Discussion of All Things Political

Many Australians have questioned the need for an Occupy movement of our own. In contrast to the US, we’re not struggling in quite the same way, economically, having never slipped into recession or been caught up in the Eurozone debt crisis. There are no largescale cuts to public jobs as in Europe or the U.S. At The Referral, Kimberley Ramplin points out that the Australian economy is quite healthy, comparatively speaking:

5.2 per cent unemployment in September 2011. As the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Measures of Australia’s Progress 2011 report shows, pretty much everything (barring productivity) has improved since 2000. Including unemployment. The bad news? That increase applies to threatened animal species due to climate change. The average weekly income per full-time employed adult is $1,305. The average hourly income is between $29.70 and$33.10 (the disparity? Female wages c.f. men) (Source: ABS)

I’ve lived in Australia and the U.S and I know from personal experience that the substantially lower standard of living in the U.S is something few Australians can truly understand. Things are not perfect in Australia economically – not with the astronomical housing prices – but we can’t say that the middle class has collapsed in the same way as in the U.S.

We do ourselves no favours when we uncritically mimic American models without changing them to suit local conditions. The cultural cringe is no more useful in activism than it is in other areas. The 99/1% slogan is powerful stuff indeed but doesn’t adequately address the income distribution of Australia as accurately in the United States. Activism must respond to local needs to be successful.

So what's wrong with Australia? A lot, as it turns out

A US court has dealt oil giant Chevron a severe blow after lifting a ban on an $18bn judgment against the firm for contaminating the Amazon.

A New York appeals court has reversed an earlier order freezing enforcement of the record damages award. It is the latest reversal in a nearly two decade-long legal battle over pollution in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador.

In February, a judge in Ecuador ordered Chevron to pay damages to the plaintiffs, but both Chevron and the residents appealed, and the case has yet to make its way to Ecuador's highest court.

In anticipation of the judgment, however, Chevron had filed court papers asking district judge Lewis Kaplan to freeze any possible enforcement of payment anywhere outside Ecuador. Kaplan, who presides over a chunk of the litigation in Manhattan federal court, issued the now-reversed preliminary injunction in March.

Karen Hinton, spokeswoman for the plaintiffs, said the appeals court order meant it had recognised that Kaplan had acted too fast in issuing an injunction. "Chevron abused the law, and Judge Kaplan rushed to judgment without considering the overwhelming evidence against the oil giant," she said in a statement.

"We can now at least dream there will be justice and compensation for the damage, the environmental crime, committed by Chevron in Ecuador," lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, Pablo Fajardo, told the Associated Press.MORE

The recent approval of Zimbabwean diamonds mined from the $800bn Marange fields by the Kimberley Process (KP) chair, the DRC's Mathieu Yamba Lapfa Lambang, has prompted a global "human rights" outcry with KP members such as Canada, the EU, and the US claiming there was "no consensus".

Meanwhile, other countries like China (the world's fastest growing diamond consumer market), and India (which cuts and polishes 11 of 12 stones) have all given the green light to Zimbabwe, removing any potential problems of surplus minerals from Marange, which has been described by Zimbabwean Finance Minister Tendai Biti as "the biggest find of alluvial diamonds in the history of mankind".

With potential revenues pegged at $1-1.7bn annually, the support of neighbouring governments like South Africa, another major diamond producer, and "host" country to 3 million Zimbabwean political and economic "refugees", is not surprising. Nor is the potential KP rupture being shaped as a battle between politically "interfering" Western nations and cash-starved developing nations.

That Zimbabwe's diamonds are mined under the direct surveillance of the country's vicious military and controlled by brutal lifetime dictator Robert Mugabe is not in question. Since the discovery of Marange's diamonds in 2006, the military has largely supervised mining; mass looting by political, corporate and military elites has occurred, accompanied by violent displacement and human rights violations; companies based in secret jurisdictions such as Mauritius and Hong Kong have been granted "due diligence" approval; and there exists complete opacity over volumes extracted, exported and sold.

But to what extent does the vehement opposition stem from political objections to a nation controlled by the blatantly anti-Western Mugabe? More broadly, was the KP system - propagating that less than one per cent of global diamonds constitute "blood" minerals - built for the purposes of eliminating corporate and state-sanctioned exploitation, or normalising and sanitising it?MORE

Politics: President has been in power for 30 years. Oil-rich enclave of Cabinda has been embroiled in a long-running independence struggle.

Economy: One of Africa's leading oil producers, but most people still live on less than US $1 a day. Experiencing a post-war reconstruction boom

International: China has promised substantial assistance to Angola, one of its main oil suppliers

Full name: The Republic of Angola
Population: 18.9 million (UN, 2010)
Capital: Luanda
Area: 1.25m sq km (481,354 sq miles)
Major languages: Portuguese (official), Umbundu, Kimbundu, Kikongo
Major religion: Christianity
Life expectancy: 47 years (men), 51 years (women) (UN)
Monetary unit: 1 kwanza = 100 lwei
Main exports: Oil, diamonds, minerals, coffee, fish, timber
GNI per capita: US $3,490 (World Bank, 2009)
Internet domain: .ao
International dialling code: +244
MORE

Angola is situated on the Western coast of Southern Africa and was a Portuguese colony till 11 Novemeber 1975, when it won independence. It has an area of 1,246,700 km².

The country is divided into 18 provinces, and its capital city is Luanda. Its periphery comprises 4,837 kilometres, bordering on Congo Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (ex-Zaire), Zambia, and Namibia. Its coast, washed by the Atlantic Ocean, has 1,650 kilometres.

Luanda, Lobito and Namibe are its main ports. The countrys highest peak is Monte Moco (2,620 metres), situated in Huambo, with its main rivers being Kwanza, Zaire, Cunene and Cubango. Its currency is Kwanza (Kz). MORE

Figures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show that during 2011 Angola will leapfrog Morocco to become Africa’s fifth largest economy. This is a startling development: just ten years ago Angola was poorer than all five North African countries, languishing among the worst performing states in the region based on indicators such as the Human Development Index (HDI). Decades of civil war had taken their toll, destroying infrastructure, halting economic expansion and slowing progress on social development indicator such as health and education. It was far from being one of the continent’s top ten economies. Today, it holds a larger nominal GDP than Tunisia and Libya. In 2003, one year after the three decades-long civil war ended, Angola’s GDP was just $13 billion: the IMF estimates this year’s figure at $110 billion, an absolute increase of almost ten-fold in eight years. The five-year period from 2003 saw average growth rates approaching close to 20% annually. The Economist claims Angola was the fastest growing economy during the last decade, ahead of China, with average rates of 11.1%. That data is even more remarkable if it is noted that the first three years of the decade saw very little expansion due to the civil war. By 2016 the IMF forecasts GDP to grow to $160 billion, an increase of $75billion over 2010’s figure. Eurostat’s latest accounts show Angola to be the third largest African Caribbean Pacific (ACP) trading partner of the European Union (EU) behind only South Africa and Nigeria. In 2008 the trade volume was greater than that of Ghana, Ivory Coast and Kenya’s combined. MORE

There’s a pickaxe in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, one of the world’s richest deposits of coal. If we’re going to have any hope ofslowing climate change, that coal—and so all that future carbon dioxide—needs to stay in the ground. In precisely the way we hope Brazil guards the Amazon rainforest, that massive sponge for carbon dioxide absorption, we need to stand sentinel over all that coal.

Geography to the rescue. You still have to get that coal to market, and at the moment, there’s no port capable of handling the huge increase in traffic it would represent.

Doing so, however, would cost someone some money. At current prices the value of that coal may be in the trillions, and that kind of money creates immense pressure. Earlier this year, President Obama signed off on the project, opening a huge chunk of federal land to coal mining. It holds an estimated 750 million tons worth of burnable coal. That’s the equivalent of opening 300 new coal-fired power plants. In other words, we’re talking about staggering amounts of new CO2 heading into the atmosphere to further heat the planet.

Rainforest Action Network activists protest bank financing of dirty coal at Duke Energy's Cliffside coal plant in Cliffside, North Carolina. Much like these demonstrators, citizens all over the U.S. are calling for progressive action toward addressing climate change.

Photo by Rainforest Action Network

As Eric de Place of the Sightline Institute put it, “That’s more carbon pollution than all the energy—from planes, factories, cars, power plants, etc.—used in an entire year by all 44 nations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean combined.” Not what you’d expect from a president who came to office promising that his policies would cause the oceans to slow their rise.

But if Obama has admittedly opened the mine gate, it's geography to the rescue. You still have to get that coal to market, and “market” in this case means Asia, where the demand for coal is growing fastest. The easiest and cheapest way to do that—maybe the only way at current prices—is to take it west to the Pacific where, at the moment, there’s no port capable of handling the huge increase in traffic it would represent.

And so a mighty struggle is beginning, with regional groups rising to the occasion. Climate Solutions and other environmentalists of the northwest are moving to block port-expansion plans in Longview and Bellingham, Washington, as well as in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since there are only so many possible harbors that could accommodate the giant freighters needed to move the coal, this might prove a winnable battle, thoughthe power of money that moves the White House is now being brought to bear on county commissions and state houses. Count on this: It will be a titanic fight.

MORE

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Full Coverage

Alan Lissner's Cancun Photo and Video Montage

Groups Protest U.N. Climate Summit for Shutting out Civil Society

Cancún Betrayal: UNFCCC Unmasked as WTO of the Sky - IEN Statement on COP16 Outcome

GRASSROOTS CLIMATE JUSTICE IN CANCUN PART I

GRASSROOTS CLIMATE JUSTICE IN CANCUN PART II MORE articles at the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Page

The short-cuts that the United Nations system is offering companies to profit from strategies against global warming were the target of loud protests on the Day of Action for Climate Justice.

Two separate demonstrations, of thousands of people each, were held Tuesday as the climate change summit that ends Friday in the southeastern Mexican resort town of Cancún enters the final stretch.

One of the protesters’ slogans, "País petrolero, el pueblo sin dinero" (In this oil-producing country, people have no money), referring to Mexico, underscored the main cause of the heating up of the planet: the burning of fossil fuels, a question that has been practically sidelined in the talks at the 16th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP16). MORE

1) What is the World Social Forum?

The World Social Forum is an open meeting place where social movements, networks, NGOs and other civil society organizations opposed to neo-liberalism and a world dominated by capital or by any form of imperialism come together to pursue their thinking, to debate ideas democratically, for formulate proposals, share their experiences freely and network for effective action. Since the first world encounter in 2001, it has taken the form of a permanent world process seeking and building alternatives to neo-liberal policies. This definition is in its Charter of Principles, the WSF’s guiding document.MORE

Though BP sticks to the ludicrous number of 5,000 barrels per day, scientific examination of either the videos that the oil giant has reluctantly shared, or the all too visible slick spreading across the ocean tell a different story. The trouble is, right now they're telling two stories.

Because the video of the gusher, available to BP shortly after the explosion that killed 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon, was until very recently hidden from the public, the oil slick on the surface was for many days the only way to measure the size of the disaster. In fact, BP wouldn't have even bumped their estimate to 5,000 if it hadn't been for the actions of SkyTruth, which took the approach of simply measuring the oil slick and calculating how much oil it contained. While BP has kept its fingers in its ears since then, SkyTruth has been updating its estimates. As of yesterday...

It's Day 35 of this fatal incident. Our estimated spill rate of 1.1 million gallons (26,500 barrels) per day, now on the conservative end of the scientific estimates, leads us to conclude that almost 39 million gallons of oil have spilled into the Gulf so far.

Meanwhile, we were supposed to have an "official" estimate from the government over the weekend. Instead we got an official reshuffling of the members of the committee making the estimate. And we still have no number.

However, while SkyTruth is estimating that BP is off by a factor of 5, other engineers looking at the video of oil gushing from the broken pipe have placed the rate of flow closer to 100,000 barrels a day -- 20 times more than BP is pretending to believe. Just as with SkyTruth's estimates, this number isn't that hard to derive. Looking at the speed of the flow by going frame by frame through the video and knowing both the size of the pipe and reference objects in the frame, it's simple geometry to determine how much material is emerging from the blown well. So why the difference? If the rate underwater is really that high, how could SkyTruth be underestimating by such a degree?
Blame it on the other Gulf gusher.


...


As NALCO indicates, removing the oil from the surface does mitigate some of the effects on birds and other animals that live near the surface. However it has another effect that's more beneficial to BP than to the Gulf's full time residents: it hides the size of the spill. BP hasn't just been spraying Corexit onto the oil that has reached the surface, it's been injecting tens of thousands of gallons a day of Corexit directly into the rising column of oil.

This is a technique that has never been used before. It has undoubtedly prevented much of the oil from reaching the surface, just as BP has said. And as a result much of the oil that has blasted out of the opening has traveled in "plumes" at varying depths below the surface. Scientists have encountered these plumes hundreds of miles away from the original well site, and now oil washing into the marshes of Louisiana isn't just moving along the surface, but actually flowing up along the bottom of the sea, rendering the usual booms and floats useless in stopping the advance.

Not only is this unprecedented use of dispersant hiding the true size of the disaster and making the oil impossible to contain, the effect on sea life is absolutely unknown.  The EPA's safety sheet for Corexit lists only short term toxicity tests for silverside minnows and mysid shrimp. That's an astoundingly limited amount of study for something that BP has now deployed in quantities exceeding half a million gallons.MORE

April 03, 2010 — Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com

The roots of the present revolution are various: South vs. North clash (Bakiev is from the South, the rebels are from the North), corruption and suppressive government (in recent years Kyrgyz people witnessed all forms of oppression from closings of the newspapers [ENG] to independent journalists' murders [EN]), Russia's Great Game interest, Ortega-y-Gasset'ian “revolt of the masses” etc). Whatever the real reasons of the Kyrgyz revolution of 2010 are it is important to note that it was overwhelmingly immediate, furious, bloody and… well-documented.

The role of the new media changed slightly this time compared to other dramatic events (like the protests in Moldova or Iran). Blogs and Twitter didn't serve as serious means of public mobilization since the Internet penetration rate is relatively small in Kyrgyzstan ( just 15 percent in 2009). However, new media were agile enough to cover all the main events giving detailed footage of initial protests in Talas, rampage in Bishkek and looting that followed. At the same time, new media were efficiently used by the opposition attracting the attention of international community and shifting public opinion to the side of the protesters. The opposition leader Roza Otunbaeva (@otunbaeva), for instance, registered her account as soon as she became the head of the provisional government. On the other day, son of president Bakiev, Maxim opened a LiveJournal account to express the pro-government point of view.

As Gregory Asmolov concluded [RUS], it was not “journalists 2.0″ who were the most efficient in covering Kyrgyz events but the “editors 2.0″. Bloggers who both knew the region and were outside the country to see the big picture and collected the photographs, videos and Twitter confessions. Two most informed bloggers in this situation were people outside the country: US-based Yelena Skochilo (a.k.a. LJ user morrire) and Kazakhstan-based Vyacheslav Firsov (a.k.a. lord_fame). They managed to assemble the most complete collections of photos, videos and timelines

With one action, the prorogation of Parliament, Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister thrust the country into election mode. (The constitution of the twin island republic states that from the moment Parliament is dissolved, a general election must be held in no fewer than 35 days and no more than 90). As the news broke, the blogosphere was rife with speculation that the move was made to pre-empt a no-confidence motion against Manning that had been scheduled for debate today in the House of Representatives, as well as to avoid the fallout over the report of the Uff Commission of Enquiry into the Construction Sector, which was critical of the modus operandi of the state-owned Urban Development Corporation of T&T (UDeCOTT) - which is not to say that bloggers are not asking other critical questions, some even as basic as “When?

Why now? Why would the Prime Minister risk losing Government with not even 3 years of his five-year term behind him?
Why? Why when the country can still call on record revenue and a commanding majority in Parliament?

The analysts are pinning it on the no-confidence motion; or Calder Hart. But as Chris Rock asked when speaking on the Columbine shootings, “Whatever happened to crazy?”
It's quite possible Manning is just a nut. A lunatic.

MORE

POUCE COUPE, British Columbia, Aug 27 (IPS) - North America's largest natural gas corporation hopes a one-million-dollar bounty will take down the saboteur who is blowing up their pipelines in northern Canada.

Since October 2008, six controlled explosions have rocked sour gas pipelines operated by EnCana energy around the Tomslake area in the province of British Columbia. EnCana's reward is thought to be the largest in Canadian history.

While Calgary-based EnCana is the largest player in the area, a boom in unconventional gas extraction has transformed the rolling hills and sleepy farmland in this sparely populated region to a bustling hub of activity.

"We really ramped things up in 2003," Encana spokesperson Brian Liverse told IPS during an interview at the company's field office.

The corporation has several hundred wells in British Columbia, and between 150 and 200 in the area facing sabotage, says Liverse.

Much of the region's gas is sour, or contaminated with hydrogen sulfide, a "highly toxic gas" which can cause death within a few breaths, according to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

...

In 2008, the province reaped a record 2.7 billion dollars from selling natural gas drilling rights. But as sour gas lines cut into fields of canola, companies flare toxic chemicals lighting up the night sky with an eerie glow, and trucks kick up dust on previously tranquil dirt roads, some local residents say increased production is coming at their expense.

"Billions of dollars leave our community every year, yet our elders have to travel to Vancouver when they get sick," said Cliff Calliou, Chief of the Kelly Lake First Nation, an indigenous community of some 500 residents 30 minutes from the bombed sites.

Industry's incursions are "changing the way of life in the community, our hunting, trapping, berry picking - even just going camping," Calliou told IPS during an interview at Kelly Lake's community centre, where several dozen residents attended a conference on strategies for dealing with the petroleum industry.

Despite the region's oil wealth, many houses in Kelly Lake are ramshackle trailers.

Unlike other native groups, there is no official treaty between Kelly Lake and the Canadian government. Natives say the gas is being stolen from unceded land and have launched a 5.2-billion-dollar claim for recompense.MORE

The strike against Vale-Inco in Sudbury heats up as company threatens to use non-union labor