| Month/year |
Theme and Author |
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| August 7, 2008 |
An equitable and humane solution to overpopulation and overconsumption may actually be possible.
Over some 60 million years, Homo sapiens has evolved into the dominant animal on the planet, acquiring binocular vision, upright posture, large brains, and -- most importantly -- language with syntax and that complex store of non-genetic information we call culture. However, in the last several centuries we've increasingly been using our relatively newly acquired power, especially our culturally evolved technologies, to deplete the natural capital of Earth -- in particular its deep, rich agricultural soils, its groundwater stored during ice ages, and its biodiversity -- as if there were no tomorrow.
The point, all too often ignored, is that this trend is being driven in large part by a combination of population growth and increasing per capita consumption, and it cannot be long continued without risking a collapse of our now-global civilization. Too many people -- and especially too many politicians and business executives -- are under the delusion that such a disastrous end to the modern human enterprise can be avoided by technological fixes that will allow the population and the economy to grow forever. But if we fail to bring population growth and over-consumption under control -- the number of people on Earth is expected to grow from 6.5 billion today to 9 billion by the second half of the 21st century -- then we will inhabit a planet where life becomes increasingly untenable because of two looming crises: global heating, and the degradation of the natural systems on which we all depend.
We believe it is possible to avoid that global denouement. Such mobilization means developing some consensus on goals -- perhaps through a global dialogue in which people discuss the human predicament and decide whether they would like to see a maximum number of people living at a minimum standard of living, or perhaps a much lower population size that gives individuals a broad choice of lifestyles. We have suggested a forum for such a dialogue, modeled partly on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but with more "bottom up" participation. It is clear that only widespread changes in norms can give humanity a chance of attaining a sustainable and reasonably conflict-free society.
How to achieve such change -- involving everything from demographic policies and transformation of planet-wide energy, industrial, and agricultural systems, to North-South and interfaith relationships and military postures -- is a gigantic challenge to everyone. Politicians, industrialists, ecologists, social scientists, everyday citizens, and the media must join this debate. Whether it is possible remains to be seen; societies have managed to make major transitions in the recent past, as the civil rights revolution in the United States and the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union clearly demonstrate.
We'll continue to hope and work for a cultural transformation in how we treat each other and the natural systems we depend upon. We can create a peaceful and sustainable global civilization, but it will require realistic thinking about the problems we face and a new mobilization of political will.
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| August 13, 2008 |
Using Georgia To Target Russia
by Stephen Lendman, Countercurrents.org
After the Soviet Union's 1991 dissolution, Georgia's South Ossetia province broke away and declared its independence. So far it remains undiplomatically recognized by UN member states. It's been traditionally allied with Russia and wishes to reunite with Northern Ossetes in the North Ossetia-Alania Russian republic. Nothing so far is in prospect, but Russia appears receptive to the idea. And for Abkhazia as well, Georgia's other breakaway province. The conflict also has implications for Transdniestria, the small independent Russian-majority part of Moldova bordering Ukraine, and for Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan.
Strategic importance of Georgia for the Anglo-American Caspian oil pipeline; its extension from Baku, Azerbaijan (on the Caspian) through Georgia (well south of S. Ossetia), bypassing Russia and Iran, and across Turkey to its port city of Ceyhan - the so-called BTC pipeline for around one million barrels of oil daily, adjacent to the South Causasus (gas) Pipeline with a capacity of about 16 billion cubic meters annually.
The regional stakes involved: Washington and Russia vying to control Eurasia's vast oil and gas reserves.
Israel's role in the region; its interest in the BTC pipline; its negotiations with Georgia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Azarbaijan to have it reach its Ashkelon oil terminal and Red Sea Eilat port; its selling Georgia state-of-the-art weapons, electronic warfare systems and intelligence; its use of military advisors to train Georgian forces in commando, air, sea, armored and artillery tactics as well as instruction on military intelligence and security.
The Israeli ynetnews.com highlighted "The Israeli Connection" and reported "Israeli companies have been helping (the) Georgian army (prepare) for war against Russia through arms deals, training of infantry and security advice;" it was helped by Georgian citizens "who immigrated to Israel and became businesspeople," and the fact that Georgia's Defense Minister, Davit Kezerashvili, "is a former Israeli fluent in Hebrew (whose) door was always open to the Israelis who came and offered his country arms;" deals went through "fast" and included "remote-piloted (Elbit System) vehicles (RPVs), automatic turrets for armed vehicles, antiaircraft systems, communications systems, shells and rockets."
What's at stake is what former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski described in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard." He called Eurasia the "center of world power extending from Germany and Poland in the East through Russia and China to the Pacific and including the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent." He continued: "The most immediate (US) task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role." Dominating that part of the world and its vast energy and other resources is Washington's goal with NATO and Israel its principal tools to do it:
-- in the Middle East with its two-thirds of the world's proved oil reserves (about 675 billion barrels); and
-- the Caspian basin with an estimated 270 billion barrels of oil plus one-eighth of the world's natural gas reserves.
"New World Order" strategy aims to secure them. Russia, China, and Iran have other plans. India allies with both sides. Former Warsaw Pact and Soviet republics split this way:
-- NATO members include the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania;
-- Georgia and Ukraine seek membership; while
-- Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazahkstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgystan ally with Russia.
Georgia now occupies center stage, so first some background about a nation Michel Chossudovsky calls "an outpost of US and NATO forces" located strategically on Russia's border "within proximity of the Middle East Central Asian war theater." Breakaway S. Ossetia and Abkhazia, though small in size, are very much players in what's unfolding with potential to have it develop into something much bigger than a short-lived regional conflict.
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| December 10, 2007 |
Ritual Gloating Postmortems - The Corporate Media v. Hugo Chavez
by Stephen Lendman, Countercurrents.org,
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net
Dateline December 3, 2007 - the corporate media is euphoric after Venezuelans narrowly defeated Hugo Chavez's
constitutional reform referendum the previous day. The outcome defied pre-election independent poll predictions and was a cliffhanger to the end.
Chavez is resilient and will rebound from one electoral setback. Don't ever count him out or underestimate his influence. A historic transformation
is underway in Latin America following more than a quarter century of neoliberal rule. The referendum and its outcome while important today is merely an episode in
the struggle between authoritarian imperial centered capitalism (Chavez opposes) and democratic workers centered socialism. |
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| July 19, 2007 |
The Militarization and Annexation of North America
by Stephen Lendman
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net
Article promoted in the Portal of the Global Community of North America (GCNA) at http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GlobalConst/gcnaindex.htm
The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) unmasked |
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| August 2, 2008 |
Letter sent by Abdul Basit to the Global Community
Humanity At Crossroads: Attitudes And Climate Change
basit72@gmail.com
The huge commotion, wide ranging research and intellectual discussions about the collapse of the civilization due to climate change has created apprehension and confusion about
the directions humanity should take to overcome the challenges to its existence. The variety of solutions recommended range from technological fantasies to pessimistic
resignation about the complete destruction of humanity. The solutions also include invading new planets, as well as constructing polar cities and Noah's model of ark, to sustain life
on earth. Most of the solutions are based on the assumption of total collapse, along with the end of civilization and human existence.
Despite these thought-provoking discussions about the influence of climate change on human existence and the solutions to tackle it, we are nearing, as time passes, the verge of a
major disaster and the options for solutions are declining. The increasing natural calamities, the concern about the tipping points due to further carbon emissions and its effects on
the habitability on earth have created great concerns.
Humanity is at crossroads. Gone are the days of extravaganza due to the unlimited supply of natural resources from nature and the habitable and comfortable climate that we had
taken for granted. If we continue with the same attitudes and policies that we hitherto followed we are on the road to self-destruction.
If we change our attitudes, lifestyle and policies to take necessary measures in order to create a society based on equality, sustainable development and peace, we still have the
chance to maintain life on this planet. Beyond superficial steps, we need a total change to face the challenges of climate change. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri had recently advised the
world to change lifestyle by implementing certain measures, including riding a bike and being a frugal shopper in order to help brake global warming. It is about time that the world
takes immediate steps to bring this huge profit driven capitalist system to a grinding halt and peddle our way back to a bright and sustainable future.
Summary of work from same author:
1.0 Wars and Climate Change: National Interests Verses Global Emergency
2.0 Humanity At Crossroads: Attitudes And Climate Change
3.0 Manifesto To Counter Global Warming And Climate Change
4.0 Obstacles To Counter Global Warming And Climate Change
5.0 Climate Change Solutions: Beyond Science And Above Confines
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| December 10, 2007 |
Sent by Abdul Basit to the Global Community
Wars and Climate Change: National Interests Verses Global Emergency
This is an appeal to World Leaders and Scientific Community, who have gathered in Bali, Indonesia for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
I remind the world leaders and researchers, who are attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, that they have a huge responsibility on their shoulders. The decisions of
this conference will not only decide the future of existence of humankind, but also for preserving all the past cultures and contributions humanity has offered throughout its thousands of years history of
existence on this beautiful planet.
So, on behalf of the human race, I appeal to the world leaders to set aside their narrow national interests and play the historical and highly moral responsibility in saving this planet and its inhabitants. The
very future for all of life, human and otherwise, depends on their meeting this obligation with nothing short of total resolve!
basit72@gmail.com |
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| September 8, 2007 |
Climate Change Solutions: Beyond Science And Above Confines
by Abdul Basit, Basit72@gmail.com,
Countercurrents.org
Along with scientific research, we require political, religious, ideological, cultural, philosophical, economic, social and intellectual coordination.
Secondly, since human factor is the main reason for climate change, the
transformation in the method of lifestyle and concepts of economic
development required is much beyond the scope of science. Most
solutions provided by scientific research are very limited in scope such
as to fill up our automobile tanks with bio fuels instead of fossil fuels.
Such solutions will only aggravate the crises and create new problems.
What we need is a total transformation from what we have hitherto
followed. This transformation requires the change of the basic concept
of materialistic way of life and pursuit of wealth. This can only be
achieved by cultivating moral and spiritual values among the society and
by replacing materialistic pursuits with holistic and simple way of life.
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| July 22, 2008 |
An Era Of Disparity
by Mir Adnan Aziz, Countercurrents.org
Coming down to our times when confronted with the latest evidence of the startling growth of income and the ever increasing chasm of wealth inequality around the world, we need to recognize obscene social arrangements for what they are and demand something different.
Presently, there are nearly 500 billionaires worldwide whereas 1.2 billion live on a dollar a day or less. Tens of millions of children are locked out of school because their parents are unable to afford school fees. More than a million children die a year from diarrhea because their families lack access to clean drinking water. More than one billion people worldwide do not get essential health care. On average, developing countries have one doctor for every 6,000 people whereas industrialized countries have one for every 350 people. Under developed countries face a nightmare of almost no healthcare for their teeming masses.
We live in a world where all natural and human resources are exploited mercilessly, so that a small minority can consume far more than their rightful share of the world's real wealth. Now, as we push the exploitation of the earths social and environmental systems beyond their limits of tolerance, we face the reality that the industrial era faces a burnout, because it is exhausting the human and natural resource base on which our very lives depend.
We must hasten its passage, while assisting in the birth of a new civilization based on life affirming rather than money affirming values. All over the world people are indeed waking up to the truth. We should strive and take steps to reclaim and rebuild our local economy. It should also be our goal to create locally owned enterprises that sustainably harvest and process local resources to produce jobs, goods and services.
Ideally our economy should be local; rooting power in the people and communities who realize their well being depends on the health and vitality of their local ecosystem. We should favor local firms and workers, who pay local taxes, live by local rules, respect and nurture the local ecosystems, compete fairly in local markets, and contribute to community life. A global economy empowers global corporations and financial institutions, local economies empower people. It is our consciousness, our ways of thinking and our sense of membership in a larger community, which should be global.
Perhaps the most important fact of all, albeit forgotten, is that life is about living, not consuming. A life of material sufficiency can be filled with social, cultural, intellectual and spiritual abundance that place no burden on the planet. It is time to assume responsibility for creating a new future of just and sustainable societies free from the myth that competition, greed and mindless consumption are paths to individual and collective fulfillment.
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| June 6, 2008 |
On May 23, 2007, the world reached a seemingly invisible but momentous milestone. For the first time in history the world's urban population outnumbered the rural one. Now more than half its human population, 3.3 billion is living in urban areas. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost 5 billion. Many of the new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of our cities and the future of humanity itself, all depends very much on decisions made now in preparation for this growth.
Towns and town creation play an important role to impose control over the country. It also directs the activities of urban residents towards the larger purpose of establishing an administrative network and helps attain national prosperity. Unfortunately powerful political and economic interests shape urban policies to line their own pockets. The middle and working classes pay the bills for humongous, perpetually undelivered projects and programs.
There is an ominous divide between the urban and rural economy. Incomes in the cities have greatly increased for some whereas rural residents, who make up a huge section of the population, have barely felt the effect. This economic differential leads to large scale resentment and a sense of deprivation. The widening divide in turn drives millions into the cities, creating slums filled with poor, dislocated people. To slow down this stampede, we have to bring jobs to the countryside. Investors should be encouraged to build factories away from the presently focused main cities and help boost the local cottage industry.
The course of sustainable development at the local and regional levels requires the pursuit of economic policies that do not add new burdens to the carrying capacity of our locale. Population shifts or migrations to urban areas globally have traditionally been a tell-tale sign of many issues. Here people move for assumed advantages, such as employment, educational and economic opportunities. There is also forced movement to flee environmental crises, persecution and violence at the hands of the feudal.
A lack of imagination, rather than lack of skills, is a far more critical distinction between survivors and victims. To learn to make our cities livable we will have to break some longstanding chronic habits. The hardest habit to break is the 'syndrome of tragedy', that brooding feeling, like we are terminal patients in almost all walks of life. There is absolutely no dearth of 'specialists' out to prove that change is not possible. What has to be explained to them is that it takes the same energy to say why something cannot be done as to figure out how to do it, provided an honest working will is there.
Today our struggling cities, like almost everything else, are portrayed as evolutionary dead ends, with no future to contemplate. Our vision should be less a dream, an end-point or an unrealizable utopian existence, out there somewhere in the future; it should instead be an unending process to promote social justice and economic well-being among all Pakistanis. We should work towards peace with nature and that enveloping ecosystem which sustains life on our planet and is the true source of our natural capital.
It is time to raise our voices in opposition to the degradation of our lives, the jeopardizing of our individual and collective health and well being and above all the pollution of our politics. The consumer culture we inhabit bombards us with messages to buy beyond our budgets and live beyond our means. We can be more happy and content if we could but get off the habit of buying too much and consuming thoughtlessly. Hiding our unhappiness by frolicking in this consumer paradise for some, we who can, eat too much, spend too much, and waste too much time on things that do not matter. Along the way, we contribute to the plunder of nature's depleting capital and the theft of our children's future.
It is time to construct a future where people and nature matter, where wealth is based on the things that count rather than merely the things that can be counted. It is time to find the means for putting our urban house in order by planting seeds that will establish new roots for our urban community; enliven and enrich the nourishing soil on which we depend for human life itself.
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| August 13, 2008 |
A Path To Peace In The Caucasus
by Mikhail Gorbachev, Countercurrents.org
The past week's events in South Ossetia are bound to shock and pain anyone. Already, thousands of people have died, tens of thousands have been turned into refugees, and towns and villages lie in ruins. Nothing can justify this loss of life and destruction. It is a warning to all.
The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia's separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. This turned out to be a time bomb for Georgia's territorial integrity. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force -- both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar -- it only made the situation worse. New wounds aggravated old injuries.
Nevertheless, it was still possible to find a political solution. For some time, relative calm was maintained in South Ossetia. The peacekeeping force composed of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians fulfilled its mission, and ordinary Ossetians and Georgians, who live close to each other, found at least some common ground.
Through all these years, Russia has continued to recognize Georgia's territorial integrity. Clearly, the only way to solve the South Ossetian problem on that basis is through peaceful means. Indeed, in a civilized world, there is no other way.
The Georgian leadership flouted this key principle.
What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenseless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity.
Mounting a military assault against innocents was a reckless decision whose tragic consequences, for thousands of people of different nationalities, are now clear. The Georgian leadership could do this only with the perceived support and encouragement of a much more powerful force. Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of U.S. instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of NATO membership, emboldened Georgian leaders into thinking that they could get away with a "blitzkrieg" in South Ossetia.
In other words, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was expecting unconditional support from the West, and the West had given him reason to think he would have it. Now that the Georgian military assault has been routed, both the Georgian government and its supporters should rethink their position.
When the problems of South Ossetia and Abkhazia first flared up, I proposed that they be settled through a federation that would grant broad autonomy to the two republics.
The region's political leaders need to realize this. Instead of flexing military muscle, they should devote their efforts to building the groundwork for durable peace.
Over the past few days, some Western nations have taken positions, particularly in the U.N. Security Council, that have been far from balanced. As a result, the Security Council was not able to act effectively from the very start of this conflict. By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its "national interest," the United States made a serious blunder. Of course, peace in the Caucasus is in everyone's interest. But it is simply common sense to recognize that Russia is rooted there by common geography and centuries of history. Russia is not seeking territorial expansion, but it has legitimate interests in this region.
The international community's long-term aim could be to create a sub-regional system of security and cooperation that would make any provocation, and the very possibility of crises such as this one, impossible. Building this type of system would be challenging and could only be accomplished with the cooperation of the region's countries themselves. Nations outside the region could perhaps help, too -- but only if they take a fair and objective stance. A lesson from recent events is that geopolitical games are dangerous anywhere, not just in the Caucasus.
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| November 8, 2007 |
How to Hold Corporations Accountable
by Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs and Jason Mark
AlterNet, The Mix is the Message, Environment
When the system doesn't allow people to protect themselves from corporate harm to their communities, it is time to change the system.
Can you tell us about "democracy"? It's a word used by everyone and can mean so many things.
Some people might say you are anti-business. Is that the case?
Many people in this country don't understand that corporations have personhood rights. Why does this come as such a surprise to some people?
Speak about the regulatory system. It's supposed to keep corporations from doing harm, but everywhere you look -- the water, the land, the air -- everything is polluted.
Some believe that laws such as anti-corporate personhood ordinances are a waste of time because they will be challenged and shot down, so why bother? What is
the logic behind civil disobedience to the law?
Do you believe it's possible to change the role of corporations in our society?
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| August 8, 2008 |
Doom Or Disaster?
by John James, Countercurrents.org
Nearly every projection for the future of civilisation made in the IPCC reports has been exceeded. Events that were projected to emerge by the end of the century have been moved back to 2070, then to 2040, and even now to ‘within the next few years’.
The goal posts are moving towards us at a terrible pace.
The most obvious is the visible state of the summer sea ice in the Arctic that was expected to still be there in the lifetime of my grandchildren, but is now well on the way to disappearing by 2012. What was to have deteriorated slowly over 80 years could now be gone in four.
It is the same with global temperatures, loss of species, sea-level rise and aggravated drought. Wherever we look at the figures we are, on nearly every front, approaching Armageddon at an appallingly fast rate.
As greenhouse gas emissions are increasing every year, as more and more coal-powered generators are being built, as larger trucks are carrying goods over longer distances and as the population continues to increase, it is blindingly obvious that Hansen’s best scenario is now extremely unlikely.
We are left with disaster (that will be bad enough) or doom.
We need to understand what Doom means. There is no possibility that Frodo will drop the ring into the crater and suddenly save us all. Doom means anything over 4 degrees temperature increase. It means the loss of most of the world’s best agricultural land to rising seas, the end of trade as docks and cities are flooded, and the displacement of billions of men, women and children.
It means nuclear war and genocide, enormous suffering and the end of diversity in both human cultures and living creatures. It means the end of civilisation and a return to the most primitive way of life imaginable for the few thousand scattered survivors.
It means that we will have long passed the point of no return, and that even if we do stop emitting more pollutants into the air we will have begun the unstoppable release of methane from permafrost and under-sea clathrates that will quite rapidly take the world to even higher temperatures at which little life will remain.
We could end up like Mars or Venus.
At the speed at which things are changing, this could happen in our lifetime.
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| August 12, 2008 |
Something tells me we're going to be seeing a lot more of this in his final months.
The Bush administration has been attempting to bypass or kill the Endangered Species Act for years. Recently, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff used his power to waive federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, in order to expedite building the U.S.-Mexico border fence. Unclear if the new rules are the doing of Vice President Cheney, who has been maneuvering increased control over environmental policies.
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| June 1st, 2008 |
Federation of Global Governments essential services
are offering the
" Global Movement to Help "
by
Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
Summary
As a first step to getting help, all nations can and should approve those first three sections on the Scale of Global Rights.
The approval would supersede the political and physical borders of participating member nations.
The Global Protection Agency (GPA) would have the approval from all member nations to give immediate help, bypassing normal government protocols.
Somewhat like an emergency unit but at the global level. That is what those first three sections mean. They represent an efficient and immediate emergency response to help.
First, participating member nations need to give their approval to the GPA.
The GPA is a global organization much like the World Trade Organization (WTO) for trade between nations, the World Health Organization (WHO) for health,
or the European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFT), South American Community of Nations (SACON) for trade and economics.
The GPA offers an efficient emergency response to help.
The GPA is a short term solution, an immediate and efficient response to help. There are also long term solutions. As with the short term solution, the most significant long term solution is also related to
the Scale of Global Rights. The Scale was entrenched in the Global Constitution and is thus the fundamental guide to Global Law.
Now the Scale of Global Rights is a long term solution and is also a part of the Global Movement to Help of the Global Community.
The Scale was designed to help all life on Earth. What would be preferable is that nations unite amongst themselves to help.
Over time, we have seen the creation of the United Nations, the European
Union, the South American Community of Nations, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Except for the UN, these organizations are mainly concerned with trade and economics.
The Global Community offers a more meaningful union in the form of nine or more Global Governments. For instance the South American Community of Nations can be
a Global Government by simply accepting the Global Constitution as a way of dealing between member nations. A Global Government is concerned not only with economics and trade,
but also with the environment, health, agriculture, energy, food, social, cultural and many other essential aspects.
The Federation of Global Governments is the place of meeting between Global Governments.
The very first step of the Federation, and maybe the only one for several decades ahead of us, would be the approval of essential services amongst the participating member nations. The Global
Community has researched and developed such services and listed them here. All of them are already in operation on a small scale.
Introduction
Key words: Global essential services, Global Community, Federation of Global Governments, Global rights, Scale of Global Rights, global citizens, Global Parliament,
Global Protection Agency (GPA), Global Information Media (GIM),
Earth Government, Earth Executive Council, House of Elected Representatives, House of Advisers, Global Ministries, Ombudspersons Office, volunteering for the Global Community,
Global Community Assessment Centre (GCAC)
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| May 1, 2008 |
Global Rights year one
Letter to the Global Community sent by
Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
Global Rights year one is new impetus of the Global Community to educate everyone about the need for a change in thinking
and of doing things amongst all
nations. We need to realize what is a priority, what is the most important, and what is the least important for our survival. We need a clear vision. We need a common
vision. And we must all change! There are many important aspects of our lives we can longer do, or should never do anymore. They are destructive. Humanity and all life
can no longer afford activities that destroy life and the global environment. And there are other activities we must do, certainly thousands of them, to assure the survival of life on Earth.
In view of the planetary state of emergency we all must change, we must do things differently to give life on Earth a better survival chance.
And this is what Global Rights year one is about: to establish global fundamentals and a clear vision to follow.
Perhaps the Scale of Global Rights represents the strongest pillar of our vision.
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| April 3, 2008 |
The government has invested trillions in weapons that are completely useless in the fight against stateless terrorists.
A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and soon you're talking real money. But when it comes to reporting on what the Bush war legacy has cost American taxpayers, the media have been shockingly indifferent to the highest run-up in military spending since World War II. Even the devastating defense spending audit released Monday by the Government Accountability Office documenting the enormous waste in every single U.S. advanced weapons system failed to provoke the outrage it, and five equally scathing previous annual audits, deserved.
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| April 2, 2008 |
The bank is turning dirty carbon credits into gold -- bad news for those seeking a real solution to the climate crisis.
The World Bank's long-running identity crisis is proving hard to shake. When efforts to rebrand itself as a "knowledge bank" didn't work, it devised a new identity as a "Green Bank." Really? Yes, it's true. Sure, the Bank continues to finance fossil fuel projects globally, but never mind. The World Bank has seized upon the immense challenges climate change poses to humanity and is now front and center in the complicated, international world of carbon finance. It can turn the dirtiest carbon credits into gold.
How exactly, does this work, you ask?
Quite simply: The Bank finances a fossil fuel project, involving oil, natural gas, or coal, in Poor Country A. Rich Country B asks the Bank to help arrange carbon credits so Country B can tell its carbon counters it's taking serious action on climate change. The World Bank kindly obliges, offering carbon credits for a price far lower than Country B would have to pay if Country B made those cuts at home. Country A gets a share of the cash to invest in equipment to make fossil fuel project slightly more efficient, the World Bank takes its 13 percent cut.
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| March 4, 2008 |
Protect the Arctic Refuge from drilling forever
by Rebecca Young
from Care2 and
The Petition Site Team
Sign in.According to the U.S. Department of Energy's own Energy Information Administration,
oil from the Arctic Refuge would have little or no impact on oil prices. Big Oil doesn't need the Arctic Refuge - polar bears do. Urge Congress to act immediately
to protect the Arctic Refuge from drilling forever! Thank you for making a difference today.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is home to caribou, snow fox and millions of migratory birds. It is also the most important onshore denning habitat for America's vanishing polar bears.
But this natural treasure is constantly under siege. Time and time again, the oil industry and their allies in Congress have sought to open this special place to harmful new drilling, threatening all of the wildlife that depend on it for survival.
And now President Bush has called for drilling in the Arctic Refuge by 2010 in his new budget proposal! We need to permanently protect the Arctic Refuge!
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| February 3, 2008 |
A truthful democracy for the people of the North American continent
by
Germain Dufour
President
Earth Government
Key words:Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the Global Government of North America (GGNA).
Ever wonder why Canadians and Mexicans were never asked in a referendum the kind of relationship we want to have with Americans and the White House?
Ever wonder why Canadians and Mexicans dont have a veto power on the White House's policies and legislation, and yet we feed Americans with our resources?
How is that possible? What does that do to the world, to all life on Earth, and to the next generations?
As of January 30, 2008, the total U.S. federal debt held by the public was roughly $5.1 trillion and the annual deficit roughly $400 billion. They paid very little for our
resources and with money they borrowed every year from China. Americans buy our ' home grown corporations ' with money they dont own.
When they have not borrowed the money, they have invaded other nations and taken their resources. Blood resources. Blood money.  How can we trust a partner
that is basically bankrupted morally and economically? How can we let our governments be dealing with the White House on an agreement such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)?
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| February 8, 2008 |
Canadian society: a vibrant, modern, symbiosis global society
by
Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
Prophete of God
Key words: Canadian multiculturalism, diversity, the Canadian experience, immigration, symbiosis global society, symbiotical relationship, global ministries
Canadian society today includes a vast diversity of cultural heritages and racial groups. This multicultural diversity is a result of centuries of immigration.
Truly, the struggle for the making of Canadian multiculturalism is the Canadian experience and the Canadian identity.
Canadian multiculturalism is a symbiotical relationship between Canada, the Canadian people, and the world.
|
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| February 6, 2008 |
The Soul of all Life, the Soul of Humanity, is the unifying religion of a modern symbiosis society, that of the global civilization of the 3 rd Millennium
by
Soul of all Life
and by
Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
Prophete of God
The teaching of the Soul 
The fundamental criteria of a global symbiotical relationship
Guiding Souls and God want to help us manage Earth
Guiding Souls to serve God is a part of a new unifying religion of a modern symbiosis global society
The Divine Plan and the higher purpose of humanity
The Global Community teaching
Global Law
|
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| December 10, 2007 |
Wars and Climate Change: National Interests Verses Global Emergency
Letter sent by Abdul Basit to the Global Community
This is an appeal to World Leaders and Scientific Community, who have gathered in Bali, Indonesia for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
I remind the world leaders and researchers, who are attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, that they have a huge responsibility on their shoulders. The decisions of
this conference will not only decide the future of existence of humankind, but also for preserving all the past cultures and contributions humanity has offered throughout its thousands of years history of
existence on this beautiful planet.
So, on behalf of the human race, I appeal to the world leaders to set aside their narrow national interests and play the historical and highly moral responsibility in saving this planet and its inhabitants. The
very future for all of life, human and otherwise, depends on their meeting this obligation with nothing short of total resolve!
basit72@gmail.com |
Read |
| November 14, 2007 |
Palm oil: Cooking the Climate Once you pop, you can't stop
by Greenpeace Canada http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/
Indonesia — If, as you read this, you're tucking into a KitKat or dipping into a tube of Pringles, you might be interested
to know that these products contain palm oil that is linked to the destruction of forests and peatlands in Indonesia. As our new report "How the palm oil industry
is cooking the climate" shows, it's a recipe for disaster. The manufacturers of these products - Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever - are sourcing their palm oil from suppliers who aren't picky about where they site their
plantations. As the volunteers at the Forest Defenders Camp in Sumatra have seen, this includes tearing up areas of pristine forest then draining and burning the
peatlands. Indonesia's peatlands act as huge carbon stores so replacing them with plantations them not only threatens the amazing biodiversity, including the rare Sumatran tiger,
it also releases huge volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They only cover 0.1 per cent of the land on Earth, but thanks in part to the activities of the palm
oil industry they contribute 4 per cent to global emissions. If expansion of the palm oil industry continues unabated, that figure can only rise.
What's to be done? The Indonesian government should urgently introduce a moratorium on forest and peatland destruction, which will provide a chance to develop long-term
solutions and prevent further emissions from deforestation. And our eyes are fixed firmly on the UN climate meeting in Bali next month, where the next phase of the Kyoto
Protocol will be discussed. With deforestation accounting for up to a fifth of global emissions, including financing for forest protection as a core part of the plan to
tackle climate change is essential. | Read |
| November 27, 2007 |
UNDP wants climate justice through trade
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) for the first time in its human development report has analysed the impact of climate
change. The Human Development Report 2007-08 – Fighting climate change : Human solidarity in a divided world is released at a time when the climate change agenda is
slowly gaining its entry in the WTO negotiations and the discussions on the review of the work under Kyoto Protocol is slated to take place in Bali in Indonesia in
December, this year.
The report documented the impact of climate change across the world also projected the likely scenario for the future. Making out a case for alternative sources of
energy and fuels like bio-fuels, the UNDP report said that global trade has a major role to play. It said :International trade could play a much larger role in
the expanding Markets for alternative fuels. Brazil is more efficient than either the European Union or the United States in producing ethanol, Moreover, sugar-based
ethanol is more efficient in cutting carbon emissions. The problem is that imports of Brazilian ethanol are restricted by high import tariffs. Removing these tariffs
would generate gains not just for Brazil, but for climate change mitigation.
Negotiations on emissions limits for the post-2012 Kyoto Protocol commitment period can – and must – frame the global carbon budget.
Saying so it noted most developed countries like Canada fell short of the targets. Though the European Union and UK have both embraced their targets, they are likely to
fall far short of the goals set unless they move rapidly to put climate mitigation at the center of energy policy reform. Two major OECD countries like US and Australia
are not bound by Kyoto Protocol.
The report suggested two ways to mitigate climate change, one is to directly tax carbon dioxide emission and the other is cap-and-trade. Under cap-and-trade system,
the government sets an overall emissions cap and issues tradable allowances that grant business the right to emit a set amount. Those who can reduce emissions more cheaply
are able to sell allowances. One potential disadvantage of cap-and-trade is energy price instability while the potential advantage is environmental certainty, it noted.
While the transition to climate protecting energy and life styles will have short-term costs, there may be economic benefits beyond what what is to be achieved by
stabilizing temperatures. These benefits are likely to be realized through Keynesian and Schumpeterian mechanisms with new incentives for massive investment stimulating
overall demand and creative destruction leading to innovation and productivity jumps in a wide array of sectors, the foreward to the report said.
While government leadership is going to be essential in correcting the huge externality that is climate change, Markets and prices will have to be put to work so that
private sector decisions can lead more naturally to optimal investment and production decisions.
| Read
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| November 11, 2007 |
Deal climate injustice at home: Greenpeace India
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
More than 800 million poor people in India are bearing the burnt of climate change. This is partly due to the emissions caused by
the few privileged rich people in the country, said a report released by Greenpeace India Society. The report on climate injustice entitled `Hiding Behind the Poor’
urged the government to apply the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” in the country to deal with the situation arising out of climate change.
The study authored by G Ananathpadmanabhan, K Srinivas and Vinuta Gopal, however advocated India’s right to seek common but differentiated responsibilities at the global level.
Referring to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, it said that India claims its right to development and thus its right to consume more energy from
fossil fuels, asking developed nations to create the carbon space. Implicit in this is the notion that the developed countries need to decrease their carbon dioxide emissions
drastically so that developing countries can still increase theirs without pushing the planet in the direction of climate change.”
However, the study pointed out that over the last few decades, emissions of rapidly developing countries like India and China have surged. In fact, rankings by the WRI of
top GHG emitters has US on top and developing countries such as China and India are ranked at No 2 and 5 respectively, making them amongst the world’s biggest emitters.
The Greepeace India made an urgent plea to the government to consider the situation especially when the next round of negotiations for the second phase of Kyoto Protocol
is scheduled to take place in Bali in Indonesia in December, this year.
The Greenpeace India report further said that India was faced with two sharply contradictory realities. On the one hand there was a rapidly growing rich consumer class
which has made the country the 12.
The largest luxury market in the world and on the other hand India has become the home to more than 800 million poor people on the planet who are extremely vulnerable to
the impacts of climate change. India’s per capita carbon dioxide emission has averaged to 1.67 tonne.
| Read
|
| November 11, 2007 |
Global warming speeds up: IPCC
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon urged the national governments to do more to arrest the climate change. The report also offered blueprints to avert the worst
catastrophes, he said and added that climate change imperils the most precious treasures of our planet.
Ki-moon said that the report would be placed before the forthcoming UN framework on climate change meeting in Bali in Indonesia to review the progress made under the
Kyoto Protocol. The report noted that observational evidence from all continents and most oceans showed that many natural systems were being affected by regional climate changes,
particularly rise in temperatures. Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of the human
activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial value determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years.
| Read
|
| November 11, 2007 |
New hygiene norms for food items soon
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
The 39th CCFH also decided to work on proposed guidelines for control of Campylobacter and Salmonella spp in broiler (young birds), chicken meat, meat carcass, and portions.
Poultry, egg and egg products, fresh fruits, and vegetable will soon be subjected to new hygienic standards in global trade. Based on the recommendations of an ad hoc
panel chaired by India, the 39th session of the Codex Committee on Food Hygiene (CCFH), which concluded in New Delhi early this month, agreed to take up the new work on
the code of hygienic practices for fresh fruits and vegetables. The Codex Committee agreed that the US should take the initiative and set up an electronic working group
for receiving comments and suggestions. The electronic working group would be open to all interested parties.
| Read
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| November 10, 2007 |
Biotech to figure in new EU-India S&T cooperation
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
Biotechnology in agriculture, bio-fuel, climate change and energy security are top on the agenda of the European Union’s new offer for science and technology cooperation with India.
I am confident that we are embarking upon a new eara in science and technology cooperation between the European Union and India. Our S&T cooperation agreement is
about to be renewed for a further 5 years and we are about to announce new exciting opportunities for collaborative research, which may include biotechnology in
agriculture, bio-fuel, climate change, energy security and computational material science. We will establish a road map of our strategic S&T cooperation for 2008
and beyond.
| Read
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| November 11, 2007 |
Bunker Fuel in the Bay
by Danielle Fugere , Friends of the Earth foe@foe.org
On November 7, a container ship crashed into the San
Francisco Bay Bridge and spilled an estimated 58,000
gallons of bunker fuel -- a tragedy of immense proportions that
creates both immediate and long-term threats to marine life in
and around the bay. Today, Friends of the Earth is calling on Congress to ban the use of this dirty fuel forever. Will you join our call?
Bunker fuel literally comes from the bottom of the barrel. It is
the asphalt-like gunk that's left over after crude oil is refined into
gasoline for cars and is especially damaging when spilled in
accidents.* Even when used as intended, though -- to power
cruise and cargo ships -- it is extremely harmful. Indeed, a
study released just last week found that more than 60,000
people died from shipping emissions in 2002, due in large part to
the use of bunker fuel, which is more than 1,000 times dirtier
than the highway diesel used by trucks and buses. Its reliance
on this dirty fuel is also a key reason that the shipping industry is
a major global warming polluter.
Friends of the Earth's Clean Vessels Campaign has been leading
the fight against shipping pollution for years, at the local level,
nationally, and in the international arena, and phasing
out the use of bunker fuel has been one of our key aims. Now,
this dirty fuel has led to a disaster in the San Francisco Bay.
Let's ensure that this tragedy isn't repeated and phase out this
dirty fuel forever.
Please sign our petition calling for an end to bunker fuel use
today.
The petition can be found at: http://action.foe.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=816
|
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| November 22, 2007 |
Handy Hints For Post-Petroleum
by Peter Goodchild , Countercurrents.org, petergoodchild@interhop.net
The priority of these "hints" will vary as the years go by, but most of
them will remain relevant over the course of the century. The slight bias
toward northern North America is partly due to the fact that the area
meets most of the criteria.
Everything in the modern world is dependent on hydrocarbons. From
hydrocarbons we get fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, lubricants, plastic, paint,
synthetic fabrics, asphalt, pharmaceuticals, and many other things.
When oil goes, our entire industrial society will go with it. We must
therefore look to "primitive" technology. On a broader scale, one could can say that modern industrial society
is based on (1) hydrocarbons, (2) metals, and (3) electricity. The three
are intricately connected; each is only accessible — on the modern
scale — if the other two are present. Electricity, for example, has been
possible on a global scale only with hydrocarbons. The same is true of
metals: most metals are now becoming rare, and the forms that remain
can be processed only with modern machinery — which requires
hydrocarbons. There is no way of breaking that "triangle." What we are
then looking at is a society far more primitive than the one to which we
have been accustomed.
|
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| November 21, 2007 |
Why Israel Has No "Right To Exist" As A Jewish State
by Oren Ben-Dor , Countercurrents.org, okbendor@yahoo.com
A recognition of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish
state is a recognition of the Jews special entitlement, as eternal victims,
to have a Jewish state. Such a test of supreme stake for Jews is the
supreme criterion not only for racist policy making by the legislature but
also for a racist constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court.The
idea of a state that is first and foremost for the sake of Jews trumps
even that basic law of Human Freedom and Dignity to which the Israeli
Supreme Court pays so much lip service. Such constitutional
interpretation would have to make the egalitarian principle equality of
citizenship compatible with, and thus subservient to, the need to
maintain the Jewish majority and character of the state. This of course
constitutes a serious compromise of equality, translated into many
individual manifestations of oppression and domination of those victims
of such compromise--non-Jews-Arabs citizens of Israel.
The demand is that
Palestinians recognise Israel's entitlement to constitutionally entrench a
system of racist basic laws and policies, differential immigration criteria
for Jews and non-Jews, differential ownership and settlements rights,
differential capital investments, differential investment in education,
formal rules and informal conventions that differentiate the potential
stakes of political participation, lame-duck academic freedom and
debate.
The Jewish state could only come into being in May 1948 by ethnically
cleansing most of the indigenous population -- 750000 of them.
The fate of the descendants of those 750000 Palestinians
who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 would
continue to be discriminated under a two-state solutions.
The judaisation of the state could only be effectively implemented by
constantly internally displacing the population of many villages within the
Israel state. The Right of Return of Palestinians means that Israel acknowledges and
apologises for what it did in 1948. It does mean that Palestinian
memory of the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah, is publicly revived in the
Geography and collective memory of the polity. It does mean that
Palestinians descendants would be allowed to come back to their
villages. If this is not possible because there is a Jewish settlement there,
they should be given the choice to found an alternative settlement
nearby. This may mean some painful compulsory state purchase of
agricultural lands that should be handed back to those who return. In
cases when this is impossible they ought to be allowed the choice to
settle in another place in the larger area or if not possible in another area
in Palestine. It is clear that part of the realisation
of that right of return would not only be a just the actual return, but also
the assurance of equal stake and citizenship of all, Jews and
non-Jews-Arabs after the return. A return would make the egalitarian
claim by those who return even more difficult to conceal than currently
with regard to Israel Arab second class citizens. What unites Israelis
and many world Jews behind the call for the recognition of the right of a
Jewish state to exist is their aversion for the possibility of living, as a
minority, under conditions of equality of stake to all. But if Jews enjoys
this equality in Canada why can not they support such equality in
Palestine through giving full effect to the right of Return of Palestinians? |
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| November 19, 2007 |
A World Dying, But Can We Unite To Save It?
by Geoffrey Lean , Countercurrents.org, The Independent
Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world’s governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process — thought to be the most profound
change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years — is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse.
The warning is just one of a whole series of alarming conclusions in a new report published by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Scientists add that, as the seas become more acidic, they will be less able to absorb carbon dioxide, causing more of it to stay in the atmosphere to speed up global warming. Research is already uncovering some signs that the oceans’ ability to mop up the gas is diminishing. Environmentalists point out that the increasing acidification of the oceans would in itself provide ample reason to curb
emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and felling forests even if the dwindling band of skeptics were right and the gas was not warming up the planet.
Getting agreement on a new treaty to tackle climate change hangs on resolving an “after you, Claude” impasse between the United States and China, the two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming.
China insists - with other key developing countries like India and South Africa — that the United States must move first to clean up. It points out that, because of the disparity in populations, every American is responsible for emitting much more of the gas than each Chinese. But the US refuses to join any new treaty unless China also accepts restrictions. |
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| November 19, 2007 |
Globalisation Or Militarist Imperialism? India Must Choose: the Indo-US nuclear deal
by Rohini Hensman, Countercurrents.org,
If India wishes to be a respected member of
the international community, it would need to uphold
international law. This would entail working with
other countries to outlaw weapons of mass destruction
(chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, including
Depleted Uranium weapons), as well as weapons that
target civilians, such as land mines and cluster
bombs, all of which violate international law by
failing to confine their effects to military targets.
Obviously this would imply halting the nuclear
weaponisation programme in India.
It is easy to understand why the current US
administration is so desperate to seal a strategic
alliance with India, at a time when Pakistan, its
traditional ally in South Asia, appears to be
faltering. For India, however, the deal would be a
disaster. Backing out of it under pressure from public
opinion may be embarrassing, but not shameful; on the
contrary, it is the only democratic option. Going
through with it, on the other hand, would be
detrimental to India in the multifarious ways outlined
above. Clearly, the democratic option is both the
wisest and the only honourable one. |
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| November 13, 2007 |
US, British And Australian Forces Build Oil-Protection Base In Iraq
by Patrick Martin, Countercurrents.org, WSWS.org
The US Navy, with the assistance of British and Australian commandos, is building a permanent base to guard two oil-export platforms in Iraqi waters
at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. The military mission goes far beyond the patrols which US warships
have conducted in the Persian Gulf for the past 30 years, in the name of
keeping oil shipping lanes open. The Navy finds
itself with an additional, much more specific role: playing security guard
to Iraq’s offshore oil infrastructure. US, British and Australian military officers will control Iraq’s oil export
shipping for the indefinite future.
Iraq is one of the least-explored countries among the major oil producers, and there are plans to
explore for oil in the western desert (Anbar province) as well as the
traditional oil-producing regions in the north and south. Iraq has 112
billion barrels in proven oil reserves, but UN estimates have placed its
probable but as yet unproven reserves at 214 billion barrels, perhaps
the world’s largest pool of untapped oil. The oil ministry reported last week that daily crude oil production in
October hit a three-year high of 2.7 million barrels a day, of which 1.8
million barrels were exported. Hussein al-Shahristani, the oil minister,
said that crude production should reach 3 million barrels daily by the
end of the year.
|
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| November 8, 2007 |
US Alliance Afghan Genocide - Six Million Excess Deaths?
by Dr Gideon Polya, Countercurrents.org,
Post-invasion non-violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan - a month on from the 6th anniversary of the war criminal US invasion and occupation on 7th October 2001 – now total an estimated 3.2 million. However comparisons with Occupied Iraq (1.5-2 million TOTAL post-invasion excess deaths, and 0.8-1.2 million or about 50% of these being VIOLENT deaths) suggest that the post-invasion violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan could total 3 million.
The racist, war criminal US military state that they “don’t do body counts” of Indigenous victims but publicly-accessible UN demographic data allow us to estimate the carnage as outlined below.
With Racist Zionist-beholden Bush America and Racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel threatening to devastate remote, peaceful, non-invading, non-occupying, non-threatening, non-nuclear armed, democratic Iran (population 70 million, half of them KIDS and three quarters Women and Children), perhaps the best advice about how the World can stop these proto-Nazi, racist war-mongers is that given by outstanding CONSERVATIVE American economist, writer, academic and “Father of Reaganomics” Dr Paul Craig Roberts (see: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02122007.html ), QUOTE :
“Dump the Dollar! How the World can stop Bush … If the rest of the world would simply stop purchasing US Treasuries, and instead dump their surplus dollars into the foreign
exchange market, the Bush Regime would be overwhelmed with economic crisis and unable to wage war ...The demise of the US dollar is only a question of time.
It would save the world from war and devastation if the dollar is brought to its demise before the Bush Regime launches its planned attack on Iran.” |
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| November 8, 2007 |
Preparing for Life After Oil
by Michael T. Klare, The Nation
AlterNet, The Mix is the Message, ForeignPolicy
Welcome to the Age of Insuffiency: As oil prices hit new highs and supplies sink, our way of life will drastically change.
We are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency.
Major investors are not likely to cough up the trillions of dollars needed to substantially boost production in the years ahead, suggesting that the global output of
conventional petroleum will not reach the elevated levels predicted by the Energy Department but will soon begin an irreversible decline.
This conclusion leads to two obvious strategic impulses: first, the government will seek to ease the qualms of major energy investors by promising to protect their overseas
investments through the deployment of American military forces; and second, the industry will seek to hedge its bets by shifting an ever-increasing share of its investment
funds into the development of nonpetroleum liquids. In considering these past events, it is important to recognize that the use of military force to protect the flow
of imported petroleum has generally enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Washington. One might imagine that the current debacle in Iraq would shake this consensus, but
there is no evidence that this is so. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case: possibly fearful that the chaos in Iraq will spread to other countries in the Gulf
region, senior figures in both parties are calling for a reinvigorated US military role in the protection of foreign energy deliveries.
There is mounting perils to the safe flow of foreign oil. Concluding that the United States alone has the capacity to protect the global oil trade against the threat of
violent obstruction, it argues the need for a strong US military presence in key producing areas and in the sea lanes that carry foreign oil to American shores.
An awareness of this new "Washington consensus" on the need to protect overseas oil supplies with American troops helps explain many recent developments in Washington.
Most significant, it illuminates the strategic stance adopted by President Bush in justifying his determination to retain a potent US force in Iraq -- and why the Democrats
have found it so difficult to contest that stance. We should expect an increase in the use of military force to protect the overseas flow of oil, as the threat level rises
along with the need for new investment to avert even further reductions in global supplies.
|
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| October 22, 2007 |
It’s The Oil
by Jim Holt, Countercurrents.org, London Review Of Books
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five
times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it
is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two
thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas
alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on
Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of
undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these
estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on
one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely
light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30
trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected
total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’
for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil
revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress
would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National
Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields,
leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign
corporate control for 30 years.
The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but
the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has
all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the
next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil
wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic
government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police
force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that
government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in
the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is
oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final
‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been
more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few
dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and
which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists
killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to
$30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and
cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a
fiasco; it is a resounding success. |
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| September 27, 2007 |
Full Text Of Ahmadinejad's Remarks At Columbia University
by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Countercurrents.org
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed students and
professors at the US Columbia University during his short sojourn
in New York before his address at the 62nd meeting of the UN
General Assembly.
His remarks at Columbia University were almost entirely
boycotted by western and specially US media; while he spoke of
such crucial issues as Iran's nuclear program and the Holocaust
which have always been at the center of western media's attention,
almost the only point the US press mentioned about Ahmadinejad's
address at Columbia university pertained to a few seconds of his
answer to a question about the rights of homosexuals in Iran.
The following is the full text of President Ahmadinejad's speech at
Columbia University.
|
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| September 26, 2007 |
Earth Calls for Radical Social Change and Spiritual Transformation
by Dr. Glen Barry
The population bomb has burst, the climate and biosphere are
in tatters, and tyrannical, militaristic governments rule; yet
there remains a path to global ecological sustainability
Earth Meanders
http://earthmeanders.blogspot.com/
Dr. Barry is founder and President of Ecological Internet; provider of the largest, most used environmental portals on the Internet including the Climate Ark at
http://www.climateark.org/ and
http://EcoEarth.Info/ .
Earth Meanders is a series of ecological essays that are written in his personal capacity. |
Read |
| September 9, 2007 |
Because humanity has developed jurisprudence systems by which various entities claim legal title to selected segments of the earth, the earth is owned by those entities, by John R. Ewbank,
johnewb@comcast.net
john.1916@yahoo.com
hmrl@libertynet.org , (part of our group discussion by email)
Because humanity has developed jurisprudence systems by which various entities claim legal title to selected segments of the earth, the earth is owned by those entities having, under the local jurisprudence,
the legal title to various areas. All systems invonving confiscation of such veted property rights can be attacked as "thievery".Rights of eminent domain have permitted government intervention for better use
of land, and this involves use not merely for government fbut also for rr and utilities,and other public interests. However, those asserting common ownership and or confiscation must be classified by at least
some analysts as thieves.
|
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see also |
| July 28, 2007 |
|
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| August 1, 2007 |
Sent by DR. Charles Mercieca to the Global Community
China’s Transition into a Society of Social Harmony (Part II)
China represents one of the oldest civilizations in the entire history of our earthly society. Its dynasties managed to leave legacies that have enriched the culture of China in
many unique ways. By nature, the Chinese are very kind people and they try to be helpful with those around and with those they come across. They also tend to live in
peace and to let others live in peace as well. The only ambition the Chinese people seem to have is to see the members of their relatives and friends equipped with all the
vital needs of life.
mercieca@knology.net |
Read |
| September 16, 2007 |
Sent by Jose G. Vargas-Hernández to the Global Community
SCALE OF CONFLICTS BETWEEN FIRMS, COMMUNITIES, NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT
The role of the nation-state is to regulate conflicts between the essential elements, the nation-state, capitalists (firms), laborers and consumers, binding together disparate and conflicting interests.
This paper is aimed to review the different levels of scale of conflicts between firms, communities, New Social Movements and the role of government. |
Read
or Download full WORD document of Research Paper by author |
| September 17, 2007 |
Sent by Leslaw Michnowski to the Global Community
World - Grid Type, Continuously Under-development - System Dynamics. Why do we need it?
Manage the Sustainable Development Global Information Society website.
kte@psl.org.pl, elmamba@poczta.onet.pl
Committee for Futures Studies "Poland 2000 Plus", Polish Academy of Sciences,
The main goal of the United Nations is realization of sustainable development world society
vision. Such society would need to integrate social development with economic development and
environmental protection. For this end it is necessary to enable sustained economic growth,
internalizing externalities and DECOUPLING the range of economic growth from the range of deficit
natural resources depletion growth and degradation of environment. It is necessary also to COUPLE
economic growth with popular life-quality growth.
To achieve sustainable development OF THE WORLD SOCIETY we have to build, a
commonly accessible WORLDWIDE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INFORMATION (SYSTEM DYNAMICS) SYSTEM for:
- dynamic monitoring,
- long range forecasting, and
- measurable evaluation,
of policy, economy, work, and other changes effects in life-conditions of human beings and nature in
general. I propose a research program aimed at describing conditions of creation such big, grid, multi
stage built, information system.
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| September 24, 2007 |
Sent by Guy CREQUIE to the Global Community
A Decade of a Culture for Peace and Non-Violence for the Benefit of the Children of the World
by Guy CREQUIE
guy.crequie@wanadoo.fr
We are assembled in this congress to debate on this ever so important topic of peace for all humanity. Perhaps some of you come from countries where civil war prevails! There may
be among you, poets who have gone through the pangs and sufferings caused by foreign invasion. |
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| September 25, 2007 |
Sent by Guy CREQUIE to the Global Community
THE CULTURE OF PEACE JUSTIFIES IN FAVOR OF DETERMINED UNIVERSAL CITIZENS AND ENGAGE
guy.crequie@wanadoo.fr
Today, it is a confrontation between two designs: Political leaders in the name of the ideology (liberal and warlike) openly declined or which advances masked while misant on the
emotion that the evocation of the nation gets are made (in fact) from the nature of their speeches the cantors of the culture of the war, this, whereas we them poétesses and poets, we
are the carriers of a culture of peace. |
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or Download full WORD document of article by author
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| September 26, 2007 |
Sent by Germain Dufour to the Global Community
Global Community 22 nd Year Anniversary
Twenty two years ago the Global Community organization was created. Today the world is seeing the amazing accomplishments of the Global Community.
Back in 1985, I remember having accomplished my first 'soft activism'. It was such a memorable day for me as I actually stood up for a worthy cause: humanity, all life on Earth, and the protection of the
global life-support systems. Being a scientist I extended my principles to include standing up for them in public. This was in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. And the day was October 29. I was born again that
day! Standing up for what I believed in very strongly! I produced a brochure explaining everything I stood up for. Those who know me can easily imagine how meticulously long the brochure may
have been. Then I went to the University of Calgary campus and distributed the brochure to anyone I met. I also posted the brochure on bulletin boards. My first very intense exploration of my own
capability of reaching out to others and standing up for workable sound solutions to global problems. That day I became one with myself and all life on Earth. I became 'a Global Community'. |
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| September 26, 2007 |
Sent by Dr. Glen Barry to the Global Community
Earth Calls for Radical Social Change and Spiritual Transformation
The population bomb has burst, the climate and biosphere are
in tatters, and tyrannical, militaristic governments rule; yet
there remains a path to global ecological sustainability
Earth Meanders
http://earthmeanders.blogspot.com/
Dr. Barry is founder and President of Ecological Internet; provider of the largest, most used environmental portals on the Internet including the Climate Ark at
http://www.climateark.org/ and
http://EcoEarth.Info/ .
Earth Meanders is a series of ecological essays that are written in his personal capacity. |
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| September 27, 2007 |
Sent by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Global Community
Full Text Of Ahmadinejad's Remarks At Columbia University
by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
published by Countercurrents.org
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed students and
professors at the US Columbia University during his short sojourn
in New York before his address at the 62nd meeting of the UN
General Assembly.
His remarks at Columbia University were almost entirely
boycotted by western and specially US media; while he spoke of
such crucial issues as Iran's nuclear program and the Holocaust
which have always been at the center of western media's attention,
almost the only point the US press mentioned about Ahmadinejad's
address at Columbia university pertained to a few seconds of his
answer to a question about the rights of homosexuals in Iran.
The following is the full text of President Ahmadinejad's speech at
Columbia University.
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| October 1, 2007 |
Sent by Jan Oberg to the Global Community
The US, media and scholars contribute to war: Stop the MIMAC!
by Jan Oberg
TFF director
http://www.transnational.org/sitemap.htm
PeaceBrowser TFF@transnational.org
MIMAC has nothing to do with Mac or MiMac or that
sort of thing. It's the
Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, and
we have just witnessed its mode of operation once
again during Iranian President Ahmadinejad's
visit to New York.
The Military Industry is solidly anchored in
Vice-President Cheney's and President Bush's
offices. The Media - many owned or influenced by
the Military Industrial corporations - managed -
again - to mis-translate, mis-interprete and
demonise the Iranian President. Nobody listened,
few cared about checking sources - the first duty
of any professional media person. So the
Holocaust denial and wipe-Israel-off-the-map was
repeated - irrespective of the fact that the man
has NEVER said any of it.
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| October 22, 2007 |
Sent by Germain Dufour to The Honourable Paul Okalik, Premier of the Canadian territory of Nunavut
Letter to the Honourable Paul Okalik, Premier of the Canadian territory of Nunavut concerning the Northwest Passage, Nunavut and Canada Sovereignty
The creation of Nunavut was the outcome of the largest aboriginal land claims agreement between the Canadian government and the
native Inuit people. The Inuit is one of the first indigenous peoples in the Americas to achieve self-government. They have the right to participate in decisions regarding the land and water resources, and
rights to harvest wildlife on their lands.
Conservation, restoration, and management of the Earth resources
is about asking ourselves the question of " Who owns the Earth?"
The Global Community has proposed a democracy for the people based on the fact that land, the air, water, oil, minerals, and all other natural resources
rightly belong to the Global Community along with the local communities where those resources are found. The Earth is the birthright of all life.
To gain control of the Northwest Passage, Canada would have to show strong Earth management initiatives and the protection of its environment.
Without the fulfillment of the Global Community criteria for sovereignty no one can claim ownership - sovereignty - of both Nunavut and the Northwest Passage.
In Nunavut there is also a vast array of different life-form communities such as the polar bears, caribou, Arctic foxes, seals, beluga whales, northern fulmars, and those communities of organisms that inhabit the sea
floor like brittle stars, worms, zooplankton, microalgae, bivalves and some of the lesser known sea spiders.
And there are many more. Everyone of those global communities have an Earth right of ownership
of the North and of all its natural resources. It is their birthright. They dont express themselves in English, but we understand them. Human beings have a moral
obligation to protect and conserve the biodiversity of life on Earth.
Fot the protection of those global communities we will need to create a biodiversity zone in the North by way of Earth rights and taxation of natural resources.
We are all members of the Global Community. We all have the duty to protect the rights and welfare of all species and all people.
This letter may be a starting place for a group global discussion and roundtable on the issues of Canada sovereignty in the Nunavut and the control of the Northwest Passage.
If you wish to send a reply I will post it on the Global Community website at
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/EmailDiscussions/
and
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GPA/2008discussionroundtables.htm
For now I started the process by researching and writing a paper concerned with the issues, and you will find the paper at
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GIMProceedings/gimLetterNP.htm
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| November 15, 2007 |
Sent by DR. Charles Mercieca to the Global Community
Islands of Peace: Hope of World Stability
In view of this, the time seems now ripe when we need to reform drastically the institution of the military by changing it from an element of destruction into one of
construction. In other words, we need to find healthy means to enable the military change its negative image into a positive one. As conscientious and responsible human beings, we should all work to help turn as many nations as possible into islands of peace. The creation of such nations would
generate among millions of people positive and constructive energy that is bound to influence the rest of the world at a time least expected.
Of course, we need to establish good criteria to make this providential peace event on a global scale meaningful. Here are some of the criteria for a nation to qualify to
become declared as an Island of Peace.
mercieca@knology.net |
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| December 1, 2007 |
Sent by Guy CREQUIE to the Global Community
LA TERRE….ET LE SIECLE A VENIR 
GROUND….AND THE CENTURY TO COME
guy.crequie@wanadoo.fr
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| February 2, 2008 |
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is illegal
Ever wonder why Canadians and Mexicans were never asked in a referendum the kind of relationship we want to have with Americans and the White House?
Ever wonder why Canadians and Mexicans dont have a veto power on the White House's policies and legislation, and yet we feed Americans with our resources?
How is that possible? What does that do to the world, to all life on Earth, and to the next generations?
As of January 30, 2008, the total U.S. federal debt held by the public was roughly $5.1 trillion and the annual deficit roughly $400 billion. They paid very little for our
resources and with money they borrowed every year from China. Americans buy our ' home grown corporations ' with money they dont own.
When they have not borrowed the money, they have invaded other nations and taken their resources. Blood resources. Blood money. How can we trust a partner
that is basically bankrupted morally and economically? How can we let our governments be dealing with the White House on an agreement such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)?
Letter to the Global Community of North America sent by Germain Dufour
Key words:Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the Global Government of North America (GGNA).
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| January 8, 2008 |
Canadian society: a vibrant, modern, symbiosis global society
Letter to the Global Community sent by Germain Dufour
Key words: Canadian multiculturalism, diversity, the Canadian experience, immigration, symbiosis global society, symbiotical relationship, global ministries
| Read |
| December 10, 2007 |
Sent by Abdul Basit to the Global Community
Wars and Climate Change: National Interests Verses Global Emergency
This is an appeal to World Leaders and Scientific Community, who have gathered in Bali, Indonesia for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
I remind the world leaders and researchers, who are attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, that they have a huge responsibility on their shoulders. The decisions of
this conference will not only decide the future of existence of humankind, but also for preserving all the past cultures and contributions humanity has offered throughout its thousands of years history of
existence on this beautiful planet.
So, on behalf of the human race, I appeal to the world leaders to set aside their narrow national interests and play the historical and highly moral responsibility in saving this planet and its inhabitants. The
very future for all of life, human and otherwise, depends on their meeting this obligation with nothing short of total resolve!
basit72@gmail.com |
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| January 6, 2008 |
The Soul of all Life, the Soul of Humanity, is the unifying religion of a modern symbiosis society, that of the global civilization of the 3 rd Millennium
Letter to the Global Community sent by the Soul of all Life, the Soul of Humanity
The teaching of the Soul
The fundamental criteria of a global symbiotical relationship
Guiding Souls and God want to help us manage Earth
Guiding Souls to serve God is a part of a new unifying religion of a modern symbiosis society
The Divine Plan and the higher purpose of humanity
The Global Community teaching
Global Law
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| April 2008 |
Global Community Peace Movement
by
Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
President
Earth Government
(short
Bio)
Global Community Peace Movement website
What Effective Earth governance and management means?
Introduction to Effective Earth governance and management
- Effective Earth governance and management means follow the pathway to Peace in the world.
- Effective Earth governance and management means having a global vision for humanity and knowing what is needed to give a healthy future to the next generations.
- Effective Earth governance and management means Justice for all.
- Effective Earth governance and management means sharing global values, understanding our global commons.
- Effective Earth governance and management means sharing natural resources.
- Effective Earth governance and management means applying the new way of doing business and trade.
- Effective Earth governance and management means applying the fundamental principle: you have a property, use it, share it, or lose it. This principle applies to eveyone from a private individual to worldwide financial institutions.
- Effective Earth governance and management
- Effective Earth governance and management means participating in the Global Dialogue to resolve problems.
- Effective Earth governance and management means the absence of wars, disarmament from all nations.
- Effective Earth governance and management means getting involved, participating, volunteering.
- Effective Earth governance and management means respecting human and Earth rights.
- Effective Earth governance and management means politics without borders.
- Effective Earth governance and management means universal health care, education and employment for all.
- Effective Earth governance and management means a robust global economy.
- Effective Earth governance and management means the building of global communities for all life and the making of a global symbiosis society.
- Effective Earth governance and management means a global, legitimate, transparent, comprehemsive, visionary, inspiring, creative, compassionate leadership to harmonize diversity with unity for the good of all. The Global Community organization offers such leadership.
- Effective Earth governance and management means integrating into our ways of life global standards and practices, and global law for the protection of the global life-support systems.
- Effective Earth governance and management means having the Global Protection Agency (GPA) to give every community security and safety.
- Effective Earth governance and management means no global destruction of the environment and life habitats.
- Effective Earth governance and management means educating the population on the need to obtain a negative average annual population growth rate.
- Effective Earth governance and management means land and all other natural resources on the planet belong to the Global Community along with the local communities where these resources are found.
- Effective Earth governance and management means acknowledging, respecting and protecting within a constitutional framework the diverse cultural, religious, racial, and minority groups that make up a population.
- Effective Earth governance and management means that the education and upbringing of chidren include the principles and global concepts listed in the different sections included here.
- Effective Earth governance and management means creating new global ministries serving the Global Community.
- Effective Earth governance and management means no taxes on labor but taxes on the uses of natural resources.
- Effective Earth governance and management means creating symbiotical relationships between communities and nations. As with global ministries, these relationships must follow the fundamental criteria.
- Effective Earth governance and management means giving the people of a population the rights to vote democratically for a government of their choice, to participate in the global referendum on issues, to make sustainable choices for their communities.
- Effective Earth governance and management means by celebrating Life Day on May 26 of each year.
- Effective Earth governance and management means by participating in the Global Exhibition each year.
- Effective Earth governance and management means decreasing the wealth gap between rich and poor, between the industrialized nations and the developing nations.
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| August 2008 |
Global Community
Global Movement to Help
offers
Essential Services
to serve the people of all nations, all life on Earth
by
Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
President
Earth Government
(short
Bio)
Global Movement to Help main listing:
Global Movement to Help essential services to serve the people of all nations, all life on Earth
Protection of the :
- global life-support systems
- Earth ecosystems
- environment
Security for all life, and safety at work
Peace and disarmament
Have shelter and basic clothing
Global voting
Sustainable agriculture and food supplies
Water resources protection and drinking fresh water
Ombudspersons Office
Global Information Media ( GIM )
Volunteering
Breathing clean air
Global Community Assessment Centre ( GCAC)
Preventive actions against polluters
Eating a balance diet
Sustainable use of human and natural resources
' Clean ' energy
Eradicating poverty and hunger
Universal health care and education for everyone
Global Rights
All of the above essentials for this generation and the next ones
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| February 2008 |
The Soul of all Life, the Soul of Humanity, is the unifying religion of a modern symbiosis society, that of the global civilization of the 3 rd Millennium
by Germain Dufour
The Soul of all Life, the Soul of Humanity, is the unifying religion of a modern symbiosis society, that of the global civilization of the 3 rd Millennium
The teaching of the Soul
The fundamental criteria of a global symbiotical relationship
Guiding Souls and God want to help us manage Earth
Guiding Souls to serve God is a part of a new unifying religion of a modern symbiosis global society
The Divine Plan and the higher purpose of humanity
The Global Community teaching
Global Law
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| March 2008 |
Direct Democracy Global Voting on the Net
by Germain Dufour
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Direct democracy
A) How 'direct democracy' works
B) Development report on direct democracy
C) The Global Community overall picture on direct democracy
- The process of global voting on the Internet
- A democracy for the Americas
- We can do better together as friends and united as a Global Government: the Canadian view point.
- The Global Government of North America (GGNA) represents all citizens of the North American Community and others. Find out what it means to be united as a Global
Government.
- A new world to build, a future to share and protect together!
- Canada wants a veto power on all major proposals, policies, strategies, or any action (s) submitted to the GGNA for approval. Canada wants "direct democracy"
- Ratification of the Global Constitution
- The militarization of Canadian Culture
- The Militarization and Annexation of North America
- The Global Community perspective on the control of the Northwest Passage, Canada sovereignty of Nunavut and 'blood resources'
- Canadian society: a vibrant, modern, symbiosis global society
- Ever wonder why Canadians were never asked in a referendum the kind of relationship we want to have with Americans and the White House?
Ever wonder why Canadians dont have a veto power on the White House's policies and legislation, and yet we feed Americans with our resources?
-
GGNA vs NAFTA and the FTAA: the Canadian view point
1.0 Global Community Earth Government (GCEG)
2.0 Global Governments Federation
3.0 Global Government of North America (GGNA)
a. Human and Earth Rights within the GGNA
b. GGNA proposal
b. GGNA principles
4.0 Portal of the Global Community of North America (GCNA)
5.0 Recommendations to all Peoples on Earth
6.0 Politics and Justice without borders: Canada and the U.S.
7.0 Politics and Justice without borders: Canada, the U.S. and Mexico
8.0 Global citizenship
9.0 Global Laws
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| July 3, 2008 |
The media reports about Zimbabwe’s elections present them as a clash between the ‘evil’ Mugabe and the ‘heroic’ Tsvangirai, an electoral battle for Zimbabwe’s soul. Mugabe is depicted as having brought Zimbabwe to its knees, causing widespread poverty and enforcing terror and repression, and Tsvangirai is discussed as the harbinger of a dignified ‘revolution’ against Mugabeism (2). This is a fantasy. It ignores the key role played by Western governments and financial institutions in using sanctions, tough diplomacy and the proxy interventionists of the South Africa government and the African Union to isolate and harry Zimbabwe over the past decade. Such self-serving external meddling has contributed to Zimbabwe’s economic crisis - and it has dangerously distorted the political dynamics inside Zimbabwe and elsewhere in the south of Africa.
Over the past 10 years, American and European governments cynically transformed Mugabe’s Zimbabwe into the West’s whipping boy in Africa, the state they love to hate, a country against which they can enforce tough sanctions to demonstrate their seriousness about standing up to ‘evil’. The West has imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, warned off foreign investors, denied Zimbabwean officials the right to travel freely around the world, demonised Mugabe as an ‘evil dictator’, discussed the idea of military action against Zimbabwe, and used moral and financial blackmail to cajole South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki to ‘deal with’ Mugabe.
Bashing Zimbabwe played a dual role for Western officials and commentators. It allowed those of a conservative stripe to defend the historic reputation of colonialism by comparing it favourably with the rule of individuals like Mugabe. Eton-educated British observers loathed Mugabe because they considered him a symbol of African cockiness, who had humiliated Ian Smith (the white minority ruler of a self-declared ‘independent’ Rhodesia from 1965 to 1979) before the eyes of the world. Attacking Mugabe’s rule became a way of rehabilitating the image of old-fashioned, British-tinged colonialism. At the same time, one-time anti-colonialist radicals - including most notably the gay rights activist Peter Tatchell in the UK - focused their political energies on opposing Mugabe, describing him as intolerant and not sufficiently respectful of minority rights. At a time when political radicalism is on the wane in the West, some activists sought to recover their old campaigning spirit by taking potshots at the easy target of a beleaguered African state. Indeed, radicals often led the charge for tougher economic and political punishment of Zimbabwe - and frequently, they got what they asked for.
On the basis of little more than the fact that they needed a focus for their international pretensions, Western governments have put Zimbabwe into an economic straitjacket and warped its internal political process. If the sanctions, blackmail and withdrawal of trade have helped to push Zimbabwe’s economy into freefall, then the relentless backdoor political interventions have disempowered the people of Zimbabwe. The dynamic of Western intervention caused Mugabe to become more entrenched and paranoid about outsiders - and it encouraged the MDC to look to Western officials and radicals for their favour and flattery rather than to build a meaningful grassroots movement inside Zimbabwe. Indeed, for all the talk of a ‘revolution’ in Zimbabwe, both during minor street protests last year and during the elections this week, many people actually seem quite resigned about Zimbabwe’s fate. As one report recently said: ‘[T]he opposition hasn’t been able to mobilise tens of thousands of people…’ (18) Lots of the current news coverage continually shows Zimbabweans queuing up for hours to buy a newspaper for a few thousand dollars so that they can read about the elections. This footage is supposed to show how bad inflation has become in Zimbabwe, but it also reveals something else: that the West’s attempted strangulation of Mugabe’s regime reduced the people of Zimbabwe to observers rather than masters of their fate, who look to the front pages of newspapers to find out what might happen next in their country.
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| June 27, 2008 |
In a time when the old order is shattering, a global movement is emerging to challenge the use of war as a tool of statecraft.
Cheap oil provided an energy subsidy that defined the wars, economies, settlements, values, and lifestyles of the 20th century. The result was a century of wasteful extravagance and inefficiency that encouraged us to squander virtually all Earth's resources -- including water, land, forests, fisheries, soils, minerals, and natural waste recycling capacity. We are now waking up to the morning-after consequences of a brief but raucous party. These include depleted natural systems, unsustainable economies, an obsolete physical infrastructure, and a six-fold increase in the human population dependent on the diminished resources of a finite planet.
Cheap oil also fueled a zero sum global competition for access to resources -- particularly cheap oil -- and for the military superiority required to secure that access. The United States combined the global projection of military power with the global projection of economic and cultural power to achieve unchallenged global dominance as the sole reigning superpower.
Cheap oil is no more and the global projection of military and economic power it made possible is no longer viable.
According to the scientific consensus, to avoid driving Earth's system of climate regulation into irrevocable collapse we humans must achieve at least an 80 percent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions no later than 2050 and possibly sooner. Less noted is the corresponding imperative that to avoid irrevocable social collapse, we must simultaneously achieve an equitable allocation of allowable emissions to meet the essential needs of every person on the planet.
This presents a particular challenge for the United States. As the world's leading producer of green house gases, our emissions reduction must be closer to 90 percent.
There is no place in this equation for war or the global projection of military power. Beyond the fact that military planes, ships, and vehicles are gluttonous consumers of oil, the central activity of warfare is to kill and maim people and destroy critical infrastructure to impair capacity for normal life. The collateral damage includes massive scale toxic and radioactive environmental contamination that renders growing portions of our crowded planet uninhabitable. The more we humans war the more certain our ultimate collective demise.
The second is an emergent social movement calling all the world's parliaments to adopt the principles of Article 9 added to the Japanese Constitution following World War II. In the official translation it reads:
ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.(2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
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| June 26, 2008 |
Human potential fully realized in the age of cosmic genealogy on Earth rests, finally, on resolution of deep human needs to know from whence we came, safety and security, meaning and purpose - consonant with
life-centered cosmologies recognizing the cognitive and formative basis of all compassionate global societies: mate selection, the nurturing of offspring, and early childhood education in a healthful, sustainable
environment.
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| June 26, 2008 |
To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years." In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.
This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.
Even in the most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20% or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8% boost.
In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.
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| June 24, 2008 |
Climate Chaos Is Inevitable. We Can Only Avert Oblivion.
by Mark Lynas, The Guardian
Countercurrents.org
We came up with three alternative visions of the future, and asked experts at the Met Office Hadley Centre to run them through its climate models to give each a projected temperature rise. The results were both surprising, and profoundly disturbing.
The most pessimistic was labelled "agree and ignore" - a world where governments meet to make commitments on climate change, but then backtrack or fail to comply with them. Sound familiar? It should: this scenario most closely resembles the past 10 years, and it projects emissions on an upward trend until 2045. A more optimistic scenario was termed "Kyoto plus": here governments make a strong agreement in Copenhagen in 2009, binding industrialised countries into a new round of Kyoto-style targets, with developing countries joining successively as they achieve "first world" status. This scenario represents the best outcome that can plausibly result from the current process - but ominously, it still sees emissions rising until 2030.
The third scenario - called "step change" - is worth a closer look. Here we envisaged massive climate disasters around the world in 2010 and 2011 causing a sudden increase in the sense of urgency surrounding global warming. Energised, world leaders ditch Kyoto, abandoning efforts to regulate emissions at a national level. Instead, they focus on the companies that produce fossil fuels in the first place - from oil and gas wells and coal mines - with the UN setting a global "upstream" production cap and auctioning tradable permits to carbon producers. Instead of all the complexity of regulating squabbling nations and billions of people, the price mechanism does the work: companies simply pass on their increased costs to consumers, and demand for carbon-intensive products begins to fall. The auctioning of permits raises trillions of dollars to be spent smoothing the transition to a low-carbon economy and offsetting the impact of price rises on the poor. A clear long-term framework puts a price on carbon, giving business a strong incentive to shift investment into renewable energy and low-carbon manufacturing. Most importantly, a strong carbon cap means that global emissions peak as early as 2017.
But the other great lesson is that sticking with current policy is actually a very risky option, rather than a safe bet. Betting on Kyoto could mean triggering the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and crossing thresholds that involve massive methane release from melting Siberian permafrost. If current policy continues to fail - along the lines of the "agree and ignore" scenario - then 50% to 80% of all species on earth could be driven to extinction by the magnitude and rapidity of warming, and much of the planet's surface left uninhabitable to humans. Billions, not millions, of people would be displaced.
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| June 16, 2008 |
The day of reckoning for our reckless human ways that many of us have for decades warned would be coming is here.
We cannot grow our way out of poverty. The only way to end poverty and heal our social divisions on an already over stressed planet is through a redistribution of resources from rich to poor and from nonessential to essential uses.
Natural wealth was created by our Earth mother and is therefore a common heritage of all her children, including all non-human species. None of us has a right to abuse that wealth or to monopolize it to the exclusion of our sisters and brothers.
This brings us to the third element of the big picture: the governing institutions to which we give the power to set our priorities and our collective course. We might wonder how such injustice could happen in a world governed by democratically elected governments. The answer is simple and alarming. Our world is not governed by democratically elected governments. It is ruled by global financial institutions in the service of financial speculators who exchange trillions of dollars daily in search of instance unearned profits to increase the fortunes -- and the power -- of the richest people on the planet. They bring down governments that displease them, and buy and sell the largest corporations like commodities. By design and law the defining priority and obligation of these governing institutions is to generate financial profits to make rich people richer, in short to increase inequality in a world in desperate need of greater equity. To this end, the corporations rise or fall at the pleasure of the speculator, assault of our eyes and ears with advertising messages intended to get those of who are already have more stuff that we need -- to buy more stuff.
So what does this big picture overview tell us about what we need to do? How much suffering will changing our ways impose? Well, we need to grow strong caring communities in which we get more of our human satisfaction from caring relationships and less from material goods. We will need to end war as a means of settling international disputes and dismantle our military establishment. We need to reclaim the American ideal of being a democratic middle-class nation without extremes of wealth and poverty. And we need to encourage and support the rest of the world in doing the same. To do all this we will need create democratically accountable governing institutions devoted to the well-being of people and nature.
There can be no trade offs between justice, sustainability, happiness, and democracy. They are all inseparably linked.
The idea that beneath the surface of our wondrous cultural diversity most humans want the same thing is consistent with recent scientific findings that our human brains are wired for compassion, caring, altruism, and cooperation. It turns out that most people everywhere, irrespective of their skin color, religion, nationality, or language are happiest when they are being helpful, loving, peaceful, generous, and cooperative. Isn't that stunning? Think of the possibilities.
People of color and women won recognition of their full human rights only as the civil rights and women's movements successfully exposed the fallacy of the story that people of color and women are less than fully human. Recognizing the full humanity of all peoples opens us to a deeper understanding of what it truly does mean to be human in all the rich potentials that our human nature embodies.
The environmental movement is replacing the story that nature is a dark and evil threat to be subdued, vanquished, and used for whatever purposes please us with the story of Earth as a living being, the mother of life, a living spaceship.
Through sharing stories about what makes us truly happy, we come to see the fallacy of the advertising story that material consumption is our source of happiness. Once this fallacy is seen for what it is, we can enthusiastically share our stories of how we are improving the quality of our lives by reducing the quantity of our consumption and gaining control of our time to do more of the things that make us feel fully alive.
In everything you do, share the story of our human possibility and of our right and responsibility to create for ourselves and for future generations, the world of our shared dream. Our distinctive human capacity for reflection and intentional choice carries a corresponding moral responsibility to care for our Mother Earth and for one another. We must now test the limits of the individual and collective creative potential of our species as we strive to become the change we seek.
In these turbulent and frightening times, it is important to remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most exciting moment of creative opportunity in the whole of the human experience. The future is in our hands. Now is the hour. We have the power to turn this world around. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
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| June 15, 2008 |
We can continue to believe our politicians as they echo messages of stability and order around our planet, and we can continue to feed off the BBC or the New York Times to get an insight into the normality of the global situation, but sooner or later, the collapse of our economies is going to affect us directly by hitting our pockets, and then perhaps we will be ready to act. Hopefully, against those politicians and global capitalists who are infecting our daily life by bringing a painful and miserable reality to the majority of humanity.
We have not been smart enough as a collective of global citizens to understand that we are being taken on a ride, that affected groups are being kept isolated by the magic wand of the mainstream media regurgitating the propagandistic message of the ruling elite. Everyday, the global situation is getting worse. As strikes are on the rise and unemployment is increasing, we must be alert, we must understand what is happening. The elites will continue to keep us divided, because divided is how they can control us, but we must be smarter than them and understand that the only strength we have against their policies, is the collective strength of united discontent.
When will we understand that our politicians are lying to us? Will we ever understand that the mainstream media is not democratic and that the police are there to defend the interests of the wealthy? One can see clearly whose interest the police serves when those who protest and strike have guns pointed at them.
We must begin to pave the path to peace in order to gain global stability, and that must be done by setting measures to stop speculators from benefiting from the misery of others, by punishing corrupt politicians, and by collectively understanding that bankers are rich because we have placed our money in their hands. Ultimately, unless we begin to see the world as a whole, in which things are truly interconnected, our governments will continue their hostilities, oil prices will keep on rising, and when the time comes for us to complain, we will be faced with the guns of the police whom we have helped to create with the payment of our taxes. The only positive thing coming out of this chaos, is that we are no longer able to avoid facing reality, and soon after this social Tsunami which has begun to unravel is over, we will be faced with a true opportunity to collectively construct global order.
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| June 11, 2008 |
The rate of climate warming over northern Alaska, Canada, and Russia could more than triple during periods of rapid sea ice loss, according to a new study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The findings raise concerns about the thawing of permafrost, or permanently frozen soil, and the potential consequences for sensitive ecosystems, human infrastructure, and the release of additional greenhouse gases.
"Our study suggests that, if sea-ice continues to contract rapidly over the next several years, Arctic land warming and permafrost thaw are likely to accelerate," says lead author David Lawrence of NCAR.
Arctic soils are believed to hold 30 percent or more of all the carbon stored in soils worldwide. Although researchers are uncertain what will happen to this carbon as soils warm and permafrost thaws, one possibility is that the thaw will initiate significant additional emissions of carbon dioxide or the more potent greenhouse gas, methane.
An important unresolved question is how the delicate balance of life in the Arctic will respond to such a rapid warming," Lawrence says. "Will we see, for example, accelerated coastal erosion, or increased methane emissions, or faster shrub encroachment into tundra regions if sea ice continues to retreat rapidly?
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| June 6, 2008 |
The fate of global food production has now become the chief terror of the future.
Much of our current recessionary intrigue has been aided and abetted by market speculation, from the oil and food sector all the way to the White House itself. For the last seven years, the Bush administration has placed climate crisis on the back burner in existential pursuit of resource wars and an "American way of life" that has turned from a dream of Hummers, housing and bling into a nightmare of price hikes, foreclosures and layoffs. Mission accomplished.
But someone will have to pick up the pieces, which are going viral fast. In that chaos, food has stopped being our other energy problem and become a chief terror of the future. And considering increasing prices, decreasing dollars and a world that will soon house many more people but feed even less of them, we're probably in for a famine or two before all is said and done.
Skyrocketing prices are hitting those who already spend 60 percent, sometimes even 80 percent, of their budget on food. These groups include the rural landless, pastoralists and the majority of small-scale farmers. But the impact is greatest on the urban poor. And the rises are producing what we're calling the "new face of hunger" -- people who suddenly can no longer afford the food they see on store shelves because prices have soared beyond their reach.
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| December 10, 2007 |
Ritual Gloating Postmortems - The Corporate Media v. Hugo Chavez
by Stephen Lendman, Countercurrents.org,
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net
Dateline December 3, 2007 - the corporate media is euphoric after Venezuelans narrowly defeated Hugo Chavez's
constitutional reform referendum the previous day. The outcome defied pre-election independent poll predictions and was a cliffhanger to the end.
Chavez is resilient and will rebound from one electoral setback. Don't ever count him out or underestimate his influence. A historic transformation
is underway in Latin America following more than a quarter century of neoliberal rule. The referendum and its outcome while important today is merely an episode in
the struggle between authoritarian imperial centered capitalism (Chavez opposes) and democratic workers centered socialism. |
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| December 8, 2007 |
Peak Oil And The Vision In The Mirror
by Aaron Wissner, Countercurrents.org,
LiVEJOURNAL
Aaron Wissner, Organizer, Local Future Network
What happens when the energy supply stops growing, but the population continues to grow?
More importantly, what happens when the energy supply begins to decline, as population continues to grow?
Peak oil is not simply an issue of learning to conserve or finding ways to do more with less. It isn't simply about the possibility of economic
collapse, war, starvation or global pandemic. It isn't just about changing our behaviors or our beliefs. It is about turning ourselves inside-out, and not only
surviving the transformation, but also being and living equal and in harmony with all the rest. |
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| December 7, 2007 |
Forests Could Cool or Cook The Planet
by Stephen Leahy , Countercurrents.org,
BROOKLIN, Canada, Dec 7 (IPS) - A two-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures could flip the Amazon forest
from being the Earth's vital air conditioner to a flamethrower that cooks the planet, warns a new report released at the climate talks in Bali, Indonesia Friday.
The trees of the Amazon contain at least 100 billion tonnes of carbon -- 15 years worth of global emissions from all sources, he said. "It's not
only essential for cooling the world's temperature but also such a large source of freshwater that it may be enough to influence some of the great ocean currents."
It is in everyone's interest to keep the Amazon intact, but deforestation continues apace, driven by expanding cattle ranching, soy farming, conversion into sugar cane for
biofuel and logging. This assault is drying out the forest, making it more vulnerable to burning. Rising global temperatures are also increasing evaporation rates,
drying the forest further. |
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| December 10, 2007 |
The Missing Link in Creationism
by Sean Gonsalves
AlterNet, The Mix is the Message
How can social conservatives deny Darwin's theory of evolution while espousing social Darwinism?
I confess my heresy: like the Jesuit theologian/paleontologist Pierre Teilhard did 50 odd years ago, I'm a believer whose made his peace with evolution. But then,
I've never understood why science and faith are discussed as if they're mutually exclusive. Folks who think evolution is an inherently atheist argument or those
who think evolution disproves the existence of God are people with little imagination. The evolution vs. creationism debate may be an unavoidable political fight
but much more relevant and revealing is what many evolution-believing secular conservatives and evolution-denying religious conservatives have in common: a
belief in social Darwinism. A popular misconception is that Darwin coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." Actually, Darwin's thing was "natural selection,"
which turns out to involve lots of cooperation.
So while science battles evolution-opponents, I'm trying to understand a conservative political species that opposes evolution on religious grounds while supporting
social Darwinism on the political and economic grounds. There's a missing link here. |
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| November 29, 2007 |
Labor Goes to Bali: Unions Ready to Take on Global Warming
by Brendan Smith and Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Labor Strategies
AlterNet, The Mix is the Message, ForeignPolicy
The devastating realities of climate change, and the scientific consensus around its cause and cure, are shifting the global political climate.
Some people might say you are anti-business. Is that the case?
This week trade unionists from around the world will travel to Bali for the December 3rd launch of negotiations for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol limiting greenhouse
gasses. It will include delegates from such U.S unions as the Electrical Workers (IUE), Mine Workers, Service Employees, Boilermakers, Steelworkers, Communication Workers,
Transport Workers (TWU), and UNITE HERE garment and textile workers. It will also include the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council as well as such labor-oriented groups as the
Blue-Green Alliance, the Cornell Global Labor Institute, and the Labor Research Association. The Kyoto Protocol was signed by 172 countries - not including the U.S. The AFL-CIO, which then represented the great majority of all U.S. unions, opposed the
Kyoto protocol. What will be the stance of American labor toward an even stronger version for the future?
As trade unionists, we are confident that Bali will mark the beginning of a new and more ambitious process of social change, where our collective hearts and minds must
aspire to save our planet, on the basis of solidarity and mutual respect. |
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| December 10, 2007 |
Wars and Climate Change: National Interests Verses Global Emergency
Letter sent by Abdul Basit to the Global Community
This is an appeal to World Leaders and Scientific Community, who have gathered in Bali, Indonesia for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
I remind the world leaders and researchers, who are attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, that they have a huge responsibility on their shoulders. The decisions of
this conference will not only decide the future of existence of humankind, but also for preserving all the past cultures and contributions humanity has offered throughout its thousands of years history of
existence on this beautiful planet.
So, on behalf of the human race, I appeal to the world leaders to set aside their narrow national interests and play the historical and highly moral responsibility in saving this planet and its inhabitants. The
very future for all of life, human and otherwise, depends on their meeting this obligation with nothing short of total resolve!
basit72@gmail.com |
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| November 14, 2007 |
Palm oil: Cooking the Climate Once you pop, you can't stop
by Greenpeace Canada http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/
Indonesia — If, as you read this, you're tucking into a KitKat or dipping into a tube of Pringles, you might be interested
to know that these products contain palm oil that is linked to the destruction of forests and peatlands in Indonesia. As our new report "How the palm oil industry
is cooking the climate" shows, it's a recipe for disaster. The manufacturers of these products - Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever - are sourcing their palm oil from suppliers who aren't picky about where they site their
plantations. As the volunteers at the Forest Defenders Camp in Sumatra have seen, this includes tearing up areas of pristine forest then draining and burning the
peatlands. Indonesia's peatlands act as huge carbon stores so replacing them with plantations them not only threatens the amazing biodiversity, including the rare Sumatran tiger,
it also releases huge volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They only cover 0.1 per cent of the land on Earth, but thanks in part to the activities of the palm
oil industry they contribute 4 per cent to global emissions. If expansion of the palm oil industry continues unabated, that figure can only rise.
What's to be done? The Indonesian government should urgently introduce a moratorium on forest and peatland destruction, which will provide a chance to develop long-term
solutions and prevent further emissions from deforestation. And our eyes are fixed firmly on the UN climate meeting in Bali next month, where the next phase of the Kyoto
Protocol will be discussed. With deforestation accounting for up to a fifth of global emissions, including financing for forest protection as a core part of the plan to
tackle climate change is essential. | Read |
| December 1, 2007 |
LA TERRE….ET LE SIECLE A VENIR
GROUND….AND THE CENTURY TO COME
Poeme sent by Guy CREQUIE to the Global Community
guy.crequie@wanadoo.fr
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| November 27, 2007 |
UNDP wants climate justice through trade
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) for the first time in its human development report has analysed the impact of climate
change. The Human Development Report 2007-08 – Fighting climate change : Human solidarity in a divided world is released at a time when the climate change agenda is
slowly gaining its entry in the WTO negotiations and the discussions on the review of the work under Kyoto Protocol is slated to take place in Bali in Indonesia in
December, this year.
The report documented the impact of climate change across the world also projected the likely scenario for the future. Making out a case for alternative sources of
energy and fuels like bio-fuels, the UNDP report said that global trade has a major role to play. It said :International trade could play a much larger role in
the expanding Markets for alternative fuels. Brazil is more efficient than either the European Union or the United States in producing ethanol, Moreover, sugar-based
ethanol is more efficient in cutting carbon emissions. The problem is that imports of Brazilian ethanol are restricted by high import tariffs. Removing these tariffs
would generate gains not just for Brazil, but for climate change mitigation.
Negotiations on emissions limits for the post-2012 Kyoto Protocol commitment period can – and must – frame the global carbon budget.
Saying so it noted most developed countries like Canada fell short of the targets. Though the European Union and UK have both embraced their targets, they are likely to
fall far short of the goals set unless they move rapidly to put climate mitigation at the center of energy policy reform. Two major OECD countries like US and Australia
are not bound by Kyoto Protocol.
The report suggested two ways to mitigate climate change, one is to directly tax carbon dioxide emission and the other is cap-and-trade. Under cap-and-trade system,
the government sets an overall emissions cap and issues tradable allowances that grant business the right to emit a set amount. Those who can reduce emissions more cheaply
are able to sell allowances. One potential disadvantage of cap-and-trade is energy price instability while the potential advantage is environmental certainty, it noted.
While the transition to climate protecting energy and life styles will have short-term costs, there may be economic benefits beyond what what is to be achieved by
stabilizing temperatures. These benefits are likely to be realized through Keynesian and Schumpeterian mechanisms with new incentives for massive investment stimulating
overall demand and creative destruction leading to innovation and productivity jumps in a wide array of sectors, the foreward to the report said.
While government leadership is going to be essential in correcting the huge externality that is climate change, Markets and prices will have to be put to work so that
private sector decisions can lead more naturally to optimal investment and production decisions.
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| November 11, 2007 |
Deal climate injustice at home: Greenpeace India
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
More than 800 million poor people in India are bearing the burnt of climate change. This is partly due to the emissions caused by
the few privileged rich people in the country, said a report released by Greenpeace India Society. The report on climate injustice entitled `Hiding Behind the Poor’
urged the government to apply the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” in the country to deal with the situation arising out of climate change.
The study authored by G Ananathpadmanabhan, K Srinivas and Vinuta Gopal, however advocated India’s right to seek common but differentiated responsibilities at the global level.
Referring to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, it said that India claims its right to development and thus its right to consume more energy from
fossil fuels, asking developed nations to create the carbon space. Implicit in this is the notion that the developed countries need to decrease their carbon dioxide emissions
drastically so that developing countries can still increase theirs without pushing the planet in the direction of climate change.”
However, the study pointed out that over the last few decades, emissions of rapidly developing countries like India and China have surged. In fact, rankings by the WRI of
top GHG emitters has US on top and developing countries such as China and India are ranked at No 2 and 5 respectively, making them amongst the world’s biggest emitters.
The Greepeace India made an urgent plea to the government to consider the situation especially when the next round of negotiations for the second phase of Kyoto Protocol
is scheduled to take place in Bali in Indonesia in December, this year.
The Greenpeace India report further said that India was faced with two sharply contradictory realities. On the one hand there was a rapidly growing rich consumer class
which has made the country the 12.
The largest luxury market in the world and on the other hand India has become the home to more than 800 million poor people on the planet who are extremely vulnerable to
the impacts of climate change. India’s per capita carbon dioxide emission has averaged to 1.67 tonne.
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| November 11, 2007 |
Global warming speeds up: IPCC
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon urged the national governments to do more to arrest the climate change. The report also offered blueprints to avert the worst
catastrophes, he said and added that climate change imperils the most precious treasures of our planet.
Ki-moon said that the report would be placed before the forthcoming UN framework on climate change meeting in Bali in Indonesia to review the progress made under the
Kyoto Protocol. The report noted that observational evidence from all continents and most oceans showed that many natural systems were being affected by regional climate changes,
particularly rise in temperatures. Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of the human
activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial value determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years.
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| November 11, 2007 |
New hygiene norms for food items soon
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
The 39th CCFH also decided to work on proposed guidelines for control of Campylobacter and Salmonella spp in broiler (young birds), chicken meat, meat carcass, and portions.
Poultry, egg and egg products, fresh fruits, and vegetable will soon be subjected to new hygienic standards in global trade. Based on the recommendations of an ad hoc
panel chaired by India, the 39th session of the Codex Committee on Food Hygiene (CCFH), which concluded in New Delhi early this month, agreed to take up the new work on
the code of hygienic practices for fresh fruits and vegetables. The Codex Committee agreed that the US should take the initiative and set up an electronic working group
for receiving comments and suggestions. The electronic working group would be open to all interested parties.
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| November 10, 2007 |
Biotech to figure in new EU-India S&T cooperation
by ASHOK B SHARMA
published by Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture and by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
Biotechnology in agriculture, bio-fuel, climate change and energy security are top on the agenda of the European Union’s new offer for science and technology cooperation with India.
I am confident that we are embarking upon a new eara in science and technology cooperation between the European Union and India. Our S&T cooperation agreement is
about to be renewed for a further 5 years and we are about to announce new exciting opportunities for collaborative research, which may include biotechnology in
agriculture, bio-fuel, climate change, energy security and computational material science. We will establish a road map of our strategic S&T cooperation for 2008
and beyond.
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| November 11, 2007 |
Bunker Fuel in the Bay
by Danielle Fugere , Friends of the Earth foe@foe.org
On November 7, a container ship crashed into the San
Francisco Bay Bridge and spilled an estimated 58,000
gallons of bunker fuel -- a tragedy of immense proportions that
creates both immediate and long-term threats to marine life in
and around the bay. Today, Friends of the Earth is calling on Congress to ban the use of this dirty fuel forever. Will you join our call?
Bunker fuel literally comes from the bottom of the barrel. It is
the asphalt-like gunk that's left over after crude oil is refined into
gasoline for cars and is especially damaging when spilled in
accidents.* Even when used as intended, though -- to power
cruise and cargo ships -- it is extremely harmful. Indeed, a
study released just last week found that more than 60,000
people died from shipping emissions in 2002, due in large part to
the use of bunker fuel, which is more than 1,000 times dirtier
than the highway diesel used by trucks and buses. Its reliance
on this dirty fuel is also a key reason that the shipping industry is
a major global warming polluter.
Friends of the Earth's Clean Vessels Campaign has been leading
the fight against shipping pollution for years, at the local level,
nationally, and in the international arena, and phasing
out the use of bunker fuel has been one of our key aims. Now,
this dirty fuel has led to a disaster in the San Francisco Bay.
Let's ensure that this tragedy isn't repeated and phase out this
dirty fuel forever.
Please sign our petition calling for an end to bunker fuel use
today.
The petition can be found at: http://action.foe.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=816
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| November 22, 2007 |
Handy Hints For Post-Petroleum
by Peter Goodchild , Countercurrents.org, petergoodchild@interhop.net
The priority of these "hints" will vary as the years go by, but most of
them will remain relevant over the course of the century. The slight bias
toward northern North America is partly due to the fact that the area
meets most of the criteria.
Everything in the modern world is dependent on hydrocarbons. From
hydrocarbons we get fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, lubricants, plastic, paint,
synthetic fabrics, asphalt, pharmaceuticals, and many other things.
When oil goes, our entire industrial society will go with it. We must
therefore look to "primitive" technology. On a broader scale, one could can say that modern industrial society
is based on (1) hydrocarbons, (2) metals, and (3) electricity. The three
are intricately connected; each is only accessible — on the modern
scale — if the other two are present. Electricity, for example, has been
possible on a global scale only with hydrocarbons. The same is true of
metals: most metals are now becoming rare, and the forms that remain
can be processed only with modern machinery — which requires
hydrocarbons. There is no way of breaking that "triangle." What we are
then looking at is a society far more primitive than the one to which we
have been accustomed.
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| November 21, 2007 |
Why Israel Has No "Right To Exist" As A Jewish State
by Oren Ben-Dor , Countercurrents.org, okbendor@yahoo.com
A recognition of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish
state is a recognition of the Jews special entitlement, as eternal victims,
to have a Jewish state. Such a test of supreme stake for Jews is the
supreme criterion not only for racist policy making by the legislature but
also for a racist constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court.The
idea of a state that is first and foremost for the sake of Jews trumps
even that basic law of Human Freedom and Dignity to which the Israeli
Supreme Court pays so much lip service. Such constitutional
interpretation would have to make the egalitarian principle equality of
citizenship compatible with, and thus subservient to, the need to
maintain the Jewish majority and character of the state. This of course
constitutes a serious compromise of equality, translated into many
individual manifestations of oppression and domination of those victims
of such compromise--non-Jews-Arabs citizens of Israel.
The demand is that
Palestinians recognise Israel's entitlement to constitutionally entrench a
system of racist basic laws and policies, differential immigration criteria
for Jews and non-Jews, differential ownership and settlements rights,
differential capital investments, differential investment in education,
formal rules and informal conventions that differentiate the potential
stakes of political participation, lame-duck academic freedom and
debate.
The Jewish state could only come into being in May 1948 by ethnically
cleansing most of the indigenous population -- 750000 of them.
The fate of the descendants of those 750000 Palestinians
who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 would
continue to be discriminated under a two-state solutions.
The judaisation of the state could only be effectively implemented by
constantly internally displacing the population of many villages within the
Israel state. The Right of Return of Palestinians means that Israel acknowledges and
apologises for what it did in 1948. It does mean that Palestinian
memory of the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah, is publicly revived in the
Geography and collective memory of the polity. It does mean that
Palestinians descendants would be allowed to come back to their
villages. If this is not possible because there is a Jewish settlement there,
they should be given the choice to found an alternative settlement
nearby. This may mean some painful compulsory state purchase of
agricultural lands that should be handed back to those who return. In
cases when this is impossible they ought to be allowed the choice to
settle in another place in the larger area or if not possible in another area
in Palestine. It is clear that part of the realisation
of that right of return would not only be a just the actual return, but also
the assurance of equal stake and citizenship of all, Jews and
non-Jews-Arabs after the return. A return would make the egalitarian
claim by those who return even more difficult to conceal than currently
with regard to Israel Arab second class citizens. What unites Israelis
and many world Jews behind the call for the recognition of the right of a
Jewish state to exist is their aversion for the possibility of living, as a
minority, under conditions of equality of stake to all. But if Jews enjoys
this equality in Canada why can not they support such equality in
Palestine through giving full effect to the right of Return of Palestinians? |
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| November 19, 2007 |
A World Dying, But Can We Unite To Save It?
by Geoffrey Lean , Countercurrents.org, The Independent
Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world’s governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process — thought to be the most profound
change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years — is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse.
The warning is just one of a whole series of alarming conclusions in a new report published by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Scientists add that, as the seas become more acidic, they will be less able to absorb carbon dioxide, causing more of it to stay in the atmosphere to speed up global warming. Research is already uncovering some signs that the oceans’ ability to mop up the gas is diminishing. Environmentalists point out that the increasing acidification of the oceans would in itself provide ample reason to curb
emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and felling forests even if the dwindling band of skeptics were right and the gas was not warming up the planet.
Getting agreement on a new treaty to tackle climate change hangs on resolving an “after you, Claude” impasse between the United States and China, the two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming.
China insists - with other key developing countries like India and South Africa — that the United States must move first to clean up. It points out that, because of the disparity in populations, every American is responsible for emitting much more of the gas than each Chinese. But the US refuses to join any new treaty unless China also accepts restrictions. |
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| November 19, 2007 |
Globalisation Or Militarist Imperialism? India Must Choose: the Indo-US nuclear deal
by Rohini Hensman, Countercurrents.org,
If India wishes to be a respected member of
the international community, it would need to uphold
international law. This would entail working with
other countries to outlaw weapons of mass destruction
(chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, including
Depleted Uranium weapons), as well as weapons that
target civilians, such as land mines and cluster
bombs, all of which violate international law by
failing to confine their effects to military targets.
Obviously this would imply halting the nuclear
weaponisation programme in India.
It is easy to understand why the current US
administration is so desperate to seal a strategic
alliance with India, at a time when Pakistan, its
traditional ally in South Asia, appears to be
faltering. For India, however, the deal would be a
disaster. Backing out of it under pressure from public
opinion may be embarrassing, but not shameful; on the
contrary, it is the only democratic option. Going
through with it, on the other hand, would be
detrimental to India in the multifarious ways outlined
above. Clearly, the democratic option is both the
wisest and the only honourable one. |
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| November 13, 2007 |
US, British And Australian Forces Build Oil-Protection Base In Iraq
by Patrick Martin, Countercurrents.org, WSWS.org
The US Navy, with the assistance of British and Australian commandos, is building a permanent base to guard two oil-export platforms in Iraqi waters
at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. The military mission goes far beyond the patrols which US warships
have conducted in the Persian Gulf for the past 30 years, in the name of
keeping oil shipping lanes open. The Navy finds
itself with an additional, much more specific role: playing security guard
to Iraq’s offshore oil infrastructure. US, British and Australian military officers will control Iraq’s oil export
shipping for the indefinite future.
Iraq is one of the least-explored countries among the major oil producers, and there are plans to
explore for oil in the western desert (Anbar province) as well as the
traditional oil-producing regions in the north and south. Iraq has 112
billion barrels in proven oil reserves, but UN estimates have placed its
probable but as yet unproven reserves at 214 billion barrels, perhaps
the world’s largest pool of untapped oil. The oil ministry reported last week that daily crude oil production in
October hit a three-year high of 2.7 million barrels a day, of which 1.8
million barrels were exported. Hussein al-Shahristani, the oil minister,
said that crude production should reach 3 million barrels daily by the
end of the year.
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| November 8, 2007 |
US Alliance Afghan Genocide - Six Million Excess Deaths?
by Dr Gideon Polya, Countercurrents.org,
Post-invasion non-violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan - a month on from the 6th anniversary of the war criminal US invasion and occupation on 7th October 2001 – now total an estimated 3.2 million. However comparisons with Occupied Iraq (1.5-2 million TOTAL post-invasion excess deaths, and 0.8-1.2 million or about 50% of these being VIOLENT deaths) suggest that the post-invasion violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan could total 3 million.
The racist, war criminal US military state that they “don’t do body counts” of Indigenous victims but publicly-accessible UN demographic data allow us to estimate the carnage as outlined below.
With Racist Zionist-beholden Bush America and Racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel threatening to devastate remote, peaceful, non-invading, non-occupying, non-threatening, non-nuclear armed, democratic Iran (population 70 million, half of them KIDS and three quarters Women and Children), perhaps the best advice about how the World can stop these proto-Nazi, racist war-mongers is that given by outstanding CONSERVATIVE American economist, writer, academic and “Father of Reaganomics” Dr Paul Craig Roberts (see: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02122007.html ), QUOTE :
“Dump the Dollar! How the World can stop Bush … If the rest of the world would simply stop purchasing US Treasuries, and instead dump their surplus dollars into the foreign
exchange market, the Bush Regime would be overwhelmed with economic crisis and unable to wage war ...The demise of the US dollar is only a question of time.
It would save the world from war and devastation if the dollar is brought to its demise before the Bush Regime launches its planned attack on Iran.” |
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| November 2, 2007 |
Six Steps To “Getting” The Global Ecological Crisis
by John Feeney, Countercurrents.org, GrowthMadness.org
Some of us who examine and discuss environmental matters are constantly puzzled and frustrated by the seeming inability of elected officials, environmental organizations, and environmental and political writers to “get” the nature of
our ecological plight. Could it be they’re simply unaware of the ecological principles which enable one to understand it?
A finite earth can support only a limited number of humans. There is therefore a global “carrying capacity” for humans. A basic definition of carrying capacity is “The maximum number of people, or individuals of a particular species, that a given part of the environment can maintain indefinitely.”
It is an axiom of ecological science that a population which has grown larger than the carrying capacity of its environment (e.g., the global ecosystem) degrades its environment. It uses resources faster than they are regenerated by that environment, and produces waste faster than the environment can absorb it without being degraded.
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| November 15, 2007 |
Islands of Peace: Hope of World Stability
Letter sent by DR. Charles Mercieca to the Global Community
In view of this, the time seems now ripe when we need to reform drastically the institution of the military by changing it from an element of destruction into one of
construction. In other words, we need to find healthy means to enable the military change its negative image into a positive one. As conscientious and responsible human beings, we should all work to help turn as many nations as possible into islands of peace. The creation of such nations would
generate among millions of people positive and constructive energy that is bound to influence the rest of the world at a time least expected.
Of course, we need to establish good criteria to make this providential peace event on a global scale meaningful. Here are some of the criteria for a nation to qualify to
become declared as an Island of Peace.
mercieca@knology.net |
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| November 8, 2007 |
Preparing for Life After Oil
by Michael T. Klare, The Nation
AlterNet, The Mix is the Message, ForeignPolicy
Welcome to the Age of Insuffiency: As oil prices hit new highs and supplies sink, our way of life will drastically change.
We are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency.
Major investors are not likely to cough up the trillions of dollars needed to substantially boost production in the years ahead, suggesting that the global output of
conventional petroleum will not reach the elevated levels predicted by the Energy Department but will soon begin an irreversible decline.
This conclusion leads to two obvious strategic impulses: first, the government will seek to ease the qualms of major energy investors by promising to protect their overseas
investments through the deployment of American military forces; and second, the industry will seek to hedge its bets by shifting an ever-increasing share of its investment
funds into the development of nonpetroleum liquids. In considering these past events, it is important to recognize that the use of military force to protect the flow
of imported petroleum has generally enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Washington. One might imagine that the current debacle in Iraq would shake this consensus, but
there is no evidence that this is so. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case: possibly fearful that the chaos in Iraq will spread to other countries in the Gulf
region, senior figures in both parties are calling for a reinvigorated US military role in the protection of foreign energy deliveries.
There is mounting perils to the safe flow of foreign oil. Concluding that the United States alone has the capacity to protect the global oil trade against the threat of
violent obstruction, it argues the need for a strong US military presence in key producing areas and in the sea lanes that carry foreign oil to American shores.
An awareness of this new "Washington consensus" on the need to protect overseas oil supplies with American troops helps explain many recent developments in Washington.
Most significant, it illuminates the strategic stance adopted by President Bush in justifying his determination to retain a potent US force in Iraq -- and why the Democrats
have found it so difficult to contest that stance. We should expect an increase in the use of military force to protect the overseas flow of oil, as the threat level rises
along with the need for new investment to avert even further reductions in global supplies.
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| November 5, 2007 |
Farming With Passion For Wellbeing Of All
by Umendra Dutt, Countercurrents.org,
KVM is farmers based movement dedicated to natural farming, conservation of natural resources and traditional wisdom. Most of farmers associated
with KVM works through its Vatavaran Panchayats. KVM farmers are farmer with a mission, vision and action he take pledges to start natural farming in one go or in a
phased manner. KVM currently has around a 100 formal and 800 informal members. Natural farmers of Punjab say that the land has witnessed the destruction of the environment and particularly the soil ecology in the last few decades as a consequence
of chemical intensive farming. The soil has lost its nutrient pool. Burning of paddy straw has further destroyed the soil's health.
Many professionals such as those from the medical field, college and university lecturers and professors, advocates, journalists, even government
officials and civil servants have joined this movement for rejuvenation of the soil. They are in contact with the KVM and participate in its activities. |
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| November 8, 2007 |
How to Hold Corporations Accountable
by Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs and Jason Mark
AlterNet, The Mix is the Message, Environment
When the system doesn't allow people to protect themselves from corporate harm to their communities, it is time to change the system.
Can you tell us about "democracy"? It's a word used by everyone and can mean so many things.
Some people might say you are anti-business. Is that the case?
Many people in this country don't understand that corporations have personhood rights. Why does this come as such a surprise to some people?
Speak about the regulatory system. It's supposed to keep corporations from doing harm, but everywhere you look -- the water, the land, the air -- everything is polluted.
Some believe that laws such as anti-corporate personhood ordinances are a waste of time because they will be challenged and shot down, so why bother? What is
the logic behind civil disobedience to the law?
Do you believe it's possible to change the role of corporations in our society?
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| June 12, 2008 |
FROM ONE TEACHER TO ANOTHER TEACHER - an important letter to the President of Iran, from India
by Dr. Leo Rebello
Inspite of your austere and simple life based on simple humanitarian principles,
the stories of oppression and islamic intolerance keep flying in the face. Your own Iranians in exile in India and elsewhere talk against the regime that violates
Human rights of its own citizens inspite of signing international protocols.
Take for example
Haleh Rouhi, 29, Raha Sabet 33, and Sasan Taqva 32, were each sentenced to four
years in prison and then suddenly taken into custody on 19th November 2007 on a
trumped up charge of "propaganda against the regime" for running social service
projects to help underprivileged children and youth in Shiraz. The details can be
read on pages 8 and 9 of ONE COUNTRY, International Quarterly, which I received today
(4 June 2008).
Simply because they are Baha'I, to round them up for their beliefs which are
more or less akin to Islam, is NOT proper and and I think you should immediately consider presidential Amnesty to them and censor those who interpret
laws in
un-islamic manner in an Islamic Democracy, which has stood the American onslaught.
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| June 7, 2008 |
Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains.
Whether in Latin America, Asia, or Africa, the story has been the same: the destabilization of peasant producers by a one-two punch of IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs that gutted government investment in the countryside followed by the massive influx of subsidized U.S. and European Union agricultural imports after the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture pried open markets.
African agriculture is a case study of how doctrinaire economics serving corporate interests can destroy a whole continent’s productive base.
The lower cost of U.S. products stemmed from subsidies that were becoming more massive each year, despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase out all forms of subsidy. From $367 billion in 1995, the first year of the WTO, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Subsidies now account for 40% of the value of agricultural production in the European Union (EU) and 25% in the United States.
The social consequences of structural adjustment cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”
In sum, biofuel production did not create but only exacerbated the global food crisis. The crisis had been building up for years, as policies promoted by the World Bank, IMF, and WTO systematically discouraged food self-sufficiency and encouraged food importation by destroying the local productive base of smallholder agriculture. Throughout Africa and the global South, these institutions and the policies they promoted are today thoroughly discredited. But whether the damage they have caused can be undone in time to avert more catastrophic consequences than we are now experiencing remains to be seen.
Walden Bello is a senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, a program of Chulalongkorn University's Social Research Institute, and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org).
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| June 6, 2008 |
On May 23, 2007, the world reached a seemingly invisible but momentous milestone. For the first time in history the world's urban population outnumbered the rural one. Now more than half its human population, 3.3 billion is living in urban areas. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost 5 billion. Many of the new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of our cities and the future of humanity itself, all depends very much on decisions made now in preparation for this growth.
Towns and town creation play an important role to impose control over the country. It also directs the activities of urban residents towards the larger purpose of establishing an administrative network and helps attain national prosperity. Unfortunately powerful political and economic interests shape urban policies to line their own pockets. The middle and working classes pay the bills for humongous, perpetually undelivered projects and programs.
There is an ominous divide between the urban and rural economy. Incomes in the cities have greatly increased for some whereas rural residents, who make up a huge section of the population, have barely felt the effect. This economic differential leads to large scale resentment and a sense of deprivation. The widening divide in turn drives millions into the cities, creating slums filled with poor, dislocated people. To slow down this stampede, we have to bring jobs to the countryside. Investors should be encouraged to build factories away from the presently focused main cities and help boost the local cottage industry.
The course of sustainable development at the local and regional levels requires the pursuit of economic policies that do not add new burdens to the carrying capacity of our locale. Population shifts or migrations to urban areas globally have traditionally been a tell-tale sign of many issues. Here people move for assumed advantages, such as employment, educational and economic opportunities. There is also forced movement to flee environmental crises, persecution and violence at the hands of the feudal.
A lack of imagination, rather than lack of skills, is a far more critical distinction between survivors and victims. To learn to make our cities livable we will have to break some longstanding chronic habits. The hardest habit to break is the 'syndrome of tragedy', that brooding feeling, like we are terminal patients in almost all walks of life. There is absolutely no dearth of 'specialists' out to prove that change is not possible. What has to be explained to them is that it takes the same energy to say why something cannot be done as to figure out how to do it, provided an honest working will is there.
Today our struggling cities, like almost everything else, are portrayed as evolutionary dead ends, with no future to contemplate. Our vision should be less a dream, an end-point or an unrealizable utopian existence, out there somewhere in the future; it should instead be an unending process to promote social justice and economic well-being among all Pakistanis. We should work towards peace with nature and that enveloping ecosystem which sustains life on our planet and is the true source of our natural capital.
It is time to raise our voices in opposition to the degradation of our lives, the jeopardizing of our individual and collective health and well being and above all the pollution of our politics. The consumer culture we inhabit bombards us with messages to buy beyond our budgets and live beyond our means. We can be more happy and content if we could but get off the habit of buying too much and consuming thoughtlessly. Hiding our unhappiness by frolicking in this consumer paradise for some, we who can, eat too much, spend too much, and waste too much time on things that do not matter. Along the way, we contribute to the plunder of nature's depleting capital and the theft of our children's future.
It is time to construct a future where people and nature matter, where wealth is based on the things that count rather than merely the things that can be counted. It is time to find the means for putting our urban house in order by planting seeds that will establish new roots for our urban community; enliven and enrich the nourishing soil on which we depend for human life itself.
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| June 6, 2008 |
We are at the crossroads of the most serious economic and social crisis in modern history. The process of global impoverishment unleashed at the outset of the 1980s debt crisis has reached a major turning point, leading to the simultaneous outbreak of famines in all major regions of the developing World.
There are many complex features underlying the global economic crisis pertaining to financial markets, the decline in production, the collapse of State institutions and the rapid development of a profit-driven war economy. What is rarely mentioned in this analysis, is how this global economic restructuring forcibly impinges on three fundamental necessities of life: food, water and fuel.
The provision of food, water and fuel is a precondition of civilized society: they are necessary factors for the survival of the human species. In recent years, the prices of these three variables has increased dramatically at the global level, with devastating economic and social consequences.
These three essential goods or commodities, which in a real sense determine the reproduction of economic and social life on planet earth, are under the control of a small number of global corporations and financial institutions.
Both the State as well as the gamut of international organizations --often referred to as the "international community"-- serve the unfettered interests of global capitalism. The main intergovernmental bodies including the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organizations (WTO) have endorsed the New World Order on behalf of their corporate sponsors. Governments in both developed and developing countries have abandoned their historical role of regulating key economic variables as well as ensuring a minimum livelihood for their people.
We are dealing with a complex and centralized constellation of economic power in which the instruments of market manipulation have a direct bearing on the lives of millions of people.
The prices of food, water, fuel are determined at the global level, beyond the reach of national government policy. The price hikes of these three essential commodities constitute an instrument of "economic warfare", carried out through the "free market" on the futures and options exchanges.
These hikes in the prices of food, water and fuel are contributing in a very real sense to "eliminating the poor" through "starvation deaths". The sugar coated bullets of the "free market" kill our children. The act to kill is instrumented in a detached fashion through computer program trading on the commodity exchanges, where the global prices of rice, wheat and corn are decided upon.
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| June 5, 2008 |
South Africans wouldn't be killing Zimbabwean refugees if it weren't for the stranglehold Zimbabwe's whites have on its farmland.
There was a sad little war in South Africa last week. Actually, it was one of the latest battles in a war that's been going on for over a hundred years. Like they say in the Congo, "Mokilo e komplike," "It's a complicated world.
Like a lot of wars, this one was between two groups that lost out in the bigger war. Now they're forced to fight each other for scraps, while the real bad guys, the British, send camera crews to go "tsk-tsk" at how uncivilized it all is. The way the BBC tells it, this wasn't even a war, just "riots" by Zulu mobs targeting Zimbabwean immigrants, but it was war. In most places and most times, war isn't uniformed armies meeting on the field of battle, but mobs looking for people from the enemy tribe to kill. When they find them, they kill them just like the Zulu mobs killed any Zimbabwean immigrant lucky enough to fall into their hands: in the goriest way possible, in order to scare the rest of the enemy tribe off the disputed turf.
A better question to ask would be, what sent so many Zimbabweans fleeing into South Africa, driving wages down and messing up the place? The official answer to that in the Western press is that it's all the fault of Robert Mugabe, the old ex-guerrilla who runs Zimbabwe. I don't buy it. Mugabe's an old fool, an egomaniac, yeah -- most of the men who rule countries are. Bu the damage to Zimbabwe was done a long time ago, and Mugabe's in trouble with the Western newspapers for trying to fix things. That's what blows me away: in all this coverage of Zimbabwe, nobody asks simple questions like, "Who owns the farmland, and why?" The situation's changing fast now, but keep in mind that just ten years ago, 4000 white farmers "owned" three-quarters of all the good land. That's less than one percent of the country's population controlling three-quarters of its useful farmland. That's why Zimbabwe's a mess. Imagine what this country would look like if there were 300 million Native Americans crowded into shantytowns, with a few thousand European settlers living on huge plantations. That's the population profile of Zimbabwe. Mugabe's been taking that land back, and whatever else he's done, he was in the right. He has the military power, and for all you Christians out there, he has every moral right too, as far as I can see.
After all, what right do those white settlers have to the land? Their great-grandfathers stole it at gunpoint, or got it by dirty tricks, a little over a century ago. Funny how nobody ever wants to talk about that. The man who took Zimbabwe for the Brits, Cecil Rhodes, was a classic Victorian closet case who distracted himself from his sinful urges with a bloodsoaked vision of British flags flying from Cape Town to the Mediterranean. Rhodes would use any sleazy trick to take the land he needed. When he couldn't force or trick King Lobengula, leader of the Matabele who ruled southern Zimbabwe, into selling off his land, he sent the king a British doctor who was under orders to turn the King into a morphine addict. Once the King was strung out, Rhodes grabbed the Matabeles' land. King Lobengula killed himself.
That's how a few whites ended up with three-quarters of the decent land. And this didn't happen in the long-ago far-away time. It was barely over a century ago (1884-1902). So when rightwing papers like the UK Telegraph scream about Mugabe's land grabs, I have to laugh.You can't rob a thief, and the Brits who grabbed Zimbabwe's farmland are nothing but thieves who've lost their power to hold onto what they stole. They're just getting their loot taken back by the people they stole it from, but if you listen to the BBC you'd think these farm seizures are the greatest crime in history. BBC crews have been out there for years, filming every "white-owned farm" that gets handed over to Mugabe's guerrilla veterans, showing long sobby close-ups of the dear old white guys' heartbroken livestock as if this was the real tragedy. They love to focus on the little dogs especially -- boo hoo, little doggy lost its home! Nobody ever mentions the sick stuff that happened to put that farm into British hands in the first place.
The Zulus who are necklacing a few poor Zimbabweans now lost out the same way, massacred by British armies using modern weapons in a series of wars a little over a century ago. Until they sent warriors armed with spears up against the redcoats' repeating rifles, they were one of the great empires of the world, moving south in their own wave of conquest. But like everyone who got in the Empire's way, they were slaughtered and forced off the good land by the same holier-than-thou white people who stole all the farmland in Zimbabwe. That's what we have here: two groups of Africans robbed and gutted by the Empire, forced to fight over scraps, while the descendants of the white land thieves still hold all the land and money.
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| June 2, 2008 |
The low-income black township here in Durban, which suffered more than any other during apartheid, Cato Manor, was the scene of a test performed on a Mozambican a week ago Wednesday morning.
Thousands of Zimbabweans and Mozambicans living in Johannesburg and Durban returned across the borders, but most went nearby to police stations, community centers and churches. The notoriously corrupt Cato Manor police station now has several hundred people sheltering in the immediate vicinity, and a large tent was erected for shelter.
In fact, when police do come–as to Johannesburg’s Central Methodist Church on January 30, where 1500 Zimbabweans had taken refuge–their agenda is often pure brutality. Host bishop Paul Verryn was beaten that evening, and almost all the Zimbabweans were arrested. But no charges stuck.
Apartheid-era super-profits for capital were the result. Now, with more porous borders and the deep economic crisis Zimbabweans face (in part because President Thabo Mbeki still nurtures the Mugabe dictatorship), South African corporate earnings are roaring.
It is hard to celebrate Africa Day given that, in the meantime, neoliberalism and paranoid nationalism imposed from above have made mockery of Africa’s ubuntu philosophy (we are who we are through others). From below, the thugs who beat up that Mozambican have merely joined a rapidly growing movement in the opposite direction: to barbarism.
Patrick Bond has written several books about African history and politics. Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation details how exploitative debt has helped keep sub-Saharan Africa mired in poverty. Fanon’s Warning shows how the New Partnership for Africa's Development counterposed sustainable growth to Africa's rapid integration into the world economy. Ashwin Desai’s We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa focuses on the Chatsworth community movement against cut-offs of water and electricity.
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| June 1st, 2008 |
Federation of Global Governments essential services
are offering the
" Global Movement to Help "
by
Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
Summary
As a first step to getting help, all nations can and should approve those first three sections on the Scale of Global Rights.
The approval would supersede the political and physical borders of participating member nations.
The Global Protection Agency (GPA) would have the approval from all member nations to give immediate help, bypassing normal government protocols.
Somewhat like an emergency unit but at the global level. That is what those first three sections mean. They represent an efficient and immediate emergency response to help.
First, participating member nations need to give their approval to the GPA.
The GPA is a global organization much like the World Trade Organization (WTO) for trade between nations, the World Health Organization (WHO) for health,
or the European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFT), South American Community of Nations (SACON) for trade and economics.
The GPA offers an efficient emergency response to help.
The GPA is a short term solution, an immediate and efficient response to help. There are also long term solutions. As with the short term solution, the most significant long term solution is also related to
the Scale of Global Rights. The Scale was entrenched in the Global Constitution and is thus the fundamental guide to Global Law.
Now the Scale of Global Rights is a long term solution and is also a part of the Global Movement to Help of the Global Community.
The Scale was designed to help all life on Earth. What would be preferable is that nations unite amongst themselves to help.
Over time, we have seen the creation of the United Nations, the European
Union, the South American Community of Nations, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Except for the UN, these organizations are mainly concerned with trade and economics.
The Global Community offers a more meaningful union in the form of nine or more Global Governments. For instance the South American Community of Nations can be
a Global Government by simply accepting the Global Constitution as a way of dealing between member nations. A Global Government is concerned not only with economics and trade,
but also with the environment, health, agriculture, energy, food, social, cultural and many other essential aspects.
The Federation of Global Governments is the place of meeting between Global Governments.
The very first step of the Federation, and maybe the only one for several decades ahead of us, would be the approval of essential services amongst the participating member nations. The Global
Community has researched and developed such services and listed them here. All of them are already in operation on a small scale.
Introduction
Key words: Global essential services, Global Community, Federation of Global Governments, Global rights, Scale of Global Rights, global citizens, Global Parliament,
Global Protection Agency (GPA), Global Information Media (GIM),
Earth Government, Earth Executive Council, House of Elected Representatives, House of Advisers, Global Ministries, Ombudspersons Office, volunteering for the Global Community,
Global Community Assessment Centre (GCAC)
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| May 29, 2008 |
Petroleum supplies are declining as demand increases. This unfolding trend will radically change human habitation on the Earth. Among the consequences will be the drastic reduction of food and fresh water available to people, not only in poorer parts of the globe, but throughout the planet.
Industrial societies with their industrial agriculture are dependent upon fossil fuels such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal for many things, including transportation, electricity, and making plastics and other modern essentials. Oil is the main ingredient in conventional food. As the supply of petroleum and other fossil fuels decline Peak Water and Peak Food will follow. In recent months we have seen the return of food riots in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa.
Industrial societies run on electricity powered by the cheap energy of fossil fuels. As the supply of those energy sources decline and world-wide competition for them through wars and other means heighten, more electrical grids will fail, and with them access to both food and water.
The pace quickens. The signs are more numerous. We need even more than food security; we need food sovereignty. Who controls your food? Growing at least part of one's own food--and having something to trade--will be essential to survival.
Dr. Shepherd Bliss, sbliss@hawaii.edu, teaches at Sonoma State University and has run the organic Kokopelli Farm for most of the last 15 years.
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| May 16, 2008 |
Over time, our bodies lose their ability to cope with toxic chemicals, and each exposure has a more severe
effect.
My first visit to the SIPCOT Chemicals Hub in Cuddalore, India could have appeared deceptively pleasant to outside eyes. It's a beautiful day and there's a good breeze as we drive past the welcome sign for SIPCOT. The air in some places seems far
cleaner than the air in nearby Chennai. In some spots it smells sweet, in others, like opening a bottle of ibuprofen -- an antiseptic, medicinal smell.
A chemical that will have no visible effect on an adult, can have catastrophic effects on the developing fetus and the young child -- dulling the mind, triggering birth defects, and setting the stage for autism, asthma, allergies and cancer. What may only make an adult nauseated, will cripple the dreams of a child and of a family for a healthy future; a whole and better life.
In the U.S., epidemics of cancer, autism, asthma, and reproductive birth defects in baby boys are sky high. Yet the air quality is far better in the U.S. than in most Indian cities. In India garbage piles are burnt spewing whole incinerator's worth of dioxin into the common air. Americans benefit from better environmental standards and enforcement for vehicle and factory emissions. Both India and U.S. have addressed the air quality problems of their cities -- particularly the places where the well-to-do live -- by exporting the sources of pollution -- Texas; Louisiana; Gary, Indiana; and the Port of Los Angeles are cases in point. The urban poor in either country would recognize these lit up refineries, chemical factories and power plants through the stinging fog.
Childhood cancer increased .6% a year from 1975-2002 according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. One in almost 7 women will suffer from breast cancer in their lifetimes; hormonally active toxins may be determining cancer outcomes for our children before they are even born.
We are just starting to see public discussion of the science of how certain chemicals attach to our DNA and are passed down from generation to generation. No longer is our chemical inheritance limited to in utero exposure and breast milk -- fathers are now known to contribute the effects of their chemical exposures as well. This widespread low level toxic contamination has been building its biological trap for more than four generations. In the U.S. and U.K., one in 250 boys is born with a malformed penis; one in 200 with autism.
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| May 15, 2008 |
Sharp increases in food prices have generated a new wave of anti-occupation and anti-U.S. sentiment in Fallujah.
Fallujah faces this new crisis after much of the city was destroyed by U.S. military operations in 2004.
The area around Fallujah city, which lies 70 km west of Baghdad, has traditionally been one of the most agriculturally productive in Iraq. Farmers planted tomatoes and cucumbers north of Fallujah, others grew potatoes south of the city near Amiriya. Both areas had plenty of date palm trees and small fruit plantations. Now production is down to a fraction of what it was.
Farmers have been struggling with changing times.
Residents say they are told of a world food crisis that may be affecting them. But their crisis arises mainly from local factors like shortage of water, fuel and electricity.
Whatever the reason, residents simply want relief. "We just want our lives back," said a college student who gave her name only as Nada. "We want to eat, buy clothes, get proper education and breathe pure air. No thanks to Americans for their effort to bring us democracy that killed half of us by their bombs and is now apparently killing the other half by starvation. Can you pass this message to the American people for us?"
According to the UN, at least four million people in Iraq do not have enough food, while approximately 40 percent of the 27.5 million population do not have access to clean drinking water. At least 30 percent do not have access to proper health services.
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| May 15, 2008 |
All beings have impact, and thus all of them leave an ecological footprint. Some of those impacts are in harmony with the biosphere and thus are in accord with the organizing principles of life; whereas others are discordant. Harvesting nuts in a sustainable manner, leaving enough for other animals to use and for the reproduction of the species in perpetuity is an example of harmony; whereas clear cutting and mountain top removal are examples of excess and discord. Some actions compliment life; others diminish it.
Over consumption and waste and the endless economic expansion they cause are the governing principle of capitalism and over population; and, like it or not, they fundamentally conflict with the natural order of things. This ideology is counter to the organizing principle of life and it has the effect of diminishing biodiversity and the ecological processes upon which all life depends.
Capitalism and reductionism hold that every component of the biosphere are resources when, in fact, they are sources of life. At some point in human history, man began taking things apart in an attempt to gain detailed scientific knowledge and understanding; however, in nature—anything apart from the organic whole is dead. It is easily understood that if someone removes another’s heart from his or her chest cavity, that person will quickly die. The heart is a vital organ that pumps blood to every part of the body; it is a part of a connected whole. Sever that connection and the body collapses and death ensues.
Likewise, nature has no unimportant parts. The earth functions like a single living organism of world-size proportions. Everything under the sun exists for a purpose; every organism plays a vital role in the local, regional, and the global ecology. Remove or destroy a part and the whole suffers; one has diminished possibilities, foreclosed options, and subverted natural processes, with consequences to untold numbers of species, including Homo sapiens.
Western humans tend to give value to the parts of nature that can be economically exploited, and under values those that cannot. By continually teasing out the separate parts of nature and isolating them from the organic whole, we are undoing the very fabric of life: we are playing god. Thus, we are living in the midst of the sixth great extinction episode in the earth’s 4.5 billion year history, and we are the primary cause. Few Americans are aware of this fact. It does not behoove capitalism to advertise that it is killing the biosphere; it is not good for business. Who wants to be a cancer? And fools believe that business, rather than ecology, makes the world go round. After all, the highway signs leading into West Virginia, the state where I live, are followed by these revealing words: open for business. Whatever happened to wild and wonderful?
Charles Sullivan is a nature photographer, naturalist, environmental educator and free-lance writer residing in the Ridge and Valley Province of geopolitical West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at: csullivan@copper.net
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| May 14, 2008 |
Food prices rose 4 percent in the United States last year, the highest rise since 1990. All over the world food prices are on the rise. At the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank finance ministers wanted to focus the world's attention on food crisis rather than the credit crisis.
There are many factors contributing to this current crisis, including the rising price of oil, deregulated agricultural markets, financial speculation, and biofuels. Another key factor is climate change, which is affecting crop yield and food production. It is time for us to get serious about understanding the way climate change affects water resources for food production and conversely the way agricultural water use is leading to climate change.
Agricultural practices geared towards growing export-oriented monoculture crops are chemical intensive and have resulted in high levels of pollution in local water systems. In addition, nitrogen used in fertilizers leaches into water courses increasing the indirect nitrous oxide emissions downstream. This model of production has intensified water use, both in terms of the water going into the growing of the commodities themselves, but also in terms of inter-basin water transfers.
Protecting our waters in local watersheds and wetlands and using them judiciously in support of local agricultural systems and livelihood practices, rather than continuing with the current strategy of promoting export-oriented, monoculture, industrial, water-guzzling agricultural systems, is key to reducing the water sector's direct contributions to climate change. Moreover local practices that conserve and enhance local water availability to ensure resilience of rain-fed agricultural systems are necessary as an adaptation mechanism, to meet climate challenges and to help meet food security goals, two of the biggest challenges for developing countries today.
It is time to reevaluate our agricultural policies that promote water and energy intensive agriculture. We will have to make some major changes in our agriculture systems to address some of the upcoming climate challenges. Doing so will help us cope with extreme changes in the hydrological cycle and resultant food and water crises many communities and nations are sure to face. Effective and sustainable water management in agriculture in support of healthy food systems needs to be part of the climate solution.
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| May 12, 2008 |
The U.S. has a grossly corrupted health protection system.
The nation's biggest polluter isn't a corporation. It's the Pentagon. Every year the Department of Defense churns out more than 750,000 tons of hazardous waste -- more than the top three chemical companies combined.
Yet the military remains largely exempt from compliance with most federal and state environmental laws, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Pentagon's partner in crime, is working hard to keep it that way.
For the past five decades the federal government, defense contractors and the chemical industry have joined forces to block public health protections against perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel that has been shown to effect children's growth and mental progress by disrupting the function of the thyroid gland which regulates brain development.
Perchlorate has been leaking from literally hundreds of defense plants and military installations across the country. The EPA has reported that perchlorate is present in drinking and groundwater supplies in 35 states. Center for Disease Control and independent studies have also overwhelmingly shown that perchlorate is existent in our food supplies, cow's milk, and human breast milk. As a result virtually every American has some level of perchlorate in their body.
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| May 9, 2008 |
Nineteen years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall effectively eliminated the Soviet Union as the world's other superpower. Yes, the USSR as a political entity stumbled on for another two years, but it was clearly an ex-superpower from the moment it lost control over its satellites in Eastern Europe.
Less than a month ago, the United States similarly lost its claim to superpower status when a barrel crude oil roared past $110 on the international market, gasoline prices crossed the $3.50 threshold at American pumps, and diesel fuel topped $4.00. As was true of the USSR following the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the USA will no doubt continue to stumble on like the superpower it once was; but as the nation's economy continues to be eviscerated to pay for its daily oil fix, it, too, will be seen by increasing numbers of savvy observers as an ex-superpower-in-the-making.
When it comes to the U.S.-Russian relationship, just how much the balance of power has shifted was evident at the NATO summit at Bucharest in early April. There, President Bush asked that Georgia and Ukraine both be approved for eventual membership in the alliance, only to find top U.S. allies (and Russian energy users) France and Germany blocking the measure out of concern for straining ties with Russia. "It was a remarkable rejection of American policy in an alliance normally dominated by Washington," Steven Erlanger and Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times reported, "and it sent a confusing signal to Russia, one that some countries considered close to appeasement of Moscow."
For Russian officials, however, the restoration of their country's great power status is not the product of deceit or bullying, but a natural consequence of being the world's leading energy provider. No one is more aware of this than Dmitri Medvedev, the former Chairman of Gazprom and new Russian president. "The attitude toward Russia in the world is different now," he declared on December 11, 2007. "We are not being lectured like schoolchildren; we are respected and we are deferred to. Russia has reclaimed its proper place in the world community. Russia has become a different country, stronger and more prosperous."
The same, of course, can be said about the United States -- in reverse. As a result of our addiction to increasingly costly imported oil, we have become a different country, weaker and less prosperous. Whether we know it or not, the energy Berlin Wall has already fallen and the United States is an ex-superpower-in-the-making.
Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of the just-released Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books).
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| May 1, 2008 |
Global Rights year one
Letter to the Global Community sent by
Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
Global Rights year one is new impetus of the Global Community to educate everyone about the need for a change in thinking
and of doing things amongst all
nations. We need to realize what is a priority, what is the most important, and what is the least important for our survival. We need a clear vision. We need a common
vision. And we must all change! There are many important aspects of our lives we can longer do, or should never do anymore. They are destructive. Humanity and all life
can no longer afford activities that destroy life and the global environment. And there are other activities we must do, certainly thousands of them, to assure the survival of life on Earth.
In view of the planetary state of emergency we all must change, we must do things differently to give life on Earth a better survival chance.
And this is what Global Rights year one is about: to establish global fundamentals and a clear vision to follow.
Perhaps the Scale of Global Rights represents the strongest pillar of our vision.
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| April 29, 2008 |
This is the brutal world of capitalist agriculture – a world where some people destroy food because prices are too low, and others literally eat dirt because food prices are too high.
We are in the midst of an unprecedented worldwide food price inflation that has driven prices to their highest levels in decades. The increases affect most kinds of food, but in particular the most important staples – wheat, corn, and rice.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that between March 2007 and March 2008 prices of cereals increased 88%, oils and fats 106%, and dairy 48%. The FAO food price index as a whole rose 57% in one year – and most of the increase occurred in the past few months.
Another source, the World Bank, says that that in the 36 months ending February 2008, global wheat prices rose 181% and overall global food prices increased by 83%. The Bank expects most food prices to remain well above 2004 levels until at least 2015.
These increases are catastrophic for the 2.6 billion people around the world who live on less than US$2 a day and spend 60% to 80% of their incomes on food. Hundreds of millions cannot afford to eat.
Food is not just another commodity – it is absolutely essential for human survival. The very least that humanity should expect from any government or social system is that
it try to prevent starvation – and above all that it not promote policies that deny food to hungry people.
That’s why Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was absolutely correct on April 24, to describe the food crisis as the greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the
capitalist model.
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| April 28, 2008 |
The future of water is anything but clear. We face a future world fraught with water challenges – too much, too little, too contaminated or inaccessible to meet our needs.
We live in a rapidly changing world in which many of our expectations about natural resources may no longer be met. The seeming abundance of safe, low-cost water may falsely lead us to assume perpetual easy access to all the low-cost, high-quality water we want, when we want it.
The water industry today must examine these assumptions. Although water covers 70 percent of our planet’s surface, less than one-half percent is freshwater available for our use. Most of our planet’s water is in oceans and too salty for many uses. Much of the remainder is locked in frozen glaciers, is remote from population centers or circulating in our atmosphere. So this seemingly abundant resource is actually quite constrained.
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| April 28, 2008 |
A look at climate-friendly options for buildings, electricity production, transportation, and food and forestry.
The crisis of global warming is deeply serious, yet many are finding that it is also powerfully energizing. Instead of trying to squeeze our existing way of life into a post-carbon life-jacket out of fear of a climate catastrophe, these people see the transformation as a great adventure. They are drawing on their imagination and courage to create the building blocks of a sustainable, post-carbon world -- one in which all beings -- not just humans -- will flourish and find fulfillment, within the harmony and limits that Nature provides.
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| April 19, 2008 |
Food riots are breaking out across the planet. We must re-examine corporate control of the food supply.
The rise in global food prices has sparked a number of protests in recent weeks, highlighting the worsening epidemic of global hunger. The World Bank estimates world food prices have risen 80 percent over the last three years and that at least thirty-three countries face social unrest as a result. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned the growing global food crisis has reached emergency proportions.
In recent weeks, food riots have also erupted in Haiti, Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Protests have also flared in Morocco, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mexico and Yemen. In most of West Africa, the price of food has risen by 50 percent -- in Sierra Leone, 300 percent. The World Food Program has issued a rare $500 million emergency appeal to deal with the growing crisis.
Several causes factor into the global food price hike, many linked to human activity. These include human-driven climate change, the soaring cost of oil and a Western-led focus on biofuels that critics say turns food into fuel.
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| April 19, 2008 |
Should the ban on commodity futures be widened?
by Dr. Krishan Bir Chaudhary
Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture
Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
Futures trading in wheat, rice and pulses like tur and urad has been
suspended by the Forward Markets Commission as it caused market
manipulation, leading to a rise in prices. But, still, futures trading is
being carried out in a number of agricultural commodities.
The government knows for certain that futures trading in farm commodities is
the cause for market manipulation.
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| April 18, 2008 |
Environmental experts have been warning that biofuels, far from reducing greenhouse gas emissions, actually have a negative environmental footprint.
Biofuels gained from extensive plantations of oil palms, soybean, rapeseeds and the like have a negative environmental footprint due to massive use of pesticides
and fertilisers, which leads to acidification of groundwater. You also have to consider whether for the production of soybean oil the tropical forest in Brazil or in Indonesia is being eroded.
Problems with biofuels are numerous: deforestation, increase in greenhouse gas emissions, requirements for land that does not exist to achieve positive
environmental effects, enhanced food insecurity, creation of more poverty, increased soil degradation, decreased biodiversity, (and) accelerated depletion of
natural resources.
A trade-off between fuel and food is taking place, and that the economically more attractive production of biofuels for the industrialised countries has
crowded out food production for the poorest regions of the world. Increasing prices of food, and their scarcity, have recently sparked riots.
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| April 18, 2008 |
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez remains the world’s leading secular, democratically elected political leader who has consistently and publicly opposed imperialist wars in the Middle East, attacked extra-territorial intervention and US and European Union complicity in kidnapping and torture. Venezuela plays the major role in sharply reducing the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and Central America, thus substantially aiding them in their balance of payments, without attaching any ‘strings’ to this vital assistance. Venezuela has been in the forefront in supporting free elections and opposing human right abuses in the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia by pro-US client regimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia. No other country in the Americas has done more to break down the racial barriers to social mobility and the acquisition of land for Afro-Latin and Indio Americans. President Chavez has been on the cutting edge of efforts toward greater Latin American integration – despite opposition from the United States and several regional regimes, who have opted for bilateral free trade agreements with the US.
Even more significant, President Chavez is the only elected president to reverse a US backed military coup (in 48 hours) and defeat a (US-backed) bosses’ lockout, and
return the economy to double-digit growth over the subsequent 4 years. President Chavez is the only elected leader in the history of Latin America to successfully win
eleven straight electoral contests against US-financed political parties and almost the entire private mass media over a nine-year period. Finally President Chavez is the
only leader in the last half-century who came within 1% of having a popular referendum for a ‘socialist transformation’ approved, a particularly surprising result in a
country in which less than 30% of the work force is made up of peasants and factory workers.
President Chavez has drastically reduced long-term poverty faster than any regime in the region, demonstrating that a nationalist-welfare regime is much more effective in
ending endemic social ills than its neo-liberal counterparts. A rigorous, empirical study of the socio-economic performance of the Chavez government demonstrates its
success in a whole series of indicators after the defeat of the counter-revolutionary coup and lockout and after the nationalization of petroleum (2003).
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| April 18, 2008 |
War is definitely not green
by Alicia, Dana, Desiree, Farida, Gael, Gayle, Jodie, Liz, Medea, Nancy, Rae, and Tighe
We are in love with our planet. One of the reasons we work for peace is to
nurture our entire planet; we want our
beautiful Mother Earth to flourish.
CODEPINK is one of the few groups that
connect war and the environment. Pink
and green are gorgeous together, don't
you think? As natural as a stem and a
flower.
War is definitely not green. It is, in fact,
quite the opposite. The U.S. military is the single largest consumer of oil in the
world and the world's larger polluter, generating 750,000 tons of toxic waste
annually. If we stop funding the war for oil in Iraq, our tax dollars can go toward
developing clean, green sources of energy that will help us build a healthy,
peaceful planet.
We like to think of CODEPINK as a perennial garden; we plant seeds of love and
peace that flower throughout the year--often in surprising places (did you see
the parody of CODEPINK on Saturday Night Live this weekend?) Help the
CODEPINK garden grow. You can spread seeds of peace by signing our War is
Not Green petition and sending it along to five friends. The more people who
join us, the more we can work for the Earth.
It is deeply inspiring to see what we can
create when we come together. We
witnessed a glorious blossoming in New
Orleans, where we just planted a
beautiful community garden in the still
devastated Lower Ninth Ward. Click here
to see pictures of the garden and photos
from the phenomenal tribute to the
women of New Orleans organized by
V-Day--the campaign to end violence
against women and girls. It was a true
honor to bring love and beauty and hope
to a community so desperately in need of
healing.
You can plant seeds of peace in your
own community by downloading our
War is Not Green petition and flyer and
bringing them to your local Earth Day
celebrations; you can also put our War is
Not Green sign in your window. We need
to remind our friends and neighbors how
war hurts the Earth as well as her
citizens. We need to remind them that we
can all stand up and nurture both peace
and the environment.
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| April 16, 2008 |
Get ready for a new world order in which energy will govern what we eat, where we live, and if and when we travel.
This new world order will be characterized by fierce international competition for dwindling stocks of oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium, as well as by a tidal shift in power and wealth from energy-deficit states like China, Japan, and the United States to energy-surplus states like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. In the process, the lives of everyone will be affected in one way or another -- with poor and middle-class consumers in the energy-deficit states experiencing the harshest effects. That's most of us and our children, in case you hadn't quite taken it in.
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| April 16, 2008 |
World leaders to discuss bio-fuel use. Will Brazil support curbing bio-fuel programme to contain rising prices?
by ASHOK B SHARMA
A special correspondent with The Financial Express
indiansocietyag@yahoo.co.in
Other work by author published by the Global Community
Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture
Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
Bio-fuel programme across the world has become controversial as food crops used in its production have caused food prices to soar up and the use of non-food crops like jatropha has displaced food
crops from cultivation and has also caused environmental problems. But Brazil basing on its decades of experience on use of ethanol as auto-fuel has now decided to take up bio-diesel programme in a big
way.
By the end of 2004, Brazilian federal government launched the National Programme of Bio-diesel Production and Use (PNPB). It was planned that from January 2008, B2 blends will be mandatory
across the country. In January 2013, this mandatory mix will increase to 5% of bio-diesel (B5). Blends with higher shares of bio-diesel or even pure bio-diesel (B100) can be used, but in this case
authorisation by the Petroleum, Natural Gas and Bio-fuels National Agency is required.
The FAO has called a meeting of world leaders in early June to deliberate on the issue of rising global prices caused by the bio-fuel programme. The WTO mini-ministerial is slated to be convened in
Geneva in May 19 to deliberate on reviving multilateral trade negotiations in the midst of rising food prices. It seems unlikely that Brazil, with its ethanol-based Economy, would support any view which
would discourage bio-fuel programme.
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| April 16, 2008 |
My Perspective On Modern World Events
by Mitchell Valentine
An American teacher in the People's Republic of China
Countercurrents.org
I don't claim any organized religion, prepackaged doctrine, political label, or even really scientific hypothesis. I merely consider myself a participant in the Earth as it exists at the current moment. Though I am educated and understand at least the basics of my former claims.
I was born in the United States of America and am therefore entitled to an American passport. Which I understand affords me a certain amount of global freedom that others passports may not warrant. I currently reside in the People's Republic of China. My rights stem from my acquisition of a Foreign Expert Certificate and a Temporary Residence Permit.
There is recently a mass uprising all over the world about the current relationship between Tibet and China and I begin to ask myself a lot of questions being a resident here and all. There is mounting concern that the 2008 Olympics may be affected by the flack that arises. From my perspective on the ground here I have come to a few observations on what is really going on here.
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| April 15, 2008 |
GreenFacts Digest on Agriculture and Development: new pressing challenges identified by international assessment
by Stephanie Mantell
http://www.agassessment.org/
GreenFacts was created in 2001 by individuals from scientific institutions, environment and health
organizations, and businesses, who called for wider access to unbiased information on environment
and health topics.
Scientific Facts on Agriculture & Development
The unequal distribution of food and conflict over control of the world's
dwindling natural resources present a major political and social challenge to governments and policy
makers.
To evaluate how to make
better use of agricultural knowledge, science and technology to reduce hunger and poverty, improve
rural livelihoods, and foster equitable and sustainable development.
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| April 15, 2008 |
Jim Hansen, The Big Ice Melt And The Mainstream Media
by Bill Henderson
Bill is at pacificfringe.net, Countercurrents.org
Imagine you have a choice between two scenarios on the future impact of climate change:
Scenario A: Climate change is real and human-caused, a gradual increase in global temperature that we have a long time to do something about (2050 targets) before drought, sea level rise, etc. get too severe; climate change can be effectively mitigated within continuing political and economic business as usual with carbon taxes and more efficient green technology.
Scenario B: Climate change is an emergency where we must make Draconian cuts to our use of fossil fuels immediately and globally in order to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere this decade so that we don't continue over a tipping point where both polar ice caps melt completely, sea level rises by 75 meters, and conditions become fiercely inhospitable to humanity and most of the species with which we share this small blue planet. Political and economic business as usual is far too slow and path dependent for mitigation of this scale, so we must innovate a World War II-style government mobilization so that a systemic reconfiguration of the global economy is possible.
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| April 15, 2008 |
Fatal food riots in Haiti. Violent food-price protests in Egypt and Ivory Coast. Rice so valuable it is transported in armoured convoys. Soldiers guarding fields and warehouses. Export bans to keep local populations from starving.
For the first time in decades, the spectre of widespread hunger for millions looms as food prices explode. Two words not in common currency in recent years — famine and starvation — are now being raised as distinct possibilities in the poorest, food-importing countries.
Unlike past food crises, solved largely by throwing aid at hungry stomachs and boosting agricultural productivity, this one won't go away quickly, experts say. Prices are soaring and stand every chance of staying high because this crisis is different.
A swelling global population, soaring energy prices, the clamouring for meat from the rising Asian middle class, competition from biofuels and hot money pouring into the commodity markets are all factors that make this crisis unique and potentially calamitous. Even with concerted global action, such as rushing more land into cultivation, it will take years to fix the problem.
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| April 11, 2008 |
We need to shift our understanding of water as a commodity to an appreciation for water as a human and environmental right.
All human beings are deeply affected by water and its movements. When we go on vacation we go to the water. We slide over it, across it, through it. We swim in it. We take part in water rituals and want to be nurtured by water ... we thirst for it.
Yet water, in a very deep way, is a women's issue. It is vital to the role women play in caring for their families. Women bathe and nourish their young, often tend the crops, and are the keepers of the waters. When fetching potable water requires distance, there is less time for the family and abject poverty and disease result.
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| April 10, 2008 |
New report: Logging in Canada's Boreal Forest could trigger carbon bomb impacting global climate
by Greenpeace
mail@ems02.com
Greenpeace Canada
250 Dundas West
Suite 605, Toronto
(Ontario) M5T 2Z5
(416) 597-8408 or 1-800-320-7183
Logging in Canada’s Boreal Forest could trigger “carbon bomb” impacting global climate10 April 2008Print Send to a friend Turning up the heat
Enlarge ImageLogging in Canada’s Boreal Forest is exacerbating global warming by releasing greenhouse gases and reducing carbon storage, says a new Greenpeace report
released today. It also makes the forest more susceptible to global warming impacts like wildfires and insect outbreaks, which in turn release more greenhouse gases.
If this vicious circle is left unchecked, it could culminate in a massive and sudden release of greenhouse gases referred to as "the carbon bomb," the report warns.
Canada's Boreal Forest stores 186 billion tonnes of carbon—equivalent to 27 times the world's annual fossil fuel emissions. A widespread outbreak of forest or peat fires
could release much of this carbon, causing a disastrous spike in emissions.
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| April 10, 2008 |
Winds Of Change
by Pablo Ouziel
Pablo Ouziel is sociologist and freelance writer.
Countercurrents.org
As a tax paying human being holding a Spanish Passport with the words “European Union” embossed on it, I have enjoyed the pleasures of being a global citizen
with rights that others have not enjoyed when moving around the globe. As a conscious human being, I have come to see my passport as a statement of my social
class in the globalized world.
I understand that within nations there are social classes, which are greatly defined by the economic wealth of each individual, I also understand that there is
a borderless global upper class. However, these people to me are not important, because ultimately I understand they are there because the rest have not yet
understood their true rights and their organized collective power.
Society overall has accepted a system which leaves behind those who do not matter, who cannot make it. They don’t matter, because what matters are the statistics of
humanity, statistics that are thrown at us on a daily basis with the sole purpose of dehumanizing social reality and promoting the interests of the rich and powerful.
Again the important thing to me is not how these powerful individuals are able to maintain this situation, what is interesting to me is why the common people are so
tolerant of this reality.
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| April 9, 2008 |
It's time to call BS on the idea of a mythical North American Union.
This month, President Bush will host the leaders of Canada and Mexico to advance the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). The SPP is presented as a big step towards a single world government, with David Rockefeller preventing any resistance by implanting us all with Vchips.
Launched in 2005, the SPP is an ongoing process of negotiation between the three countries' executive powers to change regulations and other policies to boost business and support the U.S. War on Terror. Twenty SPP working groups on everything from financial services to intelligence cooperation hammer out details in between the annual presidential summits.
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| April 7, 2008 |
The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Reports
by Achim Steiner
Executive Director, UNEP
Intergovernmental Plenary Opening Address: April 7, 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa
Agriculture is not just about putting things in the ground and then harvesting them…it is increasingly about the social and environmental variables that will in large part determine the future capacity of agriculture to provide for eight or nine billion people in a manner that is sustainable
The goals of the IAASTD: how Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology (AKST) can be used to reduce hunger and poverty, to improve rural livelihoods and to facilitate equitable environmentally, socially and economically sustainable development. Under the rubric of IAASTD, we recognize the importance of AKST to the multifunctionality of agriculture and the intersection with other local to global concerns, including loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, climate change and water availability.
The IAASTD is unique in the history of agricultural science assessments, in that it assesses both formal science and technology (S&T) and local and traditional knowledge, addresses not only production and productivity but the multifunctionality of agriculture, and recognizes that multiple perspectives exist on the role and nature of AKST. For many years, agricultural science focused on delivering component technologies to increase farm-level productivity where the market and institutional arrangements put in place by the state were the primary drivers of the adoption of new technologies. The general model has been to continuously innovate, reduce farm gate prices and externalize costs. This model drove the phenomenal achievements of AKST in industrial countries after World War II and the spread of the Green Revolution beginning in the 1960s. But, given the new challenges we confront today, there is increasing recognition within formal S&T organizations that the current AKST model requires revision. Business as usual is no longer an option. This leads to rethinking the role of AKST in achieving development and sustainability goals; one that seeks more intensive engagement across diverse worldviews and possibly contradictory approaches in ways that can inform and suggest strategies for actions enabling to the multiple functions of agriculture.
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| April 7, 2008 |
Rising prices may change India's stand at WTO
by ASHOK B SHARMA
A special correspondent with The Financial Express
indiansocietyag@yahoo.co.in
Other work by author published by the Global Community
Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture
Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
New Delhi, Apr 6 In the backdrop of the rising global prices and the government resorting to drastic cuts in tariffs on many agricultural commodities, India's negotiating position at the farm talks in the
WTO may be weakened.
The recent rise in global prices has completely changed the earlier scenario where the developing countries accused the developed world for depressing global prices through heavy subsidies and thereby
minimizing the gains of Third World producers. Several factors are, however, responsible for the turnaround in the global situation. The reports of UNCTAD, UN ESCAP, OECD and other UN agencies
have held massive bio-fuel programme in Europe and in the US as one of the main cause for the rise in global food prices.
The bio-fuel programme in the developed world backed by heavy subsidies has caused many farmers to cultivate crops for producing fuel rather than for food.
The prices of bio-fuels have shot up in tandem with the fossil oil prices and the bio-fuel prices have had a spilling effect on food prices
The member of the Planning Commision, Abhijit Sen agrees with the view and says : "The government has reduced tariffs with the good intention of importing food at cheaper prices to combat the price
inflationary trend in the country. But this may soften our negotiating position at the WTO as we have already begun reducing our tariff barriers. It now would be difficult for the developing countries to raise
the issue that developed countries' subsidies depresses global prices. Many poor net food-importing countries are facing problems of importing food at high prices."
Another factor contributing to the rise in global food prices is the subprime crisis and the meltdown in the equity market. The investors are now shifting their investments to commodity Markets. Sen says :
"The same thing is seen happening in India also."
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| April 5, 2008 |
Assocham critical about FTA with China
by ASHOK B SHARMA
A special correspondent with The Financial Express
indiansocietyag@yahoo.co.in
Other work by author published by the Global Community
Indian Society For Sustainable Agriculture
Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.
Assocham is particularly critical about the proposed FTA with China as that country has deliberately undervalued its currency to remain competitive.
In its study `India's FTAs and Indian Industry-2008' it said : "it is realized that in a globalised world Indian industry cannot shy away from international competition and it will be difficult to remain on
crutches supported by the wall of high tariffs. But yes, if certain parameters are kept in perspective while starting negotiations on trade agreements with various countries and regions it may lead to a
stronger and sustainable economic development in terms of improvement in employment and competitiveness."
The study called a careful preferential trade agreement (PTA) before a FTA where India has some inherent trade advantage with products on the sensitive lists having a reasonable timeframe so tat industry
can gear up for competition. It cautioned that some countries with zero or low tariff rates have already suffered. Before initiating FTAs a level playing field in terms of access to infrastructure, market
determined exchange rate and fuel cost should be determined.
The exports of raw materials should be discouraged and value added exports should be encouraged. Brand India should be marketed as provider of business solutions. Indian manufacturing business
should overcome commodification of their products, the study said.
It urged the Reserve Bank of India to see that the changes in valuation of currency is gradual as sharp change in exchange rates could affect industrial exports. Banks should also make their clients
(exporters) aware about currency hedging.
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| April 3, 2008 |
The government has invested trillions in weapons that are completely useless in the fight against stateless terrorists.
A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and soon you're talking real money. But when it comes to reporting on what the Bush war legacy has cost American taxpayers, the media have been shockingly indifferent to the highest run-up in military spending since World War II. Even the devastating defense spending audit released Monday by the Government Accountability Office documenting the enormous waste in every single U.S. advanced weapons system failed to provoke the outrage it, and five equally scathing previous annual audits, deserved.
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| April 2, 2008 |
The bank is turning dirty carbon credits into gold -- bad news for those seeking a real solution to the climate crisis.
The World Bank's long-running identity crisis is proving hard to shake. When efforts to rebrand itself as a "knowledge bank" didn't work, it devised a new identity as a "Green Bank." Really? Yes, it's true. Sure, the Bank continues to finance fossil fuel projects globally, but never mind. The World Bank has seized upon the immense challenges climate change poses to humanity and is now front and center in the complicated, international world of carbon finance. It can turn the dirtiest carbon credits into gold.
How exactly, does this work, you ask?
Quite simply: The Bank finances a fossil fuel project, involving oil, natural gas, or coal, in Poor Country A. Rich Country B asks the Bank to help arrange carbon credits so Country B can tell its carbon counters it's taking serious action on climate change. The World Bank kindly obliges, offering carbon credits for a price far lower than Country B would have to pay if Country B made those cuts at home. Country A gets a share of the cash to invest in equipment to make fossil fuel project slightly more efficient, the World Bank takes its 13 percent cut.
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| April 18, 2008 |
Comments and opinions concerning the Global Community perspective of the Dalai Lama request for the sovereignty of Tibet and of his leadership as a peacemaker
by Dr. Michael Ellis
Email
mindquest@ozemail.com.au
michaelellis@alumni.swinburne.edu
What we have in the current Christian religious tradition is the St James version of the bible which is a readers digest version and has no parallel with the truth that the great avatar Jesus Christ actually taught, which is the same as
what the Buddha taught.
The Dalai Lama preaches, I believe, a somewhat distorted version of this. I believe that his presence on the world stage means that his teachings are to a certain extent venerated without adequate understanding. He, for example,
doesn’t recognize the nature of the soul and believes in the void as the basis of mind which is something which was discussed and then clarified by Tien Tai the great Buddhist Sage and teacher to the emperors of China in about
400AD who systematized the teachings of the Buddha and was able to express the great secret law of life itself, which is in fact the secret hidden within the penultimate teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha, namely the Lotus Sutra.
However, the Dalai Lama does preach complete compassion for all humanity and does express a deep reverence for the interconnectedness and oneness of all life.
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| April 18, 2008 |
More comments and observations concerning the Global Community perspective of the Dalai Lama request for the sovereignty of Tibet and of his leadership as a peacemaker
by Dr. Leo Rebello
The Dalai Lama, judged by his words and actions, may be put in the same category of Buddha, Lao Tze, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Oscar Arias, Desmond Tutu
and the list goes on and on.
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| April 16, 2008 |
New comments concerning the Global Community perspective of the Dalai Lama request for the sovereignty of Tibet and of his leadership as a peacemaker
by Dr. Charles Mercieca
President, International Association of Educators for World Peace
Dedicated to United Nations Goals of Peace Education
Environmental Protection, Human Rights & Disarmament
Professor Emeritus, Alabama A&M University
Your negative statements about the Dalai Lama reveal, at the very least, that you have never read any book he wrote where he reveals the depth of his holiness and spirituality.
This deeply spiritual man wants to help the Chinese through the opening of a dialogue with them who seem to have been reluctant to do so. I am not for this or that man but I am for what is right in the best interest of the welfare of all
people without exception.
You are dong a good job with your newsletter but this is an item you touched where you really went off guard. See comments in blue here below. Best regards.
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| April 4, 2008 |
My opinion concerning the Global Community perspective of the Dalai Lama request for the sovereignty of Tibet and of his leadership as a peacemaker
by Dr. Charles Mercieca
President, International Association of Educators for World Peace
Dedicated to United Nations Goals of Peace Education
Environmental Protection, Human Rights & Disarmament
Professor Emeritus, Alabama A&M University
I agree with virtually everything you stated except for your negative statementson the Dalai Lama whom you misinterpreted and clumniated. We read in the holy scriptures: "Judge a tree by the fruit
it gives." This means if the tree looks like an orange tree but produces lemons then we have to call it lemon tree.
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| April 4, 2008 |
Comments and observations concerning the Global Community perspective of the Dalai Lama request for the sovereignty of Tibet and of his leadership as a peacemaker
by Dr. Leo Rebello
We all know that America identifies (so-called leaders), trains them, promotes and uses them, keeps a tab on them, and then discards them. Now the time has come to
discard Dalai Lama. Hopefully, in the next general elections, Manmohan Singh, too, will be discarded for following the decadent USA and messing up with superior
Indian values and principles of good governance.
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| April 3, 2008 |
The Global Community perspective of the Dalai Lama request for the sovereignty of Tibet and of its leadership as a peacemaker
by Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
The Global Community consider the Dalai Lama as a dangerous religious extremist. He ought to be brought to justice. His crimes include:
a) organizing and leading deadly riots in Tibet for the purpose of putting down the Tibetan government and destabilizing China;
b) associating himself with President Bush and the White House; President Bush is a wanted criminal and the White House along with NATO have been shown to be
rogue organizations worldwide, and criminal in nature; to give speeches at the White House for the purpose of obtaining military help; to make a deal with the US that would
allow the US to build a military base in Tibet in exchange of military help; to help the US continue destabilizing China;
c) violating the human rights of those workers in Tibet whether they come from another part of China or not;
d) planning to destabilize China, and that will have immense destructive and deadly consequences far beyond the area of Tibet and are a serious threat to
* global security as defined by the Global Community,
* global life-support systems,
* the global environment, and
* human and Earth rights on a global scale.
The fact that the Dalai Lama is aware of those consequences makes him even more dangerous.
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| March 18, 2008 |
Unchecked climate change could spark instability in energy-producing states and lead to the collapse of fragile states around the world.
Rising sea levels are what some nations fear most about global warming. But in Europe, climate change is likely to mean a new flood of immigrants from Africa and other poorer countries, according to a new report.
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| March 16, 2008 |
To respect Tibet and its specificity!
by Guy CREQUIE
Ambassadeur de la Paix
Cercle Universel des Ambassadeurs de la Paix
Universal Ambassador Peace Circle
guy.crequie@wanadoo.fr
Guy CREQUIE Global file
Our Global Community volunteers will help you
http://www2.blogger.com/profile/16097917629603014188
http://guycrequie.blogspot.com
http://poetesaparis.aceblog.fr
I invite the Chinese leaders to join again the dialog with the Dalai Lama and his government in exile for a respectful exit negotiated of each one for an harmonious development of this
part of the world.
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| March 12, 2008 |
Biofuels: the fake climate change solution
by Ben, Ricken, Iain, Galit, Paul, Graziela, Pascal, Esra'a, Milena
the Avaaz.org team
http://www.avaaz.org
Each day, 820 million people in the developing world
do not have enough food to eat. Food prices around
the world are shooting up, sparking food riots from
Mexico to Morocco. And the World Food Program
warned last week that rapidly rising costs are
endangering emergency food supplies for the world's
worst-off.
Wealthiest countries are
using more and more biofuels -- alcohol made from plant products, used in
place of petrol to fuel cars. Biofuels are billed as a way to slow down climate change. But in
reality, because so much land is being cleared to grow them, most biofuels today are
causing more global warming emissions than they prevent, even as they push the price
of corn, wheat, and other foods out of reach for millions of people.
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| March 5, 2008 |
Enslaved by Freedom
by Sandhya Jain
Kosovo's scandalous independence has driven another nail in the coffin of a deeply discredited United Nations and proved its complicity in the return of naked
eighteenth century colonialism. Nations with oil, gas, or other prized commodity may gear up for 'free trade' exclusively with Western corporates; Western military presence
to protect freedom as in Iraq; or self-determination of the kind that carved Christian East Timor out of Muslim Indonesia to become a virtual colony of Australian oil majors.
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| March 4, 2008 |
Protect the Arctic Refuge from drilling forever
by Rebecca Young
from Care2 and
The Petition Site Team
Sign in.According to the U.S. Department of Energy's own Energy Information Administration,
oil from the Arctic Refuge would have little or no impact on oil prices. Big Oil doesn't need the Arctic Refuge - polar bears do. Urge Congress to act immediately
to protect the Arctic Refuge from drilling forever! Thank you for making a difference today.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is home to caribou, snow fox and millions of migratory birds. It is also the most important onshore denning habitat for America's vanishing polar bears.
But this natural treasure is constantly under siege. Time and time again, the oil industry and their allies in Congress have sought to open this special place to harmful new drilling, threatening all of the wildlife that depend on it for survival.
And now President Bush has called for drilling in the Arctic Refuge by 2010 in his new budget proposal! We need to permanently protect the Arctic Refuge!
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| March 4, 2008 |
Pretty soon we will see a price on water just like there is now for carbon and carbon emissions. The right
to use water will soon follow in the footsteps of carbon emissions and become a commodity, like the right to pollute, that industry will have to pay for, executives
have warned. |
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| March 3, 2008 |
Understanding corn could be the key to social change that saves the planet and helps us create democratic communities and local food supplies.
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| February 8, 2008 |
It is high time to unite the forces, raise awareness so that Earth takes its true place as humanity's heritage
by Jean Jacques Saussey
Ambassadeur de la Paix
Cercle Universel des Ambassadeurs de la Paix
Universal Ambassador Peace Circle
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| February 3, 2008 |
Message of Peace from Jesus and Prophet Muhammad
by Dr. Charles Mercieca
President, International Association of Educators for World Peace
Dedicated to United Nations Goals of Peace Education
Environmental Protection, Human Rights & Disarmament
Professor Emeritus, Alabama A&M University
The sacred books of two of the leading religions in the world, the Bible and the Koran, speak reverently and highly of Jesus of Nazareth. In the Bible we find several
references to Jesus whose presence on Earth, as the promised Messiah, was predicted for a number of centuries. References to His Blessed Mother Mary are also found
since the early days of creation.
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| November 2, 2007 |
Eco-Humanism and Popular System Dynamics as Preconditions for Sustainable Development
( A review of VISION OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT SOCIETY – FUTURE OF THE WORLD FROM CYBERNETICIST PERSPECTIVE )
by Leslaw Michnowski
Manage the Sustainable Development Global Information Society website.
http://www.psl.org.pl/kte
kte@psl.org.pl
elmamba@poczta.onet.pl
leslaw.michnowski@neostrada.pl
Committee for Futures Studies "Poland 2000 Plus", Polish Academy of Sciences
Luis T. Gutierrez, Editor of the Solidarity & Sustainability, Non-Violence homepage says the following about the book. The invited article this month is contributed by Leslaw Michnowski, a member of the Committee for
Futures Studies "Poland 2000 Plus," Polish Academy of Sciences. In this paper, which is a synopsis of his recently
published book on his vision for a sustainable development process "with a human face," he identifies the ingredients
that will be required to assure a future for humanity and the human habitat. The reader is warned that this paper is not
intended for casual, easy reading. Michnowski's intent is to define the information/knowledge infrastructure that will
be required, the technologies to be used, and the principles of solidarity and social justice to be adhered to, in order to
face the inevitable global crises now emerging as a consequence of the pervasive human misbehavior, socially and
environmentally, triggered by (most recently) the industrial revolution. The reader will notice the congruence between
this article and some of the issues and concerns discussed in page 1. The vision presented here is one that shows the
need for a global transition toward a new order of things, one in which technology and other resources are used to
balance individual interests with the common good. It is shown that it is a feasible vision, one that can be achieved if
the humans who populate the planet make a decision to overcome obsolete mindsets that seek the accumulation of
wealth and power as the only path to "happiness." The impending global crisis may trigger a sequence of events that
forces making such decisions in the midst of turmoil and much suffering. Let us pray and work for a transition from
homo economicus to homo solidarius. It may be painful, but it can be peaceful. This is the path of truth, freedom, and
care; the path toward a better world for our children and grandchildren. This is the only path of sure hope.
This article is an overview of a book by the author: "VISION OF A SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT SOCIETY – THE
FUTURE OF THE WORLD FROM THE CYBERNETICIST PERSPECTIVE” (in Polish), published by Polish Academy of
Sciences, Committee for Futures Studies "Poland 2000 Plus", Warsaw, Poland, 2006. This book contains his
conclusions from many years of research on the current global crisis. This definitive work is based on the
author’s System of Life evidence-based model that couples the realities of globalization and information
technology with the urgent need to identify and analyze the conditions for transitioning the worldwide human
community toward a new worldwide civilization that uses information and knowledge for sustainable development
and, in particular, sustainable human development.
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| October 31, 2007 |
Here are 11 solutions already being put into practice by innovative communities around the world.
You probably don't need to be told that the threat of climate change is real. If you're concerned about the issue, it's fairly easy to conjure the apocalyptic scenes of widespread drought, frequent deadly storms, mass hunger, and wars over natural resources like oil and water. Much harder to come by are examples of positive actions that can avert these disasters and ease the crisis in places where they are already in play. So let's skip the litany of catastrophes that await if global warming is not controlled. Instead, why not focus on some solutions? None are perfect or complete, but each offers a model of positive change that is more than theoretically possible -- it is already happening.
Many of these examples are small-scale and local. That's instructive because our best hope for sustainability -- in agriculture, industry, energy, community design, and government -- may lie in local, small-scale models like some of those presented here. It may seem as though large-scale problems require large-scale solutions. But most big institutions and processes are driven by the very people and ideas that have generated our global crisis. It's in the local and the small that the majority of people can exercise agency and decision-making power.
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| October 22, 2007 |
The Global Community perspective on the control of the Northwest Passage, Canada sovereignty of Nunavut and 'blood resources'
Investigative report by Germain Dufour, Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
The creation of Nunavut was the outcome of the largest aboriginal land claims agreement between the Canadian government and the
native Inuit people. The Inuit is one of the first indigenous peoples in the Americas to achieve self-government. They have the right to participate in decisions regarding the land and water resources, and
rights to harvest wildlife on their lands.
Conservation, restoration, and management of the Earth resources
is about asking ourselves the question of " Who owns the Earth?"
The Global Community has proposed a democracy for the people based on the fact that land, the air, water, oil, minerals, and all other natural resources
rightly belong to the Global Community along with the local communities where those resources are found. The Earth is the birthright of all life.
To gain control of the Northwest Passage, Canada would have to show strong Earth management initiatives and the protection of its environment.
Without the fulfillment of the Global Community criteria for sovereignty no one can claim ownership - sovereignty - of both Nunavut and the Northwest Passage.
In Nunavut there is also a vast array of different life-form communities such as the polar bears, caribou, Arctic foxes, seals, beluga whales, northern fulmars, and those communities of organisms that inhabit the sea
floor like brittle stars, worms, zooplankton, microalgae, bivalves and some of the lesser known sea spiders.
And there are many more. Everyone of those global communities have an Earth right of ownership
of the North and of all its natural resources. It is their birthright. They dont express themselves in English, but we understand them. Human beings have a moral
obligation to protect and conserve the biodiversity of life on Earth.
Fot the protection of those global communities we will need to create a biodiversity zone in the North by way of Earth rights and taxation of natural resources.
We are all members of the Global Community. We all have the duty to protect the rights and welfare of all species and all people.
This report may be a starting place for a group global discussion and roundtable on the issues of Canada sovereignty in the Nunavut and the control of the Northwest Passage.
If you wish to send a reply I will post it on the Global Community website at
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/EmailDiscussions/
and
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GPA/2008discussionroundtables.htm
For now I started the process by researching and writing a paper concerned with the issues, and you will find the paper at
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GIMProceedings/gimLetterNP.htm
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| October 24, 2007 |
Peace Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning
by David Swanson, Afterdowningstreet.org Countercurrents.org
What gives a life meaning is the awareness that you have dedicated your life to working to improve the world, not just at the end of a strategic sadistic adventure, but in every bit of the work you do. When you work for peace and justice, a little work does a little good, and a lot does a lot of good. And, while even your utmost exertion can fail, you know you will have done no harm, you will have set the right example, and you will have refused to sit silently by as crimes were committed.
Peace and justice activism, when it is serious, involves sacrifice and risk. Soldiers who refuse illegal orders risk prison.
Citizens who engage in civil disobedience risk jail. And, increasingly, ordinary exercising of the right to free speech risks fines and other punishments. We also now
collectively face the risk of state-based and non-state-based attacks on us in response to our government's policies. We face nuclear annihilation, global warming, and
the declaration of complete martial law. We face the increased use of detention, torture, and murder. We face a growing difficulty and danger in doing what we do for
peace and freedom. And we face the possibility of great glory and fame as our rewards. |
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| October 23, 2007 |
Déclaration des poètes du monde pour la paix
by Guy CREQUIE
guy.crequie@wanadoo.fr
The beginning of the third millenium places the whole of inhabitants of our planet vis-a-vis stakes and challenges of a gravity rarely known before.
The poets brought together with the 1st International Festival of Poets in Paris, believe that the poetic word is committed compared to these challenges and declare:
The poetic word is love and meeting, it supports the dialog between men and different cultures, it is the leaven of dialog and peace in a world devastated by wars and terrorism.
The poetic word is fraternal, It revolts against all the demonstrations of xenophobia and racism which return to the load under all the latitudes
The poetic word is freedom and tolerance, it says yes to the human rights for all the citizens of the planet, it says no to all forms of tyranny, oppression and torture.
The poetic word is interdependent, it is opposed to the social injustices and the various forms of exclusion, it affirms that the rights to feed, to educate themselves, to look after themselves and to shelter themselves belong to the human rights
The poetic word is fed on diversity, there are no cultures, nor minority languages, it is in the diversity that richness of humanity resides. Any culture, any language in danger, means danger to all humanity.
The poetic word is history and beauty, culture and nature, it is committed, even before the birth of the writing, in the construction and the defence of the historical inheritance of various civilizations.
The poetic word is rain and seed, it is for life, it rises against the environmental pollution, biodiversity, and threats that weigh on the various ecosystems which constitute a common good of humanity
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or Download full WORD document of article by author
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| October 3, 2007 |
I have written an article on how big Corporate houses are grabbing farmlands from farmers in India at a platter. This is due to the government policy of Corporate pampering, ignoring the food security of the nation.
As per the National Rural Labour Commission, an average agricultural worker gets 159 days of work in a year; and as per NSSO (2005), the average daily wage of agricultural labour in rural areas is
around Rs. 51. Considering this, the estimated 82,000 agricultural labourers' households will lose Rs. 67-crore in wages. And put together, the total loss of income to the farming and the farm worker
families is to the tune of Rs. 212-crore (Rs 2120 million) a year. For the marginalized, the loss of income – even if it hovers around the poverty line – has disastrous implications. Farmland is the economic
security for farmers and farm labourers. |
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| October 28, 2007 |
Uncommon Grace: Biology And Economic Theory
by Charles Sullivan, csullivan@phreego.com Countercurrents.org
In a society that holds sacred the private ownership of property and economic self interest, it may seem strange that neither my wife nor I consider
ourselves property owners. At best, we are squatters or temporary guardians of something that has inherent value; an evolving biological entity that exists far beyond
the realm of economic self interest and monetary valuation systems.
In an ownership society, the land is valued not as an evolved living biological entity with inherent value and rights, including the
fulfillment of its own evolutionary destiny, but as a commodity — a natural resource. Ecological integrity is the foundation of planetary health. It is the
organizing principle of life. Undermining that integrity for short term profits is to limit all future options in perpetuity, the ultimate
incarnation of insensate greed and selfishness. Like all economic systems that are not based upon real science, or an appropriate land ethic, the concept of property rights and private ownership are misguided and ultimately self-destructive constructs. The public welfare and the ecological integrity of the earth exceed all economic self interests in importance. Economics are based upon self-serving, false premises, whereas ecology is real.
The most precious things in life are those that cannot be commodified, and hence, owned. |
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| October 22, 2007 |
It’s The Oil
by Jim Holt, Countercurrents.org, London Review Of Books
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five
times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it
is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two
thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas
alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on
Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of
undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these
estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on
one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely
light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30
trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected
total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’
for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil
revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress
would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National
Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields,
leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign
corporate control for 30 years.
The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but
the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has
all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the
next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil
wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic
government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police
force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that
government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in
the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is
oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final
‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been
more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few
dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and
which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists
killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to
$30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and
cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a
fiasco; it is a resounding success. |
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| October 12, 2007 |
Surviving The Century
by Chris Goodall, Countercurrents.org, Nature.com
Surviving the Century: Facing Climate Chaos and Other Global Challenges. climate change is not a technical or scientific problem. The main impediment to tackling global warming is that many of the powerful institutions of the world, whether it be the World Trade Organization, BP or the investment banks that control the world's allocation of capital are resistant to radically changing the way we operate the world economy. The poor, whose share of world income is certainly not growing, are unable to successfully demand that policies be developed to protect them from climate change or from other environmental or economic disasters.
The most productive and efficient economies, judged in the conventional sense, are often the most wasteful and destructive. |
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| October 11, 2007 |
We are faced with thoughtless development that paves flood plains and destroys wetlands; dams that displace native people and scar watersheds; unchecked industrial growth that pollutes water sources; and rising rates of consumption that nature can't match. Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave of privatization that is sweeping across the world, turning water from a precious public resource into a commodity for economic gain.
The problems extend from the global north to the south and are as pervasive as water itself. Equally encompassing are the politics of water. Discussions about our water crisis include issues like poverty, trade, community and privatization. In talking about water, we must also talk about indigenous rights, environmental justice, education, corporate accountability, and democracy. In this mix of terms are not only the causes of our crisis but also the solutions.
It ultimately comes down to an issue of democracy. We came to see that the conflicts over water are really about fundamental questions of democracy itself: Who will make the decisions that affect our future, and who will be excluded? |
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| October 7, 2007 |
Climate Change And Entire Landscapes On The Move
by Stephen Leahy, Countercurrents.org BROOKLIN, Canada, Inter Press Service
The hot breath of global warming has now touched some of the coldest northern regions of world, turning the frozen landscape into mush as temperatures soar 15 degrees C. above normal.
Entire hillsides, sometimes more than a kilometre long, simply let go and slid like a vast green carpet into valleys and rivers on Melville Island in Canada’s northwest Arctic region of Nunavut this summer, says Scott Lamoureux of Queens University in Canada and leader of one the of International Polar Year projects.
The entire landscape is on the move, it was very difficult to find any slopes that were unaltered, said Lamoureux, who led a scientific expedition to the remote and uninhabited island.
The topography and ecology of Melville Island is rapidly being rearranged by climate change.
Burning such fossil fuels is the major reason why the Arctic is losing ice. Scientists and native people note that it would be more than ironic should those emissions facilitate the extraction of even more fossil fuels with which to further warm our overheating global greenhouse. |
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| October 5, 2007 |
Economic Sharing: A Shift In Global Values
by Rajesh Makwana, Countercurrents.org Rajesh Makwana is the Director of Share The World's Resources (STWR), an NGO campaigning for global economic and social justice.
He can be contacted at rajesh@stwr.net
A growing body of progressives within the global justice movement, including environmentalists, economists and policy makers, broadly agree that a significant overhaul of the world’s economic and political systems is long overdue, and that without significant restructuring our most pressing problems will never be tackled.
It is time for a significant re-evaluation of global economic and political values and the creation of an economy that serves the needs of the global community as a whole, within our environmental limitations.
In order to consider how the ownership and management of key resources could be organized, it is useful to group them according to type. There are three general categories:
-Naturally occurring resources – e.g. land, water, oil, gas and mineral ores
-Produced goods – e.g. agricultural produce, medicines, building materials and machinery
-Services – e.g. utilities, healthcare and education
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| October 6, 2007 |
Whether we avert catastrophe with climate change may actually be decided by Citibank and Bank of America.
Citi has been busy funding dirty energy. Last year they gave 200 times more money for dirty energy than for clean. In the process they've helped underwrite some of the world's worst environmental and human rights offenders.
In 2006 they gave $4 billion to Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal mining company, which has been ravaging Dine and Hopi lands for 40 years, taking 2.5 million gallons of water out of their desert watershed each day and leaving behind a trail of toxic waste.
The disastrous Peabody Energy got $4 billion last year from BOA, which should help them on their way to building new plants in New Mexico, Illinois and Kentucky.
The banks are helping coal to take the wealth from us, to steal us blind and leave us in poverty, and leave us in poison. If those banks took the $141 billion they plan to spend on building new coal plants, and instead invested it in energy efficient measures, they could reduce electricity demand by 19 percent by 2025.
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| September 29, 2007 |
Arctic Thaw May Be At ‘Tipping Point’
by Alister Doyle, Countercurrents.org
A record melt of Arctic summer sea ice this month may be a sign that global warming is reaching a critical trigger point that could accelerate the northern thaw, some scientists say.
The Arctic summer sea ice shrank by more than 20 percent below the previous 2005 record low in mid-September to 4.13 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles), according to a 30-year satellite record. It has now frozen out to 4.2 million sq km.
This is a strong indication that there is an amplifying mechanism.
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| September 27, 2007 |
Full Text Of Ahmadinejad's Remarks At Columbia University
by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Countercurrents.org
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed students and
professors at the US Columbia University during his short sojourn
in New York before his address at the 62nd meeting of the UN
General Assembly.
His remarks at Columbia University were almost entirely
boycotted by western and specially US media; while he spoke of
such crucial issues as Iran's nuclear program and the Holocaust
which have always been at the center of western media's attention,
almost the only point the US press mentioned about Ahmadinejad's
address at Columbia university pertained to a few seconds of his
answer to a question about the rights of homosexuals in Iran.
The following is the full text of President Ahmadinejad's speech at
Columbia University.
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| September 26, 2007 |
Earth Calls for Radical Social Change and Spiritual Transformation
by Dr. Glen Barry
GlenBarry@EcologicalInternet.org
The population bomb has burst, the climate and biosphere are
in tatters, and tyrannical, militaristic governments rule; yet
there remains a path to global ecological sustainability
Earth Meanders
http://earthmeanders.blogspot.com/
Dr. Barry is founder and President of Ecological Internet; provider of the largest, most used environmental portals on the Internet including the Climate Ark at
http://www.climateark.org/ and
http://EcoEarth.Info/ .
Earth Meanders is a series of ecological essays that are written in his personal capacity. |
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| September 25, 2007 |
THE CULTURE OF PEACE JUSTIFIES IN FAVOR OF DETERMINED UNIVERSAL CITIZENS AND ENGAGE
by Guy CREQUIE
guy.crequie@wanadoo.fr
Today, it is a confrontation between two designs: Political leaders in the name of the ideology (liberal and warlike) openly declined or which advances masked while misant on the
emotion that the evocation of the nation gets are made (in fact) from the nature of their speeches the cantors of the culture of the war, this, whereas we them poétesses and poets, we
are the carriers of a culture of peace. |
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or Download full WORD document of article by author
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| September 24, 2007 |
A Decade of a Culture for Peace and Non-Violence for the Benefit of the Children of the World
by Guy CREQUIE
guy.crequie@wanadoo.fr
We are assembled in this congress to debate on this ever so important topic of peace for all humanity. Perhaps some of you come from countries where civil war prevails! There may
be among you, poets who have gone through the pangs and sufferings caused by foreign invasion. |
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| September 17, 2007 |
World - Grid Type, Continuously Under-development - System Dynamics. Why do we need it? by Leslaw Michnowski,
Manage the Sustainable Development Global Information Society website.
kte@psl.org.pl, elmamba@poczta.onet.pl
Committee for Futures Studies "Poland 2000 Plus", Polish Academy of Sciences, Al. 3 Maja 2 m. 164, 00-391 Warszawa Poland, Tel.: +48 22 7681019. +48 601 264 164
The main goal of the United Nations is realization of sustainable development world society
vision. Such society would need to integrate social development with economic development and
environmental protection. For this end it is necessary to enable sustained economic growth,
internalizing externalities and DECOUPLING the range of economic growth from the range of deficit
natural resources depletion growth and degradation of environment. It is necessary also to COUPLE
economic growth with popular life-quality growth.
To achieve sustainable development OF THE WORLD SOCIETY we have to build, a
commonly accessible WORLDWIDE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INFORMATION (SYSTEM DYNAMICS) SYSTEM for:
- dynamic monitoring,
- long range forecasting, and
- measurable evaluation,
of policy, economy, work, and other changes effects in life-conditions of human beings and nature in
general. I propose a research program aimed at describing conditions of creation such big, grid, multi
stage built, information system.
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| September 16, 2007 |
SCALE OF CONFLICTS BETWEEN FIRMS, COMMUNITIES, NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT
The role of the nation-state is to regulate conflicts between the essential elements, the nation-state, capitalists (firms), laborers and consumers, binding together disparate and conflicting interests.
This paper is aimed to review the different levels of scale of conflicts between firms, communities, New Social Movements and the role of government. |
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or Download full WORD document of Research Paper by author |
| September 12, 2007 |
What Is Being Stolen From Us All
by Jeff Berg
Countercurrents.org
Once again, this time in Iraq, we see the natural resource wealth of an
entire nation enriching none but a criminal class and megacorporations. I
will assume a distinction. Once again this is only able to take place as a
result of the planned aggression and full cooperation of a government &
military that acts as if it is a wholly owned subsidiary of a monied elite.
Much the same thing is being done here in Canada but "thanks" to the
connivance of significant elements of our corporate and government
elite it is being achieved without the need for military force.
It should be noted however that to some in the corporate class the
missing military element is a major mistake even in Canada as it
seriously erodes the huge profit margins possible in war zones and
markedly reduces the amount of money that can be transferred from
citizens to shareholders in times of military conflict. (The quintessential
double dip) Admittedly this is a minority opinion but as Iraq will not be
the last to prove not an uninfluential one. Evidence of this influence here
in Canada can be seen by the massive increase in expenditures for our
military and security industrial complexes over the last few years.
NB. Before the Harper government's commitment to a $13 billion
increase in military spending Canada’s military spending was the 7th
highest in absolute terms in the OECD and 12th overall in the world.
If you are skeptical of the claim that Canadians are being all but
completely shut out of the benefits of their resource wealth go to the
Parkland Institute site and discover for yourself the pitiful fraction the
Albertan people receive of their resource wealth compared to the
people of Norway.
http://www.ualberta.ca/PARKLAND/
For we the Canadian people the situation is an even crueler joke as we
receive even less benefit while at the same time bearing more of the
brunt of the economic problems associated with being a resource
dollar. Aka. Dutch Disease
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutchdisease.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
And it is all Canadians and especially Albertans and even the rest of the
world that are at the same time forced to pick up the massive
environmental tab even as the profits flee the province and the country. |
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| September 12, 2007 |
The End Of The World?
by William M. H. Kötke ,
Countercurrents.org
William H. Kötke author ofGarden Planet: The Present Phase Change of the Human Species. See at: www.gardenplanetbook.com and THE
FINAL EMPIRE an underground classic book available for free
download at: http://www.Rainbowbody.net/Finalempire .
We are all looking at the end of the world as we know it. Our
attention is focused on the holes in the ozone layer, planet warming,
peak oil, the spread of DU weapons, the collapse of the house of credit
cards, and the prospect of the planetary financial elite quickly
establishing fascist control of the planet. Below this threshold of
conscious awareness our biological survival systems are rapidly
eroding. At this point some twenty percent of the planet’s soils erode
each twenty-five year period. Each year at least two hundred thousand
acres of irrigated crop-lands go out of production because of
salinization or water-logging and experts say that sixty to eighty percent
of all irrigated acreage is due to follow the eight to ten million acres that
have historically gone into ruination from irrigation. The total drylands of
the planet are 7.9 billion acres of which 61% are desertified, that is,
driven by human abuse toward uselessness. Globally, 23% of all arable
crop lands have been lost since 1945 through human use and experts
say that all arable land on the planet will be ruined in 200 years.
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| September 12, 2007 |
Does Our Planet Have Too Many People?
by Madeleine Bunting
http://www.alternet.org/authors/8621/, published in AlterNet: The Mix is the Message, Environment,
Reducing consumption is imperative, but it's pointless to cut out meat and cars while having lots of children.
When challenged, environmentalists have coherent arguments to defend their retreat from the population debate. They insist that the pressure on the earth's
resources - its water, forests, soil fertility - and carbon emissions are all about consumption and lifestyle, not about sheer numbers of human beings. They rightly
point out that the average American produces some 20 tonnes of carbon a year while some of those living in areas of the world with the fastest growing populations,
such as Africa, produce a tiny fraction of that kind of carbon footprint. They insist that the earth can support the 9 billion now predicted by 2050 (the increase
in the next 40 years will equate to roughly what the entire global population was in 1950) if everyone is living sustainable lifestyles. The focus of campaigning
must stay on the consumption patterns of the developed world, rather than on numbers of people. |
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| September 9, 2007 |
Because humanity has developed jurisprudence systems by which various entities claim legal title to selected segments of the earth, the earth is owned by those entities
by John R. Ewbank,
johnewb@comcast.net
john.1916@yahoo.com
hmrl@libertynet.org
USA (part of our group discussion by email)
Because humanity has developed jurisprudence systems by which various entities claim legal title to selected segments of the earth, the earth is owned by those entities having, under the local jurisprudence,
the legal title to various areas. All systems invonving confiscation of such veted property rights can be attacked as "thievery".Rights of eminent domain have permitted government intervention for better use
of land, and this involves use not merely for government fbut also for rr and utilities,and other public interests. However, those asserting common ownership and or confiscation must be classified by at least
some analysts as thieves.
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see also |
| September 8, 2007 |
Climate Change Solutions: Beyond Science And Above Confines
by Abdul Basit, Basit72@gmail.com,
Countercurrents.org
Along with scientific research, we require political, religious, ideological, cultural, philosophical, economic, social and intellectual coordination.
Secondly, since human factor is the main reason for climate change, the
transformation in the method of lifestyle and concepts of economic
development required is much beyond the scope of science. Most
solutions provided by scientific research are very limited in scope such
as to fill up our automobile tanks with bio fuels instead of fossil fuels.
Such solutions will only aggravate the crises and create new problems.
What we need is a total transformation from what we have hitherto
followed. This transformation requires the change of the basic concept
of materialistic way of life and pursuit of wealth. This can only be
achieved by cultivating moral and spiritual values among the society and
by replacing materialistic pursuits with holistic and simple way of life.
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| September 6, 2007 |
Earth Meanders: Now Is Time for Non-Violent Earth Revolution
by
Dr. Glen Barry, Earth Meanders
Now Is Time for Non-Violent Earth Revolution. That begins by stopping ancient forest logging, ending burning of coal and restraining growth in aviation.
Insightful original Earth essays placing environmental sustainability within the context of other contemporary issues including peace and freedom. Thought-provoking,
raw and frequently outrageous - but always Bright Green. These are the personal writings of Dr. Glen Barry.
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| August 5, 2007 |
Who should own the Earth ?
by Norman Kurland thirdway@cesj.org
Email discussion with Norman Kurland and Garry Davis of the Global Justice Movement, and with John Watkins of the Alliance for Human Empowerment |
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| August 1, 2007 |
China’s Transition into a Society of Social Harmony (Part II)
Letter sent by DR. Charles Mercieca to the Global Community mercieca@knology.net
China represents one of the oldest civilizations in the entire history of our earthly society. Its dynasties managed to leave legacies that have enriched the culture of China in
many unique ways. By nature, the Chinese are very kind people and they try to be helpful with those around and with those they come across. They also tend to live in
peace and to let others live in peace as well. The only ambition the Chinese people seem to have is to see the members of their relatives and friends equipped with all the
vital needs of life.
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| July 28, 2007 |
China in True Perspective
Letter sent by DR. Charles Mercieca to the Global Community mercieca@knology.net
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| July 25, 2007 |
How the Political Parties are possible at World level under World Democracy?
by Sabzali Khan yusufzai sa_yusufzai@hotmail.com
Keeping in view the prevailed political and social Orders of the World it seems to be impossible in the near future that the dream of World Democracy would become true. Because,
under the prevailed Orders, the human community is divided in to so many small groups and identity on the base of Nationality, Race and Ideology. All these groups bear on their own
Agenda, objectives, ideology and recognition as such it is impossible to unite the present dispersed human community at global level for World Democracy. Therefore, keeping in view
the above facts and realities, the human community is hereby recognized on new such grounds that will gradually globalize not only all Citizens of the World for World Democracy but
also will leads them to a World Government in the near future. The following 9 (nine) global Parties of the human community are hereby identified on Professional base/ grounds along
with their universal rights, responsibilities, frame of work and objective as mentioned below in details
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| July 19, 2007 |
The Militarization and Annexation of North America
by Stephen Lendman
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net
Article promoted in the Portal of the Global Community of North America (GCNA) at http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GlobalConst/gcnaindex.htm
The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) unmasked |
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