Sunday, June 10, 2012
An opinion poll of Irish Catholics found that two-thirds of Irish Catholics don’t believe [in transubstantiation], nor do they attend Mass weekly. The survey, published in The Irish Times with an error margin of 3 points, also found that just 38 percent believe Ireland today would be in worse shape without its dominant church. And just three-fifths even knew the Eucharistic Congress was coming to Ireland.
Catholic faith on line as church rallies in Dublin
DUBLIN — An international conference celebrating Roman Catholicism opened Sunday in Ireland against a backdrop of anger over child abuse cover-ups and evidence of declining faith in core church beliefs.
About 12,000 Catholics, many from overseas, gathered for an open-air Mass in a half-full Dublin stadium at the start of the Eucharistic Congress, a weeklong event organized by the Vatican every four years in a different part of the world. The global gathering, begun in the 19th century and last held in Quebec in 2008, highlights the Catholic Church’s belief in transubstantiation, the idea that bread and wine transforms during Mass into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.
An opinion poll of Irish Catholics found that two-thirds of Irish Catholics don’t believe this, nor do they attend Mass weekly. The survey, published in The Irish Times with an error margin of 3 points, also found that just 38 percent believe Ireland today would be in worse shape without its dominant church. And just three-fifths even knew the Eucharistic Congress was coming to Ireland.
Such views reflect rapid secularization and alienation with the church in Ireland, where church and state once were tightly intertwined. The last time Ireland hosted the Eucharistic Congress in 1932, more than 1 million — a quarter of Ireland’s population — packed Dublin’s Phoenix Park for Mass with nary a dissenting voice.
This time, Ireland’s opening soccer match Sunday in the European Championship is dominating public attention and excitement. So much so that the congress blog had to point out to visitors that all the Irish flags on display on buildings, shops and taxis represented excitement about the football, not the faith.
And as Catholic pilgrims entered the opening Mass, they passed protesters from Survivors of Child Abuse, an Irish pressure group that has spent more than a decade demanding that church leaders in Ireland and Rome admit their full culpability for the protection of pedophile priests. Other protest groups highlighted the church’s opposition to homosexuality and its role in running most Irish elementary schools and many hospitals today.
Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, president of the Eucharistic Congress and the Irish church’s leading voice calling for greater openness on past abuse, led a moment of silence inside the Royal Dublin Society Arena dedicated to those unknown tens of thousands of children molested or raped by priests.
Martin said the Irish church had harbored “a darker side of sinful and criminal abuse and neglect of those weakest in our society: children, who should have been the object of the greatest care and support and Christ-like love.”
“We recall all those who suffered abuse, who still today bear the mark of that abuse and may well carry it with them for the rest of their lives. In a spirit of repentance, let us remember each of them in the silence of our hearts,” he said in calling for prayers.
Sunday’s ceremonies also featured the unveiling of a symbolic “healing stone” with a poem written by a victim of a pedophile priest.
Earlier, Martin said the church in Ireland was facing its gravest fight for survival since the early 19th century, when British laws that barred Irish Catholics from political power were still in force.
“The church is in crisis in Ireland, and that crisis is very, very deep,” he said. “But ... we’re turning the corner to be a very different church to the one we were. The difference will be reflected perhaps in the Eucharistic Congress. It won’t resemble the 1932 congress in any way.”
Eighty years ago, Ireland had been independent of Britain for less than a decade. Historians credit the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, with its huge crowds and a Dublin Bay filled with ocean liners bearing overseas pilgrims, as the ultimate expression of how Catholicism served as the central pillar of Irish nationalism.
But since the early 1990s the church’s standing in society has been battered by a series of scandals involving the church’s concealment of child-abuse crimes from police and other Irish authorities. Four state-ordered investigations over the past decade have documented how tens of thousands of children from the 1940s to 1990s suffered sexual, physical and mental abuse from priests, nuns and church staff in three Irish dioceses and in a network of workhouse-style residential schools. More investigations of other dioceses beckon.
“The return of the Eucharistic Congress offers an escape from the trauma of a decade in which the moral standing of the institutional church has been ravaged by its systematic collusion with the abuse of children,” The Irish Times said in its lead editorial. It said the church in Ireland would never return to “the triumphalist Catholicism of 1932. That world is dead.”
Copyright © 2012 Paddock Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
A $125 billion plan to rescue Spain’s banks won’t solve Europe’s debt crisis or ease the pain of double-digit unemployment across the continent. But it is likely to calm financial markets and buy time for European policymakers to work with other weak economies threatening the stability of the 17-nation eurozone.
Rescue loans for Spain’s banks buys Europe time
WASHINGTON — A $125 billion plan to rescue Spain’s banks won’t solve Europe’s debt crisis or ease the pain of double-digit unemployment across the continent.
But it is likely to calm financial markets and buy time for European policymakers to work with other weak economies threatening the stability of the 17-nation eurozone.
Europe still has plenty of troubles to address in the three other countries that have already received financial help — Greece, Portugal and Ireland. In Greece, voters could elect a government next week that will refuse to live up to the terms of the country’s $170 billion rescue package. Portugal is combating a toxic combination of high debts and 15 percent unemployment. Ireland is cleaning up a banking mess a lot like Spain’s. Then there’s Italy, the eurozone’s third-the largest economy, where debts are piling up as the economy stagnates.
“We still have some pretty fundamental problems to solve,” says Nicolas Veron, senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. “We need more radical solutions than this one.”
Germany, worried that it will get stuck with the bill for any ambitious schemes, has rejected several ideas for easing the crisis. It has been reluctant to ease the terms of previous bailouts to reduce the pain of austerity on Greece, Portugal and Ireland. And it has resisted calls for the creation of joint “Eurobonds” that would raise money and spread responsibility for repayment across the eurozone.
Likewise, the European Central Bank has been reluctant to intervene to jolt the eurozone economy. Last week, it passed up an opportunity to reduce interest rates. And it has been reluctant to flood the economy with money to push down interest rates the way the U.S. Federal Reserve has.
But the plan to lend gobs of money to Spanish banks eases an immediate crisis in the euro’s fourth-largest economy. The deterioration of Spain’s banks and the pressing need for a rescue was threatening to bankrupt its government. That would likely cause far more pain for Europe than the financial messes in Greece, Portugal and Ireland.
Investors were already worried about what will happen when Greek voters go to the polls June 17.
If Greece reneges on the strict austerity measures that come with its rescue package, it could be forced to abandon the euro. Greece’s departure from the eurozone would likely cause financial chaos across Europe: Greek debts would go from being denominated in sturdy euros to being denominated in Greek drachmas of dubious value.
Worse, a Greek exit from the euro would raise fears that another European country such Portugal or Italy might be next.
“A significant part of this (bailout for Spanish banks) has to do with ring-fencing Greece,” says Jacob Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “This is enough to prevent added market contagion.”
Spain on Saturday asked the 16 other countries that use the euro currency for money to rescue its banking system.
Spain has not yet said how much money it would seek. But the eurozone finance ministers said in a statement Saturday that they were prepared to lend up to (euro) 100 billion.
“This move brings into sharp relief the enormous amount of money that will be needed to cordon off the rest of the euro zone periphery in the event of a Greek meltdown,” says Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University.
The rescue loans will be sent to the Spanish government’s Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB). The fund would then use the money to strengthen the Spanish banks’ capital, their bulwark against loan losses.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said interest rates on the loans will be considerably lower than the rate near 7 percent that Spain has been forced to pay recently on the international debt markets, a level that forced the other countries to seek bailouts.
It is not yet clear whether the money will come from the eurozone’s current (euro) 440 billion ($550 billion) rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, or its new (euro) 500 billion ($625 billion) European Stability Mechanism.
Spain had been resisting pressure to seek outside help for its banks, which have been overwhelmed by bad real estate loans. But leaders became increasingly concerned that any fallout from Greece’s upcoming elections would rock markets, further hurting Spain’s financial sector. The exact amount Spain needs won’t be clear until outside accountants complete an audit of its banks by June 21.
Unlike the three other European countries that have received financial help — Ireland, Portugal and Greece — Spain did not have to agree to deeper cuts in its government budget to secure the help.
Working in Spain’s favor is the fact that its public debts aren’t especially high. They amounted to less than 69 percent of its gross domestic product at the end of 2011, lower than powerhouse Germany’s 82 percent.
Spain has already agreed to government belt-tightening. More austerity likely would have pushed Spain, already suffering from near-25 percent unemployment, deeper into recession.
“You don’t want an economy of that magnitude going down the tubes,” says Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. Spain has the world’s 13th-biggest economy, more than four times the size of Greece’s. It is the fourth-largest economy in the eurozone.
In recent weeks, jittery investors had demanded higher interest rates on Spanish bonds. If Spain had tried to borrow money in the bond market to rescue its banks, investors would have balked at providing it.
The rising fears come at a time when nearly half the countries that use the euro are in recession. At 11 percent, unemployment in the euro zone is at the highest level since the single currency was introduced in 1999.
Europe’s weakest countries aren’t all alike.
Spain and Ireland, like the United States, were crushed by a collapse in the housing market, which left their banks with huge losses on housing loans. The Irish government was forced to slash government spending to pay for a bank rescue. The austerity has pinched the economy; Irish unemployment exceeds 14 percent.
Greece ran up vast budget deficits it couldn’t sustain and smothered its economy in regulations designed to protect favored industries.
Italy and Portugal are desperately in need of economic growth that will provide the tax revenues they need to pay their bills.
The Italian government of Prime Minister Mario Monti is committed to raising taxes, cutting spending, fighting tax evasion and promoting competition in many professions, from cabdrivers to pharmacists. But the budget cuts threaten to undermine Italy’s economy, which is already in recession. Under the terms of its earlier bailout, Portugal is making deep spending cuts, which have made its recession deeper and more painful.
The troubles in Europe also are causing economic problems for the United States and developing countries such as China and Brazil, which rely on Europeans to buy their exports. So the plan unveiled Saturday eases pressure on the United States and the rest of the world economy as well.
European economic troubles pinch U.S. businesses. U.S. companies send 22 percent of the goods they export to Europe and have more than $2 trillion invested in factories, offices and businesses there.
A bigger fear is that Europe’s financial troubles could cross the Atlantic. When banks lose confidence in each other, they refuse to lend each other money. Credit dries up, depriving economies of the fuel they need to grow. A financial crunch can wreck the economies on both sides of the ocean as it did in 2008.
“Anything that calms European markets is good for the United States,” says Tufts’ Drezner.
And anything good for the U.S. and world economies is good for President Barack Obama’s re-election hopes.
“This move will come as a relief to the Obama administration as it suggests that European leaders are finally beginning to take significant actions to ease the intensifying pressure on the euro zone’s peripheral economies” such as Spain and Portugal, says Cornell’s Prasad.
The Spanish deal also gives European policymakers more time to strengthen the euro 10 years after the single currency was introduced. They are already planning to create a “banking union” with a centralized regulator, a bailout fund and deposit insurance that covers savers across Europe.
Europe still needs to find a way to stimulate economic growth across the continent so that European countries can begin to grow their way out of their debt problems.
Despite the bank deal, Spain’s grinding economic misery will get worse this year, Prime Minister said Sunday. “This year is going to be a bad one,” Rajoy said Sunday in his first public comments about the rescue.
The conservative prime minister added that the economy, stuck in its second recession in three years, will still shrink by 1.7 percent this year, even with the help. More Spaniards will lose their jobs, he said.
Analysts also say the eurozone countries must pull closer together politically and economically. They need to agree to more standardized policies limiting government debts and strengthening bank regulation.
Critics complain that the Spanish plan, like an Irish rescue before it, rescues banks but leaves taxpayers responsible for repaying the bailout loan.
Bruegel’s Veron says bank owners and investors should absorb some of the losses when banks run into trouble. He wants to see Europe develop a more standardized way of dealing with shaky banks and closing them down when necessary.
Michael McGrath, a spokesman for the Irish opposition political party Fianna Fail, expressed dismay that Saturday’s bank plan would leave Spain’s government holding more debt and reinforce the idea “that ordinary citizens have to carry bank losses.”
Copyright © 2012 Paddock Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
The dreary, rusted displays of murder devices, each encased in its dusty glass box, all bore labels identifying the countries that had manufactured each weapon and the relative explosive potential of each.
Thursday, June 7, 2012 by Common Dreams
'The Butter Battle Book' from Kabul
“On the last day of summer, ten hours before fall …
… my grandfather took me out to the wall.”
… my grandfather took me out to the wall.”
KABUL -- When we arrived at the museum, two legless men wheeled
themselves past us, traveling in wooden carts operated by a hand held
steering device. Inside Kabul’s OMAR museum, which houses ordnance and
land mines used in Afghanistan over four decades of warfare, there were
many more pictures of legless, armless and eyeless survivors of land
mine explosions lining the walls. The OMAR organization bravely
collects and defuses abandoned mines and cluster bomblets before they
can produce more casualties such as these (and casualties that are far,
far worse) among men, women, and children in Afghanistan.
And my mind, I suspect as a sort of defense mechanism, started going back repeatedly, as I studied the exhibits, to The Butter Battle Book.
Generations who were raised (or are raising others) on the children’s
books of Theodore Giesel aka “Dr. Seuss” may have recognized, above,
the opening lines of “The Butter Battle Book,” Dr. Seuss’s delightful
yet alarming parable of the cold war and its fragile nuclear stalemate,
with only the threat of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) holding off
attempts by either side to exterminate the other, as an arms race
spiraled towards a potential World War III.
In Seuss’s story, the little boy’s grandfather schools him in the
rightness of their nation’s principles, and assures his grandson that at
last “the boys in the back room” have come up with the ultimate weapon,
so that the “Yooks”, who eat their bread butter-side-up, can finally
triumph over the “Zooks”, who eat theirs butter-side-down. He narrates
the arms race up to this point, from relatively harmless snick-berry switches through elephant-mounted slingshots to long-legged blue-goo spraying machines,
and how the hated Zooks would match each newfangled victory-promising
invention, inspiring the Yooks to escalate. “I’m here to say that if
Yooks can goo Zooks, you’d better forget it, ‘cause Zooks can goo
Yooks!” As his story unfolds, the grandfather cycles through shame and
elation depending on whether he is behind or in front of the latest
weapon, but when both sides develop the “bitsy big-boy boomeroo,”
fleeing to underground shelters in case it is deployed, even the
belligerent grandfather, perched atop the wall staring down his Zook
nemesis, is given cause to look nervous as the book unresolvedly ends: “’Grandpa’,
I shouted. ‘Be careful! Oh, gee! Who’s going to drop it? Will you?
Or will he…?’ ‘Be patient,’ said Grandpa. ‘We’ll see. We will see…’”
The book is bright, clever and shrewdly truthful. A simplification,
certainly, but to be comprehensible maps have to be simpler than the
terrain. There in the museum, memories of bringing Seuss’s colorful
and fanciful approach toward war and destruction into classes I taught,
three decades ago, helped me cope with the abject realities presented
by each curated display. How can anyone comprehend the actual madness
of developing round after ever-more-lethal round of sophisticated
explosives and killing devices, and in particular this selection of
devices, whether laid as a trap in the ground or rained from the skies
over a land that has taken its place among the poorest and most
desperate nations on Earth?
The dreary, rusted displays of murder devices, each encased in its
dusty glass box, all bore labels identifying the countries that had
manufactured each weapon and the relative explosive potential of each.
We learned that Afghanistan’s countryside is still littered with
remnants of HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) tracer missiles and rockets
made by the Chinese and the Soviets, High Explosive Anti-Personnel
projectiles from China, cluster munitions made by the Italians, Czechs,
Chinese and Russians, Soviet fragmentation bombs, Soviet plastic
explosive fragmentation bombs, US Claymore fragmentation bombs, plastic
land mines from Iran and Pakistan, British and Egyptian anti-tank
mines, plastic explosives from Italy, Belgium and Pakistan, plus mortar
bombs, rocket propelled grenade launchers and, displayed on shelves but
a few inches above the floor, the disused rifles, bullets and swords
from back at the start of this escalation, in the simpler, "snick-berry
switch" days of one-on-one small-scale violence.
A caption next to a dismantled mine explains how, upon activation of
the mine by an unwary soldier or grown or youthful civilian, a part
called the initiator (a small copper cartridge) would be pierced by a
striker pin causing a flame to pass through a hole to the
explosive-packed detonation chamber: the large hollow space we could see
on the left.
Another display case of bomblets from a cluster bomb noted that in
2001 the U.S. had dropped unnumbered cluster bombs each consisting of
exactly 202 bomblets. Many of the bomblets would not explode on
landfall but would wait years to be stepped on, or picked up, or else
driven over or ploughed through by an unsuspecting victim. They looked
like yellow building blocks that any unschooled child might take for a
plaything, as many had.
Our guide, a Pashtoon man from Jalalabad, had worked in mine
clearance for four years and then at the museum for three years. He
seemed friendly to us, but had admonished our friend Farhad, as we later
learned, that he had no right to befriend foreigners. “These
foreigners are not our friends,” he had told Farhad. “They are infidels.
They are coming only for their own benefit and not for the benefit of
the people, and they are only in the country to cause destruction and to
steal from us.”
"The crises in climate stability and global
health that international cooperation might have delayed or prevented...
crises we ignored in order to fight our butter battle. And our
resource wars brought us the chain of escalating economic detonations
that seems far from over."
We’re in Kabul, visiting with the young activists of the Afghan Peace
Volunteers, for the purpose of helping describe the consequences of war
as experienced by ordinary Afghans. But nearly every Westerner in the
country is there under the presumption of offering necessary help, and
Afghans understandably bristle when they see that many of them foster
unsustainable projects while earning large salaries. So why should he
have trusted us? Was he aware that the U.S. is spending 2 billion
dollars per week to maintain our part of the occupation of his country,
preparing and all-too-often employing a devastating arsenal of
state-of-the-art weapons, with even cyberspace wars planned to guarantee
U.S. control of resources and politics in his country?
I wonder what tiny fraction of U.S. weapon expenditure is devoted to
the never-ending work of mine clearance and disposal which so taxes the
resources, courage and dedication of the sparsely funded OMAR group.
Our guide insisted that before leaving we should all climb into a
very old plane parked outside the museum. Once inside, we realized that
the plane’s cabin had been converted into a classroom where children
visiting the museum were shown films about land mines – how villages
could go about clearing them, and how children could avoid them. They
were encouraged never to touch a land mine, to identify partially
exposed mines on sight, and to understand how terrible these weapons
are. With shock I remembered visiting the Intrepid Museum years before,
a converted U.S. aircraft carrier that is still moored at its pier in
Manhattan, and feeling outraged that the school teachers who had brought
their students there would allow the children to climb into the tiny
coin-operated facsimile bomber aircraft that let them aim bombs, using a
joystick, not even at individual humans but at whole countries, at maps
of Iraq and Central Asia, allowing them to imagine bombing whole
peoples, for fun, without seeing a single human face.
Elsewhere in Kabul, just before heading to the OMAR museum, we’d
informally met with a man whom we’d known for some time and who
confessed that in his earlier life he had been involved with gun running
and weapon distribution. It had been a desperately needed way to feed
his family. Now, he told us, he never wants his children to become
involved in handling, much less smuggling or employing weapons. His
life has changed - he has cultivated several gardens and is proud to
supply his family with food that he has grown himself.
Our guest nevertheless seemed quite savvy about weapon distribution
in Afghanistan today. He readily estimated percentages of ethnic
populations, within Afghanistan, that are armed. The butter-side ups
have this many – the butter-side-downs have these. So many of the
weapons had been handed out, first to this favored ally and then to
that, by the occupying forces who have so much more force to apply, and
much more than buttered bread to eat, but the same rapacious hunger for
victory and an apparent willingness to encourage any amount of
internecine warfare to divide the country and thereby satisfy its own
long-term aim of dominance.
Our next visit was with a group of university students hosting one of
many regular debates about current events relevant to Afghanistan. For
several hours, they engaged in thoughtful discussion about whether or
not Afghan people will be more secure now that an agreement has been
made to allow - at the minimum - ten more years of U.S. military
occupation, in and outside bases scattered across Afghanistan. One
student said that Afghans have no choice but to accept the forces, but
that the militarism contributes to an atmosphere in which everyone is
waiting for World War III.
It's a cliché, but in many ways World War III is starting, is already
underway. It's happening now. The crises in climate stability and
global health that international cooperation might have delayed or
prevented; incurable TB appearing as predicted in the slums of India,
uncontainable in the absence of anything resembling a healthcare system
and destined for worldwide spread; global warming data exceeding our
former worst-case scenarios. These were crises we ignored in order to
fight our butter battle. And our resource wars brought us the chain of
escalating economic detonations that seems far from over.
Having written the first book about global warming 23 long years ago, I’ve watched the issue unfold across decades, continents, and ideologies. I’ve come to earth summits and conferences of the parties from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen, and many places in between. All along, two things have been clear. One, the scientists who warned us about climate change were absolutely correct—their only mistake, common among scientists, was in being too conservative. So far we’ve raised the temperature of the earth about one degree Celsius, and two decades ago it was hard to believe this would be enough to cause huge damage. But it was. We’ve clearly come out of the Holocene and into something else. Forty percent of the summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone; the ocean is 30 percent more acidic. There’s nothing theoretical about any of this any more. Since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere is about 4 percent wetter than it used to be, which has loaded the dice for drought and flood. In my home country, 2011 smashed the record for multibillion-dollar weather disasters—and we were hit nowhere near as badly as some. Thailand’s record flooding late in the year did damage equivalent to 18 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). That’s almost unbelievable. But it’s not just scientists who have been warning us. Insurance companies—the people in our economy who we ask to analyze risk—have been bellowing in their quiet, actuarial way for years. Here’s Munich Re, the world’s largest insurer, in their 2010 annual report: “The reinsurer has built up the world’s most comprehensive natural catastrophe database, which shows a marked increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance, globally, loss-related floods have more than tripled since 1980, and windstorm natural catastrophes more than doubled, with particularly heavy losses from Atlantic hurricanes. This rise cannot be explained without global warming.”
Thursday, June 7, 2012 by Solutions
Time For Outrage On Behalf of the Planet
It's Time to Fight the Status Quo
My solution is: get outraged.
Campaigners
marched in Copenhagen under the banner "System Change, Not Climate
Change." On the eve of Rio+20, that message again will rise, but slogans
and proposals and will mean nothing without the requisite power
standing behind them.
Having written the first book about global warming 23 long years ago,
I’ve watched the issue unfold across decades, continents, and
ideologies. I’ve come to earth summits and conferences of the parties
from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen, and many places in between.
All along, two things have been clear.
One, the scientists who warned us about climate change were
absolutely correct—their only mistake, common among scientists, was in
being too conservative. So far we’ve raised the temperature of the earth
about one degree Celsius, and two decades ago it was hard to believe
this would be enough to cause huge damage. But it was. We’ve clearly
come out of the Holocene and into something else. Forty percent of the
summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone; the ocean is 30 percent more
acidic. There’s nothing theoretical about any of this any more. Since
warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere is about 4
percent wetter than it used to be, which has loaded the dice for drought
and flood. In my home country, 2011 smashed the record for
multibillion-dollar weather disasters—and we were hit nowhere near as
badly as some. Thailand’s record flooding late in the year did damage
equivalent to 18 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
That’s almost unbelievable. But it’s not just scientists who have been
warning us. Insurance companies—the people in our economy who we ask to
analyze risk—have been bellowing in their quiet, actuarial way for
years. Here’s Munich Re, the world’s largest insurer, in their 2010
annual report: “The reinsurer has built up the world’s most
comprehensive natural catastrophe database, which shows a marked
increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance,
globally, loss-related floods have more than tripled since 1980, and
windstorm natural catastrophes more than doubled, with particularly
heavy losses from Atlantic hurricanes. This rise cannot be explained
without global warming.”
Two, we have much of the technological know-how we need to make the
leap past fossil fuel. Munich Re again: “Whilst climate change cannot be
stopped, it can be kept within manageable proportions, thus avoiding
the possibility that climate change tipping points will be reached.”
We need politicians more afraid of voter outrage than they are of corporate retribution.
What does this mean in practice? Go to China where, yes, they’re
emulating the West by putting up lots of coal-fired power plants. But
they’re also busy building, say, solar hot-water heaters: 60 million
arrays, providing hot water for 250 million Chinese, almost a quarter of
the country—compared with less than 1 percent in America. I could list
here a long tally of solutions (wind, geothermal, conservation,
bicycles, trains, hybrid cars, tidal power, local food) and I could list
an equally long tally of policies that everyone knows would help bring
them quickly to pass: most important, of course, putting a stiff price
on carbon to reflect the damage it does to the environment. That price
signal would put markets to work in a serious way. It wouldn’t guarantee
that we could head off climate change, because we’ve waited a very long
time to get started, but it’s clearly our best chance.
So, if we have an emergency, and we have the tools to fight it, the
only question is why we’re not doing so. And the answer, I think, is
clear: it’s in the interest of some of the most powerful players on
earth to prolong the status quo. Some of those players are countries,
the ones with huge fossil-fuel reserves: recent research
has demonstrated that the nations with the most coal, gas, and oil are
the most recalcitrant in international negotiations. And some of those
players are companies: the fossil fuel industry is the most profitable
enterprise in history, and it has proven more than willing to use its
financial clout to block political action in the capitals that count.
If we are going to impose a stiff-enough price on carbon to keep
those reserves in the ground (which we simply must do—physics and
chemistry don’t allow us any other out) then we have to overcome the
resistance of those companies and countries. We can’t outspend them, so
we have to find different currencies in which to work: creativity,
spirit, and passion. In other words, we have to build
movements—creative, hopeful movements that can summon our love for the
planet, but also angry, realistic movements willing to point out the
ultimate rip-off under way, as a tiny number of people enrich themselves
at the expense not only of the rest of us, but also at the expense of
every generation yet to come, not to mention every other species.
As it happens, such movements are possible. We built one in the last
year around the Keystone Pipeline, which would have run from the tar
sands of Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline was a
certifiably bad idea—burning the world’s tar sands alone would raise the
planet’s temperature almost a half degree Celsius. (Burning all the
coal will add, wait for it, 15 degrees.) And so people came together in
huge numbers—we had the largest civil disobedience action in America in
30 years with 1,253 people arrested. We ringed the White House with
people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, five deep. We inundated the Senate
with 800,000 messages in 24 hours, the most concentrated burst of
environmental activity in many years. And it kind of worked—though the
battle rages on, the president at least decided to deny the permit for
the pipeline.
Our campaign preceded, and then was dwarfed by, the wonderful Occupy
movement, which raised specific issues, like the Keystone Pipeline, but
mostly concentrated on larger questions of fairness. It showed a great
depth of concern about inequality and corporate power, the very set of
arrangements that have produced climate change. And it offered a number
of solutions—getting money out of politics, above all—that would really
help.
But talking endlessly about these solutions at international
conferences is not going to produce them. They go against the power of
the status quo, and hence they will be enacted only if we build
movements strong enough to force them. We need politicians more afraid
of voter outrage than they are of corporate retribution. And so—at
350.org, and many other places—we’ll go on trying to build that
movement. We’ll focus on pipelines and coal mines, and on subsidies to
the fossil fuel industry. We’ll demand fee-and-dividend systems that tax
fossil fuel and give the proceeds to citizens. We’ll write and march
and, when necessary, we’ll go to jail. And we need those who spend too
much of their time at international conclaves to join us, when you can.
We’ll never get the solutions we need—the solutions everyone has known
about for two decades—unless we build the movement first.
© 2012 Solutions
Behind the killing by drone strike of al-Qaida's Abu Yahya al-Libi lies a story of the senseless brutality by which the US makes its enemies
Friday, June 8, 2012 by The Guardian/UK
Killing Another #2 and the Perpetually Self-Defeating 'War on Terror'
Behind the killing by drone strike of al-Qaida's Abu Yahya al-Libi lies a story of the senseless brutality by which the US makes its enemies
"A man for all seasons … He's a warrior. He's a poet. He's a scholar. He's a pundit. He's a military commander. And he's a very charismatic, young, brash rising star within …"Abu Yahya al-Libi in 2008. Following his escape from Bagram, he assumed a leadership role in al-Qaida. (Photograph: Reuters)
This statement could easily be construed as praise, even admiration, for the possessor of such qualities – until one reads who and what it's referring to: "… al-Qaida,
and I think he has become the heir apparent to Osama bin Laden in terms
of taking over the entire global jihadist movement." So says Jarret
Brachman, a former CIA analyst and Westpoint research director,
regarding Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was reportedly killed in a US drone-strike in Waziristan this week.
Last September, on a visit to Libya,
I met with a rebel military commander who told me that his country
wanted "a good relationship with the Americans". That man was Abu
Yahya's brother.
I couldn't help wondering at the time, just two weeks after the fall
of Tripoli, whether he'd shared his views with his brother, who I knew
was regarded by the US as a high-ranking of member of al-Qaida. This was
a bizarre paradox: the people I'd come to see, including Sami al-Saadi and Abdel Hakim Belhadj, had been, along with their families, victims of rendition to Gaddafi's Libya
instigated by the British government. Yet, now, the cause of these men
and that of the duplicitous nations that had facilitated their rendition
and torture did, at least for the short term, coincide.
During my stay in the Libyan capital, I visited the notorious Abu Salim prison,
where both al-Saadi – who lost two brothers in the infamous 1996
prison-massacre – and Belhadj had been held. Spray-painted on one of the
doors by rebels who had broken free from the prison were the words in
Arabic: "Life [imprisonment] in Guantánamo is not even a day in Abu
Salim." Perhaps that was an exaggeration, but I have also met Libyan former Guantánamo prisoners, who were held in both prisons, and they were not objecting tot his assessment.
"Killing with drones may have the short-term
effect of eliminating a few obscure enemies. But with all the civilian
casualties, the strategy is generating still more hostility, at a time
when everyone admits that the war – on the ground, and for hearts and
minds – is being lost."
I was also shown the cell and final abode of a rendition victim whose
tortured testimony was used by the US to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi's "confession, which asserted al-Qaida was in
partnership with Saddam Hussain in obtaining WMD, was cited by US
Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2003 as a source of credible
information in his presentation to the UN security council, preceding
Operation Iraqi Freedom. But there were no WMDs in Iraq and al-Qaida
only materialised there afterwards, and as a direct result of
the invasion. A year later, Ibn al-Sheikh retracted his statement; after
being bounced around Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco, Jordan, Afghanistan and perhaps Poland, he was returned to Libya where he was found dead in his cell in 2009.
Ibn al-Sheikh's testimony had been taken during interrogations in
Mubarak's Egypt, where he'd been sent by the CIA – in a coffin. Prior to
that, he was held at the Bagram internment facility, which is where I
first learned heard about him after the CIA threatened me with his fate
if I didn't cooperate.
Abu Yahya al-Libi was also held in Bagram from 2002, until his dramatic escape in 2005.
I was there in 2002, but I did not see him or any of the other three
who escaped with him. However, after my release, I did see an interview
on the al-Arabiyya news channel, in which Aby Yahya not only described
the escape in detail, but also the conditions in Bagram and his
experience as a captive of the US.
Having spent so long in Bagram, I found it hard to believe that they
had escaped; I saw one man beaten to death during an escape attempt. I
also recalled how the CIA had told me that they would "fake" an escape
for me if I agreed to work for them, which would springboard me into
al-Qaida automatically. But after having heard the detail in which Abu
Yahya described the escape, and his actions thereafter, I believe it was
genuine. And coupled with his knowledge and the qualities Brachman
alludes to above, the escape is precisely what took him to the
leadership of al-Qaida. Hardly anyone had heard of him before that.
I've always maintained that Bagram was much worse than Guantánamo; I
was looking forward to the latter after being in the former for almost a
year. Being punched and kicked, shackled naked to other prisoners and
dragged to communal showers, forcibly shaved, hands chained to the tops
of cage doors and left suspended were just some of the daily occurrences
we all witnessed or experienced. The worst for me was hearing the
screams of a woman who I had thought for a time was my own wife.
Mercifully, it wasn't, but I am convinced it was someone's wife, mother,
daughter or sister; and Abu Yahya and his comrades did more than hear a
woman.
Of all the abuses he describes in his account, the presence of a
woman and her humiliation and degradation were the most inflammatory to
all the prisoners – and they would never forget it. He describes how she
was regularly stripped naked and manhandled by male guards, and how she
used to scream incessantly in isolation for two years. He said
prisoners protested her treatment, going on hunger strike, feeling
ashamed they could do nothing to help. He described her in detail: a
Pakistani mother – torn away from her children – in her mid-thirties,
who had begun to lose her mind. Her number, he said, was 650.
After their escape, which was notably downplayed by the media at the
time, Abu Yahya and his comrades all became fighters with al-Qaida and
joined the war against the US. He was the last of the four, as one was later captured, another killed in Iraq and the other killed by a drone strike in Afghanistan.
In 2007, I interviewed another so-called al-Qaida leader in the making: Anwar al-Awlaki had been imprisoned in Yemen
and interrogated by US agents. Something traumatic, which he was not
prepared to discuss with me, had happened during the encounter with the
Americans; and not long after, he went from condemning the September 11
attacks to becoming a regional commander of al-Qaida in the Arabian
Peninsula, before also being killed by a US drone strike.
Abu Yahya and al-Awlaki, I believe, were both creations of the US-led "war on terror". There were opportunities
in the case of the latter to enter into a meaningful dialogue to create
understanding, while the former, who also spoke of the decent US
soldiers he met, could have been given humane treatment, instead of yet
another excuse to hate America.
Killing with drones may have the short-term effect of eliminating a
few obscure enemies. But with all the civilian casualties, the strategy
is generating still more hostility, at a time when everyone admits that
the war – on the ground, and for hearts and minds – is being lost.
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited
As the state repression of the student movement heightened, so has the creativity of the students’ tactical repertoire, which has expanded to include marching nude, community assemblies and, especially important in Quebec’s bilingual society, the tactical use of translation though music and words.
Friday, June 8, 2012 by Waging Non-Violence
Translating the Quebec Student Protests
Compared to its current clamor, the Quebec student protests began
last year with a whimper. In March of 2011, Finance Minister Raymond
Bachand announced that Quebec student tuition would increase by $325
every year for five years. By August, student organizations were
debating the possibility of an unlimited student strike. In February
2012, student organizations from several colleges and universities
endorsed the action and blockaded Montreal’s Jacques Cartier Bridge, a
major artery in the city. Over the next few months, numerous violent
clashes with Montreal police led to mass arrests. But on May 18, 2012,
Quebec’s Premier Charest raised the stakes by instituting “special” Bill
78. This law prohibited protests within 50 meters of any university,
effectively making all of downtown Montreal a protest-free zone. May 22
marked the 100th day of the strike, and nearly 400,000 people marched through downtown joyously defying the law.
As the state repression of the student movement heightened, so has
the creativity of the students’ tactical repertoire, which has expanded
to include marching nude, community assemblies and, especially important
in Quebec’s bilingual society, the tactical use of translation though
music and words.
J.B. Staniforth, a McGill graduate and writer, explains that there is
a Francophone cultural memory that differs from its Anglophone
counterpart. “People who don’t speak French have no idea how different
Francophone culture and values are from Anglophone culture,” he says,
“particularly given the history of Franco culture rooted in protest and
rebellion. The Québécois owe much of their present identity to rebelling
against the authoritarian rule of Dupléssis in the fifties.” Maurice
Dupléssis, Quebec’s Premier from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959 is best
remembered for corrupt politics and violently suppressing the left.
Resisters in Quebec have recently taken up two translation-based
tactics in particular that aim to increase participation in the protests
and bridge the cultural divide. Protesters have rallied around a series
of musical night marches to counteract the increased police pressure.
They’ve also started a blog to pit the English media’s coverage against that of the French.
After Bill 78 passed, a decentralized form of resistance fomented in
neighborhoods across the city, in which at 8 o’clock every night people
participate in the “casserole protests” by banging on pots and pans
while marching near their homes. The Montreal police Twitter account,
which usually provides information about the location of the central
protest, suggests that the police have been unable to follow, corral or
control these distributed actions. People of all ages take to the
streets with a spirit of joy and resistance. This tactic, borrowed from
movements in places like Argentina and Chile, has been taken up by
solidarity marches around the world, including a recent one by Occupy Wall Street in New York.
In Montreal, every act of police or legislative oppression is met
with new neighborhood nodes emerging, from the suburbs of Saint Hubert
to the island communities of Verdun and LaSalle. The clinks and clanks
of pots on balconies turn into roaming clusters of people converging at
the borders of neighboring boroughs. They stop briefly along the way to
greet one another. This is truly a unique moment for the city, as many
political issues hinge on a deep cultural divide between Francophones
and Anglophones not just in the Province, but also across Canada. The
music of the casseroles translates their struggles, giving no preference
to a single voice or language. Speaking through music provides the
levity and spontaneity necessary to fight back against state oppression
during dark times. But this is not the only space in which an act of
translation is uniting the people of Montreal and of Canada as a whole.
The focus of these protests in other locales
is different, but they are united by a common cause of valuing
affordable education for the social good it provides. That is something
that anyone, in any language, should be able to understand.
The movement has faced a challenge in that mainstream media accounts
of it reflect a severe cultural divide. While the English media portray
the students as entitled and naïve, usually siding with the government,
the French reports depict a vastly different scene of students fighting
for the civil rights of generations to come. Disheartened by the English
language media coverage of Bill 78, a group of friends hatched a plan
to fight back using a tumblr blog,
aptly titled Translating the Printemps Érable (Maple Spring). They
chose tumblr as a platform because it allows for the quick dissemination
of information, along with the ability for others to submit content.
Greame Williams, an admin for the site, elaborates on its origins:
I subscribe to the Saturday edition of Le Devoir (a French-language paper), and the morning after Law 78 was passed, the editorial line of the paper was unambiguous in condemning it as a likely illegal and unconstitutional authoritarian act. Then I looked at the Globe and Mail, and they thought that the law was justified in ending the student strike. That was the breaking point leading to the blog being actually created, but poor coverage in the English-language media generally led up to this.
By setting the mainstream outlets against one another, the blog undermines their claims to journalistic objectivity.
A. Wilson, a translator for the site, adds that the problem is also
rooted in the limitations of monolingual publishers themselves. “The
French media,” she explains, “gets more in-depth, primary-source
interviews with main players in the crisis just because many are more
comfortable interviewing in French, typically their mother tongue.”
The great irony of the English media’s portrayal of the protests is
that many involved in the blog and in the casserole marches do not
directly benefit from the students’ cause and see it as anything but
naïve. A woman who goes by Anna, an admin for the Maple Spring blog,
says:
I am not a student, but I hope to have kids someday and so I am invested in education being affordable in that way. But more importantly, I will benefit from a more accessible, equitable Quebec if the students “win” because we all do; I want my neighbors to be able to educate themselves, and I want our society to have a high and rigorous level of debate. All of this is only possible with accessible education.
With people like Anna recognizing themselves in the students’
struggle, the task of translation and breaking down boundaries seems all
the more important. It may help many more of them to turn from
bystanders to participants.
“Casseroles Night in Canada”
is quickly replacing the famed “Hockey Night in Canada,” with
solidarity protests across the globe last week, organized largely
through online social media. The focus of these protests in other
locales is different, but they are united by a common cause of valuing
affordable education for the social good it provides. That is something
that anyone, in any language, should be able to understand.
This work is licensed under a Share Alike 3.0 Creative Commons Attribution License
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)