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By Derek Dougdale

14 November, 2013

@ Asia Times

All too often an emancipatory politics is substituted for idealism posturing as an emancipatory politics. Syria is a case in point. Two years ago, we were told the troops of Bashar al-Assad took to the streets of Damascus and violently crushed a peaceful, democratic protest. This, we are still told, led to a popular uprising, a revolution.

Despite serious criticism and reports the event was exaggerated – if not fabricated – even today, the alleged response to the March 2011 uprisings has formed the moral basis and unwavering belief in a principled support for the opposition. In this context, opposition groups such as Al-Nusra Front and al-Qaeda are classed as fringe actors just as detrimental to the “good” opposition as they are to the government.

There is no doubt some truth in this. In-fighting between various opposition groups has been widely reported, mainly because the opposition is deeply fractured into hundreds of militias. Yet however splintered, however chaotic, and whatever the crimes of the opposition, the government exercised violence first, therefore – the principle goes – it is morally worse. That is the belief. That is the principle.

Now, suppose for a moment the Syrian government did send troops into a crowd of peaceful protesters two years ago. Suppose the troops did exercise violence, shooting live bullets at unharmed protesters waving placards, murdering innocent men and women. Even then, there has been much talk about the way in which the Syrian government is said to have crushed those initial protests, but little talk about the why.

Following its formal independence from French colonial rule in 1946, Syria was one of the most unstable nations in the Greater Middle East and witnessed a series of coups and counter-coups. The first came in 1949 when Syrian president Shukri al-Kuwaiti was overthrown by the US-backed Husni al-Zaim, who was operating as the Chief of Army. In the same year, another coup was launched and al-Zaim was overthrown and executed. This time it was Hashem al-Atassi who gained power, only to be overthrown in the very same year in a counter-coup led by Adib al-Shishakli.

The three coups of 1949 set the precedent for the next 21 years, which saw the country suffer coup after counter-coup until Hafez al-Assad eventually consolidated his power in the Corrective Movement of 1970. Yet even then, destabilizing forces within Syria worked to overthrow the government.

Towards the end of the 1970s, Syria was rocked by a series of brutal terrorist attacks by various Islamist groups generally referred to under the umbrella term “Muslim Brotherhood”. At first, Islamists targeted politicians and party members for assassination, but quickly turned their attacks on the public.

In the ensuing bloodbath, thousands were killed while the Syrian government was slow to react. This culminated in 1982 when the city of Hama came under the control of Islamists, thus endangering the future of the Syrian state. The Syrian government responded with force, shelling the city in a battle that lasted for three weeks, until Hafez al-Assad’s government quashed the insurgents and finally regained control of the city.

Syria’s existence was also threatened by the emergence of the State of Israel, which was established on land once known as Greater Syria in 1948. With the US shifting their imperial eyes over the region in a bid to combat Soviet influence, support for Israel – who they saw as a potential counterweight to the Russians and Nasser’s Egypt – led to a geopolitical nightmare for the new Syrian state, resulting in three disastrous wars with Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973.

The context of Cold War politics, with the two main superpowers vying for control in the region, also resulted in covert support for various groups within Syria in a bid to manufacture dissent and gain political power and leverage, a policy which the US has continued up until today.

While Hafez al-Assad managed to bring stability to a country in absolute chaos and maintain a level of respect and independence in the existential battle with the US and Israel, the religious, ethnic, and political tensions in a fragile Syrian state, along with imperialist interference in Syrian affairs, continued up until Hafez al-Assad’s death. In fact, it wouldn’t be unfair to say the government’s response two years ago to protesters was sparked by fears of the fragile Syrian state disintegrating. Two years on, and with the country looking more and more like it will be partitioned, it is clear these fears were well-grounded.

In a 2006 Wikileaks cable, the extent of US interference in pre-2011 Syrian affairs is revealed. The cable discusses extensive plans to destabilize the country, including fomenting dissent amongst Syrian Sunni groups; promoting conflict in the government’s inner-circle; encouraging rumors of coup-plotting in the military; highlighting the failures of reform in the run up to the 2007 elections; and promoting a Kurdish rebellion in the country’s north. In no uncertain terms, the cable also points to “the potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists”, and suggests there “may be actions, statements, and signals that the USG [United States government] can send that will improve the likelihood of such opportunities arising”.

Despite all this, the “principled, moral” stance taken up by commentators outside of Syria has failed to take into account Syria’s historical, social, and political reality. The fact the Syrian Arab Republic is just 67 years old and was carved like a chunk of flesh from the earth is ignored. Its ethnic and religious makeup, often alienated, ambivalent, or even hostile to the colonial frontiers that constitute the post-independence Syrian state is not considered, while the secular government’s history of ethnic and religious toleration is hardly given a mention. In the same way, Syria’s complicated process of nation-building along with the internal and external agents seeking its destruction are not positioned as part of the context of the 2011 uprisings.

The “principled, moral” stance taken up by bourgeois, liberal, and leftist commentators has instead prevailed in a vacuum: after all, it is the principle that matters, the principle. But this is a conflict that has witnessed the death of well over 100,000 civilians and created millions of homeless, exiled refugees.

It will likely see the end of the Syrian Arab Republic, which will probably be partitioned and experience a future of “liquid” war. Is it not a little disingenuous then for comfortable liberal commentators and the like to stand by an abstract principle divorced from social, historical, and political reality?

Is it not time we trace the contours of conflict – the historical roots, the roots of causation – before making uninformed, emotive decisions and building our very politics from the present? It is all too easy to stand by a principle when its consequences cannot pierce one’s remote, detached, isolated comfort.

In the words of the inspirational Lebanese academic and political activist Amal-Saad Ghorayeb: “The Syrian refugees don’t need our liberal humanitarianism, nor our lefty class solidarity, nor our bourgeois “tolerance” for their presence in our midst. They just need their country back.”

We cannot give the exiled their country back, but we can stop conflating our comfortable idealism with the realities of Syria’s pain.

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing. Articles submitted for this section allow our readers to express their opinions and do not necessarily meet the same editorial standards of Asia Times Online’s regular contributors.

Derek Dougdale is a pseudonymous writer and journalist based in Berlin, Germany. He can be reached at dabcule@gmail.com

By Vacy Vlazna

12 November, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Here we go again. On Israel and the US losing their UNESCO voting rights, ‘Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, ‘said in an interview that his country supports the U.S. decision [to suspend contributions], “objecting to the politicization of UNESCO, or any international organization, with the accession of a non-existing country like Palestine.” (AP 8-11-13)

Palestine-denial, next to straight out violent ethnic-cleansing, is Israel’s sinister stratagem to wipe Palestinians off the face of their own ancestral land in order to lay a fictitious claim to the whole of historic Palestine.

Like the boy who cried ‘wolf’, Israel’s frenetic cries of ‘delegitimisation’ or’ anti-semitism’ at criticism of its illegal occupation and apartheid policies, is falling on the skeptical ears of the decent masses fed up with Israel’s double standards of delegitimising Palestine and dehumanising Palestinians as non-people.

In between the years spanning Golda Meir’s “There were no such things as the Palestinians… They did not exist.” (June 15, 1969) to the regurgitation by US Presidential nominee candidate, Newt Gingrich, Sheldon Adelson’s ventriloquist dummy, “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state — (it was) part of the Ottoman Empire. I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs” (10 12- 11) and up to Barkan’s present absurdity, are torrents of similar Zionist gibberish in the media.

Just as the English people evolved over millennia through the assimilation of indigenous folk and conquering colonisers and migrants, ie Picts, Celts, Britons, Romans, Angles, Saxons and Normans, so too modern Palestinians descended from sundry peoples; Canaanites, Edomites, Eremites, Moabites, Assyrians, Egyptians, Philistines, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Europeans,Turks.

In fact the nation of England didn’t manifest from multiple kingdoms until the 10th century CE and English identity only began to develop after the Norman conquests in the 12th century. At that time Palestine was part of the Arab Caliphate that took over from 600 years of Roman rule in 634 and held Palestine until 1516 three times longer than the sum of historic Jewish control sans the fictitious monarchies of Saul, David and Solomon:

“There is no evidence of a United Monarchy no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem or of any coherent, unified political force that dominated western Palestine, let alone an empire of the size the legends describe. We do not have evidence for the existence of kings named Saul, David or Solomon; nor do we have evidence for any temple at Jerusalem in this early period. What we do know of Israel and Judah of the tenth century does not allow us to interpret this lack of evidence as a gap in our knowledge and information about the past, a result merely of the accidental nature of archeology. There is neither room nor context, no artifact or archive that points to such historical realities in Palestine’s tenth century. One cannot speak historically of a state without a population. Nor can one speak of a capital without a town. Stories are not enough.” The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past, Thomas L Thompson

Thus the Israeli claim to Palestine on historic grounds has much less validity than a claim by modern Italians or Greeks on Palestine, or say Italians or Danes on England or Germans on France or the Syrians on Spain. In his book, ‘The Invention of the Land of Israel’, Israeli historian Prof. Shlomo Sand ‘argues that for 2,000 years the Jews did not constitute a people and that only religion, belief and culture united them.’(Haaretz 24-5-13)

To alchemise the myth that Palestine is the birth of the Jewish people into ‘reality’, Israel fused two elements, the Bible and archeology. As the Hebrew Bible is the basis of Christianity, which itself is a pillar of western civilisation, Biblical archeology then becomes the focul and front for a fabricated and dominant Zionist history, a ‘master story’ totally obscuring the rich heritage of Palestinian history. In short, Palestine-denial;

“ Appropriations of the past as part of the politics of the present… could be illustrated for most parts of the globe. One further example which is of particular interest to this study, is the way in which archeology and biblical history have become of such importance to the modern state of Israel. It is this combination which has been such a powerful factor in silencing Palestinian history.” ( p.16 The Invention of Ancient Israel: the silencing of Palestinian history, Keith W Whitelam)

The findings of Biblical archeology have gone unquestioned until recently with the advent of The Copenhagen School which challenged the Bible’s literal value as history.

These scholars agree that the heroic biblical accounts of David and Solomon were written between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC; hundreds of years after the so-called Iron Age united monarchy. Much the same as Homer’s heroic Iliad and Odyssey were written 400 years after its Bronze age setting. Nevertheless, the state of Israel has invested heavily in the David myth for its false historic claim to Jerusalem as its capital because it was the city of David.

Indeed, archaeology has become a state apparatus for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Zionist fairyland aka the City of David Archaeological Park located in the Palestinian village of Silwan in East Jerusalem,

‘De-Arabizing the history of Palestine is another crucial element of the ethnic cleansing. 1500 years of Arab and Muslim rule and culture in Palestine are trivialized, evidence of its existence is being destroyed and all this is done to make the absurd connection between the ancient Hebrew civilization and today’s Israel. The most glaring example of this today is in Silwan, (Wadi Hilwe) a town adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem with some 50,000 residents. Israel is expelling families from Silwan and destroying their homes because it claims that king David built a city there some 3000 years ago. Thousands of families will be made homeless so that Israel can build a park to commemorate a king that may or may not have lived 3000 years ago. Not a shred of historical evidence exists that can prove King David ever lived yet Palestinian men, women, children and the elderly along with their schools and mosques, churches and ancient cemeteries and any evidence of their existence must be destroyed and then denied so that Zionist claims to exclusive rights to the land may be substantiated.’ — Miko Peled, Israeli dissident.

Furthermore Prof. Ze’ev Herzog at Tel Aviv University in Deconstructing the walls of Jericho debunks a historic Exodus myth, “This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel.” The emergence from the desert and creating a unified state where the desert blooms and the brave pioneering Jews prosper lies at the core of Israeli identity and echoed here by President Shimon Peres;

“I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world? This is a miracle: a land built by people” (Maariv, 14 -4-2013).

The old ‘there was nothing here’ strikes agin! Peres knows this is charlatanry. Palestinian agriculture and trade was booming when the Zionist colonists arrived and was vibrant, booming, and plenteous for centuries.

Guy Le Strange, in 1890, translated in his fascinating book, Palestine Under the Moslems; From AD650 to 1500, the works of 20 medieval Muslim geographers including the famous Jerusalemite, Al Mukaddasi and Ibn Battuta;

“Filasîn is watered by the rains and the dew. Its trees and its ploughed lands do not need artificial irrigation; and it is only in Nâbulus that you find the running waters applied to this purpose. Filastîn is the most fertile of the Syrian provinces.

“From Palestine come olives, dried figs, raisins, the carobfruit, stuffs of mixed silk and cotton, soap and kerchiefs. “ From Jerusalem come cheeses, cotton, the celebrated raisins of the species known as ’Ainûnî and Dûrî, excellent apples, bananas—which same is a fruit in the form of a cucumber, but when the skin is peeled off, the interior is not unlike the water-melon, only finer flavoured and more luscious—also pine nuts of the kind called ‘ Kuraish-bite’ and their equal is not found elscwhere; further, mirrors, lamp-jars, and needles. “ From Jericho is brought excellent indigo. “ From Sughar and Baisân come both indigo and dates, also the treacle called Dibs. “

“Unequalled is this land of Syria for its dried figs, its common olive-oil, its white bread, and the Ramlah veils; also for the quinces, the pine-nuts called ‘ Kuraish-bite,’ the ’Ainûnî and Duri raisins, the Theriack-antidote, the herb of mint, and the rosaries of Jerusalem. And further, know that within the province of Palestine may be found gathered together six-and-thirty products that are not found thus united in any other land. Of these the first seven are found in Palestine alone; the following seven are very rare in other countries; and the remaining two-and-twenty, though only found thus gathered together in this province, are, for the most part, found one and another, singly, in other lands. Now the first seven are the pine-nuts, called ‘ Kuraish-bite,’ the quince or Cydonian-apple, the ’Ainûnî and the Duri raisins, the Kâfûrî plum, the fig called As Sabâ’i, and the fig of Damascus. The next seven are the Colocasia or water lily, the sycamore, the carob or St. John’s bread (locust-tree), the lotus-fruit or jujube, the artichoke, the sugar-cane, and the Syrian apple. And the remaining twentytwo are the fresh dates and olives, the shaddock, the indigo and juniper, the orange, the mandrake, the Nabk fruit, the nut, the almond, the asparagus, the banana, the sumach, the cabbage, the truffle, the lupin, and the early prune, called At Tarî; also snow, buffalo-milk, the honey-comb, the ‘Âsimî grape, and the Tamri—or date-fig. Further, there is the preserve called Kubbait; you find, in truth, the like of it in name elsewhere, but of a dififerent flavour. The lettuce also, which everywhere else, except only at Ahwâz (in Persia), is counted as a common vegetable, is here in Palestine a choice dish.

What is intriguing in these Muslim chronicles is their acknowledgement of the Jewish and Christian narratives, “In the middle of the Lake of Tiberias is a projecting rock, which they say is the tomb of Solomon, the son of David. Now, the sinking together of the waters of the Lake of Tiberias will be a sign of the coming of the Antichrist, called Ad Dajjâl.” and according to Sand, “it was not until the arrival of the armies of Islam in the early seventh century that Jews were finally allowed to freely enter and reside in their ancient holy city.”

So unlike Israel’s perpetual denial that Palestine ever existed as a nation that disregards the definition of ‘nation’ includes both the legal entity of nation as state and also nation as ‘a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history inhabiting a particular country or territory.’ For example in Australia there are over 200 Indigenous nations and over 500 in America.

There are countless historic references to Palestine to counter Israeli denial such as:

1150 BC: “Peleset transliterated from hieroglyphs as P-r-s-t referring to the people and land of the Philistines during Egypt’s Twentieth Dynasty.

800 BC: The Assyrians referred to region as Palashtu

5th Century BC: “The first known occurrence of the Greek word Palaistine is in the Histories of Herodotus, written near the mid-fifth century B.C. Palaistine Syria, or simply Palaistine, is applied to what may be identified as the southern part of Syria, comprising the region between Phoenicia and Egypt.”

306 -337 CE: Of the Roman Emperor Constantine, Eusebius the Palestinian writes in his Vita Constantini:

In this manner, then, the emperor executed in Palestine the noble works I have above described: and indeed in every province he raised new churches on a far more imposing scale than those which had existed before his time. Chapter xlvii book III

and includes a letter from Constantine to “”Victor Constantinus, Maximus Augustus, to Macarius, and the rest of the bishops in Palestine “ LII

Arab Caliphate 650-1500: “the early division of Syria into five Junds. These corresponded very nearly with the old Roman and Byzantine provinces, such as the Arabs found in existence at the time of the conquest, and which are described in the Code of Theodosius, a work that dates from the fifth century A.D. Palæstina Prima, with Cæsarea for its capital, comprising Judsea and Samaria, became the Arab Jund of Filastîn, with Ramlah for capital. Palæstina Secunda, with Scythopolis (Beth Shean, Baisân) for its capital, comprising the two Galûees and the western part of Persea, became the Jund of Al Urdunn (the Jordan), with Tiberias for the new capital. Palæstina Tertia, or Salutaris, including Idumsea and Arabia Petraea, was absorbed partly into the Damascus Jund, and partly was counted in Filastîn. ( le Strange)

“ The population of Palestine consists of Arabs of the tribes of Lakhm, Judhâm, ’Âmilah, Kindah, Kais ( le Strange)

The discovery of the 7th Century Standing Caliph Coins of Aylah-Filastin

Circa 1603: Shakespeare’s Othello, Act4 Sc.3 ll38-9

EMILIA: I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot

to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip.

1896: Even the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, recognised Palestine within the Ottoman Empire,”If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey.” (The Jewish State,)

1915-8: The Australian War memorial and the official Australian Light Horse website recognise the WW1 Sinai and PALESTINE campaigns.

1927: “the Currency Board put into circulation a new currency which in 1928 became the sole legal currency. This was the Palestine pound, equivalent in value to the pound sterling and divided into 1,000 mils. The notes in current circulation in Palestine are £P ½, 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 and 500. There are also silver coins of 50 and 100 mils and bronze and nickel coins of 5, 10 and 20 mils.”

February 1927: ultra Zionist David Ben Gurion said

“The right which the Arabs in Palestine have is one due to the inhabitants of any country . . . because they live here, and not because they are Arabs . . . The Arab inhabitants of Palestine should enjoy all the rights of citizens and all political rights, not only as individuals, but as a national community, just like the Jews.”

The same Ben Gurion who, according to Prof. Ilan Pappe, was the “architect of ethnic cleansing” during the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) when, 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed by Zionist militias and 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their ancestral land while thousands of innocents were murdered.

Israel has compelled the criminalisation of Holocaust denial in Europe and elsewhere even though it has enacted domestic laws criminalising Nakba commemoration. The flaccid reaction of world governments to Israel’s galling double standards is as ethically contemptible as Israel’s effrontery to expunge an oppressed people and their lineal land.

Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

By Herman Daly

12 November, 2013

@ Dalynews.org

Let’s get specific. Here are ten policies for ending uneconomic growth and moving to a steady-state economy. A steady-state economy is one that develops qualitatively (by improvement in science, technology, and ethics) without growing quantitatively in physical dimensions; it lives on a diet — a constant metabolic flow of resources from depletion to pollution (the entropic throughput) maintained at a level that is both sufficient for a good life and within the assimilative and regenerative capacities of the containing ecosystem.

Ten is an arbitrary number — just a way to get specific and challenge others to suggest improvements. Although the whole package here discussed fits together in the sense that some policies supplement and balance others, most of them could be adopted singly and gradually.

1. Cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources. Caps limit biophysical scale by quotas on depletion or pollution, whichever is more limiting. Auctioning the quotas captures scarcity rents for equitable redistribution. Trade allows efficient allocation to highest uses. This policy has the advantage of transparency. There is a limit to the amount and rate of depletion and pollution that the economy can be allowed to impose on the ecosystem. Caps are physical quotas, limits to the throughput of basic resources, especially fossil fuels. The quota usually should be applied at the input end because depletion is more spatially concentrated than pollution and hence easier to monitor. Also the higher price of basic resources will induce their more economical use at each upstream stage of production, as well as at the final stages of consumption and recycling. Ownership of the quotas is initially public — the government periodically auctions them to individuals and firms. There should be no “grandfathering” of quota rights to previous users, nor “offshoring” of quotas for new fossil fuel power plants in one by place by credits from planting trees somewhere else. Reforestation is a good policy on its own. It is too late for self-canceling half measures — increased carbon sequestration and decreased emissions are both needed. The auction revenues go to the treasury and are used to replace regressive taxes, such as the payroll tax, and to reduce income tax on the lowest incomes. Once purchased at auction the quotas can be freely bought and sold by third parties, just as can the resources whose rate of depletion they limit. The cap serves the goal of sustainable scale; the auction serves the goal of fair distribution; and trading allows efficient allocation — three goals, three policy instruments. Although mainly applied to nonrenewable resources, the same logic works for limiting the off-take from renewable resources, such as fisheries and forests, with the quota level set to approximate a sustainable yield.

2. Ecological tax reform. Shift the tax base from value added (labor and capital) to “that to which value is added,” namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), and returned to nature (pollution). Such a tax shift prices the scarce but previously un-priced contribution of nature. Value added to natural resources by labor and capital is something we want to encourage, so stop taxing it. Depletion and pollution are things we want to discourage, so tax them. Payment above necessary supply price is rent, unearned income, and most economists have long advocated taxing it, both for efficiency and equity reasons. Ecological tax reform can be an alternative or a supplement to cap-auction-trade systems.

3. Limit the range of inequality in income distribution with a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Unlimited inequality is unfair; complete equality is also unfair. Seek fair limits to the range of inequality. The civil service, the military, and the university manage with a range of inequality of a factor of 15 or 20. Corporate America has a range of 500 or more. Many industrial nations are below 25. Could we not limit the range to, say, 100, and see how it works? This might mean a minimum of 20 thousand dollars and a maximum of two million. Is that not more than enough to give incentive for hard work and compensate real differences? People who have reached the limit could either work for nothing at the margin if they enjoy their work, or devote their extra time to hobbies or public service. The demand left unmet by those at the top will be filled by those who are below the maximum. A sense of community, necessary for democracy, is hard to maintain across the vast income differences current in the United States. Rich and poor separated by a factor of 500 have few experiences or interests in common, and are increasingly likely to engage in violent conflict.

4. Free up the length of the working day, week, and year — allow greater option for part-time or personal work. Full-time external employment for all is hard to provide without growth. Other industrial countries have much longer vacations and maternity leaves than the United States. For the classical economists the length of the working day was a key variable by which the worker (self-employed yeoman or artisan) balanced the marginal disutility of labor with the marginal utility of income and of leisure so as to maximize enjoyment of life. Under industrialism the length of the working day became a parameter rather than a variable (and for Karl Marx was the key determinant of the rate of exploitation). We need to make it more of a variable subject to choice by the worker. Milton Friedman wanted “freedom to choose” — OK, here is an important choice most of us are not allowed to make! And we should stop biasing the labor-leisure choice by advertising to stimulate more consumption and more labor to pay for it. At a minimum advertising should no longer be treated as a tax-deductible expense of production.

5. Re-regulate international commerce — move away from free trade, free capital mobility, and globalization. Cap-auction-trade, ecological tax reform, and other national measures that internalize environmental costs will raise prices and put us at a competitive disadvantage in international trade with countries that do not internalize costs. We should adopt compensating tariffs to protect, not inefficient firms, but efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition with foreign firms that are not required to pay the social and environmental costs they inflict. This “new protectionism” is very different from the “old protectionism” that was designed to protect a truly inefficient domestic firm from a more efficient foreign firm. The first rule of efficiency is “count all the costs” — not “free trade,” which coupled with free capital mobility leads to a standards-lowering competition to count as few costs as possible. Tariffs are also a good source of public revenue. This will run afoul of the World Trade Organization/World Bank/International Monetary Fund, so….

6. Downgrade the WTO/WB/IMF. Reform these organizations based on something like Keynes’s original plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances with the union — seek balance on current account, and thereby avoid large foreign debts and capital account transfers. For example, under Keynes’s plan the U.S. would pay a penalty charge to the clearing union for its large deficit with the rest of the world, and China would also pay a similar penalty for its surplus. Both sides of the imbalance would be pressured to balance their current accounts by financial penalties, and if need be by exchange rate adjustments relative to the clearing account unit, called the “bancor” by Keynes. The bancor would also serve as the world reserve currency, a privilege that should not be enjoyed by any national currency, including the U.S. dollar. Reserve currency status for the dollar is a benefit to the U.S. — rather like a truckload of free heroin is a benefit to an addict. The bancor would be like gold under the gold standard, only you would not have to tear up the earth to dig it out. Alternatively a regime of freely fluctuating exchange rates is a viable possibility requiring less international cooperation.

7. Move away from fractional reserve banking toward a system of 100% reserve requirements. This would put control of the money supply and seigniorage (profit made by the issuer of fiat money) in the hands of the government rather than private banks, which would no longer be able to live the alchemist’s dream by creating money out of nothing and lending it at interest. All quasi-bank financial institutions should be brought under this rule, regulated as commercial banks subject to 100% reserve requirements. Banks would earn their profit by financial intermediation only, lending savers’ money for them (charging a loan rate higher than the rate paid to savings or “time-account” depositors) and charging for checking, safekeeping, and other services. With 100% reserves every dollar loaned to a borrower would be a dollar previously saved by a depositor (and not available to him during the period of the loan), thereby re-establishing the classical balance between abstinence and investment. With credit limited by prior saving (abstinence from consumption) there will be less lending and borrowing and it will be done more carefully — no more easy credit to finance the massive purchase of “assets” that are nothing but bets on dodgy debts. To make up for the decline in bank-created, interest-bearing money the government can pay some of its expenses by issuing more non-interest-bearing fiat money. However, it can only do this up to a strict limit imposed by inflation. If the government issues more money than the public voluntarily wants to hold, the public will trade it for goods, driving the price level up. As soon as the price index begins to rise the government must print less and tax more. Thus a policy of maintaining a constant price index would govern the internal value of the dollar. The Treasury would replace the Fed, and the target policy variables would be the money supply and the price index, not the interest rate. The external value of the dollar could be left to freely fluctuating exchange rates (or preferably to the rate against the bancor in Keynes’s clearing union).

8. Stop treating the scarce as if it were free, and the free as if it were scarce. Enclose the remaining open-access commons of rival natural capital (e.g., the atmosphere, the electromagnetic spectrum, and public lands) in public trusts, and price them by cap-auction-trade systems, or by taxes. At the same time, free from private enclosure and prices the non-rival commonwealth of knowledge and information. Knowledge, unlike the resource throughput, is not divided in the sharing, but multiplied. Once knowledge exists, the opportunity cost of sharing it is zero, and its allocative price should be zero. International development aid should more and more take the form of freely and actively shared knowledge, along with small grants, and less and less the form of large interest-bearing loans. Sharing knowledge costs little, does not create un-repayable debts, and increases the productivity of the truly rival and scarce factors of production. Patent monopolies (aka “intellectual property rights”) should be given for fewer “inventions,” and for fewer years. Costs of production of new knowledge should, more and more, be publicly financed and then the knowledge freely shared. Knowledge is a cumulative social product, and we have the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, the double helix, polio vaccine, etc. without patent monopolies and royalties.

9. Stabilize population. Work toward a balance in which births plus in-migrants equals deaths plus out-migrants. This is controversial and difficult, but as a start contraception should be made available for voluntary use everywhere. And while each nation can debate whether it should accept many or few immigrants, and who should get priority, such a debate is rendered moot if immigration laws are not enforced. We should support voluntary family planning and enforcement of reasonable immigration laws, democratically enacted.

10. Reform national accounts — separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account. Natural capital consumption and “regrettably necessary defensive expenditures” belong in the cost account. Compare costs and benefits of a growing throughput at the margin, and stop throughput growth when marginal costs equal marginal benefits. In addition to this objective approach, recognize the importance of the subjective studies that show that, beyond a threshold, further GDP growth does not increase self-evaluated happiness. Beyond a level already reached in many countries, GDP growth delivers no more happiness, but continues to generate depletion and pollution. At a minimum we must not just assume that GDP growth is economic growth, but prove that it is not uneconomic growth.

Currently these policies are beyond the pale politically. To the reader who has persevered this far, I thank you for your willing suspension of political disbelief. Only after a significant crash, a painful empirical demonstration of the failure of the growth economy, would this ten-fold program, or anything like it, stand a chance of being enacted.

To be sure, the conceptual change in vision from the norm of a growth economy to that of a steady-state economy is radical. Some of these proposals are rather technical and require more explanation and study. There is no escape from studying economics, even if, as Joan Robinson said, the main reason for it is to avoid being deceived by economists. Nevertheless, the policies required are far from revolutionary, and are subject to gradual application. For example, 100% reserve banking was advocated in the 1930s by the conservative Chicago School and can be approached gradually, the range of distributive inequality can be restricted gradually, caps can be adjusted gradually, etc. More importantly, these measures are based on the impeccably conservative institutions of private property and decentralized market allocation. The policies here advocated simply reaffirm forgotten pillars of those institutions, namely that: (1) private property loses its legitimacy if too unequally distributed; (2) markets lose their legitimacy if prices do not tell the truth about opportunity costs; and as we have more recently learned (3) the macro-economy becomes an absurdity if its scale is required to grow beyond the biophysical limits of the Earth.

Well before reaching that radical biophysical limit, we are encountering the classical economic limit in which extra costs of growth become greater than the extra benefits, ushering in the era of uneconomic growth, whose very possibility is denied by the growthists. The inequality of wealth distribution has canceled out the traditional virtues of private property by bestowing nearly all benefits of growth to the top 1%, while generously sharing the costs of growth with the poor. Gross inequality, plus monopolies, subsidies, tax loopholes, false accounting, cost-externalizing globalization, and financial fraud have made market prices nearly meaningless as measures of opportunity cost. For example, a policy of near zero interest rates (quantitative easing) to push growth and bail out big banks has eliminated the interest rate as a measure of the opportunity cost of capital, thereby crippling the efficiency of investment. Trying to maintain the present growth-based Ponzi system is far more unrealistic than moving to a steady-state economy by something like the policies here outlined. It is probably too late to avoid unrealism’s inevitable consequences. But while we are hunkered down and unemployed, enduring the crash, we might think about the principles that should guide reconstruction.

Herman Daly is an American ecological economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park in the United States. He was Senior Economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, where he helped to develop policy guidelines related to sustainable development. He is closely associated with theories of a Steady state economy. He is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and the NCSE Lifetime Achievement Award

By Nile Bowie

15 November, 2013

The secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is the Obama administration’s bid to perpetuate US hegemony in Asia and lay the groundwork for a Pacific century led by American corporate and military muscle.

Although proponents of the TPP may claim that its focus is to help the economies of signatory countries, create comprehensive market access, eliminate barriers to trade, improve labor rights, and encourage environmental protection, every indication suggests that the wide-ranging agreement intends to dramatically maximize corporate revenues at the expensive of public health and safety, civil liberties, and national sovereignty. While the significant majority of the draft text remains inaccessible and shielded from public scrutiny due to draconian non-disclosure agreements, leaks made available by courageous individuals via WikiLeaks indicate that this trade deal intends to champion corporate rights and blur the divisions between governments and multinationals. In essence, the stipulations of the trade deal would make governments – including their national laws to regulate public and environmental health – subservient to corporations and their maximization of profits.

As China’s economic and military clout rises while American leadership wanes, the TPP is an integral part of the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia. The trade deal has been negotiated between the United States and eleven other Pacific Rim nations including Japan, Canada, Australia, Vietnam, Chile, Singapore, and Malaysia since 2008. Despite the length and breadth of the talks, leaks indicate dozens upon dozens of contentious issues have yet to be resolved, and that other countries participating nearly unanimously oppose the US position on patents, intellectual property, and a host of other issues. The TPP is being negotiated concurrently with the highly secretive US-EU deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which contains many of the same provisions regarding the investor-state settlement dispute mechanism that allows corporations to sue governments for changes in policy (often done to protect public health and the environment) that undermine the expected future profits of a company. These measures significantly distort the legal playing field and incentivize governments to issue policies with overtly private interests at heart.

Don’t forget the geopolitics

The glaring absence of Russia and China in these agreements is no accident; geopolitics is not a factor that should be overlooked in analyzing US trade policy. Many countries in Southeast Asia taking part in the TPP negotiations employ foreign-investment led growth strategies; China is the biggest investor in the region and is a vital partner to countries like Malaysia and Singapore. The Obama administration believes unfettered access to Southeast Asian markets will allow it to harness the region’s rapid economic growth to fuel its own economic recovery. More importantly, the trade deal is viewed as a means to undermine China and reduce dependence on it by giving products manufactured in TPP-countries preferential access to US markets, thereby encouraging extreme low-wage working conditions in countries like Vietnam. China will almost certainly face weakening overall export competitiveness while the US gains leadership over the region’s trade rules, strengthened corporate monopolies, and increased political (and military) influence.

The TPP transparently aims to economically contain China’s rise and reduce the scope for internationalization of the renminbi, while US military presence around the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca is quietly building up to broaden Washington’s capacity to police vital trade and energy chokepoints. The Obama administration has set an ambitious target to sign the trade deal into law before 2014, despite an ongoing deadlock in trade negotiations due to the reluctance of some participatory nations to accept broadened intellectual property rights legislation that would disproportionately benefit US firms, as well as drastic deregulation of financial sectors and measures that would undermine existing monetary policy in participating countries. Rampant lobbying from Hollywood, the recording industry, and US pharmaceutical, biotech and entertainment corporations quite visibly influences the Obama administration’s trade policies, and the ongoing disputes documented in the leaked intellectual property chapter may delay or prevent the deal from becoming law.

Is there an alternative to copyright fundamentalism?

Leaks suggest that the US is demanding that draconian provisions be imposed on TPP-countries that would require ISPs to enforce copyright law on behalf of foreign corporations that would include closing down their customers’ accounts for marginal offensives, in addition to restricting cheaper parallel importing, and even (ridiculously) allowing plants and animals to be patented. The IP regulations being aggressively pursued by Washington would export US copyright law abroad and introduce measures seen in the shelved SOPA and PIPA bills that would stifle innovation and digital file-sharing while limiting Internet freedom and access to educational materials. Several leaders of TPP-countries have expressed their reticence in the deal’s IP provisions that openly disregard public health by banning the production of low-cost generic medicines that may violate patents (which are slated to be extended under the deal’s terms and conditions). Reports indicate that the trade deal would also prohibit countries from putting limits on risky financial instruments, speculation, and derivatives, while measures to mitigate risk through enacting capital controls would also rolled back.

It is clear to see the reluctance of some leaders to agree to the positions that the US has aggressively pushed in the TPP, but many fear that pulling out from the deal completely would put their countries at a competitive disadvantage. Countries participating in the TPP such as New Zealand have suggested a series of alternative proposals that would avoid blocks to generic medicines, but US representatives refuse to fully agree to such provisions. Why should countries in the region submit themselves to a highly draconian and discriminatory deal that would have adverse affects on their populations? The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) represents something of an alternative; this lesser-known deal is currently being negotiated and involves 16 countries including China, India, Japan, South Korea, the entire ASEAN-bloc, Australia, and New Zealand. Unlike the TPP, the RCEP offers a truly inclusive lineup of Pacific states.

Closer economic integration in the Pacific is a stated goal of leaders in numerous countries and one cannot run away from it. Although such a deal would naturally contain controversial provisions in some areas, individual countries would have far more lenience in drafting beneficial measures in an equal negotiating environment through the RCEP that would allow developing countries to expand social services and protect their environments rather than becoming captive markets of predatory multinational corporations. The fact that the public must rely on individual leakers who can potentially be persecuted for revealing information that should rightfully be open to public scrutiny is indicative of the repressive nature of the interests propagating trade systems of this nature. WikiLeaks has again proven its relevancy by exposing the corporate entities that are the true wielders of authority behind those formally in office. There is good reason for President Obama to lobby for fast track authority that would diminish Congress’ constitutional power to set the terms of US trade policy. If Congress or the public were given a chance to review the secretive draft text of the TPP, it would be enthusiastically abandoned.

By Lauren McCauley

12 November, 2013

@ CommonDreams.org

The climate crisis is “madness” and environmentally vulnerable nations such as the Philippines do not have time for failed climate negotiations, Philippines climate negotiator Naderev “Yeb” Saño told the delegation at the 19th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP19) Monday as he vowed to go on hunger strike until “clear progress is made.”

Saño, the Philippine Climate Change Commissioner, delivered his address during the opening session of the 12-day climate talks in Warsaw, Poland three days after Typhoon Haiyan made landfall, wreaking havoc across his island nation.

“What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness,” Saño told the assembly, describing the massive devastation and thousands feared dead following Typhoon Haiyan, the “strongest in modern recorded history.”

“We can stop this madness. Right here in Warsaw,” he added, appealing to the representatives of nearly 200 countries who assembled in a bid to reach a new agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol that expired last year. Many anticipate the talks will only amount to a 2015 agreement for new limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

“Typhoons such as Haiyan and its impacts represent a sobering reminder to the international community that we cannot afford to delay climate action,” Saño continued.

His comments Monday echoed those made during last year’s UN climate conference in Doha, Qatar when Saño—pointing to both Hurricane Sandy and Typhoon Bopha as “clear examples” of climate change—demanded a call for urgency in the climate debate.

“We need not engage in the perpetual debate on whether climate change is happening or not,” he said at the time.

The Doha climate talks amounted to little more than a “sham of a deal”—as described by Friends of the Earth International spokesperson Asad Rehman—as rich nations failed to take responsibility for their outsized carbon footprints or increase their financial commitments to developing nations.

To climate change deniers, or those countries who are less impacted by the effects of global warming and therefore are less motivated to enact meaningful change, Saño challenged them before the Warsaw assembly, saying, “I dare them, I dare them to get off their ivory towers and away from the comfort of their armchairs.”

 

He continued:

I dare them to go to the islands of the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Indian ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels; to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and the Andes to see communities confronting glacial floods, to the Arctic where communities grapple with the fast dwindling sea ice caps, to the large deltas of the Mekong, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Nile where lives and livelihoods are drowned, to the hills of Central America that confronts similar monstrous hurricanes, to the vast savannas of Africa where climate change has likewise become a matter of life and death as food and water become scarce.

Not to forget the monster hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard of North America as well as the fires that razed Down Under. And if that is not enough, you may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now.

Even with developed nations establishing dramatic emissions reduction targets, he said, it is “too late” and that we are “locked-in” to climate change and now need to look forward to the issue of loss and damage.

“We have entered a new era that demands global solidarity in order to fight climate change and ensure that the pursuit of sustainable human development remains at the fore of the global community’s efforts,” he said, adding, “We cannot sit and stay helpless staring at this international climate stalemate. It is now time to raise ambition and take action. We need an emergency climate pathway.”

Saño concluded his speech by acknowledging the personal toll of the storm, saying that his family hails from the devastated town of Tacloban where Haiyan made landfall on Friday.

Further impressing the severity of his commitment and the urgency of a climate agreement, Saño pledged to go on hunger strike until “clear progress is made,” saying, “In solidarity with my countrymen who are struggling to find food back home and with my brother who has not had food for the last three days… I will now commence a voluntary fasting.”

* * *

The complete transcript of Saño’s speech is below:

Mr President, I have the honor to speak on behalf of the resilient people of the Republic of the Philippines.

At the onset, allow me to fully associate my delegation with the statement made by the distinguished Ambassador of the Republic of Fiji, on behalf of G77 and China. We likewise join others in congratulating you for your election of COP19.

The people of the Philippines, and our delegation here in Warsaw, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your expression of sympathy and solidarity to my country in the face of this national difficulty. The white flowers that you have bestowed upon my delegation that symbolize Poland’s sympathy with the Philippines are deeply and profoundly cherished so thank you for this very heartwarming gesture.

In the midst of this tragedy, one which you correctly referred to as a painful awakening, my delegation finds comfort in the warm hospitality of Poland, for welcoming us to this very beautiful and charming city of Warsaw, with your people offering us warm smiles everywhere we go: in the hotels, around the streets, with the stewards and personnel in this National Stadium. So, thank you again. Thank you, Poland.

The arrangements you and the secretariat have made for this COP is also most excellent and we highly appreciate the tremendous effort you have put into the preparations for this important meeting.

We also thank all of you, friends and colleagues gathered in this hall and from all corners of the world as you stand beside us in this trying time. I thank all countries and governments who have extended your solidarity and for offering assistance to the Philippines. We thank the youth present here and the billions of young people all over the world who stand steadfast with the Philippines, and who are carefully watching us as we craft their future.

I thank civil society, both who are working on the ground as we race against time in the hardest hit areas, and those who are here in Warsaw prodding us to have a sense of urgency. We thank the media as well for helping us communicate the reality of climate change. We are deeply moved by this manifestation of human solidarity and we likewise stand in solidarity with all countries that face and confront the adverse impact of climate change. This outpouring of support proves to us that as a human race, we can unite and we can all rise above adversity; that as a species, we care.

It was barely 11 months ago in Doha when my delegation made an appeal, an appeal to the world to open our eyes to the stark reality that we face. As then we confronted a catastrophic storm that resulted in the costliest disaster in Philippine history. Less than a year hence, we cannot imagine that a disaster much bigger would come.

With an apparent cruel twist of fate, my country is being tested by this hellstorm called Super Typhoon Haiyan. It was so strong that if there was a Category 6, it would have fallen squarely in that box. Up to this hour, we remain uncertain as to the full extent of the damage and devastation, as information trickles in in an agonizingly slow manner because power lines and communication lines have been cut off and may take a while before these are restored.

The initial assessment show that Haiyan left a wake of massive devastation that is unprecedented, unthinkable and horrific. According to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center estimated Haiyan to have attained one-minute sustained winds of 315 km/h (195 mph) and gusts up to 378 km/h (235 mph) making it the strongest typhoon in modern recorded history.

Despite the massive efforts that my country had exerted in preparing for the onslaught of this monster of a storm, it was just a force too powerful and even as a nation familiar with storms, Haiyan was nothing we have ever experienced before, or perhaps nothing that any country has every experienced before.

The picture in the aftermath is ever slowly coming into clearer focus. The devastation is colossal. And as if this is not enough, another storm is brewing again in the warm waters of the western Pacific. I shudder at the thought of another typhoon hitting the same places where people have not yet even managed to begin standing up.

To anyone outside who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare them, I dare them to get off their ivory towers and away from the comfort of their armchairs. I dare them to go to the islands of the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Indian ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels; to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and the Andes to see communities confronting glacial floods, to the Arctic where communities grapple with the fast dwindling sea ice caps, to the large deltas of the Mekong, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Nile where lives and livelihoods are drowned, to the hills of Central America that confronts similar monstrous hurricanes, to the vast savannas of Africa where climate change has likewise become a matter of life and death as food and water become scarce.

Not to forget the monster hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard of North America as well as the fires that razed Down Under. And if that is not enough, you may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now.

Climate change will mean increased potential for more intense tropical storms and this will have profound implications on many communities, especially who struggle against the twin challenges of the development crisis and the climate change crisis. Typhoons such as Haiyan and its impacts represent a sobering reminder to the international community that we cannot afford to delay climate action.

Warsaw must deliver on enhancing ambition and should muster the political will to address climate change and build that important bridge towards Peru and Paris. It might be said that it must be poetic justice that Typhoon Haiyan was so big that its diameter spanned a distance between Warsaw and Paris.

In Doha, we asked “If not us then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?” but here in Warsaw, we may very well ask these same forthright questions.

What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness.

We can stop this madness. Right here in Warsaw.

It is the 19th COP, but we might as well stop counting, because my country refuses to accept that a COP30 or a COP40 will be needed to solve climate change. And because it seems that despite the significant gains we have had since the UNFCCC (Editor’s Note: the UNFCCC stands for UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) was born, 20 years hence we continue to fall short in fulfilling the ultimate objective of the Convention.

Now, we find ourselves in a situation where we have to ask ourselves – can we ever attain the ultimate objective of the Convention – which is to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system? By failing to meet the objective of the Convention, we may have ratified our own doom.

And if we have failed to meet the objective of the Convention, we have to confront the issue of loss and damage. Loss and damage is a reality today across the world.

Developed country emissions reductions targets are dangerously low and must be raised immediately, but even if these were in line with the demand of reducing 40-50% below 1990 levels, we will still have locked-in climate change and would still need to address the issue of loss and damage.

We find ourselves at a critical juncture and the situation is that even the most ambitious emissions reductions by developed countries, who should have been taking the lead in the last two decades, will not be enough to avert the crisis. It is now too late, too late to talk about the world being able to rely on Annex I countries to solve the climate crisis.

We have entered a new era that demands global solidarity in order to fight climate change and ensure that the pursuit of sustainable human development remains at the fore of the global community’s efforts. This is why the means of implementation for developing countries becomes ever so crucial.

We cannot sit and stay helpless staring at this international climate stalemate. It is now time to raise ambition and take action. We need an emergency climate pathway.

‘We refuse to accept typhoons as way of life’

I speak for my delegation. But I speak for the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves after perishing from the storm. I speak also for those who have been orphaned by the storm. I speak for the people now racing against time to save survivors and alleviate the suffering of the people affected.

We can take drastic action now to ensure that we prevent a future where super typhoons become a way of life. Because we refuse, as a nation, to accept a future where super typhoons like Haiyan become a way of life. We refuse to accept that running away from storms, evacuating our families, suffering the devastation and misery, counting our dead, become a way of life. We simply refuse to.

Even in the context of the obvious imperative for adaptation, my country does not come with empty hands. The Philippines had enacted a Renewable Energy Law, which mandates the establishment of feed-in tariffs for renewable energy with the aspiration of doubling our renewable energy capacity by 2020 and tripling it by 2030 pursuant to our national renewable energy program. Now as has become very clear, the Philippines grapples with serious challenges in the face of climate impacts.

I challenge our friends, our partners from developed countries to finance this incremental cost of the portion of the Philippine feed-in tariff that would otherwise be paid for by the impoverished electricity consumer and only until renewables reach grid parity with fossil fuels or conventional fuels. We call this our socialized feed-in tariff.

By our estimate, it is only in the neighborhood of $500 million. We estimate also that renewables will reach grid parity by 2020. If developed countries would finance this cost, we can triple our renewable energy capacity by 2013. If developed countries will gladly come forward to provide the resources for this, we will be ready to inscribe this as our nationally appropriate mitigation action because we believe in renewables. We believe in sustainable development. And because we believe that solving climate change is our moral duty. This moral duty is applicable to all parties.

‘Fasting pending a meaningful outcome’

Now, if you will allow me, I wish to speak on a more personal note.

Super Typhoon Haiyan perhaps unknown to many here made landfall in my own family’s hometown and the devastation is staggering. I struggle to find words even for the images that we see on the news coverage. And I struggle to find words to describe how I feel about the losses.

Up to this hour, I agonize while waiting for word as to the fate of my very own relatives. What gives me renewed strength and great relief is that my own brother succeeded in communicating with us that he has survived the onslaught. In the last two days, he has been gathering bodies of the dead with his own two hands. He is very hungry and weary as food supplies find it difficult to arrive in that hardest hit area.

These last two days, there are moments when I feel I should rally behind climate advocates who peacefully confront those historically responsible for the current state of our climate. These selfless people who fight coal, expose themselves to freezing temperatures or block oil pipelines. In fact, we are seeing increasing frustration and thus more increased civil disobedience. The next two weeks, these people and many around the world who serve as our conscience will again remind us of this enormous responsibility. The youth here who constantly remind us that their future is in peril. We stand with them.

We cannot solve climate change when we seek to spew more emissions. I express this with all due sincerity. In solidarity with my countrymen who are struggling to find food back home and with my brother who has not had food for the last 3 days, with all due respect and I mean no disrespect for your kind hospitality, I will now commence a voluntary fasting for the climate.

This means I will voluntarily refrain from eating food during this COP (Conferences of the Parties to the UNFCCC) until a meaningful outcome is in sight, until concrete pledges have been made to ensure mobilization of resources for the Green Climate Fund (GFC). We cannot afford a COP with an empty GCF, until the promise of the operationalization of a loss and damage mechanism has been fulfilled, until there is assurance on finance for adaptation, until we see real ambition on climate action in accordance with the principles we have so upheld.

This process under the UNFCCC has been called many names. It has been called a farce. It has been called an annual carbon-intensive gathering of useless frequent flyers. It has been called many names. And this hurts. But we can prove them wrong. The UNFCCC can also be called the project to save the planet. It has also been called “saving tomorrow today” a couple of years ago. And today, we say, “I care.” We can fix this. We can stop this madness. Right now. Right here, in the middle of this football field. And stop moving the goalposts.

My delegation calls on you to lead us and let Poland and Warsaw be remembered forever as the place where we truly cared to stop this madness. If this is our imperative here in Warsaw, you can rely on my delegation. Can humanity rise to the occasion? I still believe we can.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

By Finian Cunningham

13 November, 2013
Mycatbirdseat.com

SOMEDAY (Song for Palestine)