Europe and Canada are facing crises of unsustainable entitlements, but social programs are not to blame. In Europe the countries with the most comprehensive social programs — Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands — are not facing severe deficit crises. The countries that are — Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and the U.K. — have far less generous social programs.

Rapidly expanding capitalist entitlement began in the 1980s with the election of neo-conservatives Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Brian Mulroney. Their governments rejected government intervention to maintain employment and consumer demand, substituting what they called supply-side policies, claiming that putting more money in the hands of the rich would increase the supply of money available for investments and employment.

Giving to One Percent, Taking from 99 Percent

Since then, the governments of most countries have adopted supply-side policies. Taxes on higher incomes, on corporations, on capital gains and dividends have been methodically lowered. In the 1950s and 1960s the effective tax rates on the highest incomes in Canada and the U.S. were 70 percent. In the early years of this century, these had fallen to 30 percent, much the same rate as paid by median income earners. (A smaller number — who may earn millions a year from capital gains and dividends — pay as little as fifteen per cent of their income as taxes.) As the tax on upper incomes fell, government revenues as a proportion of total income fell, even though governments increased sales taxes, value-added and payroll taxes.

Putting more money in the pockets of the rich did not lead to more investment. In fact, the rate of growth in private and public investments was higher in the 1950s an 60s than in the 1980s to the present in North America and Europe. The super rich do have money to spend on luxuries, private jets, yachts, and mansions. As money was available for financial speculation, share prices grew faster than the real economy, increasing capitalist claims on existing means of livelihood. To sustain and increase profit margins, corporations turned to places with cheaper labour, further reducing domestic employment. As disparities between rich and poor widened, governments with shrinking revenues were faced with expanding needs for social programs.

In Europe the most prosperous countries were shielded from the most damaging consequences of neo-conservative policies by more comprehensive social entitlements—pensions, unemployment insurance, retraining, and childcare. Poorer countries have not been as fortunate. Europe’s problem is not overgenerous social programs, but the failure to harmonize social conditions.

The European Union began with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, a time when most governments accepted the responsibility to maintain employment and improve living standards. Initially signed by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and West Germany, the Treaty of Rome envisioned a Europe with a common market for goods, workers, services, with common transport and agricultural policies, and with a European social fund that would help harmonize social conditions in all countries.

The EU’s Social Failure

As it now exists, the European Union began with a treaty signed in Maastricht, Holland in 1992. By this time, most of the continent’s major political parties had come to adhere to the Washington Consensus, a set of policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Its ten points can be summarized as holding that governments should give transnational corporate interests precedence over domestic employment and enterprise, and give creditors’ interests priority over social programs.

In harmony with the Washington Consensus, the Maastricht Treaty provided for a common currency, common interest rates, and agreement to limit government deficit and debt levels. The idea of a social fund was dropped and no effort was made to harmonize wages or living standards.

For a time, the economies of poorer countries like Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain did grow substantially. Their lower wages did attract investment until countries with even lower wages like the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovenia joined the EU. As the continent’s major corporations moved more operations east in pursuit of cheaper labour, workers’ income declined; markets stagnated.

Before the financial crash of 2007-08, the decline in employment and markets was masked by bubble economies — European versions of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis. Interest rates of one per cent and lower in Japan and the U.S. allowed German, French, and U.K. banks to borrow abroad and to lend these funds at three or four per cent to countries desperate for investment. As it became obvious that debts were unsustainable, interest rates jumped to six and seven per cent and to double digits. As more public revenues were diverted to pay creditors, governments cut spending and employment. In the U.K., Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece unemployment rose to ten per cent and higher. Youth unemployment rose to 20 per cent, 30 per cent, and even fifty per cent. Nonetheless governments focused on creditors’ interests continue to promote spending cuts which will increase unemployment and reduce consumer demand.

Stephen Harper in Davos encouraged further attacks on social entitlements. He then came home to call for reduction in future pension entitlements here. Why? Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors currently costs less than three percent of Canada’s national income. Factoring in the expected growth of the population of seniors, the cost will rise to around four percent. In Italy, public pensions cost fourteen percent of national income. The current conservative coalition insists that Italy will have no problem meeting these obligations.

Yes, prolonged public deficits can lead to future problems. Costs of borrowing may rise. The value of a currency may erode. Taxes may have to be raised. For minorities preoccupied with maximizing capitalist profits, these are concerns. For majorities who depend on income from labour and social entitlements, declining wages, and reduced benefits are far more serious problems.

Stronger Economies with Progressive Taxes and Social Programs

Deficits would not be problems for governments focused on the interests of the vast majority. Unsustainable debts would be written off, reduced, and rescheduled. What remains would be paid at fixed low interest rates. Where financial institutions that engaged in reckless lending practices must be bailed out to sustain credit markets, public funds would become public equity. Publicly owned financial institutions, transparently and democratically regulated, would focus on providing access to credits for community-owned, cooperative, and owner-operated enterprises.

To weaken the power of transnational corporations, governments would actively expand social entitlements, institute guaranteed annual income legislation, expand access to pensions, health care, post-secondary education, and public child care. The public revenues required could be raised through steeply graduated income taxes on the highest incomes. Tobin taxes on financial transactions and international agreement to raise tariffs enough to encourage domestic production for domestic markets everywhere would generate further public revenues.

Instead of giving priority to the interests of capital-owning minorities, governments would focus on policies that sustain employment, working-class income, and social entitlements. They would promote and support initiatives the are intended to provide everyone with a voice and equal vote in their communities and employment.

Following the recent Permanent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD) meeting which took place in Ottawa, the Commander of Canada Command, Lt.-Gen Walter Semianiw and the Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), Gen. Charles Jacoby, Jr. signed three military documents.

The first was the Combined Defense Plan which a backgrounder described as a “planning framework between Canada Command, its counterpart USNORTHCOM, and NORAD for enhanced defense cooperation between Canada and the U.S. should governments require each other’s assistance.” The second is the Information Sharing Memorandum of Understanding, “an arrangement between Canada Command, its counterpart USNORTHCOM and NORAD to identify and provide for ease of sharing information amongst the three organizations.” The Civil Assistance Plan, which was originally signed in 2008 and allows the armed forces of one nation to support the other during an emergency was also renewed for two years.

Lee Berthiaume of Postmedia News reported that:

The Combined Defense Plan has been under discussion for several years and would further integrate cross-border military co-operation at a time when the Harper government is trying to reassure Washington it has a reliable partner in Canada when it comes to security.

Defense Minister Peter MacKay is quoted as saying,

This agreement provides a framework for the combined defense of Canada and the U.S. during peace, contingencies, and war.

He added:

The plan describes the authorities and means by which the two governments would approve homeland military operations in the event of a mutually agreed threat, and how our two militaries would collaborate and share information.

In his speech in front of the PJBD, Minister MacKay also called for “increased military involvement implementing the Beyond the Border strategy, saying the Canadian Forces and its American counterparts should be supporting civilian agencies monitoring the cross-border security.” Also on the agenda at the defense forum was security cooperation in the Arctic, along with Canadian and U.S. engagement in the Western Hemisphere.

In an article for iPolitics, Colin Horgan wrote that at the recent bilateral defense meeting, “MacKay noted that such initiatives as Beyond the Border and the Regulatory Cooperation Council Action Plan will work to ensure that the vital economic partnership that joins our two countries continues to be the cornerstone of our economic competitiveness and security.”

Defense Minister MacKay emphasized that security is linked to the economy and called for even greater cooperation to support the dual action plans. He stated, “We need to increasingly focus our military forces in support of those civilian departments and agencies that have the lead.” MacKay also explained, “We need to all work together to mitigate capability gaps, share best practices and co-operate on new approaches.” He went on to say, “there is still room for more integrated collaboration – domestically and bi-nationally.”

The latest military agreements further promote a perimeter approach to security. They are part of the Tri Command Vision efforts to merge NORAD, USNORTHCOM and Canada Command into one. As for the PJBD, it has once again become more relevant as a venue for bilateral security and military dialogue. Created in 1940 the panel, “is the senior advisory body on continental defense. It is composed of military and diplomatic representatives from both nations.”

Over the years, it has, “served as a strategic-level military board charged with considering, in a broad sense, land, sea, air and space issues.” This includes areas concerning, “policy, operations, financial, logistics and other aspects of Canada-U.S. defense relations.” The PJBD is well positioned to play a significant role in plans for a fully integrated North American security perimeter, as well as in other facets of the evolving Canada-U.S. partnership.

On January 6, the Obama administration released the new document, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense. The new strategy calls for maintaining a strong presence in the Middle East, as well as an expanding role in the Asia-Pacific region. Much of the focus will be on countering China’s rising power. This will include supporting large bases in Japan and South Korea, along with stationing troops in Australia. The U.S. will also continue efforts to forge stronger military alliances with the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Burma. While the plan envisions a leaner military force, there is little doubt that Washington will continue to police the world.

How does Canada fit into this new realignment of American strategic priorities? It is clear that the U.S. will rely more on its allies during international missions. Canada may gain a greater voice in future military operations, but it will also mean that they will have to bear more of the burden. In the coming years, as NATO members begin cutting defense spending, Canada will be counted on to play an even bigger role in any possible overseas conflicts.

Whether it’s the perimeter security deal, the ongoing mission in Afghanistan or the bombing campaign that took place in Libya, the U.S. and Canada continue to enhance security and military cooperation. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, both countries have further deepened their defense relationship. In addition, Canada has pursued a more U.S.-style foreign policy. This includes imposing tougher sanctions on Iran, along with further expanding sanctions against Syria.

Much like the U.S., Harper has singled out Iran as a threat to international peace and security. He has echoed the same sentiments that the regime is seeking a nuclear weapon and would be prepared to use it.

Defense Minister Peter MacKay has also indicated that if necessary, Canada’s armed forces are ready to offer assistance in Syria. More than ever, the U.S, and Canada share a more common approach to advancing security interests in not only North America, but around the globe.

As it stands, the NDP is the only major national party not led by an avowed zionist. Stephen Harper leads a cabal of governing “Likudniks,” who value subservience to Israel above all else, and the interim leader of the “Labour-Zionist” Liberals Bob Rae, is on the board of the Jewish National Fund, an organization so criminal that it has been condemned in Israel as racist.

The NDP, therefore, is the only apparently Canadian governing choice that voters have, but even this modest fig leaf will be blown away if the blatant Israel-firster Thomas Mulcair becomes party leader. On May 1, 2008, he told Canadian Jewish News:  “I am an ardent supporter of Israel in all situations and in all circumstances.” [my emphasis]

Does Mulcair mean to say that he “ardently supports” Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians, which includes torturing children, bulldozing homes, and keeping Palestinians near starvation levels as a matter of national policy? Do these constitute morally defensible “situations and circumstances?” Based on his abject endorsement of Israel, the answer is clearly, “yes.” The fact that all of the preceding are contrary to Canadian and international law, to say nothing of basic humanity, doesn’t faze Mulcair one bit. What a mensch!

How this walking advertisement for sedition found a home in a left-of-centre, social-democratic party is bizarre. The NDP, after all, still cleaves to the quaint notions that the federal government should defend the Constitution, uphold the rule of law, oppose military aggression, stand up for victims of human rights abuses, and generally serve the public good. Such high-minded ethical standards clearly distinguish it from both “Likud” and “Labour,” which are financially and politically indentured to the Israel Lobby.

So, why would the NDP even allow someone like Mulcair in the front door? This question takes on added significance when we recall that Mulcair had first considered joining Harper’s Likudniks, and was even said to have been tempted by a cabinet appointment. That would at least have made sense. When questioned last July about the earlier offer, though, the NDP’s newly minted interim leader Nycole Turmel seemed curiously unconcerned: “[Mulcair] was contacted by a number of people, a number of political parties and he chose to come work with us. He chose the NDP and I’m proud of that. He’s a great candidate.”

When looked at a bit more closely, however, Turmel’s praise for this crypto-Likudnik comes across more as a perfunctory platitude than a genuine endorsement; in this case the riding, not the MP, is the prize.

Mulcair represents Outremont, a small, wealthy riding on the Island of Montreal, which he won in a 2007 by-election, thus making him the NDP’s (ta-da!) first MP from Quebec. Outremont has a substantial Jewish population, more than 20%; in the larger Labour riding of Mount Royal just to the south, represented by Israel-firster extraordinaire Irwin Cotler, it is 36%. If the NDP expects to make inroads into Quebec it is logical for it to compete for the Jewish vote, but how far is the NDP prepared to go to mortgage its principles for electoral advantage?

As party leader, Mulcair would be expected to protect his caucus colleagues from harassment and abuse from other parties, but in 2010 he sided with Labour and Likud to call for the resignation of fellow MP Libby Davies as NDP House Leader. Davies’s “crime” was to state that Israel’s occupation of Palestine began in 1948, not 1967. Her statement is a fact supported by historical documents that include admissions from leading political and military Israelis like David Ben Gurion and Gen. Moshe Dayan.

Mulcair’s contemptible attack on Davies’s basic freedom of expression, to say nothing of historical honesty, showed Mulcair’s true allegiance, and the threat he poses to this country. It doesn’t matter if he believes the zionist bilge he spews or whether he’s merely pandering to the Jewish community. By rights, he should have been expelled from the party for his misconduct.

If you are reading this and are a member of the federal NDP who plans to cast a vote at the leadership convention, ask yourself these questions before you vote:

1) Can Mulcair be trusted to put loyalty to Canada and the NDP ahead of his loyalty to Israel?

2) Would Mulcair stifle his MPs’ freedom of expression in the name of being an “ardent supporter”of Israel?

3) Would Mulcair’s overt zionism irreparably debase the NDP’s reputation as a party of law and justice?

If you answered 1) no; 2) yes; and 3) yes, then you can proudly claim to be a member in good standing of a national, Canadian political party. You know what not to do on March 24. No matter how much you may like Mulcair’s position on the environment or any other issue, anyone who bullies his own people, betrays his party’s principles, and sells out his country is unfit to lead the NDP, much less sit in the House of Commons.

As I said earlier, the NDP appears to many voters to be the only viable Canadian governing option left in this country. Don’t force them into a no-win scenario among Likud, Labour and Meretz!

Jose Marti was among the glorious legion of patriots who. throughout the second half of the 19th century, fought against the loathsome colonialism brandished by Spain for 300 years. Marti most clearly foresaw such a dramatic destiny and expressed this view in the last lines he would write prior to engaging in tough combat against a well-equipped and battle-hardened Spanish column. He declared that the primary objective of his struggles were “… preventing in time, by Cuba’s independence, that the United States should expand through the Antilles and pounce with that added strength on our lands of America. Everything that I have done up to now and will do in the future shall be done for this purpose.”

Today one cannot be a patriot or a revolutionary without thoroughly understanding this profound truth.

Without a doubt, the mass media, the monopoly of technical resources, and the substantial funds earmarked for misleading and making the masses mindless today represent considerable but not insurmountable obstacles.

Cuba showed that —despite being a factory of Yankee colonialism with widespread illiteracy and generalized poverty— it was possible to stand up to the country that threatened to definitively take over the Cuban nation. No one can argue that at the time there was a national bourgeoisie that was opposed to the empire. In fact, the Cuban bourgeoisie at the time had developed such close ties to the empire that, shortly following the triumph of the Revolution, it sent 14,000 unprotected children to the United States based on the horrendous lie that Cuba was to abolish parental authority. History would come to remember this event as Operation Peter Pan and as one of the worst manipulations of children for political ends ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

Barely two days after the triumph of the Revolution the national territory was invaded by mercenary forces —made up of former Batista soldiers and sons of landowners and the bourgeoisie— armed and escorted by the United States with ships from the US Navy fleet including aircraft carriers with equipment ready for action. The defeat and capture of almost the entire force of mercenaries in less than 72 hours, and the destruction of their planes that were operating out of Nicaraguan bases and naval transportation means, represented a humiliating defeat for the empire and their Latin American allies who had underestimated the Cuban people’s capacity to fight.

Responding to the stoppage of oil supplies from the US, the previous total suspension of traditional Cuban sugar quotas in the US market, and the ban on trade in place for more than 100 years, the USSR began to supply fuel, to buy our sugar, to trade with our country and, finally, to supply the arms that Cuba could not acquire in other markets.

The idea of a systematic campaign of pirate attacks organized by the CIA, sabotages and military actions by groups created and armed by the US, before and after the mercenary attack and that would culminate with the United States’ military invasion of Cuba, gave rise to the events that pushed the world to the brink of total nuclear war that no sides or even humanity itself would have survived.

Those events no doubt cost Nikita Jruschov his job. He had underestimated his adversary, ignored opinions and information, and did not consult his final decision with those of us who were in the frontline. What could have been a significant moral victory became a costly political setback for the USSR. For many years the US continued to commit the worst crimes against Cuba and many, such as its criminal blockade, are still carried out today.

Jruschov made extraordinary gestures to our country. At the time I did not hesitate in strongly criticizing the agreement reached with the United States without consultation. But it would be ungrateful and unjust to not acknowledge his extraordinary solidarity at difficult and decisive junctures for our people in their historic battle for independence and their revolution in face of the powerful US empire. I understand that the situation was extremely tense and that he did not want to lose a minute when he made his decision to remove the missiles and the Yankees, very secretly, agreed to not carry out their invasion.

Despite all the decades that have passed and make up more than half a century, the Cuban fruit has not fallen into Yankee hands.

Current news from Spain, France, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, England, the Malvinas and several other parts of the planet are serious and all foretell political and economic disaster due to the foolhardiness of the United States and its allies.

I will limit myself to just a few topics. I must point out that the campaign to select a Republican candidate as the possible future president of this globalized and far-reaching empire has become —I say this in all seriousness— the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been heard. But as I have things to do, I cannot dedicate any time to this topic. I knew it would be like this.

I prefer to analyze some other press dispatches that show the incredible cynicism generated by the decadence of the West. One of these reports, with amazing tranquility, tells the story of a Cuban “political prisoner” who, according to the article, died after a 50-day hunger strike. A journalist from Granma, Juventud Rebelde, radio or any other [Cuban] news agency might make a mistake writing on any given topic, but they would never make up a news story and fabricate a lie.

The article published in Granma confirms that the 50-day hunger strike did not take place. The prisoner was in jail for committing a common crime and sentenced to four years for an assault that left his wife’s face battered. The man’s own mother-in-law went to the police to request their help. All family members were aware of all the procedures taken regarding the medical care he received and were thankful of the efforts carried out by the specialist doctors who attended him. The article goes on to say that he received care at the best hospital in eastern Cuba, as any other citizen would have received. He died as a result of secondary multiple organ failure associated with an acute respiratory infection.

The patient had received all the available medical care from a country that possesses one of the best medical systems in the world and that provides these services free-of-charge, despite the empire’s blockade against our country. It simply represents a duty in a country where the Revolution proudly respects, as it always has for more than 50 years, the principles that gave it its invincible force.

Given their excellent relations with Washington, it would be best if the Spanish government went to the United States to take a look at what happens in Yankee prisons, their ruthless treatment of millions of prisoners, their electric chair policy, and the horrors committed against prisoners and public protesters.

On Monday, January 23, Granma published a full-page, hard-hitting editorial entitled Cuba’s Truths. The article details the exceptional degree of shamelessness in the latest campaign of lies launched against our Revolution by some governments “traditionally committed to anti-Cuban subversion.”

Our people are well aware of the standards that have governed over the irreproachable conduct of our Revolution since the first combat and that has never been sullied throughout more than half a century. They also know that they can never be pressured or blackmailed by their enemies. Our laws and regulations will invariably be abided by.

This is worthwhile to point out with total clarity and openness. The Spanish government and the beat-up European Union, in the midst of an acute economic crisis, should know what to abide by. It is a disgrace to read declarations from both regions in news reports that are full of shameless lies attacking Cuba. Try to save the Euro first if you can, try to resolve chronic unemployment that increasingly affects young people, and respond to the indignados who have only received attacks and constant beatings from the police.

We cannot ignore that those who currently govern in Spain are admirers of Franco, who sent members of the Blue Division along with SS and SA Nazis to kill Soviets. Close to 50,000 of them participated in the bloody attacks. In the most cruel and painful operation of that war, the Leningrad Blockade where one million Russian citizens died, the Blue Division were part of the forces that attempted to strangle the heroic city. The Russian people will never forgive that horrendous crime.

The right wing fascists led by Aznar, Rajoy and other servants of the empire must know about the 16,000 fatalities suffered by their predecessors of the Blue Division and the Iron Crosses that Hitler awarded the officials and soldiers of that division.

It is not a surprise then to see how the Gestapo police are treating the Spanish men and women who demand the right to work and bread in the country with the highest unemployment in Europe.

Why do the mass media outlets of the empire lie so shamelessly?

Those who control those media outlets are determined to deceive and make the world mindless with their gross lies, maybe believing that they represent the main recourse necessary to maintain the global system of domination and plunder, especially against those victims close to the mother country —the close to 70 million Latin Americans and Caribbean people who live in this hemisphere.

The fraternal republic of Venezuela has become one of the main targets of this policy. The reason is obvious. Without Venezuela, the empire would have imposed its Free Trade Agreement on all of the people of the continent living south of the United States; an area that holds the planet’s largest reserves of land, fresh water and minerals as well as great energy resources, which, when managed in solidarity with the other people in the world, constitutes resources which cannot and must not fall into the hands of transnationals that impose a suicidal and despicable system.

It is enough, for example, to look at the map to understand the criminal dispossession carried out against Argentina of a piece of its territory in the far south. In the Malvinas, the British employed their decadent military apparatus to assassinate inexperienced Argentine recruits dressed in summer clothing in the middle of winter. The United States and their ally Augusto Pinochet shamelessly supported England in this endeavor. Currently, with the London Olympics on the horizon, British Prime Minister David Cameron is once again proclaiming, as did Margaret Thatcher, his right to use nuclear submarines to kill Argentines. The British government is unaware that the world is changing and that the disdain felt in our hemisphere by the majority of the people against the oppressors is growing with each day.

The case of the Malvinas is not alone. Does anyone know how the conflict in Afghanistan will end? A few days ago US soldiers committed outrages against the bodies of Afghani combatants, killed by NATO drone aircraft.

Three days ago a European news agency published an article stating that Afghani President Hamid Karzai gave his support of a negotiated peace settlement with the Taliban, stressing that it must be resolved by citizens in his country. Hamid Karzai added that the peace and reconciliation process belongs to the Afghani nation and that no foreign country or organization can take away this right from Afghanis.

An article in the Cuban press written in Paris reported:

Today France suspended all its military training and support operations in Afghanistan and threatened to move up the date for the withdrawal of its troops after an Afghani soldier killed four French military officers in the Taghab valley in the province of Kapisa…Sarkozy gave instructions to Defense Minister Gerard Longuet to immediately travel to Kabul, and warned of the possibility of an early withdrawal of troops.

When the USSR and the Socialist Camp disappeared, the United States government thought that Cuba would not be able to support itself. George W. Bush had already prepared a counter-revolutionary government to preside over our country. The same day that Bush began his criminal war against Iraq, I requested that our authorities stop with the policy of tolerance towards the counter-revolutionary leaders in Cuba that had been hysterically calling for an invasion of Cuba. In reality, their actions constituted an act of treason against the Homeland.

Bush and his stupidities reigned for eight years at a time when the Cuban Revolution had already lasted for more than half a century. The ripe fruit has never fallen into the lap of the empire. Cuba will never become another force used by the empire to expand over the people of the Americas. Marti’s blood will not have been shed in vain.

Harper spoke of overwhelming evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. No evidence was provided.

That Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes caused Harper to respond, “I think there is absolutely no doubt they are lying. Absolutely no doubt.” The words “I think” and “absolutely no doubt” are linguistically at loggerheads. “I think” means “to have a belief or opinion”; beliefs and opinions imply uncertainty. They imply possibility of being wrong. They do not imply “absolutely no doubt.”

As for lying, there is a well-known saying that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks.”² Then again, one might argue who knows a liar better than another liar? To which one might retort, “How do you know the liar is not lying about someone being a liar?”

The state media CBC did not aid matters with its own piece of disinformation: “An IAEA report last fall said some of Iran’s clandestine activities could be for no other reason than a nuclear weapons program.” The IAEA report has been debunked by many. For example, the IAEA inspector never worked on nuclear weapons.³ Also,

The IAEA claim that a foreign scientist – identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko – had been involved in building the alleged containment chamber has now been denied firmly by Danilenko himself…⁴

The well-disinformed Harper reply to the CBC disinformation (why can a state media funded to the tune of $1.7 billion annually not get the story and facts right when a small independent internet newsletter with no budget can? What does it indicate?): “And that, I think, is just beyond dispute at this point.” [italics added] So thinks Harper. Harper added more opinion: “I think the only dispute is how far advanced it is.” [italics added]

Harper opined, “I’ve watched and listened to what the leadership in the Iranian regime says, and it frightens me.” First, the language is demonizing. How would Harper respond if his government were referred to as a “regime”? Second, as for frightening, how about a leaked October 2003 European Commission poll of 500 people from each of the EU’s member nations (n=7,500) who were presented a list of 15 nations and asked: “tell me if in your opinion it presents or not a threat to peace in the world.” The choice of 59 percent was Israel as the top threat to world peace.⁵

On this there is no dispute: Israel is in possession of nuclear weapons. Israel has launched plenty of wars with its neighbors. Why is the Israeli regime not frightening? Yet Israel is the country that Harper said would always have a “steadfast friend” in a Canadian Conservative government.

Harper opines again, “In my judgment, these are people who have a particular, you know, a fanatically religious worldview, and their statements imply to me no hesitation about using nuclear weapons if they see them achieving their religious or political purposes. And … I think that’s what makes this regime in Iran particularly dangerous.” [italics added]

How is that glass house doing? To talk about “a fanatically religious worldview” when you are allied with hard-Right Christian fundamentalism comes across as chutzpah.⁶

Harper contends, “While there’s, I think, a growing belief of a number of governments that my assessment is essentially correct, I think there’s still big uncertainty about what exactly to do.” [italics added]

Since Harper is so certain about the danger posed by Iran and its having nuclear weapons, what was Harper’s position on Iraq possessing weapons-of-mass-destruction?

It is inherently dangerous to allow a country such as Iraq to retain weapons of mass destruction, particularly in light of its past aggressive behaviour. If the world community fails to disarm Iraq, we fear that other rogue states will be encouraged to believe that they too can have these most deadly of weapons to systematically defy international resolutions and that the world will do nothing to stop them.⁷

Another time Harper said, “I don’t know all the facts on Iraq, but I think we should work closely with the Americans.”⁸

Today Iraq is a destroyed country, millions are refugees, upwards of 600,000 people were killed by a US-led invasion supported by Harper — despite his not knowing all the facts. Is this the credibility people would put their faith in?

Where was the background checks done by CBC News and their ace reporter Peter Mansbridge? What of the duty to report honestly and without prejudice? After all there is a good case that disinformation is a crime against humanity and a crime against peace.⁹

1. CBC News, “Iran ‘frightens me,’ Harper says: ‘Beyond dispute’ that Iran is building nuclear weapon, PM tells CBC,” CBC, 17 January 2012.
2. Even the Canadian Senate launched an inquiry into the lies of Harper. See althia.raj, “Senate launches an inquiry on Harper’s broken promises,” Eye on the Hill, 16 February 2011. See also “Five Years of Harper: A Legacy of Broken Promises“; “Broken promises piling up for Harper“; “Stephen Harpers Broken Promises: 100+ Reasons Not to Vote for Harper.”
3. See Gareth Porter, “IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons,” Dissident Voice, 10 November 2011.
4. Gareth Porter, “Ex-Inspector Rejects IAEA Iran Bomb Test Chamber Claim,” Dissident Voice, 19 November 19 2011.
5. See Peter Beaumont, “Israel outraged as EU poll names it a threat to peace,” Observer, 2 November 2003.
6. See Marci McDonald, “Stephen Harper and the Theo-cons: The rising clout of Canada’s religious right,” The Walrus, October 2006; Letters, “Harper and the religious right,” The Star, 13 May 2010.
7. Stephen Harper supporting the American invasion of Iraq, House of Commons, March 20, 2003. Accessed at In Their Own Words.
8. Stephen Harper, Report Newsmagazine, March 25th 2002. As it turned out, Harper wasn’t the only one who didn’t know all the facts. Accessed at In Their Own Words.
9. Kim Petersen, “Disinformation: A Crime Against Humanity and a Crime Against Peace,” Press Action, 17 February 2005.

“Yeah, I could use a decent vacation,” I replied, figuring he’d pay for both of us since he had just set the world record for the most nose jobs in a 24-hour period.

“What vacation?” he said. “I’m setting up practice.”

“And give up catering to rich people with inflated bank accounts and deflated ethics?”

“Don’t have a choice. I’m getting laid off.”

Comstock had been a rainmaker for the Megabucks Happy Health Care Medical Center for the past decade. There was only one reason I could think of why he’d be laid off.

“Megabucks tired of paying your malpractice insurance?” I asked.

“Not just me,” he said. “Hospital’s laying off most of the staff, making the rest work overtime, and hiring outside contractors. They said it was hard to survive when the profit was down to only 20 or so million a year.”

“I didn’t realize it was that serious,” I said. “You planning to set up private practice to help the poor in Mexico?” I asked admiringly.

“Not a chance! Gonna get rich working for Megabucks!”

“You just said you were laid off.”

“Been laid off in the U.S.,” said Comstock while putting a frozen burrito into the microwave.

“Megabucks/Mexico just hired me. There’s cheaper labor down there.”

“You crazy?” I asked. “You’re the cheaper labor.”

“Obviously you don’t know American business,” said Comstock haughtily.

“Megabucks/U.S. closes its auxiliary operations, and then contracts with Mexican companies for a fifth of the cost in the U.S. They do the work, ship it back to the U.S., and Megabucks bills Blue Cross the full rate as if it was done locally.”

“So where do you fit in?” I asked.

“Just as before. Nose jobs. Breast augmentations. Tummy tucks. All the important medical procedures. But this time, I do it in Cancun.”

“To rich Mexicans,” I said disgusted.

“To rich Americans!” said Comstock. “If they want the best care, they’ll take their private jets to Mexico and then deduct the trip as a necessary business expense.”

“And what about the impoverished and middle-class Americans?”

“If they can sneak across the border, they can also get medical care.”

“What about prescriptions?”

“Megabucks contracted with some of the best drug dealers—I mean pharmacists and chemists—in Mexico. Quality is just as good and it’ll only be four or five times production costs. Unlike the U.S. there’s no TV advertising and six-figure MBAs and lawyers that require drugs to be 30 or 40 times production costs.”

“With prices that low, how do you know there won’t be mass rushes by Americans to grab everything they can?”

“Because there’s security! Every hospital and pharmacy has armed guards with the best automatic weapons smuggled through the God-fearing 2nd Amendment patriotic Southern states.”

“Is Megabucks outsourcing all its operations?”

“Keeping the ER. After tummy tucks and butt lifts, that’s the hospital’s ‘cash cow.’”

“So, then, it’ll have to keep some services like X-Ray and the lab,” I said. “Maybe even a doctor or two.”

“Too expensive,” said Comstock. “Megabucks will hire more residents and foreign-educated doctors, and work them 18 hours a day. More work, less time to complain. Residents will do anything to get experience to pass their boards. May even hire a couple of hospitalists. You know, the ones who graduated at the bottom of their class and can’t even get work in a Free Clinic.”

“I suppose they’ll also do the lab work?” I asked.

“Do you know some of those lab techs are making as much as $30,000 a year! Made sense to lay them off, too.”

“So how will the ER know a victim’s blood chemistry, or if there’s internal injuries?”

“Technology,” said Comstock. “They scan the blood here, and send digital X-Rays to Mexico. Mexican lab technicians—you know, the ones that don’t know about unions and will work for only a few bucks a day—will analyze everything, then text the results back to the U.S.”

“This sounds like it’s not only a way to maximize profits, but also a way to avoid dealing with the President’s health care reform program.”

“Obamacare!” spit out Comstock. “Nothing but socialized medicine.”

“Most countries have forms of socialized medicine,” I countered, “and they not only have good health care but affordable prices to their citizens.”

Comstock put his hands to his ears and began chanting, “We’re Number 1, We’re Number 1.”

“Number 37,” I corrected him. “The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. just below Costa Rico.”

“They’re all Commies,” replied Comstock. “Besides, that study is a decade old.”

“Last year, the independent Commonwealth Fund compared the nations of the United Kingdom against the U.S., and the U.S. ranked seventh of the seven.”

“Yeah, like Americans will go to Canada? It’s covered by snow and run by a queen who can’t even speak English.”

“You and Megabucks are crazy!”

“Possibly,” said Comstock, “but outsourcing is the American way. By the way, do you put ketchup or mustard on a burrito?”

In this past year as the world witnessed uprisings from Santiago to Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, social media has been lauded as a weapon of mass mobilization. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent, wrote in his new book published this month Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, (excerpted in the Guardian) that this new communications technology was a “crucial” contributing factor to these revolutionary times. Nobel peace laureate and Burmese human rights campaigner, Aung San Suu Kyi, pointed out in a lecture in June that this “communications revolution…not only enabled [Tunisians] to better organize and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.” CNN even ran an article comparing Facebook to “democracy in action”, while Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was imprisoned in Egypt for starting a Facebook page told Wolf Blitzer that the revolution in Egypt “started on Facebook” and that he wanted to “meet Mark Zuckerberg some day and thank him personally.”

While the positive contributions of technology to social movements and uprisings have been been amply noted, if not overstated, more attention needs to be paid to the intrinsic dangers looming in the co-optation of this technology-driven networking, specifically by Washington, but by other repressive governments as well.

Clay Shirkey, professor of New Media at New York University, wrote in the January/February 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs that “the state is gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring, interdicting, or co-opting these tools.”

The Dangers of Digital Diplomacy

The Senate report, “Latin American Governments Need to ‘Friend’ Social Media and Technology” was written at the request of U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) in order to assess the U.S. Department of State’s use of digital diplomacy.

“Despite Latin America’s broad social and economic progress, many countries in the region still face challenges to democracy similar to those recently seen in the Middle East,” wrote Lugar in the introduction to the report. “In the extreme cases, countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are led by authoritarian leaders who curtail civil and political freedoms.”

The report urges improving internet infrastructure in the region, along with expanding the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter as essential in order to advance Washington’s foreign policy interests. This is also identified as a way to reassert Washington’s influence in a part of the world where it has been perceived to be waning since the Bush Administration and the subsequent rise of center-left governments in the region.

“In particular, the characteristics of Latin American social media use and engagement of connectivity resources…indicate that this area could be primed for substantial positive change in a manner similar in nature, if not in process, to that recently observed in the Middle East,” the report states.

The right-leaning journal Americas Quarterly praises this “smart idea” calling it “an innovative strategy to advance U.S. goals”, one of them being the need to “ramp up our data collection and research on the impact of social media and technology on fostering democracy in the region, particularly Venezuela.”

This all falls under what has been dubbed 21st Century Statecraft, the brainchild of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate re-branding—swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy—a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism,” explains the New York Times in a July 2010 article.

Described as a “marriage of Silicon Valley and the State Department,” Washington has turned to “Software engineers, entrepreneurs and tech C.E.O.’s…to think of unconventional ways to shore up democracy and spur development” abroad.

“On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does,” said Clinton in a speech on internet freedom in January 2010.

In August 2011 the Washington Post reported findings by the Lowy Institute for International Policy which show that U.S. State Department officials now operate some 230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 YouTube channels and 40 pages on Flickr.

But Judith McHale, former under secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department, gave a more honest assessment in March 2011 of what’s driving the State Department’s new initiative, stripped of the flowery and misleading language of freedom and democracy.

“New media and connective technologies enhance our ability to listen…Social media provides new ways for us to keep our ear to the ground,” said McHale. “Of course, we are not interested in developing social media platforms for the sake of having them. We are interested in applying social media to promote our strategic objectives in the Americas.”

But as history has shown, Washington’s strategic interests are often antithetical to freedom and human rights. And it is naïve to think that the State Department would be conducting this form of diplomacy in “a principled and regime-neutral fashion,” as intellectual apologists like Anne-Marie Slaughter may profess. And in Latin America, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries are undoubtedly in Washington’s cross-hairs.

During a June 30, 2011 Senate hearing,“The State of Democracy in the Americas”, Senator Lugar asked Roberta Jacobson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of the Western Hemisphere at the time, to name programs specifically targeting ALBA countries. Jackson noted in her answer that the “Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has programs that support media training in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador; these programs address the use and impact of social media, along with traditional topics such as independent journalism, investigative reporting, and overcoming self-censorship.”

All of these countries have democratically-elected governments, and while they all are struggling in varying ways to build stronger democratic institutions and to translate democratic rhetoric into functioning policy, Washington’s meddling in internal affairs through 21st Century Statecraft is dangerous for social movements and democratic activists.

The Social Networking Counterinsurgency

On February 3, 2011 the Senate held a hearing examining US intelligence agencies’ alleged lack of anticipation of the uprisings in Egypt. Afterwards, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said “she was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts on Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers of the protests against the Mubarak government,” the Washington Post reported. The CIA has an Open Source Center, where analysts based in a headquarters in an undisclosed location in Virginia, along with analysts in working in U.S. Embassies (“to get a step closer to their subjects”) throughout the world monitor as many as millions of tweets per day, along with Facebook updates and other open source media outlets.

Wired Magazine reported in July that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. Wired’s Adam Rawnsley points out:

It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself…SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out who’s behind it and what.

Furthermore, the military solicited contracts for the development of software to create fake Facebook personas, to be “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent,” the Raw Story reported in February. Private security contractor HB Gary has already been exposed for doing such a thing on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce as a way to “infiltrate left-leaning groups” in the country, as ThinkProgress revealed last year courtesy of 75,000 private company emails provided by the hactivst group Anonymous.

These strategies are particularly cynical given the following passage from Lugar’s Senate report:

Collaborators of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela recently hacked the Twitter accounts of opposition activists. Staff strongly believes that this example indicates how policy needs to take into consideration the extent repressive governments will take to silence democratic voices using this technology.

What officials seem to be saying is: never-mind what happens in this country. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring “social media sites, blogs, and forums throughout the world” isn’t important. And while US corporations are selling surveillance systems to repressive regimes, that’s just the free-market supply and demand economics at work.

And even if, “What elevated the [Occupy Wall Street] activism to a national and global movement, though, was the sophisticated and widespread use of social media,” as Betty Yu, national organizer at the Center for Media Justice, wrote last month, these same tools can, and are, being used to monitor, undermine and co-opt these and similar movements.

So if Washington approaches Latin American governments with aid for internet infrastructure and training, citizens and governments should approach this as a very loaded Trojan Horse.

I had become gravely ill on July 26, 2006, a month and a half prior to the summit, and could barely sit up in bed. Many of the most distinguished leaders who participated in the event were kind enough to visit me. Chavez and Evo visited me several times. One afternoon four visitors came by whom I will always remember: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; an old friend, Abdelaziz Buteflika, the president of Algeria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran; and the vice minister of Foreign Affairs and current Foreign Minister of China, Yang Jiechi, on behalf of the leader of the Communist Party and the president of China, Hu Jintao. It was really an important time for me; I was in the midst of intense physiotherapy on my right hand that I had seriously injured when I fell in Santa Clara.

With all four I spoke about some of the difficulties facing the world at the time; problems that have become progressively more complex.

During our meeting yesterday, I noted that the Iranian president was absolutely calm and tranquil, completely unconcerned about the Yankee threats and, fully confident in the capacity of his people to confront any aggression and in the effectiveness of their arms —which, in large part, they produce themselves— to inflict an unpayable price on its aggressors.

In reality, we hardly spoke about the topic of war. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was focused on the ideas he had presented at the Main Hall of the University of Havana during his conference on the struggle of humankind:

Moving towards reaching and achieving peace, security, respect and human dignity as a fundamental desire of all human beings throughout history.

I am convinced that Iran will not commit any rash actions that might contribute to setting off a war. If a war were to be unleashed, it would inevitably be completely as a result of the recklessness and congenital irresponsibility of the Yankee Empire.

I believe that the political situation surrounding Iran and the associated risks of a nuclear war that involves us all —regardless of whether one possess nuclear weapons— are extremely delicate because they threaten the very existence of our species. The Middle East has become the most troubled region on the planet, the same region that produces the energy resources vital for the world’s economy.

The destructive power and the mass sufferings caused by some of the weapons used in World War Two led to a strong movement to ban weapons such as asphyxiating gas and others. Nevertheless, conflicting interests and the huge profits made by arms manufacturers led to the production of crueler and more destructive weapons; modern technology has now added the means and material to build weapons that if used in a world war would lead to extinction.

I support the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all those with a basic sense of responsibility, that no country big or small has the right to possess nuclear weapons.

They never should have been used to attack two defenseless cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and irradiating with horrible and long-lasting effects hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, in a country that had already been militarily defeated.

If fascism indeed forced the allied nations against Nazism to compete with this enemy of humanity in the production of such weapons, once the war ended and the United Nations was created, the first duty of this organization should have been to prohibit nuclear weapons without exception.

However, the United States, the strongest and richest power, forced the rest of the world to follow its lead. Today, they have hundreds of satellites that spy and monitor the entire world from outer space. Their naval, air and land forces are equipped with thousands of nuclear weapons; and they control the world’s finances and investments at their whim via the International Monetary Fund.

Analyzing the history of each Latin American nation, from Mexico to Patagonia, by way of Santo Domingo and Haiti, one can observe that each and every country, without exception, have suffered for 200 years, from the beginning of the 19th century up until today. And, in one way or another, they are increasingly suffering the worst crimes that power and force can commit against the rights of a people. Brilliant Latin American writers are emerging in an increasing number. One of them, Eduardo Galeano, author of the book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that describes the aforementioned, has just been invited to open the prestigious Casa de Las Americas Awards as a recognition to his outstanding body of work.

Events happen incredibly fast; but technologies report them to the public even faster. On any given day, like today, important news comes out a dizzying pace. A cable report dated from January 11 states:

The Danish presidency of the European Union confirmed on Wednesday that a new series of more severe European sanctions against Iran, because of its nuclear program, will be discussed on January 23. The new sanctions will not only target the oil industry but also the Central Bank.

During a meeting with international journalists, Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal said that “We will increase sanctions against the oil industry in addition to sanctions against financial structures.” This clearly demonstrates that, in order to impede nuclear proliferation, Israel can go on accumulating hundreds of nuclear warheads while Iran is not allowed to produce 20% enriched uranium.

Another article, from a respected British news agency, states that “China gave no hint on Wednesday of giving ground to U.S. demands to curb Iran’s oil revenues, rejecting Washington’s sanctions on Tehran as overstepping …”

The sheer tranquility with which the United States and civilized Europe carry out this campaign with incredible and systematic acts of terrorism is enough to shock anybody. Just look at these lines reported by another important European news agency:

The murder on Wednesday of Iranian nuclear specialist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan [a scientist at the Natanz nuclear plant] was the fourth attack to kill a leading scientist in the country in almost exactly two years.

On January 12, 2010:

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at Tehran University is killed when a booby-trapped motorcycle explodes outside his home in the capital.

On November 29, 2010:

Two attacks target leading Iranian nuclear scientists on the same day. Majid Shahriari, a key member of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, is killed in Tehran by a limpet bomb attached to his car. His colleague Fereydoon Abbasi Davani is also targeted by a bomb attached to his car, but escapes.

The car was parked in front of the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran where both men worked as professors.

On July 23, 2011:

Gunmen shoot dead Dariush Rezaei-Nejad, a senior scientist who is reportedly associated with the defense ministry, and wound his wife as they waited for their child outside a Tehran kindergarten.

On January 11, 2012 —the same day that Ahmadinejad travelled from Nicaragua to Cuba to give a conference at the University of Havana—, scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, “a deputy director at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, is killed in a car bomb blast outside the [Allameh Tabatabai] University in east Tehran.” As in previous years “Iran once again accused the United States and Israel.”

The killings represent a systematic and selective slaughter of brilliant Iranian scientists. I have read articles by known Israeli sympathizers who write about crimes carried out by Israeli intelligence services in cooperation with the United States and NATO as if they were the most normal occurrence.

At the same time, Moscow news agencies report that “Russia warned that in Syria a similar scenario is developing as to that in Libya, and added that this time the attack will be launched from neighboring Turkey.

The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said the West wants to ‘punish Damascus not as much for repressing the opposition, but because it is unwilling to sever ties with Tehran.

…NATO members and some Persian Gulf states, operating according to the Libya scenario, intend to move from indirect intervention in Syrian affairs to direct military intervention…This time the main strikes forces will not be provided by France, the U.K. or Italy, but possibly by neighboring Turkey.

Washington and Ankara are now assumed to be negotiating a “no-fly” zone over Syria, where Syrian armed insurgents can be trained and concentrated, added Patrushev.

News is not only coming out of Iran and the Middle East, but also from other parts of Central Asia near the Middle East. These reports show the great complexity of the problems that can arise from this dangerous region.

The United States has been led by its contradictory and absurd imperial policy to get involved in serious problems in countries such as Pakistan, whose borders with Afghanistan were drawn up by the colonialists without taking into account culture or ethnicities.

In Afghanistan, which defended its independence against English colonialism for centuries, drug production has multiplied in the wake of the Yankee invasion. Meanwhile, European soldiers, supported by drone airplanes and armed with sophisticated US weapons, carry out deplorable massacres that increase the people’s hatred and ward off any possibilities of peace. All this and other dirty actions are also reported by Western news agencies.

WASHINGTON, January 12, 2012 – US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called the actions of four U.S. marines who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan “utterly deplorable” The video of the act was circulated in the Internet.

I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable…

This conduct is entirely inappropriate for members of the United States military and does not reflect the standards of values our armed forces are sworn to uphold…

In reality, Panetta neither confirms nor denies the action, and anyone, including the Secretary of Defense himself, may harbor doubt.

But it is also extremely inhumane that men, women and children, or an Afghani combatant fighting against the foreign occupation, be murdered by bombs dropped by drone planes. Another very serious incident: dozens of Pakistani soldiers and officials who safeguarded the country’s borders have been killed by these bombs.

Afghani President Karzai stated that the outrage committed against the bodies was “simply inhumane.” He asked for the US government “to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

Meanwhile Taliban spokespersons declared that “over the last ten years, hundreds of similar acts have been carried out that were not reported…”

One even feels sorry for those soldiers, thousands of kilometers away from their family, friends and country, sent to fight in countries that they might not have even heard of during their school days, where they are assigned the task of killing or dying to enrich transnational companies, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous politicians who each year squander funds needed to feed and educate the uncountable millions of hungry and illiterate people around the world.

Many of these soldiers, victims of the trauma suffered, end up taking their own lives.

Is it an exaggeration to say that world peace is hanging by a thread?

The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.

Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.

It turns out that almost none of the money that the general public thought was going to Haiti actually went directly to Haiti.  The international community chose to bypass the Haitian people, Haitian non-governmental organizations and the government of Haiti.  Funds were instead diverted to other governments, international NGOs, and private companies.

Despite this near total lack of control of the money by Haitians, if history is an indication, it is quite likely that the failures will ultimately be blamed on the Haitians themselves in a “blame the victim” reaction.

Haitians ask the same question as many around the world “Where did the money go?”

Here are seven places where the earthquake money did and did not go.

One.  The largest single recipient of US earthquake money was the US government.  The same holds true for donations by other countries.

Right after the earthquake, the US allocated $379 million in aid and sent in 5000 troops.  The Associated Press discovered that of the $379 million in initial US money promised for Haiti, most was not really money going directly, or in some cases even indirectly, to Haiti.  They documented in January 2010 that thirty three cents of each of these US dollars for Haiti was actually given directly back to the US to reimburse ourselves for sending in our military.  Forty two cents of each dollar went to private and public non-governmental organizations like Save the Children, the UN World Food Program and the Pan American Health Organization.  Hardly any went directly to Haitians or their government.

The overall $1.6 billion allocated for relief by the US was spent much the same way according to an August 2010 report by the US Congressional Research Office: $655 million was reimbursed to the Department of Defense; $220 million to Department of Health and Human Services to provide grants to individual US states to cover services for Haitian evacuees; $350 million to USAID disaster assistance; $150 million to the US Department of Agriculture for emergency food assistance; $15 million to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration fees, and so on.

International assistance followed the same pattern.  The UN Special Envoy for Haiti reported that of the $2.4 billion in humanitarian funding, 34 percent was provided back to the donor’s own civil and military entities for disaster response, 28 percent was given to UN agencies and non-governmental agencies (NGOs) for specific UN projects, 26 percent was given to private contractors and other NGOs, 6 percent was provided as in-kind services to recipients, 5 percent to the international and national Red Cross societies, 1 percent was provided to the government of Haiti, four tenths of one percent of the funds went to Haitian NGOs.

Two.  Only 1 percent of the money went to the Haitian government.

Less than a penny of each dollar of US aid went to the government of Haiti, according to the Associated Press.   The same is true with other international donors.  The Haitian government was completely bypassed in the relief effort by the US and the international community.

Three.   Extremely little went to Haitian companies or Haitian non-governmental organizations.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research, the absolute best source for accurate information on this issue, analyzed all the 1490 contracts awarded by the US government after the January 2010 earthquake until April 2011 and found only 23 contracts went to Haitian companies.  Overall the US had awarded $194 million to contractors, $4.8 million to the 23 Haitian companies, about 2.5 percent of the total.  On the other hand, contractors from the Washington DC area received $76 million or 39.4 percent of the total.  As noted above, the UN documented that only four tenths of one percent of international aid went to Haitian NGOs.

In fact, Haitians had a hard time even getting into international aid meetings.  Refugees International reported that locals were having a hard time even getting access to the international aid operational meetings inside the UN compound.  “Haitian groups are either unaware of the meetings, do not have proper photo-ID passes for entry, or do not have the staff capacity to spend long hours at the compound.”  Others reported that most of these international aid coordination meetings were not even being translated into Creole, the language of the majority of the people of Haiti!

Four.  A large percentage of the money went to international aid agencies, and big well connected non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The American Red Cross received over $486 million in donations for Haiti.  It says two-thirds of the money has been contracted to relief and recovery efforts, though specific details are difficult to come by.  The CEO of American Red Cross has a salary of over $500,000 per year.

Look at the $8.6 million joint contract between the US Agency for International Development (USAID) with the private company CHF for debris removal in Port au Prince. CHF is a politically well-connected international development company with an annual budget of over $200 million whose CEO was paid $451,813 in 2009. CHF’s connection to Republicans and Democrats is illustrated by its board secretary, Lauri Fitz-Pegado, a partner with the Livingston Group LLC.  The Livingston Group is headed by the former Republican Speaker-designate for the 106th Congress, Bob Livingston, doing lobbying and government relations.  Ms. Fitz-Pegado, who apparently works the other side of the aisle, was appointed by President Clinton to serve in the Department of Commerce and served as a member of the foreign policy expert advisor team on the Obama for President Campaign.  CHF “works in Haiti out of two spacious mansions in Port au Prince and maintains a fleet of brand new vehicles” according to Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone, in an excellent article by Janet Reitman, reported on another earthquake contract, a $1.5 million contract to the NY based consulting firm Dalberg Global Development Advisors.  The article found Dalberg’s team “had never lived overseas, didn’t have any disaster experience or background in urban planning… never carried out any program activities on the ground…” and only one of them spoke French.  USAID reviewed their work and found that “it became clear that these people may not have even gotten out of their SUVs.”

Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton announced a fundraising venture for Haiti on January 16, 2010.  As of October 2011, the fund had received $54 million in donations.  It has partnered with several Haitian and international organizations.  Though most of its work appears to be admirable, it has donated $2 million to the construction of a Haitian $29 million for-profit luxury hotel.

“The NGOs still have something to respond to about their accountability, because there is a lot of cash out there,” according to Nigel Fisher, the UN’s chief humanitarian officer in Haiti.  “What about the $1.5 to $2 billion that the Red Cross and NGOs got from ordinary people, and matched by governments?  What’s happened to that?  And that’s where it’s very difficult to trace those funds.”

Five.  Some money went to for profit companies whose business is disasters.

Less than a month after the quake hit, the US Ambassador Kenneth Merten sent a cable titled “THE GOLD RUSH IS ON” as part of his situation report to Washington.  In this February 1, 2010 document, made public by The Nation, Haiti Liberte and Wikileaks, Ambassador Merten reported the President of Haiti met with former General Wesley Clark for a sales presentation for  a Miami-based company that builds foam core houses.

Capitalizing on the disaster, Lewis Lucke, a high ranking USAID relief coordinator, met twice in his USAID capacity with the Haitian Prime Minister immediately after the quake.  He then quit the agency and was hired for $30,000 a month by a Florida corporation Ashbritt (known already for its big no bid Katrina grants) and a prosperous Haitian partner to lobby for disaster contracts.  Locke said “it became clear to us that if it was handled correctly the earthquake represented as much an opportunity as it did a calamity…”Ashbritt and its Haitian partner were soon granted a $10 million no bid contract.  Lucke said he was instrumental in securing another $10 million contract from the World Bank and another smaller one from CHF International before their relationship ended.

Six.  A fair amount of the pledged money has never been actually put up.

The international community decided it was not going to allow the Haiti government to direct the relief and recovery funds and insisted that two institutions be set up to approve plans and spending for the reconstruction funds going to Haiti.  The first was the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) and the second is the Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF).

In March 2010, UN countries pledged $5.3 billion over two years and a total of $9.9 billion over three years in a conference March 2010.  The money was to be deposited with the World Bank and distributed by the IHRC.  The IHRC was co-chaired by Bill Clinton and the Haitian Prime Minister.  By July 2010, Bill Clinton reported only 10 percent of the pledges had been given to the IHRC.

Seven.  A lot of the money which was put up has not yet been spent.

Nearly two years after the quake, less than 1 percent of the $412 million in US funds specifically allocated for infrastructure reconstruction activities in Haiti had been spent by USAID and the US State Department and only 12 percent has even been obligated according to a November 2011 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The performance of the two international commissions, the IHRC and the HRF has also been poor.  The Miami Herald noted that as of July 2011, the $3.2 billion in projects approved by the IHRC only five had been completed for a total of $84 million.  The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which was severely criticized by Haitians and others from its beginning, has been effectively suspended since its mandate ended at the end of October 2011.  The Haiti Reconstruction Fund was set up to work in tandem with the IHRC, so while its partner is suspended, it is not clear how it can move forward.

What to do

The effort so far has not been based on a respectful partnership between Haitians and the international community.   The actions of the donor countries and the NGOs and international agencies have not been transparent so that Haitians or others can track the money and see how it has been spent.  Without transparency and a respectful partnership the Haitian people cannot hold anyone accountable for what has happened in their country.  That has to change.

The UN Special Envoy to Haiti suggests the generous instincts of people around the world must be channeled by international actors and institutions in a way that assists in the creation of a “robust public sector and a healthy private sector.”  Instead of giving the money to intermediaries, funds should be directed as much as possible to Haitian public and private institutions.  A “Haiti First” policy could strengthen public systems, promote accountability, and create jobs and build skills among the Haitian people.

Respect, transparency and accountability are the building blocks for human rights.  Haitians deserve to know where the money has gone, what the plans are for the money still left, and to be partners in the decision-making for what is to come.

After all, these are the people who will be solving the problems when the post-earthquake relief money is gone.

- the homelands of a number of the world’s nations;

- the productivity and reliability of global agriculture; and,

- likely more of the world’s biodiversity, and faster than in any other period in geological history.

Maybe there are physical forces making disaster inevitable, or maybe what is happening is within the control of human free will, but the window of opportunity for the latter is rapidly closing.  Hopefully it is not entirely shut yet.

Global warming may be lethal, but it is still only one of Earth’s  illnesses.  A debt-ridden, overpopulated, hungry and warring humanity is shredding the biosphere, home to billions of beautiful and innocent creatures like the family of mergansers you see, and at the same time facing “peak everything,” with fossil fuels at the top of the list, along with many of the minerals essential for agriculture and high technology.¹  Our erstwhile governments and most of the seven billion, or if you prefer, the 99%, are sitting in a stupor as if paralyzed.

Some, last spring’s Middle Eastern protesters and the Occupiers around the world in recent months, were awoken by a Middle Eastern fruit vendor who immolated himself. This appeal is made by one of the seven billion, from a tiny American town not far from the home of Henry David Thoreau.  Thoreau, explaining why he went to jail rather than pay his head tax to support the Mexican-American War, wrote, “It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.”  That was also the message of the fruit vendor who sacrificed his life for us all.  There is very little evidence that the world’s governments are willing or capable of taking decisive action, so it is up to us, the 99%, or however many of us are willing, to “leaven the lump” and bring back the world from the precipice.

This article will argue that we the people, and more specifically those of us who call ourselves “green,” are losing the battle to stop global warming, and many other battles largely because we all, or at least too many of us, have been indoctrinated to forget:

- Mr. Thoreau’s other reminder, that ‘The government  is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will”;

- what “conservationists” understood before Earth Day 1970, that every environmental problem has its roots in “too many people using too much stuff”;

- what Thoreau and Gandhi and many others have taught us — that relinquishment of material wants is empowerment, not self-sacrifice; and,

- the foremost teaching of religion and spiritualism and ethics for at least four millennia — the Golden Rule.

We are all guilty.  So we need to resolve now to reinstate those principles in our personal lives and the life of society, not tomorrow but today.  It’s a tall order, but, in fact, we are coming so close to destroying civilization and the earth, that only a rethinking of fundamental values will save us.

What is more difficult to understand than that we have been losing the battles against environmental and human injustice is that the people  of the Baby Boom, now in power around the world, or at least in the United States, grew up in the shadow of a great man, John Kennedy, who said, “Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.”² We believed him then, and indeed it seems self-evident, doesn’t it? So we can believe him now. Yet most of us sit as if paralyzed.

On the global warming front in particular, the test case for survival of the Earth, all the talk and agreements and campaigns since the eighties have not even created a “blip” in the seemingly inexorable rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, never deviating in the slightest from a course followed for half a century.³

If the cacophony since the eighties has resulted in any progress, it is not apparent in the physical world, is it?  There are those who say that the talk alone is a sign of progress, and they may be right.  But not for Mama Nature.

Look what’s happened in the last few weeks.  This is what you already know if you’ve been paying attention.

1. International Energy Agency (IEA) scientists, the ones the world pays to know, announced that we have about five years (that’s until 2016, just around the corner) to put a stop to increased greenhouse-gas emissions before global warming gets completely out of control.  Their reasoning was economic.  When you build a power plant or tar sands oil pipeline or widget-manufacturing facility, you expect to pay for the investment out of the sale of electricity or tar sands oil or widgets.  So the construction locks everyone in to producing the widgets or oil or electricity, and if that causes CO2 emissions, the economics make it much harder to cut the emissions than before the construction happened.

Five years from now the expenditures will have been made that lock us into emissions that will cause more than 2 degrees C of warming.  The time to halt the emissions is now, not after many costly new  CO2-generating plants and pipelines have been built, which must somehow be paid for.  “The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, says. “If we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.” ⁴  Forever!

2. The IEA scientists also announced that global warming is happening much faster than expected; and unless practices and policies change very rapidly, global warming could easily be 3 degrees C by 2050, 6 degrees C (11 degrees F) by 2100.  The politicians had made an official finding at Copenhagen that anything more than a 2-degree warming, any time sooner than the end of the century, would have unacceptable environmental and economic impacts. Three times the warming by century’s end or 50% more in less than half the time?

We’re in trouble.  The unacceptable is becoming the inevitable.  It’s getting so warm in the arctic that (a) the ice is rapidly disappearing, which causes more sunlight to be absorbed and less reflected, which in turn means the earth heating up rapidly just because of that regardless of how how much more CO2 we put into the sky, and (b) methane is bubbling up  from under where the ice used to be and from formerly frozen peat – LOTS of methane, which is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful. than CO2 on a 100-year average basis, and even several times worse than that on an immediate short-term basis  The methane emissions will just keep coming faster, and like the missing ice, they’ll create their own global warming without regard to CO2.

3. There was also agreement at Copenhagen  for the protection of the more vulnerable countries that will be annihilated by rising seas, the 2-degree ceiling should be reconsidered no later than 2015 to be possibly lowered to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).

4. As the politicians were about to fly into Durban on highly-polluting planes to talk about global warming, it was announced that 2010 had seen a 5.6% increase in world CO2 emissions, the largest gross increase in human history.  And that’s with the Kyoto protocols in effect as much as they have ever been.  The problem is, of course, that China and the US, the biggest emitters, don’t have to do anything at all under Kyoto, and Europe, which at least gives lip service to it, uses paper emissions trading said by some to be 90% fraudulent. ⁵

5. The politicians flew into Durban knowing that:

-  Kyoto is hardly working at all and in particular that under Kyoto we just saw the largest increase in CO2 emissions in history;

-  we’ve got five years to put into effect something that will halt further commitments to emissions increases;

- they had promised to reconvene in 2015 to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees to protect the more vulnerable nations; and,

- warming is now happening much more and much sooner than the maximum they had declared acceptable at Copenhagen.

6.  What was their Kyoto protocols response?

- they agreed to extend Kyoto, due to lapse next year;

- they agreed to try to come up with a new plan in 2020, already four years after the scientists say it will be too late, five years after they had promised to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees, and thirty years after Kyoto; and,

- they declared a victory and went home for the holidays.

7.  As soon as the folks in Durban announced the extension of Kyoto, Canada announced it was going to walk out of the treaty.  Bad medicine.  Why? Because Canadian tar sands oil is just as polluting as conventional oil when it is consumed, but more polluting in the refining process and the greater source of emissions for tar sands oil is where it’s gotten out of the ground rather than where it is ultimately used.  Tar sands oil will:

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is produced in Canada, where the emissions will be completely uncontrolled with Canada out of the treaty; and,

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is consumed – in the US if the Keystone XL pipeline is built, or elsewhere via a Pacific Coast pipeline if the Keystone XL pipeline is not built.

There are those who say that if the pipeline is built, the battle to halt global warming is lost forever, and they are likely right. ⁶  The same is true by the same logic, of course, if the pipeline is not built but the oil is sent elsewhere.

2010 was a bad year for CO2 emissions?  You ain’t seen nothin’.

8. In the meantime,  the government and industry have been busy working to bring Canadian tar sands oil into the US, for all the world as if we should never cease burning oil.  Back in Washington, thanks to 350.org and William Mckibben surrounding the White House with protesters, President Obama said he would postpone approval of the pipeline until there had been further environmental studies done.  Good!   Of course, if the pipeline is blocked, the oil will likely go out to the Pacific Coast by a much more environmentally damaging pipeline route, and will be used elsewhere.⁷  Oh well, at least the US won’t be blamed for the inevitable massive increases in emissions, even if Mama Nature can’t tell the difference. So 350.org declared a victory and the protesters went home for the holidays.

9. And then there is “fracked” shale gas, an immense new source of natural gas, which will become its own immense new source of greenhouse gas emissions.  Anyone who cares about global warming knows that the only thing to do with new fossil fuels is to leave them in the ground at least until there is a global warming treaty, and not make investments in their exploitation that will have to be repaid through their sale. “Fracking”, even if it could be done “cleanly”, is for economic reasons, one more pound of nails in the earth’s coffin.

10. Last but perhaps more appropriately first, the UN recently admitted for the first time that its projected world population of 9 billion by mid-century, already more than can be fed sustainably under any plausible scenario without corresponding increases in fossil fuel consumption, is going to keep spiraling upward to over 10 billion by the end of the century.  The farther we go in that direction, the more locked in we will be to impossibly destructive CO2 emissions, not to mention impossibly destructive losses of remaining forest lands.  As was pointed out years ago, the really “inconvenient truth” about global warming is that uncontrolled population growth means uncontrolled global warming.⁸

Of course, we should have known that our efforts at Durban would fail.  The politicians flew to Copenhagen, accomplished very little, declared victory and went home.  With both the United States and China refusing to commit to anything legally binding, the possibility of meeting the 2 degree ceiling is receding into fantasy-land.  Talks began before 1990, and now the earliest we could even hope for a treaty binding on the largest emitters is more than 30 years later. And the biosphere hangs in the balance.

To this writer what is more difficult to understand about the present state of affairs is this.  We greens will have been hard at work over thirty years trying to convince the governments to do the only thing that can be done about global warming: at this point to tell us to stop putting so much CO2 in the air.  What we have to show for it is thirty years of steadily increasing emissions with no end in sight.  If we fail to get the governments to order us to stop polluting, what stops us from doing it ourselves without orders?  However difficult that may be, what more realistic alternatives do we have, and why does there seem to be resistance to the idea?

The mainstream environmental groups are very vague about who will, in fact, have to stop polluting, and how much, but the truth is that to reach the goals we assert to be needed, we will have to decrease our driving radically, decrease our consumption of electricity radically, decrease our consumption of home heating fuels radically, etc. How much? Probably at least 80% because in the thirty years between Kyoto and our next meeting date, huge volumes of CO2 will have been added to the atmosphere, making additional heating for the next century inevitable.

You and I have to make those cuts or leave an almost unlivable earth to our descendants, yet we go on using whatever fossil fuels are available as if there were no concerns, making small efforts like purchase of hybrid vehicles, which fail to show up on the chart.  “Alternatives” (e.g., solar electricity, biofuels, “hybrids,” etc.) are there, but they appear at this point to be too little, too late.  And when environmentalists talk about decreasing emissions, there are always two fundamental approaches – conservation (e.g., drive less) or efficiency (e.g., fuel efficiency standards).  We hear proposals for the latter, (which have not been shown to be sufficient soon enough, not to mention that they are fleeting at best because they will be negated by population increases), but not proposals for the former.

Forty years ago, it was gospel that the root causes underlying almost all deterioration of the environment were “too many people using too much stuff.”  The fundamental solutions, then, were fewer people using less stuff. For close to four decades, however, the mainline environmental organizations have had a conspiracy of silence about the “too many people” part.  And when it comes to “stuff,” there is a lot of talk about “sustainable alternatives” (clean energy, hybrid vehicles, etc.) but very little talk about “less stuff” –- before Earth Day we called ourselves “conservationists,” but now the major environmental groups hardly talk about conservation at all.  It’s as if the former “conservationists” have acquired a conspiracy of silence about conservation itself as well as population.

From people who saw the root cause as “too many people using too much stuff,”  mainstream professional environmentalists have become folks who won’t say there are too many people and won’t say they use too much stuff.  Of course, the GDP is measured by how many people there are and how much “stuff” they create in monetary terms, so “too many people using too much stuff” is almost the same thing as too high a GDP. Admitting that in today’s world is trouble, so we seek “sustainable growth”.

As has been observed, “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.  In the global warming context the weakness of the “alternatives” approach (which is also the “sustainable growth” approach) is self-evident.  You build a car with greater fuel efficiency, and that just allows more driving or a larger population of drivers.  The amount of fuel used has to be addressed head-on, but that doesn’t seem to be happening in active programs among the mainline environmental groups.  No wonder we lose.  This blindness shows up directly when it comes to global warming — a refusal to talk about people actually using less of what generates greenhouse emissions.  We don’t want to talk about conservation, yet expect the government to impose it.  Huh?

The primary stumbling block to implementation of the Copenhagen goals was that both the United States and China refused to make any legally binding commitment at all.  When this writer reviewed Copenhagen from his personal point of view⁹, he pointed out that there was little on the horizon that would make the outcome different in future attempts to reach an accord, and said (I’ll repeat verbatim because the facts above only demonstrate that what was apparently true then is unquestionably true now, two years deeper into the hole. For the reader’s convenience, endnotes and inter-lineations are provided for further clarification.)

We are left with the two largest GHG emitters, the United States and China, unwilling to commit to binding goals for reduction. All the while, there’s little hope that the public can introduce any sort of meaningful change in this situation. At the same time, the rest, the signers of the Kyoto accords, increased their emissions when the protocols called for decreases. So much for governments.

All considered, we have lost twenty years [now 31, since the parties at Durban postponed further discussions until 2020] for bringing about meaningful climate change mitigation and we have little time left because every year that the atmospheric CO2 load increases, there is even a lesser chance that the dangerous processes can be reversed. Meanwhile, we clearly face governments in the hands of corporations and corporations blind to any need that could adversely affect the next quarterly report. Are these conditions going to change in the few years we have? It is unlikely. The concerned public has thus far proved incapable of accomplishing meaningful governmental and corporate programs to halt global warming, so how can we have confidence except in more of the same until time runs out?

Is it hopeless? Apparently so if we are going to depend on the governments and the corporations. Yet in taking that position, we are putting aside an “inconvenient truth” – inconvenient because we might rather put responsibility on irresistible forces out there in the universe than on ourselves.

The inconvenient truth is that there are few, if any, human CO2 emissions not the result of our own individual and collective consumer decisions. There are our direct uses of fossil fuels for transportation and home heating, there is the electricity we consume that is generated by burning fossil fuels or, more recently, biofuels and biomass. There is the energy consumed in production and transport of our food and consumer products. Why?  The catalogue is, in fact, the same catalogue that would have to be dealt with under a global treaty!

So, in fact, we the people, in the United States and all over the world, have no need to wait until we are forced by government programs to take the steps necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. We can do what we’ve been waiting for the governments and corporations to do, and because they are doing nothing, we no longer have any alternative except to make the changes ourselves.

Are we so childish that we can do nothing except whine that we haven’t been told what to do when the future of the earth, the future of humanity, depends upon action? Maybe the answer is yes. I don’t know what you will do, and I don’t know what I will do. Yet if we do not want to be responsible, individually and collectively for the horrors to come, then we must, individually and collectively, say no to any more greenhouse emissions than the scientists say are safe.

Henry Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi taught us that our needs are much less than our wants and that we can peacefully bring down governments and corporations by refusing to accept their measures of our needs.

Thoreau is widely viewed as the originator of civil disobedience as a moral and civic duty, especially in all societies aspiring to democracy. He believed that the Mexican-American war was immoral, yet he found himself requested to pay a head tax to finance the war.  So he said no, and went to jail. We shall never know how far he would have taken the experiment, because his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, over his objection, paid the tax and got him released.

In explaining why he viewed refusal to pay the tax as his duty, he said:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.¹⁰

Obviously we have not wiped our hands of global warming when we buy the fuels or the electricity or consumer goods and not only create  emissions but finance our opponents as Thoreau’s head tax financed the war.  We will not, by ourselves, have stopped global warming, but the example will be seen, and our willingness to make sacrifices for reductions in emissions will for the first time be unquestionable.

As Thoreau explained:

It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing.

Rather, if substantial numbers of people refuse to pay the profiteers  or to engage in throwing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will demonstrate their sincerity in a manner that cannot be accomplished by just asking the government to do something.  We shall, hopefully, “leaven the whole lump,” and, ideally, slow the growth of demand for products destroying the earth.  There will be less profit in building the power plants and pipelines about to lock us into failure, and we can sleep better in the knowledge that we “washed our hands off it”. Besides, nothing else that has been suggested will work.

The core teaching of “Civil Disobedience” is, as Martin Luther King saw it, “Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”  As consumers and users and financial contributors to the makers of the pollutants that are destroying the earth, its biodiversity, and its agricultural productivity for millions of years to come, we must demonstrate our opposition with noncooperation.  Why?    Because:

- it is a moral duty;

- it will “leaven the whole lump”; and,

- nothing else is working at all.

Another important part of Thoreau’s teachings is his examination of our ability and responsibility to reduce our material consumption to the core at which we can carry on our lives as principled members of the community without either imposing on others, depriving ourselves of freedom or violating our own moral beliefs.  That is Walden, which forces us to understand that consumerism locks us out from living our lives with integrity and freedom.  It’s a message essential for giving up the material “needs” for which we are destroying the earth.

Gandhi’s self-imposed poverty gives us the same message — that abandonment of material needs is empowerment, not self-sacrifice.  It’s a view, of course, that is anathema to the global corporations that control our lives through the culture of materialism. Without that understanding, it is unlikely that Americans can voluntarily relinquish their “rights” to a standard of living Russia’s President Putin and undoubtedly millions or billions of others have rightly called parasitism.  As long as Americans maintain that view, they are playing with the danger that the world will quickly and painfully take away the material “rights” they enjoy at everyone else’s expense –- “rights” that will soon be gone in any event as “peak everything” imposes itself on us. To fail to make a virtue of a necessity is the height of folly.

Remember Gandhi’s spinning wheel?  It was a simple declaration of independence from British capitalism, a statement that India could do without the capitalists. “Mahatma Gandhi Album: the Man and the Wheel,”  To the extent we liberate ourselves from the causes of global warming, so will we also liberate ourselves from the corporations of Wall Street which act in arrogant confidence that we are ever their dependents and ever in debt to them.  If we step away from the shiny things they produce, they will have no power over us, so it is time to do it in small ways and large.

 It is time to stop waiting for governments to act as we expected them to act at Kyoto long ago and at Copenhagen [more than two years ago and at Durban most recently].

At this point, exclusively focusing on government action is little more than avoidance of the inconvenient truth of our individual and collective responsibility. So we must get on with the show — convincing and helping ourselves, convincing and helping our neighbors, convincing and helping humanity to reduce CO2 emissions by all means within our power to reach the goals and timelines the scientists are telling us we must meet. We must do it with the good will and generosity so lacking in Copenhagen because our “leaders” showed us in Copenhagen [and Durban] that the needed changes assuredly will not happen otherwise.

There is a little catch. The fundamental rule of social behavior, raised to a pinnacle by “free-market” economics, has been for generations, in the words of 1952 U.S. Progressive Party Presidential nominee Vincent Hallinan, “Fuck you Jack, I got mine!” That is unnatural and unsustainable.

Every major religious text, back at least as far as the Egyptian Book of the Dead [four millenia ago], has taught us in substance, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

For specific wording of the rule in twenty of the world’s religions, see  ”Universality of the Golden Rule“. The rule explicitly dictates behavior towards all things living among the Jains, Native Americans, and Nigerian Yoruba, and this writer submits, implicitly does so among others. It is hard to see how a universally accepted rule of behavior can be, as asserted by our colleagues in the corporate world, genetically impossible, and it is, of course, a necessary rule for survival among the hunter-gatherer tribes from which we descend.

The corporate anti-Christ has tried to tell us otherwise for centuries.  That is hardly surprising, because it is increasingly coming to be understood that the structure of large corporations, indeed probably all large integrated organizations, regardless of stated mission, automatically draws to the top, psychopaths, people who, generally through factors of nature and nurture beyond their control, lack the ability to empathize.¹¹

Look where it has gotten us.

There are reasons why the free market rule has repeatedly brought down the US economy, destroyed the Copenhagen and Kyoto efforts and will make our efforts to stop global warming, with or without the aid of the governments, an impossibility. No other rule than that taught by universal religion will work to leave a world to future living beings in which they can actually survive and thrive.

We certainly have our work cut out for us, but we have no choice. And the governments and corporations are welcome to join us all if they see fit. If the offenders find themselves boycotted, they should not be surprised. So think about this message, start saying no to carbon, along with unnecessary consumption of goods and services. Instead, share the vision for a low carbon footprint with your neighbors, friends, other associates, congregations, nonprofit organizations, everyone. Then ever so nicely, ask them to get with the program post haste, because the responsibility is now with us.

We the seven billion are well-meaning folks on the whole, but with all due respect we are also all the right hand men and women of Wall Street.  Want to bankrupt the global corporations, one or all?  Just stop consuming what they sell, and stop producing future consumers.  It’s that simple, and within decades it will in any event be forced upon us by the limits to growth.  It’s all about “too many people using too much stuff,” so if we fail to do now what the limits to growth will force us to do tomorrow, future generations, if they survive, will pay dearly. We allowed ourselves to be indoctrinated by the corporate psychopaths into believing that we are like them, constitutionally unable to care for our fellow beings.  That’s not us, or wasn’t until they took over control of our minds and our religions.  Things might be different if we decided to “occupy” ourselves without abandoning the occupation of Wall Street, and having done so, to implement the Golden Rule, the central teaching of every major religion on earth, and the principle that conservation is empowerment, not self-sacrifice.

Think of these things, please, but with humor and good will, as you honor in your own way the religious and spiritual holidays.   And to be effective, the nonprofits need to change course too, and stop knocking their heads against walls that will remain unmoved until we all change our ways.

1. Vernon, 2007, “Peak Minerals,” Oil Drum Europe,  There appears to be considerable uncertainty as to the supplies of key minerals, which have not been studied in nearly the detail of oil, so this writer will not vouch for the current accuracy of Vernon’s work.
2. American University Speech, June 13, 1963.
3. Farley, The Scientific Case for Modern Anthropogenic Global Warming, Monthly Review
4. “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose forever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change,” Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent Guardian, Wednesday 9 November 2011 05.01 EST
5. “Carbon offsets have already run out of credit,“, and Carbon Trade Watch, which reports, “Carbon trading schemes are awash with paper “reductions” that do not correspond to actual reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in the real world, and this is a systematic problem.”
6. Why? because of tar sands oil’s “EROEI” (energy recovered over energy in.)  When the energy recovered in extracting a fuel from the ground is less than the energy needed to extract it (ie EROEI < 1) , getting it out is pretty much worthless, and when EROEI is only a little over 1 (as when you pull 4 barrels of oil out of the ground but burn the equivalent of  three of them to get them), you’ve already expended several times the net recovery to get there, which means the oil from tar sands has already caused more CO2 emissions before it even reaches the refinery than it or conventional oil causes after it’s burnt.  Really bad medicine.   Additionally, meeting recognized scientifically-established goals for reduction of CO2 emissions requires using less than the total reserves of “conventional” oil and gas.  Once development of “unconventional” sources (tar sands oil, shale oil, deep sea oil and “fracked” shale gas) are initiated in full scale, it will become virtually impossible to halt their use, since the investors will fight to retrieve their investments.
7. Pipeline and Tanker Transport Trouble: New report shows the impact to British Columbia’s communities, rivers and Pacific coastline from tar sands oil   December 12, 2011 RELEASE: Another Tar Sands Pipeline Postponed in Major Victory for First Nations and Ecological Internet, Tar Sands, Tankers & Pipelines.
8. Diane Francis, “The Real Inconvenient Truth“, and “Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?”, one of many discussions of the need to maintain growth of fossil fuels to maintain growth of food production.
9. Copenhagen Failed Us. What Do We Do Next?
10. Civil Disobedience – Part 1 of 3
11. Brian Basham Thursday, 29 December 2011″Beware Corporate Psychopaths – They Are Still Occupying Positions of Power.”  Basham cites some of the recent peer-reviewed academic literature on the subject

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a well-conceived and attractive book about the first weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement that was recently published by the Left imprint Verso Books. It reads like a journal, except the entries are not from just one writer, but a collection of several. They range from the well-known like prison activist and Black Panther Angela Davis to a young activist named Manissa Mahawaral. Edited by a small group of occupiers and the editors of the journals n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy, and The New Inquiry, this text primarily covers the scene at the Zurcotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan where the Occupy Wall Street movement more or less began. Part diary and part reflection, some of its most compelling moments come when the younger occupiers write about various realizations they have during the course of the occupation.

My favorite anecdote of this type is from an activist involved in the Occupy movement in Oakland, CA. When she first began participating, she found the dislike of the police from certain members of the camp to be disturbing. After all, they too were part of the so-called 99%. However, after a few days in the camp and the violent police attacks on the Oakland camp and protests following the first raid on Oscar Grant Plaza, her understanding of law enforcement’s role in protecting the wealthy and powerful changed dramatically. “I am ashamed,” she writes. “I was so naive about the cops in Oakland, but even more than this I am furious… that the police are allowed to brutalize people….” It is moments like this where the Occupy movement becomes transcendent and more than the collection of individuals, groups and and encampments that it is. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of drawings and collages that are not only visually appealing but also clever statements about the essential issues involved.

The book is not just a collection observations from the frontlines. Also included are analyses of the economic reasons behind the movement from Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and a fascinating discussion of the history of the space where Occupy Atlanta was situated. This latter piece is also one of several pieces that discusses the role of people of color in the movement.

As one of the first of many books about the Occupy movement to be published, Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America sets a high standard. One hopes it is read by many, especially among those that couldn’t or didn’t make it to an Occupy camp before the State’s onslaught on them. This movement should not die.

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Written by a larger collective of writers who modestly call themselves Writers for the 99%, the OR Books text functions as a description of life at Zurcotti Park and within the Occupy movement over the period noted above. If Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a journal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America is the literary equivalent of a wonderfully written diary. These two books are not exclusive to each other. in fact they are companion volumes that read together provide an engrossing and well-told description of one of the most hopeful protest movements to erupt in the capitalist world in decades.

The Young Lords Rise From the Pages

Speaking of attractive books to arrive recently on my bookshelf, the Haymarket Books reprint of the Young Lords 1971 book Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 certainly deserves a mention. The Young Lords Party was a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican youth that organized primarily among the young and working-class residents of New York’s Puerto Rican barrios during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Borrowing some of their style from the ideologically similar Black Panthers, this group was a dominant force in barrio politics during much of their existence. Their straightforward approach to solving some of the economic and political inequities in the barrio attracted thousands of supporters in the barrio and hundreds of powerful enemies in Christie Mansion and other edifices of power in New York. When I attended briefly attended Fordham University in the Bronx from Fall 1972 through Spring 1974 one of my smoking buddies was an active member of the group. His knowledge of Marxist theory was impressive as was his commitment to the struggle in the barrio. Needless to say, he and I had many intense discussions that taught me — as no book possibly could — the colonial situation of the Puerto Rican people and helped me unlearn years of misinformation about that island nation.

Palante is a history, explanation and discussion of the Young Lords Party from the perspective of its members in 1971. There is no bourgeois nationalism repeated in these pages. Instead, in the best tradition of other revolutionary nationalism, Palante argues that cultural and social freedom for the Puerto Rican nation is inseparable from economic freedom and a socialist revolution. For those uncertain of the difference, let me quote writer Earl Ofari from a 1969 article he wrote about the two phenomena as they relate to the black people of the United States :

“Revolutionary nationalists, unlike cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist. For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism.”

The Young Lords believed the same analysis applied to the situation of the Puerto Ricans.

Looking at it today, the most striking aspect of this book is not the audacious (by today’s standards) writings calling for a revolution in the United States and an independent Puerto Rico. It is the collection of photographs. Difficult to pry one’s eyes away from, the photos herein rank up there with the best photojournalism has to offer. The struggles of the young revolutionaries and the people they worked with are evident in the faces on these pages and the places and actions set down in a darkroom forty years ago. The pride of a people realizing its power and the anger of that people realizing why and who has wronged it radiates from the stark black and white images that fill the last half of this beautiful work.

Invading a foreign country to kidnap one of its citizens, even one as notorious as Noriega, is a clear violation of international law.  Just imagine America’s response if we had declared Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic a friend (instead of a war criminal), and given him asylum in the U.S., only to have a group of Bosnian commandos shoot their way into his compound, snatch him up and, in the name of justice, take him back to Bosnia to face charges.  It would have been an outrage.

Following George H. W. Bush’s Dec. 20, 1989, invasion of Panama, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted 75-20 (with 40 abstentions) to condemn the act as a flagrant violation of international law.  Predictably, the U.S. more or less sloughed off the condemnation.  When the shoe is on the other foot, America has an unfortunate history of swapping principle for expediency. Indeed, the only two countries in the world who expect to get away with this double-standard seems to be the U.S. and Israel.

But back to Noriega.  Over the years, starting when I was doing research on the Medallin cartel, I’d developed an interest in Noriega (who was paid by Pablo Escobar to safeguard Colombian cocaine shipments through Panama, and paid by the CIA to help destabilize Latin American regimes).  I hoped to do a magazine article on him.  In fact, I’d flirted with the idea of doing a semi-comic piece on Manuel Noriega, Moammar Gadaffi, and Jack Abramoff—entitled “Manny, Moe, and Jack.”

In early 2007, amid reports that Noriega was in danger of being extradited to France, I tried to get an interview with him.  All I really had to go on was Noriega’s current residence (the Florida Correctional Institution, in Miami) and the e-mail address of his Miami attorney, Frank Rubino.

I e-mailed Rubino at his office, and, luckily, he answered back almost immediately.  I asked him two questions:  (1) Would Noriega agree to be interviewed (either by letter or face to face)? and (2) Does he speak or read English?

Rubino told me that while he couldn’t definitely say whether or not Noriega would agree to an interview, he seriously doubted it.  Apparently, Noriega had already received hundreds of requests for interviews and, as far as Rubino knew, had refused all of them.  As to the second question, Noriega didn’t read English, so we’d have to correspond in Spanish.  Rubino was kind enough to include Noriega’s mailing address.

Brushing up on my Spanish, and having a friend proof-read the final draft, I sent Noriega a brief letter, leading with the salutation, “Estimado General.”  Basically, in about 70 words, I presented my credentials and outlined my modest project.  Alas, that’s where the story ends.  He never wrote back.  Despite his attempts to avoid extradition, Noriega was eventually turned over to French authorities.

It’s stunning how inconsistently and unfairly justice is meted out.  Having already served nearly 20 years in the U.S. and France, Noriega will likely spend the rest of his life in a Panama prison.  No one is suggesting he’s innocent, or that he’s a splendid fellow, but until the U.S. demonized him as an “enemy of the state,” he worked for our government.  Dan White murders Harvey Milk and George Moscone, and serves less than two years, and Rod Blagojevich, who kills no one, is sentenced to 14 years.

And if we stick only with dictators, a reputed tyrant like “Baby Doc” Duvalier gets to return to Haiti without spending a single day in jail (at least so far).  It makes you wonder if Noriega is being moved from prison to prison in order to keep him from revealing what he knew about CIA activities in Latin America.  If that’s the case, then Baby Doc deserves credit.  He was smart enough to steer clear of American spooks.

On December 7, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the Beyond the Border Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness Action Plan. The new deal focuses on addressing security threats early, facilitating trade, economic growth and jobs, integrating cross-border law enforcement, as well as improving infrastructure and cyber-security. It will act as a roadmap with different parts being phased in over the next several years. This includes the creation of various pilot projects. Many aspects of the agreement will also depend on the availability of funding from both governments. In addition, the two leaders issued a separate Regulatory Cooperation Council Action Plan that sets out initiatives whereby the U.S. and Canada will seek greater regulatory alignment in the areas of agriculture and food, transportation, environment, health, along with consumer products.

At a Joint News Conference, President Obama declared that, “Canada is key to achieving my goal of doubling American exports and putting folks back to work. And the two important initiatives that we agreed to today will help us do just that.” He went on to say, “we’re agreeing to a series of concrete steps to bring our economies even closer and to improve the security of our citizens.” Obama also added, “we’re going to improve our infrastructure, we’re going to introduce new technologies, we’re going to improve cargo security and screening.” Prime Minister Harper proclaimed that, “These agreements create a new, modern order for a new century. Together, they represent the most significant steps forward in Canada-U.S. cooperation since the North American Free Trade Agreement.” He explained that, “The first agreement merges U.S. and Canadian security concerns with our mutual interest in keeping our border as open as possible to legitimate commerce and travel.” Harper described how, “The second joint initiative will reduce regulatory barriers to trade by streamlining and aligning standards.”

Some of the measures found in the Beyond the Border action plan include conducting joint, integrated threat assessments; improving cooperative law enforcement capacity and national intelligence- and information-sharing; cooperating on research and best practices to prevent and counter homegrown violent extremism; working to jointly prepare for, and respond to, binational disasters and enhancing cross-border critical infrastructure protection and resilience. Other facets of the deal will work towards adopting an integrated cargo security strategy; implementing entry and exit verification; establishing and verifying the identity of foreign travellers to North America; better aligning Canadian and U.S. programs for low-risk travellers and installing radio frequency identification technology at key border crossings.

As part of the agreement, both countries will “implement two Next-Generation pilot projects to create integrated teams in areas such as intelligence and criminal investigations, and an intelligence-led uniformed presence between ports of entry.” This will build on past joint law enforcement initiatives such as the Shiprider program and the Integrated Border Enforcement Teams. The Next-Generation pilot projects are scheduled to be deployed by the summer of 2012. In September, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder revealed plans that would allow law enforcement officers to operate on both sides of the border. He announced that, “the creation of ‘NextGen’ teams of cross-designated officers would allow us to more effectively identify, assess, and interdict persons and organizations involved in transnational crime.” Holder also commented that, “In conjunction with the other provisions included in the Beyond the Border Initiative, such a move would enhance our cross-border efforts and advance our information-sharing abilities.”

In his article, How the U.S. blackmailed Canada, Gar Pardy stressed that as part of a North American security zone, “Canadian security institutions will be more closely integrated with those of the United States.” While addressing the Beyond the Border declaration and the subsequent action plan, he highlighted the fact that, “these are not formal treaties or even formal agreements, although there could be greater formality in the future.” Pardy also noted, “Nowhere in the documentation resulting from the two meetings are there suggestions the people of Canada will be provided with detailed information on which judgments can be made on the wisdom of this consensual agreement negotiated in the backrooms of both capitals.” Instead he cautioned that, “the troublesome details implicit in the agreement will be hidden behind the wall of national security.” Pardy argued that in the process, “Canada sold its national security independence in exchange for hoped-for minor changes to American border restrictions.” He concluded that, “It is not an overstatement to suggest the United States blackmailed the government of Canada into making this deal. It was the American way or no way.”

The Council of Canadians have also strongly rejected the new border deal. They have challenged the notion that, “proper privacy protections can be achieved between Canada and the U.S. without significantly diluting stronger Canadian laws and norms.” Citing privacy concerns associated with the U.S. Patriot Act, the organization emphasized that, “the proposed new entry-exit system for travelers needs the greatest scrutiny by Canadian parliamentarians, security and privacy experts.” The Council of Canadians also criticized, “the government for hiding behind a sham public consultation and implying that this should clear the way for implementation of the action plan.” In August, the Conservative government released two reports which summarized online public input received concerning regulatory cooperation, as well as perimeter security and economic competitiveness. While improving the movement of trade and travel was the priority for business groups, many individuals expressed concerns over the loss of sovereignty, along with the protection of personal information.

When it comes to regulatory convergence, Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians agreed that, “Standardization can be a good thing when standards are high,” She conceded, “The problem is standards aren’t higher in the U.S. in many cases.” Barlow also acknowledged that, “Already Health Canada and other agencies consider harmonization with U.S. standards to be a more important consideration than the real safety of our food. This perimeter deal cements that skewed priority list.” There are fears that it could erode any independent Canadian regulatory capacity and weaken existing regulations. Part of the SPP agenda called for improving regulatory cooperation which resulted in Canada raising pesticide limits on fruits and vegetables. Regulatory integration threatens Canadian sovereignty and democracy. Further harmonization with the U.S. could result in Canada losing control over its ability to regulate food safety. This could also lead to a race to the bottom with respect to other regulatory standards.

By all accounts, big business is the winner in the new trade and security perimeter deal. Maude Barlow explained that, “this process has been set up to accommodate one sector of our community and that is big business.” In advance of the action plans being unveiled to the public, business stakeholders were briefed on the specifics. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives, an organization that lobbies the government on behalf of Canada’s largest corporations has given it their stamp of approval. The U.S. and Canadian Chambers of Commerce also applauded the new vision for border and regulatory cooperation. When it comes to negotiations on the border security agreement, Barlow confirmed that, “the big business community was the only sector at the table with government and guided the process from the beginning.” This was also the case with the now defunct SPP. Big business was a driving force behind the initiative which led to the creation of the North American Competitiveness Council to ensure that corporate interests were being addressed.

In her article, Maude Barlow also warned that when it comes to the perimeter deal, “Canada is essentially giving up policy control in the key areas of privacy, security, immigration and surveillance in order to entice the U.S. to loosen controls at the border.” She stated, “it is likely to lead to a wholesale replacement of Canadian privacy and security standards with American ones, set by Homeland Security.” When it comes to information being collected and stored, Barlow questioned whether it will be, “used as a form of social control, to identify not terrorists, but activists and dissenters of government policy.” She insisted that, “We must call on our government to create a full public and Parliamentary debate before this deal becomes operational.” From the beginning, the whole process has lacked transparency with no congressional or parliamentary oversight. This has drawn comparisons to the SPP which was shrouded in secrecy and fueled by fears over the loss of sovereignty that finally led to its downfall. We can only hope that this latest endeavour will meet the same fate. With the 2012 U.S. election cycle about to get into full swing, the new bilateral deal could get lost in the shuffle.

While the perimeter agreement is being sold as vital to the safety and prosperity of Canadians and Americans alike, there is little doubt that it will mean a tradeoff between sovereignty and security. Any deal which gives the Department of Homeland Security more personal information poses a serious risk to privacy rights. As both countries move forward, perimeter security will be further defined and dominated by American interests. This could force Canada to comply with any new U.S. security measures, regardless of the dangers they may pose to civil liberties. A North American Homeland Security perimeter goes well beyond keeping people safe from any perceived threats. It is a means to secure trade, resources, as well as corporate interests and is a pretext for control over the continent. Ultimately, the U.S. wants the final say on who is allowed to enter and who is allowed to leave.

The leaders of the nine countries that are part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hawaii and agreed on the broad outlines of a free trade agreement. The current members include the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Peru and Chile. The TPP has been hailed as a, “landmark, 21st-century trade agreement, setting a new standard for global trade and incorporating next-generation issues.” Key features of the TPP are that it would provide comprehensive market access and be a fully regional agreement designed to facilitate the development of production and supply chains. Various working groups have been discussing issues such as financial services, government procurement, intellectual property, investment, rules of origin, telecommunications and trade remedies. The next round of talks will take place in December and there are hopes of concluding negotiations before the end of 2012. Apart from Canada and Mexico, Japan has also expressed interest in being part of the TPP. The door is also open for other countries to join which is why many consider it to be a building block for an Asia-Pacific free trade zone.

Following the APEC forum, President Barack Obama held a bilateral meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Originally, it was scheduled to be a North American Leaders Summit, but Mexican President Felipe Calderon could not attend due to the death of Interior Minister Francisco Blake Mora. According to a Readout by the Press Secretary, the leaders look forward to a rescheduled trilateral summit. During his meeting with Prime Minister Harper, President Obama, “noted the important progress being made on the Beyond the Border and Regulatory Cooperation initiatives.” He invited Harper to Washington in early December where an action plan that would work towards a North American security perimeter could finally be released. Both leaders also discussed the announcement by the State Department to seek additional information regarding the Keystone XL Pipeline project. A final ruling on the pipeline which would carry oil from western Canada to the gulf coast of Texas will not be made until after the November 2012 presidential election. The move has prompted Canada to further diversify its trade ties and shift its focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

The decision by Japan to begin consultations with TPP countries, followed by the news that Canada and Mexico are also seeking to join negotiations, has given the trade agreement a real boost. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk welcomed their interest and stated, “Along with Japan’s similar announcement this week, the desire of these North American nations to consult with TPP partners demonstrates the broadening momentum and dynamism of this ambitious effort toward economic integration across the Pacific.” Minister of International Trade Ed Fast reaffirmed Canada’s commitment to advancing economic interests in the Asia-Pacific region. He acknowledged, “We recognize the TPP as a means to further strengthen those ties and contribute to what promises to become a broadly-based vehicle for economic integration in the region.” The report, “Canada, China, and Rising Asia: A Strategic Proposal,” released in October, recommended joining the TPP as the most efficient way to deepen integration with other Asian economies, providing that the Canadian government reforms the supply management system.

Canada has previously expressed interest in the TPP, but supply management has proven to be stumbling block. The practice which has been in place for decades sets production quotas for dairy, egg and poultry farmers and protects them with import tariffs. In a recent speech, New Zealand Trade Minister Tim Groser raised questions about Canada’s application to join TPP negotiations. He admitted, “Dairy will be very challenging for Canada. This is a statement of fact. Canada follows a policy that many Governments used to follow but most have moved forward. It is called ‘supply management.’ It is completely inconsistent with tariff elimination.” As far as benchmarks go, Groser confirmed that there are questions that TPP countries will ask when considering new applicants such as whether, “we see clear evidence of a matching commitment to attain a high-quality agreement across all chapters, including the most sensitive matters.” He maintained that, “There is a very strict dress code involved and we are going to be stuffy and old fashioned in enforcing it. When our Leaders said ‘eliminate’ tariffs and other direct barriers to imports, they meant it.” Some have hinted that TPP negotiations could be used to expand NAFTA.

The Harper government maintains that it will promote and defend Canadian interests, but there are concerns that supply management could be used as a bargaining chip to secure a spot in the TPP. In his article, “Is Harper putting dairy and poultry protection on the table in trade talks?,” Steven Chase reported that, “A former senior Canadian trade official said expanding trade with Asia is not the Harper government’s only reason for joining the Trans-Pacific talks.” He goes on to say, “John Weekes, Canada’s chief NAFTA negotiator, said Ottawa can’t afford to be left out of talks that appear to be offering signatories a deeper economic relationship with the U.S. than can be found in the North American free-trade agreement.” Weekes is also quoted as saying, “What we’re talking about here – if it really does become what Obama says it will be – is we’re renegotiating NAFTA in the same way we renegotiated the Canada-U.S. FTA.” Another NAFTA-style agreement poses a serious threat to economic sovereignty. There are fears that U.S. could use the TPP to open up the Canadian telecom market and its banking sector to more foreign financial services.

In his article, “We’re neglecting our North American neighbors,” Robert Pastor described the TPP as a flawed strategy and stressed that the road to completing an agreement would be long. He explained Canada and Mexico’s decision to join the TPP, “as a defensive measure to ensure that they protect what they gained from NAFTA.” He also stated, “Obama should give priority to forging a seamless market with Canada and Mexico. But for the second time in two years, the North American leaders postponed their summit without setting a new date.” Pastor conceded that, “The three leaders have shown little imagination or even interest in dealing with a continental agenda.” He warned how, “the TPP will divert scarce political capital and attention from North America.” Pastor further emphasized that, “The fastest way to create jobs and double exports is for the three governments to work together on continental plans for transportation, education, and infrastructure.” He also added, “If the TPP’s purpose is to put pressure on China to open its market, that won’t work” and instead suggested, “A reinvigorated North America is more likely to get China’s attention.”

Jane Kelsey sheds more light as to the real agenda behind the proposed trade agreement. She acknowledged that it is part of a, “revival of US geopolitical and strategic influence in the Asian region to counter the ascent of China. The US aims to isolate and subordinate China in part through constructing a region-wide legal regime that serves the interests of, and is enforceable by, the US and its corporations.” It is interesting to note that many of the current TPP partners, including new prospective members support U.S. foreign policy initiatives. This ties in nicely with the Obama administration’s plans of expanding alliances and military bases in the Asia-Pacific region in an effort to contain China’s rising power.

This is the third successive forum in this city, and for the third successive year Haligonians are organizing to condemn this war conference with a rally on Saturday, November 19th, 1:00 p.m., at the Cornwallis Park. The Halifax Peace Coalition and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, among others, have endorsed the stand.

In 2009 as part of their protest, anti-war groups and individuals aptly renamed the park Halifax Peace and Freedom Park in honour of the Mi’kmaq and fraternal First Nations who resisted with great honour colonial conquest and the NATO base in Labrador. The reclamation of the park was repeated in 2010 and will be done again in 2011.

In 2009 I wrote: “Conferences aimed at working out the justification for the global expansion of NATO, which has been and will continue to be a U.S. project, can only be condemned as preparations for invasion, occupation, subversion and destabilization of governments and other crimes against the peace and sovereignty throughout the world. The public security agenda has nothing to do with security if the word security is to have any meaning, premised on recognizing all nations big or small as equal and the right of all peoples to self-determination and to live in peace.”

War criminals

The HISF features a roster of open war criminals such as Ehud Barak and Amos Gilead of Israel and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is to be given the podium to deliver the keynote speech.

Panetta is a protagonist of “pre-emptive warfare”, the conduct of outright wars of aggression using self-defence and the “responsibility to protect” as a pretext and a justification.

As CIA Director until July 1st, Panetta was the invisible architect for the fourfold expansion of the unmanned “drone” attacks controlled remotely, which have caused huge numbers of casualties in both Afghanistan and over the border in Pakistan as well as in Yemen and Somalia. He has also increased the role of private companies and militias under the pretext of the war on “Islamic terrorists.”

In order to deal with the deepening crisis within NATO, Panetta is demanding the Anglo-U.S. “allies” absorb US military and Pentagon spending and foreign troop deployment. This is being done in the name of spending cuts demanded by the U.S. Congress and against the so-called “two-tiered NATO”, whereby the U.S. alleges it produces “security” while Europe “consumes” it. This demand has been embraced by the Harper government, with its so-called “transformation” of the Canadian Forces featuring boosting the number of combat-ready troops, the warship shipbuilding program and stealth jet fighters, and the establishment of military bases around the world.

CIA director Panetta continued Guantanamo, which was not shut down. In little-noticed testimony at his nomination hearing, Panetta said that if the approved techniques of torture were “not sufficient” to get a detainee to divulge details he was suspected of knowing about an imminent attack, he would ask for “additional authority.” In an internal memo issued April 9 2009 Panetta announced a blanket amnesty for all Bush officials, torturers and war criminals.

Panetta is committed to America’s “long war” including global warfare under the pretext of the “war on terrorism.”

Panetta is accompanied by Senator John McCain, the leading advocate in the U.S. Senate for aggressive foreign policies including the assassination of political leaders that Washington finds inimical to its interests. As Obama himself put it in 2008, “[T]his is the guy who sang, ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,’ who called for the annihilation of North Korea.” This is McCain’s third HISF. At the 2010 HISF, fellow U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham openly called for the “neutering” of Iran.
Other speakers involved in war crimes include members of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a short-lived but influential, neoconservative-led letterhead group that emerged after the 9/11 attacks to promote attacking Iraq, such as Bruce P. Jackson. He held a high office as vice president for strategy and planning in Lockheed Martin, one of the largest arms multinationals in the world and set to reap the big score from Harper contracts for jet fighters and warships.

On 27 December 2008, war criminal Ehud Barak, Israeli Defence Minister, ordered the aerial bombardment of Gazan population centers. The attacks involved hundreds of fighter jet sorties, dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gazan neighbourhoods. At least 1,300 Palestinians – innocent men, women and children – were killed and 5,300 were injured. Barak also commanded the violent assault on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010 where commandos killed nine people, many of them shot in the back.

Major General (Ret.) Amos Gilad is head of Israel’s defence ministry’s diplomatic-security bureau and an invited speaker for the third successive year. Gilad is a Zionist war criminal and senior state terrorist who commanded the killings of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza from 1974 to 1979 as a Chief of the Department of Military Intelligence. In December 2008, Gilad personally negotiated with Mubarak to ensure Egypt’s support for the lethal invasion of Gaza. The ongoing military siege of Gaza is a crime against humanity and in violation of the Rome Statue and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The Harper government is sending Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard to the HISF as its star representative and saviour of the Libyan people. Bouchard should also be put on trial for war crimes; he was commander of the U.S.-NATO air war on Libya including the killing of civilians, the violent overthrow of the country’s government and the extrajudicial killing of Gadhafi and others. Bouchard made it clear he held final authority for approving all targets. On November 6, CBC Newsworld interviewed Bouchard about the need for “action” against Syria with the Libyan war as “a template.” Who is next?

The crimes against peace being carried out by the U.S. government and its allies to be discussed at the HISF and hatched in its backrooms relate in particular to their plans for military intervention.

Enroute to Halifax, Barak huddled in Ottawa on Wednesday with Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay. They negotiated details (which have been kept secret) of “deepening” military cooperation in anticipation of – in the words of MacKay – “much more volatility… throughout the Arab Spring and
Summer and now Arab Fall and the cascading effects” of uprisings throughout the Middle East.

According to a Pentagon news release on November 16, Panetta has scheduled meetings in Halifax with Barak, MacKay and French Gen. Stephane Abrial, the NATO allied commander for transformation. Who is next?

From Panetta on down, the participants (300 in all) have been summoned from a select handful of countries; the US, Canada, Germany, and those who wish to subordinate national sovereignty to the strategic interests of the imperialists and NATO.

The speaker’s roster is packed with hand-picked NATO, NORAD, Pentagon, State Department and CIA veterans; elected and appointed government officials (Democrat and Republican) – those who prepared and planned the war against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; war industries; and associated think-tanks from most (but not all) 28 NATO member-states, plus the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Less than ten per cent of the participants announced so far are from Canada, including two current Conservative cabinet ministers: Vic Toews, Public Security, and Peter MacKay, Defence;
 the Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Walter Natynczyk, etc. Many of the sessions are listed as “off-the-record.”

However, military intervention is by no means the only crime against the peace and humanity in preparation at the Halifax conference.

Shift in emphasis

The first and second HISFs in 2009 and 2010 concentrated on elaborating the new “strategic doctrine” that was to be adopted by NATO at its Brussels Summit, with generals, admirals and strategists predominant and U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates inaugurating the event.

However, comparing the first and third forums – its organization, roster of speakers, and content – one notices a shift in emphasis.

The HISF organization is now intermeshed with the powerful U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the imperial brain trust, and the driving force behind the “Security and Prosperity Partnership” (SPP) for North America in the service of the biggest North American monopolies, North American Security Perimeter agreement and the annexation of Canada.

The Third Halifax International Security Forum is highlighted by the participation of leading liberal representatives of such agencies of the U.S. state as the National Endowment for Democracy and two of its core agencies, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, together with Freedom House and Human Rights Watch. Its agenda is synchronized with the program of subversion of these agencies which are well known to specialize in the “soft power” techniques of intervention, political destabilization and regime change under the pretext of “people power,” “democracy,” “open society,” “non-violence” and “human rights.”

At the same time, a much broader focus is being given by the HISF to the Middle East and Africa. Of particular significance is the fact that specialists in manipulation and subversion of the “Arab Spring” have been recruited from the NDI and Freedom House to the board of directors of the HIF.

In short, the U.S. and Canadian governments remain committed to varying forms of interference and intervention throughout the world in order to safeguard the interests of the big monopolies and financial institutions in the same measure that foreign intervention in the internal affairs of Canada as exemplified by the HISF is escalating. It is in these circumstances that all democratic people must take a stand not only against military intervention, but also and all forms of interference in the affairs of the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, South America and Asia as well as Canada itself.

Further, the involvement of the Dexter government of Nova Scotia and leading “civilian” officials from the Halifax Port Authority, which delivered the welcoming address in 2010, and other regional transportation centres is noteworthy. It indicates how the port of Halifax and Nova Scotia is being integrated into the military, logistic and strategic plans of the Pentagon as a harbour for war and global transportation route. All democratic people must remain vigilant regarding the Atlantic Gateway project, which is geared towards facilitating the robbery of oil and the other resources of the sovereign peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The Halifax International Security Forum organised by the United States and the Harper government and their warmongers must be vigorously condemned, as must the expansion of all preparations for intervention and war. American Imperialism represents the greatest threat to the security and stability of the world’s people.

Silence is shame!
No Harbour for War!

For further information contact: moc.liamtohnull@rawrofruobrahon.

The annual Meany-Kirkland award (named after the AFL-CIO’s first two presidents) was established in 1980. Previous winners include Zimbabwe union activist Wellington Chibebe, Ela Bhatt, founder of India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association, and the Independent Labor Movement of Egypt. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was joined by Leo Gerard, President of the United Steel Workers (USW) in making the presentation, and U.S. Congress members Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Mike Machaud (D-ME) also gave brief remarks.

Since 2006, Gomez Urrutia has lived in exile in Vancouver, Canada, forced to seek asylum after the Mexican government filed numerous criminal charges against him. The government not only went after him, they launched an ugly, aggressive attack on the union itself, freezing its bank accounts, declaring all strikes to be illegal (including sending in federal troops to break them up), and exhorting mine employers to replace Los Mineros with company-sponsored lackey unions.

Gomez Urrutia got himself put on the Mexican government’s hit list because of his response to a February 19, 2006, mine explosion that killed 65 miners. He publicly accused the Vincente Fox administration of committing “industrial homicide.” While his accusation may have been melodramatic, it was accurate. As for the criminal charges, not only have Mexican and international human rights and labor groups called them baseless, all but one has been subsequently dismissed by Mexican courts, and all government appeals have been denied.

The 2006 explosion at Grupo Mexico’s Pasta de Conchos coal mine will live forever in the sorrowful annals of labor history. Prior to the explosion, union officials had repeatedly warned the company of serious safety concerns, notably the prevalent odor of flammable methane gas. Those warnings were ignored and the work continued. After all, there was coal to be mined and money to be made.

Then, following the shattering explosion, and after just a few short days of rescue attempts, the government abruptly declared the rescue operation to be futile, and, with the miner’s wives waiting helplessly outside, ordered the mine to be closed and sealed. That was it. Those 65 bodies were entombed on the premises.

Los Mineros (a sister union to the USW), has a proud history of challenging the Mexican government on labor issues, many of which will doubtlessly sound familiar to American workers; e.g., safety and health concerns, declining wages, and the replacing of permanent employees with temps. In his press release Richard Trumka described Gomez Urrutia as a “truly courageous man who has shown us how difficult and how important it is to be an independent leader of a democratic union.”

Being named recipient of the Meany-Kirkland Award was a great honor. Too bad Gomez Urrutia wasn’t there to accept it. Alas, the Obama administration refused to grant him a travel visa. It’s true. His wife, Oralia Casso de Gomez, had to accept on his behalf. Just when we thought President Obama couldn’t be any more gutless or jelly-legged when it comes to defending the underdog, he goes and proves us wrong.

This time there were 27 activists, including Americans, Canadians, Irish, Polish, Greek, Palestinian and — for the first time an Egyptian, Al-Masri Al-Youm English Managing Editor Lina Attalah. For 27 years, Israel has been violating the 1979 Peace Treaty with Egypt, which guaranteed “full autonomy” for the Palestinians within five years. So it was appropriate for an Egyptian to become the 27th member of the team of activists trying to break the Gaza siege.

Tahrir passenger Kit Kittredge said, “In our sails is the wind of worldwide public opinion which has turned against the illegal blockade.” Retired US army colonel Ann Wright said, “We carry inspiration from the Arab Spring and the worldwide Occupy movements. Where governments fail, civil society must act. We will not stand by and watch $30 billion of our tax money committed to buying Israel weaponry used to carry out this illegal occupation of Palestine.”

Attalah described how, as Israel warships approached, activists and journalists started throwing equipment into the sea, “fearing that the information stored on them could be used to implicate other activists who were not on board”. When the Israel military asked their destination, organiser Ehab Lotayef replied first, “The conscience of humanity”, and as the Israelis sprayed the peaceful protesters with salt water, “The betterment of mankind”. Attalah counted 15 ships, with “dozens of Israeli soldiers pointed their machines guns at us”.

Their communications system was jammed and they entered the Israel no-mans land. But not without an Israeli practical joke. The Israelis “offered to send one person to inspect for weapons, and if he found nothing, they would let us pass”.

But the ships were suddenly ordered to proceed to Ashdod in Israel, and when the order was ignored, the Israelis boarded the ships, brandishing guns, ready to shoot anyone resisting, and using tear gas and tasers. The Tahrir and the Saoirse were forced to crash into each other, crippling both ships, and their engine rooms flooded, exposing them to the danger of sinking.

What equipment had not been thrown overboard was stolen by the pirates. Israeli Mad Kayal said, “As a Palestinian, I was not surprised at how the IDF treated us; however, for the Canadians and other Westerners onboard, it was a complete shock.” President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek, who in the past called Israel “an indispensable partner for the EU”, refused to criticise his “partner” for the arrest and imprisonment of Irish Euro MP Paul Murphy for three days.

In contrast, Attalah was treated with kid gloves, and — without any exchange of Israeli spies — was taken by an Egyptian embassy official to the border at Taba. She was upbeat in her report, relating how they got much closer this time — 50 km as opposed to 100 km in the past, and how Jewish activists, preparing for the expected Israeli attack, helped translate slogans “This is piracy” and “This is kidnapping” into Hebrew to greet the Israelis.

Shamefully, US State Department official Victoria Nuland warned activists, they “could face civil and criminal penalties in their efforts to deliver resources to the Gaza Strip,” and the US consul in Israel advised them to sign an Israeli deportation agreement. The activists refused, as the statement said they entered Israel illegally and would not attempt another effort to break the Gaza blockade, thereby giving de facto credibility to the seige.

Absurdly, US House Resolution 3131 introduced last month would require the State Department to investigate “the sources of any logistical, technical, or financial support for the Gaza flotilla ships” and produce “a report on whether any support organisation that participated in the planning or execution of the recent Gaza flotilla attempt should be designated as a foreign terrorist organisation”.

The story did not end with the deportation of the plucky activists. Israel cyberwarfare expertise is well known, but so is that of computer hackers Anonymous. They decided to avenge the Freedom Wavers, warning the Israeli military hours before they seized the ships: “If you continue blocking humanitarian vessels to Gaza, then you will leave us no choice but to strike back. Again and again, until you stop.”

A few days later, over a dozen Israeli government websites crashed, including Shin Bet, Mossad, the IDF, the Health, Justice, Housing, Science and Sports Ministries, the President’s Residence, the Immigration Authority, the Israel Land Administration and the Atomic Energy Commission. As Jewish philosopher Hillel the Elder said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Freedom Waves will continue to lap against Israeli gunships in their attempt to reach the shores of Gaza. There are tentative plans for a “Sailing for Freedom” yacht race next summer from Marseille France, a kind of Tour de Méditerranée, going to Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and on to Palestine. Turkey has committed itself to protect future naval convoys breaking the siege.

Land convoys are also being organised. The British group Long Live Palestine has called on people around the world to take part in a convoy of medical aid to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza, starting 27 December. Organisers are planning for Viva Palestina 6 – Return Convoy to be the biggest convoy of aid yet, and hope to involve Egyptians again and enter via the Rafah crossing.

Washington continues to insist upon exercising world leadership in all key global endeavors, including the environment, but has failed dramatically in terms of climate change.

In fact, the White House is greatly expanding U.S. access to fossil fuel energy sources even as scientific and environmental organizations are intensifying their warnings about the need to immediately reduce greenhouse gas carbon emissions that are warming the planet.

Although the U.S. recently has ranked second to China in fossil fuel burning, it is by far the greatest polluter of the atmosphere in the last century and a half. Given the differences in population, America still uses three times more per capita than China.

White House policy is fixated on reducing dependence upon Middle Eastern oil and gas by greatly increasing the extraction of fossil fuels closer to home — mainly a vast increase in natural gas production from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) throughout the United States, expanded drilling for offshore oil, and importing dirty tar sands oil from Canada.

While increasing the development and use of global warming fuels, President Obama is advancing no significant program to replace high carbon emitting fossil fuels with renewable non-carbon solar and wind power.

The U.S. government is subsidizing some major “green” corporations, providing them with nearly no-risk guarantees for developing solar and wind, but this remains a relatively minor enterprise. Progress made so far is being stalled by the unexpected abundance (and thus cheaper price) of domestic natural gas secreted in shale, more secure oil reserves than anticipated, and the probability of reduced federal and state subsidies.

In a major statement from London November 9, the International Energy Agency (IEA) called for a “bold change of policy direction toward the use of low-carbon fuels within the next five years. If the major industrial states do not do so quickly, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system,” which is precisely what the Obama Administration is doing.

This recommendation seeks to prevent the rise in global temperatures in this century from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, which is based upon keeping carbon emissions in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million (ppm). Anything above the target standards will cause irreparable damage to life on Earth.

According to many scientists and environmental groups these standards are inadequate, and that 350 ppm is the maximum amount that can be accommodated without causing a disaster. Atmospheric carbon, which occurs naturally, has reached dangerous levels due to industrialization. It has increased from 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial era to approximately 392 ppm today, which is why it is said warming is well underway and its effects are being felt throughout the world.

Introducing the new report, IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven declared, “Growth, prosperity and rising population will inevitably push up energy needs over the coming decades…. Governments need to introduce stronger measures to drive investment in efficient and low-carbon technologies.”

The  Environment News Service reports that the “agency’s warning comes at a critical time in international climate change negotiations, as governments prepare for the annual UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 28-Dec. 9. ‘If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door will be closed forever,’ IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned.’” (The main goal of the 17th climate summit is to agree on a resolution to replace the Kyoto Protocols, which will expire next year.)

The IEA describes itself as “an autonomous organization which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 28 member countries and beyond.” Its members represent the world’s leading capitalist countries. Greenpeace and some other environmental groups are critical of the group’s approval of tar sands oil, lower carbon fuels and nuclear energy. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are not IEA members.

Reporting October 26 on America’s hunt for more carbon-emitting fuels, the New York Times quoted Daniel Lashof, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, as declaring:

Giving new life to fossil fuels is a devil’s bargain, probably making solutions to climate change, and the development of renewable energy, even more difficult. Not only are you extending the fossil fuels era, but you are moving into fossil fuels that are dirtier and release more carbon pollution in the process of extracting and using them.

The Obama Administration has been leaning toward approving a $7 billion investment in a pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil to Texas but encountered a fusillade of activist opposition from the environmental movement in recent months. Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, has declared that “Tar sands oil is the dirtiest oil on Earth.” Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, says that fully developing the tar sands in Canada would mean “essentially game over” for the climate.

Environmental movement criticisms have been compounded by objections from residents of Nebraska with concerns that pipeline spills might pollute the irreplaceable Ogallala aquifer, which occupies 10,000 square miles north to south from South Dakota to Texas and is a major source of water for the High Plains.

In August and September 1,200 anti-tar sands activists were arrested for offering civil disobedience in front of the White House. On November 6, 12,000 people surrounded the presidential mansion demanding an end to construction of the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Four days later, President Obama announced that his final decision would now be postponed until months after next year’s elections, implying that the pipeline route might have to circumnavigate the  immense aquifer.

Some environmental groups have interpreted Obama’s delay as a victory, suggesting that the project is being abandoned, but this view is too optimistic. The White House seeks abundant and stable supplies of oil for the next several decades from sources other than (or in addition to) the volatile Middle East, and tar sands oil from nearby friendly Canada is a most attractive alternative. Canadian oil has been entering the U.S. for many years in existing pipelines, and this is continuing. In all probability, some version of Keystone will greatly increase the supply.

Environmentally-concerned Americans have also launched campaigns against fracking, mainly because of the danger to water supplies inherent in an extraction method that requires the high pressure injection of deadly chemicals deep underground.

The Obama Administration is so intent upon vastly increasing natural gas production that it has been brushing objections aside, as have state governors — such as New York State’s Andrew Cuomo — who argue that what really matters are the additional jobs and tax revenue from massive fracking operations.

Advocates of natural gas argue that burning gas for electricity emits 30% less carbon dioxide than oil, and about 45% less than coal. But recent studies have shown that the process of fracking releases sufficient stores of methane into the atmosphere to compensate for any reduction in carbon from natural gas. Methane creates a greenhouse heat trap about 20 times greater than carbon dioxide. The gas industry maintains that the reduction in emissions from natural gas “outweighs” the detrimental effects of methane.

The New York Times article points out that:

Temporary or permanent fracking bans have been put in place in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Other states are toughening drilling regulations, and the industry is responding with tighter wastewater management, while the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to complete a study on fracking next year. Nevertheless, gas shale drilling appears likely to continue at a fast pace in the most important gas-producing states.

The rest of the world is watching. Moratoriums have been put in place in parts of France, Germany, South Africa and the Canadian province of Quebec; Britain, Ukraine and other countries are moving cautiously forward. Still, the Energy Department projects that gas from shale could account for 14% of global supplies by 2030, with as many as 32 countries having production potential.

If world countries, led by the U.S., continue to disregard environmental objections to fracking, enhanced natural gas production combined with a major increase in oil production by the U.S., it will further subvert incentives toward ending use of fossil fuels. So far, shale gas extraction in the U.S. has increased 500% in the last five years, and that’s just the beginning.

Quoting Ivan Sandrea, president of the Energy Intelligence Group, the Times concluded its article with these words: “The fossil fuel age will be extended for decades. Unconventional oil and gas are at the beginning of a technological cycle that can last 60 years. They are really in their infancy.”

It has been five months since Democratic former Vice President Al Gore stuck his neck out in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone by publicly criticizing Democrat Obama for inaction on reducing America’s addiction to fossil fuels. So far, Obama has done nothing but live up to Gore’s critique:

“President Obama,” he declared, “has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change…. The president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that ‘drill, baby, drill’ [a conservative slogan] is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.”

Washington’s refusal to take more than token steps to alleviate global warming would be relatively inconsequential were the U.S. a much smaller player on the world stage. But American governments have insisted for decades — based on economic strength and unparalleled military power — on being recognized as the world’s dominant and irreplaceable hegemonic state. Uncle Sam’s leadership is enormously influential, especially in the industrialized world, and America’s sluggish response toward global warming is a global disincentive toward taking speedy, responsible and united action.

U.S. financial institutions, corporations, and the wealthiest proportion of its population are “deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives,” economist Paul Krugman noted recently. These powerful elements are not prepared to accept the economic and political rearrangements required to transform America into an environmentally sound society of minimal carbon usage and many other ecological safeguards.

Such a transformation involves greater government investments, potentially smaller profits for many years, strategic alterations in the country’s disproportionate consumption of resources and products, and substantial changes beyond today’s gridlocked and essentially conservative political process.

In effect — given its disinclination to interfere in the workings of America’s neoliberal capitalist economy, even  to protect all life on Earth — Washington’s continuing unipolar leadership is guiding the world toward irreversible climate change.

The U.S. may change its ways, but economic and political realities suggest an alteration of this magnitude is hardly on the foreseeable agenda. Climate change, however, is taking place now. At  issue are two necessities: (1) strengthening of the environmental and social change movements in the U.S., and (2) a dramatic initiative by other powerful countries and regional blocs to take significant concerted global action to save the Earth regardless of Washington’s dithering.

Speaking to about 500 Mussolini Democrats and more than a dozen reporters at the tactically sophisticated Invertebrates For Obama think tank in Washington, Obama lashed out at “so-called progressives” clamoring for an expanded New Deal.

“Far too many Americans are looking for a hand-out, not a hand up,” he said, apparently targeting the growing Occupy Wall Street movement and its sympathizers. “The reason we must reject socialist economics is that it conflicts with our core political philosophy about the purpose of government.”

“We cannot preserve liberty for ourselves and our posterity if government fails to fulfill its obligation to sustain the free market system with trillions of dollars of bailout money for selfless Wall Street firms deemed ‘too big to fail.’” Therefore we must seek common ground with the GOP and renounce relics of the Communist era like Social Security and Medicare.” To sustained applause the president added, “I hereby do so.”

Obama called for a reform of his own health care law to include a “private option” that would allow HMOs to deport Americans without health insurance to Cuba, in hopes of bankrupting the free health care system available on the Communist-ruled island. “The cost of treating fifty million uninsured Americans should bring down the Castro brothers once and for all,” proclaimed Obama gleefully.

The president said he would grant federal aid to states expelling the medically needy to Cuba, adding that he would veto any attempt to have them treated in the U.S. “We’ve got to get beyond the idea that democratic government means doling out aid to irresponsible citizens who refuse to pull their own weight.” The president emphatically rejected appeals for government assistance from ordinary Americans. “As we all know from civics lessons the only legitimate function government has is performing those tasks that Americans cannot perform themselves – like carpet-bombing foreign nations and giving away the store to transnational corporations and international banks.”

The president went on to state that his reformed health care reform bill would prove itself a more efficient system than the universal care available through Medicare. “Obviously the market is more efficient than government,” said Obama. “I mean, how much equity is returned to stockholders under Medicare? Absolutely none! Whereas under HMOs investors are making a killing, if you’ll pardon the expression,” the president said. Asked about the much higher administrative costs under privatized care, Obama explained that those “don’t count,” because they are passed on to the public.

On issues like declaring the war in Iraq “over,” Obama portrayed himself as the candidate who goes the extra mile for peace. “George Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq only once, while I am now working on my second final withdrawal from that liberated country,” the president said with obvious pride.

Obama also called for “staking out the middle ground” by privatizing Social Security, outsourcing the public schools to China, and handing over municipal water systems to corporate polluters in need of infusions of public capital in order to pay off fines imposed for systematically polluting the environment.