Thursday, November 3, 2011

Council of Canadians fights "fracking"....will you join them in this fight?

From the Council of Canadians website, November 3, 2011
Communities across Canada are asking hard questions about a natural gas drilling process called “fracking” and calling for stronger federal and provincial government oversight of this growing industry.

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking,” is a controversial drilling process used to extract natural gas from shale, coal beds and “tight sands” with vertical and horizontal drilling. Sand, water and chemicals are blasted at high pressure to fracture rock where natural gas is trapped.
Communities all over Canada, the U.S. and other countries are fighting against fracking because it pollutes water and harms human health. Fracking is extremely water intensive and requires approximately 2 million to 9 million gallons of water per “fracking” job. This method of natural gas extraction also uses dangerous chemicals. A four billion gallon fracking project requires approximately 80 tonnes (200,000 gallons) of chemicals. Contaminated fracking water, laced with these chemicals, can leach into local water supplies.
While some municipalities are imposing bans or halting fracking projects, Quebec is the only province in Canada that has implemented a limited moratorium.
Council of Canadians chapters and members are active in fights against fracking in local communities. For example, in Nova Scotia the Council’s Inverness County chapter has been challenging PetroWorth Resources Inc.’s plans to drill more than 1,200 metres beneath the ground for oil and gas just 2,000 feet from the shore of Lake Ainslie, the province’s largest freshwater lake. In Alberta, we are supporting members of the Blood Tribe who have been fighting a fracking project on their lands south of Calgary. In British Columbia chapter members are rallying against provincial government approval of a water licence that will allow the annual removal of up to 7.3 billion litres of water from the Williston Reservoir near Hudson’s Hope for fracking.

Chris Hedges: A masterclass for the "occupy" movement

By Chris Hedges, truthdig.com, October 31, 2011

NEW YORK CITY—Jon Friesen, 27, tall and lanky with a long, dirty-blond ponytail, a purple scarf and an old green fleece, is sitting on concrete at the edge of Zuccotti Park leading a coordination meeting, a gathering that takes place every morning with representatives of each of Occupy Wall Street’s roughly 40 working groups.
“Our conversation is about what it means to be a movement and what it means to be an organization,” he says to the circle. A heated discussion follows, including a debate over whether the movement should make specific demands.
I find him afterward on a low stone wall surrounding a flowerbed in the park. He decided to come to New York City, he said, from the West Coast for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. He found a ride on Craig’s List while staying at his brother’s home in Champaign, Ill.
“It was a television event when I was 17,” he says of the 2001 attacks. “I came here for the 10-year anniversary. I wanted to make it real to myself. I’d never been to New York. I’d never been to the East Coast.”
Once he reached New York City he connected with local street people to find “assets.” He slept in the parks and on the street. He arrived on the first day of the occupation in Zuccotti Park. He found other “traveler types” whose survival skills and political consciousness were as developed as his own.
In those first few days, he says, “it was the radicals and the self-identifying anarchists” who set up the encampment. Those who would come later, usually people with little experience in dumpster diving, sleeping on concrete or depending on a McDonald’s restroom, would turn to revolutionists like Friesen for survival. Zuccotti Park, like most Occupied sites, schooled the uninitiated.
“The structure and process carried out by those initial radicals,” he says with delight of the first days in the park, now have “a wide appeal.”
The Occupy movements that have swept across the country fuse the elements vital for revolt. They draw groups of veteran revolutionists whose isolated struggles, whether in the form of squatter communities or acts of defiance such as the tree-sit in Berkeley to save an oak grove on the University of California campus that ran from Dec. 2, 2006, to Sept. 9, 2008, are often unheeded by the wider culture. The Occupy movements were nurtured in small, dissident enclaves in New York, Oakland, Chicago, Denver, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Bands of revolutionists in these cities severed themselves from the mainstream, joined with other marginalized communities and mastered the physical techniques of surviving on the streets and in jails.
“It’s about paying attention to exactly what you need, and figuring out where I can get food and water, what time do the parks close, where I can get a shower,” Friesen says.
Friesen grew up in an apolitical middle-class home in Fullerton in Southern California’s Orange County, where systems of power were obeyed and rarely questioned. His window into political consciousness began inauspiciously enough as a teenager, with the Beatles, The Doors, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He found in the older music “a creative energy” and “authenticity” that he did not hear often in contemporary culture. He finished high school and got a job in a LensCrafter lab and “experienced what it’s like to slave away trying to make glasses in an hour.” He worked at a few other 9-to-5 jobs but found them “restrictive and unfulfilling.” And then he started to drift, working his way up to Berkeley, where he lived in a squatter encampment behind the UC Berkeley football stadium. He used the campus gym to take showers. By the time he reached Berkeley he had left mainstream society. He has lived outside the formal economy since 2005, the last year he filed income taxes. He was involved in the tree-sit protest and took part in the occupations of university buildings and demonstration outside the Berkeley chancellor’s campus residence to protest fee hikes and budget cuts, activities that saw him arrested and jailed. He spent time with the Navajos on Black Mesa in Arizona and two months with the Zapatistas in Mexico.
“What I saw in the Zapatistas was a people pushed to the brink of extinction and forgetting,” he says. “Their phrases ring true: Liberty! Dignity! Democracy! Everything for Everyone! Nothing for Ourselves! The masks the Zapatistas wear check egos. People should be united in their facelessness. This prevents cults of personality.”
“I have no interest in participating in the traditional political process,” he says. “It’s bureaucratic. It’s vertical. It’s exclusive. It’s ruled by money. It’s cumbersome. This is cumbersome too, what we’re doing here, but the principles that I’m pushing and that many people are pushing to uphold here are in direct opposition to the existing structure. This is a counterpoint. This is an acknowledgement of all those things that we hate, or that I hate, which are closed and exclusive. It is about defying status and power, certification and legitimacy, institutional validation to participate. This process has infected our consciousness as far as people being allowed [to participate] or even being given credibility. The wider society creates a situation where people are excluded, people feel like they’re not worth anything. They’re not accepted. The principles here are horizontal in terms of decision-making, transparency, openness, inclusiveness, accessibility. There are people doing sign language at the general assembly now. There are clusters of deaf people that come together and do sign language together. This is an example of the inclusive nature that we want to create here. And as far as redefining participation and the democratic process, my understanding of American history is that it was a bunch of white males in power, mostly. This is radically different. If you’re a homeless person, if you’re a street person, you can be here. There’s a radical inclusion that’s going on. And if it’s not that, then I’m not going to participate.”
(For the rest of this piece, go to truthdig.com)

Cultural gap between Occupiers and "establishment"...will only grow

By Terence Chea and Lisa Leff, The Associated Press, in Globe and Mail, November 2, 2011 

OAKLAND, CALIF—Several thousand Occupy Wall Street demonstrators forced a halt to operations at the United States' fifth busiest port Wednesday evening, escalating a movement whose tactics had largely been limited to rallies and tent camps since it began in September.

Police estimated that a crowd of about 3,000 had gathered at the Port of Oakland by early evening. Some had marched from the California city's downtown, while others had been bused to the port.
Port spokesman Isaac Kos-Read said maritime operations had effectively been shut down. Interim Oakland police chief Howard Jordan warned that protesters who went inside the port's gates would be committing a federal offence.

In New York, Los Angeles and other cities where the movement against economic inequality has spread, demonstrators planned rallies in solidarity with the Oakland protesters, who called for Wednesday's “general strike” after an Iraq War veteran was injured in clashes with police last week.
Organizers of the march said they want to stop the “flow of capital.” The port sends goods primarily to Asia, including wine as well as rice, fruits and nuts, and handles imported electronics, apparel and manufacturing equipment, mostly from Asia, as well as cars and parts from Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai.
And this by Gary Mason, Globe and Mail, November 3, 2011
Is the Occupy movement growing or dying? Are groups such as the one that set up camp on the grounds of the Vancouver Art Gallery hurting the cause or helping it? Does a leaderless protest organization have any promise of forcing change?
If you talk to the person considered largely responsible for the whole thing, the amorphous, anti-hierarchical nature of Occupy is part of its mystique and will eventually be the reason for its success. And if you’re tempted to ask Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn how a protest group that doesn’t have a specific set of demands can accomplish anything, he’ll tell you that you don’t get what’s really going on....
But now I watch the 75 or so people occupying the grounds of the Vancouver Art Gallery and question whether there’s any hope for the movement. The spirit of optimism that imbued the site early on has dissipated. Many campers have left, frustrated by the clash of varying ideologues and agendas. It seems to exist with no purpose.
“People expect this to be the old-style revolution,” says Mr. Lasn, whose counterculture magazine sparked the movement. “They expect it to be one that is vertical, that has demands, that has a leader who will tell you what’s going on so it’s crystal clear. But this movement is horizontal. It grew out of the culture of the Internet and learned something from the encampments in Spain and some of the anarchism going on in Greece.”

Instead, Mr. Lasn told me, Occupy is egalitarian and doesn’t like leaders or demands. It’s trying to create a new model for democracy, transcending failed revolutions of the past and eschewing simplistic left-wing slogans such as Tax the Rich.
Perhaps. But Occupy has certainly relied on catchphrases of its own – “the 99 per cent,” “the 1 per cent” – to convey its anti-establishment message. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I think what many people are struggling with is where Occupy goes from here. Does it have any hope of building on the early momentum it had behind the message that corporate greed, represented by the obscene profits and bonuses seen on Wall Street, symbolizes a world fundamentally out of sync?


There is a real divide in perceptions between those activitists who actually sleep in tents on the streets of cities around the world, and "the establishment" whose need for "the list" of demands, or of responsibilities, or of chores for the day, or of obligations from business partners drives their businesses, their personal career goals, their relationships and their "vision" of the world in which they wish to live.
A brief anecdote to illustrate: A few years ago, I was interviewed by a consulting firm, headed by a former high school principal and former mathematics teacher, whose company, along with the testing from Waco Texas on personality profiles, provided a service in interviewing, testing and hiring for their clients. Among other things their approach was to "test" all applicants, and then provide an "interview" conducted by at least eight of their key personnel. At the end of 90 minutes, after the others had departed, the CEO commented directly to me, "Every time we ask you a question, you answer with a story; you never give us a list!"
"That's because I do not think in lists, I think in stories and pictures!" I instantly retorted.
Obviously, we did not go forward together, thankfully.
His company, in my view, represents what is absolutely the worse feature of the new economy: that it is driven by those who think in LISTS...those whose parameters of the intellect, of the imagination, of the potential and of the possibilities can be reduced to lists, whose power to command others seems foreordained. It is not only that gloabization has wreaked havoc with the millions at the bottom of the pyramid; it is that those at the top have reduced everything, including themselve, to fit into the lists of goals, objectives, expectations, and the measurements necessary to document their success.
This methodology, while efficient on the surface, negates any "story" that does fit with the parameters of the lists. And the lists provide talking points for anyone, or any group, to fit the parameters of the "media" seeking to generate stories for their readers, who, themselves, seek to "grasp" the "meaning" of any person, or group, by repeating the list of objectives of that person/group. So, from a public relations perspective, a single source in any organization can provide "talking points" on any subject, and the most simple of his/her acolytes can and will deliver those "bullets" to the waiting camera, or reporter's recording device, and the mission is accomplished. Even questions from those reporters that require answers not on the "talking points" are ignored and walked on with answers that are completely irrelevant to the question or the questioner.
We have in effect legitimized a charade of "public information" by replacing full and honest and authentic answers with "talking points" of lists generated by a single "brain" who can therefore do all the thinking for the organization.
And we are all complicit in the process. It now takes a Noam Chomsky, or a Chris Hedges lecture, on a television program like "Big Ideas" on TVO, to explicate the complexities of a situation, because most of what is referred to as "public discourse" is merely the vacuuous repetition of talking points of lists.
And Occupy Wall Street, or Occupy Together, is about a different mind set. It is about peeling away the veneer of those lists of demands, of requirements, of expectations, that can so quickly and easily reduce any group to the "definition" prescribed by those in the media whose self-interest trumps their willing capacity to actually learn about complexities, nuances, and even uncertainties of the movement.
John Turner, former Prime Minister and Liberal leader, tells the story in a recent CBC interview with Peter Mansbridge, about receiving a call from a then prominent American politician running for office who said, "John I do not know very much about Canada so would you meet me in Wisconsin with a list a 'bullets' about your country?" Mr Turner replied affirmatively and met the U.S. politician in the Field House of the University of Wisconsin and privately delivered those "bullets". And three days later, that same U.S. politician was shot by an assassin in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel. His name was Bobby Kennedy.
Here is a story illustrating the appropriate use of "bullets" for a "quick learn" about the complexities of Canada, by a neighbouring politician then at his prime. No one would or could imagine Bobby Kennedy reducing Canada to Turner's list of "bullets" following his conversation with the Canadian; and no one would or could image John Turner reducing Canada to a list of "bullet"s that would capture the complexities of Canada. However, when this is the metaphor for a "quick" learn by people generally, given the multiple complexities of multiple stories, it often is taken as replacement for learning, understanding, and "grasp" of any situation.
The other driving force for such "lists" is the marketing impulse, which reduces all products and services to a list of benefits, for the purpose of a quick and easy "sell line" delivered at the end of a "story" commercial, crafted to "intrigue" the audience.
So, instead of the story being the "essence" of the product's story, it has become the icing on the cake, and we are suffocating from a diet of sugar "icings," while we are all starved for understanding, meaning and connection.
I would never have developed a connection with the CEO of the "staffing firm" if I were to work with him for  many decades; we talk a different language; we think a different set of thoughts; we expect completely different things from the other. And our mental, emotional and spiritual cultures are virtually incompatible.
And he lost a potentially useful voice at his table of consultants when he dismissed me as a "story-teller" without lists.
And a similar divide separates the Occupiers from the "establishment" today.
And this space will continue to support the admittedly amorphous, and somewhat ambiguous and clearly undefined and potentially undefinable movement that is gathering in the streets of cities around the world.
(See also, Chris Hedges: A Masterclass for the "occupy" movement, acorncentreblog.com, November 3, 2011)

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

With Peggy Nash, NDP will be far left, leaving room for Liberals in centre

By Lawrence Martin, Globe and Mail, November 1, 2011
Women are on a roll in Canadian politics. Along with Alberta, women have the premierships in British Columbia, Newfoundland and Nunavut. Sheila Copps is likely to be soon elected president of the Liberal Party.

Ms. Nash, a 60-year-old veteran of the labour movement who’s in her second stint as a federal MP, hopes to continue the trend. “She’s the Margaret Thatcher of the left,” one of her supporters offered dreamily. “That’s what the country needs.”
Ms. Nash is trilingual (English, French and Spanish), has an honours degree in French literature, and is pointed in the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate. To imagine, however, that a female union activist could some day replace Stephen Harper seems rather far-fetched. But that’s her dream.
In an interview, she said Canadians aren’t becoming more conservative, but the government has pushed the country to the right, polarized it, and created a big opening for the other side. Although her record suggests she is well ensconced in her party’s leftist tradition, she wants to broaden its appeal to the middle of the political spectrum. She is targeting a government that, she says, is “consistently siding with employers against the interests of average working people.”
Ms. Nash’s years of experience with grassroots movements and as a top negotiator for the Canadian Auto Workers union give her both a toughness and a capacity to bridge differences, she feels. While steely, she also sees herself as a rassembleur. “I am the type of person who likes to reach out to the other side and find a compromise. That’s my nature.”
But her entry into the leadership race gives the NDP two top-tier candidates from the union ranks (the other being Mr. Topp). This has the Conservatives’ divide-and-conquer strategists salivating. With the Liberals in opposition, they didn’t pay much heed to organized labour. But since the election, it’s been one broadside after another. The moves have included forceful tactics to prevent postal workers and flight attendants from striking, the promotion of a private member’s bill to demand greater financial disclosure by unions, and allegations that the NDP contravened financing laws by accepting paid advertising from unions at its June convention.
If this isn’t enough, Labour Minister Lisa Raitt, who’s been winning praise for her hard-line tactics, says she’s considering changing the Canada Labour Code so the economy will be defined as an essential service. Given that almost any strike could be said to affect the economy, such a move would give the government extraordinary arbitrary powers.
Should Ms Nash become leader of the NDP, as her supporters certainly believe she can, the other parties, especially the Liberals, would do well to take her very seriously. This is no Audrey McLaughlin, nor is she another Alexa McDonough. This is one tough, articulate and credible candidate. She has, in the parlance of the political chattering class, "gravitas" and every time she speaks, she makes sense, without causing a twisting feeling in the pit of the listener's stomach. For the NDP, Ms Nash would certainly elevate the credibility of the party, beyond the level that could be achieved, it says here, by either Mr Topp or Mr Mulcair.
For the Liberals,  it would be more than a little auspicious given that the country would have a far right conservative party under Harper or one of his sycophant underlings, and a far left NDP, farther left than the party led by Jack Layton, provinding ample opportunity for the Liberals to re-capture the proverbial middle ground of Canadian politics.
John Turner, a former Liiberal leader and also a former, if brief, Prime Minister, recently interviewed by Peter Mansbridge on CBC's One on One, reminded his interviewer that back in the mid eighties, when he took the leadership of the party, it had no money, no policy and literally nothing in the pantry on which to build. So he had to build 'from the bottom up' while continuing to fend off the Chretien people who resented his having won the leadership over Mr. Chretien. "Today, it is much more difficult to rebuild the party, " said Mr. Turner in his recent interview, hoping that 'the party' will give full support to its current, interim leader, Mr. Rae, who, Turner acknowledged, "is doing a good job as leader."
Today, the Liberals have, it appears fromt the outside the Liberals once again have 'no money, no real policy proposals, except thoat articulated by Mr. Rae on the fly in his on-camera interviews, and in his party's opportunities during Question Period (which, according to Mr.Turner, has replaced full debate as the vehicle of expression of the work of the House of Commons, to the delight of the media, and to the detriment of Parliament).
If Mr. Martin is correct, that Sheila Copps will be elected president of the Liberal Party, there will be a vigorous initiative, probably several, to attract new members, new ideas, new funding proposals and new candidates, all of them in serious scarcity. The real danger is that the party will, once again, reach for some magic bullet, in selecting a leader as the only serious business it faces to regain the confidence of the Canadian electorate. Without money, and serious, long-term sources of that money, and without serious and connecting policy proposals, thought out, researched and both financed and articulated with a degree of professionalism and competence, and without candidates who can and do believe in and subscibe to the policy proposals...the Liberal Party is not going to rise from the ashes like the phoenix...and the work ahead is not for dilletantes. It is for serious, committed and roll-up-your-sleeves activists, not merely for political pollsters, and magicians, although a little magic dust would not hurt.


Tuesday, November 1, 2011

UPDATE Nov. 9:Personhood vote in Mississippi rejected yesterday!

Katherine Q. Seelye, New York Times, November 9, 2011
One of the biggest surprises of the night (November 8) was Mississippi’s rejection of a far-reaching and stringent anti-abortion initiative known as the “personhood” amendment, which had inspired a ferocious national debate. The measure, Initiative 26, would have amended the state Constitution to define life “to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”

Supporters, including evangelical Christians, said it would have stopped the murder of innocent life and sent a clarion moral call to the world. They said they expected that passage in Mississippi would have built support for similar laws in other states.
Opponents, led by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union, said the proposal would have outlawed all abortions, including in cases of rape and incest and when the woman’s life was in danger; would have barred morning-after pills and certain contraceptives such as IUD’s; and could have limited in vitro fertility procedures.
“The message from Mississippi is clear,” Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said in a statement. “An amendment that allows politicians to further interfere in our personal, private medical decisions, including a woman’s right to choose safe, legal abortion, is unacceptable.”
The push for a personhood amendment split the country’s anti-abortion movement. Traditional leaders including the Roman Catholic bishops and National Right to Life opposed it on strategic grounds, fearing it would lead to a defeat in the United States Supreme Court and set back their decades-long efforts to chip away at abortion rights.
From NPR's On Point website, October 341, 2011
The abortion battle goes deep next Tuesday in the state of Mississippi. Voters there go to the polls to decide whether to write into the Mississippi constitution an amendment stating that life begins at conception. Sperm meets egg and you would have a legal person.

It would make abortion in any circumstance virtually impossible under the law. Backers of the so-called “personhood” movement hope to take it national. Use it to batter down Roe v Wade. Mississippi may be their first big victory
Mississippi voters will consider an amendment to the state constitution next week that would legally define a person as such from the moment of conception. That would mean that abortions – and several methods of birth control – would constitute the taking of a life.

Supporters of the bill see it as just a first step within a larger push to end abortion. “I want abortion to go away from Mississippi,” said Dr. Beverly McMillan, an obstetrician and gynecologist and President of Pro-Life Mississippi.
Opponents, meanwhile, see it as an infringement on a woman’s constitutionally protected right to secure an abortion, as well as an intrusion of the government in the relationship between the doctor and patient – one that could make life-saving medical procedures, and even types of birth control, illegal.
“This is a real shift in the way that health care decisions are made,” said Randall Hines, physician and head of Mississippi Reproductive Medicine, and a supporter of the amendment. “If we pass this amendment, we’re going to insert state government into the medical decision making process in a way that’s never been done before.”
Enshrining personhood at the state level is a nationwide effort, but one that has been controversial even among anti-abortion groups. Some prominent groups have opposed the personhood movement; for fear that a failure could set back the anti-abortion cause.
Supporters of the Mississippi effort reject those criticisms. “Those groups have had over 30 years to do something about abortion,” said Jennifer Mason, Communications Director and national spokesperson for Personhood USA. “We’ve recognized that there is a loophole in Roe v. Wade, where Justice Potter Stewart said that if a case could be made for personhood, the case for abortion collapses.”
“There’s no loophole in the constitutional law,” argued Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “The court decided clearly in Roe v. Wade that “person” does not include the unborn. It’s in the decision; it’s clear. This is an attempt to reverse Roe v. Wade.”
“Mississippi is both a socially conservative state and a religious state,” said Jeffrey Hess, capital reporter, Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “It is fertile ground for a movement that wants to end abortion nationwide.” He said that the anti-abortion measures often enjoy bi-partisan support in the state. “There’s a real likelihood that it will pass,” Hess said.
In Mississippi, the vote is apparently likely to go to the "pro-life" side of the debate. And it signals a continuing and more protracted political, religious and ethical battle in each of the remaining 49 states. The United States, having become one of, if not the most progressive state with respect to a woman's right to make decisions affecting her body, not to mention the family's right to decide on their obligations as parents, will once again head toward what is nothing short of an incipient theocracy, a state dominated by the position of the most populous church, the Roman Catholic, combined with many of the right-wing protestant fundamentalist churches.
The case for whether a fetus is a human being, part of the debate during the Roe v Wade decision at the Supreme Court, can apparently now be incontrovertibly proven through the use of new technology, according to the supporters of this ballot initiative. Nevertheless, the legal history of this question would suggest a firmly enshrined right of choice for American women.
Of course, regardless of the outcome of this Mississippi vote, the issue will once again be joined at the Supreme Court, where the outcome seems uncertain. George W. Bush appointed at least two very conservative, Roman Catholic justices, Roberts and Alito, while President Obama also appointed two female, and more liberal justices, Sotomayer and Kagan. Depending on when the issue is joined at the Supreme Court, and the court's composition, the matter could go either way.
Overturning Roe v Wade, would, in this opinion of this writer, be a regressive step in United States cultural and political wars; it would demonstrate an adherence to the literalist interpretation of scripture that can and will only support more legalistic and narrow definitions with the social contract, which is already extreme fragile and thin.
From inside the country, it seems that the proponents of this initiative have the moral high ground, without having to answer the question of how the state cares, or doesn't care, for the children currently living in the country.
And what is shocking to me is that proponents would ban abortion even in the case of rape, incest or when the health and life of the mother is at risk, and that suggests an uncompromising position, typical of the strict, literalist readings of both law and scripture.
A read tragedy in failed development of a once vibrant nation!

UNESCO votes "yes" on Palestinian Membership, but Security Council approval still unavailable

By Sarah Delorenzo, Globe and Mail, October 31, 2011
Palestine became a full member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on Monday as its membership approved the measure in a 107-14 vote with 52 abstentions.

In a surprise, France voted “yes” – and the room erupted in cheers – while the “no” votes included the United States, Israel, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany.
“Long live Palestine!” someone shouted in the hall, in French, at the unusually tense and dramatic meeting of UNESCO’s General Conference.
Monday’s vote was a grand symbolic victory for the Palestinians, but it alone won’t make Palestine into a state. The issues of borders for an eventual Palestinian state, security troubles and other disputes that have thwarted Middle East peace for decades remain unresolved.
“Joy fills my heart. This is really an historic moment,” said Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki.
Reaction from the United States was swift. Within hours of the vote, the Obama administration said it would refrain from making a $60-million payment it planned to make in November for the UN cultural agency. Canada is also reconsidering how much support it gives UNESCO, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said.
Even if the vote’s impact isn’t felt right away in the Mideast, it will be quickly felt at UNESCO, which protects historic heritage sites and works to improve world literacy, access to schooling for girls and cultural understanding.

UNESCO depends heavily on U.S. funding – Washington provides 22 per cent of its budget or about $80 million a year – but has survived without it in the past: The United States pulled out of UNESCO under president Ronald Reagan, rejoining two decades later under president George W. Bush.
UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said she worried Monday’s decision could put the agency in a precarious position.
“I am worried we may confront a situation that could erode UNESCO as a universal platform for dialogue,” said Ms. Bokova, who has led a drive to reform the institution.
In an address to parliament, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu harshly criticized the Palestinians’ move.

“Unfortunately, the Palestinians continue to refuse to negotiate with us. Instead of sitting around the negotiating table, they have decided to form an alliance with Hamas and take unilateral steps at the UN, including today,” Mr. Netanyahu said. He warned his government would “not sit quietly.”
Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, called the vote a tragedy. “They’ve forced a drastic cut in contributions to the organization.”
“UNESCO deals in science, not science fiction,” he said. “They forced on UNESCO a political subject out of its competence.”
A central question in these moves by Palestine, is whether their aggressive push for statehood, with the support of so many members of the UN, endangers the viability of Israel. Clearly, the issue of Palestinian statehood will now go to the Security Council, and clearly the U.S. will veto the application leaving the question lingering in the air, without a confirming resolution from the Security Council. However, while many of the other members of the Security Council voted in favour of the UNESCO decision yesterday there were significant abstentions.
And this by Flavia Krause-Jackson and David Lerman from Bloomberg, November 1, 2011
Among the more than 52 countries that abstained from voting in Unesco, there were three critical Security Council members -- Portugal, Colombia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. That is a blow for Abbas, who had been courting them personally for months to try to gain the upper hand in the 15-member council.

In more bad news for Abbas, the three leaders representing the Muslims, Croats and Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina met yesterday and failed to reach a unified position to support the Palestinians’ UN application.
That leaves the Palestinians one vote short of the nine needed in the Security Council to approve the application for full UN membership. Reaching that number would represent a moral victory and force the U.S. to use its veto to block Palestinian membership.
Instead, as things stand, the Palestinians can still only count on eight council members -- Russia, China, Gabon, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon and India -- to vote yes.




..

Jeffrey Sachs outpunches Niall Ferguson on Fareed Zakaria's GPS

From GPS, Sunday October 30, 2011
Fareed Zakaria interviews Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs and Harvard Economic Historian Niall Ferguson:
Fareed Zakaria: Jeff, you were at Occupy Wall Street. You've in a sense lent it support. Why do you do that? What do you think is going on there?

Jeffrey Sachs: Well, I think they have a basically correct message that when they say "we are the 99 percent," that they're reflecting the fact that the top one percent not only ran away with the prize economically in the last 30 years, but also took the power, manipulated it, twisted it, broke the law. Brought the world economy to its knees actually, and it's time to correct things. And I think that that's what Occupy Wall Street is really about. The fact that every marquee firm on Wall Street broke the law in a major way, it's now paying a series of fines. Some people are going to jail. People are disgusted about this.
Fareed Zakaria: But isn't what has caused the one percent or five percent of the top to do well, these very broad forces of technology, the information revolution which have empowered global knowledge workers, which have empowered capital rather than labor? So if it's all these much bigger structural forces, is it going to be remedied by some kind of political solution like a Buffett tax?
Jeffrey Sachs: I don't think it is all that. I think that markets caused a widening of inequalities in just about every high-income country. But some governments did something constructive about it, where starting in 1981 the U.S. government amplified this in quite reckless ways.
Because when Ronald Reagan came to office, rather than saying we have globalization, we have competition, we now have to do something about our skills, our technology and so forth, he said that government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem. It was a fateful call. And this is the path that we've been on for 30 years of dismantling that part of our social institution which - institutions which could actually help with job training, help with education, help with science and technology in a more effective way.
But more than that, Wall Street didn't just gain from globalization, it has been completely reckless. They gamed the system. They packed toxic assets. They sold them to unwitting investors. They let the hedge funds bet against them. And the SEC is finally calling them to account.
But the public is disgusted because after that happened, lo and behold, the next thing is that they begged for bailouts; they got the bailouts. The moment they got the bailouts, they said, "Leave us alone", "deregulate", "free markets". So they're completely hypocritical in this behavior.
We want everything of ours until we need help, then we want your help, once we get your help, then we want everything again. And it's that kind of impunity that has brought people out around this country deeply angry.
Niall Ferguson: Well, first of all, I think it's important to avoid criminalizing one percent of the population which you just did, Jeff. I mean, there's no question that major financial institutions have been fined and rightly so. But to turn that into an indictment of three million people seems to me -

Seems to me actually rather reckless. And having watched what you said at Occupy Wall Street, I have to say I thought you overstepped the mark and ceased to be an academic and became a demagogue at that point.
This is a demagoguic argument especially for somebody who knows that the principal driver of inequality has actually been globalization, not malpractice by Wall Street.


The second part of your argument is that banks misbehaved in Europe, too. I mean, those countries that did not go down the Reagan route have got banks that are insolvent, banks that were guilty of incompetence and malpractice.
So you argued that this was something specific to the United States. And the faults of - and the faults of Ronald Reagan.
Jeffrey Sachs: Of course it was.
FERGUSON: Just a second. The banks in Europe are in just as big a mess but they didn't go down the Reagan route. So it's not only bad economics, but it seems to me it's bad history and certainly bad politics.
Jeffrey Sachs: Let's talk what I said and what is important here. And what I've said is that in a society that is so unequal as ours and where the very top has abused the system repeatedly in the banks, the CEOs of this country taking home take-home pay hundreds of times their workers' pay, unlike any other part of the world, the hedge funds and the banks got unbelievable terms of the deal to get capital gains taxes, carried interest down to 15 percent tax rates. So outrageous compared to what the rest of America bears.
Niall Ferguson: You can't believe that this is the reason why the bottom quintile of the population is in poverty and has very limited social mobility. That's nothing to do with what happens on Wall Street, as you well know. The real problem that we have in this country, it seems to me, is declining social mobility, and not enough is said about that.
Jeffrey Sachs: Well, I write a great deal about it. And the big difference of social mobility -
Niall Ferguson: Right. And what is the principal of -
Jeffrey Sachs: The big difference of social mobility in this country is the lack of public financing for early childhood development, for daycare, for preschool, for early cognitive development, for nutrition programs, for decent schools, unlike all of the rest of the high-income world. We do not help the poor. And that's why our social mobility has come to the lowest level of any of the high-income countries.
And we are 10 or 15 percentage points lower in government revenues to help for that. And I'm asking in the book for just a few percentage points and some decency at the top that they start paying their taxes at a decent rate so that we can actually pay for preschool and pay for childcare. And that's what low social mobility is about, Niall.
Niall Ferguson: But when you look at the quality of public education in this country, you can't simply attribute its low quality to a lack of funding. And I think there's a legitimate argument that the biggest obstacle to social mobility in this country right now is not the fat cats of Wall Street, whom I do not rush to defend, but the teachers unions, who make it almost impossible to improve public school in cities like New York where we are today.
Fareed Zakaria: But would you comment on Jeff's basic point which is, you know, yes, it's not true that the gap has been produced entirely because of government policy, but that you could use government policy and government resources to help in various ways. Education may be one part of it, child nutrition would be another part of it. You know, and that that becomes impossible because you're taxing at 14 percent and spending at 23 percent?
Niall Ferguson: So a major problem here is that the projects of transforming the United States into something more like a European country does imply significant increase in taxation as well as in expenditure. And there are two obstacles to this. One, it's very clear that this would not be timely given the situation that the economy finds itself in. And two, most Americans don't believe that that is going to deliver the kind of improvement that they would like to see in education.
Look how the federal government fares and the programs that it does spend a lot of money on. Health care, social security, I mean, it's already insolvent with its provision through Medicare. This is one of the hugest unfunded liabilities in the world. And the answer that Jeff has to the U.S. problem is let's create an even bigger federal spending program on public education. I mean, it's just not credible, Jeff.
Jeffrey Sachs: Niall, you're confusing so many issues. My point is that if we are going to be decent and competitive, we have to invest in it. That's paying the price of civilization. That costs money. The fact that the United States collects in total revenues at all levels of government right now about 27 percent of national income compared with 35 percent and above in other countries is the gap of decency right now where -
Fareed Zakaria: But it's also the gap you're saying of competitiveness. Now, the path to competitiveness for you is a larger government that spends more, correct?
SACHS: If it invests properly, of course.
Niall Ferguson: You can understand why people might be skeptical about that.
Jeffrey Sachs: I'm talking about investment in education. I'm talking about investment in job skills. I'm talking about investment in science and technology. Talking about investment in 21st century infrastructure. And we've been for 30 years demonizing government. We've been demonizing taxation. We have neglected to understand that a proper economy runs on two pillars, a market and government. And until we come back to that basic level of understanding that we need a mixed economy, not just a market economy, we'll continue to fail.
Niall Ferguson: Well, I'm sure the Chinese are listening to this debate with glee thinking, well, there are still academics in the west who think that the route to salvation is to expand the role of the state because that's certainly not what is happening in China. It is not what is happening in India. It is not what is happening in Brazil. The most dynamic economies in the world today are the ones which are promoting market reforms and reining in the rule of the state, which in those countries grew hypertrophically in the 20th century and that is a big problem in Jeff Sachs' argument.
Jeffrey Sachs: Thank you for the lecture. But the catching up phenomenon is quite different from the problems that the United States or other high income societies face right now, and for us -
Niall Ferguson: The problem is the falling behind phenomenon.
Jeffrey Sachs: -- and for us to be able to have high prosperity at the living standards we want, we need training, we need education, we need infrastructure, we need governments that can pay for that.
Niall Ferguson: But you forgot and we need higher progressive taxation on the private sector, because that's the most important part --
Jeffrey Sachs: And we need the rich to pay their way, absolutely. Because they've run away with the prize. And they've run away with the prize --