Alternatives International

Israel Guilty of Apartheid

2013-11-01T18:23:26Z

Discussion on the Verdict of Russell Tribunal on Palestine

With
Frank Barat
Coordinator of Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Thursday
21 November
7 PM

Alternatives
3720 avenue du Parc
Second Floor

Frank Barat is a French activist and one of the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine from 2008 à 2013. He has edited: "Le champ du possible", "Palestine l'état de siège", "Gaza in Crisis" and "Justice pour la Palestine". He produces the program "Le mur a des oreilles" on Radio Panik.

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine is an International Tribunal citizens' initiative, created as a result of the inaction of the international community in relation to actual violations of international law committed by Israel. During five international meetings, the RTP discussed the liability and breach of third countries, companies and international organizations in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and the perpetuation of violations of international law by Israel. A session was also devoted to whether the crime of apartheid as defined by international conventions, was due to Israel.www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com

Coalition pour la justice et la paix en Palestine et BDS Québec

US-Iran Rapprochement: Obama's Lagacy?

Bradley Castelli — 2013-11-01T18:08:38Z

Assuming leadership of a military and economic superpower is anything but easy, especially when the only real certainty in the matter is the fact that you can't please all of the people all of the time. Since becoming president of the US, Americans and the international community alike have been collectively hoping for Barack Obama to deliver on his promise of ‘change we can believe in', while the president himself searches for the space and opportunity to establish his own legacy.

Obama has indeed made several concerted attempts at securing his place in history, though to date, nothing has really stuck. Shortly after being elected, the US president tried and failed to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which continues to torture and now even force-feeds hunger-striking prisoners. On the domestic front, Obamacare was at the center of October's US government shutdown and remains the source of debate and outrage, most recently due to the launch of a flawed website. There's also the Nobel Peace Prize Obama was awarded in 2009, but given the continued US invasion of Afghanistan and the intensification of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen under his presidency, that one hardly counts.

Recently, an opportunity to establish an Obama legacy has presented itself in the form of diplomacy and potential rapprochement with Iran, who has entered high-level talks to settle differences over its disputed nuclear program. Iran has always asserted that its nuclear ambitions are peaceful in nature, but has lacked transparency with regard to its nuclear development. Having been grouped with the likes of Iraq and North Korea into the Axis of Evil, and being on the receiving end of a variety of economy crippling sanctions, it serves Iran's interest to open up to the international community if its claims of peaceful nuclear development are indeed genuine. It also seems that facilitating and encouraging resolution with Iran would be an easy win for Obama, certainly worthy of legacy consideration. But like his other well-meaning political endeavors, this one might not be as clear-cut as it seems on the surface and may have greater implications that prove why you can't please all of the people all of the time.

Despite being called out as a wolf in sheep's clothing by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran's president Rouhani hopes that the nuclear talks his country is involved in are able to yield tangible results in a short period of time. The talks come amid plans for the US to impose new sanctions on Iran, which up until recently, have been the only alternative to dealing with Iran militarily. Diplomacy seems like the obvious route to verifying rumors of Iran's nuclear aspirations and finding resolution between the two countries, which should also serve Israel's interest, but apparently doesn't. This dynamic contributes to the fact that rapprochement with Iran might prove itself to be more difficult than an easy win on Obama's part.

It seems simple enough: open up a dialogue with Iran, allow Rouhani to prove his country's nuclear program is a peaceful one, and subsequently build a relationship based on facts, not speculation and paranoia. Yet Israel remains certain that the situation boils down to all or nothing, and refuses to see that sanctions can be lifted while simultaneously allowing Iran to pursue a peaceful nuclear program. This is, in the very least, suspect on the part of Israel.

Any talks about Iran's nuclear capacity will inevitably come back to the fact that Israel possesses an unregulated nuclear arsenal, which should be a primary focus when planning for peace in the Middle East. The blatant double standard can no longer be ignored, and could turn out to be the catalyst to Obama's legacy. If the ‘fanatic regime' that Iran is accused of being turns out to be another Non-Proliferation Treaty country using nuclear power peacefully, the international community's focus might just shift to the next most ‘fanatic regime', Israel.

One should keep in mind this paradox: the US has legally prohibited itself from funding countries that proliferate weapons of mass destruction, but continues to give Israel 2 billion taxpayer dollars in military and other aid to Israel each year. If the US can help persuade one of the Axis of Evil countries into being transparent about its nuclear program, shouldn't it be able to do the same with its closest ally in the Middle East? And if focus were to be put on Israel's weapons of mass destruction, wouldn't it also be fair to take a meaningful look at Israel's habit of sidestepping international law? This is already being done by the EU, who has decided to restrict its European Investment Bank from giving loans to Israeli businesses and public bodies operating inside the illegally occupied Palestinian territory, and is being called the beginning of the era of sanctions against Israel.

US-Iran rapprochement can broaden the horizons of a multitude of dialogues, some of which Israel may not be too eager about. In this sense, better relations with Iran might not be Obama's legacy alone, but may turn out to be a stepping-stone toward a much more meaningful legacy. In the meantime, rapprochement with Iran can serve as a means toward quicker resolution in Syria as well as regional stability, and can show the international community that US foreign policy is not based solely on manufactured threats and hearsay.

How To Hijack An Aid Program

Ian Smillie — 2013-11-01T18:08:35Z

Dear Tony Abbott,

The day after you led your Liberal/National Coalition to a landslide victory in September, you announced that AusAID, the Australian government's aid agency, will be integrated into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
Because many have likened this move to what Canada has done in merging CIDA with DFAIT, I thought I might give you some background information on what has happened here. Think of this as a kind of "how to" guide, an "owner's manual to hijacking the foreign aid program."

There are three parts to this: the softening up part, the announcement, and doing the deed. I know you have skipped the softening up part, Tony, but let me go through the whole process because I'm sure it will give you useful ideas as you move forward.

1.THE SOFTENING UP PART

Appointment of the Minister

I know in Australia you don't have an aid minister. Lucky you. That's one less problem to deal with. But if there had been one, it's important to appoint someone junior who doesn't know much about the business. If you don't have many women in cabinet, this slot is one where you can even up the gender balance. (Excuse me for using the word "gender" here-I mean the balance between women and men. That was a slip into the old feminist lingo that Canada has banished from government documents. I won't do it again).

Make sure the minister is loyal, someone who will do everything you say. Put some of your own people in her office and make sure they see every project before she does. Sometimes a bad one will slip through and you'll have to pull it back, so you need people who know how to fix little gaffes by adding things like "not" into an already "approved" document.

You may have to change ministers quite frequently until you find one obtuse enough for the job. Once you've got her, however, keep her, no matter what she does. In the end, if she becomes a real embarrassment, you can appoint one of the used car salesmen or cops you have on the back benches to take over for a while.

Punish One, Teach Many

Did you ever see the movie Goodfellas, Tony? Or The Sopranos? The mafia has a great expression: "Punish one, teach many." Once you start trying to get a grip on the aid program, you'll discover that there are hundreds of NGOs and academics and bleeding-heart liberals out there who'll try to come to its rescue. (By the way, Tony, I know you head the "Liberal Party", so when I say "liberal", don't take it the wrong way. In Canada, liberals are actually the bad guys. Funny old world, eh?)

What I'm getting at here is that you will have to put a few kittens down in order to get the rest in line. Find a stroppy, mid-size NGO and cut off all its funding. Make a big deal out of it. Say it's because it funded some Palestinian terrorists, or perhaps some horrible thing in your own region, like boat people. When the NGO says it isn't true, as it no doubt will, take the high road and say you have a zero tolerance attitude towards anti-Semitism or some such thing, and if that fails, just keep saying over and over that its proposal didn't fit with your government's priorities.

There is a risk here. Other NGOs may take up the cause and do an "I am Spartacus" thing. This could be dangerous, because together they do have a lot of public support. But if you're lucky, as we were in Canada, most won't say much. They'll probably shove their umbrella organization out in front to try to bell the cat. What you need to do then is cut off all funding to the umbrella organization. We did that, and you should have seen the NGOs scatter. The umbrella organization lost 75% of its staff, had to sell the building it owned, and was told by its major dues-paying members to tone down its criticism for fear the government might start coming after them.

Tony, you may have noticed my cat references. Here's one more: if you want to herd cats, all you need to do is open a small tin of Meow Mix.

Getting the NGOs in line was like taking candy from a baby, Tony. There were no Spartacus wannabes anywhere in sight.

Take Down the Think Tanks

I don't know how many international development think tanks you have in Australia, but we have a couple here. You've got to get rid of these, or bring them to heel as quickly as you can. If you're lucky, they will have noticed your sacrificial lamb in the NGO community and will start censoring themselves, but that's probably not enough. If you have any control over the appointment of board members, send in the clowns. A few crazy appointees can do amazing damage in no time flat. Human rights activists, academics and do-gooders are quickly distracted by issues close to their navels, and while the in-fighting rages, you can grab the high road and either fire a few people, or close the place down entirely.

Refusing to appoint directors and senior managers, if that's within your control, is another great tactic. And of course the best trick in the book is the Extended Meow Mix Gambit, which I'll come to in a minute. Whatever you do, however, make sure that any surviving think tanks understand that they better think or they will tank.

The Extended Meow Mix Gambit

Tony, your greatest enemy in hijacking the aid program will be the NGOs. Even if you're successful in getting them to be quiet, they are still hotbeds of radicalism, do-gooderism, and loony lefty liberalism. (Oh, sorry, I used that word again. Honestly, Tony, I have to ask why Australia's true conservatives are all under the banner of the Liberal Party. What is up with that?)

Anyway, The Extended Meow Mix Gambit: If your NGOs are anything like ours, most of them get half or three-quarters of their money from the government. They should have known that was dangerous-even stupid. That said, while you can make a sacrificial lamb of one or two, you'll have to move more softly with the rest.

The first thing to do is get rid of any kind of responsive funding arrangement. No more coming to you with their own neat ideas. You develop the neat ideas. Make it like a business: call for proposals and choose the one you like best, if you catch my drift. They'll soon enough discover what you like and don't like. No more multi-year program funding. Announce that you're not there to subsidize NGOs or to fulfill their entitlement fantasies. They'll come back at you with how they do excellent work, reach people that governments can't, how they carry the Australian flag to places that you can't and yadda yadda yadda. They'll say they have the support of tens or hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians (or even millions). Your MPs should expect a few visits from the local vicar and some parishioners. But that will pass. Simply cancel the responsive program, set out a few calls for proposals, and you'll see what happens. Ever see that Frank Sinatra movie, Some Came Running? I guess you can tell, Tony, that I'm a movie buff.

Having turned the NGOs into wannabe contractors, the next step is to stall on decisions. Tell them the funding decision critical to their survival will be made in June or December or whatever. Keep changing the dates. Stretch it out beyond the end of the financial year. Way beyond. The NGOs will start using up their reserves while they wait. You can let the money out in dribs and drabs to the friendlies, but an even better trick is to make no decision at all. You can't imagine how destructive that is as these once-confident outfits start laying off staff. Even so, you'll be amazed that they continue to hang around the back door like hungry puppies. Most will continue to lick your hand if you go anywhere near them. All you need to say is that you'll get things rolling "soon". Tell the civil servants to use that word whenever they're asked a question about money: "soon".

There's another great aspect to this gambit. If you delay decisions and payments beyond the end of your financial year, you can lapse hundreds of millions of dollars. This has two effects. First, it can go towards paying down any debt you might have racked up, as we did bailing out GM, Chrysler and all those other companies in 2009. And it also helps to reduce the claims on next year's budget because you've shown you don't need the money. And the best part is that-unlike when you announce a cut in your aid budget-no one really notices. If someone does, say something virtuous like, "We don't believe in just shovelling money out the door."

There may be a problem with the faith-based crowd. If Australia is anything like Canada, a lot of your support probably comes from this general area. But unfortunately some of the faith-based NGOs have uppity ideas about human rights and social justice, and you may find, as we have, that some of them are antagonistic to a lot of the things you favour, such as Australian mining companies in developing countries. I'll come back to our mining friends in a moment, but you have to handle this bunch carefully. Cut back on funding to the rights-and-justice crowd, but start throwing small bones to new, less vocal players among the faith-based organizations. If you're lucky, a few of the secular outfits will smell smoke and cry "fire". Maybe an academic or two will get busy with a calculator, and pretty soon you'll have all the NGOs fighting among themselves.

A Feel-Good "Initiative"

You announced major cuts to the aid budget as soon as you were elected, Tony. Good on ya, mate. It took us a while to start chopping, but we're getting there. If you want to confound your enemies and confuse the public as you're cutting the budget, however, why not think of a major feel-good "initiative"? Canada created a "Mother and Child Health Initiative" and pushed it at the G8 as though nobody had ever heard of the idea before. Mothers and children: Wow! What a crowd pleaser.

There was a bit of a glitch when we started out on this because we didn't know that some NGOs would come back at us with a lot of guff about women's reproductive rights, abortion and such like, so if we were doing it again, we might just stick to children. But in the end we found a few NGOs that would go along for the ride and ignore the feminist nonsense, so it's working out pretty well.

Results-Based Management

Tony, I have to tell you that results-based management is a brilliant and outstanding way to subvert, if not wreck an aid program-and you can look good while you're at it. The Harper government didn't have to invent this one; it was handed over on a silver platter by its predecessors.

Here's how it works: First, get everyone completely confused about the terminology. Change the rules, the guidelines, the forms and the reporting requirements. Frequently. Demand big results in all proposals. In a tough competition, the applicants will exaggerate what they plan to do in order to win the contract. Then you can hammer them a couple of years later when they haven't done what they said they would. Demand that all projects must show results within the lifetime of the funding, even if that makes no sense. Punish any executing agency or NGO that fails to meet targets: no second phase, no new contracts. Fund things you can take pictures of: bridges, schools, dams. You can show the snaps to taxpayers and you might even sell some Australian goods and services in the bargain.

There's a small problem here. Andrew Natsios, who was head of USAID under George Bush-someone who should have been a good guy-has gone rogue. He says that the focus on results has turned into an "obsessive measurement disorder". He even says that the most measurable development projects are often the least transformational, while the most transformational are the least measurable. People like that will tell you that building schools is not the most important part of an education project; it's what goes on inside the school, and that can't always be photographed or changed quickly.

Frankly, Tony, you have to ignore this kind of stuff. Make sure that whenever your foreign minister talks about aid, she uses the words "results" and "effectiveness", preferably in every second sentence. (By the way, I see you've appointed Julie Bishop as foreign minister. Great work on the gender balance-sorry, the balance between men and women.)

2. THE ANNOUNCEMENT

You cleverly announced the merger of AusAID into DFAT the day after you won the election. It took us a lot longer, but when we were ready, we did it in a similar way: we consulted almost nobody in any of the concerned departments. That had the effect of catching any possible opposition off guard, and it threw the concerned departments into a frenzy of confusion, especially because we hadn't developed any plan whatsoever as to how the transition would take place. On top of that, we got rid of the head of our aid program, as you have, and at the same time changed the aid minister in order to sow as much confusion as possible.

Remember Tony, this is about getting a grip on that aid money and reducing the number of people who have a voice in forming policy or who understand how the money is being spent.

I see that you are still using the term AusAID. My advice is to kill the name entirely as we did with CIDA. That helps to extinguish the brand and even the idea of foreign aid. I see, too, that in Australia a lot of the media are using the term "collapsed", as in "AusAID has been collapsed into DFAT." That doesn't sound too good. I would suggest you use the term that we have promoted, the one that supporters of the merger seem to like: "to fold", as in "CIDA has been folded into DFAIT". It's more gentle, a bit like folding whipped cream into custard to make zabaglione, although you don't want to draw out that analogy too far because some wag might start talking about who got whipped.

3. DOING THE DEED

There has to be a rationale for the merger, of course. In your announcement, you said that "the Australian Agency for International Development [will] be integrated into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, enabling the aid and diplomatic arms of Australia's international policy agenda to be more closely aligned."

Tony, that is simply excellent! That's exactly what the government said here, and it got a lot of applause from diplomats and academics who agreed. The dips have always wanted more money and resented CIDA because it had lots of cash. And academics, of course, especially the foreign policy wonks, think aid is a load of old cobblers. They think we should be spending more time and money on things that really matter: NATO, the United States, Europe and such like. Realpolitik they call it. They probably picked up that idea reading the memoirs of Henry Kissinger.

Anyway, the merger here has even gone over pretty well with the media and the public because a lot of them just don't "get" foreign aid. A lot of them think the money never gets there, or it's wasted, or it's stolen by corrupt dictators. (On that point, Tony, I suggest that you get Julie to do what our Foreign Minister does every time he gets a chance: slam the United Nations as nothing more than a debating club for dictators. It goes down very well with the know-nothing crowd and those who've been jollied along for so many years by all the NGOs peddling children.)

So let's get to the crux of it, Tony. Some in the so-called development community will try to find a light in the tunnel where we've stashed the aid program. They'll say that with the merger, we can perhaps stop isolating aid, and that we can now start talking about development cooperation.

Let me tell you what that means. It means that with the merger, you have a better chance for a whole-of-government policy towards developing countries and development. It means that in addition to aid, you could now talk within the same department about trade issues that affect poor countries. You could address tariffs and subsidies and these could form part of your overall approach to development. You might even include security issues and immigration. All of these things have a bearing on the main point that many in the development community stress: poverty reduction.

You'll have to nip all that in the bud. Everyone knows that poverty reduction comes from economic growth, and growth comes from the private sector. Focussing on poor people in poor countries is simply distracting. Charity has its place, but it's not where the real action is. Poor countries wouldn't be poor if they had a private sector like we do, and that's why we have to get our companies over there doing what they do best. A lot of the other aid donors are pushing their private sectors too. Even the World Bank President has said that we can end poverty by 2030, but only if we get the private sector on the case. I'm sure you know the drill, Tony.

There are two things you can keep repeating in this connection: "Foreign direct investment outpaces foreign aid by a factor of ten to one." Or "five to one" or "fifteen to one". Just pick a big number. It isn't the number that matters, it's the fact that FDI dwarfs aid, so aid must be unimportant. Right?

And there's another good one: "Remittances are ten (or fifteen or twenty) times higher than foreign aid." It sounds terrific. Nobody stops to think about the fact that there have always been remittances, or that remittances don't exactly vaccinate children, but never mind that. It's the big numbers that count, showing how insignificant aid is. And our aim is to make it even more insignificant-right, Tony?

Tony, I know that Australia is big on the extractive industry, just like Canada, and if Australian mining companies are anything like ours, they could probably use a boost from government, especially with the Chinese running away with the show in Africa and Latin America. So here's how you use the merger to good advantage: Have a look around. See if there are any NGOs getting funding from an Australian mining company, or if an NGO is helping a company to deal with a development issue around one of its mines. If you can find two or three of those, fund them and call it a policy.

Say that Australia needs to get something out of the aid program as well. Dress it up with a bunch of nice looking fripperies labelled corporate social responsibility. Call it good development and say you'll fund more. You think some came running before? Soon the queue will be half way around the block.

There's a small problem, however. Since you're planning to slash the Australian aid budget by $4.5 billion over the next five years, you may have difficulty carving out money for the extractive sector. Take a leaf from our book: close aid programs in eight or ten unimportant African countries and use the savings to open new programs in places where you have mining interests, as we did in Peru and Colombia. You can say it's just better geographic focus. The OECD will love it-they tell everyone to work in fewer countries.

The issue where mining is concerned, of course, is not whether your government supports Australian companies overseas. All governments do that. The issue is whether the money should come from the aid budget or some other place. With the merger, it will be easier to fudge these things as long as you dress them up with terms like "development", "sustainability", "social responsibility" and the like.

There may be a crunch at the OECD when you start reporting these activities as official development assistance, but the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), I have to tell you, Tony, is a pushover. Canada's last peer review in 2012-and I'm quoting-"commends the country's strong stand on human rights, its co-operation with developing countries and its effective efforts in Afghanistan and Haiti." Hah! How they got that idea about human rights is beyond me. And as soon as we got our troops out of Afghanistan, our aid program there headed straight for File 13. Where Haiti is concerned, we recently hit the brakes so hard on that one, there's rubber all over the road. The DAC did notice that we're cutting our overall aid and recommended that "as soon as possible", we move towards the international ODA target of 0.7% of GNI. Maybe when pigs fly. Or when we can count some of the money we're spending on our efforts to imitate China with the mining companies.

You may know the old story about Benjamin Franklin writing to a friend and apologizing for the length of the letter. He said, "If I had more time, it would have been shorter." Tony, I have to tell you, this is the shorter letter.
Anyway, there it is: How to hijack an aid program in three easy steps. It's a bit like The Poseidon Adventure: you turn everything upside down for a while and everyone staggers around in the dark and the wreckage, hoping there's a rescue on the way. Then, after making the most incredible mess, you send the whole thing to the bottom.

In truth, it isn't really that easy: it takes a thick skin and cold blood. But it's a lot easier when there's so little public reaction. The NGOs claim to have a huge public constituency for a compassionate aid program focussed directly on poverty reduction, but when you look at the numbers, they spend ten times more on feel-good fundraising than they do on public education about development. Just like the government. That's what's made the hijacking so straightforward and so successful. Canadians just don't get it.

Our Prime Minister Harper might have offered to buy you a frosty Foster's at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Colombo, but happily for him, he won't be attending. He's boycotting the event because of Sri Lanka's bad human rights record. It makes him look good with our large Tamil community, killing two or three birds with one stone. I guess you have to go to all of these meetings because your landslide win in Australia was partly based on your promise to send all the boat people to Manus Island or Nauru or Christmas Island.

Frankly, Tony, that doesn't look very humane. My suggestion is that you turn this negative into a good-looking positive like we always do: set up a high profile, upbeat "initiative" for the boat people after they get to Christmas Island. A spoonful of the old maternal and child health might help the medicine go down.

Ian Smillie is a member of the McLeod Group. This article is satirical in nature; any resemblance to real events, or to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

http://www.mcleodgroup.ca/2013/10/29/how-to-hijack-an-aid-program/

The Canadian Mining Industry Has Now Targeted the European Market

Alain Deneault — 2013-11-01T18:08:32Z

By Alain Deneault, author, with William Sacher of "Paradise Under the Earth, How Canada Has Become a Hub for the Global Mining Industry," Montreal/Paris, Ecosociete/Rue de l'echiquier, 2012, and of "The Mining Industry is Ruling Canada", Paris, Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2013.

A lobbying with more impact than the result of any election, a direct influence on the structuring of the text of law, a division of the population with the aims of better conquering it, an imminent ecological disaster, exploration companies that are squandering people's investments, forthcoming public health problems, preoccupations regarding the security of employees, a deterioration of cultural patrimony… After the discoveries made in African, South American, and Asian countries, Romania and Europe as a whole are the new subjects of the Canadian acquisition, exploration and exploitation methods of oil deposits.

Rosia Montana, a commune in the Alba County of Romania, is where the Canadian Gabriel Resources threatens to spill 13 000 tons of cyanide per year to exploit one of the most important open pit gold mines in Europe. This means that there will be a production of 215 million cubic meters of cyanide waste on the worksite that should be stocked permanently in a vast depot measuring 8km in diameter and 400m in depth. This could affect a valley where a 2000-year-old village exists. In order to do this, Gabriel Resources has brought the political powers to a standstill by claiming 100 000 € in damages and interest to the previous minister of the environment, Attila Korodi, and to the secretary of State, Silviu Stoica, in response to their trying to put an end to the project. The Romanian Parliament plans on relinquishing sovereignty to the mining company the next time the law is put to vote. It would then have the ability to expropriate populations residing around the site, plan out the territory the way they see fit, agree on the cost of the damages from the expropriations, even widen the perimeter being exploited, becoming in a sense a state within a state. Meanwhile, their project is terrifying. It involves using dynamite to destroy the four summits of a mountain in which there are mines dating back to the Roman Empire. UNESCO has considered some of these sites for protection. In addition, the use of dynamite may dispel air filled with toxic particles that could greatly damage the health of people living in he region.

All of this for gold…Ore without social or technical use, that already exists in abundance. It is only really useful to banks and the jewelry industry. This exploitation requires a lot of water, on top of the huge threat it poses to ecosystems. This is only the beginning of the preoccupying intentions of Gabriel Resources; sources still need to confirm but there are rumors that there will also be expropriation of uranium.

A lot of people are speculating about how much corruption has taken place in this situation. The 700 jobs created as a result do not justify the existence of the project. When the NGO Albernus Maoir obtained from the Appeals Court of the Alba Iulia region, a resolution that would make illegal any urban plans proposed by Gabriel Resources in 2008, the latter got into contact with the minister of the Environment and the Forests, Laszlo Borbely, and the project regained its authorization to keep exploiting. The will of the Canadian mining lobby seems stronger than the Romanian people's and the elected officials' that are supposed to represent them.

For the past couple weeks, waves of revolt have risen against this project, the likes of which have not been seen since the end of the reign of the Communist Regime. This has taken place in Romanian cities as well as abroad, uniting political parties that usually have opposing views.

A Wandering Canadian…

English Canadians often say “the world needs more Canada.” In Romania, they have enough. This also applies to Greece. The latter country, having been ruined by the minds behind globalfinances, is considering getting involved with the Canadian mining industry, specifically with the Eldorado Gold project set in the rich ecosystem of Skouriès, making the neighboring populations very worried.

Three out of four mining industries in the world are Canadian. A lot of them don't directly come from Canada. They register themselves from Australia, Israel, France, Sweden or the United States for example, because the administrative framework in Canada provides immunity to them. The state has catered its regulations and fiscal policies to favor the financing of speculative exploration activities such as Ronia Montana. It is exceptional that a court has allowed for a criminal case to be held against a company for activities led outside the country's borders. Canada provides insurance to its mining societies in cases of corruption and abuse abroad, as even the OECD is observing. Canadian diplomacy actively supports the various mining industries. Even though, on a national as well as international scale, the Canadian mining industry has a poor record in environmental, social, political, security and fiscal matters. It is easy to testify to this when consulting the plethora of documentation that exists on the matter. Witnesses of regular abuse, and criminal activity, hail from various sectors such as, parliamentary commissions, judicial courts, UN experts, independent consultants, economic specialists and veteran journalists.

Translated and transcribed by Marianne Hill.

Consequences of U.S. Decline

Immanuel Wallerstein — 2013-11-01T18:08:28Z

I have long argued that U.S. decline as a hegemonic power began circa 1970 and that a slow decline became a precipitate one during the presidency of George W. Bush. I first started writing about this in 1980 or so. At that time the reaction to this argument, from all political camps, was to reject it as absurd. In the 1990s, quite to the contrary, it was widely believed, again on all sides of the political spectrum, that the United States had reached the height of unipolar dominance.

However, after the burst bubble of 2008, opinion of politicians, pundits, and the general public began to change. Today, a large percentage of people (albeit not everyone) accepts the reality of at least some relative decline of U.S. power, prestige, and influence. In the United States this is accepted quite reluctantly. Politicians and pundits rival each other in recommending how this decline can still be reversed. I believe it is irreversible.

The real question is what the consequences of this decline are. The first is the manifest reduction of U.S. ability to control the world situation, and in particular the loss of trust by the erstwhile closest allies of the United States in its behavior. In the last month, because of the evidence released by Edward Snowden, it has become public knowledge that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been directly spying on the top political leadership of Germany, France, Mexico, and Brazil among others (as well, of course, on countless citizens of these countries).

I am sure the United States engaged in similar activities in 1950. But in 1950, none of these countries would have dared to make a public scandal of their anger, and demand that the United States stop doing this. If they do it today, it is because today the United States needs them more than they need the United States. These present leaders know that the United States has no choice but to promise, as President Obama just did, to cease these practices (even if the United States doesn't mean it). And the leaders of these four countries all know that their internal position will be strengthened, not weakened, by publically tweaking the nose of the United States.

Insofar as the media discuss U.S. decline, most attention is placed on China as a potential successor hegemon. This too misses the point. China is undoubtedly a country growing in geopolitical strength. But accession to the role of the hegemonic power is a long, arduous process. It would normally take at least another half-century for any country to reach the position where it could exercise hegemonic power. And this is a long time, during which much may happen.

Initially, there is no immediate successor to the role. Rather, what happens when the much lessened power of the erstwhile hegemonic power seems clear to other countries is that relative order in the world-system is replaced by a chaotic struggle among multiple poles of power, none of which can control the situation. The United States does remain a giant, but a giant with clay feet. It continues for the moment to have the strongest military force, but it finds itself unable to make much good use of it. The United States has tried to minimize its risks by concentrating on drone warfare. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has just denounced this view as totally unrealistic militarily. He reminds us that one wins wars only by ground warfare, and the U.S. president is presently under enormous pressure by both politicians and popular sentiment not to use ground forces.

The problem for everyone in a situation of geopolitical chaos is the high level of anxiety it breeds and the opportunities it offers for destructive folly to prevail. The United States, for example, may no longer be able to win wars, but it can unleash enormous damage to itself and others by imprudent actions. Whatever the United States tries to do in the Middle East today, it loses. At present none of the strong actors in the Middle East (and I do mean none) take their cues from the United States any longer. This includes Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan (not to mention Russia and China). The policy dilemmas this poses for the United States has been recorded in great detail in The New York Times. The conclusion of the internal debate in the Osama administration has been a super-ambiguous compromise, in which President Obama seems vacillating rather than forceful.

Finally, there are two real consequences of which we can be fairly sure in the decade to come. The first is the end of the U.S. dollar as the currency of last resort. When this happens, the United States will have lost a major protection for its national budget and for the cost of its economic operations. The second is the decline, probably a serious decline, in the relative standard of living of U.S. citizens and residents. The political consequences of this latter development are hard to predict in detail but will not be insubstantial.

How Science Is Telling Us All To Revolt

Naomi Klein — 2013-11-01T18:08:23Z

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year's conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of NASA's Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner's own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled "Is Earth F**ked?" (full title: "Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism").

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego, walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that "earth-human systems" are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the "are we f**ked" question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, "More or less."

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it "resistance" — movements of "people or groups of people" who "adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture." According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes "environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups."

Serious scientific gatherings don't usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn't exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people — along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street — represent the likeliest source of "friction" to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have "had tremendous influence on ... how the dominant culture evolved," he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, "if we're thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics." And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but "really a geophysics problem."

Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and "be arrested if necessary," because climate change "is not only the crisis of your lives — it is also the crisis of our species' existence."

Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate science, James Hansen, is a formidable activist, having been arrested some half-dozen times for resisting mountain-top removal coal mining and tar sands pipelines (he even left his job at NASA this year in part to have more time for campaigning). Two years ago, when I was arrested outside the White House at a mass action against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenland's melting ice sheet.

"I couldn't maintain my self-respect if I didn't go," Box said at the time, adding that "just voting doesn't seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a citizen also."

This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modeling is different. He isn't saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm — through mass-movement counter-pressure — is humanity's best shot at avoiding catastrophe.

That's heavy stuff. But he's not alone. Werner is part of a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilization of natural systems — particularly the climate system — is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favor of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favor of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.

Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britain's top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the UK's premier climate research institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists and campaigners. In clear and understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2(degree) Celsius, a target that most governments have determined would stave off catastrophe.

But in recent years Anderson's papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as "Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous ... Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope," he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.

With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies — all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned — that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritizing GDP growth above all else.

Anderson and Bows inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target — an 80 percent emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050 — has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has "no scientific basis." That's because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets three and a half decades into the future — rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately — there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby blowing through far too much of our 2(degree) "carbon budget" and putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century.

Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon international target of keeping warming below 2(degree) Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don't have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.

To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2(degree) target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialized countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 percent a year — and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 percent per year "have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval," as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.

Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 percent over a period of 10 years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 percent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 percent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as "radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations." Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).

So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.

In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:

"... in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2(degree) C rise, "impossible" is translated into 'difficult but doable,' whereas 'urgent and radical' emerge as 'challenging' — all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, 'impossibly' early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about 'big' engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geo-engineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned."

In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. "Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2(degree) C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the "evolutionary change" afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2(degree) C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2(degree) C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony." (his emphasis).

We probably shouldn't be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they "were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order."

But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It's why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favor of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations' scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid "suggesting that policies are either right or wrong" and should express their views "by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena".

If you want to know where this leads, check out what's happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning "the death of evidence." Their placards said, "No Science, No Evidence, No Truth."

But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilizing life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner's computer model, this is the "friction" needed to slow down the forces of destabilization; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the "antibodies" rising up to fight the planet's "spiking fever."

It's not a revolution, but it's a start. And it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is distinctly less f**ked.

Source:http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/How-science-is-telling-us-by-Naomi-Klein-Climate_Fracking_Protest_Sands-131030-458.html