc, in many cases the threats are personal, against particular students. In the early afternoon a group of 50-70 anarchists attacked the Riot police headquarters in Athens with rocks, sticks and molotov cocktails. They broke the building's windows and doors and set on fire 4 police cars and 1 police van. 2 cops were injured. Video: http://www.in.gr/video/default.aspx?videoID=76790 In the afternoon during the prime minister's speech, students entered the studios of NET, a public national tv station, carrying banners on which was written: "Stop Watching, Everyone Take to the Streets", "Free the Prisoners", "Freedom from everybody" and changed the image from the prime minister to them! The station almost immediately stopped the program and the students were removed without having the chance to make any announcements. However the picture of the students in the studio holding the banners made it to the media and the messages was clear. Later on the manager of the greek public television made a ridiculous announcement condemning the protest and attacking the activists. All these days the media (NET included) is playing along with the government, degrading the protests, informing wrongly on purpose and fomenting the police brutality. It is said that the manager of the greek public television will resign because of the "intrusion". It is remarkable that after the murder of a 16 year old kid by the cops and heavy riots and public revolt for 10 days now, the only one who's resigning (or forced to resignation) is a... tv manager! http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/12/415584.html?c=on#comments Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK9lpMk7fiY In the afternoon, 1000 residents of the Exarchia area, the area where the 16 year old Alexandros was murdered had another demonstration against the presence of heavy police forces on their neighborhood for many years now. With (at least) 2 riot squads and numerous cops (many undercover) in the area at all times, the neighborhood looks more like an occupied area than a residential neighborhood in a free country. The residents had to face the riot squads again, even on this effort to show that the heavy police presence is unwelcome and it only brings problems. Don't forget that there were many incidents the last few days that the residents pushed the riot squads away, threw them lemons or sprayed them with water from their balconies and let people who were in danger of been arrested into their homes to hide. Photos: http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=948165 more photos: http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=948051 In Patras there was a big demonstration which was peaceful in the biggest part. 2 banks and an major insurance company were attacked and had their windows smashed. Photos: http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=947989 The city of Athens went all merry and festive today. The new big christmas tree was lighten up in Sintagma square. The previous one was set on fire during the riots last week. The mayor of Athens seems to forget that an innocent kid was killed in the city just 10 days ago. Fortunately about 200 activists were there today to remind it to him and everyone else. They protested by laying down in front of the christmas tree. A building was occupied today in Serres and will be the place for meetings about actions in the city and also a center for informing the city citizens. Police brutality is never sentenced in Greece Today the trial of the "clay pot" incident ended. For those of you who don't know: In 2007 the Cypriot student Augoustinos Dimitriou was heavily beaten by a big group of cops. The police first claimed that the student injured himself (photo of the student after the beating: http://athens.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/756520_b.jpg ) when he stumbled and fell on a flowerpot. But the cops didn't know that the whole thing was filmed by a camera in a nearby building. Then the video reached the media and the brutality and the lies of the police were made public. At the incident there were not 2 or 3 cops but more than 15 cops and those who were not beating the student, didn't try to help him or stop their coworkers (cops in plain clothes). See the video of the incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6IfQ37BV7Q 13 months later, the judge punished the 8 of the cops with sentences scaling from 15 to 39 months. The sentences can be either bought off or be suspended which probably means that no cop will be put to prison! This is the greek justice system! Article: http://en.rian.ru/world/20081216/118891764.html Everyday that passes, more photos, videos and testimonies of police brutality are seeing the light of day. Here are some The riot squads breaking up a peaceful student sit-in outside the main police department in Athens and violently arrest two underage students: Photos: http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=947634 Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIGnd06K8rM Another video of riot cops together with cops in plain clothes or parastate thugs with masks, carrying sticks, pretending to be protesters. One of those "protesters" who was photographed some days ago was recognized and it was published the police station he works in. I guess the police, the media and the judges should stop wondering who is smashing the small businesses. What more proof do they need? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpkGxdfoTUM Finally, we should not forget to congratulate the police of Rethimno for the great accomplishment against a fearsome outlaw. Yes, I'm talking about the 14 year old kid who threw an orange on a police building. It was a miracle that nobody got hurt by this terrorist act (thousands were at risk) and I would like to thank the police for arresting him! ...jerks *dim* From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Dec 17 11:59:26 2008 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:59:26 -0800 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?Occupier=92s_=93Justice=94=3A_The_Trial_of?= =?windows-1252?q?_Saddam_Hussein?= Message-ID: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/occupiers-justice/ Occupier?s ?Justice?: The Trial of Saddam Hussein by Kim Petersen / December 17th, 2008 The Trial of Saddam Hussein By Dr. Abdul-Haq Al-Ani Paperback: 421 pages Publisher: Clarity Press (May 1, 2008) ISBN-10: 0932863582 ISBN-13: 978-0932863584 Spurred by his abhorrence of imperialism and to better equip himself, Abdul-Haq Al-Ani studied law in Britain. The barrister then applied his knowledge to become, temporarily, part of Saddam Hussein?s defense team and to write The Trial of Saddam Hussein, and even though the book profoundly, cogently, and ? on its face ? irrefutably exposes the injustice of the trial of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants, it exposes much, much more. Al-Ani?s analysis of the trial of Hussein is based in a system of entrenched injustice imposed by the imperialist, occidental world. For the imperialist system, with collaborationist Iraqis, was not conjured into existence to ?try? and condemn Hussein. Al-Ani describes an extant, hypocritical system wherein law applies to the victims of imperialists, but imperialists hold themselves above the law. ?A state cannot operate internationally and rely on international law and the UN, but still be able to excuse itself from being bound by whatever it chooses to reject. This is an unsustainable argument,? reasons Al-Ani. The United States is a testament to how preponderent prowess in violence sets a ?nation? beyond the reach of the law.1 The United States of America is built upon the denationalization of the Original Peoples and a subsequent colonization by the genocidaires. Yet the US government has never apologized to its victims, recompensed them, or atoned for its malevolence.2 This is the historical baggage carried by the US. So, historically, any claim to moral authority by the US (that is, being a self-proclaimed beacon on the hill, a human rights leader, or a leader of the free world, etc.), in an effort to bolster or garner legitimacy for its ?adventurism? abroad, is preposterous and nugatory. Al-Ani details the illegality that underlies the invasion of Iraq ? a prima facie ?supreme international crime? so reprehensible that the Nuremburg Tribunal said it differs from other war crimes in that ?it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.? The barrister accuses the US-UK of genocide. The genocide dates back to at least 1991 when the US formed a coalition to oust Hussein?s invasion force from Kuwait, a state whose borders are an imperialist creation and, therefore, according to Al-Ani, violable. Ergo, the invasion of Kuwait was caused by British imperialists. Al-Ani gives an Arab perspective on the Ba?ath Party (divulging that he is a former member) and its importance to the citizens of Iraq and wider afield in the Middle East. The party captured the nationalist aspirations of the people and attracted those people opposed to the imperialist-Zionist usurpation of Palestine. As for life under the rule of Saddam Hussein, Al-Ani asserts that Iraqis were safe as long as they did not cross the ?red line?; that is, they did not act or conspire against the Ba?ath Party or state. Al-Ani does not focus on whether Hussein was a good man or bad man. He is focused on adherence to the norms of law and justice. Hussein does receive criticism, however, especially for his ?calamitous miscalculation? to attack Iran ? a ?gift to imperialism.? I wonder what Al-Ani would say if someone wrote that same words to describe the attack of Iraq? Al-Ani situates in time. He presents a picture of a thriving Iraq in 1991: a surfeit of electricity; clean, well, equipped hospitals and clinics free to all Iraqis; clean water; no illiteracy; free education from elementary school right through graduate school; home-based industries; a good highway system; and a real estate bank to provide low-interest loans for low-income families (wiped out by Paul Bremer). Compare this to Iraq today where the electric grid still has not been fully restored.3 What permits such carnage and destruction? Al-Ani sees an inability to recognize and embrace diversity. Eurocentrism,4 he posits, holds sway; law that thwarts imperialists can be swatted aside while the same law can be bent to damn the defiers of imperialists. The Trial of Saddam Hussein gives poignant examples of Eurocentrism: from the United Nations Charter and delegation of powers between the General Assembly and the Security Council, drawing of international borders, international law and its application, to the arrogation of the right to breach the borders of sovereign nations. What gives Westerners the right to disarm Iraq? Al-Ani compares, ?Equally perplexing for the Muslim jurist is that Isreal is rewarded with new weapons and financial backing following the invasion of Lebanon [in 2006] while Iraq is decimated following its invasion of Kuwait.? Militaristically inclined types proffer that a so-called humanitarian intervention can justify the violation of national sovereignty. Here Al-Ani sides with law professor Francis Boyle who described humanitarian intervention as ?a joke and a fraud.? Obviously, for humanitarian interventions to have any moral or legal legitimacy, they must not be capricious nor unilateral; otherwise, they can function criminally as pretexts for imperialism. Surely no one would suggest there was anything humanitarian in the annihilation of Fallujah. Here again Eurocentrism is exposed. After all, how would Occidentals respond if a Christian or Jewish town in the West were obliterated? International Law Al-Ani sees two legitimate sources of international law: the United Nations General Assembly and treaties. He has scorn for the International Criminal Court (ICC) for reasons such as its Article 16, which defers to the Security Council, undermining ICC independence and making it a ?judicial tool of imperialism? as well as its inability to agree on a definition for the crime of aggression. Al-Ani does not mince words when he notes ?the great silence of the jurists of the Anglo-Saxon world, which almost amounts to an acquiescence in the crimes? of aggression. The invasion was illegal under the UN Charter. Al-Ani argues that since Iraq was not a threat to peace, it would have been impossible to invoke a resolution of attack against it. It violates the raison d??tre of the organization. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1472 which instead of condemning the attack remained seized of the matter ? pointing, according to Al-Ani, to the futility and incompetence of the UN, an understandable view given what has transpired. Arresting Saddam Hussein Al-Ani notes, ?It is ironic that the US/UK intended to try top Iraqi officials for crimes of stipulated Iraqi laws while at the same refusing to accept the jurisdiction of the prevailing Iraqi law.? He observes that Article 131 of the 2005 Iraqi Constitution calling for the continuation of the Tribunal was without legitimate legal force since it was implemented under occupation. Consequently, there was no legal jurisdiction for trying Saddam Hussein. Among the problems with the arrest of Saddam Hussein: * a head-of-state does not lose authority at hands of occupier; * a head-of-state has legal immunity; and * Hussein could not be classified as a POW. The Iraqi High Tribunal Among the problems Al-Ani finds with the Iraqi High Tribunal: * De-Ba?athication (an act which constitutes a crime against humanity according to the ICC?s Article 7) removed all Ba?athist judges in Iraq, yet Article 43 of the Hague Convention forbids this. * What process was used to select judges? Who were the judges? The anonymous judges were secretly trained in Britain. Al-Ani asks, ?[W]hy should an Iraqi tribunal with allegedly Iraqi judges and operating under Iraqi law be trained by private contractors who have no knowledge of Iraqi law?? * Judicial independence: the Iraqi Special Tribunal, later renamed the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), was clearly set up by the occupiers. Al-Ani argues that the trial was completely controlled by the US through the Regime Crimes Liaison Office (RCLO) set up by the US Department of Justice and funded by the US Congress. * Preventing international lawyers to aid Hussein?s defense ? a violation of the legal concept Equality of Arms: ?The right of the accused to legal counsel is so universal that it is difficult to see how a court would admit evidence secured when the accused was not in receipt of legal advice.? * Security for the defense: defense lawyers were murdered, forced to flee Iraq, and intimidated; so-called Human Rights Watch (HRW) admitted as much. * Defense and witnesses faced the possibility of civil suits for actions and words in court. * The collapse in security made finding willing defense witnesses difficult: ?The inequality between the blanket anonymity granted to the prosecution witnesses and the exposure of the identity of one potential defense witness clearly demonstrates the inequality of arms.? * Defendants were prevented the right to private and confidential legal counsel. * Switching chief justices; the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) charged that this was a ?blatant attack on the independence of the judiciary.? * The court-appointed defense?s performance was ?poor?; they turned down right to cross examine witnesses often or were denied cross-examination by the court. * Important evidence was withheld from the trial and defense. * It was seven months into trial before charges were formally laid against Hussein and co-defendants. * Overt judicial bias: hearsay admitted; court relied on witness testimony when documentary evidence was available; transmission of defendant?s spoken words was cut off during trial; the court refused to respond to defense requests. * Closing the defense?s case summarily. * The appeal process was a mockery: 30 days to present an appeal, and no right to challenge the legality of the IHT whose statute Al-Ani finds riddled with errors and flagrant grammatical mistakes, indicating that it was a translation from English. Al-Ani wonders why HRW and the ICTJ did not complain. Why Dujail? The Tribunal made events occuring in the town of Dujail, a stronghold of the Iranian-backed Da?wah Party, the first case to be tried against Saddam Hussein and his top officials. In 1982, assassins from Dujail ambushed Hussein?s motorcade. Hussein was accused afterwards of ordering a crackdown in which 148 of the town?s men were sentenced and executed. It is not the most heinous crime alleged of Hussein, yet that is where the Tribunal began and ended. Al-Ani writes that the perpetrators involved in the assassination admitted to acting on orders from Iran, a treasonous act during war, which then raged between Iraq and Iran. He sees no relevance of Geneva Conventions to the Dujail case. Yet, even some western-based progressivist writers and corporate med