COCHABAMBA, Bolivia - Bolivian President Evo Morales said capitalism is to blame for global warming and the accelerated deterioration of the planetary ecosystem in a speech today opening an international conference on climate change and the "rights of Mother Earth."

More than 20,000 indigenous, environmental and civil society delegates from 129 countries were in attendance as President Morales welcomed them to the conference at a soccer stadium in the village of Tiquipaya on the outskirts of the city of Cochabamba.

"The main cause of the destruction of the planet Earth is capitalism and in the towns where we have lived, where we respected this Mother Earth, we all have the ethics and the moral right to say here that the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism," said Morales, who is Bolivia's first fully indigenous head of state in the 470 years since the Spanish invasion.

Morales is the leader of a political party called Movimiento al Socialismo, the Movement for Socialism, which aims to give more power to the country's indigenous and poor communities by means of land reforms and redistribution of wealth from natural resources such as gas.

"The capitalist system looks to obtain the maximum possible gain, promoting unlimited growth on a finite planet," said Morales. "Capitalism is the source of asymmetries and imbalance in the world."

The Bolivian president called this conference in the wake of what he considered to be failed United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

Those talks produced a weak political agreement, the Copenhagen Accord, instead of a strong, legally-binding set of limits on greenhouse gas emissions to take effect at the end of 2012, as Bolivia and many other countries had hoped.

Named "World Hero of Mother Earth" by the United Nations General Assembly last October, today, President Morales warned of dire consequences if a strong legally-binding agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions is not reached.

A new agreement is needed to govern greenhouse gas emissions after the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of 2012. This year's round of international negotiations towards an agreement began earlier this month in Bonn, Germany, and the next annual United Nations climate conference is scheduled for Cancun, Mexico from November 29.

"Global food production will be reduced by approximately 40 percent and that will increase the number of hungry people in the world, which already exceeds a billion people," Morales warned. "Between 20 and 30 percent of all animal and plant species could disappear."

Global warming will cause the melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers of the Andes and the Himalayas, and several islands will disappear under the ocean," he warned.

The convocation this morning included a multi-cultural blessing ceremony by indigenous peoples from across the Americas. Speeches by representatives of social movements from five continents focused on the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for bold action that protects both human rights and the environment.

The delegates are meeting in working group sessions this week to develop strategies and make policy proposals on issues such as forests, water, climate debt, and finance.

President Morales has pledged to bring these strategies and proposals to the UN climate conference in Cancun.

"We have traveled to Bolivia because President Morales has committed to bring our voices to the global stage at the next round of talks in Cancun," said Jihan Gearon of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, who is a native energy organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network.

"Indigenous rights and knowledge are crucial to addressing climate change, but the United States and Canada have not signed on to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and are pushing corporate climate policy agendas that threaten our homelands and livelihoods," Gearon said.

"President Morales has asked our recommendations on issues such as REDDs [Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation]," said Alberto Saldamando, legal counsel for the International Indian Treaty Council.

"REDD is branded as a friendly forest conservation program, yet it is backed by big polluters," Saldamando said. "REDD is a dangerous distraction from the root issue of fossil fuel pollution, and could mean disaster for forest-dependent indigenous peoples the world over."

"We are here from the far north to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters of the South," said Faith Gemmill, executive director of Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL), who spoke from the stage at the invitation of President Morales. "We have a choice as human kind - a path of life, or a path of destruction. The people who can change the world are here!"

© 2010 Environmental News Service

Once, on both sides of the Atlantic, fish such as salmon, eels, and, shad were abundant and played an important role in society, feeding millions and providing a livelihood for tens of thousands. But as these fish have steadily dwindled, humans have lost sight of their significance, with each generation accepting a diminished environment as the new norm.

If you are a resident of the East Coast of the United States or of Western Europe, when did you last attend a shad bake, eat an eel, or watch Atlantic salmon vault a waterfall? Community shad bakes once celebrated the return of American shad to rivers as a marker of spring. Recently though, a dearth of shad led to a “shadless shad bake” on the Hudson — a river that in its glory days supplied more than four million pounds of shad in one season. Eels were widely consumed by Europeans and Americans in the 1800s and were often featured on holiday tables. And salmon once ran inland in countless numbers, providing sport and food; today, only a few hundred wild salmon remain in the eastern U.S., migrating up a handful of rivers in Maine to spawn.

Today, most people in the U.S. and Europe are scarcely aware that eels, wild Atlantic salmon, shad, and alewives — once-vital sources of food and employment — are no longer a part of their ordinary experience. This decline in importance is a manifestation of a loss of standing in society for these fishes, part of a larger phenomenon involving a regrettable interplay between ecology and the social order.

Every generation takes the natural environment it encounters during childhood as the norm against which it measures environmental decline later in life. With each ensuing generation, environmental degradation generally increases, but each generation takes that degraded condition as the new normal. Scientists call this phenomenon “shifting baselines” or “inter-generational amnesia,” and it is part of a larger and more nebulous reality — the insidious ebbing of the ecological and social relevancy of declining and disappearing species.

My colleague, Karin E. Limburg, and I have come up with another term for the broader context of this phenomenon: “eco-social anomie.” Anomie is defined as a state or condition of individuals or society characterized by a breakdown of social priorities and values. Eco-social anomie describes a biological and cultural feedback loop that spirals toward this breakdown: As species disappear, they lose both relevance to a society and the constituency to champion their revival, further hastening their decline. A vivid example of this was highlighted in a recent study in Conservation Biology, in which researchers found that younger residents along China’s Yangtze River knew little or nothing of the river dolphin, the bajii — now believed to be extinct — and the threatened paddlefish.

“Our data from the Yangtze shows that, in certain cultural environments at least, local communities will immediately start to forget about the existence of even large, charismatic species as soon as these species stop being encountered on a fairly regular basis,” said Samuel Turvey, lead author of the study.

In the case of migratory fish, their once-vital niche in society is often reduced to vestigial place names, such as the Sturgeon Pool in the Hudson watershed in New York and the Salmon Kill on the Housatonic in Connecticut, which today offer local color — but no eponymous fish. Numerous measures show that the two-dozen migratory fishes of both shores of the North Atlantic have seen profound reduction. An historical review that I conducted with Limburg, of the State University of New York — College of Environmental Science and Forestry, on the sturgeons, salmon, shads, eels and other fishes that migrate between fresh and salt waters revealed deeply alarming statistics. Of 35 studies of the long-term fate of migratory fish, relative abundances had dropped below 98 percent from historic highs for 13 species, and below 90 percent for another 11, with most species reaching their lowest levels in recent years.

Numerous populations of these fishes persist at sharply reduced levels, but all species had suffered local extirpations and many are now classified as threatened or endangered. A particularly worrisome case is the European sea sturgeon, so highly regarded that in the 1300s it was designated as a “royal fish” by England’s King Edward II. Sea sturgeon once comprised almost 20 populations in rivers between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea; they are now restricted to a vanishingly small stock in France’s Gironde River.

Even such lightly fished species as alewife are now protected from any harvest in several U.S. states because of recent population crashes. Habitat loss (especially damming), overfishing, pollution, and, increasingly, climate change have all contributed to declines in this group. Warming is already altering the geographic ranges and timing of migrations of some fishes, which likely will create “mismatches” to their established ecological relationships.

Because of their remarkably high abundances and importance in early Colonial times and the sheer magnitude of their subsequent collapse, North Atlantic diadromous fishes — those that migrate between salt and fresh water — offer a particularly egregious example of eco-social anomie. Here is a generalized history: As industrialization intensified, already overharvested migratory fish populations were sacrificed for the construction of dams for power mills. This blockage of spawning habitat reduced runs further, wiping out upriver fisheries and causing downriver fisheries to dwindle or perish. The fundamental aquatic ecology of these systems also was harmed: With fewer adults entering rivers and fewer juveniles leaving them, the normal energy transfers between fresh and marine waters were reduced, and interdependencies between diadromous fishes and their associated animal and plant communities withered.

With catches diminished, local dependencies on this food source declined, and with that, a primary constituency for the welfare of the fish runs. Industrialization led to increased contamination, growing human populations led to greater discharge of sewerage, and rivers began to serve more as power sources and gutters for societal wastes than as productive ecosystems. The disappearing migratory fishes may have granted “permission” for additional ecosystem corruption because there was less cost in further debilitating rivers.

Mitigation for the loss of wild runs of these fishes was most often in the form of the easy but nearly always ineffective — if not downright destructive — stocking of hatchery-reared specimens. The exquisitely fine-tuned life histories of natural runs to their home rivers became quashed by mass-produced specimens that were less fit, but that nonetheless competed with any remaining wild individuals, reducing their fitness, too, as they interbred. Responsibility for the continuity of the runs shifted away from maintaining ecological integrity of fish runs and rivers to what amounted to a cosmetic patch via outsourcing. Abundant research has shown that a fish is not a fish is not a fish.

As Richard Judd wrote in Common Lands, Common People, “An artificial resource maintained in a habitat no longer capable of spontaneous growth, fish became a property of the state rather than an element of the providential natural landscape.”

To put an end to the steady degradation of many ecosystems — marine and otherwise — we need to rewind important historical connections and dependencies. But tools to do so are also necessary: funding, legislation and, finally, education to rebuild societal awareness and the will to effect needed changes.

In the U.S., until the importance and legal standing of these fishes and their habitats were elevated with the Clean Water Act of 1972 and other environmental statutes, resource managers lacked the means to do much except to try and maintain existing baselines. Since then, a few victories have been won and critical precedents set. It took a population crash of Chesapeake Bay striped bass in the 1980s to push Congress into enacting laws that forced the necessary draconian changes to those fisheries. But these fish made a celebrated comeback, showing what can be accomplished with a truly determined effort. The striped bass was fortunate because it had a vocal constituency of commercial and recreational fishermen calling for its revival.

The lesson from this — one which has been learned the hard way across all kinds of fisheries — is to avoid reaching the crisis stage. This philosophy, known as the “precautionary principle,” is beginning to take hold with the simple wisdom of erring conservatively in setting fish harvests.

Maine has shown exemplary leadership in reopening rivers to migratory fishes with the dismantling of the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in 1999, an action that allowed sturgeons, shad, and striped bass to swim and spawn in a 17-mile stretch of the river that was blocked for a century. Similar efforts are underway in Maine’s Penobscot River, and these include novel compromises that will maintain hydroelectric power generation levels while eventually reopening hundreds of miles of main-stem river and tributaries.

Many smaller dam-removal and fish-passage efforts are also underway on both sides of the Atlantic, including efforts to bring Atlantic salmon back to the Thames, the Rhine, and the Seine. Maine also is home to the newly formed Diadromous Species Restoration Research Network that will help coordinate restoration efforts of academic, government, and watershed activists and residents, both in the Penobscot River and throughout the northeast.

Alewives were once so numerous along the eastern coast of the U.S. that they were likened to the passenger pigeons of the sea. Sadly, precipitous decline across much of their range is reminiscent of the passenger pigeon’s demise. A new amendment to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Interstate Management Plan for alewife and its relatives calls for detailed restoration, adapted to the state level.

Many grassroots organizations also are fighting for protection and restoration of their alewife spawning creeks on a local level. Reconnecting the public with their neighborhood alewife run has been brought to an advanced plane in the Ipswich River, Massachusetts, with an innovative Adopt-a-Herring Program, where students track radio-tagged individuals as they migrate upriver, learning much about fish and stream biology along the way, as well as regaining a sense of responsibility for securing continuity for this natural phenomenon.

Although we are still far from hearing the societal shout on their behalf that is needed, voices are rising as numbers of many North Atlantic diadromous fishes continue to dwindle. But it will require greater concerted action to actually reverse their vicious spiral. Until then, these creatures would be advised to heed the words of Henry David Thoreau, from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: “Keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the tides thou mayst meet.”

John Waldman, a professor of biology at Queens College, New York, works on the ecology and evolution of anadromous fishes, historical ecology, and urban waterways. Before joining Queens College, he worked for 20 years at the Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research. He is the author of Heartbeats in the Muck: A Dramatic Look at the History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor. In a previous article for Yale Environment 360, he wrote about the ways that warming temperatures are causing the “global weirding” phenomenon.

Original article available here

In what is becoming the hippest environment meeting of the year, presidents, politicians, intellectuals, scientists and Hollywood stars will join more than 15,000 indigenous people and thousands of grass roots groups from more than 100 countries to debate climate change in one of the world's poorest nations.

The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth which opens next week in the small Bolivian town of Cochabamba, will have no direct bearing on the UN climate talks being conducted by 192 governments. But Bolivian President Evo Morales says it will give a voice to the poorest people of the world and encourage governments to be far more ambitious following the failure of the Copenhagen summit.

Morales will use the meeting to announce the world's largest referendum, with up to 2 billion people being asked to vote on ways out of the climate crisis. Bolivia also wants to create a UN charter of rights and to draft an action plan to set up an international climate justice tribunal.

"The only way to get climate negotiations back on track not just for Bolivia or other countries, but for all of life, biodiversity, our Mother Earth is to put civil society back into the process. The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy," said Bolivia's United Nations Ambassador Pablo Solon in Bonn, at the end of the latest UN talks.

"There will be no secret discussions behind closed doors. The debate and the proposals will be led by communities on the frontlines of climate change and by organisations and individuals from civil society dedicated to tackling the climate crisis," he said.

More than 90 governments are sending delegations to Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city. Also expected to attend are scientists such as James Hansen, James Cameron, the director of Avatar, the linguist Noam Chomsky, author Naomi Klein of Canada, anti-globalisation activist José Bové of France, and actors Danny Glover, Robert Redford and Susan Sarandon are expected.

The meeting will coincide with celebrations of the Cochabamba "water war" of 2000 when a revolt against the privatisation of water in the city acted as an inspiration for social movements across Latin America and indirectly to the election of Morales as Bolivia's president.

"We hope that this unique format will help shift power back to the people, which is where it needs to be on this critical issue for all humanity. We don't expect agreement on everything, but at least we can start to discuss openly and sincerely in a way that didn't happen in Copenhagen," said Solón.

Sent from Emily Schaeffer, human right lawyer in Israel/Palestine, who asked Archbishop Tutu to write the letter.

Dear Student Leaders at the University of California – Berkeley

It was with great joy that I learned of your recent 16-4 vote in support of divesting your university’s money from companies that enable and profit from the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights. Principled stands like this, supported by a fast growing number of US civil society organizations and people of conscience, including prominent Jewish groups, are essential for a better world in the making, and it is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power.

I am writing to tell you that, despite what detractors may allege, you are doing the right thing. You are doing the moral thing. You are doing that which is incumbent on you as humans who believe that all people have dignity and rights, and that all those being denied their dignity and rights deserve the solidarity of their fellow human beings.
I have been to the Ocupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime. Students played a leading role in that struggle, and I write this letter with a special indebtedness to your school, Berkeley, for its pioneering role in advocating equality in South Africa and promoting corporate ethical and social responsibility to end complicity in Apartheid. I visited your campus in the 1980’s and was touched to find students sitting out in the baking sunshine to demonstrate for the University’s disvestment in companies supporting the South African regime.

The same issue of equality is what motivates the divestment movement of today, which tries to end Israel’s 43 year long occupation and the unequal treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them. The abuses they face are real, and no person should be offended by principled, morally consistent, non-violent acts to oppose them. It is no more wrong to call out Israel in particular for its abuses than it was to call out the Apartheid regime in particular for its abuses.

To those who wrongly accuse you of unfairness or harm done to them by this call for divestment, I suggest, with humility, that the harm suffered from being confronted with opinions that challenge one’s own pales in comparison to the harm done by living a life under occupation and daily denial of basic rights and dignity. It is not with rancor that we criticize the Israeli government, but with hope, a hope that a better future can be made for both Israelis and Palestinians, a future in which both the violence of the occupier and the resulting violent resistance of the occupied come to an end, and where one people need not rule over another, engendering suffering, humiliation, and retaliation. True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute. You, students, are helping to pave that path to a just peace. I heartily endorse your divestment vote and encourage you to stand firm on the side of what is right.

God bless you richly,

Desmond Tutu.
Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town.

Archbishop Tutu is an active and prominent proponent of the campaign for divestment from Israel

Mass paedocide (mass murder of children) is an extreme case of paedocide (pedocide; murder of a child) and far, far worse than the appalling crime of paedophilia (pedophilia; the sexual abuse of children). Yet despite Easter being a festival celebrating Spring and New Life (like Holi in India), neither the Pope nor the Archbishop of Canterbury made any reference in their Easter Messages to the topical issue of clerical sexual abuse  of children, a glaring  omission that has been noted by the Mainstream media. Yet the Mainstream media also ignored an even more outrageous omission: that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Catholic and Anglican Churches ignore US Alliance mass murder of about 1,000 Muslim Children every day in the American Empire under Emperor Obama.

The Anglican Church head, Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, recently created a huge storm by making the following comments about Catholic Church inaction (and particularly Irish Catholic Church inaction) over child sex abuse by paedophile Catholic priests (see:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/03/archbishop-canterbury-ireland-catholic-credibility ): "I was speaking to an Irish friend recently who was saying that it's quite difficult in some parts of Ireland to go down the street wearing a clerical collar now. And an institution so deeply bound into the life of a society suddenly losing all credibility ? that's not just a problem for the church, it is a problem for everybody in Ireland ."

After outcry from Catholic clergy, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams subsequently stirred the morass even more by apologizing for his comments (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8602402.stm ; he doesn't hold these views any more?): "I was saying sorry that I had made life more difficult for the Archbishop of Dublin and his colleagues who have been trying to tackle this crisis with great imagination and honesty ?.

More fuel was then added to the fire because both the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury avoided any mention of the Catholic Church child sex abuse scandals in their respective Easter messages.

However, in relation to the holier-than-thou pontifications of the clerical head of the Anglican Church, Dr Rowan Williams (Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is the actual legal Head of the Church of England as well as Head of State of the UK and Aparthied Australia),  let's remember Jesus Christ's statement:  "he who is without sin cast the first stone".

I repeat that mass paedocide (mass pedocide, mass killing of children) is worse than paedocide (pedocide, killing of children) and far, far worse than paedophilia (pedophilia, the vile sexual abuse of children).

Yet the UK , home of the Anglican Church and for which the Archbishop of Canterbury is a major spiritual leader, is intimately involved in the following mass ongoing mass paedocidal (mass pedocidal) atrocities (data from UNICEF: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html ).

Palestinian Holocaust and Palestinian Genocide: post-invasion excess deaths 0.3 million, post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 0.2 million, 7 million refugees; Occupier Apartheid Israel passively murders 0.9 x 4,000 = 3,600 Occupied Palestinians infants each year (see: http://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/ ).

Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide: 1990-2010 excess deaths under Sanctions and Occupation 4.4 million, under-5 infant deaths 2.0 million; 5-6 million refugees; war criminal Occupiers UK and  the US Alliance passively murder 0.9 x 311,000 = 279,900 under-5 year infants each year in gross violation of the Geneva Convention (see:   http://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ ).

Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide: 2001-2010 excess deaths under Occupation 4.5 million, under-5 infant deaths 2.4 million, refugees 3-4 million (plus a further 2.5 million Pashtun refugees from NW Pakistan); war criminal Occupying UK and US Alliance passively murder 0.9 x 41,000 = 36,900 under-5 year infants each year in gross violation of the Geneva Convention (see: http://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ ).

It has been estimated that about 1,000 Muslim children die avoidably due to US Alliance war crimes in the American Empire every day (see ? Hey, hey, USA, how many kids did you kill today? Answer: 1,000 ?, Bellaciao: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article18750 ).

Yet not a pip from the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Anglican or Catholic Churches over US Alliance mass murder of Arab and Muslim children (for details and documentation of this continuing horrendous atrocity see "Muslim Holocaust, Muslim Genocide": http://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ ).

Indeed the horror is set to get worse. Both Dr James Lovelock FRS (Gaia hypothesis) and Professor Kevin Anderson ( Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester, UK) have recently estimated that fewer than 1 billion people will survive this century due to unaddressed, man-made global warming ? noting that the world population is expected to reach 9.5 billion by 2050, these estimates translate to a climate genocide involving deaths of 10 billion people this century, this including 6 billion under-5 year old infants , 3 billion Muslims in a terminal Muslim Holocaust, 2 billion Indians, 1.3 billion non-Arab Africans, 0.5 billion Bengalis, 0.3 billion Pakistanis and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis (see ?Climate Genocide?: http://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/home ).

Now if miracles actually occur and by some miracle the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope were to be drawn into a public discussion  of the mass murder of Muslim children by the racist Zionist-beholden US Alliance, they might plead that apart from (regular) collateral damage from civilian-targeting US bombing, the brave US Alliance storm troopers are not actually shoving bayonets into Muslim babies.

However whether a Muslim child in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghan Territories dies from bombs or bullets or from Occupier-imposed deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease, the end result is the same and the moral culpability the same.

We know that the racist Zionists have ben blockading the Gaza Concentration Camp (1.5 million inmates, 800,000 of them children) for several years and if you consult the World Health Organization (WHO) you will find that the ?total health expenditure per capita? permitted by the US Alliance Occupiers  in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan is US$124 and US$29, respectively, as compared to US$3,122 (for Occupier Apartheid Australia) and  US$2,784 (for Occupier UK) (see WHO: http://www.who.int/countries/en/ ).

All decent people abide by national and international laws, respecting the words of Jesus Christ: ? Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's? (Matthew 22.21, the  New Testament of the Holy Bible) and so the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and all world leaders (except for the leaders of the war criminal US Alliance and racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel) would recognize the obligation to abide by Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War which demands that an Occupier should provide its Conquered Subjects with food and medical life-sustaining requisites ?to the fullest extent of the means available to it? (see: http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/y4gcpcp.htm ):

? Article 55

To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.

The Occupying Power may not requisition foodstuffs, articles or medical supplies available in the occupied territory, except for use by the occupation forces and administration personnel, and then only if the requirements of the civilian population have been taken into account. Subject to the provisions of other international Conventions, the Occupying Power shall make arrangements to ensure that fair value is paid for any requisitioned goods.

The Protecting Power shall, at any time, be at liberty to verify the state of the food and medical supplies in occupied territories, except where temporary restrictions are made necessary by imperative military requirements.

Article 56

To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.

If new hospitals are set up in occupied territory and if the competent organs of the occupied State are not operating there, the occupying authorities shall, if necessary, grant them the recognition provided for in Article 18. In similar circumstances, the occupying authorities shall also grant recognition to hospital personnel and transport vehicles under the provisions of Articles 20 and 21.

In adopting measures of health and hygiene and in their implementation, the Occupying Power shall take into consideration the moral and ethical susceptibilities of the population of the occupied territory.?

The US Alliance are grossly violating the Geneva Convention and hence are war criminally responsible for the estimated 1,000 child deaths every day under Emperor Obama in the Occupied Territories of the American Empire.

However silence kills and silence is complicity, whether it is silence over paedophiles or silence over paedocides.  One supposes that the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury ? and indeed all the clergy of the Catholic, Anglican and other Christian Churches - are conscious of their accountability to Higher Authority as set out in the following very well known injunctions of Jesus in relation to Care for Children and which He has presented very forcefully (these quotes are taken from the wonderful King James Version of the Holy Bible):

?Mark 9:42.  And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.

Mark 10:14.  Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.15 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. 16 And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them. Matthew 18:6 But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Matthew 18:10. Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven. Matthew 18:14 Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.

Mark 9:42. And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. Mark 10:14 Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.15 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. 16 And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.

Luke 17:2.  It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.?

And if He exists, may the God they believe in have mercy on their mass paedocide-ignoring souls.

Dr Gideon Polya currently teaches science students at a major Australian university. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has recently published ?Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950? (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contribution ?Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality? in ?Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics? (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007): http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ). He has just published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book ?Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History? (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the ?forgotten? World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .

Current efforts to deny climate science are part of an organized campaign that dates back 20 years, when the fossil fuel industry first formed a lobbying apparatus to stifle action on global warming, the environment group Greenpeace said on Wednesday.

In a report titled "Dealing in Doubt: The Climate Denial Industry and Climate Science," the group accused ExxonMobil of being the ringleader of what it called a "campaign of denial."

Exxon was a prominent member of the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition, one of the first industry groups established in 1989 to refute findings of the then-newly formed UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Since Exxon's 1998 merger with Mobil, the oil giant has spent $23 million on stoking opposition to climate action, Greenpeace said. It continues to fund 28 groups that run denial campaigns, according to the report, though the oil giant is hardly alone in betting against climate change.

The report said that the think tanks at the forefront of challenging the science of warming -- such as the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) -- receive a majority of their climate-related funds from a raft of utility, coal, oil and car interests.

Kenneth Green, a resident environmental scholar at AEI, said he has "never worked for an energy company, worked as a lobbyist, worked at a lobbying firm nor been registered as a lobbyist."

Green, in particular, was called out in the report for a "long history of connections with a number of the front groups funded by industry," especially ExxonMobil. "Greenpeace's implication that such donations influence my research or findings is both cynical and illogical," Green told SolveClimate.

"It is not surprising that in their efforts to stem the rapid erosion of credibility in climate science, Greenpeace would double down on the type of attacks it routinely applies to those who differ with their extremist views of climate risk and climate policy," Green added.

No. 1 Target: UN IPCC

The denial industry's main target from the get-go, according to Greenpeace, was the IPCC.

"The aim was to discredit the process by which the IPCC worked," it said.

Key moments, the group said, include:

• In 1990, fossil fuel interests launched a public push to refute the main finding of the first IPCC assessment that greenhouse gas emissions would "certainly" lead to warming.

• In 1995, following the second IPCC assessment, which concluded there is a "discernible human influence on global climate," attacks shifted from the science to the scientists themselves.

• In 1997, Bert Bolin, the chair of both the World Meteorological Organization and the IPCC for nine years, was forced to release a statement denying claims that he had flip-flopped on human-caused climate change.

• In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute, a trade and lobbying group, began a communications campaign to inform the media and citizens about "uncertainties in climate science," with the goal of thwarting Kyoto Protocol-like climate measures.

With the release of the IPCC's third and fourth assessments in 2001 and 2007, climate skeptics ramped up efforts, Greenpeace said.

The report details memos, press junkets, petitions, recent denier conferences led by the Heartland Institute, and a book by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, another conservative-leaning think tank -- all allegedly aimed at questioning the consensus view on climate change.

The report also identified a "central team of spokespeople" that for years has been used to challenge the science. They include: Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, both Harvard-Smithsonian Institute astrophysicists; Richard Lindzen, a climatologist at MIT; Patrick Michaels, a climatologist and scholar at the free-market Cato Institute; and Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist and former professor at the University of Virginia.

Singer was particularly singled out by Greenpeace as a "serial denier."

In an email to SolveClimate, Singer responded to the "serial denier" label by saying: "I don't know what this means -- perhaps someone who responds to 'serial alarmists' like Greenpeace (who moved from baby seals, to ozone to global warming)."

Singer said claims by Greenpeace that "he has published little, if any, peer-reviewed climate science in the last 20 years" are simply "not true."

2010: Climategate, IPCC Attacks, Monckton

"The campaign against climate science has intensified as global action on climate change has become more likely," Greenpeace said.

The past several months have seen "ClimateGate" -- the controversy over hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s prominent Climatic Research Unit -- and the admission by the IPCC of a mistake exaggerating Himalayan glacier melt in its 2007 report.

Both incidences sparked outrage among skeptics of climate science, who seized on them -- and on an especially snowy winter in Washington, D.C. -- to bolster their claims that global warming is not real.

"The world is learning just how shabby and shoddy the work of the United Nations IPCC and associated climate scientists has always been," Green said.

Scientists worldwide have tried to beat back the criticism with press conferences, letters and petitions pointing to overwhelming evidence that a buildup of greenhouse gases is warming the Earth.

Still, independent evaluations of both CRU and the IPCC are underway. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Washington's most prominent climate skeptic, has gone farther, suggesting criminal investigations of top climate scientists and lead authors in the IPCC.

The Greenpeace report suggests this could be the tip of the iceberg, due in part to the rise of the Internet.

"In recent years, the corporate PR campaign has gone viral, spawning a denial movement that is distributed, decentralized and largely immune to reasoned response," the group said.

New times have also spawned a new kind of denier, the group said. The main example is business consultant Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and noted climate skeptic. He is not a scientist but has testified before Congress about climate science and become a "darling of the industry-funded, U.S.-based conservative think tanks," Greenpeace said.

Richard Littlemore, a co-author of the new book "Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming" and editor of DeSmog Blog, said Monckton has "a history of advocating completely wacky positions ... and is now saying things that are diametrically opposed to the scientific consensus."

"It's impossible to have a reasoned conversation with someone like Monckton -- in part because, like some argumentative old uncle, he's just not interested in reason," Littlemore told SolveClimate. "He just wants to maintain the debate."

"Monckton offers a bunch of examples that are often narrowly true, but calculated to confuse or distract," Littlemore added.

Greenpeace warned:

"There are many more like him who repeat the denier message for no other reason than because they believe it."

Today's youth find little value in the caricature of human nature as rational, calculating and utilitarian. They prefer to think of human nature as empathic.

The following is an adapted excerpt from Jeremy Rifkin's new book, 'The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis' (Tarcher/Penguin; January 2010).

For two hundred years the American Dream has served as the bedrock foundation of the American way of life. The dream, reduced to its essence, is that in America, every person has the right and opportunity to pursue his or her own individual material self interest in the marketplace, and make something of their life, or at least sacrifice so the next generation might enjoy a better life. The role of the government, in turn, is to guarantee individual freedom, assure the proper functioning of the market, protect property rights, and look out for national security. In all other matters, the government is expected to step aside so that a nation of free men and woman can pursue their individual ambitions.

Although American history is peppered with lamentations about the souring of the dream, the criticism never extends to the assumptions that underlie the dream, but only to political, economic and social forces that thwart its realization. To suggest that the dream itself is misguided, outdated, and even damaging to the American psyche, would be considered almost treasonous. Yet, I would like to suggest just that.

The American Dream was spawned in the afterglow of the Enlightenment more than two centuries ago, at the dawn of the modern market economy and nation-state era. Enlightenment philosophers painted a new picture of human nature more in line with the new market forces that were promising a qualitative uplift in the standard of living of human beings. For 1500 years, during the feudal and medieval periods, the Church's dark view of human nature prevailed. Christian theologians exclaimed that babies are born depraved and in sin, and that personal salvation must await them in the next world with Christ. The Enlightenment philosophers views were a breath of fresh air, promising that market forces, if left unhindered by government, would guarantee every person the opportunity to improve his or her station in life. John Locke, Adam Smith, René Descartes, Marquis de Condorcet and other Enlightenment sages were of the belief that human beings were, by nature, materialistic, self-interested, and driven by the biological urge to be propertied, autonomous, independent and self-sufficient, and sovereign over their own domain.

Today, that dream is still fiercely championed by libertarian ideologues and tea party populists. Their increasingly shrill defense of the American Dream, however, seems almost panic stricken in tone, suggesting a desperate effort to hold on to a belief that may, in fact, be passing away.

How else do we account for the fact that the public discourse is becoming so ugly of late? The populist backlash against big government represents more than just a clash over legislative priorities. The opposition to a government stimulus to jumpstart an ailing economy, the reluctance to adopt universal health care, and the growing denial of human induced climate change speak to a deeper sense of apprehension and foreboding. Granted, there are legitimate concerns one might raise to each of these public policy issues. My sense however, is that there is something more profound taking place under the surface, a feeling, particularly among an older generation of Americans, that the American Dream is in jeopardy and, with it, our way of life.

After all, if the American Dream were really working, each person would be able to fend for him or herself in a self-regulating market and be without need of an economic stimulus package or universal healthcare. The reality, however, is that nearly one out of five Americans are either unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work all together, and millions of families are facing foreclosures in a land where homeownership has been regarded as the epitome of the American Dream. Climate change is particularly upsetting; it implies that the invisible hand of the marketplace is both an enabler of global warming and incapable of addressing it without government intervention.

When we consider these big picture policy issues, what becomes clear, if we bother to read between the lines, is that our long held beliefs about human nature, and by extension, the institutions we have created to express those beliefs, played no small role in precipitating the very crisis that now faces the country. In a nation that has come to think of human nature as competitive, even predatory, self serving, acquisitive and utilitarian, is it any wonder that those very values have led to a "winner take all" syndrome in the marketplace in which the rich get richer while everyone else becomes marginalized, and the well-being of the larger community, including the biosphere, becomes eroded? The US ranks 27th among industrialized countries, in income disparity -- the gap between the very rich and the very poor. Only Mexico, Turkey and Portugal, of the OECD nations, have greater disparity of income. Moreover, the US enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the two leading contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Could it be that the American Dream is becoming the American nightmare?

Interestingly, a younger generation of Americans is growing up in a very different world than the one described by the Enlightenment thinkers. Their reality is being lived out on a digital commons and in social spaces on the World Wide Web. All across America, our nation's teens are performing hundreds of hours of community service as part of their formal educational requirements. In school, they are learning that every activity they engage in -- the food they eat, the car they drive, the clothes they wear -- comes with a carbon footprint and affects the well-being of every other human being and fellow creature on Earth.

Today's youth are globally connected. They are Skyping in real time with their cohorts and friends on the far corners of the Earth. They are sharing information, knowledge, and mutual aid in cyberspace chat rooms, apparently unaware of the so called "tragedy of the commons." They have little regard for traditional property rights -- especially copyrights, trademarks, and patents -- believing information should run free. They are far more concerned with sharing access than protecting ownership. They think of themselves less as autonomous agents -- an island to oneself -- and more as actors in an ever shifting set of roles and relationships. Personal wealth, while still important, is not considered an endgame, but only a baseline consideration for enjoying a more immaterial existence, including more meaningful experiences in diverse communities.

Surveys show that the millennial generation in the United States is much more likely than older generations to feel empathy for others. They are far more concerned with the planetary environment and climate change and more likely to favor sustainable economic growth. They are also more likely to believe that government has a responsibility to take care of people who can't care for themselves, and are more supportive of a bigger role of government in providing basic services. They are more supportive of globalization and immigration than older generations. They are also more racially diverse and the most tolerant of any generation in history in support of gender equality and the willingness to champion the rights of the disabled, gays, other minorities, as well as our fellow creatures. In short, they favor a world of inclusivity over exclusivity, and are more comfortable in distributed networks than in old fashioned centralized hierarchies that establish boundaries and restrictions separating people from one another.

The new sensibilities of the younger generation are beginning to usher in a different idea about human nature and the dream that accompanies it. Today's youth find little value in the Enlightenment caricature of human nature as rational, calculating, detached, and utilitarian. They prefer to think of human nature as empathic, mindful, engaged, and driven by the intrinsic value and interconnectedness of life. Homo sapien is being eclipsed by homo empathicus, as they shift their horizon from national markets and nation-state borders to a global economy and a planetary community. Even their preferred indicators of economic progress are shifting, from the crude calculation of gross domestic product and per-capita income to more sensitive social indicators -- like health and longevity, social equality, safe communities, clean environment, etc. -- that measure the well-being of the broader community.

If we listen very closely, we can hear the whisper of a new dream in the making, one based on what youth around the world are beginning to call "quality of life". In this new world, the American Dream seems almost provincial, even quaint, and entirely unsuited for a generation that is beginning to extend its empathic sensibility beyond national identities, to include the whole of humanity and the entirety of the planet as their extended community. If the American Dream served as the gold standard for the era of national markets and nation-state governments, the dream of "quality of life" becomes the standard for the emerging biosphere era.

In this new, more expansive human setting, libertarian cries and tea party bravado suddenly seem far less significant. The assumptions about human nature and the meaning of the human journey that are bound up with the conventional American Dream, which motivate much of the current political brouhaha, are more like a faint echo of the past than a clarion call for the future. The empathic civilization looms on the horizon.

Interference by the U.S. in the internal affairs of Afghanistan has been a tragic chapter in our nation's history.

Over three decades ago, there were social movements in Afghanistan to improve the standard of living of its people, to provide greater equality for women, and there was a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. However the U.S., using subversion, weapons and money was able, as the leader of coalition of nations, to stop progress in these areas of human welfare.

In fact, the gains that had already been made were actually reversed. By 2010 the economic and social status of Afghans has been set back generations; women's status has deterioriated to such an extent that the prevalence of self-immolation has increased among discouraged women, and there is no democracy now, with the U.S. making major decisions as an occupying power.

With President Obama's recently announced military buildup, our nation's leaders are on the verge of doing the virtually impossible - making the situation even worse. But the most cataclysmic aspect of this chronology of events is that the U.S. and the world are less safe, since the image of the U.S. in the world is that of the world's leading military power attacking possibly the poorest nation on earth.

Afghanistan in the late 1970s was a predominantly poor, rural and moderate Muslim nation. Although they were second class citizens, women were allowed to unveil and had the right to vote. From 1933-1978 women started to enter the workforce and become teachers, nurses and even politicians. They worked to end illiteracy and forced marriages. Most of these advances were mostly in Kabul , the most modern and populous city in Afghanistan , although in most of the rural areas women were treated as property. 1

In the 1970s Afghanistan also had serious economic problems, one of which the concentration of ownership of most of the land in the hands of tribal and religious leaders (mullahs). Only 3% of the rural population owned 75% of the land.

Labor unions were legalized, a minimum wage and a progressive income tax were established and a separation of church and state was adopted.

Then, in the latter years of that decade various progressive and communist groups struggled over how to modernize Afghanistan and resolve these inequities. Unfortunately, their efforts to introduce changes involved a degree of coercion and violence directed mainly toward those living in areas outside of Kabul where the vast majority of the population lived in mountainous, rural and tribal areas where there was an exceptionally high rates of illiteracy. Steps to redistribute land were initiated but were met by objections from those who had monopoly ownership of land.

It was the revolutionary government's granting of new rights to women that pushed orthodox Muslim men in the Pashtun villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking up their guns. Even though some of those changes had been made only on paper, some said that they were being made too quickly.

According to these opponents, the government said their women had to attend meetings and that their children had to go to school. Since they believed that these changes threatened their religion, they were convinced that they had to fight. So an opposition movement started at that point which became known as the Mujahideen, an alliance of conservative Islamic groups. 2

By the spring of 1979, rebellion had spread to most of the country's 29 provinces. On March 24, a garrison of soldiers in Herat killed a group of Soviet advisers (and their families) who had ordered Afghan troops to fire on anti-government demonstrators. From this point, the regime was no longer merely isolated from peasants in the countryside, but divided by open hostility from an overwhelming majority of all the people.

The government's secret police and a repressive civilian police force went into action across Afghanistan , and army troops were sent into the countryside to subdue "feudal" villagers. 3

The situation was very grave in Afghanistan at that point, but the U.S. was destined to make it much worse. The initial conflict might have been resolved far short of a civil war if the U.S. had refrained from fostering the uprising. Even if the struggle had progressed to a civil war, the nation might eventually have recovered and moved ahead. Civil wars are disastrous for nations, but after great pain and suffering they can eventually overcome this setback, as the U.S. did after its civil war.

The following is an account of how the U.S laid the groundwork for its encouragement of the uprising and the enormous support that it gave later for the ongoing revolt that would lead to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

The U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began in the 1950s and 1960s. The CIA used impressive bribes and threats to support this growing opposition to the progressive changes, and it also recruited Afghan students in the U.S. to act as agents for them when they returned home. During this period at least one president of the Afghanistan Students Association (ASA), Zia H. Noorzay, was working with the CIA in the U.S. and later became president of the Afghanistan state treasury. One of the Afghan students whom Noorzay and the CIA tried in vain to recruit, Abdul Latif Hotaki, declared in 1967 that a good number of the key officials in the Afghanistan government who studied in the U.S. ?are either CIA-trained or indoctrinated.? 4

According to Roger Morris, National Security Council staff member, the CIA started to offer covert backing to Islamic radicals as early as 1973-1974. 5

Subsequently, various other U.S. officials would also indicate their willingness to sacrifice the welfare of the Afghan people in the interest of the American goal of worldwide domination.

In August 1979, four months before the Soviet attack, a classified State Department Report stated: ?the United States larger interests ?would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan .? 6

According to one senior official, "The question here was whether it was morally acceptable that, in order to keep the Soviets off balance, which was the reason for the operation, it was permissible to use other lives for our geopolitical interests." Carter's CIA director Stansfield Turner answered the question: "I decided I could live with that ." 7

Judging by examples of U.S. interferences since World War II, not included in this article, it appears that replies similar to that of Turner may have been given with similar genocidal-like results. 8

In 1998 Zigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter came clean and admitted that indeed the U.S. had helped bring about the Soviet invasion. Le Nouvel Observateur in Paris in its January 15-21 issue carried the account of an interview with him in which he was asked if he had played a role in providing intelligence to the Mujahideen before the Soviets invaded. His reply was as follows:

?Yes, according to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan , 24 Dec. 1979 . But the reality secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul . And that very day I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.? 9

The Soviet Union at that time bordered Afghanistan on the north and had various ties with Afghanistan over the years. Those areas are now the nations of Turkmenistan , Uzbekistan and Tajikistan . Since these areas had large Muslim populations, when the Afghanistan civil war started the Soviet Union feared that the revolt could spread to within its own borders. Since they were not able to convince the factions of the communist government in Afghanistan to resolve their difference and go more slowly in their modernization program the Soviets invaded in December 1979 to quell the uprising.

To counter the Soviets, the U.S. deliberately chose to give most of its support to the most extreme groups. A disproportionate share of U.S. arms went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a particularly fanatical fundamentalist and woman-hater. According to journalist Tim Weiner, "[Hekmatyar's] followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department officials I have spoken with call him 'scary', vicious', a fascist', definite dictatorship material." 10

The Mujahideen, while in power, killed or forced into exile most progressive-minded people, especially those suspected of being socialist or Marxist. Thus, the prospects of any progressive secular form of government in Afghanistan were eventually undermined. This continued after the Soviets left. Edmund McWilliams was sent to Afghanistan in 1989 as a semi-independent analyst of U.S. policy regarding the Afghan jihad. He discovered that as the Soviets left, Hekmatyar in allliance with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and other groups, moved to eliminate his rivals kidnapping, and murdering Afghan opposition members. 11

The U.S. was quick to provide weapons to the Mujahideen. By February 1980, the Washington Post reported that they were receiving arms coming from the U.S. government. 12

The CIA purchased, mainly from China 's government, grenade launchers, mines and SA-7 light anti-aircraft weapons and then arranged for shipment to Pakistan . The amounts were significant - 10,000 tons of arms and ammunition in 1983 which r ose to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, according to Mohammad Yousaf, the Pakistani general who supervised the covert war from 1983-87. 13

Milton Bearden, CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986-1989 who was responsible for arming the Mujahideen, commented, ?The U.S. was fighting the Soviets to the last Afghan.? 14

In October 1984, CIA director William Casey, who wanted to keep abreast of the CIA operation in Afghanistan , went by plane to the military air base south of Islamabad , Pakistan . Helicopters lifted Casey to three secret training camps near the Afghan border, where he watched Mujahideen training.

Pakistani officers also traveled to the U.S, for training on the Stinger missile launcher in June 1986 and then set up a secret Stinger training facility. 15 Between 1986 and 1989, the U.S. provided the Mujahideen with more than 1,000 of these state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile launchers which by some accounts, prevented a Soviet victory. Stinger missiles were able to destroy low flying Soviet planes which forced them to fly at higher altitudes thereby curtailing the damage they could cause. By 1987 a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon officials were visiting the ISI. 16

During the war with the Soviets, the Mujahideen, with U.S. and Saudi Arabia financial help, augmented the size of its military by securing additional recruits in two ways. First, fundamentalist Islamic religious schools for boys called madrassas were established in the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan . Often they came from refugee camps and were orphans of the war.

Although the subject matter of the schools was largely fundamentalist in content, structured to develop a fervor to expel the Soviets, the poverty-stricken families often had no other way to provide their boys with an education.

The prospective students usually had not learned any farming or other skills from their fathers, nor did they have other job opportunities. They were only trained for fighting in wars and how to handle guns. Besides that, food, shelter and military training were provided at no cost. Some boys who were as young as 13 or 14 saw a future stint in the military as a steady source of income. On several occasions madrassas were closed down so that all the students could join the troops on the battlefront.

The other source of additional recruits for the Mujahideen was from a variety of nations around the world with sizeable fundamentalist Muslim populations. These were males who wanted to fight the ?godless Russians?, and some them expected to be martyrs in a holy war.

According to Central Asia specialist and journalist Ahmed Rashid:

?Between 1982 and 1992 some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East , North and East Africa , Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan Mujaheddin. Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas that Zia's military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad.? 17

According to John Ryan, senior scholar at the University of Winnipeg ?As for the Mujahideen that this conflict created, they took on a life of their own, and have now spread throughout the Muslim world and are apparently in cells everywhere. About 5,000 of them were brought into Bosnia to fight the Serbs ? even Osama bin Laden may have visited Bosnian president Izetbegovic in 1992. 18 The Mujahideen later helped the Kosovo Albanians.? 19

In 1989 the Soviets retreated from Aghanistan and left behind 1.5 million dead Aghans. 20 and 14,000 of its own dead 21

But then a new war started, this time between the Mujahideen and the Afghan government. It lasted for three years, until the government was defeated in 1992. After that, the competing armies within the Mujahideen fought among themselves to control Kabul , using stockpiles of weapons that had been provided by the U.S. to fight the Soviets. About 50,000 people were killed and much of the city was left in shambles. 22 Even today, little of Kabul has been reconstructed. Hundreds of thousands of people were driven into squalid refugee camps, and millions of exiles were blocked from returning.

While the Mujahideen was in power there was a severe erosion of women's rights. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was set up to control women's dress codes and the length of men's beards. Rape was a common tool of war for the fundamentalists. As one man said ?young women who did not want to be raped by these zealots threw themselves off the top floors of tall buildings and preferred death to rape?Many families who had daughters didn't want fundamentalists to rape them. So when the fundamentalists attacked their homes, they would kill their own daughters, because it was better for them to die than to be raped by these criminals.? 23

Despite all of this brutality, women were still allowed to work, and get an education under the Mujahideen government. In fact, before the Taliban later took over Kabul , about half of the working population were women who were employed as teachers, doctors, as well as in other professional occupations.

For the next four years there was a war between the Mujahideen and the Taliban with the latter emerging victorious in 1996. Many Afghans welcomed them, since they believed that they would end the corruption of the Mujahideen. But as fundamentalist Muslims, their policies were similar to those of the Mujahideen.

A virtual war was declared on women under the Taliban, which had no basis in Islamic law. They were not allowed to participate in the work force or even have doctors treat them (without a male relative present), and girls were forbidden to go to school.  They were forbidden to work, leave the house without a male escort, not allowed to seek medical help from a male doctor, and were forced to cover themselves from head to toe, even covering their eyes. Women who were doctors and teachers before, suddenly were forced to be beggars and even prostitutes in order to feed their families. 26

Trying to understand the mindset of how such injustices can take place is not an easy undertaking. But one thing is obvious, as I have mentioned earlier in this article: the U.S. was the main force that created the conditions that allowed the Mujahideen and the Taliban to come to power because of the support it gave 20 to 30 years ago to the most violent and anti-democratic forces within Afghanistan who ruled ruthlessly, eradicating educated progressive leaders, driving others into exile and corrupting the minds of many of its young males.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001 the U.S. reacted by attacking Afghanistan , although none of the those who hijacked the planes in those attacks were Afghans.. The rationale given for the U.S. air attacks on Afghanistan was that the training of the hijackers was done by Al Qaeda in camps in Afghanistan . Although this retaliatory bombing supposedly achieved the stated goal of the U.S. government, it was decided to invade anyway and is still there eight years later. The Taliban was replaced by the Northern Alliance and now there is an Afghan government which is the surrogate of the U.S.

What do the Afghan people have to show now over 30 years after the Soviet invasion in the areas of democracy, women's rights and economic and social progress? Nothing! In fact the Afghan people are worse off now. And the future of Afghans at the hands of the U.S. probably is horrendous.

Democracy has been undermined in Afghanistan , because many of the progressive leaders were either killed or forced into exile by warlords supported by the U.S. during and after the war with the Soviets. This new government has been formed in an undemocratic process promoted by the U.S. and now consists of some of the warlords who were deposed by the Taliban.

Today the ordinary Afghan is caught between three forces: the U.S. , the Taliban, and the puppet government composed of former members of the Mujahideen who many Afghans would like to have tried as war criminals. Also, the Upper House of Parliament is not a democratic institution, its members being appointed by the President. Furthermore, the Afghan constitution, although it proclaims equality for men and women, is secondary to the supremacy of Islamic law, which can be used to squash dissent and human rights, including the rights of women. 27

Furthermore, it is ludicrous to contend that a nation that is occupied by a foreign power is allowed to make the important decisions. In short when the U.S. occupiers say ?Jump!? the Afghan government replies ?How high??

Malalai Joya, a young Afghan woman who was elected to the Lower House of Parliament and who was later barred from that body because of her criticism of some of its members. She has estimated that up to 60% of the deputies in the Lower House are directly or indirectly connected to current and past human rights abuses. 28

Under the newly established government in 2001 women were allowed to once again work and go to school. Nevertheless, the abuse of women continues, since the government is too weak to enforce many of the laws, especially in the rural areas. 29

According to Human Rights Watch, "The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying "blood money" to a girl who was injured when he raped her." 30

According to Joya:

?Women's conditions in some cities have slightly improved since the Taliban regime. But if we compare it with the era before the rule of the fundamentalists in Afghanistan , it has not changed much. Afghan women had more rights in the 1960s to 1980s than today. Rapes, abductions, murders, violence, forced marriages, and violence are increasing at an alarming rate never seen before in our history. Women commit self-immolation to escape their miseries, and the rate of self-immolations is climbing in many of the provinces. Afghanistan still faces a women's rights catastrophe.? 31

The economic and social welfare status of Afghans today due to U.S intervention that started over 30 years ago is abysmal. The U.S. is not the only culpable nation; Pakistan and Saudi Arabia also played major roles in this deterioration.

The Afghan people are in dire straits. They lost about one and a half million people in their war with the Soviet Union , according to Rashid, and tens of thousands more have died in civil wars. In addition 600,000 have been wounded. A bout one in ten Afghans is disabled, mostly due to the wars and landmines. Their life expectancy is about 43 years. 32

Many Americans explain this internal strife in Afghanistan by saying that ?they have always been fighting among themselves.? But the truth is that America has been more or less behind most of the violence, as this article demonstrates .

Since the U.S. started its bombing in 2001 an estimated 7,309 Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-led forces as of June 20, 2008 , according to an estimate made by University of New Hampshire Professor Mark Herold . Those who died after impact of an explosive are not counted. 33

Although more than 3.7 million Afghan refugees have returned to their homes in the past six years, several million still live in Pakistan and Iran . About 132,000 people are internally displaced as a result of drought, violence and instability. Furthermore, there are reportedly about 400,000 orphans in Afghanistan. 34

Afghanistan suffers from an unemployment rate of 40% and most of those who have jobs earn only meager wages. Many youth joined the Mujahideen or Taliban in order to receive some food, shelter and income. The average educational level of Afghans is 1.7 years of schooling, which severely limits their job opportunities. As many as 18 million Afghans still live on less than $2 a day. 35

Even today the Afghan people are confronted by many dangers. On their land there are still about 10 million mines which cause loss of life and limbs and reduces the amount of land available for farming.

An estimated seven million people remain susceptible to hunger throughout the country, and   Afghanistan is also vulnerable to natural disasters as well as a high risk of diseases. 36   

Afghanistan needs economic development aid, health care and educational assistance - not bombs.

U.S. officials talk about nation-building in Afghanistan . But what they neglect to say is that the U.S. has actually done just the opposite: it has fostered the destruction of much of that nation and now poses a clear and imminent danger to what remains of the rest of that beleaguered country.

James A. Lucas is a member of Peace Action and Veterans for Peace. He can be reached at jlucas511@woh.rr.com

SOURCES

http://www.afghan-web.com/woman/afghanwomenhistory.html

2. New York Times, 9 February, 1980 , p.3, (From Willian Blum, Killing Hope, Ref. 52 on p. 346)

3. Philip Gasper, ? Afghanistan , the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban,? International Socialist Review,

November-December 2001. http://www.isreview.org/issues/20/CIA_binladen_afghan.shtml

4. ?How the CIA turns foreign students into traitors?, Ramparts Magazine ( San Francisco ), April 1967, pp.

23-4. (As mentioned in William Blum, Killing Hope, Ref 29 on p.343.)

5. ?CIA Activities in Afghanistan ,Wikipedia.?. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Afghanistan

6. Gasper.

7. Gasper.

8. James A. Lucas, ?Deaths in Other Nations Since WWI Due to US Interventions?, Countercurrents, April

24, 2007. http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm

9. ?The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan , Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski?, President Jimmy

Carter's National Security Adviser. http://www.glonbalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

10. Gasper.

11. Steve Coll, ?Ghost Wars?, (Penguin Books) p 181.

12. Gasper.

13. Steve Coll, ?Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert Afghan War?, ' Washington Post', July 19, 1992 .

http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/anatomy.htm

14. Milton Bearden, ? Afghanistan Graveyard of Empires.? Foreign Affairs, November/December 2001.

15. Coll., Anatomy

16. Gasper.

17. Ahmed Rashid, ?Taliban,? Yale University Press, New Haven , London , 2001 , p. 130.

18. Dianna Johnstone, ?Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia , NATO and Western Delusions?, New York : Monthly

Review Press, 2002, pp. 61-62, personal communication with Canada 's foreign ambassador to

Yugoslavia , James Bissett.

19. John Ryan, ? Afghanistan , A Tale of Never Ending Tragedy?, Global Research , July 19 , 2006 .

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2750FA

20. Rashid, p.13.

When forecasts of fossil fuel reserves improve, how should we respond? A new report (pdf) by the trade body Oil & Gas UK says that 11bn barrels of oil and gas could now be extracted from the UK continental shelf. This would mean a rough doubling of current reserves, but it depends on high energy prices and much greater investments than companies have so far been prepared to make to turn possible or probable reserves into real ones. If the extra reserves materialised, the body says, the UK could still produce up to half its own supplies in 2020: a lower rate of decline than previously forecast.

We should be cautious about projections made by trade associations: they have an interest in talking up their industry's prospects, and the report could be read as just another plea for even more generous tax breaks. But if it's true that reserves could double, is this good news or bad news? It depends on which stories you want to hear.

In terms of its impact on the UK's energy security, it's obviously good news. Every so often – this January was an example – there's a panic about energy supplies here. Sometimes it's justified; sometimes it isn't; but the UK's low gas storage capacity and the length of the supply lines from other countries means that the decline of North Sea reserves has left us vulnerable to shortfalls. The more gas this country can produce on its own territory, the less likely it is to suffer from the effects of pipeline closures by the Russian government, or price-fixing by German utility companies.

In terms of total global supply, the trade body's projections don't make much difference. Annoyingly, it doesn't publish seperate figures for oil and gas production, but its graphs (figure 8 in the report) suggest that the possible extra reserves are split roughly equally. This would mean an extra 2.9bn barrels of oil, which equates to around one month of global consumption.

Some people see the prospect of peak oil as good news for the environment, as it might be the only threat which could prompt governments to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But it is also likely to encourage them to stimulate investments in even dirtier sources of energy: tar sands, oil shales and turning coal into synthetic petroleum.

But whether we burn filthy unconventional fuels or slightly less filthy oil and gas, beyond a certain point they will tip us beyond a critical level of global warming. Most governments identify this as 2C. Several game-changing papers published in Nature last year suggest that even if we were to burn no unconventional fossil fuels, we can afford to use only 60% of current reserves of oil, gas and coal if we're to prevent the global average temperature from rising by more than 2C.

In other words, if governments are serious about climate change, then far from encouraging the expansion of supplies, they should be deciding which 40% or more of current reserves they are going to leave in the ground. Current policy suggests that they are not serious about climate change.

In the UK, responsibility for the problem rests with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc). The way it operates suggests that the two halves of the department must hate each other. The energy section seems to be in a state of perpetual war with the climate change section. Every morning Ed Miliband, the secretary of state, must beat himself up like Edward Norton in Fight Club.

At the end of January, for example, the department announced a:

Record acreage … in latest Licensing Round for offshore oil and gas exploration...areas of the Continental Shelf not as yet explored, and will provide a new boost to activity in the basin. … Estimates suggest there are still around 20 billion barrels of oil equivalent, or possibly more, to be produced, and this latest licensing round will help ensure we realise this potential.

In other words, far from cutting our extractable reserves by 40%, the government wants to boost them by 300%.

In reality, no fight is taking place within the department, because no one there, as far as I can tell, is prepared to acknowledge the contradiction. When I challenged Ed Miliband about this last year, he responded as if he had never been exposed to the problem before. Decc happily pursues its two policies, apparently unaware that one negates the other.

Is this ever going to change, or are the government's elaborate measures encouraging us to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels nothing more than a public relations stunt, designed to create a semblance of action as ever carbon more is dragged out of the ground to be burnt?

The release of more than 370 billion tons of carbon (GtC) from buried early biospheres, adding more than one half of the original carbon inventory of the atmosphere (~590 GtC), as well as the depletion of vegetation, have triggered a fundamental shift in the state of the atmosphere [1]. Raising atmospheric CO2 level at a rate of 2 ppm/year, a pace unprecedented in the geological record, with the exception of the effects of CO2 released from craters excavated by large asteroid impacts, the deleterious effects of pollution and deforestation have reached a geological dimension, tracking toward conditions which existed on Earth in the mid-Pliocene, about 2.8 million years ago [2].

Lost all too often in the climate debate is an appreciation of the delicate balance between the physical and chemical state of the atmosphere-ocean-land system and the evolving biosphere, which controls the emergence, survival and demise of species, including humans. By contrast to Venus, with its thick blanket of CO2 and sulphur dioxide greenhouse atmosphere, exerting extreme pressure (90 bars) at the surface, or Mars with its thin (0.01 bar) CO2 atmosphere, the presence in the Earth's atmosphere of trace concentrations of greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, nitric oxides, ozone) modulates surface temperatures in the range of -89 and +57.7 degrees Celsius and a mean of 14 degrees Celsius, allowing the presence of liquid water and thereby of life [3].

Forming a thin breathable veneer only slightly more than one thousand the diameter of Earth, and evolving both gradually as well as through major perturbations with time, the Earth's atmosphere acts as a lungs of the biosphere, allowing an exchange of carbon gases and oxygen with plants and animals, which in turn affect the atmosphere, for example through release of methane and photosynthetic oxygen (Figure 1).

CO2 is 28 times more soluble in water than is oxygen. Above critical threshold CO2 becomes toxic for certain organisms. Marine organisms are more sensitive to changes in CO2 levels than are terrestrial organisms. Excess CO2 reduces the ability of respiratory pigments to oxygenate tissues, and makes body fluids more acidic, thereby hampering the production of carbonate hard parts like shells. Relatively modest but sustained increases in CO2 concentrations hamper the synthesis of proteins, reduce fertilization rates, and produce deformities in calcareous hard parts. The observed pattern of marine extinctions is consistent with hypercapnia (excessive levels of CO2), with related extinction events [4].

When the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere rises above a critical threshold, climate shifts to a different state. Any significant increase in the level of carbon gases triggers powerful feedbacks. These include ice melt/warm water interaction, decline of ice reflection (albedo) and increase in infrared absorption by exposed water. Further release of CO2 from the oceans and from drying and burning vegetation shifts global climate zones toward the poles, warms the oceans and induces ocean acidification [5].

The essential physics of the infrared absorption/emission resonance of greenhouse molecules is indicated by observations in nature and laboratory studies, as portrayed in the relations between atmospheric CO2 and mean global temperature projections (Figure 2).

During most of Earth history the oxygen-poor composition of the atmosphere resulted in dominance of reduced carbon species in the air and the oceans, including methane and carbon monoxide, allowing mainly algae and bacteria to exist in the oceans (Figure 3). It is commonly held that, about 0.7 billion years ago, in the wake of the Marinoan glaciation (so-called ?Snowball Earth?), oxygenation of low-temperature water allowed development of new oxygen-binding proteins and thereby of multicellular animals, followed by development of a rich variety of organisms - the ?Cambrian explosion? [6].

The present state of the biosphere, allowing survival of large mammals and of humans on the continents, developed when CO2 levels fell below about 500 ppm some 34 million years ago (end Eocene) [7]. At this stage, as well as following warm periods in the Oligocene (c. 25 million years ago) and mid-Miocene (about 15 million years ago), development of the Antarctic ice sheet led to a fundamental change in the global climate regime. About 2.8 million years ago (mid-Pliocene) the Greenland ice sheet and the Arctic Sea ice began to form, with further decline in global temperatures expressed through glacial-interglacial cycles regulated by orbital forcing (Milankovic cycles), with atmospheric CO2 levels oscillating between 180 and 280 ppm CO2 (Figure 4). These conditions allowed the emergence of humans in Africa and their migration all over the world (Figure 5) [8].

Recent paleoclimate studies, using multiple proxies (soil carbonate d13C, alkenones, boron/calcium, stomata leaf pores), indicate that the current CO2 level of 388 ppm and CO2-equivalent level of 460 ppm (which includes the methane factor), commit warming above pre-industrial levels to 3 to 4 degrees C in the tropics and 10 degrees C in polar regions, tracking toward an ice-free Earth [2].

Small human clans post-3 million years-ago responded to changing climates through migration within and out of Africa . Homo sapiens emerged during the glacial period preceding the 124 thousand years-old Emian interglacial, when temperatures rose by about 1 degree C and sea levels by 6-8 meters relative to pre-industrial [5].  The development of agriculture and thereby human civilization had to wait until climate stabilized about 8000 years ago, when large scale irrigation along the great river valleys (the Nile , Euphrates , Hindus and Yellow River ) became possible. 

Since the 18 th century mean global temperature has risen by about 0.8 degrees C. Another 0.5 degrees C is masked by industrial-emitted aerosols (SO2), and further rise ensues from current melting of the ice sheets and sea ice. The polar regions, acting as the ?thermostats? of the Earth, are the source of the cold air current vortices and the cold ocean currents, such as the Humboldt and California current, which keep the Earth's overall temperature balance, much as the blood stream regulates the body's temperature and the supply of oxygen.

At 4 degrees Celsius advanced to total melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets leads to sea levels tens of meters higher than at present. Further rise of CO2-e above 500 ppm and mean global temperatures above 4 degrees C can only lead toward greenhouse Earth conditions such as existed during the Cretaceous and early Cainozoic (Figure 4) [5, 7].

A rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration triggers feedback effects due to warming, desiccation and burning of vegetation, releasing more CO2. The onset of methane release from polar bogs and sediments is of major concern. Ice/melt water interaction proceeds as melt water melts more ice, ice loss results in albedo loss and exposed water absorb infrared heat, resulting in an amplified feedback cycle. Because CO2 is cumulative, with atmospheric residence time on the scale of centuries to millennia, stabilization of the climate through small incremental reduction in emission may not be sufficient to avoid runaway climate change and possible tipping points.

Climate change is appropriately described as a global oxygenation event affecting geological carbon deposits as well as the present biosphere. At 2 ppm/year the pace of carbon oxidation exceeds the highest recorded geological rate of 0.4 ppm/year at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary at 55 Ma, when about 2000 GtC were burnt, triggering an extinction of species [7].

Sea level rise constitutes a critical parameter which reflects all other components of climate change. Since the early 20 th century the rate of sea level rise increased from about 1 mm/year to about 3.5 mm/year (1993 ? 2009 mean rate 3.2+/-0.4 mm/year), representing a nearly 4 fold increase since the onset of the industrial age (Figure 6).

The Earth poles are warming at rates 3 to 4 times faster than low latitudes (Figure 7) [9]. The most detailed satellite information available shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica are shrinking and in some places are already in runaway melt mode [10]. A new study, using 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, calculates changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges, where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica , ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003 [10].

The consequences of open ended rise in atmospheric CO2 are manifest in the geological record (Frontispiece). The world is in a lag period, when increasing atmospheric energy is expressed by intense hurricanes, increased pressure at mid-latitude high pressure zones and shift of climate zones toward the poles. With ensuing desertification of temperate zones, i.e. southern Europe , southern Australia , southern Africa , the desiccated forests become prey to firestorms, such as in Victoria and California .

There is nowhere the 6.5 billion of contemporary humans can go, not even the barren planets into the study of which space agencies have been pouring more funding than governments allocate for environmental mitigation to date. At 460 ppm CO2-equivalent, the climate is tracking close to the upper stability limit of the Antarctic ice sheet, defined at approximately 500 ppm [5,7]. Once transcended, mitigation measures would hardly be able to re-form the cryosphere.

According to Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute and advisor to the German government:

? We're simply talking about the very life support system of this planet ?.

Humans can not argue with the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere. What is needed are urgent measures including

•  Deep cuts in carbon emissions.

•  Parallel Fast track transformation to non-polluting energy utilities ? solar, solar-thermal, wind, tide, geothermal, hot rocks.

•  Global reforestation and re-vegetation campaigns, including application of biochar.

The alternative does not bear contemplation.

Andrew Glikson is Earth and paleoclimate scientist, Australian National University

[1] After Peter Ward, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future (HarperCollins, NY 2007, p 135).

[2] Pagani M. et al. 2010. http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n1/abs/ngeo724.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth#Weather_and_climate

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event

[5] Hansen et al. 2008. Target CO2: Where Should humanity aim? http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf

[6] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/4/l_034_02.html

[7] Zachos J.C. et al. 2008 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html

[8] deMenocal, P.B. 2004. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~peter/Resources/Publications/deMenocal.2004.pdf

[9] http://wwfblogs.org/climate/content/looking-above-normal-temperatures-they-are-arctic

[10] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/nature08471.html

http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/26/nature-dynamic-thinning-of-greenland-and-antarctic-ice-sheets-glacier/

 

Figure 1. The terrestrial atmosphere as ?lungs of the biosphere? ? an analogy.

Figure 2. The relations between atmospheric CO2-equivalent (including the radiative forcing of methane) and mean global temperature, according to Charney's climate sensitivity parameter (Hansen et al., 2007, 2008) (IPCC-2007). Circles mark new paleoclimate estimates of atmospheric conditions in the mid-Pliocene (2.8 million years ago) and the mid-Miocene (15 million years ago), with implications to current climate trajectories.

Figure 3. An artist's impression of Earth's oceans as they may have appeared up to about 1 billion years ago, when the oceans were populated by single celled algae and bacteria.

 

 

Figure 4. CO2 and deep ocean temperature changes during the Cainozoic (since 65 million years-ago [Ma]), based on proxy studies (stomata fossil leaf pore densities; 13C isotopes in carbonate nodules in fossil soil), indicating the onset age of the Antarctic ice sheet (c. 34 Ma), West Antarctic ice sheet and Northern Hemisphere ice sheets (c. 3 Ma). Note the glacial-interglacial approximate upper limits at 500 ppm CO2 [7].

 

Figure 5. Human evolution in relation to the atmosphere from about 5 Ma (early Pliocene) (after deMenocal 2004) [8]. Upper blue plot represents paleo-deep sea temperature variations. Black plot represent atmospheric dustiness, corresponding to wind and glacial states. Discontinuous line below represents the duration of Milankovic cycles. Black marks below represent development of grasslands and decrease of organic productivity as the habitats shift from tropical to savannah conditions. Discontinuous lines below represent recorded durations of human species.

 

Figure 6 . Sea level changes 1993 ? 2009 scanned by the Topex and Jason satellites. University of Colorado , 2009 http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

 

 

Figure 7. Northern Hemisphere temperature anomalies, December, 2009 (NOAA/ESRL Physical Science Division) http://wwfblogs.org/climate/content/looking-above-normal-temperatures-they-are-arctic

Atmospheric levels of methane, the greenhouse gas which is much more powerful than carbon dioxide, have risen significantly for the last three years running, scientists will disclose today – leading to fears that a major global-warming "feedback" is beginning to kick in.

For some time there has been concern that the vast amounts of methane, or "natural gas", locked up in the frozen tundra of the Arctic could be released as the permafrost is melted by global warming. This would give a huge further impetus to climate change, an effect sometimes referred to as "the methane time bomb".

This is because methane (CH4) is even more effective at retaining the Sun's heat in the atmosphere than CO2, the main focus of international climate concern for the last two decades. Over a relatively short period, such as 20 years, CH4 has a global warming potential more than 60 times as powerful as CO2, although it decays more quickly.

Now comes the first news that levels of methane in the atmosphere, which began rising in 2007 when an unprecedented heatwave in the Arctic caused a record shrinking of the sea ice, have continued to rise significantly through 2008 and 2009.

Although researchers cannot yet be certain, and there may be non-threatening explanations, there is a fear that rising temperatures may have started to activate the positive feedback mechanism. This would see higher atmospheric levels of the gas producing more warming, which in turn would release more methane, which would produce even further warming, and so on into an uncontrollable "runaway" warming effect. This is believed to have happened at the end of the last Ice Age, causing a very rapid temperature rise in a matter of decades.

The new figures will be revealed this morning at a major two-day conference on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, taking place at the Royal Society in London. They will be disclosed in a presentation by Professor Euan Nisbet, of Royal Holloway College of the University of London, and Dr Ed Dlugokencky of the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, which is run by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Both men are leading experts on CH4 in the atmosphere, and Dr Dlugokencky in particular, who is in charge of NOAA's global network of methane monitoring stations, is sometimes referred to as "the keeper of the world's methane". In a presentation on "Global atmospheric methane in 2010: budget, changes and dangers", the two scientists will reveal that, after a decade of near-zero growth, "globally averaged atmospheric methane increased by [approximately] 7ppb (parts per billion) per year during 2007 and 2008."

They go on: "During the first half of 2009, globally averaged atmospheric CH4 was [approximately] 7ppb greater than it was in 2008, suggesting that the increase will continue in 2009. There is the potential for increased CH4 emissions from strong positive climate feedbacks in the Arctic where there are unstable stores of carbon in permafrost ... so the causes of these recent increases must be understood."

Professor Nisbet said at the weekend that the new figures did not necessarily mark a new excursion from the trend. "It may just be a couple of years of high growth, and it may drop back to what it was," he said. "But there is a concern that things are beginning to change towards renewed growth from feedbacks."

The product of biological activity by microbes, usually in decaying vegetation or other organic matter, "natural gas" is emitted from natural sources and human activities. Wetlands may give off up to a third of the total amount produced. But large amounts are also released from the production of gas for fuel, and also from agriculture, including the production of rice in paddy fields and the belches of cows as they chew the cud (which is known as "bovine eructation"). However, methane breaks down and disappears from the atmosphere quite quickly, and until recently it was thought that the Earth's methane "budget" was more or less in balance.

Global atmospheric levels of the gas now stand at about 1,790 parts per billion. They began to be measured in 1984, when they stood at about 1,630ppb, and were steadily rising. It was thought that this was due to the Russian gas industry, which before the collapse of the Soviet Union was affected by enormous leaks.

After 1991, substantial amounts were invested in stopping the leaks by a privatised Russian gas industry, and the methane rise slowed.

Methane in the atmosphere: The recent rise

Many climate scientists think that frozen Arctic tundra, like this at Sermermiut in Greenland, is a ticking time bomb in terms of global warming, because it holds vast amounts of methane, an immensely potent greenhouse gas. Over thousands of years the methane has accumulated under the ground at northern latitudes all around the world, and has effectively been taken out of circulation by the permafrost acting as an impermeable lid. But as the permafrost begins to melt in rising temperatures, the lid may open – with potentially catastrophic results.

Deniers are dancing on the graves of their reputations, to say nothing of reality itself. But Earth will still get the last laugh on all of them, and us for that matter.

Bad news. Thanks to perfectly timed, premeditated reality assassinations like so-called ClimateGate, nearly half of Americans may now believe that the various threats of climate change are exaggerated. That's the highest quotient ever since polling on the issue commenced. But there is good news: They're on the wrong side of history and science, and Earth will still get the last laugh on all of them, and us for that matter.

Welcome to our existential nightmare. From rising seas and runaway droughts and storms to the outer limits of dystopian catastrophes like the fart apocalypse -- I'll explain later -- our planet has no shortage of ways to bitch-slap us back into our dangerous reality, whether we want it to or not.

Of course, we could stave off some of the more egregious probabilities of extinction, if we acted now to limit global warming's inexorable rise to 2 degrees. But that means a determined destruction of the status quo, and that's always messy for those who like things just the way they are, thank you very much. But they'll still get theirs. How? Let us count the ways.

1. Envirogees: If you're one of those righteously indignant climate change deniers who also hates immigration, you're in for a world of hurt. According to scientists and scholars, climate refugees could hit 50 million this year and explode to 150 million over the next 50. Hordes of these envirogees, as I call them, will be turned out of their environmentally sensitive homes in China, India, the United States and elsewhere.

They will doubtless end up in the backyards of disgruntled citizens who like to mumble or scream about things they won't settle for in their backyards. If you think immigration is a problem now, just wait until Mother Earth starts cleaning house.

2. Dead Zones: Deniers might like to point out that hypoxic oceans and lakes, known as dead zones in ecological parlance, could be just as attributable to overpopulation as to global warming. Whatever. Their increased frequency is making climate change worse, no matter the prime cause, as if there could ever be such a thing. From shrinking the sex organs of our planet's fish to fucking up its food chain and escalating the ocean's nitrous oxide emissions, dead zones are deep threats.

More nitrous oxide, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, means more ozone depletion, which means more cancer, crop depletion and much worse.

3. Rising Tides: Of course, most deniers, especially those who live near oceans, probably won't be worrying about their chemical content once catastrophic climate change's more severe symptoms arrive. They'll be too busy fleeing the rising tide.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report prophesied that global warming would increase sea levels by 190-580 millimeters by 2100. More recent research has doubled the bar to an upper limit of two meters. Which probably means that in another few years, the already catastrophic limit will be raised again, perhaps by another 100 percent, at which point there won't be much point in measuring anything at all. Coastal metropoles like Los Angeles, Miami, London, Sydney and others will literally be drowning in data.

It's an object lesson in ironic reversal: ClimateGate deniers were partially right about the IPCC's projections, although they were wrong in thinking they were too severe. In fact, they were too conservative.

4. Fart Apocalypse! The hits just keep on coming, when it comes to global warming and the oceans. Take methane, for example, which like nitrous oxide is a killer greenhouse gas. Plus, it smells terrible, like someone took a crap right in your head.

Now imagine being choked by it, as it is belched from the oceans in a toxic feedback loop and dominates the atmosphere. It's probably happened before in one or more of a variety of extinction events like the Permian-Triassic, more scarily known as the Great Dying. But it could be happening again, as the permafrost melts and farts methane into the ocean and thereby the sky.

According to recent science, atmospheric methane has steadily risen each year since 2007, and whether it's factory farming of beef or melting permafrost, the threat remains the same. Earth has serious gas, and it's not afraid to use it. Hey, at least it's not hydrogen sulfide, an extinction executioner you'll never smell coming. Methane has the decency to stink up your nose and future.

5. Droughts and Desertfication: Sure, flooded cities and fart Armageddons are flashier than drying croplands, but the latter is a clear and present danger while the former are still future catastrophes waiting to strike.

Drought and desertification are surely the least glamorous ravages of global warming, but they are immediate. Parched rivers and declining precipitation, especially in once-fertile regions in America, India, China, Africa and elsewhere, are fueling everything from crop failure to gender inequality and "famine marriages." Drought news has eased somewhat, thanks to recent record-breaking storms and freezes that have balanced water accounts for some regions, especially in the United States. But if you think climate change is going to bring more water your way instead of less, I've got a subprime condo in Australia I'd like to sell you. It's hot!

6. Ice Age Cometh? Deniers love the aforementioned record-breaking storms, because it's hard for their tiny brains to comprehend that catastrophic climate change could simultaneously feature both deep freezes and ferocious firestorms. (They just can't figure out why snow won't make the words "global warming" go away.) The first decade of this still-new century was the hottest on record, yet our recent winter was wetter and colder than average. That dynamic flux is central to global warming, at least for now, as changing atmospheric flows remake the environmental map of the world. What we end up with once the new normal settles down, no one really knows.

In fact, it could be another ice age, at least for some parts of the world endangered by disruptions in thermohaline circulation and other possibilities. It happened after the Medieval Warm Period, and it can happen again. Which means that deniers pointing to deep freezes as evidence against global warming might be frozen before they realize how wrong they are. Oh well.

7. Deforest Dystopia: What's as bad as global carbon dioxide emissions from planes, trains and automobiles? Deforestation, which accounts for around 20 percent of the CO2, currently at an all-time high, belched into the air every year. Cutting down forests, which are carbon sinks, in order to build wood and paper crap like the Wall Street Journal that we're just going to throw away and burn into the atmosphere later is an unclassifiable kind of dumb.

Yet we do it every year, to our own detriment. Our rampant hyperconsumption and half-hearted conservation efforts have endangered the billion or so of us that perennially live off of forests. At best, we could kill off our great forests, as well as our way of life. At worst, climate change turns trees from carbon sinks to emitters, without looking back. And then deniers truly won't be able to see the forests for the trees, because there won't be any left.

8. Magnetic Mourning: Genius cosmologist Stephen Hawking once publicly worried that runaway greenhouse gases could eventually turn our verdant Earth into the celestial hellhole known as Venus. But what probably helped turn a once-oceanic Venus into that hellhole is a relative lack of a magnetic field, like the one we have on Earth that shields us from the sun's interstellar ferocity. But for how long?

As recently discovered, Earth's protective magnetic field is 250 million years older than previously thought. Now a ripe age of 3.5 billion years, our magnetic field could be weakening, and that weakening could turn us into Mars, not Venus, or even lead to the type of geomagnetic reversal that terrorized audiences in Roland Emmerich's disaster porn movie, 2012.

What's this got to do with global warming? Well, that depends on who you talk to. Some scientists believe that an already weakening magnetic field is causing global warming, but it's probably only a matter of time before that arrangement is flipped. Fucking with a planet's stable temperature and atmospheric flows tends to encourage these things. Who knows what that's doing to the Earth's core? Who wants to find out?

9. Give Us Demographics or Give Us Death! Tired of the bring-downs? Cheer up, pal! Demographics, not just facts, could be against the deniers as well. The median age of network and cable viewers grows older by the year, as those outlets decide to either avoid covering global warming or, like Fox News, glorify the deniers.

Even U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu admits the denier campaigns are led by global warming's future losers, who will eventually have to bow to reality. Last year, ad revenue for newspapers and networks continued to decline, while it increased online, where the diversity of opinion and information on matters of great importance like global warming is much greater.

Only Fox News managed to stave off the old media bloodbath, but its viewers are continually dumber than everyone else. The trend is obvious: The more global warming wears on, the more evidence for its ascendancy piles up, and the more skeptics, graying and irrelevant, fall by the wayside. Now that climate-change believers in the White House are teaming up with Hollywood to spread the word, you can practically hear the skeptics aging by the minute.

10. Cosmological Constant: The list above is compelling enough to convince you that deniers are dancing on the graves of their reputations, to say nothing of reality itself. But we science-minded world citizens share one major commonality with them: The planet will probably outlive us both, no matter what happens.

In a billion years, the sun's luminosity will likely increase, stripping Earth of its oceans and vegetation. By then, one can hope we have evolved enough to realize that no intelligent design can save us, that we're lucky to be spinning on a green and blue rock through the void of space. If we do, it's likely we'll have worked out a way to migrate to a more suitable planet and save our sorry hides. But that would mean getting through less existentially obvious hoops like global warming, which isn't currently going so great.

It's just a question of time, which is ridiculous if you think about it: We wouldn't even understand time were it not for the gravitational ballet of our solar system. But here we are, at the dawn of the 21st century, trying to avoid the revelation that we are not God's lucky children, but Earth's lucky children, and we should be taking much better care of our sandbox. Or else.

We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door.

Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.

These communities, if they retreat into a pure survivalist mode without linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community, the state and the planet, will become as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against us. All infrastructures we build, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. Resistance will be reduced to small, often imperceptible acts of defiance, as those who retained their integrity discovered in the long night of 20th-century fascism and communism.

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.

My analysis comes close to the analysis of many anarchists. But there is a crucial difference. The anarchists do not understand the nature of violence. They grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions, they know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism, but they naïvely believe that it can be countered with physical forms of resistance and acts of violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement – such as those on the destruction of property – but once you start using plastic explosives, innocent people get killed. And when anarchic violence begins to disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts, however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless amounts of force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the rage of the dispossessed.

I am not a pacifist. I know there are times, and even concede that this may eventually be one of them, when human beings are forced to respond to mounting repression with violence. I was in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia. We knew precisely what the Serbian forces ringing the city would do to us if they broke through the defenses and trench system around the besieged city. We had the examples of the Drina Valley or the city of Vukovar, where about a third of the Muslim inhabitants had been killed and the rest herded into refugee or displacement camps. There are times when the only choice left is to pick up a weapon to defend your family, neighborhood and city. But those who proved most adept at defending Sarajevo invariably came from the criminal class. When they were not shooting at Serbian soldiers they were looting the apartments of ethnic Serbs in Sarajevo and often executing them, as well as terrorizing their fellow Muslims. When you ingest the poison of violence, even in a just cause, it corrupts, deforms and perverts you. Violence is a drug, indeed it is the most potent narcotic known to humankind. Those most addicted to violence are those who have access to weapons and a penchant for force. And these killers rise to the surface of any armed movement and contaminate it with the intoxicating and seductive power that comes with the ability to destroy. I have seen it in war after war. When you go down that road you end up pitting your monsters against their monsters. And the sensitive, the humane and the gentle, those who have a propensity to nurture and protect life, are marginalized and often killed. The romantic vision of war and violence is as prevalent among anarchists and the hard left as it is in the mainstream culture. Those who resist with force will not defeat the corporate state or sustain the cultural values that must be sustained if we are to have a future worth living. From my many years as a war correspondent in El Salvador, Guatemala, Gaza and Bosnia, I have seen that armed resistance movements are always mutations of the violence that spawned them. I am not naïve enough to think I could have avoided these armed movements had I been a landless Salvadoran or Guatemalan peasant, a Palestinian in Gaza or a Muslim in Sarajevo, but this violent response to repression is and always will be tragic. It must be avoided, although not at the expense of our own survival.

Democracy, a system ideally designed to challenge the status quo, has been corrupted and tamed to slavishly serve the status quo. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul writes, a coup d’état in slow motion. And the coup is over. They won. We lost. The abject failure of activists to push corporate, industrialized states toward serious environmental reform, to thwart imperial adventurism or to build a humane policy toward the masses of the world’s poor stems from an inability to recognize the new realities of power. The paradigm of power has irrevocably altered and so must the paradigm of resistance alter.

Too many resistance movements continue to buy into the facade of electoral politics, parliaments, constitutions, bills of rights, lobbying and the appearance of a rational economy. The levers of power have become so contaminated that the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant. The election of Barack Obama was yet another triumph of propaganda over substance and a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by the mass media. We mistook style and ethnicity – an advertising tactic pioneered by the United Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein – for progressive politics and genuine change. We confused how we were made to feel with knowledge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand for an experience. Obama, now a global celebrity, is a brand. He had almost no experience besides two years in the senate, lacked any moral core and was sold as all things to all people. The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer’s dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertisers want because of how they can make you feel.

We live in a culture characterized by what Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics.” Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It always personalizes issues rather than clarifying them. It eschews real debate for manufactured scandals, celebrity gossip and spectacles. It trumpets eternal optimism, endlessly praises our moral strength and character, and communicates in a feel-your-pain language. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes, “meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage.”

The cultural belief that we can make things happen by thinking, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength or by understanding that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking. We can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking, preached to us across the political spectrum by Oprah, sports celebrities, Hollywood, self-help gurus and Christian demagogues, is largely responsible for our economic and environmental collapse, since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as “negative.” This belief, which allows men and women to behave and act like little children, discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporate state are never seriously questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. And it has perverted the way we view ourselves, our nation and the natural world. The new paradigm of power, coupled with its bizarre ideology of limitless progress and impossible happiness, has turned whole nations, including the United States, into monsters.

We can march in Copenhagen. We can join Bill McKibben’s worldwide day of climate protests. We can compost in our backyards and hang our laundry out to dry. We can write letters to our elected officials and vote for Barack Obama, but the power elite is impervious to the charade of democratic participation. Power is in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls who are ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And appealing to their better nature, or seeking to influence the internal levers of power, will no longer work.

We will not, especially in the United States, avoid our Götterdämmerung. Obama, like Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the other heads of the industrialized nations, has proven as craven a tool of the corporate state as George W. Bush. Our democratic system has been transformed into what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin labels inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, a free press, parliamentary systems and constitutions while manipulating and corrupting internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington, Ottawa or other state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. Mass culture, owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia, spectacles and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics – and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

Inverted totalitarianism wields total power without resorting to cruder forms of control such as gulags, concentration camps or mass terror. It harnesses science and technology for its dark ends. It enforces ideological uniformity by using mass communication systems to instill profligate consumption as an inner compulsion and to substitute our illusions of ourselves for reality. It does not forcibly suppress dissidents, as long as those dissidents remain ineffectual. And as it diverts us it dismantles manufacturing bases, devastates communities, unleashes waves of human misery and ships jobs to countries where fascists and communists know how to keep workers in line. It does all this while waving the flag and mouthing patriotic slogans. “The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed,” Wolin writes.

The practice and psychology of advertising, the rule of “market forces” in many arenas other than markets, the continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the saturation by mass media and propaganda of every household and the takeover of the universities have rendered most of us hostages. The rot of imperialism, which is always incompatible with democracy, has seen the military and arms manufacturers monopolize $1 trillion a year in defense-related spending in the United States even as the nation faces economic collapse. Imperialism always militarizes domestic politics. And this militarization, as Wolin notes, combines with the cultural fantasies of hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility to sever huge segments of the population from reality. Those who control the images control us. And while we have been entranced by the celluloid shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, these corporate forces, extolling the benefits of privatization, have effectively dismantled the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services and public housing) and rolled back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. The proponents of globalization and unregulated capitalism do not waste time analyzing other ideologies. They have an ideology, or rather a plan of action that is defended by an ideology, and slavishly follow it. We on the left have dozens of analyses of competing ideologies without any coherent plan of our own. This has left us floundering while corporate forces ruthlessly dismantle civil society.

We are living through one of civilization’s great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all “inevitable” utopian visions, is being exposed as a fraud. The power elite, perplexed and confused, clings to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the looming political and economic vacuum. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs led industrial nations to sacrifice other areas of human importance – from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution – on the altar of free trade. It left the world’s poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits – which can never be repaid – in human history. The massive bailouts, stimulus packages, giveaways and short-term debt, along with imperial wars we can no longer afford, will leave the United States struggling to finance nearly $5 trillion in debt this year. This will require Washington to auction off about $96 billion in debt a week. Once China and the oil-rich states walk away from our debt, which one day has to happen, the Federal Reserve will become the buyer of last resort. The Fed has printed perhaps as much as two trillion new dollars in the last two years, and buying this much new debt will see it, in effect, print trillions more. This is when inflation, and most likely hyperinflation, will turn the dollar into junk. And at that point the entire system breaks down.

All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators walk away with millions. The elite will retreat, as Naomi Klein has written in The Shock Doctrine, into gated communities where they will have access to services, food, amenities and security denied to the rest of us. We will begin a period in human history when there will be only masters and serfs. The corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross. Totalitarianism, George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith but an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote. “That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Our elites have used fraud. Force is all they have left.

Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved. More importantly, they are trying to save themselves. All attempts to work within this decayed system and this class of power brokers will prove useless. And resistance must respond to the harsh new reality of a global, capitalist order that will cling to power through ever-mounting forms of brutal and overt repression. Once credit dries up for the average citizen, once massive joblessness creates a permanent and enraged underclass and the cheap manufactured goods that are the opiates of our commodity culture vanish, we will probably evolve into a system that more closely resembles classical totalitarianism. Cruder, more violent forms of repression will have to be employed as the softer mechanisms of control favored by inverted totalitarianism break down.

It is not accidental that the economic crisis will converge with the environmental crisis. In his book The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi laid out the devastating consequences – the depressions, wars and totalitarianism – that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolves, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism – and a Mafia political system – which is a good description of our financial and political structure. A self-regulating market, Polanyi wrote, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The free market’s assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market allows each to be exploited for profit until exhaustion or collapse. A society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. This is what we are undergoing.

If we build self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, we can weather the coming collapse. This task will be accomplished through the existence of small, physical enclaves that have access to sustainable agriculture, are able to sever themselves as much as possible from commercial culture and can be largely self-sufficient. These communities will have to build walls against electronic propaganda and fear that will be pumped out over the airwaves. Canada will probably be a more hospitable place to do this than the United States, given America’s strong undercurrent of violence. But in any country, those who survive will need isolated areas of land as well as distance from urban areas, which will see the food deserts in the inner cities, as well as savage violence, leach out across the urban landscape as produce and goods become prohibitively expensive and state repression becomes harsher and harsher.

The increasingly overt uses of force by the elites to maintain control should not end acts of resistance. Acts of resistance are moral acts. They begin because people of conscience understand the moral imperative to challenge systems of abuse and despotism. They should be carried out not because they are effective but because they are right. Those who begin these acts are always few in number and dismissed by those who hide their cowardice behind their cynicism. But resistance, however marginal, continues to affirm life in a world awash in death. It is the supreme act of faith, the highest form of spirituality and alone makes hope possible. Those who carried out great acts of resistance often sacrificed their security and comfort, often spent time in jail and in some cases were killed. They understood that to live in the fullest sense of the word, to exist as free and independent human beings, even under the darkest night of state repression, meant to defy injustice.

When the dissident Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken from his cell in a Nazi prison to the gallows, his last words were: “This is for me the end, but also the beginning.” Bonhoeffer knew that most of the citizens in his nation were complicit through their silence in a vast enterprise of death. But however hopeless it appeared in the moment, he affirmed what we all must affirm. He did not avoid death. He did not, as a distinct individual, survive. But he understood that his resistance and even his death were acts of love. He fought and died for the sanctity of life. He gave, even to those who did not join him, another narrative, and his defiance ultimately condemned his executioners.

We must continue to resist, but do so now with the discomforting realization that significant change will probably never occur in our lifetime. This makes resistance harder. It shifts resistance from the tangible and the immediate to the amorphous and the indeterminate. But to give up acts of resistance is spiritual and intellectual death. It is to surrender to the dehumanizing ideology of totalitarian capitalism. Acts of resistance keep alive another narrative, sustain our integrity and empower others, who we may never meet, to stand up and carry the flame we pass to them. No act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a corporate charter, holding global internet votes or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order. But we will have to resist and then find the faith that resistance is worthwhile, for we will not immediately alter the awful configuration of power. And in this long, long war a community to sustain us, emotionally and materially, will be the key to a life of defiance.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that the exclusive preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group is what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible: “The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.”

The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion. We will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door. Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive. And for now this is the only victory possible.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Sanhati.com

The devil’s advocate?

It was a bizarre spectacle, Karan Thapar interviewing Dr. Binayak Sen on CNN-IBN on Maoist violence in India. The subject of Maoist violence, more than any other at present, agitates the powers that be, including the media. The choreography of the debate follows a similar pattern. Invite a respectable person(s) for a “debate” on the issue of violence, lure them into believing they are invited because the media wants to present a contrary point of view; once there, corner the person, prevent them from making their point of view, heckle them if necessary, and somehow wring a statement, even if by slip of tongue, that can be bandied about as endorsement for the military offensive against the Maoists, as a moral justification for the so called “war on terror”. This desperation for moral endorsement from respected citizens like Dr. Sen, is itself evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the powers that be.

Dr. Sen tried, heroically, to make the point that one third of the people of India suffer from chronic malnutrition, that over 50% of the Adivasis and 60% of Dalits are bordering on starvation (dear readers, put these numbers in perspective by bearing in mind that India is one-sixth of humanity), that over 50% of India (1/12th of world population) is undernourished, and that state policies that create and sustain the conditions for this mass starvation fall within the definition of “genocide” in international law. One would have thought that the enormity of what Dr. Sen was saying, and its implications for what we have become as a nation, made his point of view, at least, worth listening to. But no, Thapar had lured Dr. Sen into the platform to wring a public condemnation from him against Maoists, and he was determined to do that come what may. Half the nation may have turned into semi-starved ghosts, but we need to condemn Maoist violence, first and foremost, to feel morally good about ourselves; and it was Thapar’s job to make the nation feel they stood on high moral ground. Any competing ethics, or higher moral principle, would deflate the performance choreographed for the nation.

“I am not talking on behalf of the Maoists. I am talking from the point of view of a human rights worker”

Dr Sen said as he tried desperately to stand his ground. Again and again he tried to make the point about state violence.

“I will come to the state. I promise you and I will handle the state later but first I want to hear you clearly say that annihilation which is an acceptable and justified policy of the Maoists is one that you completely, totally condemn”

Karan Thapar persisted, literally putting words into Dr. Sen’s mouth. Note too his words “I”, Thapar, “want you to clearly say…” etc. Of course Thapar never came to the state as he promised, we knew he wouldn’t, there is only that much time allocated for a show, and that time was up. The show was never about hearing Dr. Sen’s point of view; it was a choreographed performance to corner a respected citizen into endorsing the moral justifications touted out for the state’s military offensive. Ironically the show was called the “Devil’s Advocate” –Karan Thapar, the Devil’s Advocate?

No, this is no time for humorous asides. Let’s turn to the moral outrage. Ethics is important, and moral awareness is the essence of being human. It is important we do not walk away from ethics, especially when there is a widespread perception among ordinary Indians that the nation has lost its moral compass. Thapar too is bound by ethics. Basic principles of media ethics require that an interviewee is given an opportunity to make his/her point of view clearly, that their views are not misrepresented, that there is no ulterior motive or collateral purpose, and to ensure that views of the interviewee are fairly represented. Thapar clearly breached rules of fairness and representation in media ethics. Paradoxically, there appears to be a correlation between the length of the code on media ethics in India and falling ethical standards in the media. When there were no codes we had a vibrant independent press. Over the years as scepticism about the media has grown so has the length of the code from one page in 1992 to 112 pages today (see Norms of Journalistic Conduct, Press Council of India, 1992, 1996, 2005, 2010). Let’s not judge this only through narrow legalistic lenses.

We are proud of the spiritual foundations of our society a tad bit more than others. In the Indian tradition, when we invite a guest we are required to show him/her due respect, and treat them with some indulgence. Amartaya Sen wrote about how we are an “argumentative society” and about how the ethos of public debate goes back a long time in our history. In a moving scene at the end of the Kurkshetra war (in the Mahabharata), the philosopher Charvaka publicly accused Krishna of bringing ruin upon the entire society by his actions. Everyone heard him out, including a subdued Krishna. Clearly Dr. Sen was Thapar’s athithi (guest). But Thapar was not going to let any Western legal principles of media ethics, any Indian codes of athithi dharma (codes of right conduct towards guests) or the glorious Indian cultural traditions of public debate to get in his way. Freedom of the press it appears is freedom from all constraints: legal, cultural, ethical. Are we surprised that so many ordinary Indians feel the nation has lost its moral anchor?

I have used this interview to exemplify how ethics gets confounded in the media and in public debate, but the point can be extended to all sorts of public debates in the Indian media today. If the job of the media is to inform and educate, that purpose is defeated either because viewers and readers are left bewildered as a result, or condemned to vitriolic mindlessness. The first is the basis for cynicism and the second, for fascism. This production of mindlessness requires closer scrutiny.

Institutional and individual violence

At the heart of the controversy over Maoist violence is an issue that is foundational to modern societies, an issue that Thapar went out of his way to ensure did not register in public minds: the difference between institutional and individual violence. Only human beings can make ethical judgments because only human beings have a psyche capable of moral differentiation. For that reason in criminal trials, for example, intention is decisive. Institutions are not human beings, they are literally “mindless”. Institutions are complexes of laws that structure society and allocate people their places within it. When an institutional system is founded on violence, violence becomes the necessary condition for the continued existence of those institutions, in other words, the institution cannot survive without violence, it becomes like the proverbial vampire that will die if it cannot suck blood. This type of violence is fundamentally different from individual and group violence. However brutal, or obnoxious, or vicious it may be, individual violence is still human violence, it involves the mind, rightly or wrongly, and it invariably invites contestation over ethics in society. Institutions founded on violence, on the other hand, will collapse if violence is taken away. Individuals in charge of institutions must, therefore, continue to engage in violence if they are to save the institution from collapse. Let me exemplify this.

In a controversial TV interview to 60 Minutes (5/12/96) Lesley Stahl the TV host, when questioning the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on U.S. sanctions against Iraq, asked her:

“We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Her reply was:

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

This statement scandalised a large cross section of people in the United States and elsewhere. Imagine by some miracle if a total pacifist were to occupy the White House. It is estimated that sixty percent of the American economy is directly or indirectly dependent on defense. Corporate America: the Lockheeds, the Boeings, the Northrops, will collapse like a pack of cards, taking with them the thousands they employ. Most technological innovations of the West that invest their institutions with so much power and capabilities are the result of militarism. Even banal things like food packaging, gyms and exercise regimes, dietetics, aging research, are driven by militarism. The internet and the communication technologies were military innovations. The incorporation of civilian and military uses of technologies through dual-use policies makes the intermeshing of militarism and economy virtually inseparable. The entire society is organized in a “warlike way” to use Marx’s phrase. In such a military-industrial-finance-media complex waging war becomes a necessity for survival of those institutions. If Iraqi children die in their millions in the process, it is sad, but necessary. Albright was not wrong. She was speaking as Secretary of State for the US state and economy. Her only ethics, if there was one, was to save those institutions from collapse.

Our messiah of peace in the White House will have to reorganize life in America, bottoms-up, get people to plant potatoes and cabbages, run their own local communal power plants, dismantle the supermarkets and get them to preserve and cook their own food, and turn them into a community of people affiliated to land, instead of a community of interest groups affiliated to different types of market institutions. The messiah of peace will, without doubt, be branded a trouble maker, a revolutionary, a terrorist, even a Maoist perhaps, who knows. He will without doubt be liquidated before long. Only the people of America can undertake such a task, and that too only when they feel so committed to building a non-violent society that they are prepared for the sacrifices, and violence and bloodshed the task will necessarily invite.

The Indian armed forces are the fourth largest in the world. Unlike the United State, the Indian military has been used primarily against the Indian people: against Kashmiris, Nagas, Assamese, North-eastern peoples, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, or… Maoists. This is a fundamental difference between capitalist nations like the US, and India. The Indian state must colonise its own people to remain affiliated to the military-industrial-finance-media complex that rules. Is the price worth it? The NDTVs and the CNN-IBN journalists are too terrified to pose this question to the ministers of the Indian state as Lesley Stahl did with Madlinene Albright. Understandably so. Colonising one’s own people is far more terrifying than colonising all those “out there” somewhere.

We in India are more fortunate, however, because our task of building a non-violent society is much less daunting. It is less daunting precisely because fifty percent of our people, at least, are already outside the formal, institutionalised, globalised, militarist political economy. Many more, such as the urban poor for example, are only marginally or loosely tied to it. Of course, that is also the reason why they are being slowly starved to death, or driven to commit suicide, as with the two hundred thousand farmers. Only a numerically small, but economically powerful section is tied to the political economy of violence, and they must defend it come what may.

The violence of individuals and political groups pales into insignificance in comparison. The nation faces its worst crisis ever as swathes of land is auctioned off to powers that be and people turned into cannon fodder for the military-industrial-finance-media complexes of vampire states. The Maoists are desperate to get the message across to a nation besotted with the vampire, and they do it using desperate means. Are we going to shoot the messenger because we do not like the message, or, ostrich-like, bury our heads in the sand because we do not want to know about the message?

The message will not go away because we do not like how the message is delivered. If anything it will feed the vampire institutions with more blood. This has nothing to do with our revulsions for the methods of the messengers. Remember, institutions do not feel? They have no psyche? The message and the desperate messengers are part of the same problem, the problem of the political economy of violence. Paradoxically, the institutions founded on violence, the military-industrial-finance-media complexes, are the ones that preach the ideology of non-violence in unequivocal terms; and those who advocate peace with justice end up advocating violence. How are we to understand this paradox? We cannot say it is because the institutions are hypocrites because, if institutions are mindless, they cannot be hypocrites.

Merchants, people of the land, and political violence

In his book The Great Transformation, written during the World Wars, a time when states and economic institutions were collapsing, as now, Karl Polanyi points out that during the hundred years between 1815-1914, for the first time in their histories, European powers did not go to war with one another (except minor forays) and he inquires into the reasons for this extraordinary century of non-violence. The reasons he argues was “haute finance” the emergence of financial institutions that

“functioned as the main link between the political and economic organization of the world”.

Let us not rush to the conclusion that there was global peace during that time. Polanyi adds:

“They were anything but pacifists; they made their fortune in the financing of wars; they were impervious to moral consideration; they had no objection to any number of minor, short, or localized wars. But their business would be impaired if a general war between the Great Powers should interfere with the monetary foundations of the system.”

For the merchants, just the right level of war is good because it allows for sale of weapons and provides access to markets; but too much war destroys trading systems. In the merchant’s world view non-violence is a way of limiting and containing wars. Modern capitalism projects the merchant’s world view as the human world view: violence in economy through usury, expropriation, whatever; and containment of violence in politics through ideology of non-violence. See how the UN writes PEACE in large bold letters in its Charter, but retains veto powers with the victorious Allies in the Security Council? When the Cold War ended the Euro-American states hailed it as new era of peace for the world. The Pentagon, however, spent many anxious hours trying to work out what a defence policy in the era of peace should look like. After much deliberation, it adopted the “two-wars” policy. If somehow wars to be limited to two at a time, America would just about manage to survive peace. We witnessed great euphoria about peace simultaneously with new forms of militarism. The Pentagon’s logic makes perfect sense, but only to those who subscribe to the merchants’ world view or “haute finance” as Polanyi calls it. The recipients of violence are not merchants however, they are “people-of-the-land”; and their ideas of violence and non-violence differ fundamentally from those of the merchants’.

The Maori word “whenua” means land/earth and umbilical cord, and whanau, derived from whenua, means biradri or extended family from common ancestry. For people of the land, land is the umbilical cord that ties them to this world. Cut it, and it is like a new born child thrown away from its mother; it means certain death. People-of-the-land have always defended their land, non-violently if possible, violently if necessary, because land is life itself. This is the case with indigenous peoples anywhere in the world, and our own Adivasis and Dalits are no exception. It is not surprising therefore that with the new round of aggressive “haute finance”, with liberalisation and globalisation, indigenous peoples everywhere have been at the forefront of defending the land. People-of-the-land throw the peace plans of merchants, the “two-war” strategies of “haute finance”, the “rights based approach to development” and such, into disarray. The Adivasis and Dalits tar the shine on “shining India”. See the fifth Afghan war? The mandated territories of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and many more that the League of Nations distributed to the Great Powers to keep the peace? Did the people-of-the-land quietly fade away with the years?

And what of our own people-of-the –land? First we said, don’t fight, after Independence you will be okay, then we said don’t fight we will give you special place in the Constitution, don’t fight we will give you land reforms, don’t fight we will give you jobs in the factories that we build on your land, and now we are saying, don’t fight, we will kill you non-violently, by slowly starving you to death. Are we prepared to be party to an economy founded on cheap labour and confiscated land? Are we going to allow our land and people to be auctioned in the global bazaars? Are we people-of-the land? Or, are we not?

Dear readers, I can see many of you pouncing on me at this point, wagging your fingers and saying to me: but the Maoists are not Adivasis and Dalits. I will concede the point to the sceptical reader; I will agree that we cannot conflate Maoists with Adivasis and Dalits. But I must insist that you answer my question: are you people-of-the-land? Are you a bystander who watches your people and land auctioned in global bazaars? Or, are you going to defend it by whatever means you are capable of? If India is auctioned off, all of us, without exception, lose the ground on which we stand rightfully. Are you going to leave the your fate to the Vedantas and Stanley Morgans, up today, down tomorrow; or the military-industrial-finance-media complexes always on the prowl hunting for “rogue states”, today Iraq, tomorrow Iran, the day after India?

Do you want to be counted as the people-of-the-land, or, are you happy to remain a citizen who wants to be allocated a place in the institutions of the political economy of violence? The urgency of this question drives many to take desperate steps. When we fail to answer this question unequivocally we create the political spaces for Maoism.

Is there a difference between citizens and people-of-the-land?

Civilisation, Nation-State, and Comprador State

The Indian subcontinent is home to an ancient civilisation, a fact that people of the subcontinent are conscious of. The problem with such an inheritance is that we have to live up to it. A civilisation defines its place in the world, provides the people with their conceptual resources, their languages, forms their relationship to their natural environments, and helps people to locate themselves in society and to make sense of the world they live in. Citizenship, in contrast, is a relationship of individuals to the state which is an institution, a constitutional order that oversees a range of economic and political institutions. Clearly, we have forfeited our claims to be a civilisation if we cannot create the conditions that sustain life for our people. Actually we are not even a nation-state properly speaking, because a nation state integrates all its citizens, even the poorest, and most discriminated, in its military-industrial-finance-media complexes, in its institutions, from dole queues to defence. Nation-states bludgeon other states to keep their “civil society” integrated into the state machine. Can you see Germany or Sweden launching Operation Green Hunt against their poor? The Indian state in contrast leaves out half if population from its institutions, it leaves them to fend for themselves, and it is on the prowl, always, to confiscate anything they may have: their land, resources, labour, and starves them to death. The other half, it leaves to the vagaries of global markets, pledges them to the military-industrial-financial-media complexes, the real nation states. Juridical recognition alone is not enough to be a state. We are a comprador state, a dalal state, which will collapse if we start getting fancy ideas about our place in the world.

This is the reason why we are unable to respond to the present crisis. The Maoist say: constitutionalism has failed our people, and we say, true it has failed, but what can we do, let us try once more. The Maoists say: India has become a violent society, forty percent of our parliamentarians have a track record of violence, our democratic political parties have their militias, we kill freely in the name of Ram, our army with its vast arsenal has waged war against our people for sixty-three years, and therefore, they say violence is the order of the day. We say: all this is true, but you Maoists should not be violent.

The Adivasis and the Dalits (see, I am not conflating them with Maoists) raise a more fundamental question about human life, one that touches a raw nerve in modern societies. They say land and labour can never become commodities. That human life can only be lived out on land in relation with nature; that land, labour and nature are necessary conditions for human life; that it is not possible to gouge out “The Economy” from society and cast it into different sets of institutions, insulate “The Economy” from people. Doing this is violence par excellence. Civil society displaces people from land, and promises them a place in market institutions: labour markets, consumer markets, property markets, whatever. That capitalism is made possible, and underpinned by colonisation of land and labour, nature and culture. What do we say to them? We say: all this is true but let us turn to the very colonial inheritances for our conceptual resources, for knowing our place in the world, for nurturing our land and people. We are unable to think beyond ideas of liberal democracy, economic and political rights, individualism and constitutionalism, and all the conceptual, philosophical, ethical, legal inheritances we have from our colonisers. Macaulay must be laughing in his grave.

India stands at historical crossroads at present. The challenge it faces is the task of real and actual decolonisation: of the mind, of the institutions, of the political economy for the first time since Columbus set sail on that unfortunate voyage five hundred years ago; a daunting task by any measure. India cannot meet this challenge by turning the clock back, for the cycle of time rotates without beginning or end.

The Cycle of Violence

Violence, no doubt, begets violence. We can all agree that the vicious cycle must be broken. But who should break the cycle? The case can be argued both ways: the state is violent therefore the Maoists are violent, or, the Maoists are violent therefore the state is violent.

To the best of my knowledge (and I am open to correction here) the Buddha was the first thinker to address this question directly. It is useful to recall the context in which he spoke about the cycle of violence and the onus of breaking it. He too lived in difficult times.

King Prasanjit, a follower of the Buddha, was attacked by Ajatasatru, a powerful king with expansionist ambitions. Ajatasatru mobilised a large army, defeated Prasanjit, confiscated his kingdom and took his people as slaves. Prasanjit fled and lived as a demoralised refugee, incognito. A merchant named Ananthapindika offered to finance Prasanjit and help him raise an army to regain his kingdom. Prasanjit took the merchant’s support, raised an army and defeated Ajatasatru. The defeated Ajatasatru pleaded with Prasanjit to end his life. Prasanjit took Ajatasatru, instead, to the Buddha instead and said: he attacked me, therefore I attacked him, but really I want nothing from him, I want to let him go. The Buddha agreed that Prasanjit was right in defeating Ajatasatru first, but equally, in wanting to free him, because the onus of breaking the cycle of violence is on the victor, the strong, and the more powerful. Note too, that Prasanjit does not see himself beholden to the merchant forever.

If we are to extend the analogy to our times, we must insist that the state, clearly the more powerful party, must cease its violence first, must stop displacement of people, stop forcible acquisition of land, stop unending suffering. Sadly, we live in a mindless modern state. If we could get the state to end violence we could stand on high moral ground and say to the Maoists what the Buddha said to Prasanjit and Ajatasatru: “Victory begets hatred; defeat begets suffering. They that are wise will forgo both victory and defeat. Insult is born of insult, anger of anger. They that are wise will forgo both victory and defeat. (The Life of Buddha, by A. Ferdinand Herold, tr. by Paul C Blum [1922])

It is a hallmark of civilisation that the strong, the more powerful, the better armed are called upon to renounce it first. We are not a civilisation any longer, we cannot think for ourselves about the destiny of our people and society. We take our moral cues from heads of nation-states: “war on terror”, “axis of evil” and such. The Buddha said:

The Killer begets a killer;

One who conquers, a conqueror.

The abuser begets abuse,

The reviler, one who reviles.

Thus by the unfolding of karma,

The plunderer is plundered.

We witness before our eyes the “killer begetting a killer”, and the “unfolding” of the karma of the conquerors and abusers and revilers and plunderers. But we live in strange times of equality, liberal rights, and individual freedoms, and somehow these lenses do not help us to see the difference between abuser and abused, between plunderer and plundered, between cause and effect, the begetter and the begotten.

Postscript

In 1873, when India faced famines, starvation deaths, disease, and political unrest, another medical professional someone we would call a human rights campaigner today was invited to speak on the situation in India. She told the gathering:

It is not, however, more enquiry that is most needed. Enquiry and investigation are the curse of India, as of any country where we do not act up to the light we have : where evils are investigated and re -investigated fifty times over, simply as an excuse for doing nothing. […]Under the permanent settlement the share of the produce of the soil left to the cultivator is often too little for health. A process of slow starvation may thus go on, which so enfeebles the great mass of the people, that when any epidemic sets in they are swept off wholesale. Land is let and sublet to a degree unknown anywhere else. […]Such is the relation between the State and the ‘ creatures of its own creation,’ the Zemindars.

What is the answer given by modern ‘financial policy ‘ or impolicy ? […] Is it not as though we said : It is ‘ unsound financial policy ‘ to live unless you have money in your stocking […]?Is it cheaper to let a man ‘ get dead ‘ than to feed him or house him, on borrowed capital ? […].But one must live in order to be a subject for sanitary considerations at all; and one must eat to live. If one is killed off by famine, one certainly need not fear fever or cholera. [ “Life Or Death In India” Paper read at the Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Norwich, 1873 LONDON :Harrisons and Sons (1874)]

That health professional and campaigner was Florence Nightingale. Fortunately for Nightingale, there were no NDTVs and CNN-IBNs at that time and she was allowed to complete what she had come to say.

Uruknet.info

Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S.-led World Bank tightened its grip on Haitian economic policy. Essentially, it decided that the dysfunctional Haitian elite should encourage international investment in export-oriented assembly sweatshops. This was called a "structural adjustment program." Haiti’s trade tariffs on foreign goods were to be removed, public utilities privatized, and all state subsidies removed—including on essential items like gasoline, subject to sharp price fluctuations that can greatly increase transportation costs for workers and street vendors.

Assembling the goods, of course, would be the super-exploited Haitian worker, considered by World Bank experts to be Haiti’s greatest asset. The ideal was to make Haiti "the Taiwan of the Caribbean." Today, textile assembly plants produce 90% of exports.

There are about 20,000 assembly workers in Haiti. They make about 20 cents an hour, about 70 Haitian gourdes a day (40 gourdes equals around $1). A study by the Haitian government showed that a subsistence salary would be closer to 300-400g a day.

Despite heavy quake damage to assembly-plant buildings, Haitian workers in some plants have been ordered back to work. Said Laurance Merzy, 32, a worker at DKDR Haiti in Port au Prince, "The walls are still standing, but they are cracked. It is not safe in there." The New York Times reports that the Palm Apparel T-shirt factory in Carrefour, a few miles outside of the capital and at the epicenter of the quake, collapsed, killing at least 500 people.

An essential player in maintaining the plantation system in Haiti is Obama asset Bill Clinton, who, in addition to promoting tourism and sweatshops in Haiti, successfully campaigned for passage of the Hope I and Hope II trade bills. Hope I and II require yearly certification that Caribbean countries are complying with guidelines that mirror World Bank policies—that is, super-low wages that attract foreign investors.

Last summer, a struggle erupted for passage of a minimum-wage increase from 70g to 400g a day. Tens of thousands of workers took to the streets in August, but a massive deployment of UN troops blocked their entry to the assembly sector. In the end, Preval bowed to pressure from Bill Clinton to increase the minimum daily wage to 125g ($3) in 2009, which would rise to 200g ($5) in 2012. Assembly workers are exempt from the new wage levels and will only receive the 200 gourdes in 2012.

In reality, the initial 125 gourdes is worth less than half of the minimum wage that existed in 1980 under the U.S.-backed dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. Annual inflation in Haiti over the last decade was about 12-14%, although accurate figures are hard to come by.

Another key goal of the World Bank plan was to redirect food production away from satisfying the nutritional needs of Haitians to producing food for the export market. A 1982 document of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal "aid" agency often linked to the CIA, proposed the "gradual but systematic removal" of domestic crops from 30% of all tilled land, whose products can then be exported.

The result was the massive migration of Haitian rural farmers and workers from the countryside, where most Haitians live, to already over-crowded urban centers like Port-au-Prince, where unemployment stood at 70-80% before the earthquake.

Rice, a staple of the Haitian diet, used to be produced in quantities that would satisfy domestic needs. However, World Bank economic policy meant dropping tariffs on imported goods. Within a few years, cheaper "Miami rice" flooded the Haitian market, resulting in the destruction of domestic rice farming.

In 2008, after a 45% jump in the price of Miami rice in two years, there were "food riots," as thousands poured into the streets in the capital shouting, "We’re hungry. Feed us!" Some described their hunger pains as "swallowing Clorox." UN troops killed about a dozen protesters throughout Haiti. The practice of eating mud laced with sugar is not uncommon in Haiti.

Keeping Haiti politically dependent on the World Bank and Western capital are loans from the World Bank and imperialist governments that come with political strings attached, as do the "structural adjustment" programs. Today, over 50% of the almost $1 billion Haitian budget originates from so-called foreign aid.

Foreign debt had multiplied 17.5 times between 1957 and 1986, the years of the Duvalier family dictatorship. In 2001, the yearly debt servicing alone was $321 million.

However, last June the WB, IMF, and Paris Club reduced the current debt by $1.2 billion out of $1.4 billion to make payments "bearable" as part of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC), after years of delay. New loans will increase the debt again unless a genuine debt cancellation is enacted. In order to qualify for HIPC, however, Haiti had to be certified by imperialist institutions as being in compliance with World Bank/IMF policies of "structural adjustment," the privatization of public utilities, the elimination of tariffs on foreign goods, and the elimination of all price subsidies, etc.

A government study of the public phone company found that its annual revenues amounted to approximately $600 million, but as a result of privatization, this amount was lost to the Haitian people for schools, roads, and medical care—as well as debt repayment.

Although in the wake of the crisis there has been an international call to cancel Haiti’s debt, much of it having originated with dictatorships, Haiti is still on the hook for about $764 million to U.S.-dominated lending institutions, which constitute about 80% of all Haitian debt.

Activists in the Jubilee USA network and author Naomi Klein launched a campaign that pressured the World Bank’s International Monetary Fund into restructuring a recent $100 million loan into a no-interest loan, with the possibility that the IMF might decide that it does not have to be repaid at all.

What is needed is a powerful workers’ movement in Haiti that will challenge the entire system of vulture capitalism and imperialism and reconstruct Haiti under the democratic control of Haiti’s working masses. It would enforce the cancellation of all foreign debts. That would require building a revolutionary party and working for a socialist revolution in Haiti, and building a powerful solidarity movement in the U.S.

As the early 20th-century revolutionary leader Rosa Luxemburg put it, the choice faced by humanity is a choice between "socialism and barbarism."

(The author is a long-time Haiti solidarity activist and a member of the TWU in New York.)

Guardian.co.uk

The living fabric of this planet - its ecosystems and biodiversity - are in rapid decline worldwide. This is visible and palpable and is variously due to commercial over-exploitation, or population pressures, or a raft of unhelpful policies, or some combination. At a very fundamental human level, however, it is due to the lack of awareness that there is a problem with human society being disconnected from nature.

Economics is blamed for much of our woes these days and credited with little so two questions need to be asked: is economics part of the problem of ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss? And is it part of the solution?

The answer to the first question is a fairly obvious "yes". The economic invisibility of nature in our dominant economic model is both a symptom and a root cause of this problem. We value what we price, but nature's services - providing clean air, fresh water, soil fertility, flood prevention, drought control, climate stability, etc - are, mostly, not traded in any markets and not priced. These so-called "ecosystem services" are all "public goods" provided free. Our tendency to value private wealth creation over improving public wealth - creating a healthier natural world, for example - doesn't help.

We cannot manage what we do not measure and we are not measuring either the value of nature's benefits or the costs of their loss. We seem to be navigating the new and unfamiliar waters of ecological scarcities and climate risks with faulty instruments. Replacing our obsolete economic compass could help economics become part of the solution to reverse our declining ecosystems and biodiversity loss.

We need a new compass to set different policy directions, change incentive structures, reduce or phase out perverse subsidies, and engage business leaders in a vision for a new economy. Holistic economics – or economics that recognise the value of nature's services and the costs of their loss – is needed to set the stage for a new "green economy".

The crisis of biodiversity loss can only begin to be addressed in earnest if the values of biodiversity and ecosystem services are fully recognised and represented in decision-making. This may reveal the true nature of the trade-offs being made: between different ecosystem services (food provision or carbon storage), between different beneficiaries (private gain by some, public loss to many), at different scales (local costs, global benefits) and across different time horizons. When the value of ecosystem services are understood and included, what may have looked like an "acceptable" trade-off may appear quite unacceptable.

Conversely, benefits that were unrecognised become visible, and worth preserving. In Costa Rica, payments to farmers who conserve forests on their land rather than destroy them for low-earning pasture have become almost a national environment programme. Soil and water benefits flow to farmlands all around them. And this was funded by a small 3% tax on transport.

In India, ecological restoration and water harvesting is paid for by a national rural employment guarantee scheme, employing millions. In San Francisco and New York, ecological infrastructure is the reality: reservoirs and lake watersheds surrounded by well-managed forests provide cities with a freshwater supply. Meanwhile, biomimicry - using nature's methods to solve human problems, such as Velcro which was inspired by dog hair and burrs - is offering opportunities for innovative businesses across both developing and developed nations.

These are all examples of new economic models for government and business in which both private opportunity and "public goods" are being created and rewarded by a new partnership between business, citizens, and their government.

Teeb (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) has assembled a library of suggestions for policy-makers on how to use good economics to conserve wild nature (TEEB for Policy-Makers, November 2009). In June, TEEB will publish a parallel document on what role business can play in changing the rules of the game and herald a society that profits and progresses yet lives in harmony with nature.

• Pavan Sukhdev is a special adviser to the United Nations environment programme's green economy initiative and study leader for Teeb. He is speaking at the annual Earthwatch Oxford lecture tonight, co-hosted by environmental charity Earthwatch and strategy consultancy and thinktank SustainAbility

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

TruthDig.com

As any student of foreign and national security policy well knows, the devil is in the details. Back in April 2009, in a speech delivered in Prague, the Czech Republic, President Barack Obama articulated his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. Since that time, however, the Obama administration has offered very little of substance to push this vision forward. When one looks past the grand statements of the president for policy implementation that supports the rhetoric, one is left empty-handed. No movement on ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). No extension of a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia (START). No freeze on the development of a new generation of American nuclear weapons. Without progress in these areas, any prospects of a new approach to global nuclear nonproliferation emerging from the May 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference are virtually zero.

Perhaps the most telling indicator of failed nonproliferation policy on the part of the Obama administration is the fact that there has been no progress on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, and in particular the ongoing controversy surrounding a proposed uranium exchange. The deal would have Iran swap a significant portion of its existing stock of 3.5 percent enriched uranium (the level needed to fuel Iran’s planned nuclear power reactors, as opposed to uranium enriched to 90 percent, which is needed for nuclear weapons) in exchange for nuclear fuel rods containing uranium enriched to 19.5 percent (the level needed to operate a U.S.-built research reactor in Tehran that produced nuclear isotopes for medical purposes). Iran is running out of fuel for this reactor, and needs a new source of fuel or else it will be forced to shut it down. As a signatory member of the NPT, Iran should have the right to acquire this fuel on the open market, subject of course to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, but the United States and Europe have held any such sale hostage to Iran’s agreeing to suspend its indigenous uranium enrichment program, which is the source of the 3.5 percent enriched uranium currently in Iran.

The crux of the U.S. and European concerns rests not with Iran’s possession of 3.5 percent enriched uranium, but rather that the enrichment technique employed by Iran to produce this low-enriched uranium could be used, with some significant modifications, to manufacture high-enriched uranium (90 percent) usable in a nuclear weapon. This reality, and the fears of a nuclear-armed Iran it produces, trumps the fact that the IAEA today is in a position to certify that it can account for the totality of Iran’s inventory of nuclear material, and that any diversion of nuclear material would be detected by the IAEA almost immediately. Furthermore, beyond its capacity to enrich uranium, there is no real evidence that Iran has engaged in a nuclear weapons program.

But the fear and hype that emanate from American and European policymakers, strongly influenced by the zero-tolerance policy of Israel when it comes to Iran and anything nuclear, peaceful or otherwise, have created an environment where common sense goes out the window and anything becomes possible. Take, for instance, Iran’s current stock of 3.5 percent enriched uranium. The IAEA certifies that Iran is in possession of approximately 1,800 kilograms of this material. Policy wonks and those in the intelligence community given to hypotheticals have postulated scenarios that have Iran using this stock of 3.5 percent enriched uranium as the feedstock for a breakout enrichment effort that, if left to its own devices, could produce enough high-enriched uranium (90 percent) for a single nuclear bomb. This breakout capability would require Iran to reconfigure thousands of the centrifuges it uses for low-level enrichment for use in the stepped-up process of follow-on enrichment. Ironically, one of the next steps required in such a scenario would be for Iran to reconfigure its centrifuges to enrich uranium up to 20 percent—roughly the level Iran needs for the nuclear fuel required to operate the Tehran research reactor.

Fears about a potential covert Iranian enrichment breakout capability reached feverish proportions when, in September 2009, Iran revealed the existence of (and U.S. intelligence proclaimed the discovery of) a prospective small underground centrifuge enrichment facility near the city of Qom. The fact that this facility was under construction, and consisted as of September 2009 of little more than a reinforced hole in the ground without any equipment installed, did nothing to allay the fears of those who saw an Iranian nuclear bomb behind every bush, or under every rock. Suddenly Iran was on the verge of having a nuclear bomb, and something had to be done to prevent this from happening.

The focus of attention shifted away from Iran’s ongoing enrichment capability, which the U.S. and Europe demanded be permanently suspended, to Iran’s 1,800 kilograms of 3.5 percent enriched uranium. This material represented Iran’s theoretical atomic bomb. If the material could be placed under international control, then Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, at least for the immediate future, could be thwarted. Iran was not going to freely hand over this material. However, a deal was negotiated between the U.S. and Iran that would have Iran ship 1,600 kilograms of its 3.5 percent enriched uranium to Russia, which would then further enrich it to 19.5 percent before sending it to France, which would process the uranium into fuel rods unusable for nuclear weapons. This fuel swap appeared to provide an elegant solution to a vexing problem. Indeed, President Obama embraced it as his own initiative when it was announced in October 2009.

For Iran, the swap was always about acquiring the needed nuclear fuel rods, manufactured from 19.5 percent enriched uranium, in order to continue operation of its research reactor in Tehran, which produces much-needed nuclear isotopes for medical purposes. The main attraction for the Iranians for such a deal, beyond acquiring the fuel rods, was that they would not need to produce any 19.5 percent enriched uranium itself, and thus not have to reconfigure their current centrifuge-based enrichment infrastructure to operate beyond its 3.5 percent enrichment threshold. Iran has consistently maintained that it neither requires, nor desires, any capability to enrich uranium beyond the 3.5 percent level needed to manufacture nuclear fuel rods for its own nuclear power reactors. Having its uranium enrichment infrastructure locked in at 3.5 percent simplified not only Iran’s own operations, but also the safeguard monitoring and inspection requirements of the International Atomic Energy Agency, charged with verifying Iran’s compliance with the terms of the NPT. Iran viewed the fuel swap as a means of facilitating international acceptance of its uranium enrichment program, a point of view that was in fundamental opposition to that of the United States and Europe.

No amount of finessing the specifics of a fuel swap, whether it be done in stages, managed by a neutral third party, or carried out over the course of several months or several years, could reconcile the Iranian position with that of the U.S. and Europe. At the center of this problem is the Iranian uranium enrichment program itself. Any fuel swap deal is little more than window dressing to the larger issue of whether or not Iran will be permitted by the international community to enrich uranium. To the U.S. and Europe, finer points such as whether such enrichment would be capped at 3.5 percent, or diversified to include 19.5 percent, remain irrelevant, since their unified policy approach is to suspend all uranium enrichment activities inside Iran.

The fatal flaw in the Obama fuel swap proposal, when it was broached in October 2009, was that it failed to explicitly state that any fuel swap had to be linked to Iran’s suspension of its uranium enrichment program. While policy wonks in and out of the Obama administration can argue that such a position was more than implied, given the existence of U.N. Security Council resolutions that explicitly call for suspension, any deal that introduces Iran’s stocks of low-enriched uranium as a legitimate commodity provides de facto legitimization of the processes that produced that commodity. Since Iran has consistently refused to suspend its uranium enrichment activities, it had every reason to treat the proposed fuel swap as a stand-alone deal that focused on a short-term problem, and not as part of the larger U.S.-driven demands for enrichment suspension.

The U.S. policy objective was never to provide Iran with 19.5 percent enriched uranium fuel rods, or to lock Iran in at a 3.5 percent enrichment threshold, but rather to get the majority of Iran’s existing stocks of 3.5 percent enriched uranium out of the country, thereby eliminating any scenario that had Iran using this low-enriched uranium as feedstock for any breakout nuclear weapons production capability, no matter how farfetched such a scenario might be. This is why the Obama administration never paid much attention to the details of such a swap, since these details simply didn’t matter. The U.S. approach was never about facilitating a swap so much as it was about facilitating a kidnapping. The policy objective was to get the majority of Iran’s enriched uranium stocks under international control. Once Iran no longer had access to 1,600 kilograms of its 1,800-kilogram stockpile of low-enriched uranium, the Obama administration could blunt the fear-driven concerns over the immediacy of any Iranian nuclear capability. It would take Iran several months to reconstitute its low-enriched uranium stocks to the level needed to produce its hypothetical nuclear bomb. During this period, the U.S. would redouble its demands for suspension of uranium enrichment and develop a comprehensive package of stringent economic sanctions that would be imposed on Iran should it fail to cooperate.

The fatal flaw in the U.S. approach was that it failed to recognize that such policy formulations may work on paper but in the real world things are far more complicated. The Obama administration had hoped for immediate Iranian agreement to the fuel swap. Once Iran’s enriched uranium was safely out of Iran, the U.S. would then redouble its diplomatic pressure to suspend enrichment activities while simultaneously pressing for international consensus on sanctions. U.S. policy formulators envisioned a seamless transition between these various stages of policy implementation. But Iran, by agreeing in principle to a fuel swap, but demanding closer scrutiny of the details inherent in any such deal, complicated implementation of the U.S. plan.

By December 2009, a point at which the U.S. had hoped to have the Iranian uranium under its control and a sanctions campaign under way, Iran had yet to agree to the specifics of any fuel swap but at the same time publically remained committed to the concept. That approach paralyzed the U.S.-led effort to rally support behind sanctions since most nations did not want to do anything that would threaten the fuel swap negotiations. As 2010 rolled around, the Iranian delay tactics forced the U.S. to shed all pretenses around the fuel swap. While Iranian negotiators spoke of a potential swap formula that could unfold over the course of several months, the U.S. spoke of a swap timetable stretching out several years, making such a swap useless for the purpose it was ostensibly being instituted for—the Iranian nuclear research reactor and the manufacture of medical isotopes.

With the true U.S. policy objective thus exposed, Iran last week announced that it would carry out its own indigenous enrichment of uranium to the 19.5 percent needed to fuel the research reactor. Whether Iran has the technical or practical capabilities necessary to bring such a plan to fruition is debatable. While reconfiguring its existing centrifuge cascades to produce 19.5 percent enriched uranium is not impossible, Iran has never before attempted to process enriched uranium into nuclear fuel rods. Likewise, there is a question about the viability of Iran’s feedstock of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), the gaseous material that is fed into the centrifuges for the purpose of enriching uranium.

Iran’s stores of foreign-procured UF6 are nearly exhausted. So is the stock of UF6 that Iran produced using foreign supplies of natural uranium. What is left for Iran is UF6 produced from indigenous sources of natural uranium. However, these stocks are believed to be contaminated with molybdenum, a metallic substance the presence of which creates destructive mass-distribution problems when Iran’s centrifuges are spun up to the more than 60,000 revolutions per minute needed to extract enriched uranium from the UF6 feedstock. If Iran cannot come up with the means to extract the molybdenum from its indigenous UF6, then short of finding an outside supplier of natural uranium or clean UF6 (activities that would have to be declared to the IAEA), the Iranian enrichment program will halt.

This would not prevent Iran from using its existing stocks of 3.5 percent enriched uranium as the feedstock for any effort to produce 19.5 percent uranium. Reconfiguration of its centrifuges to conduct this higher level of enrichment is likewise well within the technical capability of Iran. The ultimate testament to the failure of U.S. nonproliferation policy when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program is the reality that, in an effort to retard any Iranian nuclear breakout scenario that saw Iran rapidly converting its low-enriched stocks to high-enriched fissile material, the United States has actually facilitated such a scheme. Had the U.S. sought to lock Iran’s enrichment infrastructure in at a 3.5 percent capacity, any deviation from that level would have been viewed with suspicion. However, by creating the conditions that have Iran now seeking to build enrichment facilities capable of 20 percent enrichment, the Obama administration has significantly reduced the threshold of detection and prevention which was in place when all Iran produced was 3.5 percent enriched uranium.

The number of centrifuges required to step up enrichment of 20 percent uranium to higher levels is significantly smaller than the number needed to step up from 3.5 percent to 20 percent. Furthermore, any Iranian breakout scenario that starts at 20 percent enriched feedstock will reach its end objective of 90 percent enrichment far quicker than a similar program that starts at 3.5 percent. The Obama administration has not only made it easier for Iran to hide a covert nuclear weapons enrichment capability, but also made it far more efficient. That there is no evidence of any such program in existence does not matter in the minds of those who had given Iran such a capability to begin with. When dealing in a universe driven by the theoretical, the U.S. fumbling of the nuclear fuel swap with Iran has simply made the breakout theory more viable. And since U.S. nonproliferation policy toward Iran is more driven by faith-based analysis than it is by fact-based analysis, one can all but guarantee that the U.S. response to this new fiction will be real, and measurable, and have nothing but negative results for the Middle East and the World.

The unfolding crisis concerning Iran’s nuclear program represents but one of several nonproliferation failures perpetrated by the United States that, in combination, bode poorly for the upcoming NPT Review Conference scheduled for May. In May of 2009, at the conclusion of the preparatory committee for the NPT Review Conference, there were high hopes for the possibility of progress in reaching international consensus on nonproliferation issues, and reshaping the NPT to capture this consensus. Much of these hopes were derived from the statements and rhetoric of the Obama administration about nuclear disarmament and arms control. Unfortunately, rhetoric never caught up with reality.

Not only has U.S. policy toward Iran been exposed as operating in total disregard to the provisions of the NPT (Iran, after all, is permitted to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes under Article IV of that treaty), but the cornerstone commitments made by the Obama administration as a prerequisite for a successful NPT Review Conference in May 2010—movement toward ratification of the CTBT, agreement with the Russians to extend the verification mechanisms inherent in START while achieving even deeper cuts in their respective nuclear arsenals—have failed to materialize. There is almost no chance of the CTBT being submitted to the U.S. Senate for ratification, let alone being actually ratified. The failure of the administration to extend START past its December 2009 expiration date has not only left the U.S. and Russia with no arms control verification vehicle, but has reignited dormant Cold War-era tendencies in both nations, with the Russians deploying a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missile and the U.S. talking about nuclear warhead modernization.

President Obama had hoped that the 2010 NPT Review Conference would pave the way to a global consensus on multilateral approaches toward nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. Instead, its looming demise only accelerates the existing trend in the United States to reject international agreements and instead embrace a unilateralism sustained by the false premise that security can be achieved through nuclear supremacy. One only needs to examine the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the ongoing fiasco that is America’s global war on terrorism to understand the fallacy of that argument.

The policy of the U.S. toward Iran’s nuclear program is to blame for much, if not all, of this failure. Had the administration used the fuel swap agreement as an opportunity to bring Iran back into the fold of the international community—not by excluding its uranium enrichment efforts, but rather legitimizing them through enhanced IAEA inspections and Iran’s agreement to participate in closely controlled regional fuel bank programs that kept its enriched uranium stocks under stringent international controls—there would not have been the policy floundering which occurred in the fall of 2009.

Fears about a phantom Iranian nuclear weapon would have dissipated, and with it the illogical U.S. insistence on ballistic missile defense initiatives that have fatally undermined the current round of U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations. Had the Obama administration remained consistent with its September 2009 decision to terminate the controversial Bush-era missile defense plan involving the stationing of interceptor missiles and radar systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, there would be a START treaty today. But the sleight-of-hand approach, in which one program was terminated only to be replaced by another, triggered concerns among Russian military leaders about the real policy objectives of the Obama administration.

The administration has demonstrated that, for all the noble intent and objectives in the arena of arms control and nonproliferation exhibited at its inception, it too is susceptible to the addiction to nuclear weapons that has plagued America since 1945. This addiction, which feeds the notion of the United States’ self-appointed status of global savior and policeman, prevents any policy formulation that is perceived to weaken or undermine America’s nuclear supremacy. At a time when the world needed American leadership in the field of disarmament and nonproliferation, it instead got nothing but a replay of past policy, wrapped in the paranoid delusions of a nation that is unable or unwilling to come to grips with reality. Genuine international security is derived not from any nation, even the United States, seeking to impose deterrence-based policies through nuclear supremacy. True security comes from a world free of nuclear weapons.

To secure America, a president must have the courage to dismantle what, in the past, has been proclaimed as the foundation of our survival, but in reality presents us with the seeds of our destruction—nuclear weapons. President Obama had articulated such a vision in his groundbreaking speech in Prague back in April 2009. Since that time the United States has embarked on arms control and nonproliferation policies that have not only failed to move America and the world further down the path of peace and security, but actually made matters worse.

Policies must be judged not by their intent but their results. In this, the Obama administration’s policies represent an abysmal failure. The administration seeks to place the blame for these failures elsewhere, on Iran, China, Russia and North Korea. But the root cause of such failure lies with the utter lack of courage and conviction on the part of Barack Obama. He claimed to possess a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, only to succumb to the same hubris and avarice that afflicted past U.S. presidents when tempted by the world supremacy that nuclear weapons promise.

Scott Ritter was U.S. weapons inspector in the Soviet Union (1988-1990) and chief inspector for the United Nations in Iraq (1991-1998) and is author of “Iraq Confidential” (2006), “Target Iran” (2007) and “Dangerous Ground: The Failure of U.S. Arms Control Policy From FDR to Obama,” to be published by Nation Books this year.

TomDispatch.com

On the relatively rare occasions when the media turns its attention to U.S. weapons sales abroad and shines its not-so-bright spotlight on the latest set of facts and figures, it invariably speaks of “the global arms trade.”

Let’s consider that label for a moment, word by word:

*It is global, since there are few places on the planet that lie beyond the reach of the weapons industry.

*Arms sounds so old-fashioned and anodyne when what we’re talking about is advanced technology designed to kill and maim.

*And trade suggests a give and take among many parties when, if we’re looking at the figures for that “trade” in a clear-eyed way, there is really just one seller and so many buyers.

How about updating it this way: “the global weapons monopoly.”

In 2008, according to an authoritative report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), $55.2 billion in weapons deals were concluded worldwide. Of that total, the United States was responsible for $37.8 billion in weapons sales agreements, or 68.4% of the total “trade.” Some of these agreements were long-term ones and did not result in 2008 deliveries of weapons systems, but these latest figures are a good gauge of the global appetite for weapons. It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to recognize that, when one nation accounts for nearly 70% of weapons sales, the term “global arms trade” doesn’t quite cut it.

Consider the “competition” and reality comes into focus. Take a guess on which country is the number two weapons exporter on the planet: China? Russia? No, Italy, with a relatively paltry $3.7 billion in agreements with other countries or just 9% of the U.S. market share. Russia, that former Cold War superpower in the “trade,” was close behind Italy, with only $3.5 billion in arms agreements.

U.S. weapons manufacturers have come a long way, baby, since those Cold War days when the United States really did have a major competitor. For instance, the Congressional Research Service’s data for 1990, the last year of the Soviet Union’s existence, shows global weapons sales totaling $32.7 billion, with the United States accounting for $12.1 billion of that or 37% of the market. For its part, the Soviet Union was responsible for a competitive $10.7 billion in deals inked that year. France, China, and the United Kingdom accounted for most of the rest.

Since then, the global appetite for weapons has only grown more voracious, while the number of purveyors has shrunk to the point where the Pentagon could hang out a sign: “We arm the world.” No kidding, it’s true.

Cambodia ($304,000), Comoros ($895,000), Colombia ($256 million), Guinea ($200,000), Greece ($225 million), Great Britain ($1.1 billion), the Philippines ($72.9 million), Poland ($79.8 million), and Peru ($16.4 million) all buy U.S. arms, as does almost every country not in that list. U.S. weapons, and only U.S. weapons, are coveted by presidents and prime ministers, generals and strongmen.

From the Pentagon’s own data (which differs from that in the CRS report), here are the top ten nations which made Foreign Military Sales agreements with the Pentagon, and so with U.S. weapons makers, in 2008:

Saudi Arabia $6.06 billion

Iraq $2.50 billion

Morocco $2.41 billion

Egypt $2.31 billion

Israel $1.32 billion

Australia $1.13 billion

South Korea $1.12 billion

Great Britain $1.10 billion

India $1 billion

Japan $840 million

That’s more than $17 billion in weapons right there. Some of these countries are consistently eager buyers, and some are not. Morocco, for example, is only in that top-ten list because it was green-lighted to buy 24 of Lockheed Martin’s F-16 fighter planes at $360 million (or so) for each aircraft, an expensive one-shot deal. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia (which inked $14.71 billion in weapons agreements between 2001 and 2008), Egypt ($13.25 billion) and Israel ($11.27 billion) are such regular customers that they should have the equivalent of one of those “buy 10, get the 11th free” punch cards doled out by your favorite coffee shop.

To sum up, the U.S. has a virtual global monopoly on exporting tools of force and destruction. Call it market saturation. Call it anything you like, just not the “global arms trade.”

Getting Even More Competitive?

It used to be that the United States exported goods, products, and machinery of all sorts in prodigious quantities: cars and trucks, steel and computers, and high-tech gizmos. But those days are largely over.

The Obama administration now wants to launch a green manufacturing revolution in the U.S., and in February, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced a new “National Export Initiative” with the aim of doubling American exports, a move he said would support the creation of two million new jobs. The U.S. could, of course, lose the renewable-energy race to China and that new exports program may never get off the ground. In one area, however, the U.S. is manufacturing products that are distinctly wanted -- things that go boom in the night -- and there the Pentagon is working hard to increase market share.

Don’t for a second think that the American global monopoly on weapons sales is accidental or unintentional. The constant and lucrative growth of this market for U.S. weapons makers has been ensured by shrewd strategic planning. Washington is constantly thinking of new and inventive ways to flog its deadly wares throughout the world.

How do you improve on near perfection? In the interest of enhancing that “competitive” edge in weapons sales, the Obama administration is investigating the possibility of revising export laws to make it even easier to sell military technology abroad. As Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morell explained in January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to see “wholesale changes to the rules and regulations on government technology exports” in the name of “competitiveness.”

When he says “government technology exports,” Morell of course means weapons and other military technologies. “Tinkering with our antiquated, bureaucratic, overly cumbersome system is not enough to maintain our competitiveness in the global economy and also help our friends and allies buy the equipment they need to contribute to global security,” he continued, “[Gates] strongly supports the administration’s efforts to completely reform our export control regime, starting ideally with a blank sheet of paper.”

The laws that regulate U.S. weapons exports are a jumbled mess, but in essence they delineate what the United States can sell to whom and through what bureaucratic mechanisms. According to U.S. law, for example, there are actually a few countries that cannot receive U.S. weapons. Myanmar under the military junta and Venezuela while led by Hugo Chavez are two examples. There are also some weapons systems that are not intended for export. Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor jet fighter was -- until the Pentagon recently stopped buying the plane -- deemed too sophisticated or sensitive to sell abroad. And there are reporting requirements that give members of Congress a window of opportunity within which they can question or oppose proposed weapons exports.

Given what’s being sold, these export controls are remarkably minimal in nature and are constantly under assault by the weapons industry. Bans on weapons sales to particular countries are regularly lifted through aggressive lobbying. (Indonesia, for example, was offered $50 million in weapons from 2006 to 2008 after an almost decade long congressional arms embargo.) The industry also works to relax controls on new technology exports to allies. Japan and Australia have mounted campaigns to win the ability to buy F-22 Raptors, potential sales that Lockheed Martin is now especially happy to entertain. The reporting window to Congress remains an important export control, but the time frame is shrinking as more countries are being “fast tracked,” making it harder for distracted representatives to react when a controversial sale comes up.

In addition to revising these export controls, the administration is looking at the issue of “dual-use” technologies. These are not weapons. They do not shoot or explode. Included are high-speed computer processors, surveillance and detection networks, and a host of other complex and evolving technologies that could have military as well as civilian applications. This category might also include intangible items like cyber-entities or access to controlled web environments.

Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other major weapons manufacturers have invested billions of dollars from the Pentagon’s research and development budgets in exploring and perfecting such technologies, and now they are eager to sell them to foreign buyers along with the usual fighter planes, combat ships, and guided missiles. But the rules as they stand make this something less than a slam dunk. So the weapons industry and the Pentagon are arguing for “updating” the rules. If you translate updating as “loosening” the rules, then the United States would indeed be more “competitive,” but who exactly are we trying to beat?

Weapons Sales are Red Hot

“What’s Hot?” is the title of Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieranga’s blog entry for January 4, 2010. Wieranga is the Director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which is charged with overseeing weapons exports, and such pillow talk is evidently more than acceptable -- at least when it’s about weapons sales. In fact, Wieranga could barely restrain himself that day, adding: “Afghanistan is really HOT!” Admittedly, on that day the temperature in Kabul was just above freezing, but not at the Pentagon, where arms sales to Afghanistan evidently create a lot of heat.

As Wieranga went on to write, the Obama administration’s new 2010/2011 budget allocates $6 billion in weaponry for Afghan Security Forces. The Afghans will actually get those weapons for free, but U.S. weapons makers will make real money delivering them at taxpayers’ expense and, as the Vice Admiral pointed out, that “means there is a staggering amount of acquisition work to do.”

It’s not just Afghanistan that’s now in the torrid zone. Weapons sales all over the world will be smoking in 2010 and beyond.

The year began with a bang when Wieranga’s Agency announced that the Obama administration had decided to sell a nifty $6 billion in weapons to Taiwan. Even as the United States leans heavily on China for debt servicing, Washington is giving the Mainland a big raspberry by offering the island of 22 million off its coast (which Washington does not formally recognize as an independent nation), a lethal cocktail of weaponry that includes $3 billion in Black Hawk helicopters. This deal comes on top of more than $11 billion in U.S. weapons exports to Taiwan over the last decade, and is certain to set Chinese-U.S. relations back a step or two.

Other bonanzas on the horizon? Brazil wants new fighter planes and Boeing is battling a French company for the contract in a deal that could be worth a whopping $7 billion. India, once a major arms buyer from the Soviet Union, is now another big buy-American customer, with Boeing and Lockheed Martin vying to equip its air force with new fighter planes in deals that Boeing estimates may reach $11 billion.

Such deals are staggering. They contribute more bang and blast to a world already bristling with particularly lethal weaponry. They are a striking American success story in a time filled with failures. Put in the lurid but everyday terms of a nation weaned on reality television, the Pentagon is pimping for the U.S. weapons industry. The weapons industry, for its part, is a pusher for every kind of lethal technology. The two of them together are working to ensure that more of the same will flow out of the U.S. in ever easier and more lucrative ways.

Global arms trade? Send that one back to the Department of Euphemisms. Pimps and pushers with a lucrative global monopoly on a killing drug -- maybe that’s the language we need. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to launch a “war on weapons.”

Frida Berrigan is a Senior Program Associate with the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative. “Weapons at War 2008,” a report she co-authored with William D. Hartung, goes into much more detail about the politics and pratfalls of weapons exports.

For decades, international activists have been pushing the idea of a tax on financial transactions. Such a tax would give us a twofer: a drop in short-term speculation that serves no productive purpose and leads to dangerous bubbles, and 2) loads of money that could be used for good things, like health, climate, and jobs programs.

Today, we’re closer to achieving this two-for-one deal than we’ll probably ever be in our lifetimes. Reeling from the worst financial crisis in 80 years, policymakers are not only desperate for new sources of revenue, they’re more open to rethinking the role of Wall Street and making sure it serves real economic needs.

To take advantage of these new opportunities, a wide range of activists, including trade unionists, international health advocates, and climate justice groups, have come together to move this decades-old proposition into practice. Their efforts are gaining traction—and even some celebrity support.

The specific proposal is to tax trades of all types of financial assets, including stock, derivatives, and currencies. The tax rate would be so low that ordinary investors wouldn’t even notice it. Some U.S. legislative proposals would even exempt retirement funds and mutual funds, the primary middle class investment vehicles. The real target would be the hedge fund investors and other high fliers in the global casino, who make most of their money through high-frequency betting on short-term market movements that often have nothing to do with what’s going on in the real economy. Since the tax would apply to each of these transactions, it would make this type of speculative gambling much less profitable and encourage more long-term, patient investment.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has analyzed the likely impact of a set of taxes, ranging from 0.01 percent on currency transactions to 0.25 percent on stock trades. Assuming that trading volumes dropped by 50 percent, these taxes could raise more than $175 billion per year in the United States alone.

The call for such taxes has been particularly loud in Europe, where activists have managed to win promises of support from leaders of the three largest economies—the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. But more pressure is needed to make speculation taxes a reality.

In the UK, activists have teamed up with filmmaker Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’ Diary) to put some star power behind the cause. Through a creative media campaign being launched today, they aim to secure commitments from candidates vying for votes in the upcoming general election.

One of the campaign tools Curtis has produced is this video, starring British actor Bill Nighy (who you'll recognize from his roles as Davy Jones in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies or as the ribald aging pop singer in Love Actually) as a haughty banking executive whose arguments against the tax completely unravel in the course of three minutes. The UK groups kicked off their campaign by projecting a giant image of ordinary people wearing Robin Hood masks and the slogan “Be Part of the World’s Greatest Bank Job” on the side of the Bank of England.

In the United States, we may not yet have Hollywood spokespeople, but we do have prominent business leaders on our side, including John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund. We also have bills to create financial speculation taxes in both the House and the Senate, introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA).

President Obama is not yet on board. Recently, he did call for a new fee on the top 50 banks. This is a positive, but far more modest, approach—it wouldn’t directly affect speculation, would leave hedge funds off the hook, and would generate far less revenue.

U.S. activists are hoping to see a shift in the administration’s position by the time Obama travels to Toronto in June for a summit with the leaders of the other G20 big economies. Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a coalition of more than 200 labor unions, consumer groups, and other activist organizations, has been working to raise the profile of the issue in the media and on Capitol Hill and recently sent this letter to the president, urging his support. AFR is also working with other U.S. and international activists to coordinate pressure on key governments and the International Monetary Fund, which is carrying out a feasibility study of the issue at the G20’s request.

Taxing financial speculation won’t single-handedly prevent another crisis or solve the world’s climate and jobs crises. But for those of us who want the financial industry to serve people and the planet rather than dominate them, this is the most exciting reform under serious consideration on the world stage. And it is an idea whose time has come.

The rapid mobilization of U.S troops in Haiti was not primarily done for humanitarian reasons; we're likely to see a neoliberal economic plan imposed, at gunpoint if necessary.

Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide "security and stability" to bring in aid, according to nearly all independent observers in the field, violence was never an issue. in
 
Instead, there appears to be cruder motives for the military response. With Haiti’s government "all but invisible" and its repressive security forces collapsed, popular organizations were starting to fill the void. But the Western powers rushing in envision sweatshops and tourism as the foundation of a rebuilt Haiti. This is opposed by the popular organizations, which draw their strength from Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to be imposed on a devastated Haiti it will be done at gunpoint.
 
The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S troops was not for humanitarian reasons; in fact it crowded out much of the arriving aid into the Port-au-Prince airport, forcing lengthy delays. Doctors Without Borders said five of its cargo flights carrying 85 tons of medical and relief supplies were turned away during the first week while flights from the World Food Program were delayed up to two days. One WFP official said of the 200 flights going in and out of Haiti daily “most … are for the U.S. military.” Nineteen days into the crisis, only 32 percent of Haitians in need had received any food (even if just a single meal), three-quarters were without clean water, the government had received only two percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running "dangerously low" on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. On Feb. 9, the Washington Post reported that food aid was little more than rice, and “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.”

At the same time, the United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500 soldiers on the ground, with another 15,000 troops offshore at one point, dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. embassy was issuing orders on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, the New York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,” while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back “half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word."
 
In the first week, the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, said the presence of the Haitian police was “limited” because they had been “devastated" by the earthquake. The real powers in Haiti right now are Keen, U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke, Bill Clinton (who has been tapped by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts) and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it" while Lucke added, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.”
 
While much of the corporate media fixated on "looters,” virtually every independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as "relatively calm." One aid worker in Haiti, Leisa Faulkner, said, “There is no security threat from the Haitian people. Aid workers do not need to fear them. I would really like for the guys with the rifles to put them down and pick up shovels to help find people still buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings and homes. It just makes me furious to see multiple truckloads of fellows with automatic rifles."
 
Veteran Haiti reporter Kim Ives concurred, explaining to “Democracy Now!”: “Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population themselves organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. This is a population which is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for all these years.”

Beginning February 15th two Greenpeace activists - Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, known as the 'Tokyo Two' - will be on trial in Japan for their role in exposing major corruption in the government funded Japanese whaling industry.

Recently, a division of the United Nations Human Rights Council has ruled that the Tokyo Two's human rights have been breached by the Japanese justice system. This is the first ever such ruling of its kind for Japan.

Junichi and Toru have put their freedom and rights on the line to defend whales - please pledge your support for them. Tell the Japanese government that it is whaling that should be on trial - not those who oppose it.

We will ensure that your pledge is communicated to the government of Japan as we show the strong level of support behind Junichi and Toru during their trial.

[You can follow updates from the trial on our Facebook page, or by following the Twitter list @Greenpeace/whaletrial or hashtag #whaletrial.]

Much heartfelt thanks,

Things you can do now! http://www.greenpeace.org/international/getinvolved

Letter to the people of Haiti who survived the devastating earthquake and are in need of help.    

The Federation of Global Governments Help victims in all parts of the world. http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/Federation/FERRC.html

In the aftermath of the earthquake, with much of the infrastructure and government services destroyed, Haitians have relied on each other for the relief efforts, working together to pull their neighbors, friends and loved ones from the rubble. One report from IPS News in Haiti explained, "In the day following the quake, there was no widespread violence. Guns, knives and theft weren't seen on the streets, lined only with family after family carrying their belongings. They voiced their anger and frustration with sad songs that echoed throughout the night, not their fists."

Bob Moliere, an organizer within the popular political party Fanmi Lavalas was killed in the earthquake. His wife, Marianne Moliere, told IPS News after burying her husband, "There is no life for me because Bob was everything to me. I lost everything. Everything is destroyed," she said. "I'm sleeping in the street now because I'm homeless. But when I get some water, I share with others. Or if someone gives some spaghetti, I share with my family and others."

It is not this type of solidarity that has emerged in the wake of the crisis - and the delayed and muddled response from the international community - that most corporate media in the US have focused on. Instead, echoing the coverage and calls for militarization of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, major media outlets talk about the looting, and need for security to protect private property.

One request from Erwin Berthold, the owner of Big Star Market in Petionville, Haiti, reflects this concern for profit over people. Berthold told the Washington Post about his supermarket, "We have everything cleaned up inside. We are ready to open. We just need some security. So send in the Marines, okay?"

That militarization is already underway. This week the US is sending thousands of troops and soldiers to the country. The Haitian government has signed over control of its capital airport to the US. Brazil and France have already lodged complaints that US military planes are now being given priority over other flights at the international airport.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez responded to the US troop deployment. "I read that 3,000 soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war. There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals, that's what the United States should send," Chavez said. "They are occupying Haiti undercover." The Venezuelan President pledged to send any necessary amount of gasoline needed to the country to aid with electricity and transport.

A Heroic History in Washington's Backyard

There is also little mention in the major news outlets' coverage of how the US government and corporations helped impoverish Haiti in the first place, creating the economic poverty that makes disasters like this so extensive. Nor is there mention of the country's heroic struggle against imperialism and slavery. Fidel Castro pointed out in a recent column, "Haiti was the first country in which 400,000 Africans, enslaved and trafficked by Europeans, rose up against 30,000 white slave masters on the sugar and coffee plantations, thus undertaking the first great social revolution in our hemisphere. ... Napoleon's most eminent general was defeated there. Haiti is the net product of colonialism and imperialism, of more than one century of the employment of its human resources in the toughest forms of work, of military interventions and the extraction of its natural resources."

University professor Peter Hallward, writing in the Guardian Unlimited, criticized Washington for its responsibility in creating the suffering it is now pledging to alleviate in Haiti. "Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty' has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies. Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smoldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilization and pacification force in the country."

Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti told Hallward of the root causes for the overpopulation of neighborhoods in the city of Port-au-Prince that were hit so hard by the earthquake. "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labor force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Unnatural crises such as this made the earthquake much more devastating.

Disaster Capitalism Comes to Haiti

As Noami Klein thoroughly proved in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, throughout history, "while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times." This push to apply unpopular neoliberal policies began almost immediately after the earthquake in Haiti.

In a talk recorded by Democracy Now!, Klein explained that the disaster in Haiti is created on the one hand by nature, and on the other hand "is worsened by the poverty that our governments have been so complicit in deepening. Crises-natural disasters are so much worse in countries like Haiti, because you have soil erosion because the poverty means people are building in very, very precarious ways, so houses just slide down because they are built in places where they shouldn't be built. All of this is interconnected. But we have to be absolutely clear that this tragedy, which is part natural, part unnatural, must, under no circumstances, be used to, one, further indebt Haiti, and, two, to push through unpopular corporatist policies in the interests of our corporations."

Following the disaster in Haiti, Klein pointed out that the Heritage Foundation, "one of the leading advocates of exploiting disasters to push through their unpopular pro-corporate policies," issued a statement on its website after the earthquake hit: "In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti's long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region."

The mercenary trade group International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) immediately offered their services to provide "security" in Haiti to its member companies, according to Jeremy Scahill. Within hours of the earthquake, Scahill wrote, the IPOA website announced, "In the wake of the tragic events in Haiti, a number of IPOA's member companies are available and prepared to provide a wide variety of critical relief services to the earthquake's victims."

Kathy Robison, a Fortune 500 executive, formerly with Goldman Sachs Companies, wrote of the earthquake disaster in Haiti. "The business leaders I have been meeting with have seen enough disappointment and suffering," she wrote. "What Haiti needs is economic development and the building of a true middle class. ... There is much we are planning as far as creating new and innovative ways of using international aid and government support to promote private investment."

On January 14, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced a $100 million loan to Haiti to help with relief efforts. However, Richard Kim at The Nation wrote that this loan was added onto $165 million in debt made up of loans with conditions "including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low." This new $100 million loan has the same conditions. Kim writes, "in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms."

The last thing Haiti needs at this point is more debt; what it needs is grants. As Kim wrote, according to a report from the The Center for International Policy, in 2003 "Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million."

In the midst of the suffering and anguish following the earthquake, many Haitians came together to console and help each other. Journalist David Wilson, in Haiti during the time of the earthquake, wrote of the singing that followed the disaster. "Several hundred people had gathered to sing, clap, and pray in an intersection here by 9 o'clock last night, a little more than four hours after an earthquake had devastated much of the Haitian capital." A young Haitian American commented to Wilson on the singing, "Haitians are different," he said. "People in other countries wouldn't do this. It's a sense of community."

If these elements of the "relief" efforts continue in this exploitative vein, it is this community that will likely be crushed even further by disaster capitalism and imperialism.

While international leaders and institutions are speaking about how many soldiers and dollars they are committing to Haiti, it is important to note that what Haiti needs is doctors not soldiers, grants not loans, a stronger public sector rather than a wholesale privatization, and critical solidarity with grassroots organizations and people to support the self-determination of the country.

"We don't need soldiers," Patrick Elie, the former Defense Minister under the Aristide government told Al Jazeera. "There is no war here." In addition to critiquing the presence of the soldiers, he commented on the US-control of the main airport. "The choice of what lands and what doesn't land, the priorities of the flight[s], should be determined by the Haitians. Otherwise, it's a takeover and what might happen is that the needs of Haitians are not taken into account, but only either the way a foreign country defines the need of Haiti, or try to push its own agenda."

***

For more information and suggestions on acting in solidarity with the Haitian people, read this article.

The UN inSecurity Council has done it again in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia has been committing genocide in the Ethiopian Ogaden and in response the UN Security Council, in a closed door meeting, passed sanctions against...Eritrea?

In the bizarre world of the UN Security Council, black is white, up is down and right is wrong. Ethiopia can invade its neighbors (Eritrea in 2000, Somalia in 2006) steal an election (2005, in the process of which Ethiopian troops gunned down over 500 protestors and locked up another 50,000) and commit crimes against humanity against its own people, including ethnic cleansing in western Ethiopia and outright genocide in the Ogaden, and remain untouched..

Eritrea can help bring peace to Sudan, including eastern Sudan, the North-South civil war and now in Dafur and in reward be sanctioned by the UN Security Council. What were the charges against Eritrea? Supporting terrorism in Somalia ie providing arms to the Al Shabab Somali resistance.

As one who spent many hours sharing cuppucinos with the Somali resistance in the lobby of the former Imperial Hotel here in Asmara (I have renamed it the Peace Hotel for it seems all of the peace deals brokered here in the Horn of Africa were born there) I can speak from first hand experience that the one Somali resistance organization that I have never been introduced to is the Al Shabab leadership. Of course the evidence for such charges is pretty non-existent or even laughable. For example, the UN “Monitoring Committee” for Somalia is the main source of charges that Eritrea has provided weapons to Al Shabab. Never mind that this same “Committee” also issued a widely ridiculed report that Somali Jihadists fought along side Hezbollah in the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war. Even Israeli intelligence officers had a good laugh at this one.

In contrast, Dumusani Khumalo, South Africa’s Ambassador to the UN and the chair of the UN special committee on Somalia has just issued a report that said that at least 80% of the arms available in Somalia came from Ethiopia or were arms “donated” by the USA and other western countries to the so called “Somalia Transitional Government” and then sold on the black market, often times to the resistance. So much for enforcing the UN arms embargo for Somalia. Just another case of acquired amnesia for the “distorters” working for the western media here in east Africa.

A few years back the “Special Monitoring Committee for Somalia” aka the CIA, issued a report that arms shipments were arriving in Somalia via Asmara Airport here in Eritrea and even provided a registration number for the aircraft. But when a little research was done it turned out that the aircraft in question was registered to a well known Russian arms dealer with a long history of working for...the CIA!

No one has bothered trying to explain how Eritrea was able to sneak arms shipments past all the naval task forces assembled in the Indian Ocean to try and prevent piracy. No one has been able to explain how Eritrea was able to sneak arms past both the French and USA military in Djibouti, with all their satellite technology and around the clock intell systems. No has been able to explain how no arms shipments from Eritrea to Al Shabab have ever been captured. But then the western media doesnt have to explain anything, just report whatever the CIA tells them and move on to the next story.

As someone with a long background in the history of the Horn of Africa this latest distortion of reality by the UN Security Council comes as no suprise. The UN has violated its own charter so many times in matters concerning Africa’s Horn we have lost count. This latest shameful act is just another in a long, disgraceful history going back to the UN/USA handing over the former Italian colony of Eritrea to the USA cop on the beat at the time, the Haile Sellasie regime in Ethiopia and Eritrean independence be damned.

We here in Eritrea have come to expect that no good deed goes unpunished and bringing peace to the Horn of Africa is in opposition to USA imperial policy. The USA does NOT want peace in Africa, just the opposite. With peace could come strong, nationalistic governments and how is the USA and its western partners in crime going to be able to rape and pillage Africa’s raw materials at will if this is the case?

A good example is how the Anglo-American Mining company operates one of the largest gold mines in the world in Tanzania, for which the Tanzanian people recieve a whopping 5% royalty. Thats right, for every $1000 per ounce of Tanzanian gold sold, Anglo-American recieves $950 with Tanzania recieving just $50. This isnt partnership, this is theft.

Compare this to Eritrea where the Canadian company Nevsun will be opening the Bisha Gold Mine later this year. Eritrea will be recieving 40% of the profits and Nevsun 60%. This should give you pretty good idea of why the USA and its western capos are hell bent on destroying Eritrea, or at least bringing us to heal, you know, kneel down and kiss the masters feet? Africa remains about the only place in the world that the west is able to exploit without restriction and without Africa’s wealth is will be increasingly impossible for the western countries to maintain their bloated standard of living.

Thomas C. Mountain
Asmara, Eritrea

In a former life, Thomas C. Mountain was the publisher of the Ambedkar Journal on India's Dalits and a founding member of the Phoolan Devi International Defense Committee thomascmountain at yahoo dot com

In her book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," Naomi Klein explores the myth of free market democracy, explaining how neoliberalism dominates the world with America its main exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere.

As a result, wars are waged, social services cut, public ones privatized, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or in duress to object. Disaster capitalism is triumphant everywhere from post-Soviet Russia to post-apartheid South Africa, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Honduras before and after the US-instigated coup, post-tsunami Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia, New Orleans post-Katrina, and now heading to Haiti full-throttle after its greatest ever catastrophe. The same scheme always repeats, exploiting people for profits, the prevailing neoliberal idea that "there is no alternative" so grab all you can.

On Her web site, Klein headlines a "Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again," then quotes the extremist Heritage Foundation saying:

"In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the US response to the tragic Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti's long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region."

Heritage notes "Things to Remember While Helping Haiti," itemized briefly below:

-- be bold and decisive;

-- mobilize US civilian and military capabilities "for short-term rescue and relief and long-term recovery and reform;"

-- US military forces should play an active role interdicting "cocaine to Haiti and Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola;"

-- US Coast Guard vessels should stop Haitians from trying "to enter the US illegally;"

-- Congress should authorize "assistance, trade and reconstruction efforts;" and

-- US diplomacy should "counter the negative propaganda certain to emanate from the Castro-Chavez camp (to) demonstrate that the US's involvement in the Caribbean remains a powerful force for good in the Americas and around the globe."

Heritage is an imperial tool advocating predation, exploitation, and Haitian redevelopment for profit, not for desperate people to repair their lives. It disdains democratic freedoms, social justice, and envisions a global economy "where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish" solely for the privileged, the chosen few, not the disadvantaged or greater majority.

It's for free market plunder, regulatory freedom, tax cuts for the rich, exploiting the majority, corporate handouts, and militarized control for enforcement. It supports the Bilderberg idea of a global classless society - a New World Order with rulers and serfs, no middle class, no unions, no democracy, no equity or justice, just empowered oligarchs, freed to do as they please under a universal legal system benefitting them.

For the moment, their focus is Haiti, ripe for plunder, like the second tsunami that hit coastal Sri Lankans. The December 2004 one took 250,000 lives and left 2.5 million homeless throughout the region. Klein explained the aftermath at Arugam Bay, "a fishing and faded resort village" on Sri Lanka's east coast that was showcased to "build back better." Not for villagers, for developers, hoteliers, and other business interests to exploit. After the disaster, they had a blank slate for what the tourist industry long wanted - "a pristine beach (on prime real estate), scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people working, a vacation Eden. It was the same up and down the coast once rubble was cleared....paradise" given the profit potential.

New rules forbade coastal homes, so a buffer zone was imposed to insure it. Beaches were off-limits. Displaced Sri Lankans were shoved into grim barracks, and "menacing, machine-gun-wielding soldiers" patrolled to keep them there.

Tourist operators, however, were welcomed and encouraged to build on oceanfront land - to transform the former fishing village into a "high-end boutique tourism destination (with) five-star resorts, luxury chalets, (and even a) floatplane pier and helipad."

It was to be a model for transforming around 30 similar zones into a South Asian Riviera to let Sri Lanka reenter the world economy as one of the last remaining uncolonized places globalization hadn't touched. High-end tourism was the ticket - to provide a luxury destination for the rich once a few changes were made. Government land was opened to private buyers. Labor laws were relaxed or eliminated. Modern infrastructure would be built, and public opposition suppressed to let plans proceed unimpeded.

The same scheme followed Hurricane Mitch in October 1998 when Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua were hardest hit. In Sri Lanka, Washington took the Mitch model to the next level - beyond individuals to corporate control over reconstruction. Business ran everything. Affected people were shut out. Klein called it a new type corporate coup mother nature made possible. Now again in Haiti with an idea of what's coming.

Powerful business interests constructed a blueprint from housing to hotels to highways and other needed infrastructure. Disaster relief went for development. Victims got nothing and were consigned to permanent shantytowns like the kinds in most Global South cities and Global North inner ones. Aceh and other affected areas adopted the same model.

A year after the tsunami, the NGO Action Aid surveyed the results in five Asian countries and found the same pattern - residents barred from rebuilding and living in militarized camps, while developers were given generous incentives. Lost was their way of life forever.

The same scheme played out in New Orleans with unfettered capitalism given free reign. With considerable Bush administration help, mother nature gave corporate predators a golden opportunity for plunder. Prevailing wage rates for federally funded or assisted construction projects were suspended. So were environmental regulations in an already polluted area, enough to be designated a superfund site or toxic waste dump. Instead, redevelopment was planned.

As a previous article explained, New Orleans had ample warning but was unprepared. The city is shaped like a bowl, lies below sea level, and its Gulf coast is vulnerable. As a result, the inevitable happened, affecting the city's least advantaged - the majority black population targeted for removal and needing only an excuse to do it. The storm wiped out public housing and erased communities, letting developers build upscale condos and other high-profit projects on choice city land.

It was right out of the Chicago School's play book, what economist Milton Friedman articulated in his 1962 book, "Capitalism and Freedom." His thesis:

"only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When a crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around...our basic function (is) to develop alternatives to existing policies (and be ready to roll them out when the) impossible becomes the politically inevitable."

Friedman believed that government's sole function is "to protect our freedom from (outside) enemies (and) our fellow-citizens. (It's to) preserve law and order (as well as) enforce private contracts, (safeguard private property and) foster competitive markets."

Everything else in public hands is socialism, an ideology he called blasphemous. He said markets work best unfettered of rules, regulations, onerous taxes, trade barriers, "entrenched interests" and human interference, and the best government is practically none - the wild west because, in his view, anything government does business does better so let it. Ideas about democracy, social justice, and a caring society were verboten because they interfere with free-wheeling capitalism.

He said public wealth should be in private hands, profit accumulation unrestrained, corporate taxes abolished, and social services curtailed or ended. He believed "economic freedom is an end to itself (and) an indispensable means toward (achieving) political freedom." He opposed the minimum wage, unions, market interference, an egalitarian society, and called Social Security "the biggest Ponzi scheme on earth." He supported a flat tax favoring the rich, and believed everyone should have to rely on their own resources to get by.

In a word, Friedmanomics preaches unrestrained market fundamentalism. "Free to choose," he said with no regard for human needs and rights. For him and his followers, economic freedom is the be-all-and-end-all under limited government, the marketplace being the master.

Applied to New Orleans, it meant permanent changes, including removing public housing, developing upscale properties in its place, privatizing schools, and destroying a way of life for thousands of disadvantaged blacks expelled from their communities and not allowed back.

Klein called Friedman's thesis "the shock doctrine." Applied to Russia, Eastern Europe and other developing states, it was shock therapy. For affected people, it was economic and social disaster under Friedman's prescription for mass-privatizations, deregulation, unrestricted free market predation, deep social spending cuts, and harsh crackdowns against resisters. It's disaster capitalism, business is booming, and Haitians will soon feel its full fury under military occupation.

Haiti - Beleaguered, Occupied, and Stricken by a Disaster of Biblical Proportions

Since the 19th century, America dominated Haiti. Before the quake, a proxy paramilitary Blue Helmet force occupied the country, dispatched not for peacekeeping but iron-grip control. Worse still, it was the first time ever that UN forces supported a coup d'etat government, the one Washington installed after US Marines kidnapped President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, forcibly exiled him to Africa, and ended the political, economic and social reforms he instituted - in areas of health, education, justice and human rights. Ever since, conditions for Haitians have been nightmarish, and now the quake and further misery ahead from the Pentagon's iron fist and greater than ever exploitation.

Obama's top priority is control, underway immediately after the Pentagon took over the Port-au-Prince airport, reopened it after its brief closure, and set up a temporary air traffic control center. Military personnel now decide what gets in or out, what's delivered, how fast, and according to unconfirmed reports, they slowed arriving search and rescue equipment, supplies, and personnel, except for what other countries managed to send in types and amounts way short of what's needed. As a result, trapped Haitians perished, whereas a concentrated, sustained airlift, including heavy earthmoving and other equipment, might have saved hundreds or thousands more lives.

The 1948 - 49 Berlin airlift showed how. For nearly 11 months, western allies delivered what rose to a daily average of 5,500 tons, providing vital supplies for the city's two million people. Today, the Pentagon has far greater capabilities. If ordered, massive amounts of virtually everything could be expedited, including heavy earthmoving equipment and teams of experts for every imaginable need. The result would have been vast numbers more lives saved, now perished because little was done to help, except for heroic volunteers providing food, water, and medical care, and Haitians who dug out survivors with small implements and their bare hands.

On January 15, Reuters reported that the Port-au-Prince 9,000-foot runway escaped serious damage and could handle big cargo planes easily. Immediately, food, water, medicine, rescue crews, and other specialists began arriving from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, and elsewhere, but very little from America, including vitally needed heavy equipment. Haiti has very little of what's needed.

Instead, the Pentagon sent in thousands of Marines and 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers (a 10,000 force contingent once in place), armed killers, not humanitarian personnel and regular supplies to sustain them. Larger numbers may follow to be supplemented by UN Blue Helmets and Haitian National Police under Pentagon command. A long-term commitment for militarized control is planned, not humanitarian relief, reminiscent of the 20-year 1915 - 1934 period when US Marines occupied and ravaged Haiti.

Throughout the country, the lives of nine million people are at stake. Of immediate concern, are the three million in Port-au-Prince and surroundings, devastated by the quake and unable to sustain themselves without substantial outside help.

Central also is Haiti's government, now crippled, including one report saying the senate building collapsed with most of the lawmakers inside. It's not clear who's alive or dead in either National Assembly chamber, the cabinet, or other government posts. It hardly matters, however, under US military control leaving President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive mere figureheads.

Once full control is established, the immediate shock subsides, and the media lose interest, reconstruction will be implemented for profit, not poor Haitians left on their own in communities like Cite Soleil and Bel Air or permanently displaced for what developers have in mind.

Efforts will focus on upscale areas and facilities for the Pentagon, US officials and selected bureaucrats. Before the quake, the Preval government was weak, ineffective, and uncaring about Haiti's vast needs. He effectively ceded power to Washington, the UN, and the large imperial-chosen NGO presence in the country.

In addition, Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party was banned from the scheduled February 2010 parliamentary elections (now cancelled or postponed), and was earlier excluded from the 2009 April and June process to fill 12 open senate seats, resulting in a turnout below 10%, and mocking a true democratic process.

Now, millions of Haitians hang by a thread. As one of them put it, "tout ayiti kraze," the whole country is no more. The government is inoperative. Port-au-Prince is in shambles. People are struggling to survive, 100,000 or more likely dead, a toll sure to rise as disease and depravation claim more. Those in poor communities are on their own. Rescuers are concentrating on high-profile, well-off areas, but without earthmoving equipment can do little to save victims. The problem - Washington obstructionism and indifference to human suffering and need.

On January 15, Al Jazeera reported that aid agencies are struggling under difficult conditions and inadequate supplies, let alone how to distribute them throughout the capital. As a result, frustration is growing with little help, no shelter, decaying bodies still unburied, the threat of disease, and the stench of death everywhere with no power, phones, clean water, food, and everything millions need.

Sebastian Walker, Al Jazeera's Port-au-Prince correspondent said:

"A lot of people have simply grown tired of waiting for those emergency workers to get to them. Thousands of people are streaming out of the city towards the provinces to try to find supplies of food and water, supplies that are running out in the city."

On January 16, Al Jazeera headlined "Haiti: UP to 200,000 feared dead." About 50,000 bodies have been collected, according to Haiti's interior minister, Paul Antoine Bien-Aime, and he anticipates "between 100,000 and 200,000 dead in total, although we will never know the exact number," nor how many more will expire in the weeks and months ahead, unnoticed and unreported.

On January 17, Al Jazeera headlined, "Aid teams struggle to help Haitians....amid difficulties in distributing relief supplies to those who need it most.

Sebastian Walker said delivering supplies stacking up at the airport has been extremely problematic:

"This comes down to the complex issue of who is in charge here. The US military has a great deal of control over the number of flights that are landing here. We heard that a UN flight carrying aid equipment had to be diverted because the US was landing its own aircraft there. The question of just who makes the decision over how to distribute the aid seems to be what is holding up the supplies."

The Pentagon decides, of course, and that's the problem. Obama also urges "patience," saying "many difficult days (are) ahead," without explaining his obstructionist uncaring role.

The result is reports like this:

-- from Canada's CBC As It Happens broadcast interview with an ICRC spokesperson saying he spent the morning of January 15 touring one of the hardest hit areas, and "In three hours, I didn't see a single rescue team;"

-- a same day BBC interview with an American Red Cross spokesperson complained about aid delivery - that arriving planes carried people, not supplies, and amounts at the airpot weren't being delivered;

- the Canada Haiti Action Network calls Port-au-Prince a city largely without aid because areas most in need aren't getting it; further, in nicer neighborhoods, dogs and extraction units arrived, but 90% of them are just sitting around, perhaps because of no earthmoving equipment to reach victims;

-- another report said a French plane carrying a field hospital was turned away, then later allowed in; meanwhile, Israel got carte blanche for its own field hospital, able to handle 500 casualties daily, so it begs the question - why praise Israel for (selectively) helping Haitians when it murders Palestinians daily, keeps the West Bank isolated and locked down, Gaza under siege, and denies critically ill residents exit permission for treatment unavailable from Strip facilities, leaving them to perish; and

-- various reports say US forces are preventing flights from landing; prioritized are landing US troops, repatriating American nationals, and perhaps starving poor Haitians to death; dozens of French citizens and dual Haitian-French nationals couldn't leave when their scheduled flight to Guadeloupe couldn't land; an angry French Secretary of State for Cooperation, Alain Joyandet, told reporters that he "made an official complaint to the Americans through the US embassy."

UN Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Report on Haiti Relief

On January 15, OCHA reported as follows:

"Logistics and the lack of transport remain the key constraints to the delivery of aid. Needs are still being identified as access becomes possible and as assessments begin to take place.

Displaced populations are currently scattered across multiple locations where there is open space. Temporary shelters urgently need to be established.

Fifteen sites have been identified for distribution of relief items. World Food Program reached 13,000 people today with food, jerry cans and water purification tablets."

OCHA continued, saying:

"A total of (only) 180 tons of relief supplies have arrived in-country so far. Operations are heavily constrained due to the lack of fuel, transport, communications and handling capacity at the airport. Some flights are being re-routed through Santo Domingo airport (far from Port-au-Prince in the Dominican Republic) which is also becoming congested."

In its latest January 16 report, OCHA repeated that airport logistics remain a challenge, the result of re-routed flights, congestion, lengthy offloading times, the lack of transport and fuel, no storage facility, and the airport "now packed with goods and teams" not being delivered.

Three million Haitians need help, but the World Food Program distributed high energy biscuits only to 50,000. Around 50,000 are getting hot meals.

Major health concerns include untreated trauma wounds, infections, infectious diseases, diarrhea, lack of safe drinking water and sanitation, and Haitians with pre-existing condition like HIV/AIDS, diabetes and cancer aren't being treated.

Up to a million people need immediate shelter and non-food aid, including clean water, blankets, kitchen and hygiene kits, plastic sheeting and tents.

"As of 16 January it is estimated that fuel for humanitarian operations will only last 2 to 3 more days before operations will be forced to cease."

There have only been 58 live rescues so far among the many thousands trapped beneath or behind rubble. OCHA launched a Flash Appeal for $575 million "to cover 3 million people severely affected for six months."

Sixteen EU nations are providing aid but not enough. America is doing practically nothing.

One nation delivering heroic help is Cuba, but little about it is reported. Despite its own constraints, it's operated in Haiti for years, and now has over 400 doctors and healthcare experts delivering free services. They work every day in 227 of the country's 337 communes. In addition, Cuban medical schools trained over 400 Haitian doctors, now working to save lives during the country's gravest crisis. It's no small achievement that Cuba, blockaded and constrained, is responsible for nearly 1,000 doctors and healthcare providers, all of whom work tirelessly to save lives and rehabilitate the injured.

According to China's Xinhua News Agency:

"Cuban aid workers have taken charge of (Haiti's) De la Paz Hospital, since its doctors have not appeared after the quake," perhaps because many perished, are wounded, or are trapped beneath or behind rubble themselves.

Cubans are working despite a lack of everything needed to provide care except for what its government managed to deliver. Dr. Carlos Alberto Garcia, coordinator of its medical brigade, said Cuban doctors, nurses and other health personnel are working non-stop, day and night. Operating rooms are open 18 hours a day.

Independent reports now say Washington is trying to block Cuban and Venezuelan aid workers by refusing them landing permission in Port-au-Prince. The Caribbean Community's emergency aid mission is also blocked. On January 15, the US State Department confirmed that it signed two Memoranda of Understanding with the remnants of Haiti's government putting Washington in charge of all inbound and outbound flights and aid offloading in the country.

For years, Cuba has sent doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers to countries in need worldwide, winning hearts and minds for its free highly professional services. It provides national healthcare for all its people, and now has about 25,000 doctors in 68 countries. In addition, over 1,800 doctors from 47 developing states graduate annually from Cuban medical schools, return home, and provide quality care for their people.

Major Media Misreporting

Ignoring Haiti's long history as a de facto US colony, the major media report a sanitized version of today's catastrophe. For example on January 14, The New York Times cynically editorialized: "Once again, the world weeps for Haiti." This is the same paper that lied in a March 1, 2004 editorial after US Marines forcibly exiled Aristide, saying:

-- he resigned;

-- sending in Marines "was the right thing to do;" and

-- they only arrived after "Mr. Aristide yielded power."

It also blamed him for "contribut(ing) significantly to his own downfall (because of his) increasingly autocratic and lawless rule," and accused him of manipulating the 2000 legislative elections and not "deliver(ing) the democracy he promised."

In fact, other than a brief period after its liberating revolution (1791 - January 1, 2004), the only time Haiti was democratically governed was under Aristide and during Rene Preval's first term. Aristide, in fact, was so beloved, he was overwhelmingly reelected in 2000 with a 92% majority and would be equally supported today if allowed to run. In fact, when he's most needed and wanted, Washington won't let him return.

In media coverage of Haiti's disaster, the greater story is suppressed, the one that matters, that puts today's tragedy in context:

-- 500 years of repression; slavery under the Spanish, then French, and since the 19th century as a de facto US colony;

-- deep poverty and human misery, the worst in the hemisphere;

-- despotic rule, occupation, exploitation, starvation, disease and low life expectancy; and

-- now now a disaster of biblical proportions getting Times headlines like:

"In Show of Support, Clinton Goes to Haiti"

Omitted was that it was for a brief airport photo op, America's usual show of indifference to human suffering, in this case, the result of US imperialism, not as a benefactor the way The Times and other major media portray.

"Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises"

In fact, Haitians have been remarkably calm, no thanks to Washington that's slowing aid delivery, providing very little of its own, and offers little more than militarized occupation, armed killers, including Xe (formerly Blackwater Worldwide) mercenaries, notoriously savage brutes.

"Looting Flares Where Authority Breaks Down"

Looting? People are suffering, starving, dying, desperate because America sends fighters, not food; Marines, not medical aid; combat killers, not compassion, caring, and kindness; and diplomats, not doctors or human decency.

"Government Struggles to Exhume Itself"

Calling it "comparatively stable" ignores that Preval's government is a proxy for US interests and no longer functioning. Pentagon killers are now in charge.

"Bush, Clinton and Obama Unite to Raise Money for Haiti"

After the December 2004 tsunami struck East Asia, the Bush administration spearheaded a similar campaign, raised over $1 billion, and used it for corporate development, not people needs. Obama backs a similar scheme (Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund) in a show of contemptible indifference to human misery and chose two co-conspirators for his plan.

The Bush administration engineered the February 2004 coup ousting Aristide, established police state rule, and immiserated nine million Haitians. For his part, Clinton kept an iron grip throughout his presidency instead of supporting Aristide's political, economic and social reforms.

He's now UN Special Envoy to Haiti heading an Obama administration neoliberal scheme featuring tourism, textile sweatshops, sweeping privatizations and deregulation for greater cheap labor exploitation at the expense of providing essential needs. He orchestrated a plan to turn northern Haiti into a tourist playground and got Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines to invest $55 million for a pier in Labadee where the company operates a private resort and has contributed the largest amount of tourist revenue to the country since 1986.

More still is planned, including a new international airport in the north, an expanded free trade zone, a new one in Port-au-Prince, now delayed, various infrastructure projects, and an alliance with George Soros' Open Society Institute for a $50 million partnership with Haitian shipper Gregory Mevs to build a free-trade zone for clothing sweatshops.
In addition, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) has $258 million in commitments, including the Better Work Haiti and HOPE II projects, taking advantage of duty-free Haitian apparel exports to America to encourage greater sweatshop proliferation.

According to TransAfrica's founder Randall Robinson:

"That isn't the kind of investment that Haiti needs. It needs capital investment. It needs investment so that it can be self-sufficient. It needs investment so that it can feed itself." It also needs debt relief, not another $100 million the IMF just announced adding more to a $1.2 billion burden.

Above all, Haiti needs democratic governance freed from US control, military occupation, and the kind of oppression it's endured for centuries so its people can breathe free.

It doesn't need two past and a current US president allied with Haiti's elites, ignoring economic justice, exploiting Haitian labor, ignoring overwhelming human desperation, militarizing the country, crushing resistance if it arises, and implementing a disaster capitalism agenda at the expense of essential human needs, rights and freedoms.

The only good new is that the Obama administration granted undocumented Haitians Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 18 months. They can now work legally and send remittances to family members. It affects 30,000 ordered deported and all non-US citizens.

During the Bush administration and throughout Obama's first year in office, repeated calls for it were refused. Now after 80 representatives and 18 senators, Republicans and Democrats, and the conference of Roman Catholic bishops sent appeals, Obama relented for Haitians in America as of January 12. New arrivals will be deported unlike Cubans under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act (as amended), a "wet foot/dry foot" policy under which those interdicted at sea are returned home, but others reaching shore are inspected for entry, then nearly always allowed to stay.

TPS aside, Haiti faces crushing burdens - deep poverty, vast unemployment, overwhelming human needs, severe repression, poor governance, Washington dominance, a burdensome debt, and much more before the January 12 quake. Now the disaster, militarization by the Pentagon, and disaster capitalism soon arriving besides what's already profiteering. It's been Haiti's plight for generations, the poorest hemispheric nation in the area most under Washington's iron grip and paying dearly for the privilege.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Lendman News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

Everyone wants to believe in the best intentions of all involved, but five days after the quake, with so few being helped, we have to ask: how did this get so badly done?

Every disaster plan is built to some degree around the idea of triage -- deciding who can and cannot be saved. The worst cases are often separated and allowed to perish so that others who are considered more survivable can be treated.

There is a tragic triage underway in Haiti thanks to screw-ups in the US and western response, and in part because of the objectively tough conditions in Haiti that blocked access and made the delivery of food, water and services difficult. But the planners should have known that!

Look at the TV coverage. “Saving Haiti” is the title CNN has given to its coverage. It shows us all the planes landing, and donations coming in and celebrity response on one hand, and then the problems/failures to actually deliver aid on the other.

Much of the coverage focuses on the upbeat -- people being saved. But despite that frame, which highlights a compassionate America's response, the reality of what's happening in Haiti is only barely getting through. It's not pretty.

Everyone wants to believe in the best intentions of all involved but five days after the quake, with so few being helped, we have to ask: how did this get so badly done?

It’s like Obama’s plan to stop foreclosures through modifying loans. Great idea, but only a handful of homeowners have benefited. There is a yawning gap between the idea and its execution.

So what happened in Haiti? The short answer: it is too little and in many cases, much of it too late. A natural disaster has been compounded by a well-intentioned man-made one.

Why? One global report explained:

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon emphasized the importance of the first 72 hours following the 12 January disaster. But already much of that crucial time has been spent attempting to assess the situation. The structures usually responsible for dealing with civilian emergencies have been unable to respond effectively due to widespread destruction of national and international power structures.

(This means the UN and the Haitian government as well as the US effort).

Lacking outside support, civilians have worked communally to try to save their own families. Supplies were sent but many have yet to get out of the airport. Troops have not been assigned to help deliver water or guard medical facilities. There is a fear of the wrath of a people that are pissed off at hearing about aid and money donated, and then seeing nothing trickling down into their neighborhoods. 

And there is a deeper fear -- a political fear. With President Aristide, the man the US considers too radical for its tastes, anxious to return, there is fear that a possible revolt against the lack of help could turn angry and political.

Hillary Clinton keeps telling the Haitians that we are their friends -- but many doubt it. They know that Aristide's Lavalas party is the most popular in Haiti and wants a more profound transformation than the US wants to allow. It had been banned from taking part in scheduled elections next month, that are likely to be canceled now. Haiti’s president Preval is weak and dependent on US largesse.

They also know that in the aftermath of earthquakes, like the one that rocked Manaqua, Nicaraga in the 1970s, there can be revolution. They don’t want that to happen in Haiti. They also know how volatile the country is, in part because of neglect by the West over the years.

Private help is not getting through either. Western Union offices are still closed in a country that relies on foreign remittances as a lifeline. The media is finally admitting the aid mission is failing, although that’s not the word used -- they say the relief effort is “troubled!” Here’s the headline in the NY Times: "Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises." The piece continues: "A sprawling assembly of international officials and aid workers struggled to fix a troubled relief effort.”

The Guardian/Observer focuses on a water delivery crisis. The article doesn’t ask why armed troops were not assigned to protecting drivers:

Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are in desperate need of drinking water because of an earthquake-damaged municipal pipeline and truck drivers either unable or unwilling to deliver their cargo.

Many drivers are afraid of being attacked if they go out, some drivers are still missing in the disaster and others are out there searching for missing relatives," said Dudu Jean, a 30-year-old driver who was attacked on Friday when he drove into the capital's sprawling Cite Soleil slum.

The lack of water has become one of the greatest dangers facing Haitians in part because earthquake survivors stay outdoors all day in the heat out of fear of aftershocks and unstable buildings.

But there is something else going on.

The disaster planners have an agenda that goes beyond just saving lives. They want to use the crisis to rebuild Haiti along lines they support. (ie. Support of property rights etc) So far they have not spoken about how policies backed by the United States through the Caribbean Basin Initiative were responsible for uprooting peasants from the countryside to move them to the city to be a cheap labor reserve. In that Reagan era effort, pigs were killed and imported food replaced home grown varieties to benefit US suppliers. Debt dependence grew -- classic imperialist policies.

Read this report in coded uncritical top-down language from the Washington Post:

Even as rescuers are digging victims out of the rubble in Haiti, policymakers in Washington and around the world are grappling with how a destitute, corrupt and now devastated country might be transformed into a self-sustaining nation.

Development efforts have failed there, decade after decade, leaving Haitians with a dysfunctional government, a high crime rate and incomes averaging a dollar a day. But the leveled capitol, Port-au-Prince, must be rebuilt, promising one of the largest economic development efforts ever undertaken in the hemisphere -- an effort "measured in months and even years," President Obama said Saturday in an appeal for donations alongside former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And those who will help oversee it are thinking hard about how to use that money and attention to change the country forever.

"It's terrible to look at it this way, but out of crisis often comes real change," said C. Ross Anthony, the Rand Corp's global health director. "The people and the institutions take on the crisis and bring forth things they weren't able to do in the past."

The Rand Corporation is a military contractor primarily, a center for spooks and covert strategies. The fact that they are being quoted as saviors is scary in itself. In other words, Haiti’s future is being planned outside of Haiti and will be imposed step by step.

I don’t know about you but anything that George W. Bush is supporting, I tend to be skeptical of, to say the least.

Let’s admit it, this disaster response is itself a disaster. And it's helping promote a new disaster to come.

Greg Palast points to some of the many contradictions that the TV networks that are milking Haiti’s pain in an orgy of self-congratulatory reporting have yet to explore:

*China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right there. [Greg, make that 25,000 miles away!]

* Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't know how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has." We know Gates doesn't know.

* From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, "I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people." Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

* Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed -- without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

* But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.

[Hillary Clinton said proudly on Saturday that there are now 30 teams in place. No one asked, why only 30?]

* Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said, there was no "structure ... to provide security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it's security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.

* Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It's treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president. "

And Greg asks the question that our media heroes have yet to explore:

How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two fire stations in the entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for "nature" to finish it off?

Good question. One of the many we should be asking. In the meantime, we need the press to start asking tougher questions and exposing a Katrina-like response that is still losing countless lives.

A country in pain deserves relief. Not more pain.

If you lived there, wouldn’t you be pissed and ready to explode?
 

In the hours following Haiti's devastating earthquake, CNN, the New York Times and other major news sources adopted a common interpretation for the severe destruction: the 7.0 earthquake was so devastating because it struck an urban area that was extremely over-populated and extremely poor.  Houses "built on top of each other" and constructed by the poor people themselves made for a fragile city.  And the country's many years of underdevelopment and political turmoil made the Haitian government ill-prepared to respond to such a disaster.   

True enough.  But that's not the whole story.  What's missing is any explanation of why there are so many Haitians living in and around Port-au-Prince and why so many of them are forced to survive on so little.  Indeed, even when an explanation is ventured, it is often outrageously false such as a former U.S. diplomat's testimony on CNN that Port-au-Prince's overpopulation was due to the fact that Haitians, like most Third World people, know nothing of birth control.   

It may startle news-hungry Americans to learn that these conditions the American media correctly attributes to magnifying the impact of this tremendous disaster were largely the product of American policies and an American-led development model.   

From 1957-1971 Haitians lived under the dark shadow of "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a brutal dictator who enjoyed U.S. backing because he was seen by Americans as a reliable anti-Communist. After his death, Duvalier's son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" became President-for-life at the age of 19 and he ruled Haiti until he was finally overthrown in 1986.  It was in the 1970s and 1980s that Baby Doc and the United States government and business community worked together to put Haiti and Haiti's capitol city on track to become what it was on January 12, 2010.   

After the coronation of Baby Doc, American planners inside and outside the U.S. government initiated their plan to transform Haiti into the "Taiwan of the Caribbean."  This small, poor country situated conveniently close to the United States was instructed to abandon its agricultural past and develop a robust, export-oriented manufacturing sector.  This, Duvalier and his allies were told, was the way toward modernization and economic development.   

From the standpoint of the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Haiti was the perfect candidate for this neoliberal facelift.  The entrenched poverty of the Haitian masses could be used to force them into low-paying jobs sewing baseballs and assembling other products.   

But USAID had plans for the countryside too.  Not only were Haiti's cities to become exporting bases but so was the countryside, with Haitian agriculture also reshaped along the lines of export-oriented, market-based production.  To accomplish this USAID, along with urban industrialists and large landholders, worked to create agro-processing facilities, even while they increased their practice of dumping surplus agricultural products from the U.S. on the Haitian people.   

This "aid" from the Americans, along with the structural changes in the countryside predictably forced Haitian peasants who could no longer survive to migrate to the cities, especially Port-au-Prince where the new manufacturing jobs were supposed to be.  However, when they got there they found there weren't nearly enough manufacturing jobs go around.  The city became more and more crowded.  Slum areas expanded.  And to meet the housing needs of the displaced peasants, quickly and cheaply constructed housing was put up, sometimes placing houses right "on top of each other."   

Before too long, however, American planners and Haitian elites decided that perhaps their development model didn't work so well in Haiti and they abandoned it.  The consequences of these American-led changes remain, however.       

When on the afternoon and evening of January 12, 2010 Haiti experienced that horrible earthquake and round after round of aftershock the destruction was, no doubt, greatly worsened by the very real over-crowding and poverty of Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas.  But shocked Americans can do more than shake their heads and, with pity, make a donation.  They can confront their own country's responsibility for the conditions in Port-au-Prince that magnified the earthquake's impact, and they can acknowledge America's role in keeping Haiti from achieving meaningful development.  To accept the incomplete story of Haiti offered by CNN and the New York Times is to blame Haitians for being the victims of a scheme that was not of their own making.  As John Milton wrote, "they who have put out the people's eyes, reproach them of their blindness."   

Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now -- and that number is quickly rising.

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone -- that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, “From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

Despite the massive number of contracts and contractors in Afghanistan, oversight is utterly lacking. “The increase in Afghanistan contracts has not seen a corresponding increase in contract management and oversight,” according to McCaskill’s briefing paper. “In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently vacant.”

A former USAID official, Michael Walsh, the former director of USAID’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance and Chief Acquisition Officer, told the Commission that many USAID staff are “administering huge awards with limited knowledge of or experience with the rules and regulations.” According to one USAID official, the agency is “sending too much money, too fast with too few people looking over how it is spent.” As a result, the agency does not “know … where the money is going.”

The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors. According to the McCaskill memo:

In Afghanistan, USAID is relying on contractors to provide oversight of its large reconstruction and development projects. According to information provided to the Subcommittee, International Relief and Development (IRD) was awarded a five-year contract in 2006 to oversee the $1.4 billion infrastructure contract awarded to a joint venture of the Louis Berger Group and Black and Veatch Special Projects. USAID has also awarded a contract Checci and Company to provide support for contracts in Afghanistan.

The private security industry and the US government have pointed to the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker(SPOT) as evidence of greater government oversight of contractor activities. But McCaskill’s subcommittee found that system utterly lacking, stating: “The Subcommittee obtained current SPOT data showing that there are currently 1,123 State Department contractors and no USAID contractors working in Afghanistan.” Remember, there are officially 14,000 USAID contractors and the official monitoring and tracking system found none of these people and less than half of the State Department contractors.

As for waste and abuse, the subcommittee says that the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified more than $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs submitted by Defense Department contracts for work in Afghanistan. That’s 16% of the total contract dollars reviewed.

We face losing everything from 50,000 species a year to the world's best wines. How to put it all in perspective?

If we don't work quickly to curb the effects of climate change we may lose the bird-eating fanged frog. Most of us may not miss that one, but there is an enormous list of species and places we may never see again unless we reverse this crazy climate change ride we've put the earth on. The Natural Resources Defense Council reported that, "The first comprehensive assessment of the extinction risk from global warming found that more than 1 million species could be obliterated by 2050 if the current trajectory continues."

The numbers are virtually impossible to comprehend, especially when you consider that not just individual species, but entire habitats, cities, and cultures may be lost. How to put it all in perspective? Below are eight major features of our planet and our lives whose potential disappearance may inspire action.

1. World's Best Wines

So far the polar bear has become the poster child for climate change, but we may have more luck galvanizing people into action if they know the future of some of world's best wine is at stake. A report from Greenpeace showed that the climatically sensitive process of wine production in France is being disrupted by changing temperatures. "The average annual temperature has significantly increased, leading to major shifts in the wine production calendar," the group reports. "The harvesting season is occurring much earlier than normal and higher temperatures are proving detrimental to the vines. Wines end up having higher sugar levels and alcohol content while retaining less acids -- which means they are unbalanced with an overripe flavor and heavier texture."

Great wines are the result of a combination of climate and terroir, and both are at risk. Apparently this news is spurring food and wine groups in France to demand action in Copenhagen. Greenpeace reported that a coalition of renowned chefs and sommeliers have said that if French wines are to survive, they need "an ambitious deal by developed nations to reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020."

And it's not just French wine. The National Academy of Sciences predicted that climate change could mean the end for California's tasty vinos, too. Hey, if the threat of millions of climate refugees and mass extinction doesn't get people going, maybe alcohol will.

2. 50,000 Rainforest Species a Year

Scientists estimate that we lose 50,000 species a year to deforestation in the world's rainforests. And to make matters worse, the already horrendous environmental effects of deforestation are being amplified by climate change. This is playing out most notably in the Amazon.

"The fear is that there will be a kind of a feedback where trees are cut down, and it gets warmer and drier" in the forest and harder for the trees and other vegetation to grow back, Bob Henson, author of The Rough Guide to Climate Change, told CNN.

Without the Amazon, we lose what scientists call the "lungs" of our planet -- the area where 20 percent of the world's oxygen is produced. Not to mention the thousands of fruits, plants, herbs, medicines and other edibles that come from the region.

Now scientists are saying that one third of the Amazon's trees could be wiped out by modest temperatures rises. "The research, by some of Britain's leading experts on climate change, shows that even severe cuts in deforestation and carbon emissions will fail to save the emblematic South American jungle, the destruction of which has become a powerful symbol of human impact on the planet," the Guardian reported. "Up to 85% of the forest could be lost if spiraling greenhouse gas emissions are not brought under control, the experts said. But even under the most optimistic climate change scenarios, the destruction of large parts of the forest is 'irreversible.'"

3. New Orleans

There's a long list of cities in danger of being swamped by rising sea levels, including major population centers like London, New York, Calcutta and Shanghai. But New Orleans, which already sits below sea level, is especially vulnerable. And we all know how good our nation's record is of helping New Orleans deal with catastrophe and its aftermath.

"Scientists say New Orleans and the barrier islands to the south will be severely affected by climate change by the end of this century, with sea level rise and growing intensity of hurricanes. Much of the land mass of the barrier island chain sheltering New Orleans was lost in the 2005 storm," the Guardian reported. "But the extent of the land that will be lost is far greater than earlier forecasts suggest," said Dr. Michael Blum and Professor Harry Roberts.

The two performed a study which found that huge amounts of soil need to be dumped into the Mississippi River Delta, otherwise 5,212 square miles of land in the area could be lost to the ocean and tidal marsh by 2100. "All that remains of New Orleans would probably be the French Quarter and the airport," the Christian Science Monitor reported about the study. "Lake Pontchartrain would lie beneath a vast bay. Along its southernmost reaches, the Mississippi River would remain a river only by virtue of the levees raised to contain it."

4. Pacific Salmon

Salmon on the Pacific coast have had a rough time, thanks to dams, pollution, introduction of nonnative species and other bad decisions by us humans. Now, climate change is causing rising temperatures, which are affecting this cold-water loving species, and decreased precipitation is causing reduced river flows, further threatening salmon. Throw in some ocean acidification and it's a recipe for disaster for salmon populations and those who depend on them. And there are lots who do.

Salmon are a crucial part of the food chain for 150 species, including humans. The fish is a staple in many Native American communities and an economic mainstay for tens of thousand of fishermen in coastal towns.

"Global warming is expected to hit the already warm and dry western U.S. very hard," said Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, most of whose members depend on salmon harvests for a large part of their livelihoods. "The science shows that these changes have already begun, and are already affecting our region's valuable salmon runs. Averting this looming disaster should be one of our nation's highest priorities."

5. The Maldives and Tuvalu

While rising seas may threaten one of the United States' most beautiful and culturally rich cities, it's also getting dangerously close to wiping out entire countries, including the island nations of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific. The Maldives are composed of over 1,000 coral islands and support a huge diversity of marine life, including commercial tuna fisheries. The gorgeous Polynesian country of Tuvalu is one of the smallest in the world and is already looking for other nations to take in its citizens as climate refugees.

The Maldives' first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, spoke at COP15 earlier this week, calling for immediate action to restrain CO2 levels and return them to 350 parts per million, as scientists have recommended:

We are here to save our planet from the silent, patient and invisible enemy that is climate change ... There are those who tell us that solving climate change is impossible. There are those who tell us taking radical action is too difficult. There are those who tell us to give up hope.

Well, I am here to tell you that we refuse to give up hope. We refuse to be quiet. We refuse to believe that a better world isn't possible.

I have three words to say to the doubters and deniers. Three words with which to win this battle. Just three words are all I need. You may already have heard them. Three - Five - Oh. Three - Five - Oh.

6. Glaciers

Glacier National Park is going to have the same draw without the glaciers. When the park was created in 1910 it had 150 glaciers. Today it has only 30, and they're getting smaller.

And it's not the only iconic spot on the verge of losing its icy coat -- both Mount Everest and Mount Kilimanjaro are threatened, too. "It is clear that global warming is emerging as one, if not the, biggest threat to mountain areas," says Roger Payne of the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation.

As for Kilimanjaro, National Geographic reports, "The ice fields Ernest Hemingway once described as 'wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun' have lost 82 percent of their ice since 1912--the year their full extent was first measured. If current climatic conditions persist, the legendary glaciers, icing the peaks of Africa's highest summit for nearly 12,000 years, could be gone entirely by 2020."

This is bad news for animals that have adapted to live in these ecosystems and for the businesses that are supported by tourism and climbers. But melting glaciers also mean immediate flooding, following by drought. This is bad news for billions.

Agence France Presse reported this week that melting glaciers in the Himalayas will affect 1.3 billion Asians living downstream in Pakistan, India, China, Nepal and Bhutan. "Temperatures in the region have increased by between 0.15 and 0.6 degrees Celsius (0.27 and 1.08 degrees Fahrenheit) each decade for the last 30 years, dramatically accelerating the rate at which glaciers are shrinking," the news outlet reported. "'Scientists predict that most glaciers will be gone in 40 years as a result of climate change,' said Prashant Singh, leader of environmental group WWF's Climate for Life campaign."

7. Coral Reefs

Carbon dioxide emissions are causing the world's oceans to become more acidic, which is a threat to creatures that have "chalky" skeletons (including corals). In order to form their skeletons, they need the water to be saturated with calcium carbonate, but as acidification goes up, saturation goes down. According to Science Daily this poses a risk to one-third of ocean life and the basis of the ocean food chain.

If temperatures rise by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, we are likely to lose 97 percent of our coral reefs. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) recently filed a petition to have 83 species of coral listed under the Endangered Species Act.

SolveClimate reports that, "Since acidification happens at a rate parallel to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide -- oceans absorb about one-third of CO2 -- it's picking up pace. According to CBD oceans director Miyoko Sakashita, coral reefs are likely to be the first major ecosystems widely damaged by the effects of more acidic oceans."

Some of the world's most famous coral reefs include Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which is the world's largest; the Belize Barrier Reef; the New Caledonia Barrier Reef in the South Pacific; the Red Sea Coral Reef; and the Andros, Bahamas Barrier Reef. The reefs are home to an incredible array of biological diversity, next only to rainforests, and also provide vast economic boosts. "Globally, the welfare of 500 million people is closely linked to the goods and services provided by coral reef biodiversity," Science Daily reports.

They are also home to some of the most beautiful sights on Earth.

8. Really Big Bears

Most environmentalists know that "charismatic megafauna" are the ones that capture the hearts of the public and the media. This has catapulted the polar bear to the forefront of our attention, making it the first mammal to be listed as threatened because of climate change. The loss of summer ice in the Arctic has meant shrinking hunting grounds for the bear. They've had to travel farther to find food, decreasing their fat storage, increasing their stress, and causing some to drown as they swim to reach distant ice floes. By 2050, two-thirds of polar bear sub-populations will be gone.

But polar bears aren't the only bears at risk. Changing temperatures are now causing grizzlies to den later in the fall. As a result they're overlapping with hunting season, which is bad news for the bear. But that's not all. Climate change is also affecting their food sources. "Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) seeds are a food resource for grizzly bears in some areas, including Yellowstone. Global warming has led to an increase in whitebark pine blister rust as well as an increase in competing species such as Douglas fir in higher elevations," the Endangered Species Coalition reports. "As whitebark pine and other natural grizzly food resources decline due to global warming, grizzlies may shift from remote high elevation areas to lower elevation human-populated areas, looking for alternative foods. Here, they often encounter humans and our garbage, food and livestock. This causes bears to become conditioned to humans; these human-conditioned bears are often removed or killed by wildlife managers due to safety concerns."

And the List Goes On

There are thousands of other species teetering on the brink of collapse and as many incredible places that will lost, if we don't take action to curb our greenhouse gas emissions and begin mitigation strategies. Later today, we will be able to see what the world's political leaders have agreed to and if it will be enough. As we try to untangle the outcome of the COP15 climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, let's try to keep this list in mind, even though it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what's at stake. When we're talking about preserving ecological diversity, amazing creatures, human lives, and some of the most beautiful places on Earth we need solutions that transcend politics and economics as usual.

The way to lower the quantity of energy required to make and distribute short-lived consumer goods is to make them durable, repairable and upgradable.

As the middle-class daughter of a refugee mother and a Depression-era father, I grew up straddling two worlds. My parents could afford much more than they were willing to buy. Most things that broke could be and were repaired. My German grandmother’s aphorisms lingered in the air: “Waste not, want not,” “A penny saved is a penny earned,” “A stitch in time saves nine.”

By the time my own children were born, America was flooded with cheap and cheaply made goods. So while my parents continued working at the sturdy antique desks they inherited from my grandparents and sleeping beneath a hand-crocheted bedspread, my children and their friends became the first and last owners of a seemingly endless supply of plastic toys and particle-board furniture.

I was part of the transitional generation. Building blocks were still made of wood. Comforters were still filled with down. I recall the meticulously machined pencil sharpeners with “made in West Germany” stamped on their sides that lasted until I lost them. Even the cheap items—the ones “made in Japan”—tended to hold up pretty well.

Now nearly everything is produced in China and made to be discarded. According to a 2008 report by the Economic Policy Institute, the United States imported $320 billion in Chinese goods in 2007. In that year alone, this country imported $26.3 billion in apparel and accessories, $108.5 billion in computers and electronic products, and $15.3 billion in furniture and fixtures from China.

The manufacture, distribution and disposal of an ever-growing mountain of short-lived consumer goods has taken an enormous environmental toll. Annie Leonard’s website “The Story of Stuff,” which has garnered more than 7 million views in less than two years, has helped spread awareness of that cost far beyond the usual environmentalist circles.

We can’t, however, only blame the quantity and quality of Chinese goods for the environmental and other consequences of this transoceanic factory-to-waste stream. For that we can blame the two horsemen of the modern consumer apocalypse: functional obsolescence and fashion obsolescence.

Functional, or planned obsolescence is the purposeful decision by designers and manufacturers to ensure things don’t last, so that consumers must buy new ones. Fashion obsolescence is the related decision to offer new features and aesthetic changes to entice consumers to discard their old items in favor of updated and supposedly better ones.

Ironically, product obsolescence was once seen as the remedy for what ailed our country. Lizabeth Cohen, chair of the History Department at Harvard University and author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Vintage, 2003), traces the origins of mass consumption to the period immediately before and after World War II, when a demand-driven economy was seen as the key to our nation’s recovery and prosperity.

“In the 1940s and ’50s, there was a much closer connection between consumer demand and factories and jobs,” Cohen says. “That was a completed circle more than it is today. When people were buying things, they were buying things that were made by American workers.”

The only way to guarantee continued demand was to ensure that people would keep replacing the things they owned. The literature on planned obsolescence makes frequent reference to statements by industry analysts and strategists of that era. “Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption,” retailing analyst Victor Lebow said in 1948. “We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate.”

This applied to male as well as female consumers, and to styling lines on cars as well as hemlines on skirts. Allied Stores Corporation’s Chairman B. Earl Puckett, speaking to fashion industry leaders in 1950, said, “Basic utility cannot be the foundation of a prosperous apparel industry. We must accelerate obsolescence.” And General Motors’ design chief Harley Earl said in 1955, “The creation of a desire on the part of millions of car buyers each year to trade in last year’s car on a new one is highly important to the automobile industry.”

Business people and politicians weren’t the only ones pushing this idea, Cohen says. “Labor really bought into this package. Purchasing power was the answer to how people would be employed and have a better life. Consumers would fuel the powers of factories that would provide jobs that would put money in peoples’ pockets.”

Since then, Cohen argues, we’ve conflated our concepts of ourselves as good consumers and as good citizens. The idea of consumption as our country’s economic engine continues to this day. Indeed, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush implored Americans to go shopping. And frugal as I am and as green as I try to be, during the recent economic downturn I’ve found myself feeling that every major purchase I make is a perverse kind of civic duty. The notion of the citizen-as-consumer clearly runs deep.

But things have changed since the 1940s and ’50s. “When people were making goods that lasted [back then], they were benefiting from the explosion of global capitalism and the expanding of markets,” Cohen says. “Now that we have this global recession, it’s problematic. Where do these companies go if they are going to build goods that last? How do they profit if they don’t sell new goods? I don’t know the answer to this, but it’s a problem that policy makers, economic planners, labor unions—everybody has to think about.”

A Radically Obvious Idea

Although the greening of the American consumer has fostered some deceptive greenwashing campaigns seeking to capitalize on our good intentions, it has also made it possible for us to make better ecological and economic choices.

A host of clever websites now enables consumers to calculate their own ecological footprints and offer advice on how to reduce the toll. These include:

•MyFootprint.org, where you can find out how many Earths would be necessary if everybody on the planet shared your lifestyle;

•H20Conserve.org, where you can tally your water footprint;

•Wattzon.com, where you can calculate the energy required to sustain your lifestyle.

Some of these calculations become conceptually complex as they try to measure the energy required for the extraction and transportation of raw materials, and the manufacturing, distribution and ultimate disposal of products. It can all get abstract quite quickly, but there’s a far simpler message embedded in all that complexity: Buy stuff that lasts.

Saul Griffith, a 2007 MacArthur Fellow, serial inventor and co-founder of WattzOn, refers to this as “heirloom design”—a term he introduced during a talk at the February 2009 Greener Gadgets conference in New York. The best way to lower the quantity of energy required to manufacture and distribute consumer goods, he argues, is to make those products not only durable, but repairable and upgradable.

Griffith shares this radically obvious idea with Tim Cooper, head of the Centre for Sustainable Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, England, and editor of the forthcoming book, Longer Lasting Solutions (Gower, June 2010). The Centre, which Cooper founded in 1996, conducts research into consumers’ behavior as well as the environmental effects of the choices they make.

Cooper argues for “product life extension”—making things more durable, using them properly, and ensuring they are maintained, repaired, upgraded, and reused. A key obstacle, he says, is the perception (supported by public policies) that higher levels of consumption yield greater happiness. After all, an increase in the GNP is considered healthy for the economy and can only be achieved if consumers increase their spending.

Cooper calls for “slow consumption,” the consumer purchasing equivalent of the Slow Food movement (which seeks to build consumer awareness and appreciation of food and its connection to community and the environment). “The issue to address is what kind of economy is going to be sustainable in its wider sense — economically, environmentally and socially,” he says. “The current economy is not sustainable. The sheer throughput of energy and materials cannot be continued.”

If products were more durable, Cooper argues, some jobs lost due to the decrease in consumption would be offset by the addition of more highly skilled maintenance and repair jobs. And whereas the lost jobs might be overseas, the repair jobs would be local. “We need to look at new business models that move away from manufacturing and selling more and more products,” he says. Such models might include “products that last longer but have associated services attached to them, so that the supplier guarantees to maintain, repair and upgrade the products for a certain period.”

This might be a hard sell for consumers, however. Cooper cites the results of a survey in which British homeowners were asked what they considered the disadvantages of longer-lasting appliances. Twenty-three percent stated concerns about price, while 30 percent said they feared these products would become “out of date.” He found that consumers were often disinclined to have products repaired because of the high cost of labor compared with the low cost of replacement, thanks to the quantity of consumer goods manufactured in countries with low wages and lax environmental regulations.

When I mentioned this conundrum to one of my ecologically conscious friends, she sheepishly admitted she had just discarded her old DVD player because the repair estimate was higher than the cost of a new one. “The present economic system does give an advantage to the current economy,” Cooper says, “and for the consumer, replacement is often the cheaper option.” That would have to change.

Close Encounters of the Durable Kind

Most of us have had an heirloom design or product life extension epiphany at one point or another.
Years ago, along with an untold number of other caffeine addicts, I succumbed to the then-ubiquitous ads for Gevalia coffee. Buy a couple pounds of beans and get a free drip coffeemaker. That became the first of a steady stream of plastic automatic drip coffee machines of various makes that took up residence on our countertop, none of which lived to see their second birthdays. Each time one broke, my husband and I found that the features available to us had multiplied. We could buy coffeemakers with built-in bean grinders, brew strength controls and programmable timers. We had been cornered by a combination of functional obsolescence and fashion obsolescence.

Then we discovered what any self-respecting Italian coffee drinker knew all along: A $30 cast aluminum stovetop espresso maker lasts forever. Replace the rubber gasket every couple of years, and you’ll stay happily caffeinated for life. We bought a used ’70s model on eBay several years ago and have been using it every day ever since.

Not everything older is better, of course. Visit your local thrift store, and you’ll be confronted by an exhibit of the unnecessary and the obsolete. Did anybody ever need a bread machine, an ice cream maker or an Atari game console?

And yet, thrift stores are also the repositories of time-tested items. The garments sold there are Darwinian success stories. They’ve survived the wrath of washers and dryers and still have significant life left in them. The dishes may be mismatched, but they are dishwasher and hand-washer safe. And I’m convinced that this is where the world’s missing teaspoons come to rest. If heirloom design has a line of boutiques, this is it.

Heirloom design has its adherents in the design and manufacturing worlds, too.

Patagonia, based in Ventura, Calif., was founded by avid mountain climbers who began selling clothing to support their barely profitable climbing-hardware business. From the start, the company was grounded in concern for the environment, and was an early adopter of several socially and environmentally responsible corporate policies, from donating a percentage of profits to environmental groups to offering employees on-site daycare.

Patagonia products are designed to last, and when they don’t hold up, the company stands behind them. Its “ironclad guarantee” states: “If one of our products does not perform to your satisfaction, return it to the store you bought it from or to Patagonia for a repair, replacement or refund.”

Sixteen years ago, my older brother gave me a Patagonia fleece jacket his children had outgrown. He purchased it around 1987 for his oldest daughter, who wore it until she outgrew it and handed it down to her younger sister. When she outgrew it, my daughter wore it, and then my son. At some point, the zipper broke, so I sent it to Patagonia, which repaired it at no cost. The jacket never wore out. That’s heirloom design.

The alternative to durability and repair is remanufacturing. After more than two decades in the modular carpet business, Ray Anderson, founder and chair of Interface Inc. of Lagrange, Ga., heard a talk by environmentalist Paul Hawken and was inspired to green up his company. In addition to other ecological efforts on the materials and production sides, in 1995 the company introduced an “evergreen lease” arrangement, essentially turning carpet into a service instead of a product. By taking responsibility for retrieving and remanufacturing carpet no longer wanted by its customers, Interface was able to keep used carpet out of the waste stream and reduce the need for new materials.

Unfortunately, the leasing concept proved complicated and expensive. The company eventually gave up on it but continued to aggressively pursue discarded carpet—both its own and that of other companies—so that the materials could be reclaimed and remanufactured. Andrew King, a visiting fellow in mechanical engineering at the University of Bristol and consultant with the Centre for Remanufacturing and Reuse, notes that remanufacturing is preferable to recycling because it preserves most of a product’s embodied energy while bringing it back to its original quality. And it creates jobs.

Here’s the kicker: By emphasizing product durability, service and remanufacturing, both of these companies have earned extra dividends in the form of corporate image and customer loyalty.

In Search of Solutions

The question, then, is what would it take to overcome our dependence on cheap goods? Even though obsolescence is no longer a boon for this country’s manufacturers, cheap products are essential for consumers who can barely afford to put food on the table. If a durable coffeemaker costs twice as much as a breakable one but lasts four times as long, it’s still less attractive to someone who doesn’t have the additional cash up front.

Policy would have to play a key role in reversing this unfortunate check-out counter calculation. Legislation on extended producer responsibility (EPR), requiring manufacturers to account for the full life-cycle of their products from extraction to disposal, could affect consumer culture by making disposable items more expensive and reviving an interest in repair.

Such legislation is complicated, however, by the ongoing pressure to protect industrial production. “Legislation tends to get watered and watered until it gets to be almost a hindrance to these breakthrough changes because in order for Big Business to buy into it, it has to become easy for them,” King says. EPR legislation would only be effective if it created a financial incentive for industry to produce more durable goods and for consumers to favor them.

Consumers are certainly influenced by price, but Cooper holds out hope that they also can be persuaded by having more of a connection to the objects they purchase—something referred to as “emotionally durable design.” If that sounds too touchy-feely for a coffee machine, consider the difference between a pair of shoes custom-made for you by your local cobbler and an off-the-rack pair from the shoe store. Which would you be more likely to clean, resole and repair?

Part of the solution might also be having more products available without the burden of ownership. Tool rentals, car-sharing and even laundromats diminish the number of products that need to be manufactured and place a premium on durability and longevity. (This can even be done informally. We’ve shared a lawnmower with one of our neighbors for years.) “We should have much more attachment to certain products but for others we should see that they are services,” King says.

Cooper warns, however, that rental can backfire in some areas, such as electronics. “The danger of the rental model with technology is that as advances are made, people who rent them might upgrade even more quickly than they would at the moment,” he says. But even electronics could have a smaller ecological footprint if they could be updated through the use of modular design instead of being casually discarded. “The trick will be to understand what does and what doesn’t change,” King says.

King sees consumers playing a large role in putting pressure on industry to make the necessary changes. “The real issue is creating the demand,” he says. “I work with a large number of large multinationals. When they assign their designers to the challenge—design this for two lives—they rise to the challenge. They just start to think in a different way.”

Ultimately, environmental and economic sustainability won’t be possible until we become less dependent on consumer spending, which currently comprises 70 percent of the U.S. economy. We can’t just keep churning out, buying and disposing of stuff.

“We can diversify the range of goods that are underpinning our economy and providing us with jobs and some prosperity,” Cohen says. “It doesn’t just have to be commodities for the individual consumer. That would be the best hope.”

The protestors say that the environmental advocacy group has aligned itself with corporate interests whose goals for reducing emissions are far too limited.

November 30, 2009 - A phalanx of NYPD officers on foot and aboard several police vans surrounded the marchers as they walked up Sixth Avenue in the cold rain on Monday, at times pushing people off of the street and back on to the sidewalk. A group of roughly 30 climate activists, joined by award-winning NASA scientist and outspoken climate change expert, James Hansen, chanted as they went: "The earth, the earth, the earth is on fire. We don't need no cap and trade, the market is a liar."

Was it a satellite Goldman Sachs trading office that brought the greens out to the barricades? The Manhattan offices of a large and influential oil or gas company? The downtown penthouse of a Big Coal mogul? Nope. The soggy climate activists were camped out in front of the headquarters of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the largest environmental advocacy groups in the country.

The activists accuse the NRDC of collaborating with polluters through its involvement with the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, or U.S. CAP, which is billed on its website as "an alliance of major businesses and leading climate and environmental groups that have come together to call on the federal government to enact legislation requiring significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions." Members of the group include such corporate heavyweights as The Dow Chemical Company, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, General Electric, Shell, Alcoa, BP America and Caterpillar. Other environmental groups involved in the group include Environmental Defense, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and World Resources Institute.

U.S. CAP played a pivotal lobbying role in drafting the massive Waxman-Markey climate bill in the House which, while calling for modest emission reductions, will also create an exponentially lucrative carbon trading market. And many of the largest financial institutions that have been deemed "too big to fail" (Goldman Sachs, Bank of America) are expected to cash in on what some activists have begun to call a new system of "climate profiteering."

Outside of the nondescript office building on 20th Street where the crowd eventually assembled, the NYPD set up a row of metal barricades around the entrance in an effort to keep the protesters away from the front entrance. For every three members of the crowd, there was roughly one police officer, with a total of three police vans and three small interceptor vehicles parked in a line out front.

"You have to be a little flattered by that," said Monica Hunken, a protest organizer who spoke to the crowd on a soapbox on the sidewalk. "They even brought out their pen, it's pretty heavy-handed." That contrasted with the police activity at the launch point for the march -- the Bank of America branch on 17th St and 5th Avenue -- where the group spoke out about the bank's investments in mountaintop removal and oil and gas prospecting. No such safety precautions were in evidence at that site.

The demonstration in Manhattan was one of over a dozen organized by the Mobilization for Climate Justice and organizers of BeyondTalk.net, a website that rallies individuals to commit civil disobedience in the name of climate change action. At least one member of the New York contingent did just that, when he attempted to lock himself to the front doors of the building.

"Stopping coal starts with the NRDC," yelled out Robert Jereski, co-founder of New York Climate Action Group, as he was handcuffed and hustled in to a paddy wagon parked up the street. Jereski was eventually charged with "obstruction of governmental administration" and disorderly conduct.

"I stand here at the NRDC building with a heavy heart. I never thought that in 2009 I'd be standing here decrying their stance on climate," said Charles Komanoff, co-director of the Carbon Tax Center. "What NRDC is championing as a big step forward is actually a baby step forward. NRDC is on the wrong side, cutting deals with their pals in business and finance."

"Come back NRDC," yelled out a voice in the crowd. Overall the lament was in line with much of the sentiment of the demonstration, as many participants described their action as an expression of tough love rather than outright opposition. They say that the NRDC has aligned itself with a broader coalition of corporate interests whose goals and benchmarks for reducing carbon emissions are drastically below what is necessary according to prevailing climate science.

"We appreciate the work that the protesters are doing," said Jenny Powers, National Media Director for NRDC, in response. "Overall I think we're very supportive of any opportunity to bring more attention to this issue. We definitely view it as all of us as being united in the same goal. We're on the same track, we just deploy different strategies."

Although nobody from NRDC stepped outside to discuss the issues with those at the barricades, Powers did say that Dr. Hansen and Mr. Komanoff were invited via email to a meeting with NRDC Executive Director Peter Lehner.

After the demonstration petered out, I spoke with NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen about the meager turnout and the prospects for major policy change going forward.

Hansen, when not publishing and speaking at academic Fora, is no stranger to disobedient protests. This June he was arrested with 30 others during a protest against mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia.

"It's an indication of where we are, it's a really screwy situation," said Hansen, wearing a white Gilligan-style hat to ward off the rain. "But despite the small numbers, it's becoming more widely recognized that cap and trade just won't work. Country by country doesn't work. The president should ask the national academy of Scientists to give him a report. Instead he's getting a 2000 page bill written largely by polluters. We have governments acknowledge that we have a planet in peril, but they're not doing anything."

As for the unusual tableau of a group of environmental activists demonstrating outside the offices of an organization peopled by environmental activists, Rocco Ferrer, had an interesting take on the dynamic. "It's like NRDC used to be Lou Reed," said Ferrer, a young environmental activist and fashion consultant who participated in the demonstration. "But now they're more like the Jonas Brothers."

M.A. in Development Economics, Doctorates in Systems Theory and in Management.
Retired from University of Maribor, Faculty of Economics & Business as Professor Emeritus of Systems and Innovation Theory.
+1.500 publications in +40 countries (see: IZUM – Cobiss, 08082).
Visiting professor abroad for15 semesters.
Author of the Dialectical Systems Theory (see: François, 2004, International Encyclopedia) and Innovative Business Paradigm for catching-up countries.
Member of New York Academy of Sciences (1996), European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Salzburg (2004), European Academy of sciences and Humanities, Paris (2004).
President of IFSR (International Federation for Systems Research with 37 member associations).
E-mail: mulej@uni-mb.si

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Prof. Dr. Roger Haw Boon Hong
ANSTED University

Following the Bush pattern of expecting the leaders of Iran to do the bidding of Washington means placing a bet on the inconceivable.

While the tone of the Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W. Bush, at their core both administrations subscribe to the same doctrine: Whatever the White House perceives as a threat -- whether it be Iran, North Korea, or the proliferation of long-range missiles -- must be viewed as such by Moscow and Beijing.

In addition, by the evidence available, Barack Obama has not drawn the right conclusion from his predecessor's failed Iran policy. A paradigm of sticks-and-carrots simply is not going to work in the case of the Islamic Republic. Here, a lesson is readily available, if only the Obama White House were willing to consider Iran's recent history. It is unrealistic to expect that a regime which fought Saddam Hussein's Iraq (then backed by the United States) to a standstill in a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s, unaided by any foreign power, and has for 30 years withstood the consequences of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions will be alarmed by Washington's fresh threats of "crippling sanctions."

Most important, the Obama administration is ignoring the altered international order that has emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis triggered by Wall Street's excesses. While its stimulus package, funded by taxpayers and foreign borrowing, has arrested the decline in the nation's gross domestic product, Washington has done little to pull the world economy out of the doldrums. That task -- performed by the U.S. in recent recessions -- has fallen willy-nilly to China. History repeatedly shows that such economic clout sooner or later translates into diplomatic power.

Backed by more than $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the state-owned Chinese oil corporations have been locking up hydrocarbon resources as far away as Brazil. Not surprisingly, Iran, with the second largest oil as well as gas reserves in the world, looms large in the strategic plans of Beijing. The Chinese want to import Iran's petroleum and natural gas through pipelines across Central Asia, thus circumventing sea routes vulnerable to U.S. naval interdiction. As this is an integral part of China's energy security policy, little wonder that Chinese oil companies have committed an estimated $120 billion dollars -- so far -- to Iran's energy industry.

During a recent meeting with Iran's first vice president, Muhammad Reza Rahimi, in Beijing, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao stressed the importance of cooperation between the two countries when it comes to hydrocarbons and trade (at $29 billion a year, and rising), as well as "greater coordination in international affairs." Little wonder, then, that China has already moved to neutralize any sanctions that the United States -- backed by Britain, France and Germany -- might impose on Iran without United Nations authorization.

Foremost among these would be a ban on the export of gasoline to Iran, whose oil refining capacity falls significantly short of domestic demand. Chinese oil corporations have already started shipping gasoline to Iran to fill the gap caused by a stoppage of supplies from British and Indian companies anticipating Washington's possible move. Between June and August 2009, China signed $8 billion worth of contracts with Iran to help expand two existing Iranian oil refineries to produce more gasoline domestically and to help develop the gigantic South Pars natural gas field. Iran's national oil corporation has also invited its Chinese counterparts to participate in a $42.8 billion project to construct seven oil refineries and a 1,000 mile trans-Iran pipeline that will facilitate pumping petroleum to China.

Tehran and Moscow

When it comes to Russia, Tehran and Moscow have a long history of close relations, going back to Tsarist times. During that period and the subsequent Soviet era, the two states shared the inland Caspian Sea. Now, as two of the five littoral states of the Caspian, Iran and Russia still share a common fluvial border.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, relations between the Islamic Republic and Russia warmed. Defying pressures from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Russia's state-owned nuclear power company continued building a civilian nuclear power plant near the Iranian port city of Bushehr. It is scheduled to begin generating electricity next year.

As for nuclear threats, the Kremlin's perspective varies from Washington's. It is far more concerned with the actual threat posed by some of Pakistan's estimated 75 nuclear weapons falling into militant Islamist hands than with the theoretical one from Tehran. Significantly, it was during his recent trip to Beijing to conclude ambitious hydrocarbon agreements with China that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, "If we speak about some kind of sanctions [on Iran] now, before we take concrete steps, we will fail to create favorable conditions for negotiations. That is why we consider such talk premature."

The negotiations that Putin mentioned are now ongoing between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., Britain, China, France, and Russia) as well as Germany. According to Western sources, the agenda of the talks is initially to center on a "freeze for freeze" agreement. Iran would suspend its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for the U.N. Security Council not strengthening its present nominal economic sanctions. If these reports are accurate, then the chances of a major breakthrough may be slim indeed.

At the heart of this issue lies Iran's potential ability to enrich uranium to a level usable as fuel for a nuclear weapon. This, in turn, is linked to the way Iran's leaders view national security. As a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran is, in fact, entitled to enrich uranium. The key point is the degree of enrichment: 5% enriched uranium for use as fuel in an electricity generating plant (called low enriched uranium, LEU); 20% enriched for use as feedstock for producing medical isotopes (categorized as medium enriched uranium, MEU); and 90%-plus for bomb-grade fuel (known as high enriched uranium, HEU).

So far, what Iran has produced at its Natanz nuclear plant is LEU. At the Iran-Six Powers meeting in Geneva on October 1st, Iran agreed in principle to send three-quarters of its present stock of 1,600 kilograms (3,500 pounds) of LEU to Russia to be enriched into MEU and shipped back to its existing Tehran Research Reactor to produce medical isotopes. If this agreement is fleshed out and finalized by all the parties under the aegis of the International Atomic Energy Agency, then the proportion of Iran's LEU with a potential of being turned into HEU would diminish dramatically.

When it comes to the nuclear conundrum, what distinguishes China and Russia from the U.S. is that they have conferred unconditional diplomatic recognition and acceptance on the Islamic Republic of Iran. So their commercial and diplomatic links with Tehran are thriving. Indeed, a sub-structure of pipelines and economic alliances between hydrocarbon-rich Russia, Iran, and energy-hungry China is now being forged. In other words, the foundation is being laid for the emergence of a Russia-Iran-China diplomatic triad in the not-too-distant future, while Washington remains stuck in an old groove of imposing "punishing" sanctions against Tehran for its nuclear program.

Tehran and Washington

There is, of course, a deep and painful legacy of animosity and ill-feeling between the 30-year-old Islamic Republic of Iran and the U.S. Iran was an early victim of Washington's subversive activities when the six-year-old CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Muhammad Mussadiq in 1953. That scar on Iran's body politic has not healed yet. Half a century later, the Iranians watched the Bush administration invade neighboring Iraq and overthrow its president, Saddam Hussein, on trumped-up charges involving his supposed program to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Iran's leaders know that during his second term in office -- as Seymour Hersh revealed in the New Yorker -- Bush authorized a clandestine CIA program with a budget of $400 million to destabilize the Iranian regime. They are also aware that the CIA has focused on stoking disaffection among Sunni ethnic minorities in Shiite-ruled Iran. These include ethnic Arabs in the oil-rich province of Khuzistan adjoining Iraq, and ethnic Baluchis in Sistan-Baluchistan Province abutting the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

Little wonder that Tehran pointed an accusing finger at the U.S. for the recent assassination of six commanders of its Revolutionary Guard Corps in Sistan-Baluchistan by two suicide bombers belonging to Jundallah (the Army of Allah), an extremist Sunni organization. As yet, there is no sign, overt or covert, that President Obama has canceled or repudiated his predecessor's program to destabilize the Iranian regime.

Insecure regimes seek security in nuclear arms. History shows that joining the nuclear club has, in fact, proven an effective strategy for survival. Israel and North Korea provide striking examples of this.

Unsure of Western military assistance in a conventional war with Arab nations, and of its ability to maintain its traditional armed superiority over its Arab adversaries, Israel's leaders embarked on a nuclear weapons program in the mid-1950s. They succeeded in their project a decade later. Since then Israel has acquired an arsenal of 80 to 200 nuclear weapons.

In the North Korean case, once the country had tested its first atomic bomb in October 2006, the Bush administration softened its stance towards it. In the bargaining that followed, North Korea got its name removed from the State Department's list of nations that support international terrorism. In the on-again-off-again bilateral negotiations that followed, the Pyongyang regime as an official nuclear state has been seeking a guarantee against attack or subversion by the United States.

Without saying so publicly, Iran's leaders want a similar guarantee from the U.S. Conversely, unless Washington ends its clandestine program to destabilize the Iranian state, and caps it with an offer of diplomatic acceptance and normal relations, there is no prospect of Tehran abandoning its right to enrich uranium. On the other hand, the continuation of a policy of destabilization, coupled with ongoing threats of "crippling" sanctions and military strikes (whether by the Pentagon or Israel), can only drive the Iranians toward a nuclear breakout capability.

During George W. Bush's eight-year presidency, the U.S. position in the world underwent a sea change. From the Clinton administration, Bush had inherited a legacy of 92 months of continuous economic prosperity, a budget in surplus, and the transformation of the U.N. Security Council into a handmaiden of the State Department. What he passed on to Barack Obama was the Great Recession in a world where America's popularity had hit rock bottom and its economic strength was visibly ebbing. All this paved the way for the economic and political rise of China, as well as the strengthening of Russia as an energy giant capable of extending its influence in Europe and challenging American dominance in the Middle East.

In this new environment expecting the leaders of Iran, backed by China and Russia, to do the bidding of Washington means placing a bet on the inconceivable.

Many of the beliefs held by religious moderates -- smart people who respect science and the separation of church and state -- are as untenable as the dogma of fundamentalists.

"You can't disprove religion."

I'm seeing this trope a lot these days. "You can't disprove religion. At least -- not my religion."

"Well, of course," the trope continues, "many outdated religious beliefs -- young-earth creationism, the universe revolving around the earth, the sun being drawn across the sky by Apollo's chariot -- have been shown by science to be mistaken. But modern progressive and moderate beliefs -- these, you can't disprove with science. These are simply matters of faith: things people reasonably choose to believe, based on their personal life experience."

Then there's the corollary to this trope: "Therefore, atheism is just as much a matter of faith as religion. And atheists who think atheism is better supported by evidence are just as dogmatic and close-minded as religious believers."

The usual atheist reply to this is to cry, "That's the God of the Gaps! Whatever phenomenon isn't currently explained by science, that's where you stick your God! What kind of sense does that make? Why should any given unexplained phenomenon be best explained by religion? Has there ever been a gap in our knowledge that's eventually been shown to be filled by God?"

Which is a pretty good reply, and one I make a lot myself. But today, I want to say something else.

Today, I want to point out that this is simply not the case.

The fact is that many modern progressive and moderate religions do make claims about the observable world. And many of those claims are unsupported by science... and, in fact, are in direct contradiction of it.

I want to talk today about three specific religious beliefs. Not obscure cults or rigid fundamentalist dogmas; not young-earth creationism, or the doctrine that communion wafers literally and physically transform into the human flesh of Christ somewhere in the digestive tract, or the belief that the human mind has been taken over by space aliens. I want to talk about three widely held beliefs of modern progressive and moderate believers: beliefs held by intelligent and educated believers who respect science and don't think religion should contradict it.

And I want to point out that even these beliefs are in direct contradiction of the vast preponderance of available evidence -- almost as much as the obscure cults and the rigid fundamentalist dogma.

So let's go! Today's beliefs on the chopping block are:

1: Evolution guided by God.

Also known as "theistic evolution." Among progressive and moderate believers, this is an extremely common position on evolution. They readily (and rightly) dismiss the claims of young-earth creationists that humanity and all the universe were created in one swell foop 6,000 years ago. They dismiss these claims as utterly contradicted by the evidence. Instead, they say that evolution proceeds exactly as the biologists say it does, but this process is guided by God, to bring humanity and the vast variety of life into being.

A belief that is almost as thoroughly contradicted by the evidence as young-earth creationism is.

Nowhere in anatomy, nowhere in genetics, nowhere in the fossil record or the geological record or any of the physical records of evolution, is there even the slightest piece of evidence for divine intervention.

Quite the contrary. If there had been a divine hand tinkering with the process, we would expect evolution to have proceeded radically differently than it has. We would expect to see, among the changes in anatomy from generation to generation, at least an occasional instance of the structure being tweaked in non-gradual ways. We would expect to see -- oh, say, just for a random example -- human knees and backs better designed for bipedal animals than quadrupeds. (She said bitterly, putting an ice pack on her bad knee.) We would expect to see the blind spot in the human eye done away with, perhaps replaced with the octopus design that doesn't have a blind spot. We would expect to see the vagus nerve re-routed so it doesn't wander all over hell and gone before getting where it's going. We would expect to see a major shift in the risk-benefit analysis that's wired into our brains, one that better suits a 70-year life expectancy than a 35-year one. We would expect to see... I could go on, and on, and on.

And it's not just humans. We'd expect to see whales with gills, pandas with real thumbs, ostriches without those stupid useless wings.

We don't see any of this.

What we see instead is exactly what we would expect to see if evolution proceeded entirely as a natural, physical process. We see "designs" of living things that are flawed and inefficient and just plain goofy: "designs" that exist for no earthly reason except the slow incrementalism that's an inherent part of the physical process of evolution. We see anatomical adaptations severely constrained by the fact that each generation can only be a slight modification on the previous generation, with no sudden jumps to a different basic version. We see anatomical adaptations severely constrained by the fact that each new version has to be an improvement on the previous version (or at least, not a deterioration from it). We see a vast preponderance of evidence showing that evolution proceeds very slowly, very gradually, with the anatomy of each generation being only slightly altered (if at all) from that of the previous generation.

And that isn't how things designed by a conscious designer, or even things tinkered with by a conscious designer, work.

Even when a designer is stuck with the outlines of a previous design, they can still make significant, non-incremental changes. They can tear out the cabinets and replace them with windows, and move the stove to the other side of the room where the fridge is now. They're not stuck with moving the stove one inch at a time, once every week or year or twenty years. And they're not stuck with a system in which every inch that the stove moves has to be an improvement on the previous inch. They're not stuck with a system where, if the stove has been moving across the floor in a series of incremental improvements, it's going to have to stop if it starts blocking the door... because blocking the door is a serious disadvantage.

And if a designer is omnipotent, they're not even stuck with the outlines of a previous design. They're not stuck with anything at all. Why on earth would an all-powerful and benevolent god, a god who's capable of magically altering DNA, bring life into being by the slow, cruel, violent, inefficient, tacked- together- with- duct- tape process of evolution in the first place?

Now, it's true that we do see some evidence for what are sometimes called "jumps" in the fossil record: evidence that evolutionary changes sometimes happen very slowly, and sometimes happen more rapidly. (It's a controversial position, but it is one held by some respected evolutionary biologists.) And some believers in theistic evolution leap onto this hypothesis and hang on like it's the last helicopter out of Saigon.

But the "rapid jumps" thing is very misleading. "Rapid," in evolutionary terms, means "taking place over a few hundred years instead of a few thousand" (or "a few thousand years instead of a few hundred thousand.") And as recent research has repeatedly shown, evolution can take place surprisingly rapidly, in a matter of decades... and still be an entirely natural process of small changes, incremental alterations in each generation from the previous one. Exactly as we would expect if evolution were an entirely natural, physical process of descent with modification. So even if this "rapid jumps" (or "punctuated equilibrium") hypothesis is true, it still doesn't point to theistic evolution. Not even a little bit.

Again: There is not the slightest bit of evidence supporting the idea of evolution guided by God. And there is a significant body of evidence that strongly suggests the contrary.

2: An immaterial soul that animates human consciousness.

I will acknowledge freely: We don't yet understand consciousness very well. The sciences of neurology and neuropsychology are very much in their infancy, and the basic questions of what exactly consciousness is, and where exactly it comes from, and how exactly it works, are, as of yet, largely unanswered.

But research is happening. The foundations for our understanding of consciousness are beginning to be laid. There are a few things that we do know about consciousness.

And among the things we know is that, whatever consciousness is, it seems to be an entirely biological process. A massive body of evidence points to this conclusion.

When we make physical changes to the brain, it changes consciousness. Drugs, injury, surgery, sensory deprivation, electrical current, magnetic fields, medication, illness, exercise -- all these things change our consciousness. Sometimes drastically. Sometimes rendering an entire personality unrecognizable. Even very small changes to the brain can result in massive changes to consciousness... both temporary and permanent.

This works vice versa as well. Magnetic resonance imagery has shown that, when people think different thoughts, different parts of their brains light up with activity. Changes in thought show up as changes in the brain.... just as changes in the brain show up as changes in thought.

And, of course, we have the drastic change in consciousness created by the very drastic change in the physical brain known as "death."

All the available evidence points to the conclusion that, when the brain dies, consciousness disappears. (And by "when the brain dies," I don't mean, "when the brain is temporarily deprived of oxygen for a short time," a.k.a. "near death experiences." I mean when the brain dies, permanently.) The belief that consciousness survives death has probably been researched more than any other supernatural hypothesis -- nobody, not even scientists, wants death to be permanent -- and it has never, ever been substantiated. Reports of it abound. But when carefully examined, using good, rigorous scientific methodology, these reports fall apart like a house of cards.

Everything we understand about consciousness points to it being a physical, biological process. Physical changes cause observable effects. When we see that in any other phenomenon, we assume that what's going on is physical cause and effect. We have no reason to think that anything else is going on with the phenomenon of consciousness.

And there is not a single scrap of good evidence supporting the hypothesis that consciousness is even partly a supernatural phenomenon. There are many gaps in our understanding of consciousness -- that's a massive understatement -- but there is not one piece of solid, rigorously gathered evidence suggesting that any of those gaps can and should be filled with the hypothesis of an immaterial soul. There's not even a good, testable theory explaining how this immaterial soul is supposed to interact with the physical brain. All there is to support this belief is a personal intuitive feeling on the part of believers that the soul has to be non-physical because, well, it just seems like that... plus thousands of years of other believers with a similar intuitive feeling, who have told it to one another, and taught it to their followers, and made up elaborate rationalizations for it, and written it into their holy texts.

Again: There is not the slightest bit of evidence supporting the idea of an immaterial soul that animates human consciousness. And there is a significant body of evidence that strongly suggests the contrary.

3: A sentient universe.

You might ask why I'm including this particular belief in my Big Three Targets. You might wonder why, among all the widely held religious beliefs in the world today, I'm aiming my sights at this New Age/ Neo-Pagan/ Wiccan belief in a World-Soul.

My answer: I live in Northern California. 'Nuff said.

So that's why I want to debunk this belief. And I'm pretty much going to repeat what I said in #2 above:

We don't yet understand what consciousness is. But we do know that, whatever it is, it seems to be a biological product of the brain.

And the universe does not have a brain.

The universe does not have a physical structure capable of supporting consciousness. The universe does not have neurons, dendrites, ganglia. The universe has stars, and planets, and other astronomical bodies, separated by unimaginably vast regions of empty space.

And stars and planets and so on do not behave like neurons and dendrites and so on. They behave like stars and planets. They behave like objects that, as nifty as they are, are not alive, by any useful definition of the word "life."

If consciousness is a biological process -- as an overwhelming body of evidence suggests, see #2 above -- then the universe, not being a biological entity, cannot possibly be conscious. To say that it is would mean radically redefining what we mean by "conscious." And we have no reason to do so... other than a wishful desire to think of the universe as sentient.

Consciousness has, for a long time, been a mysterious and utterly ineffable phenomenon. So, before Darwin, was the tremendous variety and mind-boggling complexity of life. And like the variety and complexity of life, consciousness is no longer ineffable. It is being effed. The unexplainable is being explained. And it is being explained as a biological phenomenon -- as physical cause and effect.

Again: There is not the slightest bit of evidence supporting the idea of a sentient universe. And there is a significant body of evidence that strongly suggests the contrary.

***
Now. I can hear the chorus already. "How can you prove that? You don't know that with absolute certainty! God could be intervening in evolution -- just in ways that are indistinguishable from natural selection! There could be some sort of immaterial soul interacting with the biological process of consciousness, in ways we don't yet perceive! There could be some weird form of consciousness that we don't understand, one that's generated by stars and planets and lifeless astronomical bodies! You can't prove with absolute certainty that there isn't! Your non-belief is just an article of faith!"

My answer:

No. We can't prove that with 100% certainty.

But neither can we prove with 100% certainty that the universe wasn't created 6,000 years ago, by a god who deliberately planted the fossil record and the genetic record and the geological record and the laws of atomic decay, all to test our faith. (Or all of which was planted by Satan, to trick us and tempt us into disbelief.) We can't prove with 100% certainty that communion wafers don't turn into Christ's physical body on contact with the human digestive system. Hell, we can't prove with 100% certainty that the earth goes around the sun, and that all our senses and logical abilities haven't been fooled by some trickster god into thinking that it does.

And it doesn't matter. As I've said many times: 100% unshakeable certainty is not the objective here. Reasonable plausibility, supported by carefully gathered and rigorously tested positive evidence, is the objective. And there is no reason to apply the "Reasonable plausibility supported by evidence" standard to the belief in young-earth creationism... and still apply the "If you can't disprove it with 100% certainty, then it's still reasonable for me to believe it" standard to the beliefs in theistic evolution, and an immaterial soul, and a sentient universe.

If you're going to accept that young-earth creationism has been conclusively disproven by a mountain of scientific evidence, even though we acknowledge a .00001% hypothetical possibility that it might be true... then, if you're going to be consistent, you have to apply that same standard, that same willingness to accept the reasonable conclusions of science about which ideas are and are not plausible, to all religious beliefs.

Including your own.

Especially your own.

Not everything is a matter of opinion or perspective. Not everything can turn into something completely different if you just look at it differently. Some things are either true or not true. It is not true that the universe was created 6,000 years ago. It is not true that the sun goes around the earth. And it is not true that evolution is shaped by the hand of God, or that consciousness is animated by an immaterial soul, or that the universe is sentient.

These things aren't true for exactly the same reason that young-earth creationism isn't true. They aren't true because the evidence simply doesn't support them. They aren't true because the evidence actively contradicts them.

If you're going to be a moderate or progressive religious believer; if you're going to be a religious believer who respects and supports science instead of treating it as the enemy; if you're going to be a religious believer who wants their beliefs to at least not be directly contradictory with the available scientific evidence... then you need to be willing to consider the possibility that your own beliefs are every bit as contradicted by that evidence as the beliefs of the fundamentalist crazies.

And if the answer is "yup, that belief seems to be contradicted by the evidence"... then you need to be willing to let go of that belief.

What happens to women in Afghanistan is not merely a "women's issue." It is the central issue of stability, development and durable peace.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal says he needs more American troops to salvage something like winning in Afghanistan and restore the country to "normal life." Influential senators want to increase spending to train more soldiers for the Afghan National Army and Police. The Feminist Majority recently backed off a call for more troops, but it continues to warn against U.S. withdrawal as an abandonment of Afghan women and girls. Nearly everyone assumes troops bring greater security; and whether your touchstone is military victory, national interest or the welfare of women and girls, "security" seems a good thing.

I confess that I agonize over competing proposals now commanding President Obama's attention because I've spent years in Afghanistan working with women, and I'm on their side. When the Feminist Majority argues that withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan will return the Taliban to power and women to house arrest, I see in my mind's eye the faces of women I know and care about. Yet an unsentimental look at the record reveals that for all the fine talk of women's rights since the U.S. invasion, equal rights for Afghan women have been illusory all along, a polite feel-good fiction that helped to sell the American enterprise at home and cloak in respectability the misbegotten government we installed in Kabul. That it is a fiction is borne out by recent developments in Afghanistan -- President Karzai's approving a new family law worthy of the Taliban, and American acquiescence in Karzai's new law and, initially, his theft of the presidential election -- and by the systematic intimidation, murder or exile of one Afghan woman after another who behaves as if her rights were real and worth fighting for.

Last summer in Kabul, where "security" already suffocates anything remotely suggesting normal life, I asked an Afghan colleague at an international NGO if she was ever afraid. I had learned of threatening phone calls and night letters posted on the gates of the compound, targeting Afghan women who work within. Three of our colleagues in another city had been kidnapped by the militia of a warlord, formerly a member of the Karzai government, and at the time, as we learned after their release, were being beaten, tortured and threatened with death if they continued to work.

"Fear?" my colleague said. "Yes. We live with fear. In our work here with women we are always under threat. Personally, I work every day in fear, hoping to return safely at the end of the day to my home. To my child and my husband."

"And the future?" I said. "What do you worry about?"

"I think about the upcoming election," she said. "I fear that nothing will change. I fear that everything will stay the same."

Then Karzai gazetted the Shiite Personal Status Law, and it was suddenly clear that even as we were hoping for the best, everything had actually grown much worse for women.

Why is this important? At this critical moment, as Obama tries to weigh options against our national security interests, his advisers can't be bothered with -- as one U.S. military officer put it to me -- "the trivial fate of women." As for some hypothetical moral duty to protect the women of Afghanistan -- that's off the table. Yet it is precisely that dismissive attitude, shared by Afghan and many American men alike, that may have put America's whole Afghan enterprise wrong in the first place. Early on, Kofi Annan, then United Nations secretary general, noted that the condition of Afghan women was "an affront to all standards of dignity, equality and humanity."

Annan took the position, set forth in 2000 in the landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325, that real conflict resolution, reconstruction and lasting peace cannot be achieved without the full participation of women every step of the way. Karzai gave lip service to the idea, saying in 2002, "We are determined to work to improve the lot of women after all their suffering under the narrow-minded and oppressive rule of the Taliban." But he has done no such thing. And the die had already been cast: of the twenty-three Afghan notables invited to take part in the Bonn Conference in December 2001, only two were women. Among ministers appointed to the new Karzai government, there were only two; one, the minister for women's affairs, was warned not to do "too much."

The Bonn agreement expressed "appreciation to the Afghan mujahidin who...have defended the independence, territorial integrity and national unity of the country and have played a major role in the struggle against terrorism and oppression, and whose sacrifice has now made them both heroes of jihad and champions of peace, stability and reconstruction of their beloved homeland, Afghanistan." On the other hand, their American- and Saudi-sponsored "sacrifice" had also made many of them war criminals in the eyes of their countrymen. Most Afghans surveyed between 2002 and 2004 by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission thought the leaders of the mujahedeen were war criminals who should be brought to justice (75 percent) and removed from public office (90 percent). The mujahedeen, after all, were Islamist extremists just like the Taliban, though less disciplined than the Taliban, who had risen up to curb the violent excesses of the mujahedeen and then imposed excesses of their own. That's the part American officials seem unwilling to admit: that the mujahedeen warlords of the Karzai government and the oppressive Taliban are brothers under the skin. From the point of view of women today, America's friends and America's enemies in Afghanistan are the same kind of guys.

Though women were excluded from the Bonn process, they did seem to make strides in the first years after the fall of the Taliban. In 2004 a new constitution declared, "The citizens of Afghanistan -- whether man or woman -- have equal rights and duties before the law." Westerners greeted that language as a confirmation of gender equality, and to this day women's "equal rights" are routinely cited in Western media as evidence of great progress. Yet not surprisingly, Afghan officials often interpret the article differently. To them, having "equal rights and duties" is nothing like being equal. The first chief justice of the Afghan Supreme Court, formerly a mullah in a Pakistani madrassa, once explained to me that men have a right to work while women have a right to obey their husbands. The judiciary -- an ultraconservative, inadequate, incompetent and notoriously corrupt branch of government -- interprets the constitution by its own lights. And the great majority of women across the country, knowing little or nothing of rights, live now much as they did under the Taliban -- except back then there were no bombs.

In any case, the constitution provides that no law may contravene the principles of Sharia law. In effect, mullahs and judges have always retained the power to decide at any moment what "rights" women may enjoy, or not; and being poorly educated, they're likely to factor into the judgment their own idiosyncratic notions of Sharia, plus tribal customary laws and the size of proffered bribes. Thus, although some women still bravely exercise liberty and work with some success to improve women's condition, it should have been clear from the get-go that Afghan women possess no inalienable rights at all. Western legal experts who train Afghan judges and lawyers in "the law" as we conceive it often express frustration that Afghans just don't get it; Afghan judges think the same of them.

The paper foundations of Afghan women's rights go beyond national law to include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Treaty of Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). All these international agreements that delineate and establish human rights around the world were quickly ratified by the Karzai government. CEDAW, however, requires ratifying governments to submit periodic reports on their progress in eliminating discrimination; Afghanistan's first report, due in 2004, hasn't appeared yet. That's one more clue to the Karzai government's real attitude toward women -- like Karzai's sequestration of his own wife, a doctor with much-needed skills who is kept locked up at home.

Given this background, there should have been no surprise when President Karzai first signed off in March on the Shiite Personal Status Law or, as it became known in the Western press, the Marital Rape Law. The bill had been percolating in the ultraconservative Ministry of Justice ever since the Iranian-backed Ayatollah Asif Mohseni submitted it in 2007. Then last February Karzai apparently saw the chance to swap passage of the SPSL for the votes of the Shiites -- that is, the Hazara minority, 15-20 percent of the population. It was just one of many deals Karzai consolidated as he kept to the palace while rival presidential candidates stomped the countryside. The SPSL passed without alteration through the Parliamentary Judicial Committee, another little bunch of ultraconservative men. When it reached the floor of Parliament, it was too late to object. Some women members succeeded in getting the marriageable age for girls -- age 9 -- revised to 16. Calling it victory, they settled for that. The Supreme Court reviewed the bill and pronounced it constitutionally correct on grounds the justices did not disclose.

The rights Afghan women stood to lose on paper and in real life were set forth in the SPSL. Parliamentarian Shinkai Karokhail alerted a reporter at the Guardian, and the law was denounced around the world for legalizing marital rape by authorizing a husband to withhold food from a wife who fails to provide sexual service at least once every four days. (The interval assumes the husband has four wives, a practice permitted by Islam and legalized by this legislation.) But that's not all the law does. It also denies or severely limits women's rights to inherit, divorce or have guardianship of their own children. It forbids women to marry without permission and legalizes forced marriage. It legalizes marriage to and rape of minors. It gives men control of all their female relatives. It denies women the right to leave home except for "legitimate purposes" -- in effect giving men the power to deny women access to work, education, healthcare, voting and whatever they please. It generally treats women as property, and it considers rape of women or minors outside marriage as a property crime, requiring restitution to be made to the owner, usually the father or husband, rather than a crime against the victim. All these provisions are contained in twenty-six articles of the original bill that have been rendered into English and analyzed by Western legal experts. No doubt other regressive rules will be discovered if the 223 additional articles of the law ever appear in English.

In April a few women parliamentarians spoke out against the law. A group of women, estimated to number about 300, staged a peaceful protest in the street, protected by Kabul's police officers from an angry mob of hundreds of men who pelted them with obscenities and stones, shouting, "Death to the enemies of Islam!" Under pressure from international diplomats -- President Obama called the law "abhorrent" -- Karzai withdrew it for review. The international press reported the women's victory. In June, when a large group of women MPs and activists met with Karzai, he assured them the bill had been amended and would be submitted to Parliament again after the elections.

Instead, on July 27, without public announcement, Karzai entered the SPSL, slightly revised but with principal provisions intact, into the official gazette, thereby making it law. Apparently he was betting that with the presidential election only three weeks away, the United States and its allies would not complain again. After all, they had about $500 million (at least half of that American money) riding on a "credible" outcome; and they couldn't afford the cost of a runoff or the political limbo of an interregnum. In August, Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, observed that such "barbaric laws were supposed to have been relegated to the past with the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, yet Karzai has revived them and given them his official stamp of approval." No American official said a word.

But what about all the women parliamentarians so often cited as evidence of the progress of Afghan women? With 17 percent of the upper house and 27 percent of the lower -- eighty-five women in all -- you'd think they could have blocked the SPSL. But that didn't happen, for many reasons. Many women parliamentarians are mere extensions of the warlords who financed their campaigns and tell them how to vote: always in opposition to women's rights. Most non-Shiite women took little interest in the bill, believing that it applied only to the Shiite minority. Although Hazara women have long been the freest in the country and the most active in public life, some of them argued that it is better to have a bad law than none at all because, as one Hazara MP told me, "without a written law, men can do whatever they want."

The human rights division of the UN's Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) published a report in early July, before the SPSL became law, documenting the worsening position of Afghan women, the rising violence against them and the silence of international and Afghan officials who could defend them. The researchers' most surprising finding is this: considering the risks of life outside the home and the support women receive within it, "there is no clear distinction between rural and urban women." Commentators on Afghanistan, myself included, have assumed -- somewhat snobbishly, it now appears -- that while illiterate women in the countryside might be treated no better than animals, educated urban Afghan women blaze a higher trail. The debacle of the Shiite Personal Status Law explodes that myth.

The UNAMA report attributes women's worsening position in Afghan society to the violence the war engenders on two domestic fronts: the public stage and the home. The report is dedicated to the memory of Sitara Achakzai, a member of the Kandahar Provincial Council and outspoken advocate of women's rights, who was shot to death on April 12, soon after being interviewed by the UNAMA researchers. She "knew her life was in danger," they report. "But like many other Afghan women such as Malalai Kakar, the highest-ranking female police officer in Kandahar killed in September 2008, Sitara Achakzai had consciously decided to keep fighting to end the abuse of Afghan women." Malalai Kakar, 40, mother of six, had headed a team of ten policewomen handling cases of domestic violence.

In 2005 Kim Sengupta, a reporter with the London Independent, interviewed five Afghan women activists; by October 2008 three of them had been murdered. A fourth, Zarghuna Kakar (no relation to Malalai), a member of the Kandahar Provincial Council, had left the country after she and her family were attacked and her husband was killed. She said she had pleaded with Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar Provincial Council, for protection; but he told her she "should have thought about what may happen" before she stood for election. Kakar told the reporter, "It was his brother [President Karzai], the Americans, and the British who told us that we women should get involved in political life. Of course, now I wish I hadn't."

Women learn to pull their punches. MPs in Kabul confessed that they are afraid of the fundamentalist warlords who control the Parliament; so they censor themselves and keep silent. One said, "Most of the time women don't dare even say a word about sensitive Islamic issues, because they are afraid of being labeled as blasphemous." Many women MPs have publicly declared their intention to quit at the end of the term. Women journalists also told UNAMA that they "refrain from criticizing warlords and other power brokers, or covering topics that are deemed contentious such as women's rights."

Other women targeted for attack are civil servants, employees of international and national organizations, including the UN, healthcare workers and women in "immoral" professions -- which include acting, singing, appearing on television and journalism. When popular Tolo TV presenter Shaima Rezayee, 24, was forced out of her job in 2005, she said "things are not getting better.... We have made some gains, but there are a lot of people who want to take it all back. They are not even Taliban, they are here in Kabul." Soon after, she was shot and killed. Zakia Zaki, 35, a teacher and radio journalist who produced programs on women's rights, was shot to death in her home in Parwan Province on June 6, 2007. Actress Parwin Mushtakhel fled the country last spring after her husband was gunned down outside their house, punished for his failure to keep her confined. When the Taliban fell, she thought things were getting better, but "the atmosphere has changed; day by day women can work less and less." Setara Hussainzada, the singer from Herat who appeared on the Afghan version of American Idol (and in the documentary Afghan Star) also fled for her life.

Threats against women in public life are intended to make them go home -- to "unliberate" themselves through voluntary house arrest. But if public life is dangerous, so is life at home. Most Afghan women -- 87 percent, according to Unifem -- are beaten on a regular basis. The UNAMA researchers looked into the unmentionable subject of rape and found it to be "an everyday occurrence in all parts of the country" and "a human rights problem of profound proportions." Outside marriage, the rapists are often members or friends of the family. Young girls forced to marry old men are raped by the old man's brothers and sons. Women and children -- young boys are also targets -- are raped by people who have charge of them: police, prison guards, soldiers, orphanage or hospital staff members. The female victims of rape are mostly between the ages of 7 and 30; many are between 10 and 20, but some are as young as 3; and most women are dead by 42.

Women rarely tell anyone because the blame and shame of rape falls on them. Customary law permits an accused rapist to make restitution to the victim's father, but because the question of consent does not figure in the law of sexual relations, the victim is guilty of zina, or adultery, and can be punished accordingly: sent to jail or murdered by family members to preserve family honor. The great majority of women and girls in prison at any time are charged with zina; most have been raped and/or have run away from home to escape violence. It's probably safe to say, in the absence of statistics, that police -- who, incidentally, are trained by the American for-profit contractor DynCorp -- spend more time tracking down runaway women and girls than real criminals. Rapists, on the other hand, as UNAMA investigators found, are often "directly linked to power brokers who are, effectively, above the law and enjoy immunity from arrest as well as immunity from social condemnation." Last year Karzai pardoned political thugs who had gang-raped a woman before witnesses, using a bayonet, and who had somehow been convicted despite their good connections. UNAMA researchers conclude: "The current reality is that...women are denied their most fundamental human rights and risk further violence in the course of seeking justice for crimes perpetrated against them." For women, "human rights are values, standards, and entitlements that exist only in theory and at times, not even on paper."

Caught in the maelstrom of personal, political and military violence, Afghan women worry less about rights than security. But they complain that the men who plan the country's future define "security" in ways that have nothing to do with them. The conventional wisdom, which I have voiced myself, holds that without security, development cannot take place. Hence, our troops must be fielded in greater numbers, and Afghan troops trained faster, and private for-profit military contractors hired at fabulous expense, all to bring security. But the rule doesn't hold in Afghanistan precisely because of that equation of "security" with the presence of armed men. Wherever troops advance in Afghanistan, women are caught in the cross-fire, killed, wounded, forced to flee or locked up once again, just as they were in the time of the Taliban. Suggesting an alternative to the "major misery" of warfare, Sweden's former Defense Minister Thage Peterson calls for Swedish soldiers to leave the "military adventure" in Afghanistan while civilians stay to help rebuild the country. But Sweden's soldiers are few, and its aid organizations among the best in the world. For the United States even to lean toward such a plan would mean reasserting civilian control of the military and restoring the American aid program (USAID), hijacked by private for-profit contractors: two goals worth fighting for.

Today, most American so-called development aid is delivered not by USAID, but by the military itself through a system of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), another faulty idea of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Soldiers, unqualified as aid workers and already busy soldiering, now shmooze with village "elders" (often the wrong ones) and bring "development," usually a costly road convenient to the PRT base, impossible for Afghans to maintain and inaccessible to women locked up at home. Recent research conducted by respected Afghanistan hands found that this aid actually fuels "massive corruption"; it fails to win hearts and minds not because we spend too little but because we spend too much, too fast, without a clue. Meanwhile, the Taliban bring the things Afghans say they need -- better security, better governance and quick, hard-edged justice. U.S. government investigators are looking into allegations that aid funds appropriated for women's projects have been diverted to PRTs for this more important work of winning hearts and minds with tarmac. But the greatest problem with routing aid through the military is this: what passes for development is delivered from men to men, affirming in the strongest possible terms the misogynist conviction that women do not matter. You'll recognize it as the same belief that, in the Obama administration's strategic reappraisal of Afghanistan, pushed women off the table.

So there's no point talking about how women and girls might be affected by the strategic military options remaining on Obama's plate. None of them bode well for women. To send more troops is to send more violence. To withdraw is to invite the Taliban. To stay the same is not possible, now that Karzai has stolen the election in plain sight and made a mockery of American pretensions to an interest in anything but our own skin and our own pocketbook. But while men plan the onslaught of more men, it's worth remembering what "normal life" once looked like in Afghanistan, well before the soldiers came. In the 1960s and '70s, before the Soviet invasion -- when half the country's doctors, more than half the civil servants and three-quarters of the teachers were women -- a peaceful Afghanistan advanced slowly into the modern world through the efforts of all its people. What changed all that was not only the violence of war but the accession to power of the most backward men in the country: first the Taliban, now the mullahs and mujahedeen of the fraudulent, corrupt, Western-designed government that stands in opposition to "normal life" as it is lived in the developed world and was once lived in their own country. What happens to women is not merely a "women's issue"; it is the central issue of stability, development and durable peace. No nation can advance without women, and no enterprise that takes women off the table can come to much good.

Bees teach us how to live our life in a way that by taking what we need from the world around us, we leave the world better than we found it.

MG: What are the biggest obstacles faced by organic beekeepers today?

RC: The biggest challenge beekeepers face today is the same challenge facing all of Western industrial civilization…

In his 1980 book, Overshoot, William Catton, Jr. states, "Infinitesimal actions, if they are numerous and cumulative, can become enormously consequential." This statement refers to the problem of cumulative impacts where actions that are harmless or tolerable at the individual level can degrade the planets life support systems if thousands or millions of people do them. One person fertilizing their lawn near Chesapeake Bay for example makes no significant impact, but when thousands do it the bay becomes degraded and Blue Crab populations decline precipitously.

When it comes to chemicals the current regulatory approach to controlling pollution does not deal with global pollution. The main focus has instead been on the maximally exposed individual. In the United States, we conduct risk assessments (used when conducting "cost-benefit" analyses) to evaluate the risk to a hypothetical "maximally exposed" individual. If the threat to that individual (or honey bee) is found to fall within acceptable limits, then regulation does not occur and these so-called acceptable amounts of contamination are allowed to be released forever after. Then another risk assessment and cost benefit analysis gives the go-ahead to another acceptable release or use of a different toxic substance or harmful activity. Then another and another. What we have not started to look at until recently is the total impact of all these acceptable risks. Our society has assumed that it could tolerate unlimited small amounts of harm as a byproduct of economic growth. It is only when a particular activity is demonstrated to fail to provide a net benefit to society that most of our property and environmental laws are permitted to interfere with economic activity.

Biochemist and lawyer, Joseph H. Guth, legal director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, has analyzed this situation and offered solutions in several scholarly papers one of which was published in the Barry Law Review, titled "Cumulative Impacts: Death-Knell for Cost-Benefit Analysis In Environmental Decisions." In this paper Guth points out that our laws only forbid damage when the perceived benefits are not considered to outweigh the cost or destruction to the environment or human health. The law also puts the burden of proof that an activity is creating more harm than good on the injured party, or the government. If the victim (or the government) can not meet the burden of proof, then the damaging action is allowed to continue by default. This burden of proof transforms doubt, and missing scientific information into a barrier to legal protection for the environment (and honey bees). The default presumption is that the benefits of economic activity always outweigh the costs unless a specific cost-benefit analysis (often based upon incomplete or faulty research conducted by those that stand to profit) can show otherwise.

According to Joe Guth, "These laws do not permit regulators broadly to take account of what is happening to the world around them. They embed regulators in a decision-making structure that may seem scientific but in fact is profoundly unscientific because it prevents them from responding to the ever more detailed findings by the world scientific community that we are overshooting the Earth's ecological capacities. Rooted in the assumption that ecological overshoot does not occur, our current statutes are incapable of containing the cumulative scale of ecological damage… It is an approach that has become outdated because it is based on assumptions that are no longer valid."

Guth sums up by stating, "To maintain a functioning biosphere in which humans can prosper, the law must turn its attention to the problem of cumulative impacts. The law will have to abandon its use of cost-benefit analysis to justify individual environmental impacts and instead adopt the goal of maintaining the functioning ecological systems that we are so dependent upon."

In Section II of his "Cumulative Impacts" paper, Joe Guth states that "Our legal system already harbors examples of decision-making structures that establish a principle of standard of environmental quality or human health and do not rely on cost-benefit balancing." and that these examples "show that such legal principles or standards can enable the legal system to contain the growth of cumulative impacts." The cumulative impacts of our culture are destroying the life support systems of the planet and the bees are simply acting as the proverbial "canary in the coal mine." As a result we don't have an environmental problem that we can "solve" we have a situation we must learn to adjust to. The actions that needed to be taken to rectify our predicament should have been taken years ago. At this point the damage is done. The only real question left is whether our actions today are going to result in our great grandchildren living a difficult life in a crippled world that is a shadow of the world we live in today, or are we going to inflict damage that is so devastating that we will have created a total catastrophe for future generations?

MG: Describe briefly beekeeping as a business. How much energy do you focus on honey production?

RC: Honey production is not the focus of my beekeeping business at all. The focus is on caring for the honey bees and keeping the colonies as healthy and vibrant as possible. This means primarily reducing stress on the bees. In fact the only consistent observation that has been made of hives suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is that the bees in infected colonies are always suffering from stress that has caused the bee's immune systems to collapse. While there are numerous stresses that the bees must deal with that we cannot directly control (see below), there are numerous other stresses on the hive that we do have control over. Such stressors include reducing chemical contaminants in the hive, eliminating the presence of antibiotics in the hive, making sure that the bees are fed a healthy diet of honey and pollen from a wide variety of plants and that the hives have access to clean uncontaminated water. When the bees health needs are taken care of, a honey harvest tends to be the natural result.

MG: Let's say I'm an aspiring small-scale farmer, or beginning life on a homestead, or merely thinking of expanding my urban garden. Why should I keep bees, in terms of honey production, and their pollination benefits, etc?

RC: The biggest benefit honey bees provide is pollination. Pollination fees are what is keeping the beekeeping industry alive today. Honey is really a byproduct of pollination. Why should anybody keep bees? As suggested above, the life support systems of our planet are collapsing. The forests are disappearing, desert regions are growing, the climate is shifting so that some areas are getting dryer, other areas are getting wetter, some areas are getting colder, other areas are getting warmer, and our oceans are collapsing with large dead zones, acidification, giant "islands" of floating plastic debris, collapsing fisheries, and ocean animals that are dying in greater numbers every day from cancer. My observation is that it is our industrial civilization that is, if not the actual cause of all this destruction, it is certainly contributing to the devastation. As a member of this society then, I am partly responsible and part of the problem. This is a wonderful thing, for if I am part of the problem, then I have the responsibility and am empowered to be part of the solution.

One of the greatest lessons we learn from the honey bee is in observing how they go about making their "living" here on earth. As they go about their business collecting pollen, nectar, propolis and water (everything they need to survive) they do not harm or kill anything in the process. Unless they feel threatened and are forced to defend themselves, not so much as a leaf on a plant is harmed. In the process of taking what they need to survive they in turn give back more than they take and make the world a better place through the pollination the plants. This gift of pollination ensures that the plants can thrive and reproduce in vast numbers which produces a large variety of seeds, nuts, berries, fruits and vegetable in all shapes and sizes, which in turn ensures an abundance of food for all the rest of the insects, animals and people on the planet. This is the ultimate lesson that the bees teach us and challenge us to accomplish: How to live our life in a way that by taking what we need from the world around us we leave the world better than we found it.

Each one of us who takes care of the honey bees and makes sure that there is adequate habitat and flowering plants for the native pollinators in our regions, is indirectly through the good work of these pollinators, making the world a better place for all of creation. This is the kind of healing our beautiful blue-green planet needs desperately at this time in history.

The day of America's global pre-eminence is over. We must face the new global realities.

1. At the global economic summit in Pittsburgh on September 24th and 25th, the leaders of the major industrial powers, the G-7 (G-8 if you include Russia) agreed to turn over responsibility for oversight of the world economy to a larger, more inclusive Group of 20 (G-20), adding in China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and other developing nations. Although doubts have been raised about the ability of this larger group to exercise effective global leadership, there is no doubt that the move itself signaled a shift in the locus of world economic power from the West to the global East and South -- and with this shift, a seismic decline in America's economic preeminence has been registered.

"The G-20's true significance is not in the passing of a baton from the G-7/G-8 but from the G-1, the U.S.," Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote in the Financial Times. "Even during the 33 years of the G-7 economic forum, the U.S. called the important economic shots." Declining American leadership over these last decades was obscured by the collapse of the Soviet Union and an early American lead in information technology, Sachs also noted, but there is now no mistaking the shifting of economic power from the United States to China and other rising economic dynamos.

2. According to news reports, America's economic rivals are conducting secret (and not-so-secret) meetings to explore a diminished role for the U.S. dollar -- fast losing its value -- in international trade. Until now, the use of the dollar as the international medium of exchange has given the United States a significant economic advantage: it can simply print dollars to meet its international obligations while other nations must convert their own currencies into dollars, often incurring significant added costs. Now, however, many major trading countries -- among them China, Russia, Japan, Brazil, and the Persian Gulf oil countries -- are considering the use of the Euro, or a "basket" of currencies, as a new medium of exchange. If adopted, such a plan would accelerate the dollar's precipitous fall in value and further erode American clout in international economic affairs.

One such discussion reportedly took place this summer at a summit meeting of the BRIC countries. Just a concept a year ago, when the very idea of BRIC was concocted by the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, the BRIC consortium became a flesh-and-blood reality this June when the leaders of the four countries held an inaugural meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

The very fact that Brazil, Russia, India, and China chose to meet as a group was considered significant, as they jointly possess about 43% of the world's population and are expected to account for 33% of the world's gross domestic product by 2030 -- about as much as the United States and Western Europe will claim at that time. Although the BRIC leaders decided not to form a permanent body like the G-7 at this stage, they did agree to coordinate efforts to develop alternatives to the dollar and to reform the International Monetary Fund in such a way as to give non-Western countries a greater voice.

3. On the diplomatic front, Washington has been rebuffed by both Russia and China in its drive to line up support for increased international pressure on Iran to cease its nuclear enrichment program. One month after President Obama cancelled plans to deploy an anti-ballistic missile system in Eastern Europe in an apparent bid to secure Russian backing for a tougher stance toward Tehran, top Russian leaders are clearly indicating that they have no intention of endorsing strong new sanctions on Iran. "Threats, sanctions, and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive," declared the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, following a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Moscow on October 13th. The following day, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that the threat of sanctions was "premature." Given the political risks Obama took in canceling the missile program -- a step widely condemned by Republicans in Washington -- Moscow's quick dismissal of U.S. pleas for cooperation on the Iranian enrichment matter can only be interpreted as a further sign of waning American influence.

4. Exactly the same inference can be drawn from a high-level meeting in Beijing on October 15th between Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and Iran's first vice president, Mohammed Reza Rahimi. "The Sino-Iran relationship has witnessed rapid development as the two countries' leaders have had frequent exchanges, and cooperation in trade and energy has widened and deepened," Wen said at the Great Hall of the People. Coming at a time when the United States is engaged in a vigorous diplomatic drive to persuade China and Russia, among others, to reduce their trade ties with Iran as a prelude to toughened sanctions, the Chinese statement can only be considered a pointed rebuff of Washington.

5. From Washington's point of view, efforts to secure international support for the allied war effort in Afghanistan have also met with a strikingly disappointing response. In what can only be considered a trivial and begrudging vote of support for the U.S.-led war effort, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced on October 14th that Britain would add more troops to the British contingent in that country -- but only 500 more, and only if other European nations increase their own military involvement, something he undoubtedly knows is highly unlikely. So far, this tiny, provisional contingent represents the sum total of additional troops the Obama administration has been able to pry out of America's European allies, despite a sustained diplomatic drive to bolster the combined NATO force in Afghanistan. In other words, even America's most loyal and obsequious ally in Europe no longer appears willing to carry the burden for what is widely seen as yet another costly and debilitating American military adventure in the Greater Middle East.

6. Finally, in a move of striking symbolic significance, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) passed over Chicago (as well as Madrid and Tokyo) to pick Rio de Janeiro to be the host of the 2016 summer Olympics, the first time a South American nation was selected for the honor. Until the Olympic vote took place, Chicago was considered a strong contender, especially since former Chicago resident Barack Obama personally appeared in Copenhagen to lobby the IOC. Nonetheless, in a development that shocked the world, Chicago not only lost out, but was the city eliminated in the very first round of voting.

"Brazil went from a second-class country to a first-class country, and today we began to receive the respect we deserve," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at a victory celebration in Copenhagen after the vote. "I could die now and it already would have been worth it." Few said so, but in the course of the Olympic decision-making process the U.S. was summarily and pointedly demoted from sole superpower to instant also-ran, a symbolic moment on a planet entering a new age.

On Being an Ordinary Country

These are only a few examples of recent developments which indicate, to this author, that the day of America's global preeminence has already come to an end, years before the American intelligence community expected. It's increasingly clear that other powers -- even our closest allies -- are increasingly pursuing independent foreign policies, no matter what pressure Washington tries to bring to bear.

Of course, none of this means that, for some time to come, the U.S. won't retain the world's largest economy and, in terms of sheer destructiveness, its most potent military force. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the strategic environment in which American leaders must make critical decisions, when it comes to the nation's vital national interests, has changed dramatically since the onset of the global economic crisis.

Even more important, President Obama and his senior advisers are, it seems, reluctantly beginning to reshape U.S. foreign policy with the new global reality in mind. This appears evident, for example, in the administration's decision to revisit U.S. strategy on Afghanistan.

It was only in March, after all, that the president embraced a new counterinsurgency-oriented strategy in that country, involving a buildup of U.S. boots on the ground and a commitment to protracted efforts to win hearts and minds in Afghan villages where the Taliban was resurgent. It was on this basis that he fired the incumbent Afghan War commander, General David D. McKiernan, replacing him with General Stanley A. McChrystal, considered a more vigorous proponent of counterinsurgency. When, however, McChrystal presented Obama with the price tag for the implementation of this strategy -- 40,000 to 80,000 additional troops (over and above the 20,000-odd extra troops only recently committed to the fight) -- many in the president's inner circle evidently blanched.

Not only will such a large deployment cost the U.S. treasury hundreds of billions of dollars it can ill afford, but the strains it is likely to place on the Army and Marine Corps are likely to be little short of unbearable after years of multiple tours and stress in Iraq. This price would be more tolerable, of course, if America's allies would take up more of the burden, but they are ever less willing to do so.

Undoubtedly, the leaders of Russia and China are not entirely unhappy to see the United States exhaust its financial and military resources in Afghanistan. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Vice President Joe Biden, among others, is calling for a new turn in U.S. policy, foregoing a counterinsurgency approach and opting instead for a less costly "counter-terrorism" strategy aimed, in part, at crushing Al Qaeda in Pakistan -- using drone aircraft and Special Forces, rather than large numbers of U.S. troops (while leaving troop levels in Afghanistan relatively unchanged).

It is too early to predict how the president's review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will play out, but the fact that he did not immediately embrace the McChrystal plan and has allowed Biden such free rein to argue his case suggests that he may be coming to recognize the folly of expanding America's military commitments abroad at a time when its global preeminence is waning.

One senses Obama's caution in other recent moves. Although he continues to insist that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is impermissible and that the use of force to prevent this remains an option, he has clearly moved to minimize the likelihood that this option -- which would also be plagued by recalcitrant "allies" -- will ever be employed.

On the other side of the coin, he has given fresh life to American diplomacy, seeking improved ties with Moscow and approving renewed diplomatic contact with such previously pariah states as Burma, Sudan, and Syria. This, too, reflects a reality of our changing world: that the holier-than-thou, bullying stance adopted by the Bush administration toward these and other countries for almost eight years rarely achieved anything. Think of it as an implicit acknowledgement that the U.S. is now descending from its status as the globe's "sole superpower" to that of an ordinary country. This, after all, is what ordinary countries do; they engage other countries in diplomatic discourse, whether they like their current governments or not.

So, welcome to the world of 2025. It doesn't look like the world of our recent past, when the United States stood head and shoulders above all other nations in stature, and it doesn't comport well with Washington's fantasies of global power since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But it is reality.

For many Americans, the loss of that preeminence may be a source of discomfort, or even despair. On the other hand, don't forget the advantages to being an ordinary country like any other country: Nobody expects Canada, or France, or Italy to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, on top of the 68,000 already there and the 120,000 still in Iraq. Nor does anyone expect those countries to spend $925 billion in taxpayer money to do so -- the current estimated cost of both wars, according to the National Priorities Project.

The question remains: How much longer will Washington feel that Americans can afford to subsidize a global role that includes garrisoning much of the planet and fighting distant wars in the name of global security, when the American economy is losing so much ground to its competitors? This is the dilemma President Obama and his advisers must confront in the altered world of 2025.

The who, what, where, when and why about COP 15, which strangely means: the "Council of Parties."

1. What the heck is it?

COP15 is the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties, the highest body of the United Nations Climate Change Convention, and it will take place this year Dec. 7-18. There will be 192 countries participating and a whole bunch of nongovernmental organizations, as well. The event will be in Copenhagen and is hosted by the Danish government. COP14 was in Poland last year.

One of the most well-known COP meetings was COP3 in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, which resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, a document now signed by over 180 countries and put into action in February 2005. The protocol set binding emissions targets for greenhouse gases (GHG) for 37 industrialized countries and the European Union, committing them to reducing their GHG emissions an average of 5 percent against 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

"Recognizing that developed countries are principally responsible for the current high levels of GHG emissions in the atmosphere as a result of more than 150 years of industrial activity, the protocol places a heavier burden on developed nations under the principle of 'common but differentiated responsibilities,'" explains the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The U.S., which contributed over 30 percent of global GHG emissions in 1990 never signed the Kyoto Protocol, and the country's reluctance to commit to international climate change negotiations has long stymied the process. Until, perhaps, now ...

2. What are they trying to accomplish?

The goal of the COP15 is to get as many countries as possible (and particularly big emitters like the U.S.) to enter into a binding agreement to reduce GHG emissions enough to prevent catastrophic results from climate change.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told Environment & Energy Publishing that he was hoping four important questions would be answered in Copenhagen:

• How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
• How much major developing countries such as China and India are willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
• How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
• How is that money going to be managed?

3. Why does the future of the world depend on it?

This is really serious stuff. The best science tells us that we need immediate action on climate change to prevent catastrophic results. This month the U.N. Environment Program released an updated report following the groundbreaking findings in 2007 by the International Panel on Climate Change that basically said thing are are going to be as bad as the IPCC predicted or worse.

"The pace and the scale of climate change is accelerating, along with the confidence among researchers in their forecasts," UNEP Director Achim Steiner said in the report.

What UNEP found was that we've already committed ourselves to an increase in temperature above pre-industrial levels by 1.4 degrees Celsius by 2100, and if we don't get our acts together soon -- meaning making 25-40 percent reductions in CO2 emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 -- we're looking at 4.3 degrees Celsius increases or worse.

A few degrees may sound like not a big deal, but actually it's quite bad. Here are some details from Matt McDermott at Treehugger to put it in perspective:

That effectively signs the extinction warrant for about half of all animal and plant life on the planet; it means coral reefs are gone due to ocean acidification; it means ice-free summers in the Arctic, sets both Greenland and Antarctica on the melting path to multimeter sea-level rise; and it means the glaciers in the Himalayas are doomed.

In human terms, that means half of all humans will face water shortages; it means widespread starvation in South and East Asia, as water availability plummets and crop yields drop; it means much the same thing in Africa; the Mekong [River] Delta is 20 percent flooded and Ho Chi Minh City is 10-20 percent underwater; the Nile Delta (source of much of Egypt's food) is inundated with saltwater; same thing for most of Bangladesh.

In the United States, it means localized temperature increases (think the Great Plains) of up to 7 degrees Celcius; it means severe water problems in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which supply meltwater to California agriculture; crop yields plummet in the Midwest; insect-borne diseases like dengue fever, historically confined to the tropics, spread to 28 states; coastal cities like Miami, New York, New Orleans and others have to contend with a sea-level rise of more than a meter.

If you want some numbers: By 2030, 500,000 people could die due to climate change -- 99 percent of them in the developing world, which it should be pointed out have historically done very little to cause the problem. Already an estimated 300,000 people are seriously affected by climate change.

In economic terms, by 2030 the global economy could take a $340 billion hit.

Really, we can't put enough pressure on the governments and international organizations meeting in Copenhagen to put politics aside and come up with a truly comprehensive and fair treaty to reduce GHG emissions.

4. Will the U.S. screw it up for everyone again?

Of course that's always a possibility, but there's ample reason to be hopeful that things will turn out differently this year. For one, we've got a president who actually understands the science and appreciates the seriousness of the issue. We've also got Congress lumbering away on a climate bill, although just how effective that bill may end up being is still in question.

It's looking more and more likely that the U.S. won't have passed a comprehensive climate bill before Copenhagen, which is bad news, but does not necessarily spell disaster for the negotiations.

David Fogarty from Reuters explains:

In reality, the U.S. Senate might pass the climate bill in the first part of 2010, allowing President Barack Obama's administration to bring a 2020 target and financing pledges to the table during a major U.N. climate meeting in Bonn [Germany] in June.

At worst, nations would have to wait until annual U.N. climate talks in December 2010.

Of course, if the Senate doesn't get its act together and no bill comes to pass, then there is a glimmer of hope, but it's quite weak. Fogarty writes:

The U.S. Senate votes against the climate bill, but other nations reluctantly go ahead with many measures to fight climate change anyway, hoping the United States will formally join the global effort at some point.

In the worst-case scenario, negotiations start to resemble failed trade talks that repeatedly stall. Nations instead work on bilateral clean-energy and carbon-offset deals that fail to achieve major reductions in the growth of emissions.

The trouble is we are dealing with a very limited time line, so making sure the U.S government is on board and our country is pulling its fair share of the weight is essential. And the sooner, the better.

5. What can I do?

While world leaders will get to make some big decisions behind the negotiating table, that doesn't mean the rest of us should sit idly by. There are a bunch of ways to get involved:

• Call your senator and ask him or her to pass a strong, comprehensive climate bill. With the U.S. committed to cutting GHG emissions, global talks will be off to a much better start.
• You can join forces with people from all over the world on Oct. 24 for the global day of climate action sponsored by Bill McKibben and 350.org. You can find an action near you or start your own. And it doesn't end this weekend. Sign up with 350.org, and you'll get reminders about future actions, science updates and news about how things are going on the climate-change front.
• Join Tck Tck Tck, the largest mobilization demanding action on a climate-change agreement in Copenhagen. The group is bringing together individuals, big NGOs, and local and national groups ranging from the Global Campaign Against Poverty to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Team up with Tck Tck Tck and help to spread the word about what needs to be done at COP15.
• Get engaged. Stay on top of the issue, and help spread the word. Forward stories like this one to your networks. Check Twitter for updates on COP15 and pass along tweets. Become a fan of the COP15 Facebook page and invite your friends.

The best thing to do is get active -- whether it's with a local group working on climate change or an international effort. We need to keep the pressure on world leaders -- here at home and abroad.

McKibben said recently: "Temperatures will continue to go up, and a lot of damage will be done. What we are working for is to prevent change so large that civilization itself will be challenged, and that's still possible (we hope). But only if we get to work right away."

Have you sent YOUR climate care package to Copenhagen?

We urgently need your help in the lead up to the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen this December.

We're trying to get as many people as we can to send a virtual package to the conference. Each package contains our demands and, if you have time, a brilliant slogan -- to be delivered by a quirky cardboard cartoon character with YOUR face on it. The best slogan will appear on a Greenpeace banner and the characters will be part of a virtual video march. The more we have the better:

The Climate Summit will see over 15,000 officials from 200 countries gather in Copenhagen with 1 goal: to agree on a deal to combat global warming. This is a truly incredible event which has the power to mark a U-turn away from decades of inaction on climate change. That's why we want to make sure they not only agree on a deal, but make a firm pact for change that packages together 3 clear actions:

1.Big cuts in emissions from rich countries
2.A fund to save our forests
3.Funds to help developing countries deal with climate change

Please, help us make sure their solution truly delivers. Visit action-pact.org and send your message.

Let's make sure our political leaders know we want them thinking about the next generation, not just the next election.

Things you can do now! http://www.greenpeace.org/international/getinvolved

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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    

bill.ellis5@gmail.com
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GlobalFiles/2009BillEllis.htm

Andrew Revkin, an environmental reporter for The New York Times and author of the paper's Dot Earth blog, warns that the math is pretty depressing.

There are about 6.8 billion people on the planet today, a number projected to get to 9 billion by 2050. Americans, the world's greatest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, produce about 20 tons of the stuff per person, per year. If we were to cut that in half, as emissions rose with the quality of life in much of the Third World, and everyone on the planet met around 10 tons per person, per year, simple multiplication says we'd collectively emit 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually come 2050.

That's three times the already problematic current number.

When we start to think about that number, 9 billion, a lot of "cheery suppositions" about what the world can do to curb climate change evaporate, Revkin said (via carbon footprint-minimizing Skype from his desk in New York). He spoke to an event in Washington discussing population trends and climate change, and the media that seldom correlate the two.

The interrelated topics aren't likely to get much talk when global leaders meet in Copenhagen in December for the next round of wrangling over a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. But at least the media could start highlighting the sensitive relationship, as was suggested at the talk hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center.

A couple of mental roadblocks emerge, central among them the sentiment that, well, there are just too many people on the planet, so what are we supposed to do about it? Any answer trips up against the politically touchy topic of family planning (a distinctly different concept, reproductive-health advocates stress, from "population control").

"The single most concrete, substantive thing a young American could do is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius," Revkin said. "It's having fewer kids."

But this is just a thought exercise, he cautions, and no model for the kind of official policy most Americans would want to live with. A recent study, though, by the London School of Economics and the British-based Optimum Population Trust, suggests meeting the world's unmet need for access to reproductive health would be the most effective and cheapest way to start dramatically cutting carbon dioxide.

Each $7 spent on basic family planning between now and 2050 would reduce emissions by more than a ton, the research says. To get the same reduction through alternative energy would cost at least $32 (or, as much as $83 to implement carbon capture and storage in coal plants, $92 to develop plug-in hybrids, or $131 for electric vehicles).

Providing such family planning over the next four decades would be the equivalent of reducing global CO2 by six times America's annual emissions.

All of this, though, assumes there's nothing controversial about getting birth control to rural Africa. Not that the conversation has to start with The Pill: Wherever women have been given access to reproductive health around the world, they have tended to opt for fewer children than they would have had otherwise, meaning that access has a controlling effect without being coercive.

Emily Douglas, Web editor at the liberal magazine The Nation and previously an editor at RHRealityCheck, suggested some historical context: World population projections were revised downward after the widespread dissemination of birth control in the West. Officials once predicted the trend would follow as birth control was made available to the Third World.

"But that assumption turned out to be false," Douglas said.

And so politicians head to Copenhagen with the most cost-effective solution to climate change (one piece, of course, of a broader menu) just as divisive as any other, inseparable from a web of policy problems that grows more connected to the climate by the day.

Take part in a week-long project to learn about your environmental footprint and reduce what you use and buy.

Next week I'm going to be participating in a little bit of an ecological/social experiment and I'm hoping you'll join me. By now you've likely heard about 'No Impact Man' Colin Beavan. Along with his wife and daughter, Colin and his family embarked on a year-long project to try to minimize their impact on the environment -- this included eating only local food (which meant no eating out and no coffee); only pedaling or walking to their destinations; not buying stuff, including no more clothes shopping or purchasing cleaning products from the store; no producing trash; and for about half of the year, not using electricity in their home (which was a New York City apartment).

Their project was a blog, a book and then a movie. And now, it's a challenge to us. For just one week you can participate in a modified version of Colin and his family's year-long adventure. There are a full set of instructions, here. But I'll run through the basic premise. I'll also be participating myself and blogging about the ups and downs of my week and I'd encourage you to do the same.

The week-long project, which is in partnership with the Huffington Post, starts on Sunday (October 18) and each day throughout the week a new concept is added -- so don't worry, you won’t have an abrupt lifestyle change all at once. Here's the basic plan: Sunday is consumption, Monday is trash, Tuesday is transportation, Wednesday is food, Thursday is energy, Friday is water, and on the weekend you are to spend one day as a day of volunteering in your community and one as an eco-Sabbath -- a time to unplug from everything.

If this sounds a little overwhelming, take a read through this guide -- it details how to do things step by step and helps provide tips and resources. The most important point of all this is not to see how much you can give up or get rid of in a week, but to actually stop and think for a little bit about your footprint on the environment and the resources that you are using. The project isn't really about eco-extremism but about asking people to be conscious of their impact. And for one week that sounds pretty manageable, right? Here's where you can sign up.

On Oct. 24, tens of thousands of people will be in the streets and on mountains, rivers and glaciers around the world demanding action to reduce CO2 emissions.

What started out a couple of years ago as a idea promoted by author/climate-change activist Bill McKibben and a few students at Vermont's Middlebury College has morphed into the biggest environmental, and possibly the most extensive worldwide protest, ever.

On Oct. 24, tens of thousands of people will be in the streets and on mountains, rivers and glaciers around the world demanding action to reduce CO2 emissions to 350 parts per million (ppm).

With just five days to go, 3,422 events are planned or under way in 160 nations on every continent, including Antarctica. More are coming online daily at 350.org, a small (seven staffers) organization based in Berkeley, Calif., that is coordinating the international day of action.

Organizers of the event are targeting the United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December. They hope the international day of action will apply pressure on the assembled heads of state and governments to reduce global greenhouse gas CO2 emissions to below 350 ppm, the number that scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

This is an impressive task given that emissions already stand at 387 ppm. That demand has created a wired worldwide movement with a just over two dozen very busy coordinators based in offices, apartments and Internet cafes from Bujumbura, Burundi, to Berkeley, reaching out to other activists and organizations and planning global actions in conjunction with local communities.

McKibben, author of The End of Nature, the first widely read book on global warming, explained via e-mail to AlterNet why he co-founded 350.org: "The U.S. and China and governments and corporations change when pressure is applied to them. There is only one place that pressure can come from, which is a movement of people. Hence 350.org."

Planned climate-change actions for Oct. 24 run the gamut from impressive to odd, hopeful to heartwarming. The entire Cabinet of the government of the Maldives held a meeting underwater to display what will happen to the Maldives if nothing is done to halt climate change. Planning for the underwater event has even received U.S. media coverage, which has largely ignored the efforts of 350.org despite widespread international interest in the protests.

Australia will see more than 160 actions, including 350 tall ships that will glide by the Sydney Opera House, St. Mary's Cathedral bell will toll 350 times and 350 wind turbines will be on display in Wagga Wagga.

Three hundred fifty people will bungee jumping off old power station towers in Soweto, South Africa. A huge outdoor concert and aerial photo shoot in Mexico City is planned. An expedition is under way to Chacaltaya in Bolivia, site of the first Andean glacier to disappear forever. When the expedition arrives, the indigenous Aymara will conduct a blessing ceremony to try to protect the glaciers that are left.

A bicycle ride against global warming will take place in Hanoi, Vietnam. Ceremonies will take place at Machu Picchu, Peru, and a banner parade will wind past the pyramids in Egypt. Over 170 actions are expected in China alone. There will even be small events in Kabul, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, areas where people already have plenty on their minds.

Then there are small-scale oddities: Horses in Mexico stenciled with the number "350"; a children's bicycle race in a Guatemalan where each participant gets to take a piglet home. Closer to home, a huge rally is expected in San Francisco organized by 350.org, the Mobilization for Climate Justice, Greenpeace and Global Exchange and a variety of other groups to demand strong action on climate change. Other events are slated in Berkeley, Oakland and San Jose, including a hands-around-the-summit of Mount Diablo organized by Save Mount Diablo.

"It's gotten so big at this point that I really can't even wrap my head around it," Kelly Blynn, 350.org's Latin American organizer based in Ecuador, said via e-mail. "Stories continue to pour in from the most difficult places to organize on earth right now, like Honduras and Afghanistan, gives me hope the world might sing together and give our leaders a big nudge in the direction we need to be going."

Lofty Goals, Economic Battles

Reducing CO2 emission to 350 ppm may not be an unattainable goal, but it is wildly ambitious. Already the U.S. climate-control bill in the House is under attack from fossil-fuel corporations, and efforts are under way to strip the EPA of its power to regulate CO2 emissions.

A push-back against climate-change activism is under way, even as the concept becomes a standard paradigm. Blynn noted that Ecuador initially supported the 350 ppm goal, until "after understanding the implications for their oil-based economy" they backed out.

But it should be noted that McKibben and six Middlebury College students successfully booted up a similarly radical, some might have said quixotic, effort in 2007 to get Congress to commit to reducing U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.

They initiated a surprisingly effective campaign in 2007 called "Step It Up." The campaign organized national days of action in April and November that year with 1,400 events, all calling on politicians to step up and take ownership of, and action on, global warming.

Everything from ski runs down endangered glaciers in Montana to a high school assembly in El Cerrito, Calif., was involved. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton included "Step It Up's" demand that the U.S. rollback greenhouse-gas emission 80 percent by 2050 in their climate-change platforms. (Of course, getting that in practice is a little harder.)

"Step It Up" grew out of a five-day walk across Vermont organized by McKibben. In 2006, roughly 1,000 people marched to the state capital demanding action on climate change. In each case -- with the Vermont march, the national day of action and now the 350.org International Day of Action -- activism started with concern over what was, by all accounts, something of concern primarily to scientists and committed environmentalists. McKibben then exported that concern to the mainstream.

Of "Step It Up's" success, McKibben said, "We felt ... smug until a few weeks later, when in the summer of 2007, the Arctic began to melt so rapidly." Shortly afterwards, McKibben recounted, James Hansen head of NASA's Institute for Space Studies released a climate-change broadside.

Hansen stated: "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggests that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

That spurred McKibben and small group of other activists to found 350.org in March 2008.

They have their work cut out for them. Even as hard-core global-warming skeptics lose traction, mainstream economists suggest stopping climate change is not economically feasible. Mainstream commentators concerned about climate change suggest that 400 to 500 ppm of CO2 might be acceptable. They argue efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emission any more would, as Nicholas Stern, author of the British government's Stern Review said, lead to "an abandonment or reversal of growth and development."

In other worlds, saving international capitalism is more important than saving the planet. At best the poor nations and people of the world will have to live with the consequences of global warming, as rich, developed nations figure out ways to protect themselves.

All the more reason for world leaders to sign on to 350 ppm, and many have. So far, over 95 nations are supporting the campaign, among them the Association of Small Island States and the 49 least-developed countries. They know full well that it is the poorest and least-developed countries that will bear the brunt of climate change. They are the ones who will end up, quite literally, underwater first.

"Even if we do everything right from here on in," stated McKibben, "it will be a long time before we're back to 350 -- the youngest people on the planet will be elderly. Temperatures will continue to go up, and a lot of damage will be done. What we are working for is to prevent change so large that civilization itself will be challenged, and that's still possible (we hope). But only if we get to work right away."

This is where the Oct. 24 action comes into play. Global warming and climate change is an issue that has largely remained in the hands of scientists, engineers, policy wonks, the nonprofit sector and government officials. Yes, there have been climate-change protests in spots around the world, but jumpstarting a mass movement along the lines of the anti-Iraq-war coalitions has just not happened yet.

350.org offers the opportunity "to have a movement based on clear, bold and simple targets," said Jamie Henn, 350.org's communications director, adding, "We are beginning to see pressure building on the U.S. ... In issues like this we are able to have stakes on something specific so that negotiators have to meet targets or at the very least explain why they are not meeting the targets."

What is also unique about the 350.org International Day of Action is how it is bringing people together who, under normal circumstances have great difficulty in cooperating. If McKibben had to pick a favorite action, he said, "it's a team organized by Friends of the Earth Middle East: Israeli activists will make a giant '3' on their shore of the dwindling Dead Sea, and Palestinians a giant '5' on their beach, and Jordanians a human '0' on theirs. To me it makes clear that we need to come together across all borders to face our first truly global crises."

Adam Welz, a 350.org organizer based in Cape Town, South Africa, wrote: "350.org has reached out across the notoriously fragmented continent of Africa to inspire people from downtown Johannesburg to remote parts of Somalia to do something, however to raise awareness of climate change. We're making inroads into consciousness, and that's great."

Welz says that 350.org's success is based on its inclusiveness and flat structure. "It's creating a platform not telling everyone exactly what to do," stated Welz. "It's so far mostly sidestepped the territorial nonsense that stops so many nonprofits cooperating by being deliberately inclusive and allowing ordinary people to bring their own creativity to the cause rather than telling them what to do and keeping them strictly 'on message.' "

And that is the beauty and hope of 350.org. It is the faith that people acting together for a common goal will actually reach it, using as many paths as there are people.

"We, the 'official' 350.org people, are just being carried along in a profoundly inspiring wave of global energy that's rising around us," noted Welz. "This tiny organization has inspired what is going to be the world's most widespread environmental awareness event ever."

Corporations have been given the power to own seeds. And they are eliminating competing varieties and crowning their own patented seeds as the only choice in the marketplace.

Seeds. They seem like such a small thing when compared to the big, complex problems the world is facing -- climate change, poverty, war, famine, peak oil and an exploding population. They're so small, in fact, that most will fit easily under your thumb.

But stop and think again. Without those tiny grains, what would be left on Earth?

Seeds are the bedrock of our food chain, the basic element of our sustenance. If they were to disappear tomorrow, we would follow them into oblivion with lightning speed. And, the most pressing issue people are often unaware of is that they are currently under grave and direct threats.

Sounds ominous, huh? Wondering why? Well, the answer is two-fold. First, we have witnessed a staggering loss of genetic diversity. In the past century, world agriculture has lost 75% of its genetic diversity to globalization, standardization and monoculture farming; 95% of the tomato varieties that existed in 1909 have become extinct; 91% of corn – gone. In addition, 95% of the cabbage varieties your great-great grandma grew have been consigned to oblivion. And though this may not seem on the surface to be a big deal, in reality it could mean the difference between full bellies and famine.

Genetic diversity in the food plants we grow is more than just the number of tomatoes listed in your favorite seed catalog. Diversity ensures that there are sufficient, genetically diverse and well-adapted varieties of any given plant to respond to any given situation. When a crisis arises, such as a new fungal disease or a severe drought, diverse genetics ensure that some varieties will naturally have genes that enable them to resist the threat and grow on, passing their genetic strengths on to the next generation. Without that diversity, with a significantly narrower gene pool to draw upon, crops and plants become susceptible to complete annihilation when these new threats arise. Such a disaster is not unprecedented.

The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840's had such a devastating effect on Ireland's population not only because they depended so heavily upon that one crop, but because they relied on only one variety. When the fungus hit, the one variety in wide cultivation was extremely susceptible and the mainstay of the Irish diet was destroyed within two seasons. Even as recently as the United States corn blight of the 1970's, when 80% of American corn was of a similar genetic heritage and some 10 million acres of the crop were lost in a single season, we have seen the perils of lack of diversity.

The second threat to our seeds comes from industrial agriculture's relative recent access to patents, as well as genetically modified organisms and seed company acquisitions, resulting in significant industry consolidation. Understanding this requires just a little micro-course in plant patent history (For a more complete history, check out the three-part series at Cooking Up A Story). In 1930, the Plant Patent Act was passed, which allowed plant breeders, a relatively new profession, to patent a single, specific plant that they had bred themselves. Patents were limited to only that specific plant and any asexual propagations of said plant. Seeds, as the result of sexual reproduction, were specifically barred from patent. Fast-forward to 1970 and the passage of the Plant Variety Protection Act. This legislation gave plant breeders the right to patent an entire variety of genetically similar plants, as well as their seeds and all subsequent generations. Fast-forward again, this time to 1980. The United States Supreme Court decision of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, a 5-4 split decision, gave individuals, and corporations acting as individuals, the right to a utility patent for laboratory engineered organisms, including seeds, under the 1952 Patent Act. Yes, that's a bunch of gobblety-gook.

What it means is this: corporations have been given the power to own life. When you combine this with the consolidation of the global seed market by these same corporations, entities such as Monsanto and DuPont can not only own life, they can also control access and set the going price of those living things. In buying up every major seed supplier, they are systematically eliminating competing varieties and crowning their own patented seeds as the only choice in the marketplace.

Unfortunately, that's not all. The right and ability to patent life extends to the genetic level, thanks to Diamond v. Chakrabarty. A corporation, like Monsanto for instance, can own a single gene and by extension, own any form of life containing said gene. This is a problem in the plant world because, let's face it, plants are promiscuous. They pollinate far and wide with any willing partner. So, genetically modified corn containing Monsanto's patented genetic sequence can cross-contaminate a nearby field of non-GM, non-corporate owned corn, and simply by the act of drifting pollen, transform every seed produced by that corn into Monsanto's property.

So, this is a screwed up situation. But what can we do about it? We're just the little people, with no real say in what happens on the giant, global corporate stage, right? Well, not really. We can take our seeds back. We can keep them out of the hands of Monsanto and DuPont. We can breed back our lost diversity in our own backyards, with our own hands, to serve our own communities and interests. Here's how…

First, we must learn how to avoid plants and seeds that are already under patent, which can be difficult! If you are lucky, there will be a number next to the plant listing in the seed catalog, or a quick Google of the variety name will turn up a number. If the letters PVP are in front, you can search the Plant Variety Protection database. Now, this doesn't always work, since many PVP registrations refer to a variety number, rather than a name and you may have to scroll through the entire “tomato” section (or whatever section is relevant) to double check that your variety is not listed or, if it is, that the patent has not yet expired. Another tactic is to check through the USDA Plant Inventory files, which list all varieties to come on the market in a given year going back to 1998. As a very general rule, all seeds listed as F1 hybrids are probably patented (or at least they were at one time) and any seeds introduced more than twenty-five years age can no longer be under patent.

These information sources are great, but they are not 100% reliable or complete. In order to really make sure that your money isn't going into Monsanto's pockets, heirlooms and open-pollinated plants that came into existence before 1970 are almost a sure bet. These seeds have been perfected over decades, centuries in some cases. They've survived through the years because farmers and gardeners have recognized their merits, superior taste and performance. They were, by and large, created on the front lines, in backyards and farmlands far, far from the clutches of any corporate entity.

But planting patent- and corporate-free seeds is only the first step. The next step is where we really begin to take back our seeds. We have to save them from season to season. We have to relearn what our grandparents knew and cut the corporate stranglehold by providing seeds to ourselves and our communities– tomatoes, peppers, kale, radishes, lettuce and more. When we begin to do this, magic will happen.

Seeds and plants are not static copies of their ancestors. Even the oldest heirlooms are dynamic, living beings constantly adapting and evolving. If we understand, even on just a very basic level, how to choose the best plants to save seed from -- the ones with the best tasting fruit, the ones that get through the season with the least pest damage, the ones that grow the fastest or yield the most, then the seeds we save will grow into better and better plants every year. They will adapt to whatever region of the world we live in. After a couple generations and a few genetic mutations and cross-pollinations, our seeds will begin to transform. Even if I start with a Green Zebra tomato (developed by private citizen and plant breeder Tom Wagner) and another gardener across the country starts with the same tomato, within a matter of a few years saving seeds, we will have created two different, genetically divergent lines. Within a decade or so, the two lines may not even bear much resemblance to one another anymore, both having changed and adapted to local conditions. I've seen this phenomenon first-hand among my local gardening group. The seeds we select and save from season to season become the superstars of our gardens, performing better and better every year. This is how the great diversity in heirloom vegetables came into being in the first place and we can repeat it to create new ‘heirlooms' that we can pass on to others. If we the people can do this, we will begin to rebuild the lost diversity in our agricultural heritage.

It will be a slow process. It will take decades, possibly more than one lifetime, to regain even a fraction of what we have lost. However, with the looming threats of climate change, new diseases, and corporate gate-keepers intent on restricting access to the most basic elements of human life, this project, this truly grassroots mission could not be more important. It's time to take back what belongs to all of us. It's time to take responsibility for preserving and rebuilding the agricultural wealth that genetic diversity assures, corporations be damned.

Who knows? When the next devastating plant disease comes rolling through the countryside, the variety that saves the entire crop for the future of humanity may be the very one we grew and saved in our own backyards.

The great age of renewable energy is in our distant future. Before then, energy prices will rise, environmental perils will multiply and conflict will grow. Buckle your seatbelts.

The debate rages over whether we have already reached the point of peak world oil output or will not do so until at least the next decade. There can, however, be little doubt of one thing: we are moving from an era in which oil was the world's principal energy source to one in which petroleum alternatives -- especially renewable supplies derived from the sun, wind, and waves -- will provide an ever larger share of our total supply. But buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride under Xtreme conditions.

It would, of course, be ideal if the shift from dwindling oil to its climate-friendly successors were to happen smoothly via a mammoth, well-coordinated, interlaced system of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and other renewable energy installations. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to occur. Instead, we will surely first pass through an era characterized by excessive reliance on oil's final, least attractive reserves along with coal, heavily polluting "unconventional" hydrocarbons like Canadian oil sands, and other unappealing fuel choices.

There can be no question that Barack Obama and many members of Congress would like to accelerate a shift from oil dependency to non-polluting alternatives. As the president said in January, "We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America that is free from our [oil] dependence and empowered by a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work." Indeed, the $787 billion economic stimulus package he signed in February provided $11 billion to modernize the nation's electrical grid, $14 billion in tax incentives to businesses to invest in renewable energy, $6 billion to states for energy efficiency initiatives, and billions more directed to research on renewable sources of energy. More of the same can be expected if a sweeping climate bill is passed by Congress. The version of the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, for example, mandates that 20% of U.S. electrical production be supplied by renewable energy by 2020.

But here's the bad news: even if all these initiatives were to pass, and more like them many times over, it would still take decades for this country to substantially reduce its dependence on oil and other non-renewable, polluting fuels. So great is our demand for energy, and so well-entrenched the existing systems for delivering the fuels we consume, that (barring a staggering surprise) we will remain for years to come in a no-man's-land between the Petroleum Age and an age that will see the great flowering of renewable energy. Think of this interim period as -- to give it a label -- the Era of Xtreme Energy, and in just about every sense imaginable from pricing to climate change, it is bound to be an ugly time.

An Oil Field as Deep as Mt. Everest Is High

Don't be fooled by the fact that this grim new era will surely witness the arrival of many more wind turbines, solar arrays, and hybrid vehicles. Most new buildings will perhaps come equipped with solar panels, and more light-rail systems will be built. Despite all this, however, our civilization is likely to remain remarkably dependent on oil-fueled cars, trucks, ships, and planes for most transportation purposes, as well as on coal for electricity generation. Much of the existing infrastructure for producing and distributing our energy supply will also remain intact, even as many existing sources of oil, coal, and natural gas become exhausted, forcing us to rely on previously untouched, far more undesirable (and often far less accessible) sources of these fuels.

Some indication of the likely fuel mix in this new era can be seen in the most recent projections of the Department of Energy (DoE) on future U.S. energy consumption. According to the department's Annual Energy Outlook for 2009, the United States will consume an estimated 114 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) of energy in 2030, of which 37% will be supplied by oil and other petroleum liquids, 23% by coal, 22% by natural gas, 8% by nuclear power, 3% by hydropower, and only 7% by wind, solar, biomass, and other renewable sources.

Clearly, this does not yet suggest a dramatic shift away from oil and other fossil fuels. On the basis of current trends, the DoE also predicts that even two decades from now, in 2030, oil, natural gas, and coal will still make up 82% of America's primary energy supply, only two percentage points less than in 2009. (It is of course conceivable that a dramatic shift in national and international priorities will lead to a greater increase in renewable energy in the next two decades, but at this point that remains a dim hope rather than a sure thing.)

While fossil fuels will remain dominant in 2030, the nature of these fuels, and the ways in which we acquire them, will undergo profound change. Today, most of our oil and natural gas come from "conventional" sources of supply: large underground reservoirs found mainly in relatively accessible sites on land or in shallow coastal areas. These are the reserves that can be easily exploited using familiar technology, most notably modern versions of the towering oil rigs made famous most recently in the 2007 film There Will Be Blood.

Ever more of these fields will, however, be depleted as global consumption soars, forcing the energy industry to increasingly rely on deep offshore oil and gas, Canadian oil sands, oil and gas from a climate-altered but still hard to reach and exploit Arctic, and gas extracted from shale rock using costly, environmentally threatening techniques. In 2030, says the DoE, such unconventional liquids will provide 13% of world oil supply (up from a mere 4% in 2007). A similar pattern holds for natural gas, especially in the United States where the share of energy supplied by unconventional but nonrenewable sources is expected to rise from 47% to 56% in the same two decades.

Just how important these supplies have become is evident to anyone who follows the oil industry's trade journals or simply regularly checks out the business pages of the Wall Street Journal. Absent from them have been announcements of major discoveries of giant new oil and gas reserves in any parts of the world accessible to familiar drilling techniques and connected to key markets by existing pipelines or trade routes (or located outside active war zones such as Iraq and the Niger Delta region of Nigeria). The announcements are there, but virtually all of them have been of reserves in the Arctic, Siberia, or the very deep waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

Recently the press has been abuzz with major discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and far off Brazil's coast that might give the impression of adding time to the Age of Petroleum. On September 2nd, for example, BP (formerly British Petroleum) announced that it had found a giant oil field in the Gulf of Mexico about 250 miles southeast of Houston. Dubbed Tiber, it is expected to produce hundreds of thousands of barrels per day when production begins some years from now, giving a boost to BP's status as a major offshore producer. "This is big," commented Chris Ruppel, a senior energy analyst at Execution LLC, a London investment bank. "It says we're seeing that improved technology is unlocking resources that were before either undiscovered or too costly to exploit because of economics."

As it happens, though, anyone who jumped to the conclusion that this field could quickly or easily add to the nation's oil supply would be woefully mistaken. As a start, it's located at a depth of 35,000 feet -- greater than the height of Mount Everest, as a reporter from the New York Times noted -- and well below the Gulf's floor. To get to the oil, BP's engineers will have to drill through miles of rock, salt, and compressed sand using costly and sophisticated equipment. To make matters worse, Tiber is located smack in the middle of the area in the Gulf regularly hit by massive storms in hurricane season, so any drills operating there must be designed to withstand hurricane-strength waves and winds, as well as sit idle for weeks at a time when operating personnel are forced to evacuate.

A similar picture prevails in the case of Brazil's Tupi field, the other giant discovery of recent years. Located about 200 miles east of Rio de Janeiro in the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Tupi has regularly been described as the biggest field to be found in 40 years. Thought to contain some five to eight billion barrels of recoverable oil, it will surely push Brazil into the front ranks of major oil producers once the Brazilians have overcome their own series of staggering hurdles: the Tupi field is located below one-and-a-half miles of ocean water and another two-and-a-half miles of rock, sand, and salt and so accessible only to cutting edge, super-sophisticated drilling technologies. It will cost an estimated $70-$120 billion to develop the field and require many years of dedicated effort.

Xtreme Acts of Energy Recovery

Given the potentially soaring costs involved in recovering these last tough-oil reserves, it's no wonder that Canadian oil sands, also called tar sands, are the other big "play" in the oil business these days. Not oil as conventionally understood, the oil sands are a mixture of rock, sand, and bitumen (a very heavy, dense form of petroleum) that must be extracted from the ground using mining, rather than oil-drilling, techniques. They must also be extensively processed before being converted into a usable liquid fuel. Only because the big energy firms have themselves become convinced that we are running out of conventional oil of an easily accessible sort have they been tripping over each other in the race to buy up leases to mine bitumen in the Athabasca region of northern Alberta.

The mining of oil sands and their conversion into useful liquids is a costly and difficult process, and so the urge to do so tells us a great deal about our particular state of energy dependency. Deposits near the surface can be strip-mined, but those deeper underground can only be exploited by pumping in steam to separate the bitumen from the sand and then pumping the bitumen to the surface -- a process that consumes vast amounts of water and energy in the form of natural gas (to heat that water into steam). Much of the water used to produce steam is collected at the site and used over again, but some is returned to the local water supply in northern Alberta, causing environmentalists to worry about the risk of large-scale contamination.

The clearing of enormous tracts of virgin forest to allow strip-mining and the consumption of valuable natural gas to extract the bitumen are other sources of concern. Nevertheless, such is the need of our civilization for petroleum products that Canadian oil sands are expected to generate 4.2 million barrels of fuel per day in 2030 -- three times the amount being produced today -- even as they devastate huge parts of Alberta, consume staggering amounts of natural gas, cause potentially extensive pollution, and sabotage Canada's efforts to curb its greenhouse-gas emissions.

North of Alberta lies another source of Xtreme energy: Arctic oil and gas. Once largely neglected because of the difficulty of simply surviving, no less producing energy, in the region, the Arctic is now the site of a major "oil rush" as global warming makes it easier for energy firms to operate in northern latitudes. Norway's state-owned energy company, StatoilHydro, is now running the world's first natural gas facility above the Arctic Circle, and companies from around the world are making plans to develop oil and gas fields in the Artic territories of Canada, Greenland (administered by Denmark), Russia, and the United States, where offshore drilling in northern Alaskan waters may soon be the order of the day.

It will not, however, be easy to obtain oil and natural gas from the Arctic. Even if global warming raises average temperatures and reduces the extent of the polar ice cap, winter conditions will still make oil production extremely difficult and hazardous. Fierce storms and plunging temperatures will remain common, posing great risk to any humans not hunkered down in secure facilities and making the transport of energy a major undertaking.

Given fears of dwindling oil supplies, none of this has been enough to deter energy-craving companies from plunging into the icy waters. "Despite grueling conditions, interest in oil and gas reserves in the far north is heating up," Brian Baskin reported in the Wall Street Journal. "Virtually every major producer is looking to the Arctic sea floor as the next -- some say last -- great resource play."

What is true of oil generally is also true of natural gas and coal: most easy-to-reach conventional deposits are quickly being depleted. What remains are largely the "unconventional" supplies.

U.S. producers of natural gas, for example, are reporting a significant increase in domestic output, producing a dramatic reduction in prices. According to the DoE, U.S. gas production is projected to increase from about 20 trillion cubic feet in 2009 to 24 trillion in 2030, a real boon for U.S. consumers, who rely to a significant degree on natural gas for home heating and electricity generation. As noted by the Energy Department however, "Unconventional natural gas is the largest contributor to the growth in U.S. natural gas production, as rising prices and improvements in drilling technology provide the economic incentives necessary for exploitation of more costly resources."

Most of the unconventional gas in the United States is currently obtained from tight-sand formations (or sandstone), but a growing percentage is acquired from shale rock through a process known as hydraulic fracturing. In this method, water is forced into the underground shale formations to crack the rock open and release the gas. Huge amounts of water are employed in the process, and environmentalists fear that some of this water, laced with pollutants, will find its ways into the nation's drinking supply. In many areas, moreover, water itself is a scarce resource, and the diversion of crucial supplies to gas extraction may diminish the amounts available for farming, habitat preservation, and human consumption. Nonetheless, production of shale gas is projected to jump from two trillion cubic feet per year in 2009 to four trillion in 2030.

Coal presents a somewhat similar picture. Although many environmentalists object to the burning of coal because it releases far more climate-altering greenhouse gases than other fossil fuels for each BTU produced, the nation's electric-power industry continues to rely on coal because it remains relatively cheap and plentiful. Yet many of the country's most productive sources of anthracite and bituminous coal -- the types with the greatest energy potential -- have been depleted, leaving (as with oil) less productive sources of these types, along with large deposits of less desirable, more heavily polluting sub-bituminous coal, much of it located in Wyoming.

To get at what remains of the more valuable bituminous coal in Appalachia, mining companies increasingly rely on a technique known as mountaintop removal, described by John M. Broder of the New York Times as "blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams." Long opposed by environmentalists and residents of rural Kentucky and West Virginia, whose water supplies are endangered by the dumping of excess rock, dirt, and a variety of contaminants, mountaintop removal received a strong endorsement from the Bush administration, which in December 2008 approved a regulation allowing for a vast expansion of the practice. President Obama has vowed to reverse this regulation, but he favors the use of "clean coal" as part of a transitional energy strategy. It remains to be seen how far he will go in reining in the coal industry.

Xtreme Conflict

So let's be blunt: we are not (yet) entering the much-heralded Age of Renewables. That bright day will undoubtedly arrive eventually, but not until we have moved much closer to the middle of this century and potentially staggering amounts of damage has been done to this planet in a fevered search for older forms of energy.

In the meantime, the Era of Xtreme Energy will be characterized by an ever deepening reliance on the least accessible, least desirable sources of oil, coal, and natural gas. This period will surely involve an intense struggle over the environmental consequences of reliance on such unappealing sources of energy. In this way, Big Oil and Big Coal -- the major energy firms -- may grow even larger, while the relatively moderate fuel and energy prices of the present moment will be on the rise, especially given the high cost of extracting oil, gas, and coal from less accessible and more challenging locations.

One other thing is, unfortunately, guaranteed: the Era of Xtreme Energy will also involve intense geopolitical struggle as major energy consumers and producers like the United States, China, the European Union, Russia, India, and Japan vie with one another for control of the remaining supplies. Russia and Norway, for example, are already sparring over their maritime boundary in the Barents Sea, a promising source of natural gas in the far north, while China and Japan have tussled over a similar boundary dispute in the East China Sea, the site of another large gas field. All of the Arctic nations -- Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States -- have laid claim to large, sometimes overlapping, slices of the Arctic Ocean, generating fresh boundary disputes in these energy-rich areas.

None of these disputes has yet resulted in violent conflict, but warships and planes have been deployed on some occasions and the potential exists for future escalation as tensions rise and the perceived value of these assets grows. And while we're at it, don't forget today's energy hotspots like Nigeria, the Middle East, and the Caspian Basin. In the Xtreme era to come, they are no less likely to generate conflicts of every sort over the ever more precious supplies of more easily accessible energy.

For most of us, life in the Era of Xtreme Energy will not be easy. Energy prices will rise, environmental perils will multiply, ever more carbon dioxide will pour into the atmosphere, and the risk of conflict will grow. We possess just two options for shortening this difficult era and mitigating its impact. They are both perfectly obvious -- which, unfortunately, makes them no easier to bring about: drastically speed up the development of renewable sources of energy and greatly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels by reorganizing our lives and our civilization so that we might consume less of them in everything we do.

That may sound easy enough, but tell that to governments around the world. Tell that to Big Energy. Hope for it, work for it, but in the meantime, keep your seatbelts buckled. This roller-coaster ride is about to begin.

Could you get by without your car, food from outside your community, your job? There's a bunch of folks who want to show you how.

Peak oil is the point when the world hits the maximum rate of petroleum extraction, and after that, production begins to decline. Petroleum is a finite substance, and we have reached the inevitable point at which it simply isn't possible to increase the rate at which we extract it from the ground. Most oil-producing countries, including the U.S., have already seen their glory days and are now watching output from their wells gradually dwindle. Only a few nations are early in the production cycle and able to ramp up the rate of flow. We depend on oil to get us to the store and to get our food and goods there as well. It's a huge component of the industrial agriculture model that feeds most of our country. And petroleum is in just about everything we buy -- from bubble gum to tires to eyeglasses. And when you consider how oil powers our economy, things look bleak. The global-energy equation is changing rapidly, and with it is likely to come great power competition, economic peril, rising starvation, growing unrest, environmental disaster and shrinking energy supplies, no matter what steps are taken. What is generally not comprehended about this predicament is that the developed world will begin to suffer long before the oil and gas actually run out. The American way of life -- which is now virtually synonymous with suburbia -- can run only on reliable supplies of dependably cheap oil and gas.

So what's a city to do?

• Encourage the installation of local, renewable, distributed electric-generating facilities
• Pursue the conversion of the electric system to a smart grid
• Convert vacant and underutilized public and private properties to food gardens
• Vastly expand urban agriculture programs and services
• Expand passenger capacity of all mass transit
• Avoid infrastructure investments that are predicated on increased auto use
• Convert city equipment, buses and trucks to 100 percent biodiesel from reclaimed lipids, as feasible
• Discourage private auto use by disincentivizing car travel and ensuring that alternatives (walking, bicycling, public transportation) are competitive with driving
• Expand the potential for rail and water transport, for both passengers and freight
• Encourage local manufacturing that utilizes recycled material as feedstock
• Retrofit the building stock for energy conservation, efficiency and on-site generation
• Begin an education plan, to inform San Francisco residents about peak oil and gas and its implications

As much as it might seem that most of us are going along, living peaceful lives, there's another kind of America that operates on the same soil -- a warfare state.

Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. Similarly, we've become used to the idea that, when various forms of force (or threats of force) don't work, our response, as in Afghanistan, is to recalibrate and apply some alternate version of the same under a new or rebranded name -- the hot one now being "counterinsurgency" or COIN -- in a marginally different manner. When it comes to war, as well as preparations for war, more is now generally the order of the day.

What does it mean when the most military-obsessed administration in our history, which, year after year, submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by a president who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar platform, and who has now submitted an even larger Pentagon budget? What does this tell you about Washington and about the viability of non-militarized alternatives to the path George W. Bush took? What does it mean when the new administration, surveying nearly eight years and two wars' worth of disasters, decides to expand the U.S. Armed Forces rather than shrink the U.S. global mission?

What kind of a world do we inhabit when, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7% and an underemployment rate of 16.8%, the American taxpayer is financing the building of a three-story, exceedingly permanent-looking $17 million troop barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan? This, in turn, is part of a taxpayer-funded $220 million upgrade of the base that includes new "water treatment plants, headquarters buildings, fuel farms, and power generating plants." And what about the U.S. air base built at Balad, north of Baghdad, that now has 15 bus routes, two fire stations, two water treatment plants, two sewage treatment plants, two power plants, a water bottling plant, and the requisite set of fast-food outlets, PXes, and so on, as well as air traffic levels sometimes compared to those at Chicago's O'Hare International?

What kind of American world are we living in when a plan to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq involves the removal of more than 1.5 million pieces of equipment? Or in which the possibility of withdrawal leads the Pentagon to issue nearly billion-dollar contracts (new ones!) to increase the number of private security contractors in that country?

What do you make of a world in which the U.S. has robot assassins in the skies over its war zones, 24/7, and the "pilots" who control them from thousands of miles away are ready on a moment's notice to launch missiles -- "Hellfire" missiles at that -- into Pashtun peasant villages in the wild, mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan? What does it mean when American pilots can be at war "in" Afghanistan, 9 to 5, by remote control, while their bodies remain at a base outside Las Vegas and then can head home past a sign that warns them to drive carefully because this is "the most dangerous part of your day"?

What does it mean when, for our security and future safety, the Pentagon funds the wildest ideas imaginable for developing high-tech weapons systems, many of which sound as if they came straight out of the pages of sci-fi novels? Take, for example, Boeing's advanced coordinated system of hand-held drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield surveillance equipment slated for seven Army brigades within the next two years at a cost of $2 billion and for the full Army by 2025; or the Next Generation Bomber, an advanced "platform" slated for 2018; or a truly futuristic bomber, "a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at hypersonic speed along the edge of the atmosphere," for 2035? What does it mean about our world when those people in our government peering deepest into a blue-skies future are planning ways to send armed "platforms" up into those skies and kill more than a quarter century from now?

And do you ever wonder about this: If such weaponry is being endlessly developed for our safety and security, and that of our children and grandchildren, why is it that one of our most successful businesses involves the sale of the same weaponry to other countries? Few Americans are comfortable thinking about this, which may explain why global-arms-trade pieces don't tend to make it onto the front pages of our newspapers.

And peace itself? Simply put, there's no money in it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it's left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves.

What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases -- recently, there were almost 300 of them, macro to micro, in Iraq alone -- and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America's true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also -- always -- marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war.

In Washington, calls are growing for Obama to training more Afghan troops and police rather than sending in more American troops. But this is pure fantasy.

In the heat of this summer, I went out to the training fields near Kabul where Afghan army recruits are put through their paces, and it was quickly evident just what's getting lost in translation. Our trainers, soldiers from the Illinois National Guard, were masterful. Professional and highly skilled, they were dedicated to carrying out their mission -- and doing the job well. They were also big, strong, camouflaged, combat-booted, supersized American men, their bodies swollen by flak jackets and lashed with knives, handguns, and god only knows what else. Any American could be proud of their commitment to tough duty. The Afghans were puny by comparison: Hundreds of little Davids to the overstuffed American Goliaths training them. Keep in mind: Afghan recruits come from a world of desperate poverty. They are almost uniformly malnourished and underweight. Many are no bigger than I am (5'4" and thin) -- and some probably not much stronger. Like me, many sag under the weight of a standard-issue flack jacket. Their American trainers spoke of "upper body strength deficiency" and prescribed pushups because their trainees buckle under the backpacks filled with 50 pounds of equipment and ammo they are expected to carry. All this material must seem absurd to men whose fathers and brothers, wearing only the old cotton shirts and baggy pants of everyday life and carrying battered Russian Kalashnikov rifles, defeated the Red Army two decades ago. American trainers marvel that, freed from heavy equipment and uniforms, Afghan soldiers can run through the mountains all day -- as the Taliban guerrillas in fact do with great effect -- but the U.S. military is determined to train them for another style of war. Still, the new recruits turn out for training in the blistering heat in this stony desert landscape wearing, beneath their heavy uniforms, the smart red, green, and black warm-up outfits intended to encourage them to engage in off-duty exercise. American trainers recognize that recruits regularly wear all their gear at once for fear somebody will steal anything left behind in the barracks, but they take this overdressing as a sign of how much Afghans love the military. My own reading, based on my observations of Afghan life during the years I've spent in that country, is this: It's a sign of how little they trust one another, or the Americans who gave them the snazzy suits. I think it also indicates the obvious: that these impoverished men in a country without work have joined the Afghan National Army for what they can get out of it (and keep or sell) -- and that doesn't include democracy or glory.

Current training and mentoring is provided by the U.S., Great Britain, France, Canada, Romania, Poland, Mongolia, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as by the private for-profit contractors MPRI, KBR (formerly a division of Halliburton), Pulau, Paravant, and RONCO. What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn't the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to "operate independently," but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of "Basic Warrior Training" 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

In a country where 40% of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it's a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin -- the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets -- and many are undoubtedly Taliban

In many districts, the police recently supplemented their low pay and demonstrated allegiance to local warlords by stuffing ballot boxes for President Karzai in the presidential election. Consider that but one more indication -- like the defection of those great Islamist fundamentalist mujahidin allies the U.S. sponsored in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s who are now fighting with the Taliban -- that no amount of American training, mentoring, or cash will determine who or what Afghans will fight for, if indeed they fight at all.

Not only do bumblebees pollinate about 15 percent of our food crops (valued at $3 billion), they also occupy a critical role as native pollinators.

Bees, and particularly the European honeybee, Apis mellifera, have come to symbolize a deepening ecological crisis in North America. Colony Collapse Disorder, first reported in 2006, has been described as "an insect version of AIDS," ravaging honeybee colonies throughout North America. In fact, the US has become so dependent on honeybees for agricultural purposes that in 2005, for the first time in 85 years, the US allowed for the importation of honeybees to meet pollination demands. Although millions of dollars have been invested in an effort to pinpoint the cause, the honeybee lobby and some environmental organizations say it's not enough, and argue that if dairy cows were disappearing, the response would be slightly more engaged. In recent years, there has been much loose talk about the overall decline of pollinators, and the causes are manifold: habitat loss, pesticides, the spread of disease, and, without fail, global warming. The tendency to make sweeping claims about the demise of all pollinators has led to a lack of specificity when it comes to why particular species have declined, or in the case of B. franklini, disappeared. A crucial factor, according to Thorp and other scientists, was the rise of the commercial bumblebee rearing industry in the early 1990s, largely for greenhouse tomato pollination. Captive bees, they say, played a key role in spreading disease, which has led to the decline of several North American species, all of which belong to the same subgenus. If their theory proves to be correct, the rapid growth of the greenhouse tomato industry over the last two decades may have inadvertently wiped out a number of important native pollinators.

In 1997, just months before he began his monitoring project, Thorp attended a symposium of the Entomological Society of America during which he learned that an outbreak of Nosema bombi – a fungus that lives in the bees' intestinal tract – had wiped out commercial populations of B. occidentalis in North America. Breeders couldn't get rid of the disease and were suffering a shortage of colonies. In an e-mail to a bombus list-serv in 1998, Adrian Van Doorn, then head of the pollination department at Koppert Biological Systems, a commercial breeder, noted that they had been rearing B. occidentalis for several years with few problems, but that in 1997 the rearing stock had "become infected with N. bombi." There was no treatment for the disease, and the breeders were unable to eradicate it. A competing company, Biobest, suffered similar losses, and both companies would eventually phase out production of B. occidentalis altogether. Today they produce only one bee for distribution in all of North America: Bombus impatiens, an eastern bumblebee whose range extends from Maine to southern Florida. After observing sharp declines of B. franklini and B. occidentalis, Thorp began to wonder if there was a possible connection to the disease outbreak that had swept through the commercial facilities.

There is a wealth of evidence pointing to the risks associated with the importation of nonnative species and of pathogen spillover. Yet, according to Otterstatter, Thorp, and others, the regulations in place are hardly adequate to ensure that risks are minimized. Discontinuing the shipment of bees beyond their native ranges and requiring all greenhouses to install insect screens would be a start, they say.
"Bumblebees are marvelous pollinators and I really wouldn't want to see the industry come to a halt," Thorp says. "But I would like to see a lot more protection of the potential environmental risk."