People Before Profit blog

Dresden citizens say, “Don’t privatize our hospitals!”

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:22:00 +0000

In Dresden, Germany, citizens voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to halt the privatization of the city's two municipal hospitals. In what is seen as a major blow to corporate interests, over 84 percent of voters rejected privatization by voting "Ja" to retain public democratic control over the hospitals. The referendum prevents privatization of the hospitals for the next three years.

According to Left Party council member Annekatrin Klepsch, "The results of the referendum are without a doubt a great victory for all residents of the city. The referendum shows that it is indeed possible to successfully fight back against the current privatization mania. This victory does not mean that we can back down - the vote only ensures that the hospital will remain in public hands for the next three years. The pressure on political decision makers to make another attempt at privatization will not stop. No one should labor under the delusion that corporate interests will give up the idea of turning hospitals into an industry driven by profit."

Since 2009, Dresden's city council has been evenly divided between the right wing faction (Christian Democrats and Libertarians) and the left wing or working class faction (Social Democrats, Greens, and the Left).

With the support of the increasingly conservative Green Party, however, the right wing faction was able to pave the way for privatization of the municipal hospitals.

The Left Party, Social Democrats, and grassroots citizens' organizations were able to prevent legislative railroading of the issue, however, by gathering the 37,000 signatures necessary to send the question to the voters.

The city of around half a million people is the capital of the state of Saxony in eastern Germany and a historically relevant leader in the nation's arts and culture.

Saxony's Left Party leader Rico Gebhardt followed up: "Health is not a commodity. This is a clear signal that the will of the people is on the side of public democratic control."

The municipal hospitals receive no tax money from the state or city. Rather, they bring in marginal income for the city of Dresden. The hospitals treat over 68,000 patients yearly. They employ around 3,000 people, all of whom are covered by a collective bargaining agreements that would likely be nullified under private control. The vote is seen as a repudiation of the neo-liberal tactic of privatizing state assets and services in order to cover short-term budgetary shortfalls - a tactic that is now running rampant in the United States.

Is seal killing at an end?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:51:00 +0000

Sealing - a grotesque business that involves killing seals for both their fur and meat - may soon see its last days in Canada. With the consumption of seal products dropping, Canadian Parliament member Ryan Cleary believes that sealing may become a thing of the past.

Cleary said that Canada and its province Newfoundland and Labrador have been taking flack from critics of commercial seal hunting, and that the sealing industry was worth just $1 million to Newfoundland and Labrador last year - a clear sign that desire for seal products is waning.

This wouldn't be the first time that excessive killing of animals came to an end, Cleary pointed out. "Part of our history is also whaling, for example, and the day came when the whaling industry stopped," he said. "Now, is that day coming with the seal hunt? It just may be."

Perhaps the largest piece of evidence to support this assertion comes from outside of Canada: the countries of Russia, Belarus and Kazahkstan have banned the import and export of seal pelts.

Seal hunting has been vehemently criticized by celebrities like Pamela Anderson and Kelly Osbourne, and musicians including metalcore band The Agonist and singer Sarah McLachlan. World leaders like President Obama and Vladimir Putin have also said they disapprove of sealing.

Opposition to sealing from such notable names may have added to the initiative of Canadians to avoid seal products, or changed their opinions on the way these animals have been treated.

The controversial practice involves the deaths of thousands of seals, including young pups. They are savagely beaten over the head, hooked in the eyes, nose, or mouth, and pulled across the ice, often while still alive.

Sealing is more devastating during a time when seal pups are dropping off at a dramatic rate, due to thinning winter sea ice, as found in a study by scientists from Duke University and the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The study concluded, moreover, that sea ice cover (in areas that serve as breeding regions for harp seals) has been declining by about 6 percent per decade for quite some time, due to climate change.

David Johnston, research scientist at the Duke University Marine Lab, remarked, "The kind of mortality we're seeing in eastern Canada is dramatic."

After finding that 80 percent of the seal pups born in 2011 died due to lack of ice, IFAW has said that Canada ought to work toward ending the seal hunt for good, noting that all hunters should be compensated fairly for their work and retrained for other jobs.

"It is time for the Canadian government to face the reality that commercial seal hunting is neither viable nor necessary," said the organization.

"We know that the world appetite is [no longer] there for seal meat," said Cleary. And, "the world appetite for seal products ... I don't know if it's there [either]. And you know what? I might get shot for saying this - but that's a question we all have to ask."

Photo: A seal hunter drags a slaughtered seal back to his snowmobile during an annual seal hunt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Jonathan Hayward/AP

"Bread, freedom, human dignity": Mass protest returns to Tahrir Square

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:09:00 +0000

Hundreds of thousands rallied in Cairo's Tahrir Square and in other Egyptian cities Wednesday on the first anniversary of the Jan. 25, 2011, uprising that led to the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak.

BBC reporter Jon Leyne said the huge crowd in Cairo was "possibly the biggest gathering in Tahrir Square since that day nearly a year ago when they celebrated the departure of Hosni Mubarak. But as to the political significance - that's a bit harder to assess."

"There are now many competing agendas in Egypt," Leyne said. "On one side of the square the Islamists reveled in their recent success in the parliamentary elections. Their leaders are in behind-the-scenes talks with the military over a negotiated handover of power later this year. On the other side of the square, liberals and representatives of the youth movement were more openly antagonistic towards Egypt's military rulers. Many more people came just to enjoy what felt like a huge street party."

The Associated Press called it "a show of strength by secular groups in their competition with the country's powerful Islamists over demands for an end to military rule."

News reports, and the video below, indicate masses of protesters expressed anger over the slow pace of trials for those accused of killing protesters last year, demanded an end to military trials for civilians, and called for the ruling military council to hand over power to elected civilian government.

"Those in uniform who shot Egyptians dead in front of me still walk the streets freely," a Cairo tour guide told the UK Guardian. "Those that, like Mubarak, ordered such shootings - they remain in power instead of being behind bars. Listen to chants around us: 'Bread, freedom, human dignity.' Where are those things? Can we see or touch them? No, and that's why we're here today."

The video was made by Mosireen, which describes itself as "a non-profit media centre in Downtown Cairo born out of the explosion of citizen journalism and cultural activism in Egypt during the revolution." It shows students, doctors, workers, women and others demanding "change, freedom, social justice": (text continues below video)

BBC reported that Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, chair of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (known as Scaf) said on Tuesday that the state of emergency, which has been in place in Egypt almost continuously since 1967, would be lifted.

But he said the law would still be applied in cases of "thuggery." The military has used the term "thugs" to justify the crackdown on people demanding a return to civilian rule, the BBC said. Repeal of the much-hated emergency law has been a key demand of the protesters, the British news agency said.

Last year, the military council widened the scope of the emergency law to include labor strikes, traffic disruption and spreading false information.

The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions was formed a year ago, in opposition to the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation. The interim governing body has not recognized the approximately 300 independent unions that have been formed since then, with a membership of approximately 2 million, according to the Egyptian Independent, the English-language website of Al-Masry Al-Youm.

Reporter Jano Charbel writes, "Many workers say they have yet to see conditions change, despite their critical role in the protests that forced former President Hosni Mubarak from office. 'Workers continue to feel marginalized, just like they did under the Mubarak regime,' says Mahmoud Rihan, a leading organizer of the recently established Federation of Transport Workers."

Workers are demanding full-time contracts for full-time work, an increased minimum wage, official recognition of independent unions, passage of a trade union rights law, purging of corrupt officials from state institutions and companies, and re-nationalization of privatized companies, Charbel reports.

Thousands of protesters have remained in Tahrir Square since Wednesday. More than 50 political groups and parties announced additional protests planned for Friday, Jan. 27, which they are calling the "Second Friday of Anger." The Friday protests will demand Egypt's military rulers hand over power to an elected civilian authority.

Photo: Egyptians set up an obelisk in Cairo's Tahrir Square with the names of people who were killed during the 18-day uprising a year ago, to mark the uprising's first anniversary, Jan. 25, 2012. (AP/Amr Nabil)

Fracking banned in Bulgaria

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:05:00 +0000

Following major protests by environmentalists, lawmakers in Bulgaria voted to ban fracking, which thwarted plans for shale gas exploration by oil giant Chevron.

On January 18, the vote was 166 to six for putting a stop to the controversial gas retrieval process known as fracking, or hydraulic fracturing. Lawmakers also established a 100 million-lev ($65 million) fine for those who fail to obey this rule.

This development marks Bulgaria as the second country in the European Union to ban fracking, after France.

"The ban is for an indefinite period of time and is valid for the whole territory of the country, including the Black Sea territorial waters," said lawmaker Valentin Nikolov.

The legislation was passed four days after major demonstrations, in which several thousand people gathered at rallies to protest fracking. They had called for Parliament to put a moratorium on shale gas extraction.

The Chevron Corporation is headquartered in the U.S., where fracking has been criticized for the hazards it poses to the environment and the wellbeing of people. Environmental experts have linked the drilling process with underground water pollution, and a confirmed fracking-triggered earthquake in Ohio has led to stateside protests and a public hearing to investigate the situation.

Bulgaria would not be pushing the oil company out of the country entirely, as Energy Minister Traicho Traikov remarked, "Chevron can still have the right to test for oil and gas, but without using the controversial technology of hydraulic fracturing."

Chevron has recently decided to further explore the shale gas reserves of other countries, including Poland and the Ukraine, and is just one of several U.S. oil magnates to do so. Other major companies pursuing international fracking include Royal Dutch Shell, which is also drilling in the Ukraine, and Exxon Mobile.

The government of Bulgaria's fellow European Union state - Poland - meanwhile seems unfazed by these events and by the fracking ban. The Polish Foreign Ministry remarked that the Bulgarian legislation wouldn't sway the energy aspirations of the Polish government.

"This will not change Poland's existing position presented to the EU," said the Ministry in a statement. "Every member state has the sovereign right to define its own position regarding energy resources."

Poland has some of the richest shale gas deposits in Europe, which are currently under examination by both Chevron and Exxon Mobile. Though fracking protests have taken place in the country, they have so far not disrupted the Polish government's intention to pursue the practice.

In Bulgaria, although the Blue Coalition political party voted against the anti-fracking legislation, the party's co-leader Martin Dimitrov backed the moratorium, noting he was definitely "opposed to experiments done on Bulgaria. The time will come when the technology is [either proven] safe or its risks are clarified."

Photo: During a protest in Sofia, Bulgaria, an environmentalist protesting fracking holds up a sign that reads, "Shale gas - no thanks." Valentina Petrova/AP Photos

Lopez Obrador again runs for Mexico’s top office

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:45:00 +0000

MEXICO CITY - After losing the 2006 elections through fraud, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is once again vying for his country's top office as Mexico prepares to go to the polls later this year.

Running for the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the Worker's Party (PT), he is again offering a sharp break from the right-wing policies pursued by successive Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) and National Action Party (PAN) governments. He also said that he has laid the groundwork to ensure that electoral fraud does not take place again.

Lopez Obrador, a former schoolteacher and popular governor of the Federal District (a large state that includes Mexico City), ran as the PRD-PT's presidential candidate in 2006. Election officials announced that PAN candidate Felipe Calderon had narrowly won the elections over Lopez Obrador.

Evidence of widespread fraud and irregularities surfaced, however, as many of the final vote counts sent from each polling station did not match the numbers of people who reportedly voted.

The PRD and PT staged mass rallies and protests to demand a vote recount. Electoral authorities agreed to recount only 9.7 percent of polling places and fraud was uncovered. The final recount narrowed Calderon's lead over Lopez Obrador but the PAN presidential candidate was still declared the winner.

Since the 2006 elections, further evidence emerged of electoral fraud. A 2007 documentary made by well known Mexican filmmaker Luis Mandoki, "The Fraud that No One Saw," shows electoral authorities illegally tampering with ballots as well as sealed storage facilities for ballots that had illegally been opened.

Lopez Obrador is touring the country promising to implement social and economic policies to rescue the country from poverty and widespread unemployment if he is elected president. While Mexico is an oil and mineral rich country, 52 million people (out of 101 million) live in grinding poverty, according to newly released federal statistics. Out of the 52 million, 28 million suffer food insecurity, meaning they have difficulty getting enough to eat. Each year hundreds of thousands have to leave the country, many of them to the U.S., because there is no work.

"Mexicans suffer the paradox of living in a rich country with a poor people and it is obvious that this contradiction is not because of fate, destiny or bad luck, but because of political corruption, absence of justice and bad government," says Lopez Obrador.

"We are going to guarantee a minimum of well being and security to the population, from birth to death, from the cradle to the grave," he said, through the introduction of social programs. Mexico, a member of the Organization of Economic Development, spends one-third as much on social programs as do other member countries.

Lopez Obrador, who says his government will listen to everyone but will favor the most impoverished and humble, is promising a full range of programs to the population that will include free education and health care, scholarships for single mothers and pensions for the handicapped and seniors. He says he will also tackle rampant corruption within the government.

Lopez Obrador is critical of "free market" policies implemented in the 1980s and '90s through so-called free trade agreements with the U.S. and Canada that he says ravaged the Mexican economy.

He says that the better path for Mexico would be a program of growth that involves supporting national companies, small, medium and large, especially those that face unfair competition from powerful foreign rivals; investment in research and development to foster technological development; public works programs, such as environmental reclamation projects, roads and airport construction and bullet trains to connect urban centers, to stimulate the economy and create jobs and economic support to farmers in the countryside, where food production is declining.

Lopez Obrador sees economic growth and job creation as critical to resolving the drug gang violence that has swept the nation in the recent period.

"The problems of insecurity and violence are not going to be resolved just with soldiers, marines, police, jails, threats of 'mano dura' [tough hand] or severe laws, but with combating poverty and inequality," he says.

He also supports expanding educational opportunities for millions of young people who have been turned away from universities. The economic and social programs will be paid, he says, "through the elimination of privileges of high public functionaries, superfluous government spending and corruption. These measures will save $600 billion pesos from the public budget to be destined for development and public well being.",

The PRD-PT's presidential candidate also opposes privatization of the national oil company, PEMEX, and the electrical industry, as advocated by the PAN and PRI. Instead, he proposes to integrate the energy sector into one "grand company that will serve as a plank for national development."

During the 2006 elections, right-wing propaganda accused Lopez Obrador of being "a danger for Mexico" because he had the same radical agenda as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. During campaign speeches he has been careful, however, to distance himself from Chavez.

Lopez Obrador has spoken out against expropriating goods from the wealthy and has called on business people to support his campaign. He announced at a recent meeting with the business community in Guadalajara that he will appoint Fernando Turner Davila, ex-president of the National association of independent businesses and ex-director of several large businesses, as his economic secretary if he wins the elections. Obrador favors a mixed economy with public and private participation. "We are not enemies of business people," he says.

Many consider his record to be that of a left-wing social democrat.

As governor of the Federal District from 2000 to 2005, he introduced a pension for poor seniors, income support measures for single mothers, educational scholarships for poor children, a program to help thousands of homeless children leave the streets, a free health care health system for the poor and he built low cost housing. Instead of running the country with a "mano dura," Lopez Obrador is promising to run it democratically with an emphasis on public participation.

To prevent electoral fraud, he said that over the last six years he has toured the country and set up 40,000 committees to supervise and prevent the right wing from winning through fraud again. He stated that in 2006, "We did not have an adequate organization and l acted in good faith. I thought they were not going to dare [rob me]. But now we are organized and this time it will be distinct." The committees will ensure that there are people in each polling station across the country overseeing the vote count.

Meanwhile, polls suggest that PRI presidential candidate Enrique Pena Nieto is the front-runner in the upcoming elections. PAN is holding its primaries to elect a presidential candidate to replace Felipe Calderon who must step down this year because of the six-year term limit for presidents.

Photo: Andres Lopez Obrador speaks in Mexico City's main square, the Zocalo, in 2008. Chupacabras CC 2.0

Who's afraid of the big bad Wulff?

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:41:00 +0000

BERLIN - Americans wonder who will be president next January; Germans are still uncertain who will live in Berlin's presidential mansion this February. Its current resident, Christian Wulff, has been under strong pressure to do just the same as his predecessor did - resign!

For weeks the media have attacked Wulff with angry charges of corruption and lying to cover up the corruption. While still in his previous position as Minister-President of Lower Saxony, Wulffe bought a house for 500,000 euros which he had borrowed, not at the usual eight to ten percent interest rate but at only about four percent. from a millionaire friend named Egon Geerkens, who often accompanied him on state visits to other countries.

This could be considered preferential treatment - which is forbidden. When questioned in the legislature, Wulff denied financial connections with Geerkens, an old friend. When pressed, he insisted that the credit was not from Geerkens but from his wife. He also spent several vacations with the Geerkens and other wealthy friends; a few other dubious but minor transgressions were also discovered. This story lasted several weeks.

Then the media pounced again. It seems that Wulff, learning of the planned attack, had telephoned the editor and publisher of the huge newspaper BILD, the leader of the Wulff-hunters, and asked them to postpone publication until they could meet and talk things over. Otherwise it could mean legal action - and a war between them.

This private message, spoken in great anger, was lustily trumpeted by the media as proof that Wulff wanted to suppress freedom of the press. What a bad example for the nation - by the president! Now he must resign!

Some observers (like myself) are a bit skeptical. There is no doubt about the sleaze involved. And, despite his good looks and pleasant manner, Wulff's conservative background makes him hard to love.

But it is likely that rags like BILD, part of the mighty Springer network, similar in power and politics to the Murdock empire, have dirty dealings files on many if not most leading politicians. Was their choice of Wulff as prey really due to a sudden discovery of older sins? Wulff, after winning the presidency by the skin of his teeth, surprised many by taking moderate, even courageous positions on some topics, most notably by opposing vicious attacks on Muslims, which have been cranked up in recent years - especially by BILD.

In one important speech, for example, Wulff said, "We need to take a clear position. A view of Germany should not limit a sense of belonging here to a passport, a family background or a religious faith, it is far broader. Christianity certainly is part of Germany. Judaism is certainly part of Germany. That is our Christian-Jewish history. But in the meantime Islam has also come to belong to Germany."

BILD does not like such remarks. What BILD does like is the power to decide - using its 11 million readers - who should rule Germany and who should not. Until a year ago they were building up the jolly, handsome, rich, blue-blooded but very dangerous Baron Karl Theodor von Guttenberg as possible savior of Germany.

Their plans were stymied when it was found that his doctoral dissertation included plagiaries on 371 of its 393 pages. All attempts to save his job as cabinet minister proved impossible. He fled to the U.S., changed his image (no more gel in the hairdo) and wrote an autobiographical book titled, menacingly, "Defeated for the Time Being" ("Vorerst Gescheitert"). Now he has a job with the European Commission as consultant on assisting bloggers in "authoritarian countries." And he has hopes.

But even BILD cannot hope to make him president - not yet anyway! Yet it did want to force Wulff out.

The Greens joined the chase, so did the Social Democrats. Maybe they hoped to replace Wulff with the man he narrowly defeated, their choice, the East German preacher and Stasi-hunter Joachim Gauck, in no way progressive, perhaps closer in his anti-GDR polemics and general views to the one-time American hero J. Edgar Hoover. Promoting him would then offer another chance to provoke, embarrass and perhaps split the Left Party (whose co-presidents surprisingly joined the attack on Wulff).

It now seems that Wulff is stubbornly refusing to quit, despite BILD, and there is no impeachment process. And what is gradually becoming clearer to many Germans: the whole Wulff affair served to distract attention from other subjects, which were far too prominent for the bosses of BILD.

One was the increase in the pension age from 65 to 67, a gradual process which began on January 1st. Though originally passed by the Social Democratic-Green coalition with the approval of the current ruling powers, Christian Democrats and Free Democrats, and opposed only by the Left Party, the Social Democrats, hoping to regain power in 2013, have suddenly discovered that they made a mistake when in government.

Now they too are really opposed to a measure which clearly steals money from those workers in jobs too tiring for someone in their age group but also from all those who have trouble keeping or finding any job after 55 and will now have to wait until 67 to get much less in payments.

The Wulff affair also distracted from a very unpleasant pro-Nazi scandal. After the discovery of three pro-Nazi murderers, two of them in the form of corpses, more and more facts are leaking out about the incredible inability of the Constitutional Defense bureau - a German FBI - to find a criminal Nazi gang responsible for killing ten retail dealers of Turkish or Greek descent and a policewoman in well over a dozen years.

We now know more about close ties between the authorities and their spies within the Nazi movement who often held leadership positions and may well have been involved in some murders. Since German unification close to 200 immigrants and left-wingers have been murdered by right-wing extremists in Germany. The authorities, always active and interested in snooping on or damaging anyone on the left, have never gotten excited about Nazis.

The head of the Constitutional Defense Authority (Verfassungschutz), another man who refuses to step down, has just split the "extremism department" into two parts, left and right, and fired one department head in hopes of saving his own neck. The Bundestag is setting up a committee to investigate, a common method of changing nothing.

The woman who raises the issue of fascist violence every week in the Bundestag is a delegate of the Left Party. All its delegates have fought the neo-Nazi menace, both its suit-and-tie variety, the government-financed National Democratic Party (NPD), and its wide network of semi-secret (but well-known) brutal gangs of marching, maiming and sometimes murdering thugs.

For the most part it is they who get police protection, as in Magdeburg a week ago when 2,000 cops protected 1,200 Nazis against antifascists trying to block their way (past the rebuilt synagogue) into the center of town, where 10,000 had rallied to reject them.

The leaders of the anti-Nazi blockade in Dresden last February are still facing legal charges, and thousands of private Email and SMS messages of the more than 18,000 participants, carefully recorded, are still held in custody by the state authorities in Dresden and Saxony.

No one can predict what will happen next month, when the Nazis again try to rally and march in Dresden, and the anti-fascists again try to stop them with two main slogans: "Fascism is not an opinion, it's a crime" - amply proved in recent months - and, with memories of anti-fascists in Spain 75 years ago, "No pasaron!"

But those are not issues that BILD likes to offer readers. And now that Angela Merkel is maintaining support for Wulff the issue is fading, and BILD can again concentrate on its usual daily nudie photos and dramatic details about the Italian cruiser shipwreck.

Of little interest to BILD, the Left party and many smaller, more radical left-wing groups again took part in the annual pilgrimage to the grave sites of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the German Communist Party in January 1919 and brutally murdered two weeks later. Once again, tens of thousands either paraded for two miles to the site singing leftist songs and waving their banners or went by subway and walked quietly the last five or six blocks to place the traditional red carnations on the grave sites of the two and on sites dedicated to other old Social Democratic, Communist and GDR leaders and artists whose urns are set in the semicircular wall around the large memorial stone.

Noteworthy this time: there were present not only the faithful old-timers, many of whom worked most of their lives to build an anti-fascist, socialist Germany, who lost their struggle but maintain their dreams, but also, now outnumbering them, thousands of young people, mostly German but of other nationalities as well, who may carry on the fight.

A constant theme among the participants: Where is the Left Party going? It has been torn by personal and political disputes for over a year, has failed to overcome media opposition or general apathy, and has dropped from its high of almost 12 percent in the 2009 elections to a current level of 6 or 7 percent.

A meeting over the weekend pledged (once again, it must be added) to reverse the trend, stop fighting within the party and fight more for the people of Germany - and Europe, too, now threatened economically by the same powerful forces which are squeezing the money out of German working class and middle class pockets.

Will the Left Party succeed in overcoming its quarrels and get moving again? The probable return of the skilled orator and political leader Oskar Lafontaine to active leadership on a national level, next to Gregor Gysi and the others, is a good sign for many. A new fighting spirit is urgently needed.

I might add this closing detail: a small but novel one-day gesture has been decided upon for International Women's Day, March 8th. The female majority of 42 Left Party Bundestag delegates decided that on that day the 34 male delegates would work at jobs in the economy always relegated to women while the women delegates will hold all the party's speeches in the Bundestag.

Mexico's oil spill: another month for cleanup

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:39:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, a pipeline leak in coastal Mexico sent 1,500 barrels of oil gushing into a river, killing many fish. Now, says a report by Reuters, it could take another month to fully clean up the mess.

The oil is currently poisoning the Coatzacoalcos River. State-owned oil company Pemex has recovered about two-thirds of the mess, under supervision from the environmental protection agency Profepa.

The priority, said Profepa official Sergio Herrera, "is about containing the emergency. There will be further actions to clean the river, the banks of the river, and the zone where the damage has happened."

Pemex has contracted 140 workers to clean up the oil.

The company claimed the leak was the result of vandalism; that fuel thieves regularly tap into Mexico's pipeline network to steal gas and oil for sale on the black market, and in the process cause small spills.

Despite this claim, worrying images of blackened water and sickened animals have environmental groups calling Pemex's credibility into question - these groups are careful to note that Pemex has a spotty safety record: In December 2010, 28 people were killed when a giant spill caused by an illegal pipeline tap east of Mexico City caught fire and exploded. The Coatzacoalcos river oil spill is the biggest since that incident.

What's more, the environmental concern is perhaps doubled due to the fact that Pemex is expressing an ambitious desire to look for oil in the deep waters off the Gulf of Mexico.

"If Pemex is incapable of dealing with an oil spill in a river, how would they contain one at a deepwater project in the Gulf of Mexico?" asked Beatriz Olivera, of Greenpeace Mexico.

Mexico-based energy analyst David Shields suggested Pemex's problems could increase if they pursued oil exploration near the Gulf, and said moreover that upstream production and exploration posed different - and perhaps greater - risks than overland transport of oil for refining.

"The main onshore problem that Pemex is having with pipelines," said Shields, "is vandalism. If you have some kind of problem with deepwater platforms, it's very unlikely to be vandalism."

Mexico is currently the world's number seven oil producer, said a report by AlertNet, and has stabilized output at approximately 2.6 million barrels a day after a sharp decrease in its largest fields. Seeking to replace lost output from some of those fields - which are aging - Pemex looks upon the estimated 29 billion barrels of oil beneath its Gulf waters with envious eyes. Pemex wants to have about 50 deepwater oil wells by 2015.

The National Hydrocarbons Commission - the oil watchdog in Mexico - remarked that Pemex has not yet obtained all of the necessary safety equipment it would need to deal with potential deepwater accidents.

"We have not seen spills decline," Commission president Juan Carlos Zepeda was careful to note. Quite the contrary, "in the past three years, the number of incidents have increased, which is a risk factor."

Photo: In a 2005 oil spill, Pemex workers clean up the mess in the Coatzacoalcos River. Dario Lopez-Mills/AP

French election pollsters: Sarkozy slipping, both left and far right advancing

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:02:00 +0000

France elects a new president on April 22, with a runoff possible on May 6. As this date approaches, it would appear that incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy, of the right wing UMP or Union for a New Movement party, is going to have trouble holding on to power.

But Francois Holland, the candidate of the second-place Socialist Party, may not be the beneficiary of Sarkozy's decline in the polls as numbers are up for both both left and far right candidates: Jean Luc Melenchon, candidate of the left-wing Left Front which combines the French Communist Party, the Left, the Unitarian Left and others: and Marine le Pen, candidate of the far right and anti-immigrant National Front.

This is the lineup depicted by a voter preference poll conducted on by pollsters LH2 and Yahoo on Jan 14. The results show Sarkozy with 23.5 percent support and dropping, Hollande with 30 percent (also slightly down), and Francois Bayrou of the centrist Democratic Movement with 14 percent. Le Pen's score has jumped to 17 percent, while leftist Melenchon's figures have also increased, to 8.5 percent.

This bad news for Sarkozy came on top of an announcement by Standard and Poor's that they are lowering their rating of France's sovereign bonds from AAA to AA+, evidently because of the country's large budget deficit. Yet Sarkozy had justified his policies such as cutting the social welfare budget and increasing the retirement age on the basis of the urgent need to retain the AAA rating.

Hollande was tapped as the standard bearer of the Socialist Party last year when their favorite standard bearer, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, had to drop out after being arrested in New York for allegedly sexually assaulting a hotel employee. Even though Hollande's overall support has not been advancing, it seems that he would win a one-on-one runoff election against Sarkozy.

Jen Luc Melenchon was active in the Socialist Party for years until recently resigning to form his own party out of dissatisfaction with what he considers the socialists' right-wing tendencies. He is an admirer of the left-wing group of Latin American leaders such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales.

The French Communist Party (Parti Comuniste Francais) consists of the largest group in Melenchon's electoral "Left Front". There was some controversy about the choice of Melenchon to be the left's candidate as he formerly was a supporter of the European Union, but he has changed that position.

In response to the Standard and Poor's announcement, Melenchon denounced the rating agency but reiterated calls to make the banks pay to preserve the French people's social gains.

Praising Melenchon as the only one of the candidates who is calling for a clean break from big business dictated austerity and privatization policies, the French Communist Party called for mass demonstrations, a "social summit in the street" on January 17, 18 and 19 to demand:

A moratorium on austerity measures.
A reindustrialization policy with union wages and benefits.
An end to the overweening power of banks and the stock exchange.
Tax the corporations and the rich.
Rebuild public services.

Marine Le Pen is the daughter of long time ultra rightist politician and anti-immigrant agitator Jean Marie Le Pen, founder of the party for whom she is the candidate. She shares his anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant populist/nationalist philosophy. As in other Western European countries undergoing financial turmoil, some people who experience increasing economic and social insecurity are evidently taken in by this scapegoating game.

Weeklong "Occupy Nigeria" strike wins victory

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:32:00 +0000

A weeklong nationwide strike resulted in a victory for Nigerians as the government on Monday agreed to partially restore a popular fuel subsidy.

The decision followed a weekend of negotiations between labor leaders and government officials in order to avert a shutdown of the country's vital oil industry.

The spark which set off what has been dubbed "Occupy Nigeria," largely because of the significant participation of Nigerian youth, was President Goodluck Jonathan's decision on New Year's Day to end fuel subsidies.

The government claimed the program is too costly to continue - at an estimated $8 billion per year - and promised to invest the savings in the development of the nation's energy and transport infrastructure.

Nigerians responded with anger as the lifting of the fuel subsidy led to dramatic increases in the cost of food, transportation, and other necessities. They also pointed with skepticism to the billions and billions of dollars lost to the nation's rampant, notorious corruption, a cancer which affects all levels of the economy and government.

Banners in the Lagos demonstrations featured the slogan "Stop corruption, not the subsidy" and protesters re-named the president "Bad luck" Jonathan. Although he was supported by labor unions in his April re-election, Jonathan's New Year's surprise engendered strong opposition from a wide spectrum of Nigerian society.

Indeed, while the Nigerian government expected protests, it seems to have been caught off-guard by the immensity and fervor of the nationwide uprising as ordinary Nigerians vented their frustrations with larger issues like poor governance and economic inequality. Some commentators hoped the mass protests would lead to a "Nigerian Spring."

Tens of thousands of Nigerians protested in the streets of the commercial center of Lagos, the governmental capital of Abuja, and the largest city in northern Nigeria, Kano. Banks and businesses were shut, schools vacated, international flights canceled, and the country's main port closed.

While the demonstrations mostly were described as peaceful and orderly, Nigerian media reported 13 protesters killed and scores injured by the police. Curfews were enacted by local governments in cities across Nigeria.

The nationwide strike entered a new stage when the nation's oil workers threatened to disrupt the heart of the Nigerian economy. Last Thursday, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (Pengassan), the biggest oil labor union, ordered its members to stop working on Sunday, an action that would have drastically affected the country's production of 2 million barrels a day.

Since many of the operations are automated, the strike would not necessarily have entirely shut down oil production, but certainly would have sent shockwaves throughout the global capitalist economy. The members of the second largest oil labor union, the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, already had stopped working in solidarity with the nationwide strike.

Pengassan officials suspended the strike in favor of negotiations over the weekend. On Monday, President Jonathan announced that fuel prices would be cut by a third and promised to tackle corruption in the oil industry. Although he emphasized the price cut was temporary, unions called off the nationwide strike so that Nigerians could return to work and school.

Pengassan President Babtunde Ogun labeled the government's removal of the fuel subsidy "illegal, hasty, without consultation, and lacking in transparency." Ordinary Nigerians consider the two-decade-old subsidy the only perk they enjoy from Nigeria's oil wealth. Neo-liberal economists argue the subsidy discourages investment in local refineries and fosters corruption.

The removal of the fuel subsidy struck ordinary Nigerians very hard as the price of gas doubled. While there is a popular perception of fabulously wealthy Nigerians living in mansions and driving the latest luxury cars, fostered in "Nollywood" films and the so-called prosperity Christian churches, at least two-thirds of Nigerians live on less than $1.25 a day. The continent's most populous nation and sub-Saharan Africa's second largest economy is a country of extremes, where the super-rich live next to the destitute poor.

And despite being Africa's number one oil producer, accounting for 80 percent of the nation's revenues, Nigeria imports 70 percent of its fuel since it does not have sufficient refining capacity.

Nigeria is the fifth largest oil exporter to the United States, which maintains a significant military presence in the resource-rich West African sub-region, through its infamous AFRICOM program. Most of the oil is derived from offshore oil platforms owned by foreign firms like Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell, the latter famously accused of environmental degradation and complicity in human rights abuses in the Niger Delta.

In short, oil production in Nigeria is a case study in neo-liberal economics and the threatened shutdown by oil workers would have had global ramifications. Yet, the government's reversal on ending fuel subsidies displays the power workers have to potentially disrupt the capitalist economy.

Photo: Overhead view of massive protests on day five of the nationwide strike following the removal of a fuel subsidy by the government, in Lagos, Nigeria, Jan. 13. Sunday Alamba/AP

Iran solidarity group calls for halt to slide to war

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:35:00 +0000

The ongoing killing of Iranian scientists has been condemned as a provocation to war by a leading solidarity organization campaigning for peace in the Middle East. The UK-based Committee for the Defence of the Iranian People's Rights (CODIR) last week pointed out that the assassination of 32-year-old chemist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was the fifth time a scientist associated with Iran's nuclear program had been killed in the past two years.
CODIR says that if such actions had taken place on U.S. or British soil they would have been seen as tantamount to a declaration of war. The organization warns that there are elements within the Iranian regime which will see these actions in the same way and may foolishly and disastrously respond accordingly.
CODIR is calling for peace activists in the United States, the UK and across Europe and the Middle East in particular to put pressure upon their governments not to push for conflict with Iran but to keep the door open for dialogue. The solidarity group says the Iranian people should not be made to pay for the provocative positions taken by the Iranian government or the belligerence of the United States and its allies.
"The interests of the people of Iran are not served by war," CODIR Assistant General Secretary Jamshid Ahmadi said on Monday. "It is only the leaders of the theocratic regime in Tehran, who see war as a distraction from their serious internal problems, and the United States, which sees it as a further chance to consolidate their influence in the region, who would regard war as an option." He continued, "The Iranian people, through their progressive intellectuals, peace activists, progressive forces and labor organizations, have made it clear that they have no interest in conflict."
While the U.S. has been anxious to distance itself from the assassinations, the Israelis, in the person of the Israeli military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoay Mordechai, have expressed the view that they are "definitely not shedding a tear." Experts in the intelligence community suggest that the killings have all the hallmarks of an Israeli operation.
The possibility of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations, making it one step removed from a direct U.S. intervention, has long been considered a tactical option and CODIR says the assassination campaign and its consequences could make such an attack more likely.
"We will continue to do all we can to support the people of Iran", said Ahmadi, "and we are looking to the peace movements across the globe to do everything they can to avert a conflict. The ordinary people of Iran would certainly be the first victims of a war but many others would follow. We call for peace and respect for international law at all times."

Photo: An F/A-18F Super Hornet from the Black Aces of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 41 launches off the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis in the Arabian Sea, Jan. 3. U.S. Navy, Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Kenneth Abbate/AP

Escalating conflict with Iran could spur disastrous war

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:34:00 +0000

With 10 days of naval exercises by Iran having just been completed, including the testing of long-range ballistic missiles, the naval commander for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, has announced further activities next month. Fadavi has said that the drill in February will be "different compared to previous exercises held by the IRGC".

The exercises, coupled with the warning that Iran could close the strait of Hormuz, the narrowest point in the Persian Gulf, through which a fifth of the world's traded oil passes, has now encouraged the United States and Israel to announce that they are to carry out extensive joint maneuvers in the region. The U.S. and UK have said they will act to keep the shipping lanes open. Philip Hammond, the British defense secretary, said during a visit to Washington: "Disruption to the flow of oil through the strait of Hormuz would threaten regional and global economic growth. Any attempt by Iran to close the strait would be illegal and unsuccessful."

The planned U.S./Israeli maneuvers will involve thousands of troops and will test multiple Israeli and U.S. air defense systems against incoming missiles and rockets. Israel and the U.S. have developed the Arrow anti-ballistic system, which is designed to intercept Iranian missiles in the stratosphere.

At the end of January, it is anticipated that European Union foreign ministers will agree to impose an embargo on Iranian oil imports. The action follows a report in November by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which supported western allegations that Iran had worked on nuclear weapon design.

While the U.S. and EU believe tough action is needed in the dispute over Iran's nuclear program there is nevertheless a risk of damage to the shaky economies of the developed world. Iran is an important oil producer and exports around 2.3 million barrels a day. Even though there are guarantees in place from Saudi Arabia to make up any shortfall in Iranian oil supply, this would use up virtually all of the spare capacity from the world's biggest producer. The last time that happened, in 2008, oil prices climbed to almost $150 a barrel. Prices are currently running at around $110 a barrel. A leap to $150 a barrel would, without question, lead to a deep global recession in 2012.

It is clear then that the stakes are high for all sides in the dispute. The threat of loss of supply may be enough to trigger recession in the West, while the reality of choking off the Persian Gulf certainly would result in recession.

In Iran, parliamentary elections are scheduled for March this year with a presidential election planned for 2013. The one is in many respects a rehearsal for the other, with many observers seeing the March elections as a showdown between supporters of President Ahmadinejad on one side and conservatives close to Ayatollah Khamenei on the other. The fact is that all independent, left and progressive forces have already openly protested about the conditions in which the parliamentary elections are taking place by announcing their decision to boycott them altogether.

Khamenei himself has acknowledged the sensitivity of the poll in March, stating that "To some extent, elections have always been a challenging issue for our country," and going on to ask people "to be careful that this challenge does not hurt the country's security".

This is clearly a coded warning to any reformist and opposition groups not to "rock the boat," especially in the face of the external threat from the U.S., EU and Israel. Although more than 5,000 candidates have put their names forward for the parliamentary elections, the Council of Guardians of the Constitution, the body of conservative clerics and lawyers in charge of vetting all candidates before elections, will publish the names of those approved by the regime. In the past, the Council has blocked many, including former MPs, from running. It was indeed announced this week that 500 of the 5,000 candidates registered for the March election have already been disqualified. This includes about 20 outspoken and independent MPs serving in the current outgoing parliament.

The election is the first significant test of the regime's ability to bring people to the polls and control the outcome in its favor since the 2009 presidential election, which saw widespread vote-rigging and the "election" for a second term of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the face of well-documented opposition claims that they had outpolled the incumbent president. In 2009 the regime responded by deploying brute force to silence the mass protest movement. Nearly 100 protesters were killed and thousands of activists were imprisoned. The opposition candidates have been detained since that time and denied any right to speak openly on any issue.

The recent announcement that Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, an Iranian-American born in Arizona in 1983, is to be sentenced to death for confessing to being a CIA agent will do little to improve relations between the U.S. and the regime. With U.S. Congress financial sanctions aimed at Iran's oil trade, due to come into effect in June, the stage is set for ongoing drama in the Persian Gulf and the potential for wider economic and military impact if all sides cannot be brought to the discussion table.

No one can be in any doubt that this situation, if not resolved, could lead to a major conflagration of unimaginable proportions and with consequences that will reverberate throughout the Middle East and across the world. Everything possible must be done to ensure that a military conflict is prevented, including the withdrawal of U.S. and British naval forces from the Persian Gulf.

Photo: The aiircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush passes through the Strait of Hormuz, Oct. 9, 2011. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Betsy Knapper.

Obama's dangerous Asia "pivot"

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

"On his recent trip to Asia Pacific, the President made it clear that the centerpiece of this strategy includes an intensified American role in this vital region," Financial Times Nov. 28, 2011
- Tom Donilon, President Barak Obama's national security advisor

"An Indo-Pacific without a strong U.S. military presence would mean the Finlandisation by China of countries in the South China Sea, such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore," Financial Times Nov. 30, 2011
- Robert Kaplan, senior fellow Center for a New American Security and author of "Monsoon:
The Indian Ocean the Future of American Power"

Donilon is a long-time Democratic Party operative and former lobbyist for Fannie Mae and a key figure in the Clinton administration's attack on Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. Kaplan is a Harvard Business School professor and advisor on the Mujahedeen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, as well as current U.S. military intervention in the Horn of Africa.

Something is afoot.

Indeed, it is. In both cases, a substantial buildup of military forces and a gloves-off use of force lie at the heart of the new approach.

The U.S. now has a permanent military force deployed in the Horn of Africa, a continent-wide military command - Africom - and it has played a key role in overthrowing the Libyan government. It also has Special Forces active in Uganda, Somalia, and most of the countries that border the Sahara.

But it is in Asia that the administration is making its major push, nor is it coy about whom the target is. "We are asserting our presence in the Pacific. We are a Pacific power," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at the National Defense University in August, "we know we face some long-term challenges about how we are going to cope with what the rise of China means."

There is whiff to all this of old fashioned Cold War hype, when the U.S. pumped up the Russian military as a world-swallowing force panting to pour through the Fulda Gap and overrun Western Europe: the Chinese are building a navy to challenge the U.S.; the Chinese are designing special missiles to neutralize American aircraft carriers; the Chinese are bullying nations throughout the region.

Common to Clinton's address, as well as to Kaplan's and Donilon's opinion pieces, were pleas not to cut military spending in the Pacific. In fact, it appears the White House is already committed to that program. "Reduction in defense spending will not come at the expense of the Asia Pacific," Donilon wrote, "There will be no diminution of our military presence or capabilities in the region."

The spin the White House is putting on all this is that the U.S. has been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, allowing China to throw its weight around in Asia. Donilon's opinion piece was titled "America is back in the Pacific and will uphold the rules."

It is hard to know where to begin to address a statement like that other than with the observation that irony is dead.

Asia and the Pacific has been a major focus for the U.S. since it seized the Philippines in the 1899 Spanish-American War. It has fought four major wars in the region over the past century, and, not counting China's People's Liberation Army (PLA), it deploys more military personnel in the Pacific than any other nation. It dominates the region through a network of bases in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the Marshall Islands, and island fortresses like Guam and Wake. The White House just announced the deployment of 2,500 Marines to Australia.

The American Seventh Fleet - created in 1943 and currently based in Yokosuka, Japan - is the largest of the U.S.'s naval fleets, and the one most heavily armed with nuclear weapons.
We aren't "back," we never went anywhere.

But the argument fits into the fable that U.S. military force keeps the peace in Asia. Kaplan even argues, "A world without US naval and air dominance will be one where powers such as China, Russia, India, Japan and others act more aggressively toward each other than they do now, because they will all be far more insecure than they are now."

In short, the kiddies will get into fights unless Uncle Sam is around to teach them manners. And right now, China is threatening to upend "the rules" through an aggressive expansion of its navy.

China is indeed upgrading its navy, in large part because of what the Seventh Fleet did during the 1995-96 Taiwan Straits crisis. In the middle of tensions between Taipei and Beijing, the Clinton administration deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Straits. Since there was never any danger that China was going to invade Taiwan, the carriers were just a gratuitous slap in the face. China had little choice but to back down, but vowed it would never again be humiliated in its home waters. Beijing's naval buildup dates from that crisis.

And "buildup" is a relative term. The U.S. has made much of China acquiring an aircraft carrier, but the "new" ship is a 1990 vintage Russian carrier, less than half the size of the standard American Nimitz flattop (of which the U.S. has 10). The "new" carrier-killer Chinese missile has yet to be tested, let alone deployed. Only in submarines can China say it is finally closing the gap with the U.S. And keep in mind that China's military budget is about one-eighth that of the U.S.

If the Chinese are paranoid about their sea routes and home waters, it is not without cause. Most invasions of China have come via the Yellow Sea, and 80 percent of China's energy supplies come by sea. China ships much of its gas and oil through the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. With major suppliers based on the west coast of Africa, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, it has little choice. Those sea-lanes are controlled by the U.S. Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain and the Seventh in Japan.

China is also building friendly ports for its tankers - the so-called "string of pearls" - and that is why Beijing is suspicious about the sudden thaw in U.S.-Myanmar relations. China plans to build a "pearl" in Myanmar.

Indeed, a major reason why China is building pipelines from Russia and Central Asia is to bypass the series of choke points through which its energy supplies pass, including the straits of Hormuz and the Malacca Strait. The Turkmenistan-Xingjian and Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean pipelines are already up and running, but their volume is not nearly enough to feed China's 11 billion barrels of oil a day appetite.

In spite of protests, the U.S. recently carried out major naval operations in the Yellow Sea, and Washington has injected itself into tensions between Beijing and some of its neighbors over the South China Sea. In part, China has exacerbated those tensions by its own high-handed attitude toward other nations with claims on the Sea. In responding to protests over China's claims, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi remarked, "China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that is just a fact."

China's initial arrogance on the issue has allowed the U.S. to wedge itself into the dispute and portray itself as the "protector" of small nations. Less than 40 years ago it was trying to bomb several of those nations back into the Stone Age, and Vietnam just recorded its 100,000th casualty since 1975 from explosives left over by the American war.

Beijing has since cooled its tone on the South China Sea and is backing away from defining it as a "core" Chinese area.

Why the "strategic pivot?" Undoubtedly, some of it is posturing for the run-up to the 2012 elections. Being "tough" on China trumps Republican charges that Obama is "soft" on foreign policy. But this "pivot" is more than cynical electioneering.

First, China does not pose any military threat to the U.S. or its allies in Asia, and the last thing it wants is a war. Beijing has not forgotten its 1979 invasion of Vietnam that ended up derailing its "four modernizations" drive and deeply damaging its economy.

Part of this "China threat" nonsense has to do with the power of the U.S. armaments industry to keep the money spigots open. When it comes to "big ticket" spending items, navies and air forces top the list. An aircraft costs in excess of $5 billion, and the single most expensive weapons program in U.S. history is the F-35 stealth fighter.

But there is more than an appetite for pork at work here.

China is the number two economy in the world, and in sharp competition with the U.S. and its allies for raw materials and human resources. It is hard to see the aggressive U.S. posture in Asia as anything other than an application of the old Cold War formula of economic pressure, military force, and diplomatic coercion. From Washington's point of view, it worked to destabilize the Soviet Union, why shouldn't it work on China?

"If you are a strategic thinker in China," says Simon Tay, chair of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, "you do not have to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to think that the U.S. is trying to bandwagon Asia against China."

Since U.S. foreign policy is almost always an extension of corporate interests, squeezing China in Asia, Africa and Central Asia helps create openings for American investments. And if such a policy also protects the multi-billion dollar military budget, including the likes of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman, so much the better.

It is a dangerous game, first, because military tension can lead to war, and, while that is an unlikely event, mistakes happen. "If we keep this up, then we are going to leave the impression with China that we are drawing battle lines," Douglas Paal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Financial Times. In fact, the Obama administration has drawn up a plan called AirSea Battle to deny China control of the Taiwan Straits.

The consequences for those caught in the middle will be severe. China has pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but it still has a ways to go. An arms race will delay that. For the average American, racked by double-digit unemployment, a vanishing safety net, and the collapse of everything from education to infrastructure, it will be no less of a tragedy.

This article originally appeared in Dispatches from the Edge and Counterpunch.

Photo: Creative Commons 2.0

“Doomsday” clock pushed forward amidst fears of nuclear conflict

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:28:00 +0000

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a Chicago-based magazine founded by nuclear scientists shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has moved forward the time on its symbolic "Doomsday" clock. Created in 1947 to represent the relative closeness of the threat of nuclear disaster, the clock's face has been adjusted twenty times since then and now also reflects developments in other technologies and the sciences that could "inflict irrevocable harm" on the human species.

In statements made yesterday, the publication's Science and Security Board members and its director provided information about the clock's adjustment. Previously, the clock had been positioned at a setting of six minutes to midnight in Jan. 2010, when "it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats we face," said board member Allison MacFarlene, an environmental science and policy professor at George Mason University in Virginia.

Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and prominent science writer, cited "[i]naction on climate change and rising international tensions" as the reason for the clock's movement, and said that world leaders are "failing to change business as usual." The decision was made Jan. 9 at a symposium in a law firm building in Washington, D.C., wherein Science and Security Board members reviewed recent events with sponsors and scientific experts.

Originally set at 11:53, the clock moved as far as 11:58 in 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union both tested thermonuclear devices. Following the avoidance of direct American-Soviet confrontation during the Suez Crisis, along with the organization of International Geophysical Year and the Pugwash Conferences, the BAS downgraded the threat in 1960. Both activities allowed American and Soviet scientists increased interaction, while the group also observed an increase in public understanding of nuclear threats.

Between 1960 and 1991, the clock moved backward and forward a number of times, moving furthest from midnight upon American and Soviet signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Thereafter, with the exception of the downgrade in 2010, the position of the clock has advanced closer to midnight since 1991, when the threat was rated lowest, at 11:43 upon the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Notably, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the point at which nuclear conflict reached its greatest potential during the Cold War, emerged and closed without a corresponding adjustment of the clock.

Commenting in the Bulletin's press release from Tuesday, Jayatha Dhanapala, a former Sri Lankan ambassador and past UN secretary-general for disarmament affairs, spoke favorably of a "new spirit of international cooperation" and an overall reduction in tensions between Russia and the United States. However, Dhanapala warned that "failure to act on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by leaders in the United States, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel and North Korea on a treaty to cut off production of nuclear weapons material continues to leave the world at risk[.]"

Dhanapala ended his statement by noting that "the world still has over 19,000 nuclear weapons, enough power to destroy the world's inhabitants several times over."

Media throws blanket on Shell Oil atrocities in Nigeria

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:50:00 +0000

Last month, oil magnate Royal Dutch Shell had an industrial accident, which sent one to two million gallons of oil straight into the ocean off the coast of Nigeria. It was the worst spill in Nigeria in 13 years and the world media took no notice.

Shell's says it has cleaned up its mess. People of villages along the coastline would disagree - they insist oil is still washing up there, in excessive amounts. The major media seems generally disinterested, and has not visibly bothered to check the facts either way. In fact, except for a few environmental groups, outrage against Shell is seemingly nonexistent.

The truth is, Shell and other oil companies in this part of the world are rarely scrutinized, and many of the people in these areas lack the political and media power to do anything about the problem.

The extent of the damage done should not be underestimated. Sensitive coastal wetlands have been poisoned, and fishing areas have become wastelands. One could easily look to BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill for comparison; the damage done to the bayou's delicate ecosystem is on par with what has been done here.

Throughout coastline villages, Shell and other oil giants have left their mark on the people. Disease, birth defects, and chronic illnesses are just some of the side effects of a life in the midst of one toxic disaster after another.

A recent report by the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization exposed Shell's tainted legacy when it outlined a 14-month study conducted by a team from the United Nations environmental program. The study found that it would take a minimum of 30 years to clean up the Niger Delta and repair the environmental damage, with a price tag starting at over $1 billion.

These types of disasters are not unusual for Nigeria; the oil and gas industry has plagued the area for over 50 years. And Shell in particular has done more than pollute the water - it has left its blackened stains upon the native Ogoni people, as well.

In 1995, Shell was connected with the government-sanctioned death of Nigerian journalist and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who led one of the first and most powerful campaigns against Shell and its inexcusable behavior. Saro-Wiwa also exposed the oil giant's corrupt practices with the local government.

Shell is also considered responsible for acts of violence against the area's Ogoni people, including the torture, illegal detention, forced exile, and shootings of Ogoni protesters throughout the 90s.

In 1990, Saro-Wiwa helped found the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, bringing its case against Shell's acts of ecoterror to an international audience. As a result, Saro-Wiwa and his fellow activists - together called the Ogoni Nine - were arrested on trumped-up charges and badly beaten. They were subsequently put on trial before a tribunal without legal representation and promptly sentenced to death.

Another aspect of Shell's current oil spill that ought to be put into the spotlight is the technology the company has at its disposal, according to a report by Wired Science.

"The significance here is the technology they're using," agreed John Amos of the environmental watchdog group Skytruth. "It's a whole new source of potentially major oil spills."

The oil is collected via a method called floating production storage and offloading (FPSO), said the report, which involves crude oil being piped to floating mobile tanks instead of fixed platforms. Shuttle tankers then collect the oil from the FPSO. FPSOs are now a hallmark of the oil industry, and were recently customized for deepwater operations.

A good example of an FPSO is a vessel "that can hold 600,000 barrels of oil," said Amos. "When it's full, it will be holding 25 million gallons. If there's any serious problem that occurs 160 miles offshore - if you get damage from a major storm because you didn't get out of the way in time, if there's a terrorist attack, if there's an explosion, then you've potentially got a near-instantaneous release of tens of millions of gallons of oil."

What it all comes down to, Amos believes, is that the technology is primitive for such a process, and plays a huge role in the likelihood of disasters very much like that which occurred in Nigeria.

In the case of this spill, the incident happened during an attempted oil transfer between two ships. When problems like this occur, the number of FPSOs would multiply the risk.

"We're ushering in an entirely new kind of technology with what appears to be very little public scrutiny," Amos concluded. "We need to do a better job of understanding the risks."

But up until now, rather than from technology, the greatest risk has come from Shell's corruption and continuous pursuit of oi l in and around the sensitive Niger Delta.

Though insult was added to injury after Shell's false claim that the oil is now cleaned up, people in Nigeria look for hope in final statement Saro-Wiwa made at his trial: "Shell's day will surely come," he said. "The crime of the company's dirty wars against the Ogoni people will be punished."

Photo: Nigeria's Ogoni community tries to raise awareness regarding the atrocities committed by Royal Dutch Shell. Bebeto Matthews/AP

Hungary's government lurches further to the right

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:27:00 +0000

The right-wing populist government of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, of the Fidesz Party, has been taking measures that many fear will not only move this country of 10 million people further to the right, but will also give the state authoritarian powers that will let it ride roughshod over all opposition.

Fidesz won a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Hungarian parliament in 2010. The previously governing Socialist Party had suffered a massive loss of public prestige after it came out that former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsanyi had lied to the public about the country's economic situation. The 2010 election also saw the rise of an extreme right-wing party, Jobbik, which has worked to legitimize various reactionary ideological trends that have a long history in Hungary, including anti-Semitism and anti Ziganism (prejudice against Roma, or Gypsies), as well as belligerent nationalism.

Hungarian right-wing nationalism has its roots in the period between the two world wars.

In the First World War, Hungary was part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a large amount of internal autonomy, though the emperor of Austria was also the king of Hungary.

After the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918, large pieces of Hungary's land and population were divided up among its neighbors, Romania and two new states that came out of the war, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The old regime in Hungary, which was dominated by landholding aristocrats and urban bankers and industrialists, was swept from power. But first a liberal regime (under Mihaly Karolyi) and then a short-lived communist one (under Bela Kun) were unable to solve the country's internal problems or successfully resist pressure from the victorious Entente powers, especially Romania and France.

As a result, not only did Hungary lose territory in the Trianon Treaty of 1919, but as many as a third of the Magyars, or ethnic Hungarians, ended up outside Hungary's borders. There was a special resentment of the fact that Transylvania, formerly an autonomous principality with a large Magyar population, went to Romania.

In 1919, reactionary forces grouped around Admiral Miklos Horthy de Nagybanya swept into power, displacing Bela Kun's communist-led government. Their project of repressing communists, socialists and trade unionists inspired the promotion of a right-wing nationalist ideology that could justify such measures. The right-wing slogan "nem, nem soha" ("no, no never"), which referred to the loss of Hungarian territory and people, dates from this time.

Hungary once more defined itself as a monarchy, with Admiral Horthy as "regent" in place of an absent King Karl, who was kept out of the country by force. A series of governments dominated by conservative aristocrats made sure that communists and socialists were repressed, trade unions limited in their scope, and nationalist ideology taught in the schools. At the same time, fascist groups challenged the regime's grip on power with an even more right-wing ideology increasingly attuned with those of Mussolini and Hitler. This, and the promise of getting back lands lost in the Trianon Treaty, eventually brought Hungary into World War II on the Axis side.

The war was an unmitigated disaster for Hungary. Admiral Horthy made belated efforts to disengage a defeated Hungary from its alliance with Germany and make peace with the Western allies and the USSR. This led to a Nazi-sponsored coup, the arrest by Germany of Horthy and members of his government, and even more brutality and bloodshed, as Jews were hunted down. Much of Hungary, including the streets of Budapest, became a gruesome battleground during the last desperate days of the war.

In 1948, a socialist government came to power, supported by the USSR. In 1956, there was an anti-communist rebellion, which was put down. Hungary remained socialist from 1948 until the collapse of the Soviet and Eastern European socialist systems at the beginning of the 1990s.

During the socialist period and for a while thereafter, the right-wing nationalist ideology epitomized by the "nem, nem soha" slogan was not allowed to flourish. But it is now revived full force. Orban's government has revived the idea that Hungary has a special right and responsibility to speak out in representation of the Magyar minorities in neighboring countries, a stance that has alarmed the governments of Slovakia, Romania and Serbia.

Prime Minister Orban and the Fidesz party have taken advantage of the supermajority they gained in the April 2010 election to ram through drastic modifications of the constitution.

They have withdrawn government recognition from a number of religious communities, including Muslims, Buddhists and Methodists. They have managed to criminalize the Communist Party (Hungarian Communist Workers Party) and its slogans and symbols, officially and legally equating it with fascism, and making possible the prosecution of former members of the socialist regime. They have reduced the power of labor unions, and worked to bring the press and cultural institutions under their political control so as to promote their right-wing, nationalist-populist ideology. On the other hand, Orban has so far held back from imposing the austerity measures being implemented in Portugal, Greece and Spain, and, to the alarm of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, made an assault on the autonomy of the Hungarian central bank.

But Hungary is in bad shape economically. Both unemployment and the public (equivalent to the entire Gross Domestic Product) and private debt are sky high. Although it is not a member of the Euro currency zone (while it is a member of the European Union and NATO), Hungary has been heavily dependent for credit on the selfsame European Union banks that are currently threatened by the crises in the poorer Western European countries, the so-called "PIIGS" (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain).

And two weeks ago, the Fitch bond rating agency followed Moody's and Standard and Poors in lowering Hungary's sovereign bonds to junk status, just as Orban's government was making a desperate plea for a bailout loan to the International Monetary Fund. It seems that Orban may back off his effort to bring the central bank under his control rather than endanger the proposed IMF bailout.

Orban's Fidesz Party government has suffered a massive loss of public support, and large-scale demonstrations against its policies are beginning to take place. However, it remains to be seen if it will respond to this by backing down from some of its right-wing positions, or if it will now move to play the fascist card in an even more forceful way, taking advantage of the disunity of the left.

After five years, Mexico still in the grip of drug war

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 12:09:00 +0000

MEXICO CITY - Five years after President Felipe Calderon sent soldiers into cities and towns across the country to dismantle drug cartels, Calderon is still far from achieving his goal. Instead, it appears the Mexican government has lost control of the situation and turned the country into a battlefield.

Not a day passes without the country's newspapers and television news networks mentioning the latest casualties, deaths and battles. Every day bodies are found, often with signs of torture. The drug cartels are waging a brutal war against government security forces and rival cartels to control lucrative drug exports to the United States. The cartels make between $18 - $39 billion in drug profits each year, according to official estimates.

Women become victims of sex trafficking

Some of the cartels are also involved in trafficking women and make as much profit from this as the sale of drugs, according to the U.S.-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs. They usually kidnap or blackmail young Mexican women, forcing them to work in Mexican or U.S. brothels or strip clubs.

One of the favored tactics used by the cartels is to leave decapitated bodies or body parts such as severed heads or arms in public spaces to terrorize security forces, rivals and the public. There have been ongoing reports of mass graves being uncovered throughout Mexico.

Mexican soldiers often cover their faces to hide their identities during operations, fearful that the "narcos" will discover their names and send gunmen to kill their families. Two years ago, the names of two soldiers who died in a shoot out with narco leaders in Guadalajara were revealed by news media. The next day gunmen showed up at the doorsteps of the dead soldiers' family homes and killed most of their family members.

Estimates of the number of deaths range from 50,000 to 67,000 over the last five years. These figures do not include the thousands of people who have disappeared across Mexico and never been heard from again.

So far, the armed forces, while killing or arresting many key figures belonging to the country's five main cartels, have been unable to destroy Mexico's principal narco organizations.

Government suspected of ties to cartels

Some critics also charge that the Calderon government has ties with some of the cartels, to which they are providing protection.

The only safe place in the country where there is no fighting is the Federal District, a large state that encompasses Mexico City. Cartel and government leaders, who live in the FD and do not want a bloody war in their backyard, appear to have called a truce.

Human rights advocates also charge that security forces, in the process of battling the cartels, have committed human rights abuses against the civilian population as well as human rights activists. Complaints to state and national human rights commissions have sky rocketed as victims complain of harassment, theft, torture, rape and illegal confinement at the hands of military and police forces.

Profiting from drug trade

According to economist and investigator Olga Rivera Barragan from the Intercultural Indigenous University of Michoacan, the cartels play a big role in the Mexican economy. Drug profits are one of the top sources of foreign exchange for the economy. The cartels employ hundreds of thousands of men and women and pay high wages in a low-wage economy with high unemployment. Mexican banks also launder drug profits for international cartels.

"Working for drug cartels has become a normal activity among many families," said Barragan. She warns that Mexico "is in a state of social decomposition."

The drug cartels have been able to count on U.S. government support as well. According to a Dec. 11, 2011 article in the New York Times, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has been washing millions of dollars of Mexican drug money for the cartels, as well as transporting drug profits back and forth from Mexico to the U.S. over the last several years. They have also been depositing money into banks accounts of cartel officials. The DEA claims they have been doing this to obtain intelligence information on the cartels. One anonymous DEA official, when asked how much money the organization was laundering, would only say "a lot."

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, under a program called "Fast and Furious," allowed smugglers to buy and sell U.S.-made modern armaments to the cartels. These revelations have caused shockwaves in Mexico.

Source links drug war to neoliberal economic policies

A source in Mexico's military intelligence services said in an interview, "Calderon initiated the war against the cartels to legitimize his presidency." Calderon gained power through electoral fraud in 2006 over left-wing rival Andres Lopez Obrador. Many Mexicans do not believe that Calderon is their legitimate president.

The source said Calderon never knew the magnitude of the power of the drug cartels. He has surrounded himself with advisors who are not very astute. The drug cartels are powerful economic and military players in Mexico. They have powerful private armies with thousands of well-trained and well-led men with the latest weaponry and telecommunications equipment, often times better than that of the Mexican army.

Last year the Mexican army discovered that ex-soldiers from the Guatemalan army were training recruits for the Zeta Cartel. The cartels have also been able to recruit ex-soldiers and officers from the Mexican army. Cartels have infiltrated all levels of government, political parties as well as military and police forces, said the source.

Neo-liberalism, championed by Calderon's National Action Party (PAN) government, has also allowed the cartels to thrive, remarked the source. Neo-conservative policies promoting low wages and high unemployment have made working for the cartels an attractive source of employment. The cartels offer their workers much higher wages than in the formal and informal economies.

"To counter the drug cartels, it is necessary to change the economic model in Mexico," said the source.

The source said that there are links between the Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquin El Chapo Guzman and the Calderon government. Calderon has gone out of his way to protect the Sinaloa Cartel while targeting the other cartels.

A conflict between the armed forces and the Calderon government over how to deal with the cartels exists, the source continued. "The military wants to kill the narcos. They believe it is too dangerous to put them in jail and try to rehabilitate them." The Calderon government cannot endorse this strategy because it would risk international condemnation. The source said the army has formed death squads to eliminate the cartels, increasing casualties.

The Calderon government knows what the military is doing but has turned a blind eye. The source estimates at least 80,000 have died over the last 5 years.

Photo: In this June 15, 2009 file photo, soldiers stand in line as they prepare to board vehicles at the Military School in Mexico City to be deployed to the northern part of Mexico to participate in drug crop eradication duties and to learn first-hand Mexico's ongoing war against the drug cartels. Five years after President Felipe Calderon launched his assault on organized crime, about 45,000 troops have been deployed, plus several thousand more from the Navy infantry, or marines. More than 45,000 people have been killed by several counts, though the government stopped giving figures on drug war dead when they hit nearly 35,000 a year ago. Still, the flow of drugs continues unabated into the U.S. while arms and money flow into Mexico. (AP/Dario Lopez-Mills)

In Nigeria, Shell causes worst oil spill in a decade

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:58:00 +0000

In Nigeria, coastal and fishing communities are worried, as Shell has admitted to causing the worst oil spill there in ten years, said a report, which was closely followed by a second disaster.

Last Wednesday, 75 miles off the coast of the Niger delta, up to 40,000 barrels of crude oil were spilled, poisoning the water, during an attempted transfer from an oil platform to a tanker.

As of that night, all production from the Bonga field - which typically produces about 200,000 barrels of oil a day - was halted.

Satellite images showed that the spill spread over 356 square miles. Shell responded by spraying dispersants on the oil and deploying booms to stop its spread. Regardless, Nigerian villagers note that oil is still washing up on the coast.

Moreover, Nnimmo Bassey, head of Environmental Rights Action, remarked that Shell's statements about the amount of oil spilled and the supposed subsequent clean-up are not to be trusted, and that other local activists do not buy the company's 'facts.'

"Shell says 40,000 barrels were spilled and production was shut," said Bassey, "But we do not trust them because past incidents show that the company consistently underreports the amounts and impacts of its carelessness."

"We are alerting fisher folks and coastal communities to be on the lookout," he added. "This just adds to the list of Shell's environmental atrocities in the Niger delta."

Jacob Ajuju, a local villager, said, "When this spill occurred, we called on Shell to come and do a clean-up, but since then, they did not turn up, so we the communities had to do it instead."

And now, Shell is trying to plug a second leak caused by a shut down pipeline in the Niger delta's Nembe Creek. The pipeline was reportedly sabotaged, after the Bayelsa State Ministry of Environment noted that oil thieves had installed valves on it.

Oil theft - or 'bunkering' - is often the source of blame when Shell is linked with destructive oil spills in this region, reported Reuters. However, human rights groups like Amnesty International often find a much more appropriate source to blame - Shell itself, for its negligence in its continuous greedy pursuit of oil, which has resulted in troubling developments in other parts of the world.

These latest disasters in Nigeria come after Shell admitted in August 2011 that it was responsible for "two major spills in the Bodo region of the delta that took place in 2008," which it has "yet to pay compensation for," according to the The Daily Activist.

Shell has also admitted that it closed a Gulf of Mexico deep drilling operation after reportedly spilling 319 barrels of contaminated fluids - and that spill, reports the Telegraph, came less than a week after the U.S. conducted its first auction for drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico since the infamous 2010 oil disaster. That auction drew opposition from many concerned environmental groups and, as this 319-barrel spill proves, rightly so.

Photo: "Overhead view of Shell's oil spill in the Niger Delta region." Sunday Alamba/AP Photos

World communist parties: "Socialism is the future"

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:24:00 +0000

ATHENS - "Socialism is the future" was the theme of a meeting here of communist and workers parties from 59 countries last month. The question, of course, was how to get to socialism. Varied views were expressed on this. (Note to Glenn Beck types who conjure up a monolithic "world communist conspiracy": it just ain't so.)

At the same time, the meeting demonstrated that those who say socialism is dead need to think again.

An array of countries were represented where communist and workers parties lead or are part of the government. These include not only countries like Cuba, Vietnam and Laos, but also, for example, Guyana, where the People's Progressive Party has led the government for 19 years; South Africa, where communists, as members of the African National Congress, serve in government; Cyprus, whose president is a leader of the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL); and a number of Latin American countries such as Brazil and Paraguay, where communists hold positions in governments led by allied progressive forces.

The gathering, hosted by the Communist Party of Greece, was held Dec. 9-11 at the height of the economic crisis there.

Pointing to "the deep and prolonged capitalist crisis" prevailing internationally, including in the U.S., the meeting's final statement noted, "It becomes increasingly obvious for millions of working people that the crisis is a crisis of the system."

Many speakers referred to the Occupy Wall Street movement as an indication of this emerging sentiment. The Communist Party USA delegate spoke of a "surge in united action by labor and major organizations of the African American and Latino people and other democratic forces."

The Portuguese Communist Party representative said, "The attempt to make working people pay for the crisis is spurring the organized working-class struggle in several countries ... and leading to hugely diverse demonstrations that reveal capitalism's shrinking support base, and the availability of other anti-monopoly strata to struggle."

He continued, "There is a potential to build broad social alliances that ... can contribute toward a needed struggle against the dominant big-business policies and toward building democratic, patriotic and anti-monopoly alternatives."

The South African delegate emphasized that the whole of the left "needs to take up in earnest [the] ecological destruction caused by the rampant accumulation of capitalism." The meeting adopted the South African Communist Party's proposal for an international conference of communist and workers parties specifically on climate justice, to be held in 2012 in South Africa.

Discussion was also shaped by the "Arab Spring" uprisings and continuing popular struggles in North Africa and the Middle East.

The Turkish Communist Party's delegate warned that today's imperialist policymakers see "political Islam" - groups like the Muslim Brotherhood or Turkey's ruling Islamist party - as "compatible" with imperialism.

"The Muslim Brothers are ready to serve the imperialists," the Jordanian Communist Party representative said. U.S. policy, she said, "is based on creating an alliance with the Islamists and even the fundamentalists." The Lebanese representative declared that "Turkey is spearheading the imperialist efforts in the Arab world and the Middle East."

Likewise, several Middle Eastern parties warned that the feudal Gulf states are acting as agents of the U.S. and other capitalist powers, funneling cash, arms and other forms of assistance to "strengthen the conservatives and the Islamists," as the Jordanian representative put it.

As to how to deal with the current crisis and how to get to socialism, parties projected differing approaches.

The leader of the Communist Party of Greece said no proposal to deal with the crisis can "constitute a pro-people way out ... unless it poses as a question of principle the rupture ... with capitalist ownership, its state institutions, its international alliances."

She spoke of "the regroupment of the workers' and people's movement with a clear anti-imperialist antimonopoly orientation, anti-capitalist in the final analysis." A policy of alliances, she said, can go only two ways: either aim at the prolongation of bourgeois political power, or aim for the overthrow of the bourgeois government.

On the other hand, the representative of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) spoke of the participation of communist parties in Latin America and the Caribbean in different kinds of broad progressive political fronts that govern their countries. These fronts, he said, "are part of a tactical process of accumulation of forces, within the borders of capitalism." This, he said, advances the strategic objective of winning political power in order to start the transition to socialism.

He, and a number of others, emphasized that "there is not a single and non-historical model of revolutionary process neither of construction of socialism."

"What we have is a set of principles, formulated by Marx and Lenin and developed by other revolutionaries. Socialism is universal as a general theory and desire for freedom of the working class and the peoples in the entire world. But socialism takes on national features ... it is accomplished according to the social formation and the particular historical conditions of each people."

That, he said, requires from communists, "in each country, the elaboration of original programs and the formulation of strategies and tactics that are adequate to present times."

Photo: Representatives from the Americas, South Africa and Iran listen to the discussion at the 13^th Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties, Athens, Dec. 8, 2011. Solidnet

Bolivia’s law gives nature equal rights to humans

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:34:00 +0000

Bolivia is set to pass the Law of Mother Earth, (in Spanish La Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra) which will grant nature the same rights and protections as humans, according to PV Pulse.

For the South American country's leaders, this legislation is part of an unprecedented move to promote a major shift in conservation attitudes aimed at stopping environmental destruction.

The legislation will give new legal powers to the government, allowing it to monitor and control industry in the country.

It will create 11 distinguished rights for the environment, which include: "the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered," said a report by the Huffington Post.

But out of the 11, the measure that is potentially the most controversial to some and the most essential to others is "the right to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities."

Last year Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said, "the situation was serious."

Choquehuanca expressed his concern over the "inadequacy of the greenhouse gas reduction commitments made by developed countries in the Copenhagen Accord." He claims experts forecasted a temperature increase "as high as four degrees above pre-industrial levels." He added, "An increase of temperature of more than [just] one degree above pre-industrial levels would result in the disappearance of our glaciers in the Andes, and the flooding of various islands and coastal zones."

But perhaps no one currently defends the environment in Bolivia with more conviction than the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales. A known fighter for environmental protection, Morales addressed the press in 2009 stating, "If we want to safeguard mankind, then we need to safeguard the planet. That is the next major task of the United Nations."

Morales's words had immediately followed the resolution of the General Assembly to declare April 22nd "International Mother Earth Day."

Morales's party, the Movement Towards Socialism, holds a majority in both houses of parliament. Strong opposition to the new legislation is not expected.

Meanwhile, Undarico Pinto, leader of the Confederacion Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (a group that helped draft the law) highlighted how important it is to "allow people to regulate industry at national, regional, and local levels. Existing laws are not strong enough. [This] will help."

The law's ripple effect is apparent in the words of Canadian activist Maude Barlow, who said, "It's going to have a huge resonance around the world. It's going to start first with these southern countries trying to protect their land and their people from exploitation, but I think it will be grabbed onto by communities in our countries, for example, fighting the tarsands in Alberta."

For Bolivia, environmental concern runs very deep, and given its place in indigenous beliefs there, the Law of Mother Earth is not simply a piece of legislation, but an idea of utmost significance.

"Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals," said Choquehuanca. "We believe that everything on the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food, and financial crises with our values."

Photo: Creative Commons 2.0