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The Defining Moment for Climate Change

 

http://tinyurl.com/6bfvav

 

posted May 11, 2008 08:40 am

 

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Defining Moment for Climate Change

 

 

Already climate change -- in the form of a changing pattern of global rainfall -- seems to be affecting the planet in significant ways. Take the massive, almost decade-long drought in Australia's wheat-growing heartland, which has been a significant factor in sending flour prices, and so bread prices, soaring globally, leading to desperation and food riots across the planet.

 

A report from the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia makes clear that, despite recent heavy rains in the eastern Australian breadbasket, years of above normal rainfall would be needed "to remove the very long-term water deficits" in the region. The report then adds this ominous note: "The combination of record heat and widespread drought during the past five to 10 years over large parts of southern and eastern Australia is without historical precedent and is, at least partly, a result of climate change."

 

Think a bit about that phrase -- "without historical precedent." Except when it comes to technological invention, it hasn't been much part of our lives these last many centuries. Without historical precedent. Brace yourselves, it's about to become a commonplace in our vocabulary. The southeastern United States, for instance, was, for the last couple of years, locked in a drought -- which is finally easing -- "without historical precedent." In other words, there was nothing (repeat, nothing) in the historical record that provided a guide to what might happen next.

 

Now, it's true that the industrial revolution, which led to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at historically unprecedented rates, was also, in a sense, "without historical precedent"; but most natural events -- unlike, say, the present staggering ice melt in the Arctic -- have been precedented (if I can manufacture such a word). They have been part of the historical record. That era -- the era of history -- is now, however, threatening to give way to a period capable of outrunning history itself, of outrunning us.

 

The planet in its long existence may have experienced the extremes to come, but we haven't. The planet, unlike much life on it, may not -- given millions or tens of millions of years to recover -- be in danger, but we are.

 

When you really think about it, history is humanity. It's common enough to talk about some historical figure or failed experiment being swept into the "dustbin of history," but what if all history and that dustbin, too, go. well, where? What are we, really, without our records? Once we pass beyond them, beyond all the experience we've collected, written down, and archived since those first scratches went on clay tablets in the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates -- now being stripped of their cultural patrimony -- at least two unanswerable questions arise. Once history has been left in the dust, where are we? -- and, who are we?

 

Let the indefatigable environmentalist Bill McKibben, who has a powerful urge to stop us just short of the cliff of the post-historical era, take it from here. - --Tom

---

The World at 350

A Last Chance for Civilization

 

By Bill McKibben

 

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

 

It's not just the economy. We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so inextricably tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem. how best to put it, right.

 

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

 

There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

 

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

 

So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front. In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

 

And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. Apparently, we've managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

 

And don't forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields which suck juice ever faster.

 

Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that, if we didn't act, there was trouble coming; or, if we didn't yet know what was best for us, we'd certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His phrase was: ".if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada's efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta's tar sands.)

 

We're the ones who kicked the warming off; now, the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun's heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

 

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them -- to reverse course. Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

 

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty -- a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

 

If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

 

More likely, though, we're the Coyote -- because "doing everything right" means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation.(Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

 

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

 

That's possible -- we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase "gas tax holiday" has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton's gambit didn't sway many voters). And if it's hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.

 

Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

 

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

 

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.

 

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

 

Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not. Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That's the limit we face.

 

 

Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is The Bill McKibben Reader.

Copyright 2008 Bill McKibben

 

____________________

 

A World to Win

 

A Rough Guide to a Future Without Global Capitalism

 

 

(Posted with the permission of the authors and Peter Mclaren)

 

Contents: http://www.aworldtowin.net/about/contents.html

Purchase: http://www.aworldtowin.net/purchase/buy.html

 

 

A World to Win; A Rough Guide to a Future Without Global Capitalism

 

by Paul Feldman and Corinna Lotz

London: Lupus Books

£9.99 plus postage

ISBN: 0952345412

 

 

Introduction

 

by Peter Mclaren

 

Americans are used to reading newspaper headlines about social chaos of world historical proportions. Such chaos has always been somewhere else, in some remote, foreign-sounding region, so it was natural to feel insulated, even protected. And while in relative terms, Americans enjoy comfortable lives, it is hard not to notice the rapidly degrading conditions throughout the country. The streets of major US cities teem with the poor, the homeless, and the insane. Nearly 700,000 people are homeless at any given night in the United States. Three million people experienced homelessness in 2002. One out of every four homeless persons is a child. Hospitals in poor neighbourhoods have shut down, and remaining social services are quickly disappearing as budget crises wreak havoc on state governments across the country.

 

The budget deficit is astronomical. The several million jobs lost by the Bush administration over the last four years will make "Bush the Lesser" the first president since the early days of the Great Depression to post a new loss of jobs. One out of every six children lives in poverty. One out of four Americans were making poverty-level wages in 2000, and while major health care providers such as Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore are developing special health care coverage programs that offer "platinum service" to the rich (complimentary massage and sauna time with physical exams in state-of-the-art testing labs), nearly 40 million Americans lack health insurance.

 

Frequent terrorist alerts keep the population on edge, in a form of "ontological hysteria". People are fearful of being struck by a "dirty bomb" and report any suspicious behaviour in their neighbourhoods to police.

 

The more hardscrabble and fearful their lives become, the more they are likely to vote for the Republican Party, which for generations has mastered the means to deflect the anger and rage of mostly disaffected white working-class males from the root causes of their economic plight and to focus their rage on the weak-kneed liberals, immigrants, and multiculturalists who have let the country go to the dogs. Republican apparatchiks have camouflaged the socio-historical origins of the economic plight of this hard-bitten group and instead have emphasised their lived experiences in isolation from the socio-political order - the very order which helps to administer and enforce the reigning social relations of production.

 

Individual experience becomes the template from which all understanding and explanation proceeds, a belief which makes it all the easier for directing broad swathes of moral indignation at the multiculturalists who refuse to adhere to traditional conservative "family values" historically culled from the Anglosphere, for promoting a cultural nationalism tied to a romantic American exceptionalism, and manufacturing links between business élites and Christian evangelical groups in order to promote "faith-based initiatives" and direct political venom at environmentalists, anti-corporate and anti-globalisation groups, gay activists and feminists.

 

This creation of moral solidarity around rebuffing the "hate America" crowd who would call for more, and not less, socialist alternatives has proven to be an effective antidote to the breakdown of social cohesion and job security set in train by the transition from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism. Conservative hate radio shows have increased to 1,300 stations nationwide in tandem with steel-mill shutdowns and loss of manufacturing jobs. Former factory workers now try their hand at jobs in the no-benefits, low-wage service economy. The hands that wrap your new Levi's jeans at The Gap may have worked slag overflows in a smelting furnace. Hate radio hosts excoriate liberal critics of the economy and the war in Iraq as weaklings. The governor of California calls them "girlie men". The "liberal" John Kerry is derided for speaking more than one language and looking like a Frenchman. And once again a social group will vote against its own class interests, risking membership in Marx's reserve army of labour, for the chance to spit racist and homophobic invective against affirmative action programmes that supposedly pander to darker-skinned constituencies.

 

As the war in Iraq wages on, corporations are considering pulling advertising dollars out of television programmes that cover the destruction there, preferring instead to shift their money to "safer" networks such as the Disney Channel, where their products will not be associated with suicide bombers, roadside explosions, and decapitations. Meanwhile, arms manufacturers and dealers celebrate as the Bush administration lets the assault weapons ban expire. Police departments brace for an upsurge in crime as people buy up previously banned weapons like AK-47s, Uzis and TEC-9s.

 

The country with the best government that money can buy is in a mess. Most people who seek answers to the chaos choose electronic over print media. Three of the major networks are owned by a defence contractor who is profiting from the war in Iraq (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC). CNN is outsourcing its technological workers to cheap-labour nations while Fox serves as little more than an auxiliary wing of the Republican Party and a cheerleader for its imperial overreach.

 

Three years after the September 11 terrorist crimes in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, the US is engaged in an illegal, immoral and unjustified occupation of Iraq, is still bombing Fallujah and other cities and trying to "pacify" with unmatchable high-tech weaponry vast areas of that country that still remain outside government control.

 

The "liberation" of Iraq has been such an unmitigated disaster that it has even provoked, on the day prior to the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks, an editorial comment in the Financial Times calling for the structured withdrawal of US and remaining allied troops.

 

"The aftermath of a war won so quickly has been so utterly bungled, moreover, that the US is down to the last vestiges of its always exiguous allied support, at the time when Iraq needs every bit of help it can get. The occupation has lost control of big swathes of the country. Having decided that all those who lived and worked in Iraq under Saddam Hussein bore some degree of collective guilt, Washington's viceroys purged the country's armed forces, civil service and institutions to a degree that broke the back of the state, marginalised internal political forces, sidelined many with the skills to rebuild Iraq's services and utilities and, of course, fuelled an insurgency US forces have yet to identify accurately, let alone get to grips with."

 

Equally telling is the editorial in The New York Times on 12 September that sharply criticises the doctrine of preventive war. According to the Times editorial,

 

"So far, the preventive war doctrine has had one real test: the invasion of Iraq. Mr. Bush terrified millions of Americans into believing that forcibly changing the regime in Baghdad was the only way to keep Iraq's supposed stockpiles of unconventional weapons out of the hands of al-Qaeda. Then it turned out that there were no stockpiles and no operational links between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda's anti-American terrorism. Meanwhile, America's longstanding defensive alliances were weakened and the bulk of America's ground combat troops tied down in Iraq for what now appears to be many years to come. If that is making this country safer, it is hard to see how. The real lesson is that America dangerously erodes its military and diplomatic defences when it charges off unwisely after hypothetical enemies."

 

Despite a mounting media criticism of the war, the Bush administration shows no signs of budging on its position that the war was justified despite the fact that thousands of innocent civilians have been killed by US air strikes and tens of thousands more crippled and traumatised. Those who do not lie in their graves, or who refuse to go to their deaths without a fight, plan their revenge for lost loved ones, as a new generation of terrorists are being created from the bombed out cities of Iraq. Over a thousand US soldiers have died for the lies of a cowboy president. The worst fears of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, an organisation born out of a criticism that America's military response to the 9/11 attacks would result in the deaths of countless innocent civilians and increase recruitment for terrorist causes, making the United States, and the world, less safe and less free for generations to come, have tragically been realised. As peaceful protestors continue to be labelled "traitors" by reactionary "patriots" and as the US Patriot Act overturns hard-won civil rights and sneers at those whose lives were lost fighting for them, the laws of the Geneva Convention are mocked in military concentration camps set up for detainees labelled as "enemy combatants".

 

A climate of US exceptionalism and a foreign policy of unilateralism fuelled by the knowledge that no nation or foreseeable group of nations can oppose the might of their war machine drives the Bush regime to conduct pre-emptive strikes against probable foes of US interests, or against countries who are sitting on or near large reserves of oil and gas and who can conveniently be demonised as evil rogue regimes. Countries who refuse to open up their markets to the corporations managed by the transnational capitalist class know only too well what the consequences will be.

 

The earth has opened up to a thousand maquiladoras between the US and Mexican borders, flooding the global south with toxic waste. Throughout the Third World chattel slavery and bonded labour is proliferating at an alarming rate. With no modern day Noah's Ark to save them from extinction, the toilers of the earth are making their presence heard. The cry of "another world is possible" that issues from the masses is expanding in waves to encompass not only new vistas of desperation but also the battlefield horizon of class struggle. But even as mouths crack open in protest, the fist of capital is thrust inside, force-feeding its false hope, coated with lies. The global crisis through which humanity is currently suffering - economically, socially, financially, ecologically, militarily and culturally - is inextricably linked to the quest for world domination by the US and the neo-liberal global apparatus that conflates political freedom with freedom of the market and equates social democracy with the establishment of the rights of private property and the profit rate.

 

Since the successful revolution in fiscal and social policies that occurred as a result of the election of Margaret Thatcher and her monetarist solution to the crisis of capitalism - war against trade unions and the welfare state, as well as the privatisation of public services - neo-liberalism has continued to rudder the economic and social policies of choice among the transnational capitalist class. A similar "revolution" that included the violent repression of trade unions as well as popular social movements and leftist political organisations in the United States was carried out by Ronald Reagan, who managed to deactivate social protest by bullying and threats. His economic free-market orthodoxy - often called "voodoo economics" - has not lost its leverage. The social degredation that occurred during his time in office has yet to be reversed and in fact is becoming worse under the Bush administration. Neoliberalism is afoot, and doing well from the standpoint of the ruling class. While profit-driven competition has led to overproduction and ecological havoc, conditions for capitalist class formation have been created in China, India, Russia, and other countries, while the increase in inequality and environmental destruction has been downplayed. The restoration of class power in the United States and Britain owes a great debt to neoliberalism.

 

Because in this historical juncture transnationalised fractions of dominant groups have become the hegemonic fraction globally, social groups and classes have been transformed into central historical actors rather than "states" as power is produced within the world capitalist class by transnationally oriented state-managers and a cadre of supranational institutions such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the Trilateral Commission and the World Economic Forum. Of course, there is still a struggle between descendant national fractions of dominant groups and ascendant transnational fractions.

 

The class practices of a new global ruling class are becoming condensed in an emergent transnational state in which the transnational capitalist class has an objective existence above any local territories and polities. The purpose of the transnational ruling class is the valorisation and accumulation of capital and the defence and advance of the emergent hegemony of a global bourgeoisie and a new global capitalist historical bloc. This historical bloc is composed of the transnational corporations and financial institutions, the élites that manage the supranational economic planning agencies, major forces in the dominant political parties, media conglomerates and technocratic élites. This does not mean that competition and conflict have come to an end or that there exists a real unity within the emergent transnational capitalist class.

 

Competition among rivals is still fierce and the US is playing a leadership role on behalf of the élite, defending the interests of the emergent global capitalist historical bloc. However, in a more integrated world economic system, development is no longer based primarily upon rival trading and political empires that aim at the protection of the interests of monopoly capital. As a result, the exploitation of the labour of those subordinated and dominated countries within the world economy dramatically intensifies. The content of this imperialism is no longer primarily based upon antagonistic and rival national monopoly capitals, but the forces of the transnational corporations supported by the nation state.

 

The labour aristocracy is expanding to other countries such that core and periphery no longer denote geography as much as social location. The material circumstances that gave rise to the nation state are being superceded by globalisation such that the state - conceived in Marxist terms as a congealment of a particular and historically determined constellation of class forces and relations (i.e., a historically specific social relation inserted into larger social structures) - can no longer simply be conceived solely in nation-state centric terms.

 

Paul Feldman and Corinna Lotz importantly maintain that this new phase in the imperialist stage of capitalism does not mean that the role of the nation state has become superfluous, or that inter-imperialist rivalries have been transcended.

 

Arundhati Roy strikingly captures the dynamic between the state and capital in the following remarks:

 

"On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments, international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of appropriation that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative capital - hot money - into and out of third world countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant transnational corporations are taking control of their essential infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water, their electricity. The World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other financial institutions like the Asian Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them. All this goes under the fluttering banner of "reform". As a consequence of this reform, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, thousands of small enterprises and industries have closed down, millions of workers and farmers have lost their jobs and land. The Spectator newspaper in London assures us that "we live in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history." Billions wonder: who's "we"? Where does he live? What's his Christian name?"

 

This dynamic works along the singular trajectory of capitalist logic. Just as public capital is used to finance private investment risk, whose profits are not returned to the public, but line the pockets of the private investors, so too the nation state cannot challenge the power of corporate finance, but is compelled to defend it. Roy puts it this way:

 

"The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised on an almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate globalisation is not. Liquid capital is not. So, even though capital needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in the servants' quarters, this set up ensures that no individual nation can oppose corporate globalisation on its own."

 

The climate in the United States in this present moment is exacerbating forms of reactionary populism within regional communities. To cite one example, members of a Bainbridge Island community in Washington are upset with a social studies teacher at Sakai Intermediate School who developed and taught a sixth-grade social studies programme that criticised the internment of 110,000 to 120,000 Japanese Americans in the 1940s, hundreds of whom were forced to leave the island community six decades ago. Residents demanded that the school board change the programme so that it includes different opinions, including the view that the internment was justified. Arguing that the programme amounts to "propaganda", the group also wants to omit discussions that hint at parallels between the internment and the US Patriot Act and some members are threatening legal action - even though most scholars and the US government, which issued a formal apology and reparations to surviving internees, have officially criticised the internment. One resident called the programme "an example of an agenda-based curriculum that is designed to lead our 11- year-old Sakai students to hate America". It is clear what these same residents would say about the war in Iraq, and the endless wars that the United States have waged and sponsored for decades upon decades, often under the imperial nostrum of the White Man's Burden.

 

The problem is deep-rooted and can be traced, in part, to the notion that any criticism of the United States is equivalent to "hating America". Internalised in the minds and hearts of generation after generation, this notion carries the force of prevailing common sense among many Americans.

 

It is an example of an uncritical and largely unconscious way of thinking(ideologically deformed class consciousness) that forges an unseen ideological bond with capitalism and imperialism. Chalmers Johnson's comments are disturbingly apposite:

 

"As distinct from other peoples on this earth, most Americans do not recognise - or do not choose to recognise - that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, they are often ignorant of the fact that their government garrisons the globe. They do not realise that a vast network of American military bases on every continent but Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire."

 

A World to Win was written with an eye to the dilemmas outlined above. It offers a lucid and much welcomed counterpoint to the alienated forms of socialisation that currently plague US society and culture. It provides an opportunity for overcoming the structuring effects of bourgeois ideology by offering a strikingly different form of self-identity. Readers are invited to see society as a coherent social totality, to discern the difference between subjective consciousness and the objective conditions of commodification under capitalism, and to exercise a critical consciousness on the path to becoming a self-active revolutionary agent of social change allied to substantive rather than formal citizenship. Critical pedagogy, as it has developed in North American and Latin American contexts shares with the writers of A World to Win the common philosophical architectonic that has grown out of Marxist humanism and the goal of economic reconstruction in favour of the popular majority. A World to Win is an important political and philosophical accomplishment, not least of which has to do with its focused inquiry on changing the world, and not merely understanding it.

 

In order to be effective in the fight against economic exploitation, terrorism, and ecological destruction, teachers and cultural workers need to move beyond solutions that legitimise or naturalise capitalist-driven globalisation and profit-driven competition as the only viable options available for humanity, and instead focus on the needs of the world's population. To this end, Feldman and Lotz have put forward a number of important socialist principles that are designed to extend the gains and advances that capitalism has given the few, to people in all countries, through the struggle toward and development of a global, socialist society and control over production by the direct producers. Such principles have arisen from an unbridled faith in humanity and its associated technologies in producing the possibility (but not always the reality) of a better life for the whole of humanity. Exercising these principles to the fullest mandates the struggle for a classless society that is not dominated by the narrow sectarian interests of capitalist accumulation and the valorisation of surplus value.

 

Teachers, cultural workers, administrators and researchers would do well to incorporate these principles in their struggle to reclaim democracy for a socialist future. The most important of these principles include the social ownership of land, banking and finance, transport and communications infrastructure; the social ownership of production facilities of the major corporations though a variety of forms of co-ownership; democratic control and self-management of economic and financial resources that include public services; steering the development of productive capacity towards satisfying need; ecologically sustainable production and distribution; encouraging and supporting small-scale enterprises, creative workers and farmers; favouring local production for local needs; and facilitating the development of the conscious market.

 

The central aims of the classless society for which these principles are put into practice encompass the following: ensuring that the majority have access to the benefits currently only available to the few; ensuring survival of the planet, ecosystems and humanity; the creation of a society based on cooperation, satisfying need and not profit; releasing the potential of automation, substantially reducing working hours; overcoming alienation of people from their work, what is produced and society as a whole; employing an abundance of products to alleviate poverty and need world-wide; allowing and enabling people to fulfil their potential and aspirations; and making health and well-being the single dominant social objective for the global population.

 

Feldman and Lotz have used these principles and aims in their development of specific strategies for addressing issues of the state, including communications and the media, the legal system, state administration, the political system, criminal law, and the police as well as cultural strategies aimed at the visual arts, the music industry, the Internet and the educational system. They are aware that existing modes of governance need to be replaced by socialist planning and self-management by means of elected workers' councils and the creation of local, regional and national Assemblies. While these efforts are context specific to Britain, they could be - and should be - productively adapted for the American scene.

 

The authors of this pathfinding volume have also worked out broad, ongoing strategies for transforming the global financial system and addressing the ecological crisis, all the while recognising that the seedbed for socialism is contained in the contradictions of capital, where new tools of revolutionary theory and party organisation, and new modes of politics and governance can be used for the benefit of human survival with dignity and the promise of a better future. Exposure to the inner workings of capitalism and imperialism is not enough; we need to be actively engaged in creating strategies and programmes for transcending the alienating imperatives of capital as a structure in order to bring us closer to the goal of constructing a socialist future. With the writing of this book, humanity is better equipped to face its future and is better prepared to realise the socialist alternative that the world so desperately needs.

 

Peter McLaren

 

-Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles September 2004

 

____________________

 

 

Iraq's Ruined Library Soldiers On

 

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/lossin

 

 

by R.H. Lossin

 

The Nation

 

posted April 9, 2008

 

The brutalities of the Iraq war accumulate so fast it is difficult to keep track. But in this season of fifth- year anniversaries, one largely forgotten crime demands to be recalled, in part because it relates directly to the politics of memory itself. Five years ago this week, US troops stood by as looters sacked the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA)--one of the oldest and most used in the world. In Arab countries the old expression was "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads."

 

American troops were under orders not to intervene. Library staff who requested protection from the GI's were told, "We are soldiers, not policemen" or "our orders do not extend to protecting this building." American military orders did, however, extend to guarding the Ministry of Oil, and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police.

 

The selective passivity of US forces was not only ethically questionable, but also a violation of international law. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) makes clear that libraries should not only be spared attack in wartime but also actively protected.

 

Despite the sack of a major cultural institution and the collapse of the society around it, the library struggles on, continuing a long tradition of resurrection from the ashes of war. The world's first library was located in Mosul, in Northern Iraq. It was built in the 7th century BCE and produced the first known catalog in history. In 1927 a British archeological team unearthed it and, for "purposes of preservation", carried off many of its artifacts--including the oldest known copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great work of world literature.

 

Iraq's intellectual golden era came later and coincided with the Abbasid Dynasty (750-1258) whose capital was established at Baghdad. In 832, the construction of the Byat al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) established the new capital as an unrivaled center of scholarship and intellectual exchange.

 

The tradition of research there brought advances in astronomy, optics, physics and mathematics. The father of algebra, Al-Khawarizmii, labored among its scrolls. It was here that many of the Greek and Latin texts we accept as the foundation of Western thought were translated, catalogued and preserved. And it was from Baghdad that these works would eventually make their way to medieval Europe and help lift that continent from its benighted, post-Roman intellectual torpor.

 

In 1258, the Mongols descended on Baghdad and emptied the libraries into the Tigris, ending the city's scholarly preeminence enjoyed for nearly 500 years. "Hence the legend developed," as one scholar wrote, "that the river ran black from the ink of the countless texts lost in this manner, while the streets ran red with the blood of the city's slaughtered inhabitants."

 

But under the Ottoman Empire, the library recovered and carried on. And despite decades of repression and deprivation under Saddam, intellectual accomplishments were still regarded as a major aspect of Iraq's cultural identity.

 

The sacking of the library that began April 11, 2003, was a bad one. The current Director of Iraq's National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad Eskander, estimates that over three days, as many as "60 percent of the Ottoman and Royal Hashemite era documents were lost as well as the bulk of the Ba'ath era documents.... and approximately 25 percent of the book collections were looted or burned." Other Iraqi manuscript collections and university libraries suffered similar fates.

 

Since then, Iraqis have once again tried to rebuild their library. The occupying powers have played along, but like so much about the Iraq War, their effort has been marked by ineptitude, hypocrisy and a cruel disregard for Iraqi people and culture.

 

Early in the occupation, L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), demonstrated an unwillingness to provide the basic funds necessary for the reconstruction of Iraq's educational and informational infrastructure. Dr. Rene Teijgeler, senior consultant for Culture for the Iraqi Reconstruction Management office at the American Embassy in Baghdad, left his position in February of 2005, not having "the supplies of ready cash that could be used to acquire something as simple as bookshelves." His position was left empty.

 

When John Agresto, the education czar of the CPA, asked for $1.2 billion to make Iraqi universities viable centers of learning: he received $9 million. He asked USAID for 130,000 classroom desks, and received 8,000.

 

So the NLA staff have looked elsewhere, occasionally finding pieces of the old collection for sale there on Al Mutanabi street, home to Baghdad's booksellers. In fact Al Mutanabi is the source of 95 percent of the books purchased to replace the looted collection of Iraq's National Library and Archive. But Al Mutanabi was destroyed by a car bomb in March of 2007.

 

In a speech to the Internet Librarian International conference in 2004, Dr. Eskander described the state of the INLA: "When I was officially appointed as the new DG, INLA faced several challenges. It was the most damaged cultural institution in the country. The building was in a ruinous state; there was no money, no water, no electricity, no papers, no pens, no furniture (apart from 50 plastic chairs). The morale of employees was very low. Three departments out of 18 were half-functioning."

 

Despite this state of near-total ruin, the budget awarded by the CPA for the INLA in 2004, was only $70,000.

 

In addition to material and financial obstacles, Dr. Eskander has had to contend with the problems arising from the immaterial legacy of a totalitarian dictatorship. In sharp contrast to the de-Baathification of Iraqi society by the CPA, a purely negative process of removing ranking members of the party from civil service positions, the INLA has adopted a comprehensive approach to restructuring institutional relations.

 

"I removed all corrupt and lazy elements from positions of responsibility, while promoting a number of qualified young female staff to higher positions...The culture of taking orders was dominant," Eskander said. "Staff members were unable to and sometimes afraid of taking initiative. I have encouraged them to be proactive and creative. The new culture has begun gradually but steadily to take root in the internal life of NLA. I radically changed the mechanisms of decision-making and implementation by democratizing them. Now, librarians and archivists elect their own representatives who will participate at the meetings of the council of managers, where decisions are made. These representatives can monitor all activities within NLA and meet the DG anytime they want."

 

The INLA now provides transportation for all of its 425 employees (up from 95 and not counting a security staff of 36) despite the rising costs of private security. It houses a functional nursery in order to maintain its female staff. (American libraries, whose staff is 85 percent female and whose directors are 45 percent male, could take a cue.)

 

Many dedicated people have offered important solidarity. In Florence, the city government underwrote construction of a conservation lab. The Czech government funded the training of Iraqi archivists. With the exception of invaluable training sessions organized by private educational institutions such as Harvard University, American support has been limited to a relatively small number of individual scholars, a few dedicated nonprofit agencies, nominal USAID support and the cooperation of a handful of private corporations. In 2005 the American Library Association issued a resolution on the connection between the Iraq war and libraries, calling for a full withdrawal of troops and a redistribution of funding but the conversation never extended much further than the bullet points.

 

The US State Department has created the Iraq Virtual Science Library, which provides access to a large number of health and science databases to institutions throughout the country. But Internet access, like electricity, is intermittent at best. Iraq is, after all, a largely collapsed society.

 

Many other more promising projects have been abandoned or left in a state of limbo for lack of funding. Efforts at book donation have become ever more challenging as the security situation worsens and thus have largely stopped.

 

The British National Library has provided recently published English-language social science texts and donated microfilm copies of its colonial administrative records from its last occupation of Iraq. But the replacement of physical documents largely ends here.

 

It would be unfair and frankly absurd to blame American librarians and their shrinking budgets, rising legal costs and increasingly costly dependence on proprietary databases for the state of Iraq's infrastructure. But the increasingly unstable position of American libraries is actually part of the same logic that produced that war. The disdain for cultural institutions does not stop at the border--bombs there, budget cuts here.

 

That said, the lack of solidarity from the American community of librarians and scholars for their Iraqi counterparts is shameful. Rousseau suggested that empathy is the basis of language and communication.

 

If the raison d'Aitre of the library profession is the preservation and dissemination of information, and thus the communication of ideas and the promotion of open discourse, then this question of empathy and solidarity should be the profession's guiding purpose. Books might seem like an afterthought for people facing violent death, poverty and shattered future, yet the library now receives 750 patrons a month. If there is any hope for stability and reconstruction in Iraq, a little more library solidarity is due.

 

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Making the Most of a Global Depression

 

http://www.hopedance.org/cms/content/view/479/107/

 

 

by Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute

 

Hopedance Magazine (March 18 2008)

 

It's becoming increasingly likely that 2008 will go down in history as the year the Second Great Depression began. The unraveling started with the subprime mortgage fiasco and is spreading fast. The total value of all US dollar-based mortgage bonds is $10.4 trillion, of which thirty percent is now expected to be lost in defaults and property devaluation. That's $3.2 trillion in losses. Trillions more are likely to evaporate from the related derivatives markets. It's true that the global economy is pretty big, and a few hundred billion get lost under sofa cushions from time to time (as happened during the savings and loan crisis of the 1990s), and still, life goes on. But when we're discussing trillions of dollars (with a "T"), we're talking real money.

 

Get ready for bank runs, a stock market collapse, and, perhaps, a money panic.

 

Such things have happened before (in 1833, 1837, 1857, 1907, 1920, and 1929), but this time it's different. Now the problem is not just financial mismanagement; there is a deeper instability: the global economy is based on a fundamentally unsustainable exploitation of depleting natural resources, and that whole system is teetering. In his essay, "Barreling into Recession: How Oil Burst the American Bubble", Michael Klare points out that "The economic bubble that lifted the stock market to dizzying heights was sustained as much by cheap oil as by cheap (often fraudulent) mortgages". Veteran geologist Colin Campbell, in his ASPO Newsletter #86, steps back for an even broader overview:

 

"The Oil Age opened 150 years ago, releasing a flood of cheap energy, such that today's production is equivalent in energy terms to 22 billion slaves working around the clock. The resulting economic prosperity allowed the banks to lend more than they had on deposit, confident that Tomorrow's Expansion was collateral for To-day's Debt. It sounds a rather dubious principle but worked well enough during the First Half of the Oil Age allowing at least some countries to reap great prosperity. The Second Half now dawns, and being characterized by falling supply, effectively removes the Collateral for debt ... Whereas the post-peak physical decline of oil ... is only gradual ... the perception that past economic growth must now give way to contraction can come in an instant, prompting radical changes in the financial world."

 

So, as the oil drains away, the view is all downhill from here. A Depression is, well, depressing even to think about, much less to live through.

 

But wait a moment. For anyone with an ecological sensibility, the prospect of economic contraction has a silver lining. In a recent e-mail message, UBC Professor of Human Ecology Bill Rees summed up our collective situation this way:

 

"To raise the human enterprise ever further from thermodynamic equilibrium, we must degrade and dissipate ever-greater quantities of available energy and material resources extracted from the ecosphere. We have passed the point where the ecosphere can provide sustainably all that we are extracting. Resources are depleted; entropy accumulates. In effect, techno-industrial society has become pathologically parasitic on nature."

 

The implication is clear: if we hope to survive as a species, and if there is to be hope for millions of other creatures, we need to shrink the human enterprise. Economic contraction may be bitter medicine, but it's part of the cure for what ails our planetary home.

 

However, we can manage this contraction either foolishly or intelligently.

 

A foolish management of economic contraction would entail burning the biosphere for alternative fuels; propping up the banks and other financial institutions that created the mortgage mess, without ever re-examining the wisdom of growth-based economics; and responding to human privation and misery with repression and war.

 

Intelligent management would start with an explicit commitment to redesign the global economy to run with less. We would assess ecosphere resources and identify a humane, equitable path toward gradual reduction in population and total consumption levels. We would focus on those aspects of life that bring us increasing satisfaction without requiring more inputs of energy and materials. We would re-acquaint ourselves with the values and virtues of community, self-sufficiency, and modesty. We would redesign our cities to eliminate cars, while developing renewable energy sources and educating a new generation of ecological farmers.

 

If we handle this well, the medicine of contraction will leave Nature intact and humanity in a state of greater happiness, equity, and peace.

 

We don't have much choice regarding whether a Depression will ensue. But a great deal depends on how we respond. It's not too soon to start that discussion.

 

_

 

Richard Heinberg is the author of The Party's Over (2005) and Peak Everything (2007). He is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and lectures widely on sane responses to fossil fuel depletion.

 

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An Open Letter to the President

 

by Upton Sinclair, in Liberty Magazine (1937)

 

To the Editor:

 

Six or seven years ago I wrote an article, the Permanent Crisis, in which I predicted the continuance of our problem of unemployment. This article was submitted to more than a dozen of our leading magazines - but to no purpose. Another attempt is here made to put this problem and its solution before the public.

 

Dear Mr. President:

 

It is nearly three years since I had the pleasure of spending two hours in your home in Hyde Park, discussing with you the problems which confront our people. I ventured a prediction as to what our situation would be at the end of three years; and I now recall it to you, from notes which I made at the time.

 

Just prior to our talk I had been chosen at the California primaries as the Democratic Party's candidate for governor. For a year I had been telling the people of the state that the problem of unemployment was to be considered as permanent under our present system; that in so-called "good times" we would have ten million idle workers to support, making, with their families, about one fifth of our population; and that in the next depression this number would be doubled.

 

To you I said: "Mr. President, you now have twenty five million persons to care for, and in one way or another you will have to spend at least three billions a year to do it." You replied that you were told you would have to spend five billions a year to bring back prosperity. I continued: "Let us assume that you spend this for three years. That is fifteen billions you have to borrow from Wall Street. If you give this money to the unemployed, they will spend it for food, clothing, and shelter, and it will come back to Wall Street; and at the end of the three years we shall be exactly where we were before - except that we shall be that much deeper in debt."

 

I ventured to suggest a different course, as follows:

 

"Spend the fifteen billions as a capital investment for the unemployed. Buy land and machinery, so that they may go to work again and produce for themselves the food, clothing, and shelter they will need - not merely for the next three years but from now on. This amount is fifteen hundred dollars per unemployed worker, and our self-help co-operatives in California have proved that with this much capital co-operative groups of men and women can make themselves independent."

 

I went on to mention the demoralizing effects of charity, whether public or private. I argued that in setting up co-operative groups under government supervision you would be making a start at democracy in industry, training the workers in self-government and preparing a refuge for the larger hosts of unemployed who are bound to be created by the further mechanization of industry.

 

At the close of our discussion you stated that, not later than October 25 of that year, it was your intention to make a radio talk in favor of production for use for the unemployed. The date was seven weeks distant, and I waited for the time to pass. It did so; and on October 23 you made a radio talk on unemployment -- but it was a call for more private charity. What caused you to change your mind I do not know; but I am forced to call it one of the major tragedies of our time.

 

The fifteen billion has been spent and the unemployed have had food, clothing, and shelter of a sort. Those who make and sell these things have made profits, and now have them in the Wall Street banks, ready to be lent to you again. But the unemployed have nothing; and there are very nearly as many of them as on the day we talked. Estimates differ -- you have not permitted a census to be taken, to give us the exact knowledge. Some say nine millions, some say ten; but for practical purposes the problem remains as it was.

 

The statement that you have spent five billions a year on the unemployed requires elucidation. Business Week estimates relief expenditures at $10,700,000,000 in three years. Fortune estimates $12,444,000,000 in three years and eight months. This includes PWA, WPA, and the CCC camps. Harry Hopkins' figures on local-relief expenditures show that they run about $600,000,000 a year. In addition, bonus payments, shipping subsidies, silver purchases, various kinds of aid to farmers, loans on homes and to banks, a part of which the government will not get back. For purposes of this discussion it does not matter who got the money; the point is that the government poured it out to individuals who spent it, and this served to revive trade and keep the profit system going. Later on this money will have to be taken out of the pockets of the taxpayers -- unless the system is to admit bankruptcy.

 

The fact that you have put so-called "direct relief" back on the local authorities makes it difficult to estimate the total amount. Ten million unemployed workers means, with their families, twenty-five million persons; and five billions per year is only two hundred dollars per person. When any part of this problem is put off on states, counties, and cities, the appearance of the federal budget is helped, but the burden upon the taxpayer is not reduced by a single penny.

 

I do not wish, Mr. President, to lend aid to your reactionary opponents. I am convinced of your good intentions, and I appreciate what has been done in the Tennessee Valley and other power projects, and in the labors of the CCC boys. But, apart from these, your administration has expended a great deal of money and effort with very inadequate results. You have made forward-looking speeches by which the people have been uplifted. But they cannot eat speeches, nor wear them on their backs; the rain and the cold cannot be kept off with fine sentiments, nor can taxes and debts be paid with idealism. We are heading toward another collapse, compared to which that of 1929-33 will seem mild indeed.

 

There are signs that you now realize this danger. You have bowed before your conservative critics to the extent of trying to balance the budget. Our government starts to economize and retrench - with the certainty that every reduction of expenditure will throw new persons on to local relief! In city after city I read that funds are exhausted and the unemployed are existing from day to day. Back to the Hoover era!

 

But industry is booming, especially war manufacturers; Wall Street is happy, having what it calls prosperity again. The basic fact can be stated in one sentence: that under your administration wages have increased 10 percent, while the cost of living has increased twenty or thirty percent and profits have increased fifty percent. One need learn no more in order to write the word failure across the story of your efforts and to predict that they must end in disaster.

 

The Supreme Court has thrown out many of your favorite measures, and now you demand the reforming of the Court. I am one who regards the Supreme Court's outlawing of measures of Congress as pure usurpation, and nothing would please me more than to see that power abolished. But I am only one of fifty million American voters, and a majority of them have been taught a reverence for the Supreme Court. Congress is deadlocked over the issue and several precious months have been wasted.

 

I said to you in 1934, and I now say again, that in this crisis wisdom suggests that you should find some method of procedure which the Supreme Court cannot outlaw; and, so far as I know, the only such method is that of production for use for the unemployed. You have made many grants to self-help co-operatives, and these have met with no judicial opposition. I cannot imagine any ground upon which a court could forbid you to give unemployed workers the means of producing what they themselves are going to consume. Why not take this easy way?

 

By this method you will establish a new system enabling one fifth of our population to free themselves from dependence upon the fluctuations of the market. This system will train its workers and leaders; and if, as I foresee, the profit system continues to freeze out more and more of its employees, they will have a place to go, a way to exist without becoming burdens on the backs of the taxpayers. So, and only so, can we make the transition to a planned economy without the violence and loss of liberty which we have seen in other lands.

 

I do not know how many more years you have in which to make unsuccessful experiments. I do not know how much more of the taxpayers' money you will be permitted to spend upon blind groping in a maze. I do know that there is a limit, set by inexorable economic forces. The breakdown of the profit economy has brought the nations of Europe to the edge of another Armageddon. I do not know when they will slide in, or how soon thereafter they will drag us in; but I know that the present system is crumbling, and is dragging more and more of our people to ruin and despair. They will not, they cannot stand it forever. They will revolt, or attempt to revolt, and you will be called upon to put them down - a task which I know you will not relish.

 

I ask you, Mr. President, for how many years must a condition of mass unemployment continue before we recognize it as chronic? The condition is now nearly eight years old. If we agree that it costs two hundred dollars per year to keep a destitute American alive, we have spent forty billions of dollars upon our twenty-five million unemployed and their dependents. If we assume that a worker, using American tools and technique, will produce a thousand dollars of value per year -- surely a moderate estimate -- our ten million unemployed workers might have had eighty billions of wealth. A writer gropes in vain for words to give any idea of the mass of human misery and waste represented by such figures. Heavy indeed was the burden assumed by those persons who persuaded you to change your mind in 1934!

 

In the name of the twenty-five million, I ask you, Mr. President, to change your mind again.

 

The End

 

 

 

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Canada's Oldest Bookstore Closes

 

From Canadian Bookseller, Volume 1 - 2008, Pp12

(A Quarterly Publication of the Canadian Booksellers Association)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Halifax's venerable The Book Room has announced it is closing its doors. From the official press release: "Over the next few weeks, The Book Room will begin an orderly shutdown of its retail store and dispose of its inventory. The wholesale operation wll continue; however, the company's retail bookstore (founded in 1839) will close at the end of March, 2008."

 

Reasons cited for the closure include increased competition from (and deep discounting by) big-box stores and Internet booksellers, as well as the pressure of dual pricing. Book Room President, Charles Burchell, who was the recipient of the CBA Libris Award for Lifetime Achievement for his outstanding contribution to the book industry in 2006, commented, "I am extremely disappointed to make this announcement as The Book Room has been an institution in Nova Scotia. The bookstore has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression and economic ups and downs over its 169-year history. Over my 42 years with the bookstore, I have invited hundreds and hundreds of local authors, authors from across Canada and around the world, to come and meet their reading fans. That has been a most wonderful experience. That staff and I have been very fortunate to meet so many fabulous people."

 

The loss of this bookstore will be profoundly felt. In addition to being terrific promoters of Canadian and international writing talent, Charles Burchell (who served a total of 17 years on CBA's Board), Debbie Cameron and the staff of The Book Room have contributed tremendously over the years to their local community and the wider community of booksellers.

 

 

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Why Canada should not recognize Kosovo

 

http://tinyurl.com/2ml7mh (GlobalResearch.ca)

 

 

 

 

 

 

by James Bissett

 

Global Research, February 19, 2008

 

Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence should not be recognized by Canada. It has not been authorized by the United Nations and is therefore in violation of international law, the United Nations Charter and the Helsinki Final Accords. In addition, UN resolution 1244, which ended the bombing of Serbia, reaffirms Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo.

 

The basic principles of territorial integrity and state sovereignty have governed the relations between states since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. While they have been violated many times in the intervening years, usually by acts of aggression by dictators, they remain the essential components of international law.

 

After the cataclysmic events of two world wars and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the framers of the United Nations incorporated the principles of territorial integrity and state sovereignty into the United Nations Charter. The Charter was seen as the primary safeguard of peace and security in a nuclear age. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 reinforced these principles by adding to them the principle of the inviolability of borders. These are fundamental principles and they have universal application. They cannot be set aside because of special cases or because they present an obstacle to the policy objectives of a powerful nation. Their message is simple and clear --borders cannot be changed without the consent of the state involved.

 

In the spring of 1999 the U.S.-led NATO countries intervened militarily in Kosovo and, in violation of the UN Charter, bombed Serbia. The bombing was justified on allegations that genocide and ethnic cleansing were taking place in Kosovo. We now know these allegations were completely unfounded.

 

In the three years of armed conflict in Kosovo leading up to the bombing by NATO the UN estimates there were a total of 4,600 people killed during the fighting and this figure includes both Serbs and Albanians. In fact, so far there have been only a little over 2,000 bodies discovered. This in itself is a tragic figure, but it is not genocide.

 

As for ethnic cleansing it is now generally acknowledged that the mass expulsion of the Albanians took place after the bombing started. While there were thousands of Albanians displaced within Kosovo as a result of two years of armed conflict there was not a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing taking place.

 

Although the western media continue to justify the independence of Kosovo on the grounds of ethnic cleansing and atrocities committed by Slobodan Milosevic's security forces the facts do not support these allegations. They do stand, however, as testimony to the success of NATO's propaganda machine.

 

The intervention in Kosovo had nothing to do with humanitarian reasons but was deliberately designed to justify the continued existence of NATO and to fundamentally change its role from a purely defensive organization acting in accordance with the UN Charter into one that could intervene wherever or whenever it decided to do so, and with or without UN approval.

 

There have been numerous reports that western security agencies trained, equipped and armed members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and sent them back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, police officials and Albanians who did not support their cause. It was a highly successful operation and it fuelled the armed rebellion by the KLA.

 

In August 1998 -- seven months before the NATO bombing -- the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee reported that, "planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is largely in place. ... The only missing element seems to be an event with suitably vivid media coverage that could make the intervention politically saleable. ... That the administration is waiting for a 'trigger' is increasingly obvious." That trigger was soon to be pulled. It was the highly suspicious "Racak" massacre that, as Madeleine Albright said, was the galvanizing incident that led to the bombing.

 

The bombing of Serbia by NATO without UN approval was a historical turning point. The precedent had been set. The UN Charter could be subverted if the military intervention could be cloaked and justified in terms of humanitarianism. The intervention in Iraq was to follow but this time not all of the NATO countries went along with the American initiative. Many of those who supported the bombing of Serbia condemned the invasion of Iraq. There seemed some hope that a lesson had been learned- that violation of the UN Charter leads to a slippery slope and a return to the days when the resolution of international disputes would only be by the use of force.

 

The recognition of Kosovo outside of the UN framework will set a dangerous precedent. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said that Canada should make foreign policy decisions that are not only independent but are noticed by other powers around the world. Here is an opportunity for Canada to illustrate both of these objectives and stand firm for the UN Charter -- by saying no to the recognition of Kosovo.

 

James Bissett served as Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia.

 

Global Research Articles by James Bissett

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Omar Khadr and Guantánamo

 

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington01192008.html

 

 

 

 

 

Counterpunch January 19 / 20, 2008

 

 

 

 

 

Canada's glaring double standards on torture

 

By Andy Worthington

 

How humiliating.

 

The story begins with the shameful case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was kidnapped by US agents as he changed planes in New York in 2002, and rendered to Syria, where he was tortured for a year on behalf of the Americans before being released.

 

Mr. Arar -- who was awarded millions of dollars in compensation by the Canadian government in January 2007, but has yet to receive even an apology from the US administration -- had been wrongly fingered by Canadian intelligence, and his case his one of many chilling examples of the damage caused by failed intelligence in the American's program of "extraordinary rendition."

 

In an attempt to prime diplomats about how to spot the signs of torture when they visit Canadians in foreign jails, the Canadian government's Foreign Affairs Department instigated a "torture awareness workshop," which also informed the diplomats of where they could expect to find what CTV in Canada described as "countries and places with greater risks of torture."

 

The list, in a training manual issued by the Foreign Affairs Department, included traditional offenders -- Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Syria -- but also included some torturers that are not generally mentioned in polite Western company: Israel and the United States. Specific mention was made of Guantánamo Bay, where, to drive the point home, the manual noted specific "US interrogation techniques," including "forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation."

 

Oops.

 

The manual was never supposed to have been publicly released, of course, but the Canadian government inadvertently released it to lawyers for Amnesty International as evidence in a court case relating to the alleged abuse of Afghan detainees, after they were handed over by Canadian soldiers to the local Afghan authorities. After realizing their mistake, government officials desperately tried to get the manual back, stating, as CTV put it bluntly, that they "wanted to black out sensitive parts that may anger allies."

 

It's too late for that, of course. While US ambassador David Wilkins declared, "We find it to be offensive for us to be on the same list with countries like Iran and China," adding, "Quite frankly it's absurd," lawyers and human rights activists have seized upon the documents to insist, for the second time in only a few months, that the Canadian government is guilty of double standards in its refusal to act on behalf of Omar Khadr, the Canadian Guantánamo detainee who was just 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in July 2002.

 

And they're right to do so. The first set of double standards was highlighted in September, when, during a visit to Canada to publicize Mr. Khadr's plight, his US military lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, contrasted the Canadian government's "leadership in international efforts to recognize child soldiers as victims in need of special protection and rehabilitation" with its "virtual silence" in the case of his client. Just two weeks ago, David Crane, the former US prosecutor for Sierra Leone's war crimes trials, who is now a professor at Syracuse University, revived this argument, telling Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star that he failed to understand how Canada and the United States "could be sympathetic to the plight of Africa's child soldiers, who are forced to commit atrocious crimes," but not to Khadr, whose circumstances were the same. "I'm just not sure why the Canadian government, which was tremendously important in my work in West Africa -- they were incredibly supportive -- is not making a bigger deal of this," he said.

 

This latest revelation only adds to the government's self-inflicted woes. As Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, explained to CTV, the new developments cast doubt on the government's assertion that Khadr is being treated fairly in US custody. "Canada has just admitted we believe torture is possible in Guantánamo Bay," he told the broadcaster's Canada AM show. "That clashes terribly with what Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said, that Mr. Khadr, who is in Guantánamo Bay and was a child at the time he was put there, is being given a (quote, unquote) appropriate judicial process. Torture is not an appropriate judicial process." Attaran went on to suggest that the Canadian government's refusal to demand Khadr's release from Guantánamo was purely political. "Out of a desire to appear tough on the war on terror, Mr. Harper has put this set of considerations out the window, and that's not appropriate," he said, adding, "We have to obey the law."

 

Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler also spoke to CTV, reinforcing Amir Attaran's statement that the documents relating to the "torture awareness workshop" contradict Prime Minister Stephen Harper's assurances that Khadr is receiving fair treatment. "Omar has been there for five and a half years," he said, "and at some point in the course of his detention the Canadian government developed the suspicion he was being tortured and abused. And yet it has not acted to obtain his release from Guantánamo Bay and protect his rights, unlike every other Western country that has had its nationals detained in Guantánamo Bay."

 

Kuebler added that the suspicions that his client has been tortured at Guantánamo undermined any claims that he could receive a fair trial in his Military Commission -- the novel system of show trials invented by Dick Cheney and his advisors in November 2001, which are empowered to use evidence obtained through torture, and to prevent this evidence from being revealed to either the defendants or their lawyers.

 

He explained that he and the rest of his legal team want Khadr to be sent back to Canada to face justice there, and pointed out the absurdity of the Canadian government's claims that they were waiting for the US judicial process to play itself out. "Omar has certainly been abused, his rights have been violated under international law, and apparently the Canadian government has reason to believe that's true, and yet, they've acted not at all to assist him," he told CTV.

 

While the Canadian government attempts to repair its relations with the United States and Israel, the next phase of Omar Khadr's trial by Military Commission is scheduled to take place early next month, and several motions have already been filed on his behalf. One argues that the Commissions are unconstitutional because they are designed only for non-Americans, and another -- relating specifically to Mr. Khadr -- argues that they have no jurisdiction over him because trying a detainee who was 15 years old at the time of his capture would violate the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, a United Nations measure ratified by the United States in 2002, which safeguards juveniles (those under 18 years old) from prosecution. As his lawyers have pointed out, "No international criminal tribunal established under the laws of war, from Nuremberg forward, has ever prosecuted former child soldiers as war criminals," adding that, if Commission judge Col. Peter Brownback pursues Khadr's case, he will be "the first in western history" to preside over a trial of alleged war crimes committed by a child.

 

Adding to the Canadian government's embarrassment, at almost the same time that the contents of the Canadian government's training manual were made public, it was revealed that 55 law professors and 22 members of Parliament, including Canada's former attorney general, Irwin Cotler, had signed the defense lawyers' motion, stating unequivocally, "It is a principle of customary international law that children are to be accorded special protections in all criminal proceedings, and in any prosecution for participation in warlike acts."

 

In the pipeline, undoubtedly, are numerous references to the Canadian government's latest gaffe, in documents to be filed by Omar Khadr's lawyers, which would be laughable if the result of the government's contradictions and cowardice were not so heartless.

 

You could ask Omar Khadr himself, if you could get anywhere near him.

 

Andy Worthington (www.andyworthington.co.uk) is a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007). He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

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Happy Frankenstein Month!

Monsters of our own making

 

 

 

Los Angeles Times January 17, 2008

 

 

Foreign policy nightmares are everywhere for the U.S. these days.

 

by Rosa Brooks

 

Happy Frankenstein Month! Yes, this month marks the 190th anniversary of the publication of "Frankenstein," Mary Shelley's novel about a man who dreams of reshaping humanity but ends up creating a monster. And you're probably wondering: Just how should I observe Frankenstein Month?

 

Hallmark seems to be slacking off here -- I couldn't find a single Frankenstein's 190th anniversary card. Fortunately, you can still mark the occasion just by skimming the week's newspapers, which contain an above-average number of "Oops We've Created a Monster!" stories from the world of foreign policy -- many starring the U.S. government as a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein.

 

Start with this week's big story from Pakistan. According to Tuesday's New York Times, Islamic militant groups funded and nurtured for years by the Pakistani intelligence services -- with U.S. backing, in the 1980s -- are now completely out of control. The Pakistani government, which hoped to use militant groups to further its own interests in Afghanistan and the Kashmir region, now finds that the militants have instead "turned on their former handlers," carrying out "a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units."

 

Making matters worse, many analysts say that the Pakistani intelligence services are riddled with agents who support the militants and their extremist agenda. Despite this, the Bush administration continues to shower Pakistan's military and intelligence services with aid, even as Pakistan sinks further into chaos. Long-term U.S. strategy? None. Score: Monster, 100; Frankenstein, 0.

 

Next door in Afghanistan, six years after we "liberated" the Afghans from the Taliban yoke, Frankenstein reenactments are also taking place. Tuesday's Washington Post fronted a major story about the deteriorating situation: "After more than six years of coalition warfare in Afghanistan, NATO is a bundle of frayed nerves and tension over nearly every aspect of the conflict." Warlords -- some supported by us -- control many Afghan regions, the Taliban is resurgent and a new "Taliban offensive is expected in the spring, along with another record opium poppy crop." Suicide bombings are up by 30%, and there are signs that Al Qaeda is regrouping.

 

On Wednesday, this newspaper reported that the death rate for U.S. troops in Afghanistan was higher in 2007 than ever before.

 

Defense Secretary Robert Gates now predicts a need for at least 7,500 additional troops in Afghanistan. And -- though we've already found reason to regret our 1980s policy of arming the Afghan militants who later became the Taliban (we liked them when they were fighting the Soviets) -- the U.S. is now contemplating arming additional southern Afghan tribes to help fight the resurgent Taliban. Exit strategy? None. Score: Monster ahead, eroding early gains by Frankenstein.

 

Then there's Iraq. Deaths are thankfully down somewhat, but the lack of political progress has left a tenuous, still-violent stalemate, sustainable only if U.S. troops remain indefinitely. On Tuesday, Iraq's defense minister said Iraq couldn't provide internal security until at least 2012 and wouldn't be able to defend its borders until at least 2018.

 

Iraq was supposed to be a beacon of peace, democracy and stability. Instead, it turned into a recruiting beacon for Islamic militants, a black hole for taxpayer dollars and a quagmire for our troops.

 

Even our apparent successes have bred new problems. Arming local tribal and religious leaders has undermined efforts to strengthen Iraq's fragile central government, and Iraq's greatest success story -- the relatively stable Kurdish region in the north -- has been marred by escalating conflict with Turkey over claimed Iraqi havens for Turkish rebels. This week, Turkey bombed targets inside Iraq for the fourth time in a month. In Iraq as elsewhere, we have no exit strategy; the monsters we created continue to run rings around us.

 

So here's my proposal: Let's join together to mark Frankenstein Month, a national period of reflection on foreign policy hubris and unintended consequences. President Bush has established National Mentoring Month, National Farm-City Week and Great Outdoors Month -- so why not Frankenstein Month?

 

Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein built his monster out of body parts pilfered from corpses, and the monsters created by our reckless foreign policies also reek of the charnel house. Of course, in Shelley's novel, Frankenstein is tormented by guilt when he realizes what a horror he has unwittingly unleashed on the world, and he tries desperately to undo the damage he's done. There might be some lessons here for the White House.

 

 

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From False to Real Solutions for Climate Change

 

 

 

 

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2008-01/05bond.cfm

 

ZNet Commentary

 

January 05, 2008

 

By Patrick Bond

 

Amidst her welcome critique of the biofuel mania, Vandana Shiva's ZNet commentary last month (December 13, 2007) also made this point: 'The Kyoto Protocol totally avoided the material challenge of stopping activities that lead to higher emissions and the political challenge of regulation of the polluters and making the polluters pay in accordance with principles adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio. Instead, Kyoto put in place the mechanism of emissions trading which in effect rewarded the polluters by assigning them rights to the atmosphere and trading in these rights to pollute.'

 

Indeed in 1997 at Kyoto, Al Gore bamboozled negotiators into adopting carbon trading as a central climate strategy in exchange for Washington's support - which never materialized.

 

Likewise last month's Kyoto Conference of Parties in Bali allowed the 'everyone v. the USA' debate to obscure much more durable problems. Even many environmentalists and well-meaning citizens think that building on Kyoto is the correct strategy for post-Bali negotiations.

 

These include the Climate Action Network of NGOs and corporate-funded environmental groups including the IUCN, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Federation and Environmental Defense Fund. Senators Sanders, Kerry, Lieberman, Mccain, Leahy, Feinstein, Bingaman, Snow, Specter, Alexander and Carper proposed laws in 2007 featuring emissions trading.

 

'Fixing a market problem (pollution) with a market solution' is still a mantra to some light-greens, notwithstanding a year's worth of scandalous reports from practitioners and the press.

 

A year ago, Citigroup's Peter Atherton confessed in a powerpoint that the European Union's Emissions Trading System (ETS) had 'done nothing to curb emissions' and acted as 'a highly regressive tax falling mostly on poor people.' On whether policy goals were achieved, he admitted: 'Prices up, emissions up, profits up... so, not really. Who wins and loses? All generation-based utilities - winners. Coal and nuclear-based generators - biggest winners. Hedge funds and energy traders - even bigger winners. Losers... ahem... Consumers!'

 

The Wall Street Journal confirmed last March that emissions trading 'would make money for some very large corporations, but don't believe for a minute that this charade would do much about global warming.' The paper termed the carbon trade 'old-fashioned rent-seeking... making money by gaming the regulatory process.'

 

Speaking to Channel Four news last March, the European Commissioner for Energy offered this verdict on the ETS: 'A failure'. Yvo de Boer, the sanguine head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned of 'the possibility that the market could collapse altogether.' In April 2006, the price of carbon in Europe's market fell by half overnight due to authorities' mismanagement of the ETS.

 

But not just in Europe. According to Newsweek magazine's investigation of Third World carbon trading (through the Clean Development Mechanism) last March, 'It isn't working... (and represents) a grossly inefficient way of cutting emissions in the developing world.' The magazine called the trade 'A shell game' which has transferred '$3 billion to some of the worst carbon polluters in the developing world.'

 

After an exhaustive series on problems associated with carbon trading and offsets, the Financial Times concluded they were merely a 'carbon "smokescreen"'.

 

In June, The Guardian newspaper headlined its investigation with equal scorn: 'Truth about Kyoto: Huge profits, little carbon saved... Abuse and incompetence in fight against global warming... The inconvenient truth about the carbon offset industry.'

 

Meanwhile the Big Green groups' professionalism and reasonableness - or simple cronyism (since key personnel from CAN now work in the industry) - have made them utterly useless as watchdogs on the carbon trade.

 

So then who do we turn to?

 

The Bali conference featured an alternative movement-building component outside: a Climate Justice Now! coalition made up of Carbon Trade Watch (the Transnational Institute); the Center for Environmental Concerns; Focus on the Global South; the Freedom from Debt Coalition, Philippines; Friends of the Earth International; Women for Climate Justice and the Global Forest Coalition; the Global Justice Ecology Project; the International Forum on Globalisation; the Kalikasan-Peoples Network for the Environment; La Vía Campesina; the Durban Group for Climate Justice; Oilwatch; Pacific Indigenous Peoples Environment Coalition; Sustainable Energy and Economy Network (Institute for Policy Studies); The Indigenous Environmental Network; Third World Network; Indonesia Civil Society Organizations Forum on Climate Justice; and the World Rainforest Movement.

 

The coalition criticised carbon trading and called for genuine solutions: 'reduced consumption; huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt for adaptation and mitigation costs paid for by redirecting military budgets, innovative taxes and debt cancellation; leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in appropriate energy-efficiency and safe, clean and community-led renewable energy; rights-based resource conservation that enforces Indigenous land rights and promotes peoples' sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water; and sustainable family farming and peoples' food sovereignty.'

 

In October 2004, the Durban Group was founded to tackle the problems in the carbon trade, warning of all the dangers above, especially Shiva's point that the transfer of the right to pollute is a multitrillion dollar giveaway to the people who caused the bulk of the climate problems.

 

But establishment figures will continue confusing matters. At the Bali meeting, a key Third World leader was South African environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk - successor to FW de Klerk as leader of the National Party after serving the apartheid police as a spy against fellow students (he later folded the NP into the ruling African National Congress and was rewarded with a do-little ministry). His strategy for bringing the US into the fold came at the price of evacuating any emissions target and accountability mechanism in the official declaration, and reinforcing the carbon trade.

 

Van Schalkwyk's leadership is a travesty, for he has said nothing about South Africa's own $20 billion in new investments - partly privatised through the US multinational AES - in cheap coal-fired electricity generation for the sake mainly of large corporations; he endorses nuclear energy expansion. SA already has an emissions output per person per unit of GDP twenty times worse than the US, and van Schalkwyk's official carbon trading policy argues that it is primarily a 'commercial opportunity.'

 

This is true only if there is resistance; in Durban, Sajida Khan fought carbon trading before her death by cancer caused by an apartheid-era landfill next door - SA's Clean Development Mechanism pilot for methane-extraction.

 

In contrast to carbon trading, what is reverberating within grassroots, coalface and fenceline struggles in many parts of the world is a very different strategy and demand by civil society activists: leave the oil in the soil, the resources in the ground.

 

This call was first made as a climate strategy in 1997 in Kyoto by the group Oilwatch when it was based in Quito, Ecuador. Heroic activists from Accion Ecologia took on the struggle to halt exploitation of oil in part of the Yasuni National Park. This led President Rafael Correa to declare in mid-2007 that the North should pay Ecuador roughly $5 billion in compensation for its commitment to permanently forego exploitation of Yasuni (albeit with concern amongst indigenous people about nearby oil extraction especially by the voracious Brazilian firm Petrobas).

 

A year ago at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, many other groups became aware of this movement thanks to eloquent activists from the Niger Delta, including the Port Harcourt NGO Environmental Rights Action. For example, women community activists regularly disrupted production at oil extraction sites with sit-ins in which, showing maximum disrespect for the petro multinationals, they removed their clothing.

 

In my own neighbourhood, which includes two of Africa's largest oil refineries, the South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance has been mobilising against corporate and municipal environmental crime, including three major explosions and fires since September and a massive fish kill at Christmas from toxic dumping in Durban's harbour, the busiest in Africa.

 

But the legacy of resisting fossil fuel abuse goes back much further, and includes Alaskan and Californian environmentalists who halted drilling and even exploration. In Norway, the global justice group ATTAC took up the same concerns at a conference last October, and began the hard work of persuading wealthy Norwegian Oil Fund managers that they should use the vast proceeds of their North Sea inheritance to repay Ecuadorans some of the ecological debt owed.

 

Perhaps the most eloquent climate analyst in the North is George Monbiot, so it was revealing that last month, instead of going to Bali, he stayed home in Britain and caused some trouble, reporting back in his Guardian column:

 

'Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer! Incredible as it might seem, I have stumbled across the single technology which will save us from runaway climate change! From the goodness of my heart I offer it to you for free. No patents, no small print, no hidden clauses. Already this technology, a radical new kind of carbon capture and storage, is causing a stir among scientists. It is cheap, it is efficient and it can be deployed straight away. It is called ... leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

 

'On a filthy day last week, as governments gathered in Bali to prevaricate about climate change, a group of us tried to put this policy into effect. We swarmed into the opencast coal mine being dug at Ffos-y-fran in South Wales and occupied the excavators, shutting down the works for the day. We were motivated by a fact which the wise heads in Bali have somehow missed: if fossil fuels are extracted, they will be used.'

 

Canada is another Northern site where activists are working to leave the oil in the soil. In an Edmonton conference last November, the University of Alberta's Parkland Institute and its allies argued for no further development of tar sand deposits (which require a litre of oil to be burned for every three to be extracted, and which devastate local water, fisheries and air quality).

 

Institute director Gordon Laxer laid out careful arguments for exceptionally strict limits on the use of water and greenhouse gas emissions in tar sand extraction; realistic land reclamation plans and financial deposits; no further subsidies for the production of dirty energy; provisions for energy security for Canadians (since so much of the tar sand extract is exported to the US); and much higher economic rents on dirty energy to fund a clean energy industry (currently Alberta has a very low royalty rate).

 

I have mentioned this demand in many sites over the past two years, enthusiastically commenting on the moral, political, economic and ecological merits of leaving the oil in the soil. Unfortunately, in addition to confessing profound humility about the excessive fossil fuel burned by airplanes which have taken me on this quest, I must report on the only site where the message dropped like a lead balloon: with dear comrades in petro-socialist Venezuela.

 

Never mind, there are a great many examples where courageous communities and environmentalists have lobbied successfully to keep nonrenewable resources (not just fossil fuels) in the ground, for the sake of the environment, community stability, disincentivising political corruption and workforce health and safety.

 

The highest-stake cases here in South Africa at present are the vast Limpopo Province platinum fields and the titanium and other minerals in the Wild Coast dunes (where, ironically, the film Blood Diamond was shot). Tough communities are resisting multinational corporations, but will need vigorous solidarity, because the extraction of these resources are extremely costly in terms of local land use, peasant displacement, water extraction, energy consumption and political corruption, and require constant surveillance and community solidarity.

 

Still, the awareness that local activists are generating in these campaigns makes us all more aware of how damaging bogus strategies like carbon trading can be, in contrast with a genuine project to change the world.

 

(Patrick is co-editor of a book on climate change which will be launched in several sites in the Northeastern US in Feb-March; details will be posted at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs)

============================

If you pass this comment along to others -- periodically but not repeatedly -- please explain that Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org

 

 

 

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(in case you missed it ...)

Biblio.com launches program to offset carbon emissions

 

 

 

 

http://www.biblio.com/pages/Used_Books_Go_Greener.html

 

October 8, 2007

 

Online Book Shopping Goes Greener

 

Biblio.com announced today that it has launched a program to offset the carbon emissions of the shipment of every book sold through its site, making it the first major book marketplace in the world to become carbon neutral. used books have always been a natural fit for our core values, since they represent an ideal example of re-using and recycling. We hope that our new program will serve as an inspiration to others in the book industry to take climate change seriously and find ways they can invest in the planet's future.

 

 

Asheville, NC (PRWEB)

 

October 8, 2007 -- Biblio.com, one of the world's leading marketplaces for new, used, and rare books, announced today that it has launched a program to offset the carbon emissions of the shipment of every book sold through its site, making it the first major book marketplace in the world to become carbon neutral.

 

The new program is called " ecosend ". It is being launched in partnership with Nativeenergy, a privately held Native American renewable energy company, and will provide funding for wind turbines and farm methane energy projects in Native American communities and on family farms throughout the U.S. These projects not only provide clean, renewable energy but also play an important role in sustainable economic development for tribal communities and farm families.

 

"We did extensive research to find the best carbon offset partner we could. Nativeenergy's commitment to projects that provide both verifiable CO2 reductions and sustainable economic benefits for communities in need was compelling," commented Allen Singleton, Biblio.com Chief Operating Officer.

 

Nativeenergy has extensive partnerships with leading environmentally responsible businesses, including Mohawk Paper, Stonyfield Farm, Clif Bar, and Ben & Jerry's. "Others are sure to follow Biblio.com's lead, reduce their environmental impact first, and then offset their remaining carbon footprints with high quality carbon offsets from new projects they actually help to get built," says Nativeenergy president & CEO, Tom Boucher.

 

In addition to offsetting the carbon impact of each shipment, Biblio.com will also offset all of its business operations, including power consumption on server equipment, business travel, and employee commuting. "While we view carbon offsets as a part of an overall strategy to ensure that our business does not harm the environment and the climate," says Biblio.com CEO Brendan Sherar, "we also recognize that reducing our carbon footprint is far more important than offsetting."

 

Understanding their carbon footprints encourages consumers to change their behavior and reduce carbon emissions. By making available over 50 million used books from independent booksellers worldwide, Biblio.com plays a vital role in facilitating the sale, purchase and resale of used books. The Green Press Initiative calculates that the US book publishing industry consumes 20 million trees per year.

 

Sherar notes that, "used books have always been a natural fit for our core values, since they represent an ideal example of re-using and recycling. We hope that our new program will serve as an inspiration to others in the book industry to take climate change seriously and find ways they can invest in the planet's future."

 

 

Biblio.com

 

Biblio.com is one of the world's leading sources for textbooks, used books, and rare books. Established in 2003, Biblio.com has grown to become one of the largest global book marketplaces, with over 50 million books for sale from 5500 bookstores and booksellers in countries around the world. Biblio.com is wholly owned and operated by Biblio, Inc., a privately held company with a commitment to a triple bottom line, through its work with Biblio Charitable Works, Inc. For more information, please visit www.biblio.com.

 

 

Nativeenergy

 

American Indian majority-owned, Nativeenergy is a national marketer of renewable energy credits and carbon offsets. By providing individuals and organizations both the means to compensate for their global warming pollution and also effectively power their homes and businesses with renewable energy, Nativeenergy helps build community based renewable energy projects that create social, economic and environmental benefits. Bringing upfront payment to renewable projects, Nativeenergy enables its customers to help finance the construction of new wind farms and other renewable energy projects, such as tribal wind projects and methane digesters on family dairy farms, which directly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Nativeenergy is the choice of leading environmentally and socially respon