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By Noam Chomsky, Stuart A. Brown, Chris Gilson

@ European Politics and Policy

23 December 12

What do you think the use of technocratic governments in Europe says about European democracy?

There are two problems with it. First of all it shouldn’t happen, at least if anybody believes in democracy. Secondly, the policies that they’re following are just driving Europe into deeper and deeper problems. The idea of imposing austerity during a recession makes no sense whatsoever. There are problems, especially in the southern European countries, but in Greece the problems are not alleviated by compelling the country to reduce its growth because the debt relative to GDP simply increases, and that’s what the policies have been doing. In the case of Spain, which is a different case, the country was actually doing quite well up until the crash: it had a budget surplus. There were problems, but they were problems caused by banks, not by the government, including German banks, who were lending in the style of their US counterparts (subprime mortgages). So the financial system crashed and then austerity was imposed on Spain, which is the worst policy. It increases unemployment, it reduces growth; it does bail out banks and investors, but that shouldn’t be the prime concern.

Europe needs stimulus – even the IMF is coming around to that position – and there’s plenty of capacity for stimulus. Europe’s a rich place, there are plenty of reserves available to the European Central Bank. The Bundesbank doesn’t like it, investors don’t like it, banks don’t like it, but those are the policies which should be pursued. Even writers in the US business press agree with that. If Europe doesn’t change policy, they’re just going to go into a deeper recession. The European Commission just released its report on expectations for next year, which are for very low growth and increasing unemployment, which is the main problem. It’s a very serious problem: unemployment is destroying a generation, which is not a trivial matter. It’s also economically outlandish. If people are forced into unemployment then that’s not only extremely harmful from a human point of view – to individuals – but even from an economic point of view. It means there are unused resources, which could be used to grow and develop.

Europe’s policies make sense only on one assumption: that the goal is to try and undermine and unravel the welfare state. And that’s almost been said. Mario Draghi, the President of the European Central Bank, had an interview with the Wall Street Journal where he said that the social contract in Europe is dead. He wasn’t advocating it, he was describing it, but that’s essentially what the policies lead to. Perhaps not ‘dead’, that’s an exaggeration, but under attack.

Is the rise of the far-right in countries like Greece and France simply another symptom of the eurozone crisis?

There can’t be any doubt. I mean in Greece it’s obvious, though in France it’s been going on for a while. It’s based on anti-Islamic, anti-Muslim racism. Actually it goes beyond that in France. There are things which, amazingly to me, aren’t being discussed. Suppose that France today began expelling Jews from the country and driving them to a place where they would be attacked, repressed, and driven into poverty and misery. You can’t even describe the uproar that would follow, but that’s exactly what France is doing: not to the Jews, but to the Roma, who were treated pretty much the same by the Nazis as the Jews were. They were Holocaust victims. They’re being forced out to Romania and Hungary where they’ve got a miserable future ahead of them and there’s barely a word being said about this. And that’s not the far-right, that’s across the spectrum, which is pretty remarkable I think.

But the developments of the far-right are frightening in Europe. Germany is also experiencing something similar. For example there are neo-Nazi groups in Germany, though they don’t call themselves ‘neo-Nazi’, which are now organising to condemn the bombing of Dresden, claiming that 250,000 people were killed: ten times the actual number. Well, I think the bombing of Dresden was indeed a crime – a major crime – but not the way that neo-Nazi groups are using it. If you go a little farther east, say to Hungary, just last week a legislator, Zsolt Barath from the far-right Jobbik party, made a scandalous speech in which he was denouncing the presence of Jews in decision-making positions: “we’ve got to make a list of them, identify them, get rid of this cancer” and so on. You know, I’m old enough to remember that personally from the 1930s, but we all know what it means. That’s happening in large parts of Europe – mostly through anti-Muslim racism – and it’s a frightening phenomenon.

In the short-term, can you see Europe resolving its crisis?

Right now the eurozone is just putting off its problems – what’s called ‘kicking the can down the road’ – it’s not addressing them. There are serious problems. The eurozone, in my view, is a positive development in general, but it’s being handled in a way that is undermining the promise it should have. I think it’s widely agreed that there has to be more political union. You can’t have a system in which countries cannot control their own currencies and have austerity imposed on them, when they can’t carry out the measures that any other country would carry out if it were in economic crisis. That’s just an impossible situation and it has to be dealt with.

It should also be recognised that Europe is suffering to an extent from its relative humanity. If you compare Europe with North America, the single currency was agreed upon approximately when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was established, but they were done in very different ways. Before poorer states were brought into the project in Europe there were significant efforts made to raise their standards in many ways, using reforms, subsidies and other measures. This was done so that they wouldn’t undermine the employment and living standards of workers in more developed European countries. That’s a relatively humane way of moving towards integration. In the United States, something quite similar was proposed by the US labour movement and even by the US Congress research bureau, but it was dismissed without comment. Instead Mexico was integrated, in a fashion, in a way that was quite harmful to Mexicans and also to American and Canadian workers. Europe is suffering from that.

By Ralph Nader

@ Reader Supported News

23 December 12

Family is the foundation of our American society. In many ways, the family unit is one of the last bastions of decency holding out against encroaching corporate commoditization — the corporations can sell food, medicine, clothing, entertainment, even child and elder care, but they can’t provide the love, selflessness and generosity that close family members can provide one another. But if there was a way to commercialize all those generational, biological bonds, you can be sure that profit-hungry companies and clever marketers would discover it. In the holiday season, thoughts about family abound. But the advertisements that dominate all forms of commercial media aren’t about the benefits of family life, about how parents shape the character and personality of their children, about how turning off the screens and engaging in conversation is the cornerstone of human development. Advertisements aimed at children are meant to tantalize and sell the latest toys, gadgets and video games — many of which serve as electronic babysitters that feature violence and undermine parental authority.

Every holiday season, the commercial media relentlessly hype the big products of the season with “Holiday Shopping Guides” and “Hot Lists.” These lists feature toys and gadgets that are, inevitably, in “extremely limited quantities,” forcing parents to battle it out at early morning store openings to get the latest and greatest items. These “hot item lists” are released by the retailers themselves, such as Toys-R-Us, Walmart and Target. It’s not clear why many of these items are “hot,” aside from the fact that the chain stores that sell them say so. At one time, the big Christmas item was “Cabbage Patch Kids,” and then it was “Tickle Me Elmo,” then “Furby,” and then the “Nintendo Wii”. In 2012, Furby is back — a furry, owl-like electronic doll that talks. It was popular back in 1998 and sold millions in the late 90’s. Hasbro, the manufacturers of Furby, assumed that they could replicate the same big holiday rush sales with the same toy and the same marketing hype. According to Yahoo! Shine’s Holiday Gift Guide for parents, “Desperate parents are turning to Amazon.com, where some versions of the $54 toy are selling for $80 or more, and to eBay, where less-popular colors are selling for about $75. The hottest colors come with the highest prices: $1,000 to $2,500 for a single Furby.” One of the new features of the 2012 Furby is that is can interact with iPods and iPads — another electronic gadget that advertisers tell children they need to be hip.

The Furby hype is, of course, a retail trick, designed to fuel children’s desires for a new product. This translates into children nagging parents to acquire a new toy.

 

Spreading “joy with toys” is a major part of what the holidays in America have become — selling directly to children, without respect to limits, boundaries or even common decency. The result is young children are spending more time absorbing corporate marketing, resulting in shorter attention spans, reduced vocabularies, and less understanding of their local communities.

The only defense against the onslaught of commercializing childhood is for parents to become more aware of the “corporate week” — that is, their children spending more than 40 hours a week interacting with corporate products. These activities often involve idly sitting and absorbing entertainment with little to no historical or educational value. Children are spending less time reading, writing, studying, and having conversations with friends and family. The “corporate week” does not inspire critical thinking at a level beyond quick, Pavlovian responses. The potential impact on the developing psyche of young children of heavy exposure to the violence and crass humor found in entertainment is disturbing.

While completely shielding a child from the excesses of rampant commercialization isn’t easy in our corporate society, there are still ways to protect the essential blessings of childhood. For starters, parents can demand that marketer’s respect their children’s privacy and set limits as to where and how marketers can direct advertise to young children. (Some action has recently been made in this area. Beginning July 1, 2013, the FTC will enact new privacy laws to protect children under 13 from having their information collected online. Read the details here.) And then it’s up to the parents to turn off the TV, the computer, the cell phones and the iPads, put away the Furbys and the video games, and spend quality time with their children. This means eating family meals together and organizing family outings and activities with real educational and civic values. Consider, for instance, how many children are aware of the public workings of their town? Where does their drinking water come from? How does the local justice system operate? What is made there? For children, the local community is a vast and untapped resource of new information, new understandings, and new perspectives. Many local papers have a listing of community activities suitable for the whole family, such as nature walks, 5K races, book clubs, poetry readings, arts and crafts programs, film festivals, and more. (For D.C. residents, every Friday the Washington Post offers a huge listing of weekend cultural events taking place in the city.) By taking advantage of this nearby resource, making learning fun, and being more alert to the horde of corporate marketers that drive to infiltrate the walled boundaries of our family units, parents can provide better guidance and more enriching experiences for their children.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

By Ismail Salami

23 December, 2012

Countercurrents.org

It seems that the West is sloughing over its established definition of freedom of expression when the Iranian channels HispanTV and Press TV come under brutal censorship by the Israel-friendly satellite companies in Europe.

Evidently spearheaded by the Zionists, Spain’s satellite provider Hispasat has ordered Overon to take Press TV and Hispan TV off the air. No wonder, the illegal move created extreme joy in the Zionist organizations such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

“This is an important development in the worldwide effort to contain the defiant regime in Tehran, one we have been watching carefully for months and discussing with our friends in Spain,” said AJC Executive Director David Harris.

“Hispasat did the right thing,” Harris continued. “No satellite company in the Western world should enable the dissemination of propaganda from an Iranian government that denies human rights, supports terror organizations and is determined to achieve nuclear weapons capability. That Hispasat’s action triggered such an angry response in Tehran tells us all we need to know about its significance.”

Overon says as the EU has blacklisted the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Hispan TV and Press TV must be taken off the air. It should be noted that Hispan TV is officially registered in Spain and operates under the country’s media laws. Besides, the EU has confirmed to Press TV that its anti-Iran sanctions do not apply to the country’s media.

From a legal point of view, this move runs counter to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). Article ten of the ACHR says, “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.”

Hispasat is partly owned by Eutelsat whose French-Israeli CEO is widely believed to be the architect of attacks on Iranian media in Europe.

Without even Michel de Rosen being the Zionist CEO of Eutelsat, the European media is so pathetically caught up in the claws of the Zionists that they would readily give in to their demands especially when they are directly aimed at dispelling the political sway of the Islamic Republic.

On the one hand, the Zionists keep depicting themselves in the light of a nation so viciously persecuted in the course of history at the hands of the Europeans, an excuse which they use as a way of emotional blackmail. This, the Europeans sadly buy and seek to make up for the ‘holocaust’, an inflated issue, a political ace in the hole for the Zionists.

On the other hand, Europe is infernally prone to smother any voice coming from Iran and that which is in defense of the Islamic Republic as the Europeans are fearful of alternative channels such as Press TV, Hispan TV and RT which deliver a truthful report of the public discontent in the European community. The fact is that Europe is crumbling from within and there is no economic salvation in sight and Europe prefers media blackout. Further to that, the Zionist lobby is so powerful in Europe that they prefer to cave to their wanton demands, ignore the very basis principles upon which the European Convention of Human Rights is built, and avoid withering criticism or political isolation from Washington.

In point of fact, Europe is plunging into financial abysm largely on account of its reliance on US imperialism and its support of the Zionist regime. The role these alternative channels play in raising intellectual awareness and political insight is an irrefutable reality which serves as a resounding slap in the face of Europe. To put it in better terms, these channels hold a mirror to the European audience wherein the reality is reflected as it should. And this is exactly what harrows Europe with fear and wonder.

What is currently happening to the Iranian media is not just limited to Iran or to the Iranian community. These channels and like news outlets are the inalienable rights of the world citizens who are entitled to have an alternative voice different from theirs and choose to hear.

In fact, depriving the international community from these channels is stripping the people across the globe of the choice to hear. It is not ‘kosher’ and amounts to an act of intellectual abacination.

Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.

By Jim Taylor

23 December, 2012

Countercurrents.org

The Sandy Hook shooting should not have surprised you. It’s simply the most recent in a series of multiple murders. Since 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed into a tower on the University of Texas campus in Austin and started picking off random victims, the pattern has been depressingly familiar. The list of massacres rolls off the tongue like a litany: Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Fort Hood, Nickel Mines, Oak Ridge, Sandy Hook…

Has no one set it to music yet?

It’s always the same – go to a place where people gather, where they think they’re safe – a school, a theatre, a place of worship, a shopping mall — and mow them down.

You call America “the land of the free, and the home of the brave.” Nonsense. Only the cowardly hide behind high-powered rifles, pumping bullets into helpless children. And where’s the freedom when elementary schools and hospitals have to practice lockdown procedures?

John Cory writes, “The unthinkable has become a normal occurrence for which we have to train our children and grandchildren…”

You let this happen. Because you were afraid of standing up to idiots who believe bullets work better than brains. For the sake of avoiding conflict, you didn’t confront neighbours, gun store owners, and politicians who grovel at the altar of the National Rifle Association.

Tell me, how many Americans have been killed by socialist conspiracies or communist cells? You don’t know, do you? Nor do I. But I know it isn’t 87 a day. That’s how many die by getting shot. Over 30,000 unnecessary deaths a year.

And the NRA defends this record. America already has one gun for every adult. Yet the NRA claims that increasing the number of guns will make Americans safer – they’ll be able to defend themselves.

You moderates, who haven’t sold your souls to the NRA, who occupy the vast middle ground of sensible people, you let this happen. Yes, you.

I submit that the National Rifle Association is the most dangerous organization in your country. It has 4.3 million members. That’s barely one per cent of your adult population. But you let them lead your country’s legislators around by the noses. Or perhaps by their wallets — $17 million of political payoffs last year alone.

And you let them use their favorite weapon – the Second Amendment. Without that clause about “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” the NRA would be shooting blanks. They would have to defend the right of deranged gun owners to slaughter innocent children. Instead, they can take the moral high ground, defending idealized “constitutional rights.”

In all the rhetoric pumped out since the Sandy Hook tragedy, I have not heard one commentator – not even professional iconoclast Michael Moore – suggest that the Second Amendment should be scrapped.

Why not? If Amendments can be added, they can be removed.

The Second Amendment made sense when the States – all thirteen of them – feared seizure by European empires. The fledgling country needed an armed (and regulated) militia that could be called up instantly.

Does anyone seriously believe that James Madison intended to ensure Adam Lanza’s right to fire hundreds of rounds into huddled six- and seven-year-old schoolchildren?

Far from providing security against external invaders, the NRA has distorted the Second Amendment into the right to take up arms against America’s own government. The Constitution defines that as treason, not reason

Here’s William Rivers Pitt, writing for Truthout, “You’re going to defend yourself against a government that has nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, drones, SEALs and the United States Marine Corps with your piddly-ass AR-15? Good luck…”

I don’t like guns, but I cannot condemn them totally. As long as criminals carry guns, police will need them too. Park rangers may need guns to defend themselves against attacks by bears or enraged moose.

But no one needs an AK-47 to bring down a deer. Or a Bushmaster with a 100-round clip to chase off burglars. Or a 9mm Glock to blast marauding squirrels off the bird feeder.

I’m moved by the heroism of Sandy Hook teachers and administrators who put their own lives on the line to protect their students. But the effort to prevent Adam Lanza’s killing spree should have started long before he shot his way into the school.

An unholy alliance of literalist Christians and libertarians have wrapped bullets and the Bible in the American flag and called it patriotism. And you let them get away with it. You failed to challenge them to live the faith they claim to have received from Jesus – to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, to love rather than hate….

Instead of risking your own lives for what you believed in, you risked your children’s lives.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Jim Taylor is a Candian author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at jimt@quixotic.ca

By James Corbett

23 December 2012

Rejoice! The economy has been saved and the world is back in good financial stead!

What allows me to make this bold proclamation, you ask? Has there been some fundamental transformation in the global economy? Has the sovereign debt crisis been resolved by a giant debt jubilee? Have the central banksters finally been apprehended and shown to their rightful place behind bars? Have the people of the world finally seen through the debt-based fiat money delusion and, all at once, dropped their dependence on Federal Reserve Notes in favor of alternative currencies, self-issued credit, and local exchanges?

Of course not. No, I am referring to this headline from the Daily Mail: “The Hobbit smashes U.S. box office records to become biggest Christmas film of ALL TIME.” Sadly, all capitalization in that headline is exactly as it appears in the original.

Yes, once again erstwhile “news” sources are trumpeting the box office returns of the latest Hollywood blockbuster as if it were some important piece of information. Amidst the doom and gloom of depressing headlines about the continuing Euro debt crisis or the impending currency war that newly-elected Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is getting set to kick off comes this diversionary fluff piece about how great a sign it is that some over-bloated Hollywood fantasy flick is raking in the dough. Perhaps they’re hoping that people won’t remember that the heyday of Hollywood was back during the Great Depression, when people flocked to the theater in record numbers to immerse themselves in The Wizard of Oz or Gone With the Wind in the hopes of forgetting their troubles for an hour or two, and when the most identifiable face on the planet was that of Charlie Chaplin’s homeless, jobless, luckless Tramp.

This phenomenon of reporting box office returns as important business news is nothing new, of course. In recent decades there has been a growing obsession with the grosses of films that would be hard to explain on the surface. Surely there aren’t that many more producers or investors whose financial fortunes are dependent on the profitability of the latest Tom Cruise vehicle or the newest big budget sequel/prequel/remake/spinoff. So what is the media’s fascination with ranking the weekend intake of each movie as if they were reporting the latest sports results?

Well, for starters it’s the easiest story for an over-worked, under-staffed, under-funded “news” team in the increasingly penny-pinching offices of a dinosaur mainstream news outlet to report. More troublingly, though, it’s part of a longer-term trend in the dumbing down of basic economic literacy that allows the financial controllers to keep the public distracted by shiny baubles while they get to work looting and plundering the economy behind the scenes. In this new paradigm of mainstream “business” reporting, stories of almost no consequence whatsoever can be focused on as if they are bellwethers of the economy: if box office hauls are forever trending upward, after all, then how bad can the economy really be? The setting of box office record after record seems to be a rising economic indicator, if only in the minds of that section of the public whose greatest acquaintance with the economy is the weekly ranking of movie ticket returns.

Perhaps the saddest part of all of this is that even this utterly inconsequential number is itself based on basic three-card monte level sleights of hand and statistical fraud that even a grade schooler should be able to see through. Just as CPI is kept artificially low by excluding those things that people actually buy in favor of more obscure (and less obviously inflating) commodities, and just as unemployment figures of today are compared with unemployment figures of decades past without noting the complete changes in unemployment calculation that make such a side-by-side comparison meaningless, so too are box office intakes of modern Hollywood movies favorably compared to the ticket sales of years gone by without noting the complicating factors in such a comparison. Have you ever seen a list of “highest grossing films of all time” that failed to include information about whether or not the films were being ranked in inflation-adjusted terms? Or how rising ticket prices factor into these numbers? Or why these “records” aren’t measured in ticket sales instead of gross revenue? Never mind all that, BusinessInsider.com has a new angle on the tale of The Hobbit’s “record smashing” performance: “The Hobbit didn’t break $100 million” in its opening weekend. The horror.

If only this phenomenon of trivialization were limited to Hollyweird. Alas, this is not the case.

You’ve heard of the McDonaldization of the economy? George Ritzer uses the term to describe how both the labor market and the products they produce are increasingly being standardized in the name of efficiency. But there is a more literal level at which we can say the economy has been McDonaldized. It has long been discussed how McDonald’s has applied the concept of “artificial scarcity” to raise interest in (and sales of) the McRib, a sandwich consisting of “restructured meat product” that has been molded into the pattern of a slab of ribs. The description of the product’s creation is enough to turn one’s stomach (and as a hint, scalded stomach is one of the ingredients), but it has achieved cult-like status amongst some McDonald’s aficionados for its scarcity. So rare is its seemingly random appearance on the menu that there are entire websites devoted to tracking sightings of the sandwich at restaurants across America. (This despite the fact that it is available on the menu year-round in Germany.) What many don’t know is that its sudden appearance and disappearance from the menu in America may not be so random after all. Willy Stanley of The Awl makes a convincing case that the McRib is actually a study in pork price arbitrage. As Stanley demonstrates, nationwide reappearances of the sandwich coincide precisely with troughs in the US hog market. Every time the price of pork bottoms out, it seems, McDonald’s goes on a buying spree, reintroducing the McRib to the menu. In other words, they’re playing customers like fools, purposefully keeping alive the “mystique” (and keeping aloft the price) of a sandwich they could sell at any time, waiting for pork prices to hit bottom. As Stanley points out, this works because McDonald’s is such a market-moving force that “it’s more useful to think of it as a company trading in commodities than it is to think of it as a chain of restaurants.” McDonaldization indeed.

Or take Instagram. This is a popular photo-sharing service that allows users to take and share pictures on social media via their cell phones. As near as I can determine, its appeal comes from its ability to add digital filters to the pictures to make them look more artistic and to confine the photographs to a square shape that is more reminiscent of a Polaroid than a cell phone photo. For some reason, Facebook saw so much potential in this service that they purchased it for $1 billion, surely a staggering sum of money for a 13-employee operation that deals solely in helping people share photos. In this day and age of bloated tech valuations, few even bothered to bat an eyelid over the deal…until they discovered how Facebook might be planning to recoup its money. Earlier this week, Instagram issued a change to its Terms of Service that granted the company the right to sell users’ photos to third parties without notification or compensation. This set off a storm of controversy (with National Geographic notably suspending its own account in protest of the move), threatening to cause a mass exodus from the service. Instagram immediately issued a retraction and is currently rewording the update to remove the offensive clause. Why this move would come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Facebook’s own privacy controversies (with CEO Mark Zuckerberg having famously proclaimed in January 2010 that privacy is no longer a social norm) is as puzzling as why anyone would expect an online giant like Facebook to spend $1 billion on a photo-sharing service without expecting them to monetize the only product that service has: its users’ photos. Still, this is what passes for economic reasoning in our present-day economy.

It’s too harsh to simply blame the consumers for this sorry state of affairs, though. After all, the entire economy has been structured around things of no lasting significance for so long now that it’s hardly fair to blame today’s youth for mistaking these diversions for reality. Take the phenomenon of “YouTube celebrity.” Ever since Google took over YouTube and attempted to find ways of making it pay for itself, the site has been offering deals with popular content producers to receive a share of the advertising revenue their videos generate. So has this led to the rise of a thriving, independent video production industry? Not exactly. Instead, it wasn’t long before users found a way to game the system by leaving “reply videos” to the site’s most popular videos, guaranteeing them hundreds of thousands of views for videos that are often little more than a scantily clad woman confirming that she had indeed watched the popular video in question. The most popular of these “reply girls” was able to earn a living off of this scam until YouTube changed its algorithm, making users less likely to find her replies in the “related videos” of trending viral videos. Now, the various “reply girls” find themselves out of a job. Talk about boom and bust.

These are the trivialities upon which our economy increasingly turns: box office revenues; artificially withheld pork sandwiches; photo sharing services; reply videos. These are all further signs of an economy in decline, one that has gone from the manufacture of important products to one that is increasingly geared toward providing the public with ever more diversion and fluff. It often takes an economic crisis to shake a people out of their collective complacency, and to give them an opportunity to once again discover what a sound economy is really based on. Time will tell whether the current financial crisis will be that wake up call for the Instagram generation.

By Ernst Wolff & Alex Lantier

22 December, 2012

@ WSWS.org

On Thursday the United Nations Security Council authorized an intervention into the sub-Saharan country of Mali by foreign troops, under the pretext of freeing northern Mali from occupation by Al Qaeda-linked Islamists. The resolution was adopted unanimously.

The vote came only ten days after the forced resignation of Malian Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra and his replacement by Django Cissoko. Diarra was an outspoken defender of a foreign military intervention, whereas Cissoko, who was installed by the military junta under Captain Amadou Sanogo, has so far abstained from any commentary on foreign intervention.

The United Nations’ decision, which does not contain a specific time-table for military action, comes as a clear warning—firstly to the military junta, but above all to the workers and oppressed masses of Mali—that the imperialist powers intend to control the fate of Mali.

Malian Foreign Minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly called the resolution a “historic step,” adding that his government “commits itself fully” to fulfilling its obligations under the resolution.

To give itself a democratic touch, the resolution calls for “political reconciliation”, elections “as soon as technically possible,” and the restoration of constitutional order. It also asks UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to “confirm in advance the council’s satisfaction with the planned military offensive operation”. In reality, it is paving the way for another bloody war on African soil, setting the fuse for an explosion of the entire surrounding Sahel region.

Mali, one the world’s poorest countries, was shaken by a military coup in March. This was provoked largely by the occupation of northern Mali by heavily-armed Tuareg forces returning from the NATO war in Libya, where they had fought on Gaddafi’s side against NATO. Only months later, the Tuareg militias were forced out by Islamist fighters, who have ties to Al Qaeda and established rule by sharia law. They were joined by several thousand Islamists from North Africa and Asia, reportedly financed from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The UN resolution backs a decision by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to deploy 3,300 troops in Mali to fight the Islamists. The mission is to be led by Nigeria and has drawn criticism from Algeria, which historically has objected to foreign military deployments in the Sahel.

The imperialist powers are trying to hide their agenda behind their regional proxies. The resolution officially authorizes an African-led International Support Mission, known as AFISMA, for an initial period of one year without making any mention of its size. It “welcomes” ECOWAS troop contributions and calls on member states, including those in the Sahel, to contribute troops to the mission.

 

It also mentions providing “a voluntary and a United Nations-funded logistics support packages to AFISMA, including equipment and services for an initial period of one year”.

The resolution asks the secretary-general to provide support in critical areas to help the Malian government to “extend its authority during or following a military operation, including in the rule of law, removing land mines, and promoting national dialogue and regional cooperation”.

Although the UN Security Council resolution was unanimously adopted, it appears that the detailed planning of an intervention is still ongoing. This is due above all to considerable frictions between the United States and France, the former colonial power in Mali, over the tactics of an invasion.

French imperialism is heavily dependent on the Sahel for uranium for it nuclear industry. It is demanding immediate military action—with ECOWAS countries providing ground troops as cannon fodder for the war, while Washington and its European allies provide logistical, air, and intelligence support.

Sections of the American ruling class opposed such plans, objecting that ECOWAS troops would not be militarily able to defeat the Islamists, and that other regional powers, such as Algeria, should be involved. US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice recently dismissed France’s plan based on ECOWAS as “crap.”

An imperialist-led intervention in Mali as outlined by the UN and discussed by the United States and the European powers would be yet another reactionary war launched on the basis of lies. The claim that the NATO powers must intervene in Mali because they need to halt the spread of Al Qaeda’s influence is absurd.

NATO wars are in fact one of the main bases on which Al Qaeda’s influence develops. The fighting in Mali grew largely out of the Libyan war, in which NATO relied to a large extent on far-right Islamists, including forces of the Al Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Today, the US-backed opposition in Syria includes the Al Nusra Front, which the US government itself acknowledges is a terrorist group tied to Al Qaeda.

While using Al Qaeda as a tool of its imperialist policies elsewhere, in Mali the NATO powers are citing the threat of Al Qaeda as a lever to organize intervention in Mali and deepen imperialist control over all of western Africa. Negotiations are continuing with the ECOWAS states as well as with Algeria on how to proceed with the intervention. (See also: French president promotes corporate interests, Mali war in Algeria visit )

There are widespread expectations that an invasion of northern Mali will rapidly spread fighting throughout the Sahel, as northern Mali shares long borders with Algeria, Niger, and Mauritania. Comparisons are now openly being made between the war in Mali and the NATO war in Afghanistan, which has since spilled over into Pakistan and other neighboring countries.

Thus Algiers University Professor Ahmed Adhimi wrote, “Now we face the Afghanization of the Sahel region. Military intervention means that all adventurers, terrorists, and all those who want to fight the Crusaders will come to northern Mali. Then Algeria would become the Pakistan of Africa, and it would be easy to drag the region’s countries into war… [This would] drag Algeria into a war with which it has nothing to do, its objective is to drain the country’s wealth.”

By Anitha S

22 December, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Anselvam was returning home, her hands laden with provisions brought from her usual shop in Koodankulam. Spices to dry and grind for the fish curry, rice and lentils for the month and some new clothes for X’mas. She stopped by, put her load down, smiled and said

” Why did you not come yesterday- you could have seen Xavierammal and Selvi who are out on bail.Sundari is still inside with newer and newer charges”

“What about the other women who were arrested along with the Trio who are now more famous?” asked my friend

“ They are all back. But we were worried about Roslin who has been very ill. She is now hospitalised in Madurai”

This was on 20th November 2012.

Xavierammal, Selvi and Sundari are now in Madurai on conditional bail. Speaking to them on Sundari’s phone, one could sense relief and joy, but a certain subtle kind of anxiety and fear too. Xavierammal’s mother held my hands tight and asked “ What do you think will happen to us? What decisions will be taken?”

I had to hastily look away without answering when Tamizh sitting next to her shouted “We will win. The KKNPP will be shut down”.

Two weeks later walking into the Samarapandal, one could see the women in various groups , some engaged in talking, some in beedi rolling and some dozing. I sat near the group talking. It surprises me no end that even on the 490th day (17th December, 2012), the women were focusing on various aspects of the struggle. That day many spoke about their men going fishing and the catch, the unreliable dates of opening being announced by the Government. Selvi’s mother spoke of her grandson in 10th Class and her anxiety about his health briefly before asking about the support from the world. Malar who had travelled to Bhopal to receive the Chingari award shared her pain on seeing the many differentially abled children there and the meticulous way in which care is being provided by the women. There were silent questions being raised in all of their minds about the impact of radiation on their bodies and the future generations.

Now on 21st December, the news comes that Roseyln is no more. She died after many days of suffering in Madurai General Hospital but could be in her home the last few days. In spite of her illness that had started many months ago, she joined the September 9-10 event with all the vigour and enthusiasm of the Porattam to stop the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant. She walked the hot and windy beach on that day with her friends and relatives forgetting the constant nausea and stomach pain that was ailing her frail body. She must have slept in the beach under the stars and sky, out in the open borrowing energy from the youngsters who were getting water and food for the people. She must have run, stumbled and fallen, watched Xavier ammal and many friends being pushed into the sea, seen Selvi being taken away by Police, felt the burning fumes of the outdated Tear gas shells before realizing that she has also been picked up. There was no special reason for her to be picked up that day except that she too participated in the struggle. Same as there was no specific reason for the 68 year old fisherman charged with the Goondas Act or the 7 young men who were taken by the Police when they went visiting the new Chicken farm enterprise of a friend nearby.

No special reason except for resisting the Nuclear Program of the country by demanding to shut down the Nuclear Power Plant at their door step. And be undeterred in their demand !

Roslin must have used all the energy in her weak body suffering under an undiagnosed pain to beg that she is ill and be spared the arrest. The strong and uncompromising hands of the Women Police must have held on to her bony arms hurting her more and more. In the unfamiliar jail with her other 6 women friends from Idinthakarai she must have felt the pain of being separated from her 3 children and her sparse bed where she could rest whenever she felt the fatigue overcoming her. After more than a month of confinement and constant shuttling to Valliyur and endless wait for some decision she was granted bail and released on Oct 30,2012. She must have been shocked to know the conditions. She had to sign in Madurai, more than 100 kms from her seaside home.

Unable to do the journey, her body pushed to the limits of endurance, Roslin must have heard that judgements like waging war against the Government and Sedition were upon her. Her mind and body longing for some rest and care in her small house with loved ones must have crumbled under the ominous weight of the charges. Yet she stood on.

When the disease growing inside her overpowered her, Roslin succumbed and had to be hospitalized. By then , the cancer like ailment had taken over. She must have dreamt of her home, her children, her childhood in between fits of consciousness. She must have certainly thought of the Porattam, the Saytagraha Pandal which has been their home for so many days and the one and only demand- to shut down the KKNPP. Not knowing the cruel ramifications of the charges put on her,Roslin must have dreamt of being free and healthy, of being able to go back to life, to being with her children and grandchildren, of waiting on the beach with her friends for the boats and fish catch, of cooking a tasty meen kozhambu ( Fish curry) for her family. If all of these dreams of a 63 year old woman has the likes of waging war against the Government and Sedition, Roslin’s failing heart would have pulsed a bit more in pride to be called so.

Instead yesterday it failed her, after months of improper neglect and lack of proper diagnosis and treatment even after it was in the records that she is ill.

Adieu, Roslin, Brave Heart….

After hearing the news that Roslin is no more and recounting snippets of conversations in Idinthakarai

Anitha.S , 22. 12. 2012

 

 

By Jonathan Cook

21 December, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Carl Bernstein, of All the President’s Men fame, has a revealing commentary in the Guardian today, though revealing not entirely in a way he appears to understand. Bernstein highlights a story first disclosed earlier this month in the Washington Post by his former journalistic partner Bob Woodward that media mogul Rupert Murdoch tried to “buy the US presidency”.

A taped conversation shows that in early 2011 Murdoch sent Roger Ailes, the boss of his most important US media outlet, Fox News, to Afghanistan to persuade Gen David Petraeus, former commander of US forces, to run against Barack Obama as the Republican candidate in the 2012 presidential election. Murdoch promised to bankroll Petraeus’ campaign and commit Fox News to provide the general with wall-to-wall support.

Murdoch’s efforts to put his own man in the White House failed because Petraeus decided he did not want to run for office. “Tell [Ailes] if I ever ran,” Petraeus says in the recording, “but I won’t … but if I ever ran, I’d take him up on his offer.”

Bernstein is rightly appalled not just by this full-frontal attack on democracy but also by the fact that the Washington Post failed to splash with their world exclusive. Instead they buried it inside the paper’s lifestyle section, presenting it as what the section editor called “a buzzy media story that … didn’t have the broader import” that would justify a better showing in the paper.

In line with the Washington Post, most other major US news outlets either ignored the story or downplayed its significance.

We can probably assume that Bernstein wrote his piece at the bidding of Woodward, as a covert way for him to express his outrage at his newspaper’s wholesale failure to use the story to generate a much-deserved political scandal. The pair presumably expected the story to prompt congressional hearings into Murdoch’s misuse of power, parallel to investigations in the UK that have revealed Murdoch’s control of politicians and the police there.

As Bernstein observes: “The Murdoch story – his corruption of essential democratic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic – is one of the most important and far-reaching political/cultural stories of the past 30 years, an ongoing tale without equal.”

What Bernstein cannot understand is why his media masters don’t see things the way he does. He reserves his greatest dismay for “the ho-hum response to the story by the American press and the country’s political establishment, whether out of fear of Murdoch, Ailes and Fox – or, perhaps, lack of surprise at Murdoch’s, Ailes’ and Fox’s contempt for decent journalistic values or a transparent electoral process.”

But in truth neither of Bernstein’s explanations for this failure is convincing.

A far more likely reason for the US media’s aversion to the story is that it poses a danger to the Matrix-like wall of static interference generated by precisely the same media that successfully conceals the all-too-cosy relationship between the corporations (that own the media) and the country’s politicians.

The Petraeus story is disturbing to the media precisely because it tears away the façade of US democratic politics, an image carefully honed to persuade the American electorate that it chooses its presidents and ultimately decides the direction of the country’s political future.

Instead, the story reveals the charade of that electoral game, one in which powerful corporate elites manipulate the system through money and the media they own to restrict voters’ choice to two almost-identical candidates. Those candidates hold the same views on 80 per cent of the issues. Even where their policies differ, most of the differences are quickly ironed out behind the scenes by the power elites through the pressure they exert on the White House via lobby groups, the media and Wall Street.

The significance of Woodward’s story is not that it proves Rupert Murdoch is danger to democracy but rather that it reveals the absolute domination of the US political system by the global corporations that control what we hear and see. Those corporations include, of course, the owners of the Washington Post.

The saddest irony is that the journalists who work within the corporate media are incapable of seeing outside the parameters set for them by their media masters. And that includes even the most accomplished practitioners of the trade: Woodward and Bernstein.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is

www.jonathan-cook.net

Guardian story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/20/bernstein-murdoch-ailes-petreaus-presidency

By Chris Marsden

21 December, 2012

WSWS.org

A United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry has finally admitted that a sectarian civil war is raging in Syria. Its findings are based upon extensive investigations and interviews between September 28 to December 16, 2012.

They detail massacres and gross violations of human rights that have polarised Syria between the supporters of a Sunni insurgency and those Sunnis and various minority groups that have aligned themselves with the Alawite-led Ba’athist regime out of fear that its downfall will produce a yet more brutal Sunni chauvinist alternative.

Investigators, headed by Carla del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, have interviewed more than 1,200 victims and refugees.

The report produced is a devastating indictment of the United States and other western powers, who have worked with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to depose of Bashar al-Assad by recruiting and aiding a Sunni insurgency overwhelmingly made up of Muslim Brotherhood supporters, Salafist and Al Qaeda-style groups. Many are foreign fighters brought to Syria with the specific aim of waging a jihad against what they conceive of as a heretical government.

The UN panel, led by Paulo Pinheiro of Brazil, states that the conflict has evolved from being a battle for political change into one that is “overtly sectarian in nature.”

“Mounting tensions have led to armed clashes between different armed groups along a sectarian divide”, with “Some minority communities, notably the Alawites and Christians”, forming “armed self-defence groups to protect their neighbourhoods from anti-Government fighters.”

Many opposition fighters “operate independently… or are affiliated to Islamist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra”, but still coordinate their attacks with the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

With sectarian divisions affecting Sunnis, Alawites, Armenians, Christians, Druze, Palestinians, Kurds and Turkmen, “Entire communities are at risk of being forced out of the country or of being killed”. The report notes as an example that almost all 80,000 Christians who once lived in Homs, where Jabhat al-Nusra has a large presence, have fled to Damascus or Beirut.

The report’s findings are proof that that the US State Department’s decision on December 11 to designate Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the al-Nusra front, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization was little more than a damage limitation exercise, given that the entire insurgency is dominated by it and similar groups.

At a press conference in Brussels, Pinheiro declared, “We think this is a war where no military victory is possible. It is a great illusion that providing arms to one side or the other will help end it.”

Nevertheless, arming of the opposition by Washington and its allies will continue, in anticipation that Assad’s downfall will weaken Iran and further consolidate US hegemony over the oil riches of the region. The argument has already repeatedly been made by the advocates of war that only decisive intervention now can ensure that Assad’s downfall will see his regime replaced by a democracy and prevent the danger that chemical weapons will fall into the hands of jihadist groups.

On December 17, Israel’s Haaretz reported that US cargo airplanes carrying military equipment have landed in Jordanian airports over several days and that US military forces in the country have been significantly built up.

Yesterday, US officials accused the Syrian government of firing Scud missiles against oppositionists near Maara, north of Aleppo near the Turkish border. Syria denied the claim as “untrue rumours”. The US, Germany and the Netherlands have dispatched Patriot anti-missile systems and hundreds of troops to Turkey’s border and are clearly seeking a pretext to use them. Already on December 12, the US alleged that the Syrian military had fired six Scud missiles at the Sheikh Suleiman base north of Aleppo, which had been occupied by the FSA.

While the US military build-up takes place in Jordan and on the Turkish border, propaganda efforts will continue to portray the insurgency as a democratic movement pitched against a regime that has been repeatedly accused of lying about the influence of the Islamists while itself perpetrating sectarian atrocities alongside its supporters in various unofficial Shabiha militias.

The days leading up to the publication of the UN report saw news headlines dominated by allegations of yet another massacre by pro-government forces, only this time of Alawites in the village of Agrab in Hama. Initial reports, wholly based on opposition sources and YouTube videos of people interviewed by the FSA, alleged brutal “Alawite-on-Alawite violence.”

Everyone from the New York Times to the BBC reported opposition activists stating that up to 300 people had died when pro-government militiamen besieged by rebels blew up a building where they had been holding civilians hostage, after which it had been bombed by warplanes.

However, the only news channel to send reporters to Agrab, Channel 4 in the UK, found three key witnesses who independently told the same story “to the last detail” of anti-Assad “rebels” having carried out the killing of an unknown number of Alawites. In addition, “their accounts are further backed up by at least a dozen conversations with other Alawites who had fled from Aqrab”, Alex Thomsons writes.

He describes how opposition fighters attacked Aqrab on Sunday 2 December. One witness explained, “They had long beards. It was hard to understand what they said. They weren’t dressed like normal Syrians.”

They came from the opposition stronghold of al-Houla. The FSA forces then “corralled around 500 Alawite civilians in a large red-coloured two-storey house” and held them “until the early hours of Tuesday 11 December. Nine days.”

The “rebels wanted to take the women and children to al-Houla to use them as human shields against bombardment from government forces, and they believed they would kill the remaining men.”

A delegation of villagers was sent Monday to negotiate the release of the hostages, but after four hours shooting broke out. Later, around 70 of the prisoners were taken to safety in the nearest village a mile away, while others were taken to al-Houla.

The house reported to have been destroyed by government jets still stands.

Thomsons says he has no idea of the number of casualties or whether there was a massacre, but notes, “If the government really did massacre up to 250 people from President Assad’s own Alawite sect, YouTube would be 10 feet deep in rebel videos, of the bodies, of the funerals, of the carnage. Be in no doubt about this. Yet check on YouTube—there is not a scrap of video to back their story.”

YouTube does, however, feature a number of videos of sectarian killings by the Syrian opposition, including a recent one of two allegedly Alawite men being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child.

On the day the UN commission issued its report, the FSA also published a video report boasting of having seized control for the first time of a border crossing between the Syrian town of Rankous and the Lebanese town of Tfeil.

The aim of opening up this crossing as a key supply route pitches the FSA against Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite group that supports the Assad regime, and drags Lebanon ever more decisively into the Syrian conflict.

Cross border incursions take place almost daily and have led to dozens of casualties, while clashes between pro and anti-Assad forces have seen hundreds killed in border areas. Once again divisions have taken a sectarian dimension—a pattern that can repeat itself throughout the Middle East.

By Adam Parsons

21 December, 2012

@ Stwr.org

The recent climate talks in Doha were held as if in an alternative reality to distressing developments across the world. But there still remains hope and optimism because there is no possibility of preventing runaway climate change without global sharing and justice

The latest round of climate negotiations in Doha once again demonstrated the sheer lack of cooperation, goodwill and willingness – or ability – of the world’s governments to share responsibility for tackling climate change. Since the epochal failure to reach a global deal at Copenhagen in 2009, less and less attention is paid by the media and the general public to these byzantine and shadowy UN climate talks. After three years of further wrangling by governments with little to show, it required serious scrutiny from ordinary citizens to determine what was actually being agreed upon at COP18. Was it merely an agreement to make an agreement in 2015? An agreement based on emissions cuts and pledges for funding that will remain inadequate and far too late to deal with the climate chaos that is already upon us? And one that won’t come into effect, in any case, until 2020?

As usual there was no shortage of analysis pointing out the growing gap between evidence of global warming and action to tackle its causes and consequences. Dozens more reports were published that highlighted the dangers of sustained inaction, not least UNEP’s Emissions Gap report that argued it will be impossible to cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius if present trends continue – thus making it unfeasible to wait until 2020 to begin stringent emissions reductions. There was were even dire predictions about future climate breakdown from within the corridors of power, not least from the International Energy Agency, the CIA, a multinational business consultancy (PwC), and – with the worst prognostications of all – the World Bank.

These alarm bells from the establishment were accompanied by first-hand evidence of an already climate damaged planet, with 2012 marked by extreme weather events and climatic disasters across large parts of the world. This included the flash melting of Greenland’s surface ice; historic droughts in Russia, Australia and the US; dramatic flooding in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand and China; and of course the recent devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, as well as Typhoon Bopha that fatefully struck the Philippines as COP18 delegates were in mid-negotiation. Just as the climate talks got underway, the Global Climate Risk Index revealed that many of the worst natural disasters of last year were also the most severe ever experienced by those countries affected. Less developed countries remain generally more affected than industrialised nations, the Index reported, while the overwhelming majority of disaster-related deaths are in the developing world.

No deal to save our planet

Yet the climate talks were held as if in an alternative reality to these distressing developments across the world. Poor countries may well have won historic recognition for the losses and damage they face from climate change, but the US made sure that there would be no rights to compensation and no legal liability involved, and there is no agreement on where the money will come from or how it will be dispersed. Promises on finance to help developing countries adapt to and mitigate climate change have already been broken, despite the pledge for $30bn by 2012 being a paltry sum compared to urgent needs in the world’s poorest regions. No concrete sums of money were promised for 2013-20, no commitments were made to boost the Green Climate Fund, and nothing at all was pledged from rich countries in terms of technology transfer.

On emissions cuts, civil society leaders widely decried a weakened deal that will do nothing to stop global carbon emissions from continuing to rise indefinitely. The Kyoto Protocol has been extended until 2020, but now only includes the EU and a handful of other industrialised nations that together represent just 15% of world greenhouse gas emissions. The US never ratified Kyoto; several countries including Canada and Japan have reneged on their obligations under the treaty and shamelessly pulled out; and major developing country polluters like China and India remain excluded from the agreement. And of course the new carbon-cutting targets in the second commitment period of the Protocol are nowhere near what the science is calling for. The EU’s pledge of reducing emissions by 20% compared to 1990 levels, for example, will in reality be only 12% owing to their 8% emissions reduction during the first Kyoto Protocol period.

In sum, current commitments and ‘voluntary’ pledges remain at least 40% short of what the planet needs to avoid 4 degrees or more of warming (compared to pre-industrial temperatures); there is no sound basis for an “ambitious” and “equitable” global climate deal to be agreed by 2015, as promised by governments at Durban last year; and humanity remains on course for a ‘4°C warmer world’ of catastrophic climate change and environmental breakdown – as vividly pictured for everyone in the 84-page report courtesy of the World Bank.

Battling the ‘dirty fuel’ lobby

The only winners from the latest round of climate talks are the fossil fuel companies and business interests that are given a green light to continue profiting from the climate crisis. There are billions of dollars to be made by investing in carbon trading schemes and other market-based innovations that campaigners call ‘false solutions’, which includes carbon offsets and biodiversity offsets, payments for environmental services, and various financial mechanisms proposed to reduce deforestation and degradation in developing countries (all schemes that were introduced as part of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations).

Meanwhile, as the Arctic sea ice drops to its lowest level ever recorded, companies are rushing to exploit new oil and gas reserves with the full backing of governments. Rather than heed the IEA’s trenchant warning that two-thirds of the world’s proven fossil fuel reserves cannot be used without risking dangerous climate change and should be left in the ground, governments and international agencies continue to subsidise ‘dirty fuels’ at record-breaking levels and prolong the shift to renewable alternatives. The US in particular is busy celebrating its new status as the imminent world leader in fossil-fuel output, thanks to its massive exploitation of highly polluting energy resources like shale gas and Canadian tar sands. Outside the bubble of UN climate negotiations, there is no indication that the world’s most powerful nations are heeding the IEA’s prediction that their continued increases in fossil fuel consumption will result in a long-term average global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Celsius. (Again, cue the dystopia envisioned by the World Bank’s ‘4°C warmer world’ report).

These were the clear economic interests behind the brinkmanship and deadlock during the Doha climate negotiations, which many observers pointed out were akin to the world trade talks made famous by the same city – and now entering their 20th year of stalemate and failure. It was also widely pointed out how inappropriate it was to choose the immensely oil-rich Gulf emirate of Doha as a host country for talks on halting global pollution, not least considering it is the largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Indeed, the president of the UN summit was no less than Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, the Qatari deputy prime minister and former president of Opec, who was spotted shortly before the summit at the ‘Oil & Money 2012′ conference in London where he extolled the virtues of hydrofracking and other new fossil fuel extraction technologies. Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists said that the resulting two-week summit was more like a trade fair than a science-driven or environmental discussion, in which “you saw on display the power of these industries and their short term profit motivation to dominate the governments of the world”.

The climate talks stalemate

How then is it possible to reach a multilateral agreement on limits to carbon emissions when fossil fuel corporations are already preparing to burn more fossil fuels than the planet can absorb without becoming unliveable? When the political leadership worldwide is addicted to fossil fuels and works on behalf of short-term business interests? When policymakers are committed only to increasing economic growth through ever-expanding global trade, and are not even interested in the wholesale reorganisation of the world economy that is needed to curb excessive consumption, transition to a low-carbon development trajectory, and ensure that all countries can live sustainably within ecological limits?

The only common sense that is heard during the endless discussions on a post-Kyoto treaty comes from the beleaguered delegates of the world’s poorest nations – those worst affected by and least to blame for climate change – or else from among the voices of civil society activists who are carefully monitored on the side-lines by state police. It is not in the main conference hall that the root of the climate talks stalemate is rationally discussed, but in the side events and civil society forums that receive scant media attention during the negotiations. Here, global cooperation and shared sacrifice is understood as impossible to achieve so long as governments prize, above all things, international competitiveness and trade liberalisation – regardless of the cavalier waste of resources and pillaging of the Earth that is necessary to achieve an ever higher percentage of economic growth.

Ever since the first Kyoto Protocol discussions began over 15 years ago, the same underlying conflict of interest has been reframed in any number of articles and reports: do we continue to prioritise the unrestrained extraction, transportation and consumption of the Earth’s finite resources, or do we cooperatively manage the global economy to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and leave the planet intact for our children? The worsening state of the environment, extreme weather events and the consensus from scientists on increasing global warming underlines how both approaches are incompatible. Governments of both the North and South may wish otherwise as they continue to compete and haggle over how much of the Earth’s ecological space they can occupy and exploit, but in the not-too-distant future there can be no negotiation with Mother Nature on her limits of endurance.

There still remains great hope amid all the naysaying, however, because there is no possibility of preventing runaway climate change without the implementation of global sharing and justice. To understand this bold statement in simple terms just requires an appreciation of how the principle of sharing is fundamental to the negotiations for a real and binding climate agreement. The enduring tension at the heart of climate talks is centred on how the ecological space of the world is shared between nations, with the US and other Northern countries not wanting to give up their unfair share of the world’s atmospheric space and resources, while the emerging capitalist economies of the South claim their equal right to exploit the Earth’s atmosphere and resources as they develop. Hence there is a considerable focus on equity in climate negotiations, which is a principle that is officially recognised in the UN Climate Convention.

Sharing the world’s atmosphere

As Martin Khor of the South Centre has explained in several papers, the only way to fix a global emissions reduction goal is by having a framework for the equitable sharing of both the ‘atmospheric space’ and the ‘development space’. In practical terms this requires an effective sharing of resources and responsibilities on an international basis, such as the sharing of mitigation efforts (with rich countries taking the lead owing to their historical debt of carbon emissions), the support that must accompany this sharing (climate finance and technology transfer), and the shared vision that is necessary for nations to agree upon a fair allocation of the remaining carbon space in the world (according to rights and responsibilities). Equity is “the gateway to environmental ambition”, Khor reasons, and the sharing of climate change mitigation efforts is “a critical piece of the puzzle”.

But an effective sharing of the world’s atmospheric space could also have dramatic implications for the distribution of world resources. This is clear when we consider that climate change is an economic as much as an environmental issue, because emissions of carbon dioxide are obviously linked to economic growth. If the world’s nations are to truly agree upon a fair sharing of the world’s atmospheric space, it would ultimately mean that governments have to accept limits on their economic space or, in effect, on how much of the world’s resources their nation consumes. And as we know, there are currently massive differences in the consumption patterns and carbon emissions of people living in rich and poor countries. A small proportion of the world’s population – around 20% – currently consumes and wastes the vast majority of global resources. At the same time, the poorest 20% of the world’s population still lacks the basic resources they need to survive.

Hence the challenge of tackling climate change is intertwined with the other great challenge of the 21st century: to end poverty and achieve more equilibrium in global consumption levels. How else can the world agree upon everyone’s equal share to the atmosphere, unless we also agree upon everyone’s right to a fair share of the world’s resources? It’s in this respect that global warming has the potential to become a ‘great equaliser’, because the only way to find a solution to our environmental problems is through fundamentally rethinking the management of an economic system built upon endless consumption and competition over scarce resources. Or to put it another way, we cannot tackle climate change without simplifying our demands on the planet and learning how to share the produce of the earth more fairly.

This may be a simple framing of a highly complex issue, but it means there can be no real progress on agreeing a global climate deal until equity and justice is placed at the heart of negotiations, no matter how much developed nations and vested interests seek to undermine or ignore these basic principles. It is therefore essential that millions more people of goodwill around the world grasp the basic message of ‘climate justice’ campaigners: that the struggle for human rights and the struggle to avert catastrophic climate change are two sides of the same coin. Because of course the real hope for change lies not in the corridors of power, but in the mass engagement of ordinary citizens around the twin crises of inequality and climate change. And as the charade of climate negotiations is making increasingly clear, the only way of addressing both of these crises is through sharing.

Written by Adam Parsons, the editor at Share The World’s Resources, who can be contacted at adam(at)stwr.org.