Friday, September 7, 2012

Canada suspends diplomatic relations with Iran, expels Iranian diplomats from Canada

By Laura Payton, CBC news, from CBC website, September 7, 2012
Canada has suspended diplomatic relations with Iran and is expelling Iranian diplomats from Canada, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird announced in a statement today.

Speaking to reporters in Russia, where he's attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-Operation summit, Baird said the government is formally listing Iran today as a state sponsor of terrorism under the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act. That will theoretically allow Canadians affected by terrorism supported by the Iranian regime to sue.
"Iran is among the world's worst violators of human rights. It shelters and materially supports terrorist groups," Baird said, adding: "Unequivocally, we have no information about a military strike on Iran."
In the statement, Baird said Canada has closed its embassy in Iran, effective immediately, and declared personae non gratae all remaining Iranian diplomats in Canada. Those diplomats must leave within five days. All Canadian diplomats have already left Iran.
"Canada’s position on the regime in Iran is well known. Canada views the government of Iran as the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today," he said in the statement.
The statement cited Iran's support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, its failure to comply with UN resolutions on its nuclear program and its threats against Israel.
It also makes reference to Iran's "blatant disregard" of the Vienna Convention that guarantees the protection of diplomatic personnel.
Last November, Iranian students stormed the British Embassy in Tehran and ransacked its offices. Britain's Foreign Office summoned an Iranian diplomat in London amid complaints that Iran failed to provide proper security to the embassy and didn't do enough in response to the atta
Former diplomat Ken Taylor, who served as Canada's ambassador in Tehran during the 1979 Iranian revolution, says having a presence on the ground in a country is important. If the country's government won't interact, he said, there's still intelligence to gather.

"As a diplomat, I think you never give up. Of course, if it's a breach of diplomatic protocol, if in fact your diplomats are threatened, if in fact a country's conduct is not acceptable, this may proceed from persona non grata to the closing of the embassy," Taylor said.
"Obviously, though, the Canadian government is sending a message. Whether or not this is the best means to send a message is of course up to the government's cabinet. It's more than just a practical or technical severance of the relationship," he said.
Canada and Iran

Canada’s relations with Iran have been iffy since the 1979 Islamic Revolution:
1980: Canadian embassy closed for eight years after Canadians spirit U.S. diplomats out of Tehran during the post-revolution hostage crisis.
1996: Two countries cap a gradual return to normal diplomatic relations with an exchange of ambassadors.
2003: Relationship chills after Zahra Kazemi, a freelance photographer with dual Canadian-Iranian citizenship, is killed in custody in Iran, in what Canada describes as a state-sanctioned murder. Canada recalls its ambassador.
2012: After months of increasingly tough talk from Ottawa, Canada suspends all relations, citing several factors including treatment of foreign diplomats, Iran's support for Syria and its threats against Israel.
Of course, no one is surprised that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu praises the move, as evidence of strong Canadian support for Israel.
However, it is former Canadian Ambassador to Iran at the time of the U.S. hostages in 1979, Ken Taylor, who opposes the move. Surely, Foreign Affairs, and Minister Baird would have contacted Taylor prior to this decision, and sought both his counsel and his off-the-record views.
The timing is especially interesting, a mere one day following the Democratic convention in Charlotte NC, a day after President Obama, not the best friend of Israel and Netanyhu, accepted the nomination of his party for a second term. Is Baird trying to raise the stakes in the U.S. election, sounding hawkish, as a diplomatic overture of support not only for Netanyahu and Israel, but also for the Republican candidate for president, who also sounds much more hawkish on most fronts than Obama, and certainly on Israel.
In fact, Romney needs the Jewish vote if he is to be successful in securing the White House, and while we have no specific evidence to this effect, it would not surprise me that Baird was acting at this time in concert with both Netanyahu and Romney and directing attention to the Iranian "crisis" to bring world opinion to a more elevated and hawkish level, should there be a strike (by Israel alone, or in concert with the U.S.) against Iran in the offing as the Israeli Prime Minister has hinted in recent days.
And while there is unlikely to be any public disclosure of the Canadian government's real reasons, (several somewhat plausible public ones appear in the CBC news piece above), playing a bigger hand, and playing it more "strutt-fully" is consistent with Harper's aim of increased international bravado by Canada.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Why has Canadian public discourse been stripped of "subjectivity" and affect?

There is a quality in the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C. that Canadian political punditry seems to want to "skate" around....and that is the word and its connotations, "personal"...
Michelle Obama used it about her husband's view of various issues; indeed, her whole address to the convention delegates was "warm, and human and personal". And then President Clinton drew from his Arkansas folksy delivery reservoir to "connect" with the crowd, while decimating the Romney-Ryan critique of the Obama record. It was not only "Atticus Finch" from To Kill a Mockingbird, but it was also Bill Clinton arguing before the bar of the U.S. electorate.
And they were both brilliant, in their combination of both the facts and arguments with the "affect" that was accompanying those facts and arguments.
Objectivity, the detachment of the facts and arguments from their "affect" on both the speaker and the audience, attempts to vacuum all the feelings from the presentation, and while the Supreme Court, in both countries, may require that kind of presentation, there is no denying the "affect" on the political stump. And Canadian reporters do themselves and their readers a disservice by failing to make that affect an integral part of the story, as do Canadian politicians who present themselves as propaganda machines, merely arguing for the case their party requires them to put "out".
Stripping away all affect from the public discourse, something at which Harper and his talking heads have been ironically so successful, is nothing short of a full disclosure of their persons, and their personal reflections on whatever it is they have been "programmed" to utter.
Canadian government leaders, like historic Anglicans, run like hell from their own feelings and their public expression of those emotions, unless and until they become so "angered" as if such anger were part of the disdain they feel toward their opponents. In the spiritual life of an individual, as well as of a country, "affect" plays a very important, significant and often pivotal role. Those emotions are like signals of direction as to how we are approaching any subject, person or issue. And to remove public discussion from those emotions, and to refuse to name them or to consider them as "material" to the case, whatever that case may be, is not only an exercise in denial, but also a form of deception and lying, not so much by commission but by omission.
While Canada has a remarkable and proud history of its social net, we refuse to express public pride in that acomplishment too frequently, preferring instead to concentrate on the minimal impurities and imperfections of its execution. Or, for the opponents of the public health care system, their ire is directed to shaping public opinion in favour of a two-tiered public-private system, as code for their preference to pander to the rich voter, without having to engage in national or civic pride in the leadership and vision of our ancestors. So, we must assume, their racial profiling is camouflaged under a mask of "economic and fiscal" prudence.
And then, if they gain the upper hand, and the media adopt their stance, they are rendered immune to attacks about their racial profiling, while their economic and fiscal arguments get headlines, and the public bows down to that altar.
We are, collectively and individually, complicit in rendering public discourse "free" from the impurities of what are considered "weak and therefore unreliable human emotions" while we worship, ironically, the most unreliable of gods, the capacity of the economic guru's to understand or to predict the impact of any social policy. There is so much empirical evidence of the faulty even flakey posturing of the economic and fiscal "thinkers" as responsible and "market-driven or market-oriented" and then clustered in digital-mastery, that we are permitting such blatant seductions to rob us of our own humanity.
We need to begin to name our "gut-feelings" every time we watch and listen to a public figure, and our reporters need to be given permission to include those "aspects" of the events in their reports, so that they report not only the emotional responses of the audience at the scene of an event, but their own personal "affect" at the use of a word, or a phrase, or a statement, not only in some antiseptic and purified manner devoid of subjectivity, but honestly including such subjectivity.
We all know that subjectivity is the real test of any situation, for each of us, and for us to exclude such important truths from our public discourse, is merely to accept the emasculation of an important, and integral part of our identity. Skirting around those subjective reactions, and calling them "contaminants" and permitting our public figures to speak, as if they have undergone surgical removal of their emotional life, because they believe they can more easily seduce us as robots, renders our body politic as infantile, immature, and refusing to develop into healthy adulthood.
The school systems believe they are coping with negative emotions when they are excising conflict from their halls, classrooms and gymnasia and playgrounds. And in the process, they are expecting their teachers to undergo some mythical removal of their deep and profound emotional life, in order to present a professional "mask" to their students.
This is nothing short of the emasculation of not only the system but every individual who is complicit in such emasculation. And, of course, it will inevitably back-fire, with even more emotions bubbling up unpredictably, and potentially even more violently, than if we were to take the lid off the "pot" and permit the normal expression of honest feelings in all public situations.
It is the attempt to sanitize our public life of its real life-engines, and thereby render it the exclusive theatre of the professional, both civil servant and elected politician.
Jack Layton may have brought a happy face to public life, but in doing so, he may have so "bucked" the trend, that it exhausted his spirit, as one of a very few practicing politicians who permitted their feelings to be part of their public debate and life.
Feelings, and the whole "piano keyboard" of their nuances, are integral to every human encounter, and to attempt to remove them from our consciousness in our relationships with all our experiences, is to take all the colour out of the pictures, leaving a black and white image in our public discourse.
Was Paul Simon writing and singing about our little country when he wrote his "My Little Town"?

In my little town


I grew up believ--ing
God keeps his eye on us all
And he used to lean upon me
As I pledged allegiance to the wall
Lord I recall
My little town

Coming home after school
Flying my bike past the gates
Of the factories
My mom doing the laundry
Hanging our shirts
In the dirty breeze
And after it rains
There's a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It's not that the colors aren't there
It's just imagin-ation they lack
Everything's the same
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town

In my little town
I never meant nothin'
I was just my fathers son
Saving my money
Dreaming of glory
Twitching like a finger
On the trigger of a gun
Leaving nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Repeat and fade:
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town

[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/simon+and+garfunkel/my+little+town_20124588.html ]


Are we Canadians afraid there might not be a rainbow somewhere in our public discourse, so we colour it black and white? Or are we afraid that there might actually be that rainbow, a beautiful coloured one, and we wouldn't know how to fully appreciate it?







Obama "wins the election with that speech" says Sharpton

UPDATE: Friday morning, September 7, 2012
Some people like to speak about American exceptionalism. And then there are those who simply live exceptional lives. Barack Obama falls into the second category.
It was both electrifying and awe-inspiring to watch and listen to this food-stamp, student-loan, single-parent-grandparent-raised kid of mixed African and Caucasian background, married to a woman from the poor-side of Chicago, evoke Abraham Lincoln's humility 'to go to his knee when there was nowhere else to go' under the weight of the presidency.
It was Rev. Al Sharpton who commented, immediately after the final speech in the Democratic convention, that Obama 'has just won the election' with his speech.
The pundits and the doctoral candidates will pore over the text for decades, if not centuries, but this morning it is enough to be thankful to have been given the opportunity to witness and to celebrate another moment in American history that gives hope and confidence to Americans and those of us living elsewhere, at a turbulent  time of seismic-shifting tides for which there is neither a road map nor a security blanket.
Obama is far from perfect; however, he is the best hope for Amercian recovery, and for American justice and for global co-operation, and for American inner resolve without histrionics, and for the steady-hand of leadership. He makes all Americans and all world citizens better by his role model, although he plays in an arena under a critical microscope that exposes every minute flaw and hiccup.
He did himself, his family, his country and his fellow citizens of the world proud in his half-hour in the spotlight.
Now it is legally and factually up to the people of the United States to get out and vote for a renewal of his contract as President on November 6!

U.S. election: Bill Clinton puts it all on the line for Barack Obama

By Mitch Potter, Toronto Star, September 6, 2012

Washington Bureau CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Bill Clinton, riding a wave of popularity greater now than on the day he became president, put it all on the line for Barack Obama Wednesday night with an endorsement for the ages.
Ending days of speculation over their once-brittle relationship, Clinton cast his lot with President Obama with rule-breaking audacity — all but abandoning his written script and speaking straight from the heart.
Clocking in at an epic 48 minutes — almost double the allotted time — Clinton drove teleprompter operators to distraction, ignoring the text to free-riff his way through a president's-eye view of why Obama is the obvious choice on Nov. 6.
“When we vote in this election, we'll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in,” Clinton told a jammed arena of Democratic loyalists in Charlotte. “If you want a winner-take-all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket.
“But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility — a we're-all-in-this-together society — you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.”
Clinton rounded on Republicans, reducing the message of last week's GOP convention in Tampa to a single self-incriminating sentence: “We left him a total mess, he hasn't finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in.”
“I like the argument for President Obama's re-election a lot better,” Clinton said. “He inherited a deeply damaged economy, put a floor under the crash, began the long, hard road to recovery and laid the foundation for a more modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses and lots of new wealth for the innovators.”
It was an astonishing performance — one that transformed the night, the convention, perhaps even the race itself.
Clinton drilled down into detail with a folksy candour, making Obama's case on economic recovery, health care, jobs, debt and the threats that loom over Medicare and Medicaid, the country's two most expensive and beloved entitlement programs.
It all added up to full-throated endorsement likely to be studied for years in political science classes everywhere.
Coming on the heels of First Lady Michelle Obama's tear-tinged testimonial Tuesday, it all sets up Obama for a convention-ending finale Thursday. But the former president's performance introduces a vexing new challenge — how, precisely, does the current president outdo this?
No one doubts the capacity, ability or willingness of the president (Obama, that is!) to confront a monumental challenge and to succeed. On Thursday night, following both his wife and President Clinton, both of whom "hit home runs," Obama will demonstrate two things:
  1. That he has an in-depth grasp of both his political reality and the challenges inherent in that reality: millions are starving, sick and hopeless in the richest country of the world, while the rich's share of the pie continues to grow exponentially and tragically
  2. That his grasp brings to the table both a comprehensive approach for addressing the challenge, including his creative and unique and personable and pragmatic approaches to "building bridges with the opponents.
And he will do both in a spirit of truth-telling and political humility, (as different from personal humility) given the odds stacked against both him and the country. While even his opponents says he is "likeable" (as if they were talking about a grade nine class rep election), no one has ever accused President Obama of lacking confidence in his ability to make tough and challenging and historic and epic decisions, from his "gut" and from knowing "the right thing to do" as his wife, Michelle, the Mom-in-Chief put it in her speech to delegates on Tuesday evening.
This man may read the polls but he is not a prisoner of their restrictive vice on policy potentials.
He may read 10 letters from ordinary Americans every night, pleading their case for a better life, but he never becomes publicly trapped by any interest group.
He has favoured the removal of tax breaks for the wealthy, narcissistic and even opulent oil companies, whose profits are off the charts. He has raised the requirements of the auto companies for imprioved gas efficiencies in their cars, to help control climate change and global warming and also to lower the cost of energy to the consumer. He has succeeded where other presidents failed, to bring in a health care law that will provide coverage for some thirty million who previously did not have coverage. And he has kept his calm deliberate and moderate demeanour and policies in the face of the toronado of opposing political rhetoric and invective from the opposition...a sure sign that he can ride above the tempest in their tea-pot and the many other roiling pots around the world.
Tonight, he is in the biggest challenge of his brief but startling political career.
Tonight, he has to convince at least 5% of those undecideds ( of which there are approximately 7-8%) to vote for him, and he cannot do that with platitudes.
Specifics, details, mastery of the files, and mastery of the presidency and mastery of the intangible of "public trust" are the ingredients that he will have to "bake into the cake" of his per-oration.
He has big and strong shoulders to walk on, from previous speakers. And the bar is set as high as it could be. And like Michael Jordon, in the last minute and a half of a tied seventh game of the NBA finals, Obama is the one the country, indeed the world, is turing to to finish the campaign, for his electoral victory on November 6.
The ball is in his hands, and the path to the basket is clear...and the clock is ticking!
The great American drama, once again, is on display for the world, and we will be watching because this election is not only important for Americans but for every citizen in the world.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Michelle Obama elevates politics in her symphonic endorsement of Barack

It was four hours of political stump-speeches, topped by the First Lady's endearing, eloquent and both compassionate and passionate rendering of both her life and her husband's life, supported by loving, poor and committed parents and grandparent. We share the same values of patience, perseverance, willingness to face the obstacles head-on, sacrifice and hope that were the foundations on both of their respective families of origin.
During the first evening of the Decmocratic Party's Convention to nominate the president for a second term, we heard from Ted Kennedy in a video retrospective, President Carter in a warm and authentic endorsement of President Obama, Massachusetts Governor Duval Patrick on his litany of the mess left by his predecessor Mitt Romney in the state's governance, and keynote speaker Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio, Texas, a Latino rising star in the Democratic galaxy, also raised by his grandmother and his mother in poverty, only to attend both Stanford and Harvard Law, with the support of the federal government.
Themes like a woman's right to choose, there is more than "making money" driving the motivations of all of the speakers, the need for government assistance to lift people through the rough patches, the commitment to every child and family, regardless of race, gender or ethnicity on the part of the whole society through specific goals and accountability in the worst schools like Orchard Park in Boston, the commitment to both hard work and perseverance, a woman's legitimate right to make the same dollar for the same work as a man (women currently make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes), the dedication to results over ideology and the promise of mature, effective, courageous and inspiring leadership with "another four years" of the Obama presidency.
And this party is "all over" the family values theme, in both a pragmatic and an inspiring way that reaches beyond the kind of narrow and punishing policies and rhetoric coming out of the Republican party. Yet there was little rancour, and little defaming of their opponents, and even less bitterness given the kind of obstruction and united commitment from Republican leaders to "making Obama a one-term president, and to the secret meeting on the night of his inauguration to obstruct his every move so he would have no accomplishments on which to run for a second term.
Not only that, but every month, we learn that private funds are pouring into the Romney campaign coffers, according to public reports, $100 million in each of the last three months, from donors like the Koch brothers, whose interests in smaller government and fewer regulations for their oil investments, thereby generating more profit for their many corporations, while the Obama campaign coffers depend, much more heavily on the small $5 and $10 donations from ordinary citizens.
If ever there were a "David and Goliath" campaign, this is it.
And if ever there were a need for Democrats to become "fired up and ready to go" in order to protect the safety net, and the commitment to all American people of every race, gender and ethnicity, as well as a foreign policy agenda and approach that is demonstrably more balanced and more restrained, along with the commitment to generate the needed millions of new jobs, especially in clean energy (something the Republicans never speak about) and in government regulation of the kind of greed and narcissism that we witnessed in the 2008 Wall Street debacle, the election of 2012 is that time.
And, if Michelle Obama's address, blending both love and vision,  humility and hope, intelligence and inspiration, confidence and courage does not serve to push her husband over the finish line on November 6, on election night, no speech can accomplish it.
She was not only masterful in both the writing and delivery, she was commanding and human at the same time, as "mother-in-chief" her primary role, as she herself says. Michelle Obama, on behalf of her husband, made history last night, in delivering one of, if not the, best political speech we are going to hear in this election cycle.
In the baseball parlance so common at elections, "she hit the ball out of the park!"
And it was a privilege and an honour to watch, listen and shed a tear in both awe and hope!

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Chris Hedges: Life is Sacred...(But do we really treat it as sacrament?)

By Kim Mackrael, Globe and Mail, August 31, 2012
The sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean has shrunk to a record low this summer, prompting concerns that rising northern temperatures could affect Arctic communities and cause more erratic weather patterns in the south.
The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported this week that the area covered by pack ice had dipped below 4 million square kilometres for the first time in recorded history. The data centre has collected satellite images of sea ice in the Arctic since 1979, and the average summer ice coverage during the 1980s and 1990s was 6.7 million square kilometres.
It’s very likely the lowest [summer sea ice cover] in a century,” said Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC. “We are seeing the effect of a warming planet, and in particular a warming Arctic.”
It’s part of a long-term trend that can be attributed to climate change, he said, adding climate models have long predicted that the Arctic would be the site of the earliest and most pronounced effects of a warming planet.
“I’m certainly surprised at how low the sea ice is, but I’m not surprised regarding the overall trend being observed,” he added.
Son Nghiem, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Arctic ice is becoming thinner, weaker and younger – and therefore breaking away and melting more easily.
Ocean water is slower to adjust to seasonal changes than the atmosphere, so Arctic sea ice usually reaches its lowest level in September. That means the level of ice coverage could drop even further in the coming weeks.
Some researchers have warned that a long-term loss of summer sea ice could affect weather patterns further south, by warming the Arctic and changing the nature of the clashes between warm and cold fronts that are responsible for storms.
And then there is this:
Life is Sacred 
By Chris Hedges, from truthdig.com, September 3, 2012
I retreat in the summer to the mountains and coasts of Maine and New Hampshire to sever myself from the intrusion of the industrial world. It is in the woods and along the rugged Atlantic coastline, the surf thundering into the jagged rocks, that I am reminded of our insignificance before the universe and the brevity of human life. The stars, thousands visible in the night canopy above me, mock human pretensions of grandeur. They whisper the biblical reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Love now, they tell us urgently, protect what is sacred, while there is still time. But now I go there also to mourn. I mourn for our future, for the fading majesty of the natural world, for the folly of the human species. The planet is dying. And we will die with it.
The giddy, money-drenched, choreographed carnival in Tampa and the one coming up in Charlotte divert us from the real world—the one steadily collapsing around us. The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into self-delusion. We convince ourselves that global warming does not exist. Or we concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt. Both responses satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort. In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it. But reality will soon descend like the Furies to shatter our complacency and finally our lives. We, as a species, may be doomed. And this is a bitter, bitter fact for a father to digest.
My family and I hike along the desolate coastline of an island in Maine that is accessible only by boat. We stop in the afternoons on remote inlets and look out across the Atlantic Ocean or toward the shoreline and the faint outline of the Camden hills. My youngest son throws pebbles into the surf. My daughter toddles over the rounded beach stones holding her mother’s hand. The gray and white seagulls chatter loudly overhead. The scent of salt is carried by the wind. Life, the life of my family, the life around me, is exposed at once as fragile and sacred. And it is worth fighting to save.
When I was a boy and came to this coast on duck hunting trips with my uncle, fishing communities were vibrant. The fleets caught haddock, cod, herring, hake, halibut, swordfish, pollock and flounder. All these fish have vanished from the area, victims of commercial fishing that saw huge trawlers rip up the seafloor and kill the corals, bryozoans, tubeworms and other species that nurtured new schools of fish. The trawlers left behind barren underwater wastelands of mud and debris. It is like this across the planet. Forests are cut down. Water is contaminated. Air is saturated with carbon emissions. Soil is depleted. Acidity levels in the oceans skyrocket. Atmospheric temperatures soar. And someone, somewhere, makes obscene sums of money from it. Corporations, indifferent to what is sacred, see the death of the planet as another investment opportunity. They are scurrying to mine the exposed polar waters for the last vestiges of oil, gas, minerals and fish. And since the corporations dictate our relationship to the ecosystem on which we depend for life, the chances of our survival look bleaker and bleaker. The final phase of 5,000 years of settled human activity ends with collective insanity.
“All my means are sane,” Captain Ahab says of his suicidal pursuit of Moby-Dick, “my motive and my object mad.”
The ocean floor off the coast of Maine, which this summer has seen a staggering five-degree rise in water temperature, is now covered in crustaceans—lobsters and crabs—that no longer have any predators. The fish stocks have been killed for profit. This crustacean monoculture carries with it the fragility of all monocultures, a fragility that corn farmers in the Midwest also have experienced. Lobsters provide 80 percent of Maine’s seafood income. But how much longer will they last? When a diverse and intricately balanced biosystem is wiped out, what future is there? After you dismantle nature and throw away the parts, what happens when you desperately need to put them back together? And even if you can nurture back to life the fish stocks decimated by the commercial fleets, as valiant organizations such as the Penobscot East Resource Center are attempting to do, what happens when sea temperatures and acidity levels continue to rise amid global warming, dooming most life in the oceans?
The warmer water this year caused lobsters to shed six weeks earlier than usual. What happened to the sea further south is now happening off New England. Long Island Sound, two decades ago, had an abundance of lobsters. Then as the water heated up they disappeared. They fell prey to parasite infestations and shell disease, and the survivors migrated to colder water.

All natural resources are being exploited until exhaustion. They will diminish and soon vanish. Droughts are affecting forests in the Northeast as well as the Northwest. The wintertime die-off of pine beetles and other pests—a reduction vital for the health of the forests—is no longer happening as the planet steadily warms. The traditional hardwoods of the northern forests and the great conifer trees are dying. They are being replaced by oak-hickory forests, dooming the biodiversity, eradicating the habitat of a variety of songbirds and other wildlife and ending the maple syrup industry. Maple syrup was produced a few decades ago in Connecticut and Massachusetts. As a child I would hike in snowshoes to the farmers’ sheds deep in the woods containing vats of boiling syrup. We would pour syrup on the blanket of snow outside to make brittle winter candy. But production in the southern New England states has been largely extinguished and shifted to northern Maine and Canada. These are the small natural indicators that something is terribly wrong.
The daily loss of Arctic sea ice this summer is the most severe on record. The amount of sea ice has fallen by 40 percent since satellite tracking began in the late 1970s. The complete disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice may be no more than a decade or two away. And with the disappearance of the summer ice, our planet’s weather patterns will become dominated by freakishly powerful and sudden storms and other violent natural disturbances. Droughts will devastate some parts of the Earth, and in others there will be unrelenting rainfall. It will be a world of extremes. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Floods. Dust bowls. Fire and water.
Our political leaders, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in our demise. Our political system, like that in the declining days of ancient Rome, is one of legalized bribery. Politicians, including Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, serve the demented ends of corporations that will, until the final flicker of life, attempt to profit from our death spiral. Civil disobedience, including the recent decision by Greenpeace activists to chain themselves to a Gazprom supply vessel and obstruct a Russian oil rig, is the only meaningful form of resistance. Voting is useless. But while I support these heroic acts of resistance, I increasingly fear they may have little effect. This does not mean we should not resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. We cannot use the word “hope” if we do not fight back. But the corporations will employ deadly force to protect their drive to extract the last bit of profit from life. We can expect only mounting hostility from the corporate state. Its internal and external security apparatus, as the heedless exploitation and its fatal consequences become more apparent, will seek to silence and crush all dissidents. Corporations care nothing for democracy, the rule of law, human rights or the sanctity of life. They are determined to be the last predator standing. And then they too will be snuffed out. Unrestrained hubris always leads to self-immolation.













Monday, September 3, 2012

Tutu: Bring Bush-Blair to trial in the Hague for Iraq war

“The then-leaders of the U.S. and U.K. fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand — with the specter of Syria and Iran before us,” said Archbishop Tutu, who last week withdrew from a conference in South Africa due to Mr. Blair’s presence at the event.
While the International Criminal Court can handle cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, it does not currently have the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes of aggression. Any potential prosecution over the Iraq war would likely come under the aggression category.
The U.S. is among nations which do not recognize the International Criminal Court.
(From David Stringer's piece below, in Globe and Mail, September 2, 2012)
First, the international community's outrage at the Iraq war continues, in voices like Tutu's and others. To that chorus, we add our small voice, earnestly and unequivocally.
In Canada, we are most thankful that our then Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, refused to join the "coalition of the willing" in that fight.
However, the world community is, as Tutu suggests, far more unstable, far more willing and eager to use hard power to settle disputes and far more contentious and volatile than before the Iraq debacle.
Even the political rhetoric is much more militaristic and stuffed with lies, (witness the Republican convention in Tampa last week), almost as if the video-game industry with its millions of devotees has surged under the cover of the war.
Although there may be an argument that a trial of Bush and Blair would come under the "aggression category" as Stringer says, there is clearly no doubt that the war inflicted "crimes against humanity" and there is also little doubt that there would be an army of legal professionals willing and able to mount such a case, should Tutu's perspective gain traction internationally.
The fact that the U.S. can and does bomb another country, without considering itself obliged to commit to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, is, in a word, reprehensible. President Obama and his administration has done much to rebuild a decimated U.S. reputation among the international community (such denigration came at the hands of the Bush-Cheney administration), to the degree that most people in most world capitals would vote for his re-election if they could vote.
However, the U.S. as the world's most militarized nation (equal to the sum of all other countries combined, in their military budgets) continues to avoid, ignore and disdain most international bodies, including both the ICC in the Hague and the United Nations, where the Russian and the Chinese veto have blocked international collaboration, for example, in Syria, another scene of unmitigated slaughter of innocent people by a government in power.
This United States position, regardless of which party holds the White House, in our view is unacceptable. The United States demands a position of leadership, warranted primarily by its military might, without surrendering its independence to the legal scrutiny of the same world it seeks to police, and upon which it seeks to impose its values, often at the point of a bayonet, an AK-47 or a missile.
And within the U.S., the Republican party is adamant about retaining the military budget, even in the face of a potential bankruptcy at the end of fiscal 2012, with sequestration, the extention of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and 23,000,000 unemployed or underemployed or no longer looking for work.
Tutu is correct that the Bush-Blair duo "behaved like school-yard bullies" and must be held accountable for their actions, even amid Blair's vociferous protests to the contrary. Bush, meanwhile, remains mute, while his brother dubs him 'blunt and courageous' at the recent Republican "lie-in" in Tampa.
Sometimes the prophetic voice is both hard to find willing spokesmen and women, and always it is very hard for the rest of us to hear, comprehend and act upon. Tutu's voice is that of the prophet, in the Old Testament tradition, calling for justice and righting the balance against the "bully" archetype unleashed in the second Iraq conflict.
And all steps to confront that archetype, including any restrictions on violent video-games, violent movies and television programs, especially those based on deceptions, lies, mis-representations and rumour and innuendo, and political rhetoric that spawns and fosters the bully archetype in school yards, in corporate board rooms, in universities and colleges and in the workplaces around the world, as well as bringing the Bush-Blair tandem to trial, would serve the world community's need for both justice and fairness. It would also go a long way to restoring some semblance of accountability within and among the world's "leading" powers.
Leadership, after all, is not leadership when it refuses to be accountable!

Bush, Blair should face trial for role in Iraq war: Desmond Tutu
By David Stringer, The Associated Press, in Globe and Mail, September 2, 2012
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu called Sunday for Tony Blair and George Bush to face prosecution at the International Criminal Court for their role in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq

Archbishop Tutu, the retired Anglican Church’s archbishop of South Africa, wrote in an op-ed piece for The Observer newspaper that the ex-leaders of Britain and the United States should be made to “answer for their actions.”
The Iraq war “has destabilized and polarized the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history,” wrote Archbishop Tutu, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1984.

“Those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague,” he added.
The Hague, Netherlands, based court is the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal and has been in operation for 10 years. So far it has launched prosecutions only in Africa, including in Sudan, Congo, Libya and Ivory Coast.
Archbishop Tutu has long been a staunch critic of the Iraq war, while others opposed to the conflict — including playwright Harold Pinter — have previously called for Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair to face prosecution at the Hague.
“The then-leaders of the U.S. and U.K. fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand — with the specter of Syria and Iran before us,” said Archbishop Tutu, who last week withdrew from a conference in South Africa due to Mr. Blair’s presence at the event.
While the International Criminal Court can handle cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, it does not currently have the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes of aggression. Any potential prosecution over the Iraq war would likely come under the aggression category.
The U.S. is among nations which do not recognize the International Criminal Court.
In response to Archbishop Tutu, Mr. Blair said he had great respect for the archbishop’s work to tackle apartheid in South Africa, but accused him of repeating inaccurate criticisms of the Iraq war.
“To repeat the old canard that we lied about the intelligence is completely wrong as every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown,” Mr. Blair said. “And to say that the fact that Saddam (deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein) massacred hundreds of thousands of his citizens is irrelevant to the morality of removing him is bizarre.”
However, Mr. Blair said that “in a healthy democracy people can agree to disagree.”
In Britain, a two-year long inquiry examining the buildup to the Iraq war and its conduct is yet to publish its final report. The panel took evidence from political leaders including Mr. Blair, military chiefs and intelligence officers. Two previous British studies into aspects of the war cleared Mr. Blair’s government of wrongdoing.
The Iraq war was bitterly divisive in the U.K. and saw large public demonstrations. However, Mr. Blair subsequently won a 2005 national election, though with a reduced majority.



Saturday, September 1, 2012

Orwell unleashed at Tampa-tempest-in-a Tea-Party!

The sound of an only slightly muffled, embarrassed but unmistakable laugh that accompanied Romney's ridicule of President Obama's promise to try to lower the level of the oceans and to try to cool the planet will ripple around the globe for decades.
If Romney's ridicule of Obama's commitment to the planet's need for oceans that do not rise and continents that do not overheat was endorsed by the Republican crowd in Tampa on Thursday night, as there is no doubt it was, then we witnessed, tragically, the triumph of narcissism, denial and hubris at that political convention.
The lies and half-truths and deceptions from all the speakers, including both Christy and Ryan, pale in comparison with the cultural denial of global warming, climate change and the ravages both of these forces are already bringing to the planet, and the people living on it.
It is not an exaggeration to characterize the Republican convention as one of ostriches, head-in-sand birds whose wealth, and world view and even now religious dogma are so hubristic (and held in such a self-righteous tenacity) as to be able and willing, with impunity, to deny science, to deny a woman's right to choose, to deny the place for humility in foreign policy (Condolessa Rice: "You cannot lead from behind!") to deny the need for food stamps, to deny the need for both the Health Reform Act, Roe v Wade, and to deny the need to nurture and grow an authentic middle class and to deny the truth of America's rebuilt international respect, over the last four years of the Obama leadership.
In fact, touting "leadership" by the Republicans is nothing short of Orwellian, in whose Nineteen Eighty-four, words mean precisely the opposite of their original definition.
Masquerading as "macho" hard-power advocates, determined not to cut the pentagon budget, but willing to eliminate both food and health care from the country's most impoverished, while also reducing the taxes of the rich, fundamentally pits the "pit-bulls" against all the moderates.
I have written previously that other presidential elections seemed to be a referendum on masculinity, with Gore v Bush, in 2000, and Kerry v Bush in 2004, and even Obama v McCain in 2008, but 2012 is similar and different.
Every interview with a Republican surrogate on American television during and following the "Tampa tempest-in-a-Tea-Party" has found that surrogate yelling, talking over the interviewer, protesting throughout the unreliability of the assumptions of the questions being asked. There has not been an exchange of interpretations on the facts but rather a shouting match about the "truth".
When anyone protests too much, we all know what that means. It inevitably means that they are not connected to the truth and will do anything, including becoming desperate to defend their lies, their misinformation and their kind of political warfare, which now includes social and political bullying.
When George W. and Cheney et al lied about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and had Ms Rice complicitous in warning of a "nuclear cloud" that could befall the world if the U.S. did not invade, when they knew they were perpetrating the greatest and most epic lie in modern political history, and when the then president's brother, Jeb, addressing the recent "tampa-Tea-party" exonerated Dubya as courageous and blunt to the audience's delight, we could all see how deeply the current Republican party had become addicted to its own Kool-Aid, and that drink has, and will continue to, poison the political climate in the U.S. for decades, if not forever.
In Orwell's novel, "war is peace" is the kind of new "think" and newspeak.
In the Republican party, "war is prosperity" and that championed by none other than Jesus Christ as the prosperity gospel, is the kind of new theocracy, evoking the Orwellian newspeak.
McCain would have the U.S. engaged in at least four or five foreign countries, "leading the world" by demonstrating the gospel of American values at the end of an AK-47, a Cruise Missile, or even a Drone and the crowd ate it like Snickers bars.
Just as the U.S. people have become addicted to the sugar additives in their food choices, the Republican party has become addicted to the lies of a world view that cannot be sustained or even defended by the facts on the ground, in virtually any file.
We have created a virtual universe, digitally, and the Republican party has moved into that universe, with its acquiescence to a Mormon candidate who is a "good and decent man" according to his formerly Episcopalian wife, even though the two theologies are totally incompatible, with its clinging to the narrowness and the reductionisms of a Ryan-Romney budget that would enrich the rich and disown the poor and the underclass, that would throw women, Latino's and Blacks under the bus, and emasculate the public education system, through a commitment to "choice" for parents, removing the ordinary students in favour of American "exceptionalism" in those schools that meet that set of criteria.
Under Romney, the new American theology, ideology and political correctness is American exceptionalism and anyone who does not drink the drink is "against us."
Just as Mitch McConnell declared his sole purpose as "ensuring Obama was a one-term president, so too Romney-Ryan have drunk their own Kool-Aid, fashioned on the night of Obama's inauguration, to the decimation of the public interest and Obama's presidency, while celebrating their personal career narcissism and emasculating the U.S. government's capacity to deal with the crisis that their kind inflicted on the U.S. and the rest of the world in 2008, by their own kind of chicanery.