Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

Today has been a very busy day and I did not really find the time to blog as extensively as I wanted to. So lets make this quick. Today I want to introduce you to this very cool and at the same time very useful project called the The Great Recycle. The Great Recycle is a national (US [...]

Life is a golden gift from Allah if you’re a certified member of the Gulf Counter-Revolution Club (GCC), also known as the Gulf Cooperation Council; Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates can torture, kill, repress and demonize their own subjects – in full confidence the “master” will let you get away with it.

Just as the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in power in Bahrain is vowing, publicly, to keep arresting, tear-gassing, raiding their homes, confiscating their jobs and forcing pro-democracy protesters to live in non-stop fear, Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa is being hosted in Washington by the Barack Obama administration.

Prince Salman – who Bahraini propaganda sells as a “moderate” – showed up at the US State Department side-by-side with Secretary of State Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton. Those who “die” are evil dictators of the Muammar Gaddafi variety; “our” bastards get to party in DC after being extended a red carpet welcome.

Is there any Arab Spring-related repression and killing going in Bahrain? According to Clinton, of course not; these are only “internal issues” – in her own words.

What this means in practice is that Clinton subscribes to the official narrative that the sectarianization of everything happening in Bahrain is to be blamed on the protesters – and not the al-Khalifas, who for a year now have been destroying Shi’ite mosques and investing on all-out demonization of all things Shi’ite (blame it on “evil” Iran).

The al-Khalifas have been way wilier than President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; they have killed only an acceptable number of people. But why is Bahrain substantially “different” from Syria? Because “it hosts the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, helping the US military project its might in the Gulf and contain Iran”; and that’s not a neo-conservative talking, but Washington director of Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski.

A Bunch of Cowards

Here is Libya conqueror Clinton:

Bahrain is a valued ally of the United States. We partner on many important issues of mutual concern to each of our nations and to the regional and global concerns as well. I’m looking forward to a chance to talk over with His Royal Highness a number of the issues both internally and externally that Bahrain is dealing with and have some better understanding of the ongoing efforts that the government of Bahrain is undertaking. So again, His Royal Highness, welcome to the United States.

Here’s a Bahraini government spokesman telling it like it is to Reuters only one day before the Clinton-Crown Prince schmooze:

We are looking into the perpetrators and people who use print, broadcast and social media to encourage illegal protest and violence around the country. If applying the law means tougher action, then so be it.

Translation: we will keep going on a rampage because the masters in Washington have our backs covered.

Not a word from the Obama administration on the arrest of top Bahraini human-rights activist Nabeel Rajab, who Amnesty International declared a “prisoner of conscience”, as well as calling for his immediate release. Activist Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, for his part, has been on a hunger strike for three months, protesting his life imprisonment by the al-Khalifa regime.

R2P, “responsibility to protect”, that oh so lovely doctrine espoused by the Three Graces – Clinton, US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and Special Assistant to Obama Samantha Power – does not apply to civilian protesters, the majority of them Shi’ites, in Bahrain. They have been yelling for their basic human rights – of which they don’t have much – to be protected for over a year now.

Bahrain’s Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa – whose Medieval methods would lead Egyptian Omar “Sheikh al-Torture” Suleiman to blush with envy, not to mention Prince Nayef from the House of Saud – has been in power for 40 years.

And Bahrain’s King Hamad has been oh so generous; after all he commissioned a report on the repression. Needless to say, the report, even highly sanitized, hasn’t been implemented.

What makes it even more tragic is that these people are cowards. It would take just a single word from Clinton or Obama for the al-Khalifas to immediately stop their concerted repression, using their hardcore Sunni police force recruited from Pakistan, Syria and Yemen; release the thousands of prisoners; and rehire the thousands of workers who were laid off because they are “subversive”. Here’s why.

There has been a rumor in Britain that Nasser Bin Hamad, the son of Bahrain’s King, might be banned from attending the London Summer Olympic Games this summer. There are graphic reasons for it; he personally threatened many athletes, on top of being accused of torture. So what did he do? In haste, he deleted all his threatening tweets. Expect Nasser to be partying in Mayfair in July.

•  This article first appeared in Asia Times.

Jason F. McLennan, CEO of the International Living Future Institute (home of the Living Building Challenge, a standard launched by the Cascadia chapter of the Green Building Council in 2006 and intended to push beyond LEED at the time). He just published a memoir about his own effort to live green, Zugunruhe: The Inner Migration to Profound Environmental Change (published by the ILFI’s Ecotone Publishing, 2010)

I spoke with Jason about green washing, what the cities of Vancouver, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and others are attempting to do with architecture and urban design. We discussed how difficult it is to launch into a larger discussion about quicker, more all-encompassing ways to mitigate, plan for and design livability for a world that some like James Hansen calls, a world without ice.

He just spoke at a BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), business conference that brought “together independent business owners and innovators, local living economy entrepreneurs, community investors, government economic development professionals and sustainability leaders.” McLennon understands that restlessness folk in various forms of the sustainability movement are displaying. His book’s main title describes the grumbling and undertow some of the deep sustainability folk have just prior to a period of great migration, or change. Certain species display agitation and restlessness — a phenomenon referred to by scientists as “zugunruhe,” which McLennan identifies with, shaped by this current zugunruhe pattern emerging among people yearning for a sustainable future.

“Zugunruhe is a work of creative genius that draws us into an engaging journey of self-discovery, brings the biggest and most frightening issues of our time up close, and invites our engagement,” notes David Korten, “It will leave you envisioning human possibilities you never previously imagined.”

Paul K. Haeder: Why aren’t communities taking charge of sustainability when it comes to cities’ decision?

Jason F. McLennan: “We’ve moved backward as a population on these issues of climate change and sustainability. A large percentage of Americans do not believe it’s real. Cities will have to make more substantial progress. We still have our eyes closed using these old sets of laws, regulations. In every community there are people working on making better, sustainable cities. The problem is the cities – planners, architects, engineers, politicians – can only push sustainability … as far as where society can accept it.”

PKH: Why are we stuck in this incremental change mindset, in planning, in development, in sustainability programs?

JFM: Changes will happen for reasons not in our control. But it’s best to put into place models of what we think success is. We need to continue speaking to the choir. We need as many people in our musical group able to play the sustainability part. Look at us as little conductors with little orchestras. We have to spend time focusing on those that do sustainability and teach them to play, and then pull them into deeper commitments to sustainability. We can’t leave people in a place of shame, hopelessness. We have to envision success and a positive end game. People aren’t wanting to hear about the impending catastrophe … about Kunstler’s ‘long emergency.’”

PKH: What’s your take on LEED-washing?

JFM: LEED can be a powerful tool for powerful change … most of the time. However, it doesn’t get used that way. People are trying to game the system. The larger question is why did that group use LEED? Do I think that LEED is perfect? Absolutely not. No system is perfect. And yes, some criticism is deserved – and needed – to keep improving what has become the most dominant green building program in the world. But there is a big difference in criticism that is intended to make the program stronger – so that it can continue to contribute to lowering environmental impact and changing the building culture – and criticism that is intended to tear down and destroy something that I believe has done a lot of good in the world.1

PKH: Can planners do more to both encourage sustainability in their work and help designing cities under political constraints to take it on more vigorously?

JFM: It will take investment, large sums of money shifting into deep sustainability. The whole paradigm needs to change. It is going to take a lot of people who made money under the old paradigm — who have profited the most – to create the economic conditions for this new paradigm.

PKH: Sustainability lite or green washing. What do you have to say about those issues?

JFM: “We wish Vancouver was doing more. We feel hamstrung at times when we go in as consultants. How far can that mayor push? Not very far. Until there’s a groundswell from the communities. I will say that if we are serious about cutting greenhouse gas emissions, then we need a World War Two effort to retrofit America’s housing. We’d be cutting greenhouse emissions thirty to fifty percent in two years with the right investment – money – very little time, and significant behavioral change.”

Where Is the Planning Profession on Sustainability and Green Washing?

I spoke with John Robinson, Executive Director, UBC Sustainability Initiative; Professor, Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability and in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. My biggest concern at the sustainability leadership school was the skirting of social justice and social sustainability throughout the week.

I asked him a question so many others ducked: How can we in this sustainability movement who want net zero waste and living buildings and other sustainability designs to be the way of the future start looking at sustainability on a much more holistic and socially just and deep ecological frame?

Robinson was clear: “This is a real issue, but again I am optimistic. I think the social leg of the sustainability stool is much less well developed, but I also think it is coming. In the academic realm, fields like political ecology put it front and centre; on the activist front, and it is getting increasing attention in NGOs like DSF and Pembina (look at the Transition Towns movement in the UK, for example). Business is a bit slower and government the slowest but I believe it is coming, especially at the local level.”

We also talked about green washing.

“As someone remarked in about 1995 ‘the growth industry of the 1990s is green bullshit.’ This is not a new problem,” Robinson says. “But what is sometimes overlooked is that this growth is accompanied by an equivalent or perhaps even faster growth in our ability to measure and monitor sustainability (metrics, indicators, monitoring systems, etc.) In the 1990s at the University of Waterloo, I asked an engineering class to tell me what was better from an environmental point of view: electric hand dryers or paper towels. They couldn’t answer the question because they couldn’t find lifecycle data on the materials involved. Today, you can easily find the relevant data on the web. So green washing is, over time, self-limiting, I think, as we get better and better at measuring and detecting it.”

We toured Robinson’s brainchild, the hallmark of sustainability on any campus, right smack on the UBC campus: The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS). It is being billed as a net positive building, or at least Robinson and others want to see it that way. It will open in Summer 2011. One compelling feature are two by fours turned into ceilings – wood from Alberta’s millions of acres of pine beetle damaged timberland. It is mostly discolored, harvested before it becomes a net positive carbon releaser.

Contrasting views of the planning profession with James Howard Kunstler, John Robinson, Mark Holland (a Vancouver city planner who now manages the Sustainability Office) and Bill Rees (his four-decade career at UBC has been marked by a prolific output of writings, a resume of over 80 pages and the development of the ecological footprint concept, while helping to found numerous organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, and the International Society for Ecological Economics) is revealing.2

Kunstler:

I do not believe the planning profession as we know it will exist institutionally much longer. It rests on assumptions that to me are just not true – for instance, the idea that we can continue living within the current armatures of daily life, including the metroplex city and the suburbs. I believe our big cities will contract severely back to their old centers and waterfronts (if they are lucky enough to have them), and that the process will be very messy, with ethnic conflict, fights over ownership, massive capital losses, and infrastructure that we will be unable to maintain. Hence, I think the “action” will move to our smaller cities and towns, especially places with a meaningful relationship to agriculture. I see our economy becoming much more internally focused (within North America). Since trucking and commercial aviation are toast, the inland waterways will regain importance. It’s unclear whether we will have the capital or the will to reconstruct our regular rail system (forget about High Speed). These represent epochal shifts. Some parts of the USA (e.g. the Southwest, Florida) may become uninhabitable. This is a scenario that does not admit much of a role for conventional bureaucratic planners who sit in air-conditioned offices drawing charts based on reliable metrics.

Robinson:

I think we are the vanguard of the future and the route to real innovation and increased well being, for both the planet and ourselves. We’ll see who is right. The old sustainability agenda is about being less bad, about limits, and about sacrifice. The new sustainability agenda is about innovation, opportunity and improved well-being (the regenerative concept). I think that is an exciting and empowering concept that will catch on and become irresistible.

Holland:

We proceeded with planning according to a paradigm of modernism and no planetary limits during the massive build out of the 20th Century. The planning profession is getting its head around the new 21st Century reality of constraints and change quickly – but the cities we build and the regulations we have in place (mostly engineering regulations not connected to planners) change very slowly, especially in an atmosphere of recession, financial constraints and fear As we change and accept the global stewardship mandate of the 21st Century and change our rules development, our cities will slowly change. They’ll change a lot faster once the plateau of peak oil is over in a few years and the cost of the factors that have caused our 20th Century cities to become unsustainable become less tenable.

Ironically, the entire week of speakers, workshops, site visit and team building ended with one of the gurus of sustainability, as in the ecological footprint, William Rees. His words stirred the participants after a week of hard work, huge learning curves and spiritual bonding.

Rees: “De-growth is going to be the major issue of the century. While the energy crisis will have severe economic impacts, it is not fundamentally about economics. It is about human ecology and the limits of growth.” Rees is the author of Our Ecological Footprint. Rees is also affiliated with UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. There is a movement, De-Growth Vancouver, working with Rees and others on what this kind of city might look like.

Rees also is on the advisory board of the Carrying Capacity Network with such notables as Herman Daly (theorist of the steady-state economy) and Thomas Lovejoy (who introduced the concept of biological diversity). This larger push to tie immigration to climate change is part of a population control ploy — greenwashing nativism — which has been written about extensively, recently in a Nation magazine piece by Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, and author of Nice Work if You Can Get It.

The threat of global warming will increasingly be used to shape immigration policies around a vision of affluent nations or regions as heavily fortified resource islands. Is this mentality already at work? Internationally, the ugly side of the debate about emissions has centered on who has the right to go on polluting and which portions of the world’s population will be sacrificed. Even as cities in affluent countries compete with one another in the sustainability rankings, the same kinds of triage calculations are being made locally, and as resources tighten, the most vulnerable citizens and migrants are cut loose.

Sustain the Sustainable – Where Sustainability Is Going

Here is an interesting contrast in perspective by the leader in sustainability, Gro Harlem Brundtland’s words in the preface of “Our Common Future,” published in 1987, 1999, and then officially 20 years after its publication, 2007:

1987

Many critical survival issues are related to uneven development, poverty, and population growth. They all place unprecedented pressures on the planet’s lands, waters, forests, and other natural resources, not least in the developing countries. The downward spiral of poverty and environmental degradation is a waste of opportunities and of resources. In particular, it is a waste of human resources. These links between poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation formed a major theme in our analysis and recommendations. What is needed now is a new era of economic growth – growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.3

1999

Well, first of all, we should maybe be reminded of the key definition that we formulated: that sustainable development amounts to meeting the demands of the present generations while preserving the rights of future generations to meet their own needs. I think that concept is important to be reminded of, because that illustrates the environmental dimension of sustainable development. In fact, if we misuse nature, and the relationship between man and nature, we will not be in a situation one generation from now, or two generations from now, for them who live then, to have choices and opportunities in life to have a healthy and prosperous future. So, that intergenerational picture and very clear link came forward in that report Our Common Future, and I think that was really what made the strongest impression on people, the other one, the clear links between poverty and environment, which also means between poverty and development. If people are poor, they don’t have choices. They are not empowered, often neither by knowledge, or by health, or by choices in their daily lives, to take care of the future of their children, and the next generations, because the immediate need dominates their lives and their choices. That also made an impression on many people. And the fact that this is not only a national question inside each nation, but also a global challenge, because of the big gaps, both inside countries and between countries. So, the global perspective of being in this together came very strongly forward in 1987 when the report was delivered. And those dimensions are as relevant today as they were in 1987.4

2007

We were very clear in 1987 that the responsibility for dealing with these problems building up in the atmosphere, that responsibility belongs to the industrialized world. We have to clean up our problems, and at the same time we have to help the developing world have new technologies to make it possible for them to jump over the polluting stages that we have been through.

We have no time to lose. The data are now clearly presented and have very high confidence levels. There is no question anymore about scientific disagreement. So many things are easily done and lead to improved energy efficiency and a number of other benefits.

Unless we start immediately fulfilling the Kyoto Protocol and then continuing with a broader basis with all countries involved, this is going to get completely out of control and we will not be able to cap carbon dioxide levels. It’s a drama playing itself out in front of us, where we are still able to change a very dangerous scenario but we cannot wait for another 5 or 10 years. We must be active now.5

Read Part 1.

1. Go to, “Defending LEED,” by McLennan.
2. For more on Bill Rees.
3. 1987 – Our Common Future, one small part of Chairwoman’s Foreword, Oslo, 20 March 1987.
4. Interview by Patricia Morales and Ann Ferrara, WHO Report Making a Difference,” 1999.
5. Andrew C. Revkin, “20 Years Later, Again Assigned to Fight Climate Change,” New York Times, May 8, 2007.

Last year, not one of the 491,687 new minivans sold in the United States was made in America by unionized workers.

Some were manufactured overseas by companies owned by non-American manufacturers. The Kia Sedona, with 24,047 sales, was built in South Korea, Russia, and the Philippines. The MAZDA5, with 19,155 sales, was built in China, Japan, and Taiwan.

Some minivans from Japanese companies were built in the U.S., but by non-unionized workers. Honda sold 107,068 Odysseys built in Alabama. Toyota Siennas, built in Indiana, went to 111,429 persons. The Nissan Quest, built in Ohio, had 12,199 sales.

Only three minivans were built by unionized workers, but they were made in Canada by members of the Canadian Auto Workers. The Dodge Grand Caravan, with 110,996 sales; Chrysler Town & Country, with 94,320 sales; and the VW Routan, with 12,473 sales, all share the same basic body; most differences are cosmetic. GM and Ford no longer produce minivans.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) suggests that members who wish to buy minivans buy one of the three Chrysler products because much of the parts are manufactured in the United States by UAW members.

All cars, trucks, and vans from GM, Ford, and Chrysler are produced by union workers in the U.S. or Canada. The Japanese-owned Mitsubishi Eclipse, Spyder, and Galant, and the Mazda6 are produced in the U.S. under UAW contracts; neither company makes minivans. All vehicles produced in the U.S. have the first Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) as a 1, 4, or 5; vehicles produced in Canada have a 2 as the first VIN number.

Founded in 1935, the UAW quickly established a reputation for creating the first cost-of-living allowances (COLAs) and employer-paid health care programs. It helped pioneer pensions, supplementary unemployment benefits, and paid vacations.

It has been at the forefront of social and economic justice issues; Walter Reuther, its legendary president between 1946 and his death in 1970, marched side-by-side with Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez, and helped assure that the UAW was one of the first unions to allow minorities into membership and to integrate the workforce. Bob King, its current president, a lawyer, was arrested for civil disobedience, carrying on the tradition of the social conscience that has identified the union and its leadership.

The UAW doesn’t mind that corporations make profits; it does care when some of the profit is at the expense of the worker, for without a competent and secure work force, there would be no profit. When the economy failed under the Bush–Cheney administration, and the auto manufacturers were struggling, the UAW recognized it was necessary for the workers to take pay cuts and make other concessions for the companies to survive.

But not all corporations have the social conscience that the UAW and the “Big 3” auto manufacturers developed. For decades, American corporations have learned that to “maximize profits,” “improve the bottom line,” and “give strength to shareholder stakes” they could downsize their workforce and ship manufacturing throughout the world. Our companies have outsourced almost every form of tech support, as well as credit card assistance, to vendors whose employees speak varying degrees of English, but tell us their names are George, Barry, or Miriam. Clothing, toys, and just about anything bought by Americans could be made overseas by children working in abject conditions; their parents might make a few cents more, and in certain countries would be thrilled to earn less than half the U.S. minimum wage.

Americans go along with this because they think they are getting their products cheaper. What they don’t want to see is the working conditions of those who are employed by companies that are sub-contractors to the mega-conglomerates of American enterprise. These would be the same companies whose executives earn seven and eight-figure salaries and benefits, while millions are unemployed.

But, Americans don’t care. After all, we’re getting less expensive products, even if what we buy is cheaply made because overseas managers, encouraged by American corporate executives, lower the quality of materials and demand even more work from their employees.

Walk into almost every department store and Big Box store, and it’s a struggle to find clothes, house supplies, and entertainment media made in America. If you do find American-made products, they are probably produced in “right-to-work” states that think unionized labor is a Communist-conspiracy to destroy the free enterprise system of the right to make obscene profits at the expense of the working class.

We can wave flags and tell everyone how much more patriotic we are than them, but we still can’t buy a minivan made in America by unionized workers—even when the price is lower than that of the non-unionized competition.

• Sales figures of minivans are from Edmunds.com. Also assisting was Rosemary Brasch.

Albert Einstein wrote in 1939, “There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people. Despite the great wrong that has been done us, we must strive for a just and lasting compromise with the Arab people…. Let us recall that in former times no people lived in greater friendship with us than the ancestors of these Arabs.” Einstein was opposed from the start to the setting up of a Jewish state and to mass emigration into Palestine. He was also one of the signatories to an Open Letter to the New York Times in 1948 denouncing the terrorist activities of Menachem Begin and the massacre carried out in the Arab village of Deir Yassin.

Now that the “greater calamity” has occurred, Einstein’s prescience takes on a heartbreaking dimension, because it could have been avoided. A “just and lasting compromise” was possible, and it would have benefited both peoples. Jews and Arabs could be living in harmony, mutually benefiting from their different cultural gifts. But the imposition of a Jewish state, mass immigration, and ethnic cleansing destroyed that possibility, and now they are dying from nationalism and mutual atrocities.

Worldwide we are caught in the deadly fallout of the Holocaust. It traumatized the Zionists to the extent that they lost standards of justice and ethics that had been built up over centuries. Their efforts to turn Palestine into Israel have led to 60 years of fighting that is spreading to more and more countries. This battle is a major but unstated reason for US military aggression in the Muslim world from Libya to the Philippines, and that in turn is a major but unstated reason for the global economic crisis.

Germany was the site of the previous act of this tragedy. But what unfolded there had its roots in the trauma the Germans went through in the 1920s and ’30s. At the outbreak of the Second World War, W.H. Auden looked back on the suffering imposed on the Germans by the Versailles Treaty and wrote in his poem “September 1st, 1939″: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”

The former victims become the perpetrators, now in the Mideast. We are trapped in an ongoing chain of linked cataclysms.

To understand this chain and break it, we need to view it historically. What each link has in common is powerful financial interests relentlessly fighting to expand. The First World War was primarily a struggle between the established imperial states of Britain and France and a newcomer in the game of empire, Germany. The fascism that arose in its aftermath was financed by German capitalists in order to destroy the rising socialist movement and to rearm for another war. The Second World War in Europe was a continuation of the imperialist struggle of the First, and in the Pacific it was an imperial battle between the USA and Japan for control of Asia. After the Holocaust the demands for a Jewish state were supported by the USA and Britain mainly to extend their power over the Mideast and its oil. All this aggression with its millions of shattered lives was disguised under banners of idealism, but its fundamental impulse was economic domination.

How to break the chain? War and many other forms of violence are generated by the underlying structural violence of capitalism, which is intrinsically unjust and inevitably produces conflict. This outmoded, destructive system chains us also into working to make its owners rich. To have peace and to have fulfilling lives, we need to replace it with a democratic socialist society that emphasizes the humane in humanity. As Einstein wrote, “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy.”

Arrested, tortured, and imprisoned.  This is the recipe for justice that the Ethiopian government serves up to dissenting voices, men and women peacefully exercising their democratic right, demanding their human rights, crying out for their moral rights. The victimised are not only those living within Ethiopia who attempt to offer an alternative to the current dictatorship, who form and organise political opposition to the Meles regime, but journalists inside Ethiopia and abroad, who dare to speak out in criticism of the government’s criminality, human rights violations and policies of indifference.

Amnesty International, in its damning report of the Ethiopian government, Ethiopia: Dismantling Dissent (DDE),states that from March to November 2011 “at least 108 opposition party members and six journalists have been arrested for alleged involvement with various proscribed terrorist groups.” By November they were all charged with crimes under the internationally criticised Anti Terrorist Proclamation. In addition, Amnesty continues, “six journalists, two opposition party members and one human rights defender, all living in exile, were charged in absentia.”

The ‘T’ word, as former Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan called terrorism, is the umbrella term used by the Ethiopian government (amongst others) to justify the unjust, the dishonest and the criminal. If there is a terrorist organisation flourishing in Ethiopia, committing crimes against humanity and violating the human rights of the people, it is State terrorism delivered by the EPRDF government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, as this UN definition of terrorism makes clear:

Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable.

Fear of the government, fear of reprisal, of violence and [false] imprisonment casts a deep shadow across the people of Ethiopia, whose human rights are being ignored by the Meles regime that seized power twenty years ago and has brutalised and systematically restricted the people’s freedom and human rights ever since.

Lawless Lawmakers

In 2009 the Ethiopian government passed legislation on the highly controversial Anti Terrorism Proclamation. Human Rights Watch (HRW) that year looked closely at what was then the proposed law and amongst other recommendations, stated:

If implemented this law could provide the Ethiopian government with a potent instrument to crack down on political dissent, including peaceful political demonstrations and public criticisms of government policy and … it would permit long-term imprisonment and even the death penalty for “crimes” that bear no resemblance, under any credible definition, to terrorism. It would in certain cases deprive defendants of the right to be presumed innocent, and of protections against use of evidence obtained through torture.

Needless to say, the law was passed almost entirely as drafted, duly implemented and has since been used solely to silence dissent. Amnesty International, in its report, found that:

The prolonged series of arrests and prosecutions indicates a systematic use of the law and the pretext of counter-terrorism by the Ethiopian government to silence people who criticise or question their actions and policies, especially opposition politicians and the independent media.

It is the utilisation and enforcement of this law that is enabling the Ethiopian government to quash opposition and free speech within the country and intimidate those voices for fairness and justice abroad. The legislation allows the government to ban free association and to arrest and imprison anyone who has the courage to speak out against the government and their many human rights violations. The police, who were already commonly acting outside of the law, with little or no knowledge of human rights, were given new powers. HRW, in its analysis, reported:

The draft Proclamation grants the police the power to make arrests without a warrant, so long as the officer reasonably suspects that the person is committing or has committed a terrorist act. The Ethiopian constitution requires that a person taken into custody must be brought before a court within 48 hours and informed of the reasons for their arrest — a protection that is already systematically violated.

This constitutional requirement is dutifully ignored. Arrested under the Anti Terrorist Proclamation, individuals are held in confinement for weeks, sometimes months, without charge and denied legal support. Even before this draconian legislation was enforced, according to HRW,  “Ethiopian police routinely detain people without charge for months, and sometimes ignore judicial orders for release.”

Five From Many

In January five more people were convicted in the Ethiopian Federal High Court of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, and money laundering. Evidence against the three journalists, an opposition leader, and a woman, Hirut Kifle Woldeyesus, was made up primarily of online criticism of the government and plans to stage peaceful political protest, none of which constitute acts of terrorism. This is common as Amnesty found in the 114 cases they investigated in their detailed report:

Much of the evidence against those charged involves items that do not appear to amount to terrorism or criminal wrongdoing. Rather many items of evidence cited appear to be illustrations of individuals exercising their right to freedom of expression, acting peacefully and legitimately.

Two of the journalists tried in January were sentenced to 14 years imprisonment while Elias Kifle (tried in absentia), editor of the web-based journal Ethiopian Review, received his second life sentence [emphasis mine]. These cases are simply the most recent in a long line of miscarriages of justice, where the government has exercised an abuse of power and in the name of justice imprisoned the innocent. A further 24 journalists and opposition party members are awaiting trial, many of whom could face the death penalty, for trumped up charges which amount to nothing more than journalists exercising their constitutional and moral right to freedom of speech.

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, stated in a meeting of UN human rights investigators in February:

Journalists, bloggers and others advocating for increased respect for human rights should not be subject to pressure for the mere fact that their views are not in alignment with those of the Government.

Journalists must be free to speak out against the government, to criticise policies of persecution, to highlight the suffering of the people and to draw attention to the multiple human rights abuses taking place within Ethiopia. UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, declared:

Journalists play a crucial role in promoting accountability of public officials by investigating and informing the public about human rights violations, they should not face criminal proceedings for carrying out their legitimate work, let alone be severely punished.

However,  all those speaking out against the EPRDF’s criminality and repression are subject not simply to “pressure”, or “criminal proceedings”, but violent arrest, torture and false imprisonment or, indeed, death.

Free the Innocent

These five men and women, who were mistreated in custody, falsely imprisoned and like others, including the celebrated writer Eskinder Nega (imprisoned for life in September for writing an on-line blog), denied their liberty, must be released immediately and an independent enquiry instigated to investigate their cases, their treatment whilst in jail and their hollow convictions. During their three-month imprisonment at the Maikelawi detention center before the trial and in violation of Ethiopian and international law, the defendants were denied access to legal counsel and family members, and claim they were beaten and tortured. This is the experience of a great many whilst held in Maikelawi as Amnesty reveals in its report:

Many of the [114] detainees were forced to sign confessions and to acknowledge ownership or association by signing items of seemingly incriminating evidence.

The Ethiopian courts have not investigated any of these claims.  They are, it seems, nothing more than servants of the Government, and are as HRW states “complicit in this political witch hunt.”

This collusion of the courts contravenes the Ethiopian constitution that states in Article 78/1: “An independent judiciary is established by this Constitution.” Article 79/1: “Judicial Powers, both at Federal and State levels, are vested in the courts.”

Furthermore, 3: “Judges shall exercise their functions in full independence and shall be directed solely by the law.” The UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Gabriela Knaul, “deplored the reported failure to ensure the defendants’ right to a fair trial,” reports the UN News Centre.

Amnesty International, in its report, calls “on the representatives of the international community in Addis Ababa to take up the role of monitoring trials.” This would be an important initial act in placing the EPRDF under international scrutiny and accountability. It is time the international community, acting through the UN, undertook its responsibility and role as advocate for justice, self-determination, “the suppression of acts of aggression” (Article 1) and freedom for the people of the world, in accordance with its Charter.

A Blind Eye to Torture

In addition to the suppression of free speech, the use of the death penalty and withdrawing the legal right of presumption of innocence, torture is allowed under the Anti Terrorism Proclamation and information gathered whilst under such duress is admissible in court. HRW reports that::

The draft Proclamation deems confessions admissible without a restriction on the use of statements made under torture.

This is illegal under international law, The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment does not allow the use of any statements made in a court of law, that were elicited under torture. The use of such information is also prohibited under the Ethiopian Constitution. Article 19 states:

Persons arrested shall not be compelled to make confessions or admissions which could be used in evidence against them. Any evidence obtained under coercion shall not be admissible.

The much-trumpeted constitution  means little or nothing to the people and even less to the EPRDF who ignore its charter.

Known Unknowables

It is an acknowledged fact within the corridors of the UN and Ethiopia’s donor countries that human rights abuses are occurring daily within the country Prime Minister Meles and his ministerial menagerie. How do we as a world community, responsible and alert to the needs of our brothers and sisters, respond to such men, to such injustice and tyranny? Fight fire with fire many would advocate and in the face of such cruelty many of us would perhaps gladly fuel a furnace.  However, as Mahatma Ghandi said, “I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it. I can teach you not to bow your heads before anyone even at the cost of your life.”

To be silent in the sight of injustice and persecution is to allow tyrants like Meles to maintain their stranglehold over the innocent. It is time intense political pressure from those providing and delivering the much-needed financial and developmental aid, was applied to put an end to the current regime’s human rights violations and abuse of the people, including freezing of personal assets and targeted sanctions.

The British government gives £315 million a year to Ethiopia, a spokesperson from The Department for International Development (DFID) told the Guardian (3/02/2012):

The prime minister, the foreign secretary and the secretary of state for international development have all raised concerns with Prime Minister Meles over the recent arrests of opposition leaders and journalists.

“Concern” is all well and good, but all too easy for the arrogant to shrug off, outrage and horror a more apt response from Westminster and more in keeping with the offences being committed. Criticism alone, however, will not bring change within the abysmal regime and justice to the long-suffering people.

Repeal and Release

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi presides over a dictatorship that restricts all freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of the media in Ethiopia. Peaceful dissent is met with violence and false imprisonment. Intimidation and fear are the key tools in such repression.  This must end, and we, the international community, must ensure it is so.

The Anti-Terrorist Proclamation is an unjust piece of legislation designed and implemented by a corrupt and violent regime who is in breach of international law and their own constitution. It must be repealed immediately, the many innocent good men and women falsely imprisoned released and those supporting Ethiopia through development aid should insist on the implementation of these legitimate and morally right demands. Sit not in silent appeasement, but raise your bowed heads and act.

The Social Security program…represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.

— President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977

[This law] assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half century ago…[The Social Security Amendments of 1983 are] a monument to the spirit of compassion and commitment that unites us as a people.

— President Ronald Reagan, April 20, 1983

So said Presidents Carter and Reagan, but that was before 1996, when Congress voted to allow federal agencies to offset portions of Social Security payments to collect debts owed to those agencies. (31 U.S.C. §3716).  Now we read of horror stories like this:

I’m a 68 year old grandma of 2 young grandchildren. I went to college to upgrade my employment status in 1998 or 1999. I finished in 2000 and at that time had a student loan balance of about 3500.00.

Could not find a job and had to request forbearance to carry me. Over the years I forgot about the loan, dealt with poor health, had brain surgery in 2006 and the collection agents decided to collect for the loan in 2008.

At no time during the 6-7 year gap did anyone remind me or let me know that I could make a minimum payment on the loan. Now that I am on Social Security (have been since I was 62), they have decided to garnishee my SS check to the tune of 15%.

I have not been employed since 2004 and have the two dependents ….  I don’t dispute that I owed them the $3500.00 but am wondering why they let it build up to somewhere around $17,000/20,000 before they attempted to collect.

Her debt went from $3500 to over $17,000 in 10 years?!  How could that be?

It seems that Congress has removed nearly every consumer protection from student loans, including not only standard bankruptcy protections, statutes of limitations, and truth in lending requirements, but protection from usury (excessive interest).  Lenders can vary the interest rates, and some borrowers are reporting rates as high as 18-20%.  At 20%, debt doubles in just 3-1/2 years; and in 7 years, it quadruples.  Congress has also given lenders draconian collection powers to extort not just the original principal and interest on student loans but huge sums in penalties, fees, and collection costs.

The majority of these debts are being imposed on young people, who have a potential 40 years of gainful employment ahead of them to pay the debt off.  But a sizeable chunk of U.S. student loan debt is held by senior citizens, many of whom are not only unemployed but unemployable.  According to the New York Federal Reserve, two million U.S. seniors age 60 and over have student loan debt, on which they owe a collective $36.5 billion; and 11.2 percent of this debt is in default.  Almost a third of all student loan debt is held by people aged 40 and over, and 4.2% is held by people over the age of 60.  The total student debt is now over $1 trillion, more even than credit card debt.  The sum is unsustainable and threatens to be the next debt tsunami.

Some of this debt is for loans taken out years earlier on their own schooling, and some is from co-signing student loans for children or grandchildren.  But much of it has been incurred by middle-aged people going back to school in the hope of finding employment in a bad job market.  What they have wound up with is something much worse: no job, an exponentially mounting debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and the prospect of old age without a social security check adequate to survive on.

Gone is the promise of earlier presidents of a “commitment to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.”  The plight of the indebted elderly is reminiscent of the Irish immigrants who came to America after a potato famine in the 19th century, who were looked upon in some places as actually lower than slaves. Plantation owners kept their slaves fed, clothed and cared for, because they were valuable property.  The Irish were expendable, and they were on their own.

It is obviously not a good time to raise interest rates on student debt, but they are set to double on July 1, 2012, to 6.8%.  Many lawmakers in both parties agree that the current 3.4% rates should be extended for another year, but they can’t agree on how to find the $6 billion that this would cost. Republicans want to take the money from a health care fund that promotes preventive care; Democrats want to eliminate some tax benefits for small business owners.

Congress cannot agree on $6 billion to save the students, yet they managed to agree in a matter of days in September 2008 to come up with $700 billion to save the banks; and the Federal Reserve found many trillions more.  Estimates are that tuition could be provided free to students for a mere $30 billion annually.  The government has the power to find $30 billion — or $300 billion or $3 trillion — in the same place the Federal Reserve found it: it can simply issue the money.

Congress is empowered by the Constitution to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and no limit is set on the face amount of the coins it creates. It could issue a few one-billion dollar coins, deposit them in an account, and start writing checks.

But wouldn’t that be inflationary?  No.  The Fed’s own figures show that the money supply (M3) has shrunk by $3 trillion since 2008. That sum could be added back into the economy without inflating prices.  Gas and food are going up today, but the whole range of prices must be considered in order to determine whether price inflation is occurring.  Housing and wages are significantly larger components of the price structure than commodities, and they remain severely depressed.

There is another way the government could find needed funds without raising taxes, slashing services, or going further into debt: Congress could re-finance the federal debt through the Federal Reserve, interest-free.  Canada did this from 1939 to 1974, keeping its national debt low and sustainable while funding massive programs including seaways, roadways, pensions, and national health care.  The national debt shot up only when the government switched from borrowing from its own central bank to borrowing from private lenders at interest.  The rationale was that borrowing bank-created money from the government’s own central bank inflated the money supply, while borrowing existing funds from private banks did not.  But even the Federal Reserve acknowledges that private banks create the money they lend on their books, just as central banks do.

U.S. taxpayers now pay nearly half a trillion dollars annually to finance our federal debt.  The cumulative figure comes to $8.2 trillion paid in interest just in the last 24 years.  By financing the debt itself rather than paying interest to private parties, the government could divert what it would have paid in interest into tuition, jobs, infrastructure and social services, allowing us to keep the social contract while at the same time stimulating the economy.

For students, at the very least the bankruptcy option needs to be reinstated, usury laws restored, predatory practices eliminated, and the cost of education brought back down to earth.  One possibility for relieving the burden on students would be to give them interest-free loans.  The government of New  Zealand now offers 0% loans to New Zealand students, with repayment to be made from their income after they graduate.  For the past twenty years, the Australian government has also successfully funded students by giving out what are in effect interest-free loans.  The loans in the Australian Higher Education Loan Programme (or HELP) do not bear interest, but the government gets back more than it lends, because the principal is indexed to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which goes up every year.

Predatory lenders are keeping us in debt peonage through misguided economics and bank-captured legislators.  We have people who desperately want to work, to the point of going back to school to try to improve their chances; and we have mountains of work that needs to be done.  The only thing keeping them apart is that artificial constraint called “money”, which we have allowed to be created by banks and let out at interest when it could have been created by public institutions for public purposes, either by direct issuance or through publicly-owned banks.  We just need to recognize our oppressors and throw off their yoke, and the good times can roll again.

Discouragement is frequently viewed as the inevitable consequence of serious problems, but does it really have to be so? If you allow yourself to be intimidated by the economy recession, you might be underestimating your professional chances. If you have endured an abusive relationship, have you lost confidence in people? If you suffer from severe health problems, have you lowered your expectations?

Past mistakes generate regrets, but those should not constitute a valid excuse for paralysis. Misfortune can modify our perception of reality, but we do not need to lose the sharpness of our vision. When bad experiences lead us to focus on obstacles, it is time to push ourselves to search for solutions.

Although a fair amount of trouble is unavoidable in life, we should not make our situation worse by driving ourselves to despair. People who go through bankruptcy may feel wretched contemplating those who inherit wealth. Similarly, those who go through divorce may envy couples who lead happy lives without apparent effort.

The shock of finding oneself too far away from success is unbearable for many individuals. Sadness and despondency intensify material problems, making them deeper and more painful. Victims who compare their disgrace with other people's prosperity only compound their damage.

The desire to recover what has been lost is natural and healthy as long as it is not exacerbated by social pressure. Most psychological misery that accompanies critical problems is unnecessary. Emotional reactions can aggravate whatever losses we have incurred. Dismay can render victims deaf to common sense and blind to opportunity.

What is the reason of so much useless suffering? What makes people act against their own interests? Why do they block their achievements? What's the point of placing additional obstacles on our way? Why does this phenomenon affect so many individuals?

Those negative consequences can be blamed on the myth of short-term radical improvement. Seldom has an idea wrecked so much havoc in the lives of millions of people. The victims of this wrong conviction are as numerous today as in previous centuries, showing that the lesson has not been learned from History.

A man who has been diagnosed with cancer will only inflict unnecessary suffering on himself if he compares his physical condition with that of an Olympic athlete. The stronger his hope to find a miraculous fix for his sickness, the deeper his anxiety. His conviction that short-term radical improvement is possible will intensify his disappointment when a solution fails to materialize.

Reality is not governed by magic. Placing your trust on luck leads to overconfidence and does not increase your chances of success. Exaggerated expectations, instead of motivating individuals, paralyse their initiatives. An all-consuming desire to turn around immediately one's situation can lead to foolish actions.

The belief in short-term radical improvement seems to be deeply anchored in human psychology. Our ancestors that hunted wild animals resorted to magic incantations to turn spirits in their favour. The sale of amulets and talismans in the Middle Ages fed on similar cognitive distortions.

The sick want to heal without delay and the poor want to attain wealth overnight. Victims listen avidly to stories about secret recipes that grant men supernatural powers. Dreams of immediate achievement are predicated and encouraged. Demanding the impossible becomes a trend and people wrongly turn adversity into a claim.

Such approach does not work because it clashes head-on against reality. The world is ruled by the law of cause and effect, not by wishful thinking. Demanding short-term radical improvement can render you ineffective. More often than not, your actions will result in disappointment instead of improvement.

A wise man knows that, in times of adversity, stability is the first step towards a better life. In medical emergencies, first aid aims at preventing further injury and maintaining essential bodily functions. In corporate insolvencies, the goal of financial restructuring is to avoid bankruptcy and keep a business alive.

On most occasions, expecting short-term radical improvement is unrealistic and demoralizing. Those who suffer from life-threatening disease should focus their efforts, in the first place, on achieving stability and preventing their condition from deteriorating. The rational way of moving forward is to take small but steady steps.

If you have suffered misfortune, you can recover much faster if you discard unjustified expectations of short-term radical improvement. Let go of unworkable plans and exaggerated desires because they will only consume your time and waste your resources. Instead, concentrate on accomplishing stability.

Work your way through difficulties and reinforce your fundamental systems. Take measures to prevent the possibility of relapse. Build progressively on your accomplishments and preclude the chance of backsliding. Discard unrealistic hopes and shun hurtful comparisons. Focus your attention on achieving stability and let your improvements guide you to the next level.

[Text: http://johnvespasian.blogspot.com]

[Image by Irargerich under Creative Commons Attribution License. See the license terms under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us]

Nature is often resilient, not fragile. There is no wilderness unspoiled by man. Thoreau was a townie. Conservation, by many measures, is failing. If it is to survive, it has to change.

Environment & Energy Publishing recently featured an article on former SALT speaker Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy who argues that conservation work is in need of a new direction and philosophy. The “horror stories” ecologists love to tell about how humanity is singlehandedly (or better said, too-many-handedly) destroying nature are, he claims, not corroborated by research data. They are also a “strategy failure,” because they fail to connect the importance of conservation to the everyday lives and concerns of ordinary citizens.

The old ways aren’t working. Inch by inch, for better or worse, conservation must, he says, enter the Anthropocene Epoch – the Age of Man.

Kareiva argues that we must accept the irreversibility of the Anthropocene. Our impact on the environment can be traced back even further than we always thought – and nature itself has been continually changing since long before we came around. It is neither tenable nor desirable to protect nature from our influence. Rather, Kareiva tells us, conservation efforts must be structured around human life and our influential place in the larger ecosystem.

This means taking steps that ‘traditional’ ecologists might consider blasphemous. Conservation decisions must be based on value judgments – evaluations of value to human life – rather than on the a priori assumption that all human life is naturally destructive to the thriving of ecosystems.

“It’s not about biodiversity,” [Kareiva] said. “It’s about having a forest so you don’t get what happened in Haiti. It’s about having vegetation so water doesn’t get overloaded with nutrients. Having oyster reefs to reduce hurricane storm surges.”

E&E Publishing reports that the Nature Conservancy has indeed begun to shift its focus, with plans for precisely such an oyster reef on the Gulf Coast. In deciding its location, the Conservancy looked for a place that was not just ecologically vulnerable, but socio-economically vulnerable as well: the reef now protects a low-income region that could suffer disproportionately from storm damage.

This approach means having to make some difficult decisions. Our own Stewart Brand calls Kareiva a courageous man.

The Nature Conservancy is no longer in the business of “saving the last great places on Earth.” Its new slogan? “Protecting nature. Preserving life.” It’s a mind-boggling and welcome shift, said Brand, the environmentalist and author.

For Kareiva, it simply makes scientific sense – and it gets the message out to a wider public. For conservation to really work, everyone must be on board: not just Conservancy scientists, but also big corporations, inner-city kids, and the loggers and salmon fishers whose livelihoods depend on natural resources. Only with such a joint effort can we hope to make a sustained effort to preserve nature – so that nature can, in turn, help us preserve our civilization.

As California pushes the leading edge of renewable energy adoption in the United States, it's also approaching new legal hurdles that are slowly beginning to define the roles that solar developers and utilities will play in the year ahead.

Even the world's largest producer of oil understands the value of developing renewable energy.

In order to meet its recently announced goal to reduce the annual revenue breakeven level in its Energy and Environment Solutions (EES) segment from $800 million to $500 million in FY 2013, Applied Materials yesterday said it would be laying off approximately 250 people and moving its precision wafering system (PWS) solar business from Cheseaux, Switzerland to Asia. The EES segment includes Applied Material's solar and LED business units.

In this day and age, so many people still seem challenged by the contradiction of supporting monarchism and democracy, by the contradiction of supporting a classless society and supporting monarchy.

The CBC examined support for the monarchy in an interview with John Fraser, master of Massey College at the University of Toronto.1 Fraser wrote a book, The Secret of the Crown: Canada’s Affair with Royalty. The first question was about the book’s title: “Why Crown and not monarchy?”

A better question is why the assertion of “Canada’s affair with royalty”? There are plenty of polls done in recent years that indicate Canadians are apathetic or opposed to British royalty.2

Fraser replied, “I don’t think monarchy works here. No one talks about the Canadian monarchy and you never hear it, you don’t see it. But the Crown’s all over the place, on all sorts of things, so that seemed to me appropriate.”

The thing is that most Canadians do not see it as a Canadian monarchy but a British monarchy; this better suits monarchists since if Canadians knew the monarch of the UK was also Canada’s head-of-state (and a 2002 poll indicated that only 5 percent of Canadians knew the British monarch was Canada’s head-of-state), likeliest there would be increased pressure to, at least, Canadianize, the institution. A crown, however, merely represents a costly headpiece in the eyes of most people.

Fraser continues, “Also, we don’t really have a monarchy here. If we do I’d call it ‘monarchy lite.’ We’re not weighed down with the burden of court officers and that sort of thing.”

However, Canada is “weighed down” with the burden of paying for lieutenant governors, a governor general, and that sort of thing. Also, every time a monarch visits Canada, the cost is not cheap.3,4

Fraser says, “We have a constitutional system that seems to work quite well. It doesn’t weigh heavily on our shoulders.”

Whose shoulders? Try telling that to the Original Peoples who had no input into the British North America Act being forced upon them, who had too little immunity and military power to resist their lands being taken from them, and to resist the further encroachments into their lands today.5 The Crown represents an institution complicit in the dispossession of the Original Peoples of Turtle Island. Today, the “reserves” that Original Peoples live on are Crown lands, that is, lands belonging the Crown/state, not the First Nations.6

No need to fret over the present queen says Fraser: “She’s just the old lady of the House of Windsor, very faithful and loyal to the mandate and the burden she’s been given.”

Indeed, Elizabeth has the burden of being one of world’s wealthiest women,7 the burden of never having to do menial chores such as cleaning toilet bowls, sweeping castle floors, homecooking, etc. However, what kind of argument is that — being “just the old lady” — for having a privileged, foreign, unelected person being a head-of-state outside her own country?

Fraser: “One of the bits of fun about doing the book was looking at what I call the secret history because Canadian historians don’t like acknowledging the sovereigns.”

Why refer to them as “sovereigns” from a Canadian standpoint? Is Canada not a sovereign state?8 What kind of purportedly sovereign state allows another sovereign state to supply its sovereign? Is this not a contradiction? Furthermore, why should Canadians, whether historians or non-historians, “like acknowledging the sovereigns”? As for acknowledgement, there are plenty of geographical designations dedicated to the sovereigns, often eliding the designations used by the Original Peoples. For instance, I grew up in the Lekwungen settlement of Camosack that was renamed Fort Victoria (the Fort having since been dropped) after a monarch who never set foot on the soil, a monarch who was caught up in maintaining her empire.9 The monarchy is entwined in the history of Turtle Island; the genocide was carried out under the banner of monarchism and imperialism.

Fraser worries “… the monarchy will die if the government doesn’t support it. That’s what was happening, it was dying slowly through unbenign neglect. So the fact that the Harper government respects the monarchy and the Crown and has made sure that it had the right sort of outlets, I think is great.”

What is the reason that the Canadian government should support the monarchy? Is the monarchy deserving of respect? Does Canada support democracy or does it support monarchy? The two ideals are clearly antithetical. The Harper government, though, has abused the monarchy through the queen’s representative in Canada, to undermine democracy. In late 2008, when the three opposition parties planned to form a coalition to bring down the minority Conservative government (which governed as if it were a majority), Harper asked governor general Michaëlle Jean to prorogue parliament, and she assented.10

Fraser opines that deceased princess Diane’s “biggest bequest is those two boys, who are recognizable, contemporary human beings.”

They are two contemporary human beings born with the proverbial silver spoon in mouth. There are plenty of mothers bequeathing offspring to the world (and these mothers through their generous bequeathing — abetted in equal measure by fathers — are burdening the earth’s carrying capacity, but that is another topic). Why should William and Harry be accorded greater respect or privilege from society than the offspring of non-monarchial mothers? Either a society considers itself committed to genuine democracy and egalitarianism or it can drop the pretence and openly declare itself for class-based, non-democratic institutions.11

The Massey College master holds that because no Canadian can aspire to be the country’s head of state: “It solves a lot of problems for a country like Canada. It removes it from being an issue.”

What wonderful logic. It is a logic that applies equally well to dictatorships, especially familial dictatorships. One would assume that Massey admires how the determination of the head-of-state in North Korea, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia among others is unburdened by the issue.

Fraser says, “It’s very useful to a fractious country to have succession of the formal head of state, which is under a notion of the Crown, solved for us. We don’t have to elect it or whatever.”

Who needs the problem of democracy when monarchy can solve it for us? Fraser seems ignorant or oblivious to the fact that the British (and Canadian) sovereign is a source of friction in Canada because Canada’s Francophones stem from a republican background unlike Canadians of British lineage. The monarchy represents — to the chagrin or Schadenfreude — for many Canadians the British conquest of the French on Turtle Island.

Fraser asserts, “And the will of the people, in the end, is expressed by the sovereign, because if the vast majority of Canadians chose not to have the Crown, it wouldn’t exist.

That is just blatant assertion. There are just so many instances of “the will of the people” (and one assumes the will of the majority is meant) being disregarded by governments. If what Fraser claims is true, then why not back the bluster with a call to hold a referendum asking Canadians if they prefer the British head-of-state to continue as Canada’s head-of-state?

1. Daniel Schwartz, “Canada and the Crown: John Fraser on Canada’s affair with Royalty,” CBC News, 20 April 2012.
2. The Canadian Press, “Canadians apathetic about monarchy: poll,” CBC News, 28 June 2010.
3. “…C$1.5m (£950,000), excluding security – although that is much less than the $2.5m cost of the Queen’s visit.” Adam Gabbatt and Stephen Bates, “William and Kate visit Canada for canoes, campfires and cookouts,” Guardian, 30 June 2011.
4. The queen and prince’s visit carried a higher estimated cost. Whatever the final cost was, it was not cheap. See Citizens for a Canadian Republic, “Royal visit could cost taxpayers $1M or more per day,” Press release, 1 July 2010.
5. See many articles at “Original Peoples,” The Dominion.
6. “Specific Claim Settlements Involving Land,” Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, Modified 15 September 2010. “A reserve is land that has been set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian [sic] band. … The federal Crown holds the title to reserve lands.” … “Less than 0.2 % of Canada’s land mass, 2.6 million hectares, has reserve status.” This is despite Original peoples being 3.8 % of Canada’s population. “Canada’s aboriginal population tops million mark: StatsCan,” CBC News, 15 January 2008. The Canadian state is attempting to municipalize the reserves and entrench fee-simple land ownership, dangerous to First Nation community interests. See Harley Chingee, “Individual property ownership on reserves,” Turtle Island Native Network, 20 July 2010.
7. Luisa Kroll, “Just How Rich Are Queen Elizabeth And Her Family?,” Forbes, 22 April 2011. “Queen Elizabeth, 85, has an estimated personal net worth of $500 million.” … “The Queen also receives an annual government stipend of $12.9 million.”
8. I refer solely to whether international institutions recognize Canada as sovereign. I do not delve into whether Canada is a legitimate state. Readers can decide for themselves whether conquest can legitimate the dispossession of an Indigenous people.
9. “Queen Victoria,” History.com.
10. “GG agrees to suspend Parliament until January,” CBC News, 4 December 2008.
11. See Kim Petersen, “Elitist, Racist, Religionist, Sexist, Inegalitarian: Canada’s Head-of-State,” Dissident Voice, 4 November 2003.

What does a group of 30 “sustainability” professionals do when they run into a pair of two-story-tall common house sparrows? Most of them admire the anatomically correct metal sculptures; a few wonder what’s happening to the actual birds in this neighborhood.

It’s July and we’re in a planned community in the heart of Vancouver: green roofs, solar powered trash compactors, LEED gold and platinum architecture. It’s also a Thursday afternoon and hardly anyone is outside. Even with a building occupancy rate of over 70 percent, there is no public activity. No one is around but us and the two 19-foot tall birds, perfectly scaled sentinels of a morphing city.

The visit is part of the University of British Columbia’s Summer Institute in Sustainability Leadership, a week-long course for professional planners in July. We are hoofing it around the grounds of the Vancouver Olympic Village, the largest LEED-certified platinum neighborhood in North America—also called the world’s greenest athletic facility. The group includes planners, environmental and sustainability directors, landscape architects, social planners, energy experts, a coffee services manager, a yoga clothing manager, a Unilever middle manager—most of them from Canada, several from Korea, one from Brazil, and, me, the lone Yankee.

The developers and the City of Vancouver are trying to sell Southeast False Creek, the site of the Olympic Village, to a build-out of 16,000 people, with 250 affordable housing units—and ecology is part of the marketing campaign.

But the sparrows so lovingly depicted by Vancouver artist Myfanwy MacLeod are also a testament to humanity’s constant threat to biodiversity. Eight pairs of sparrows were first released on this continent in the spring of 1851, in Brooklyn, New York. They are now one of the most common birds in North America, the world for that matter. MacLeod’s artwork—commissioned for the 2010 Olympics and Paralympics—speaks volumes about the state of the planet and the current marketing around sustainability.

One of my conclusions from the sustainability institute is that green is in, but greenwashing reigns. James Howard Kunstler, a friend and colleague—and the author of Geography of Nowhere—is working on a new book about the limits of technology. In no uncertain terms, he tells us that inventing and selling us new stuff won’t fix our environmental problems. “The ‘green’ campaign has largely become a money-grubbing project based on extremely unrealistic wishful thinking about technology, along with a sort of therapy campaign to make us feel better,” he says.

Taking the pulse

My role at the Institute’s summer course was to take the pulse of a province, city, and university known as the most advanced green places on earth. I went in looking for a chance to frame the concept called greenwashing—or sustainability lite, as Judy Layzer calls it. Layzer is an associate professor of environmental policy and the director of MIT’s urban sustainability project.

I quickly found that many of the leaders in sustainable city movements across Canada and the U.S. tend to duck the really tough questions any planner might ask: Don’t we have to “do” deep sustainability at the municipal and regional levels to truly affect change? How does the planning profession promote greenwashing? If the poor have no safety nets and the middle class is struggling, what is the point of LEED platinum certified communities?

Many sustainability action plans call for superficial fixes. “Local policies such as plastic bag bans, restricting lawn watering, and tree-planting must be evaluated to judge their actual outcomes in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the quality of city life,” says Anthony Flint, director of public affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Flint was more than open in explaining in email exchanges what we have to do to get sustainability implemented and greenwashing quashed:

“In my chapter in This Land (2006), I looked at the then-nascent green building movement, where municipal officials and others were contemplating requiring green standards as part of urban development agreements, essentially as part of codes,” Flint told me.

“The early examples got some of the basic stuff out of the way — encouraging the use of stairs, using natural light and ventilation, efficient lighting, bike lockers, stormwater treatment and water management, landscaping beyond lawns that need to be watered, composting/recycling ( both operational and in the construction process), the now ubiquitous green roof. Now just about every developer and architect is green, as a standard. It’s no longer news to have a LEED certified building, but rather an expectation.”

Flint, like others, sees the “greenest part” of any building as its location – “a redevelopment of an urban site, access to transit, walkability context.” So, a great LEED-gold building in a suburban office park that has to be accessed by car is not green by any stretch of the imagination.

Many cities are on that bandwagon: Tearing down old buildings and putting up new- fangled green dreams—the silver, gold, platinum, and beyond platinum goals of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design architecture administrated through the U.S. Green Building Council.

But are green points the answer to global warming?

“All rating systems are flawed and completely depend on the assumptions and inputs used to get the output. And once you have them, what do they really tell us?” asks Mike Lydon, a principal for the Street Plans Collaborative, a consulting firm that helps clients improve the viability of active transportation and smart growth. Lydon is also co-author of The Smart Growth Manual (2009), with Andres Duany and Jeff Speck.

“Take LEED, for example,” Lydon continues. “The new urbanists and other likeminded people helped awaken the world to the fact that a LEED platinum building is really not as great an accomplishment as a fully walkable, transit-served neighborhood. So, while we can rate buildings, it’s critically important to look holistically at their context and how people access them.”

How do these buildings perform? Joseph Lstiburek in the Journal of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers calls to task the architects and engineers who go after the brass ring embedded in those LEED points. He calls these “green motives” that have little to do with long-term energy savings. Some of these designs use more energy than they save.

A much larger question grows out of this sustainability and greenwashing discourse.

What is a sustainable city exactly?

“Cities are at their core consumptive networks,” says Todd Reisz, an Amsterdam-based architect and co-editor of the recently published Al manakh 2: Gulf Continued, which looks at the Persian Gulf region, from both historical and contemporary perspectives.

“They consume the most energy, not only in terms of fuels but also in terms of food and natural and manufactured materials.”

Suddenly cities seem cleaner, Reisz tells me, but that’s not exactly true. Both the U.S. and Canada have sent (or lost) their carbon-heavy industries to other nations. “Manufacturing and other unappealing uses have been moved elsewhere, either to an industrial park beyond the public’s eye or to another continent altogether.” But does the ranking of the “greenest” communities, he asks, “include the CO2 emissions required to manufacture that city’s computers in China, the energy required to grow its bananas in Costa Rica?”

Many planners and analysts look for guidance from architect and designer Steve Mouzon, who has defined what real sustainability means in the built and natural environments. Among his major points for the average citizen to live by, separate from what a city planner or architect has to do for sustainability, are laid out by Lloyd Alter, architect, developer, inventor, and builder of prefab housing. He writes for TreeHugger and is an Associate Professor at Ryerson University teaching sustainable design.

• Choose it for longer than you’ll use it
• Live where you can walk to the grocery
• Live where you can make a living
• Choose smaller stuff with double duty

But in his book The Original Green—a must read—Mouzon also coins the term “gizmo green.” We can’t rely on technological solutions to our global warming crisis. Instead, Mouzon says, we should stop relying on a few experts like architects, planners and engineers and designers.

“Think about this for a moment: if millions of the best minds around the world work for years to figure out the mysteries of true sustainability, how ridiculous would it be to expect each significant architect to reformulate sustainability in the image of their own personal style? Asking a single person to reformulate years of work by millions of the best minds goes beyond the absurd… to the globally treasonous! We must be allowed to share wisdom.”

For people like Anthony Flint, he weighs the practical with the philosophical when it comes to sustainability. Flint’s a journalist and author: Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (2009) and This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (2006).

“So one divide is between what Steve Mouzon and others refer to as ‘gizmo green’ and urban development — with the emphasis on urban — that is almost by definition green. Skanska’s [USA division of Swedish giant, Skanska AB] retrofit of the Empire State Building is a good example of combining the two — the location green by definition, and cutting-edge construction processes and green technologies that result in the long-term energy savings that building owners covet.”

In the end, as the Vancouver Olympic Village architects and Mouzon and others tell us, the places that are sustainable have to build community involvement and love for place.

Lydon agrees. “We need to make places worth caring deeply about, and that requires far more than aggregating net zero building, bullet trains, or bike lanes,” he says. “Indeed, a million net zero homes that require their inhabitants to drive 30 miles a day probably aren’t as ecological as a million homes that aren’t net zero, but which are in places that don’t require driving.”

So, how can we in the sustainability movement start looking at sustainability in a much more holistic way?

“This is a good question and a challenge,” says Moura Quayle, former chair of Vancouver’s Urban Landscape Task Force, which gave birth to the city’s Neighborhood Greenways program, a true community-based sustainability tool utilizing small-scale, local connections for pedestrians and cyclists, linking parks, natural areas, historic sites, amenities and commercial streets. As the City of Vancouver’s web site explains:

“Neighbourhood Greenways provide opportunities to express the unique character of the neighbourhood and often include public art which adds further interest and distinctiveness to the project.”

Again, these projects in the Greenways Program are initiated by residents and are partnered with the City. The community is expected to take the lead and maintain the space, while the City of Vancouver assists with the design, development and construction of the project.

“We are facing it in Vancouver as we talk [about being the] ‘greenest city’ and mean much more than environmental sustainability.” For Vancouver, Quayle insists, place identity also fits into the concept of “green.”

“Place identity as a third component of community sentiment opens the discussion to a host of related disciplines, such as humanist geography and environmental psychology. These disciplines seek to investigate the meaning of place to human experience. Place identity consists of cognitions about the physical world, including memories, ideas, feelings, attitudes, values, preferences, meanings, and conceptions of behavior and experience which relate to the variety and complexity of physical settings that define the day-to-day existence of every human being.”

There are planners who see sustainability as a market-driven solution to community challenges tied to climate change, peak oil and heavy urbanization of our globe’s cities.

Mark Holland, a Vancouver city planner who now manages the Sustainability Office, has little tolerance for environmentalism and social justice driving sustainability.

“Sustainability was co-opted by the environmentalist and social justice movements and was quickly branded in the minds of those not personally identified with those movements as just another leftist radical stance.,” he says. “Sustainability is simply the only context which our economy can function in this century, and it needs to be loudly rebranded as that.”

What’s next?

How will we cope when the world has nine billion people (about 30 years from now)? Different visions for how we might operate were set forth in the report, “Our Common Future,” known more commonly as the Brundtland Report, published in 1987. The report—a gargantuan multi-government and multi-disciplinary effort—recognized holism and systems thinking as forces to solve a universal problem.

All sectors of society, according to the report, must be active participants and decision makers in a world moving into crisis mode. But it is only now that cities, counties, and states might be attempting collectively and strategically to come together after more than 24 years since that much quoted definition of sustainable development was penned by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland: “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

A bioregional framework that represents a “whole scale nature-human linked system as a place-based approach to promote scientific understanding, planning, and action to regenerate our communities and other living systems” still is way beyond the average politician and citizen operational model.

However, it’s becoming clearer to planners and politicians alike that places like the Cascade Bioregion or the Napa Valley Bioregion, for example, each call for unique investigative practices that will bring forth planning, design, and management skills that will make the bioregion resilient through these unique sets of landscape-human patterns.

Despite a general acceptance that sustainable development calls for a convergence between the three rails of economic development, social equity, and environmental protection, the concept remains elusive. For many like Kunstler and Mouzon, the grip of technological, political, and other constraints creates a fertile ground for the greenwasher to thrive.
When I am with fellow educators, sustainability planners, and professionals looking for ways to be change agents in sustainability, I understand the learning curve is steep for those who have not immersed themselves in climate change, sustainability, and social justice and grassroots movements.

At the Sustainability Leadership class, it is clear that many of the facilitators did not want to tackle the big E in the triple bottom line: equity. In fact, there is dissonance with these leaders when I challenge their assertions that Wal-Mart is the model for sustainability.

Many in sustainability circles want solar, LEED, wind turbines, some metering for energy use and carbon emissions, but they do not question the “corportacracy” that many in the deep sustainability movement in U.S. and other countries are challenging.

We’ll use Wal-Mart as an example of a company trying to use sustainability as a tool for the corporation’s profit drive. Many times I’ve heard folk cite this new book, Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (2011) by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Edward Humes.

The problem with Wal-Mart is endemic of a large predatory corporation that is attempting to corner the world’s retail market, whose CEO (Lee Scott) made $24 million last year in pay and another $8 million in stock options, and whose corporate policy is to give money to GOP and Blue Dog democrats as part of a lobbying effort.

Using solar panels made in China and selling organic produce from Chile do not make a sustainable company when one figures the wage gap issue –

According to the April 2011 “Living Wage Policies and Big-Box Retail” report by Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley, the retailer could easily pay associates $12 per hour. Even if Wal- Mart passed the total cost to customers, 46 cents per WalMart visit would be added to one’s tab.

Then there’s the issue of Wal-Mart’s “Love, Earth” line of jewelry, that, according to Wal-Mart meets environmental criteria and meets social criteria. The idea that these criteria are meaningful is refuted by the Broward-Palm Beach New Times article that examined “Love, Earth” from the mine to the store.

Think $50 a month paid to Bolivian miners for this line of Wal-Mart stuff. Or the cyanide heap-leaching process of mining the silver and gold.

Maybe the local city planner won’t be hosting a film night using Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: High Cost of Low Price or the film, Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town as a jumping off point, I’ve hosted a few in Spokane as a graduate planning student at Eastern Washington University. A few off the record voiced what Al Norman of Sprawl-Busters had to say about Store Wars:

Store Wars takes you inside the grassroots politics of Ashland, Virginia, and inside a campaign by Wal-Mart to overpower the town. It is not pretty, but it lays out why Wal-Mart has become the most reviled corporation in America today.

Planners seem to be caught somewhere in the middle of theory and practice, and pitted against politics and economics. So where does planning fit in?

“Planning’s greatest strength is its greatest weakness: It knows change does not come quickly,” says Reitz. “It also assumes there will be a continuously corrective process. And when a planner says it cannot be done quickly, he is let go. This is a broad generalization, but it happens.” Change can come neighborhood by neighborhood and still be effective, he adds. “I don’t see anything wrong in that.”

Michael Harcourt — former mayor of Vancouver and then, later, premier of British Columbia who is now a speaker and author of the book, A Measure of Defiance, and co-author of two books, Plan B: one Man’s Journey from Tragedy to Triumph and City Making in Paradise — sees sustainability as a spectrum. “I don’t use terms like greenwashing. I prefer to look on sustainability policies and practices as a continuum from easy to do, to very hard to accomplish without major structural, attitudinal, political changes.”

Also thinking along those lines is Moura Quayle, Deputy Minister of BC’s Ministry of Advanced Education as well as UBC Sauder School of Business professor. She helped save some valuable farmland on the UBC campus for what is now the ideal showcase for sustainability: the UBC Farm, where land, food, and community learning reign at the 24 hectare farm.

“My field has shifted from being focused on the built environment to a focus on leadership and transformation of the way people think. And I am quite pragmatic,” she says. “For example, I’ve tried to figure out (in the past) how to be practical about how communities can build their own environments—for social and environmental benefits.”

Another example of a seemingly fundamental shift: Will Chicago’s move to plant southern swamp oaks and sweet gum trees be considered deep sustainability or green panic? With permanent heat waves forecast in 50 to 100 years—and thermal imaging already showing the hottest spots—the city is ripping up pavement and putting in green roofs. Is putting in AC for all 750 public schools greenwashing, green scare, or impractical?

Chicago’s deputy commissioner of Department of Environment, Aaron Dumbaugh, has told the US Press many times that “cities adapt or they go away” to justify the Windy City’s green dream: to be the greenest city on the planet.

Steve Mouzon from Miami thinks about sustainability at the community level. It’s about “building sustainable places, so that it then makes sense to build sustainable buildings within them,” he says. “Sustainable places should be nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and securable. Sustainable buildings should be lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal.”

“Today, most discussions on sustainability focus on gizmo green, which is the proposition that we can achieve sustainability simply by using better equipment and better materials,” Mouzon says. “We do need better equipment and better materials, but this is only a small part of the whole equation. Focusing on gizmo green misses the big picture entirely.”

Designing with nature (think, Ian McHard, 1969, Design with Nature) might also be a salient point here, as ornithologists and amateurs alike know the common sparrow is in great decline in Europe. Maybe Canadian artist Myfanwy MacLeod gets greenwashing best through her artwork: “Locating this artwork in an urban plaza not only highlights what has become the ‘natural’ environment of the sparrow, it also reinforces the ‘small’ problem of introducing a foreign species and the subsequent havoc wreaked upon our ecosystems.”

Green Cities and Green Washing Sources
http://www.chicagoclimateaction.org/
http://ourgreencities.co
http://www.siemens.com/entry/cc/en/greencityindex.htm
http://www.originalgreen.org/OG/Home.html
http://vancouver.ca/greenestcity/
http://rmc.sierraclub.org/energy/library/sustainablecities.pdf
http://coolcitiesde.us/about.html
http://www.monocle.com/specials/35_cities/
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/11/the_global_cities_index_2010
http://ourblocks.net/neighborhood-based-community-building-handbooks-recommended-by-jim-diers/
http://home.comcast.net/~jimdiers/
http://www.naturalstep.org/
http://www.naturalstepusa.org/
http://www.citiesforpeople.net/cities/curitiba.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRD3l3rlMpo&feature=related
http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/mothincarnate/24900/how-greenwashing-really-can-make-difference
http://www.greenwashingindex.com/index.php
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/greenwashings-toll-americans-get-green-fatigue/13392
http://www.pewclimate.org/
http://www.greenerchoices.org/eco-labels/eco-home.cfm
http://blog.terrachoice.com/2010/03/18/what-does-all-natural-really-mean/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=greenwashing-green-energy-hoffman
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=greenwashing-environmental-marketing

I take to the streets and go to rallies but maybe I should go to parliament to blow my brains out.

– Dimitris Christoulas to a friend, Business Insider, Apr 5, 2012

The cornered tend to be desperate. The insecure can lose their bearings. The Greek financial crisis is producing an assortment of warring metaphors, some more plausible than others. The common target in this whole business is Germany, implying that more than just the eurozone may be under threat. It suggests, in fact, that financial instability will, in time, lead to a nationalist critique of the European idea.

As with broader conflicts, the national is explained through the local. Global events can be seen through individual lenses, the stories of citizens who have suffered, even if those stories can unduly simplify the complex. In Greece, Dimitris Christoulas has offered the premise for the Greek protest movement. The 77-year-old retired pharmacist shot himself on Syntagma Square in Athens early last month leaving behind a poignant and powerful note. In that note, he claimed that he would ‘rather die than scavenge in rubbish bins for his food’ (Guardian, Apr 5).

Christoulas’s suicide has been labelled as the first ‘act of resistance’ akin to the revolutionary actions of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit and veg vendor whose act of self-conflagration in December 2010 set the Arab Spring in motion. But what was he resisting against? Unemployment levels in Greece stand at 21 percent and GDP has shrunk. The country is now in its fifth straight year of economic contraction. Soup kitchens in Athens are full with one in every eleven residents making regular trips. A bartering economy is starting to thrive.

The country’s suicide rate has climbed dramatically. From being one of Europe’s lowest, it has officially doubled. An elderly woman, wanting to alleviate the burden on her children, set herself on fire. Such cases make the political ground rich for disaffection, an all too prominent feature in the electoral rhetoric prior to last week’s ballot. Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza party has made gains on the platform of attacking those ‘loan sharks’ who have appropriated Greek sovereignty, promising an annulment of the bailout package. Those loan sharks are, of course, German, giving outsiders the sense that Teutonic bank managers will don their jackboots and march through Athens. The German role behind the bailout has even been deemed to be an imposition of an ‘economic Fourth Reich’ by the nationalist party, the Independent Greeks.

The suicide note by Christoulas also drew on history as a weapon. The government of Lucas Papademos, he suggested, was effectively collaborating with external forces the way Georgios Tsolakoglou did with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Even if Christoulas was drawing a very long bow, the problem of sovereignty is certainly critical. The leaders of the New Resistance movement led by Mikos Theodorakis have been enthusiastic and exaggerating in their praise of the Syriza leader. ‘I support with all my strength Alexis Tsipras in his efforts to form a government that will terminate the memorandum and will seek to recover the sovereignty of our country.’

Many would prefer a state of unchanged, moneyed comforts – pensions that are unreduced in perpetuity; a retirement age in the late 40s that enables a good deal of the rest of life to be enjoyed. But the tragedy of the money economy is that the hard means of supporting such lifestyles requires a base, preferably not on quicksand. When that base is crumbling, the rest will follow suit. Bad governance produces discontented, even revolutionary citizens. Internal disaffection encourages an often fruitless search for external excuses.

In a sense, there is a true ‘occupation’ – an economic one ruled by a cadre of technocrats. The banksters are in indirect command, dictating the programs of several countries in Europe where the finances have been shown to be poor. Sovereignty has become subservient to repayment, conditional on financial assistance. A vicious cycle has come into play: the banks have been responsible for lending to those who cannot pay. The books have been cooked; the credentials of those receiving borrowing exaggerated. The result is pure, inconsolable misery. The blame, as ever, is easily levelled against states whose better finances are seen as a means of bullying rather than an issue of praise. German Chancellor Angela Merkel becomes less a sound economic manager than a cruel stifler of independence.

As with any complex, undermining event, several factors feature. Either the political forces are deemed complicit with external forces (notably the Germans), and are accused of collaborators as a shorthand reference; or they are complicit in accepting the entire list of expectations dictated to by Brussels. The true impoverishment that has taken place in Greece is its political promise. The people, as they always have done, will survive in spite of their efforts.

Michael Hudson: Back in the 1950s, I used to go to socialist meetings, and people would say, why do the trade union people keep thinking they’re locked into the Democrats? And the answer is: well, that’s the two-party system. There isn’t really room for a third party here. And all the Republicans have to do is say, no, we’re worse, and it just scares people to actually vote for the Democrats. But people have been asking that question for 60 years, and nobody’s come up with a better answer since.

More at The Real News

University students in Quebec are striking against the right-wing provincial government’s attempt to increase tuition rates. Police have been violently clamping down on the student protests.

One Quebec student organization has come up with four proposals to reduce spending on post-secondary education, so that students are not burdened by rising education costs. Gabrielle Nadeau Dubois, a Quebec student organizer and co-spokesman with CLASSE, calls for a capital tax on Canadian banking transactions, which he proffered would lead gradually to free post-secondary education in Quebec by 2016.

More at The Real News

IPS — The U.S. Treasury Department’s claim of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda, which had become a key argument by right-wing activists who support war against Iran, has been discredited by former intelligence officials in the wake of publication of documents from Osama bin Laden’s files revealing a high level of antagonism between Al-Qaeda and Iran.

Three former intelligence officials with experience on Near East and South Asia told IPS they regard Treasury’s claim of a secret agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda as false and misleading.

That claim was presented in a way that suggested it was supported by intelligence. It now appears, however, to have been merely a propaganda line designed to support the Barack Obama administration’s strategy of diplomatic coercion on Iran.

Under Secretary of Treasury David S. Cohen announced last July that the department was “exposing Iran’s secret deal with Al-Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” The charge was introduced in connection with the designation of an Al-Qaeda official named Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions.

The Treasury claim has been embraced by the right-wing Weekly Standard and others aligned with hardline Israeli views on Iran, as primary source evidence of an alliance between Iran and Al-Qaeda.

But Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, told IPS the allegation of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda “has never been backed up by any evidence that would justify such a term” and that it is “a highly misleading characterisation of interaction between Iran and Al-Qaeda….”

Pillar said the recently released bin Laden documents “not only do not demonstrate any agreement in which Iran condoned or facilitated operations by Al-Qaeda, they contradict the notion that there was any such agreement.”

“I’ve never seen anything that suggests that happened,” said another former intelligence official, referring to an Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. “I’m very sceptical about that.”

A third former intelligence official said Treasury’s “secret deal” claim “doesn’t pass the BS test” and noted that it is perfectly aligned with the Obama administration’s policy of pressure on Iran.

The official said the Treasury Department’s push for its “secret deal” line is emblematic of a larger split in the intelligence community between those for whom intelligence is secondary to their role in “counterterrorism” policy and the rest of the community.

“The counterterrorism types are like used car salesmen,” the former official told IPS. “They are always overselling something. They have to show that they are doing important work.”

The actual text of the July 28, 2011 “designation” of Yasin al-Suri suggests that the claim of such a “secret deal” is merely a political spin on the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri on the release of prisoners.

It says that Yasin al Suri is an Al-Qaeda facilitator “living and operating in Iran under agreement between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government”. Iranian authorities, it said, “maintain a relationship with (al-Suri) and have permitted him to operate within Iran’s borders since 2005″.

The designation offers no other evidence of an “agreement” except for the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri in arranging the releases of Al-Qaeda prisoners from Iranian detention and their transfer to Pakistan.

The official notice of a 10-million-dollar reward for al-Suri on the website of the “Rewards for Justice” programme under the Diplomatic Security office of the State Department also indicates that the only “agreement” between Iran and Al-Qaeda has been to exchange prisoners.

“Working with the Iranian government,” it said, “al-Suri arranges the release of al Qaeda personnel from Iranian prisons. When al Qaeda operatives are released, the Iranian government transfers them to al- Suri, who then facilitates their travel to Pakistan.”

Neither the Treasury Department nor the State Department, which joined the February 2012 press briefing on the reward for finding al- Suri, referred to the fact that Iran had been forced to deal with al- Suri and to release Al-Qaeda detainees in order to obtain the release of the Iranian diplomat kidnapped by Pakistani allies of Al-Qaeda in Peshawar, Pakistan in November 2008.

In one of the documents taken from the Abbottabad compound and published by West Point’s Counter-Terrorism Center last week, a senior Al Qaeda official wrote:

We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners).

In response to the IPS request for clarification of the “secret agreement” claim, John Sullivan, a spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, declined to answer any questions on the subject or to allow IPS to interview Eytan Fisch, the assistant director of the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office.

In briefing journalists on al-Suri last February, Fisch had again invoked the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda “secret agreement” last February.

Sullivan defended the Treasury Department’s position on the issue, however, against criticism based on the publication of the bin Laden documents. “We based our action on Yasin al-Suri on a broad array of information that far exceeds what was recently made public,” Sullivan said in an e-mail to IPS.

Asked about the hint by the Treasury spokesman that department officials used still-classified material as the basis for the claim of a “secret agreement”, former national intelligence officer Pillar called it “disingenuous”.

The origins of the Treasury Department’s “secret deal” claim indicate that it was intended to generate press stories that would increase political and government support for pressure on Iran through economic sanctions and military threats.

The designation of Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions July 28, 2011 did not have any impact on Al-Qaeda funding. The objective was to allow Treasury to generate press coverage of its charge of a secret Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. The timing of the move coincided with a shift in Obama administration strategy from diplomatic engagement to maximising pressure on Iran.

During the period when neoconservatives were pushing for an explicit policy of support for regime change in Iran during the first George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials frequently talked as though any Al-Qaeda presence in Iran was evidence of Iran’s cooperation with the terrorist organisation.

But as ABC News reported on May 29, 2008, Bush administration officials were acknowledging privately that they were not complaining about Iranian policy toward Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran, because Iran had “kept these al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate”.

One official said Al-Qaeda officials under Iranian control, “some of whom are quite important,” were “essentially on ice”.

Israel has continued, however, to use its relations with friendly news media, especially in the UK, to generate disinformation about alleged joint Iranian-Al Qaeda planning for terrorist actions.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News carried a story February 15, 2012 citing “intelligence sources” from an unnamed state as suggesting that Iran had been supplying Al-Qaeda with “training in the use of advanced explosives” as well as some funding and a safe haven “as part of a deal first worked out in 2009….”

The report quoted the intelligence sources as saying that Iran wanted to use the threat of Al-Qaeda retaliation against Western targets as “revenge for any military strike against Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

I get mad when bloggers accuse me of lying — of knowing the information was false. I didn’t.

— Colin Powell

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world’s media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you?  I mean, to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall! What an insult to the entire world that would be!

Colin Powell doesn’t have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on February 5, 2003. It’s on videotape.

I tried to ask him about it in the summer of 2004. He was speaking to the Unity Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The event had been advertised as including questions from the floor, but for some reason that plan was revised. Speakers from the floor were permitted to ask questions of four safe and vetted journalists of color before Powell showed up, and then those four individuals could choose to ask him something related – which, of course, they did not, in any instance, do.

Bush and Kerry spoke as well. The panel of journalists who asked Bush questions when he showed up had not been properly vetted. Roland Martin of the Chicago Defender had slipped onto it somehow (which won’t happen again!). Martin asked Bush whether he was opposed to preferential college admissions for the kids of alumni and whether he cared more about voting rights in Afghanistan than in Florida. Bush looked like a deer in the headlights, only without the intelligence. He stumbled so badly that the room openly laughed at him.

But the panel that had been assembled to lob softballs at Powell served its purpose well. It was moderated by Gwen Ifill. I asked Ifill (and Powell could watch it later on C-Span if he wanted to) whether Powell had any explanation for the way in which he had relied on the testimony of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law. He had recited the claims about weapons of mass destruction but carefully left out the part where that same gentleman had testified that all of Iraq’s WMDs had been destroyed. Ifill thanked me, and said nothing.

I wonder what Powell would say if someone were to actually ask him that question, even today, or next year, or ten years from now. Someone tells you about a bunch of old weapons and at the same time tells you they’ve been destroyed, and you choose to repeat the part about the weapons and censor the part about their destruction. How would you explain that?

Well, it’s a sin of omission, so ultimately Powell could claim he forgot. “Oh yeah, I meant to say that, but it slipped my mind.”

But how would he explain this:

During his presentation at the United Nations, Powell provided this translation of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers:

They’re inspecting the ammunition you have, yes.

Yes.

For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

For the possibility there is by chance forbidden ammo?

Yes.

And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there.

The incriminating phrases “clean all of the areas” and “Make sure there is nothing there” do not appear in the official State Department translation of the exchange:

Lt. Colonel: They are inspecting the ammunition you have.

Colonel: Yes.

Lt. Col: For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

Colonel: Yes?

Lt. Colonel: For the possibility there is by chance, forbidden ammo.

Colonel: Yes.

Lt. Colonel: And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.

Colonel: Yes.

Powell was writing fictional dialogue. He put those extra lines in there and pretended somebody had said them. Here’s what Bob Woodward said about this in his book Plan of Attack.

[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light. Concerning the intercept about inspecting for the possibility of ‘forbidden ammo,’ Powell took the interpretation further: ‘Clean out all of the areas. . . . Make sure there is nothing there.’ None of this was in the intercept.

For most of his presentation, Powell wasn’t inventing dialogue, but he was presenting as facts numerous claims that his own staff had warned him were weak and indefensible.

Powell told the UN and the world:

We know that Saddam’s son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam’s numerous palace complexes.

The January 31, 2003, evaluation of Powell’s draft remarks prepared for him by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (“INR”) flagged this claim as “WEAK”.

Regarding alleged Iraqi concealment of key files, Powell said:

Key files from military and scientific establishments have been placed in cars that are being driven around the countryside by Iraqi intelligence agents to avoid detection.

The January 31, 2003 INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added “Plausibility open to question.”

A February 3, 2003, INR evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s remarks noted:

Page 4, last bullet, re key files being driven around in cars to avoid inspectors. This claim is highly questionable and promises to be targeted by critics and possibly UN inspection officials as well.

That didn’t stop Colin from stating it as fact and apparently hoping that, even if UN inspectors thought he was a brazen liar, US media outlets wouldn’t tell anyone.

On the issue of biological weapons and dispersal equipment, Powell said:

We know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK”:

WEAK. Missiles with biological warheads reportedly dispersed. This would be somewhat true in terms of short-range missiles with conventional warheads, but is questionable in terms of longer-range missiles or biological warheads.

This claim was again flagged in the February 3, 2003, evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s presentation:

Page 5. first para, claim re missile brigade dispersing rocket launchers and BW warheads. This claim too is highly questionable and might be subjected to criticism by UN inspection officials.

That didn’t stop Colin. In fact, he brought out visual aids to help with his lying

Powell showed a slide of a satellite photograph of an Iraqi munitions bunker, and lied:

The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions . . . [t]he truck you [...] see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added:

We support much of this discussion, but we note that decontamination vehicles – cited several times in the text – are water trucks that can have legitimate uses… Iraq has given UNMOVIC what may be a plausible account for this activity – that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives; presence of a fire safety truck (water truck, which could also be used as a decontamination vehicle) is common in such an event.

Powell’s own staff had told him the thing was a water truck, but he told the U.N. it was “a signature item…a decontamination vehicle.” The UN was going to need a decontamination vehicle itself by the time Powell finished spewing his lies and disgracing his country.

He just kept piling it on: “UAVs outfitted with spray tanks constitute an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons,” he said.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this statement as “WEAK” and added: “the claim that experts agree UAVs fitted with spray tanks are ‘an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons’ is WEAK.”

In other words, experts did NOT agree with that claim.

Powell kept going, announcing:

In mid-December weapons experts at one facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents who were to deceive inspectors about the work that was being done there.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “not credible” and “open to criticism, particularly by the UN inspectorates.”

His staff was warning him that what he planned to say would not be believed by his audience, which would include the people with actual knowledge of the matter.

To Powell that was no matter.

Powell, no doubt figuring he was in deep already, so what did he have to lose, went on to tell the UN:

On orders from Saddam Hussein, Iraqi officials issued a false death certificate for one scientist, and he was sent into hiding.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and called it “Not implausible, but UN inspectors might question it. (Note: Draft states it as fact.)”

And Powell stated it as fact. Notice that his staff was not able to say there was any evidence for the claim, but rather that it was “not implausible.” That was the best they could come up with. In other words: “They might buy this one, Sir, but don’t count on it.”

Powell, however, wasn’t satisfied lying about one scientist. He had to have a dozen. He told the United Nations:

A dozen [WMD] experts have been placed under house arrest, not in their own houses, but as a group at one of Saddam Hussein’s guest houses.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “Highly questionable.” This one didn’t even merit a “Not implausible.”

Powell also said:

In the middle of January, experts at one facility that was related to weapons of mass destruction, those experts had been ordered to stay home from work to avoid the inspectors. Workers from other Iraqi military facilities not engaged in elicit weapons projects were to replace the workers who’d been sent home.

Powell’s staff called this “WEAK,” with “Plausibility open to question.”

All of this stuff sounded plausible enough to viewers of Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. And that, we can see now, was what interested Colin. But it must have sounded highly implausible to the U.N. inspectors. Here was a guy who had not been with them on any of their inspections coming in to tell them what had happened.

We know from Scott Ritter, who led many UNSCOM inspections in Iraq, that U.S. inspectors had used the access that the inspection process afforded them to spy for, and to set up means of data collection for, the CIA. So there was some plausibility to the idea that an American could come back to the UN and inform the UN what had really happened on its inspections.

Yet, repeatedly, Powell’s staff warned him that the specific claims he wanted to make were not going to even sound plausible. They will be recorded by history more simply as blatant lies.

The examples of Powell’s lying listed above are taken from an extensive report released by Congressman John Conyers: “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War.”