Year: 2009

By Stephanie McMillian

On December 6th the New York Times published an outrageous op-ed piece by corporate cheerleader Jared Diamond, who states, “I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.” The examples he provides? Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron.

His title asks, “Will Big Business Save the Earth?” That’s not a difficult question to answer: No. No, big business will not save the Earth. Instead of being honest, though, Diamond, answers the question in the affirmative and subjects us to a poorly-argued, mind-warping, illogical and denial-drenched apology for some of the most destructive corporations that curse our planet with their existence.

His overall argument doesn’t hold up to even the most casual scrutiny. He spends the whole column arguing that we shouldn’t hate big corporations because market forces are causing them to make changes to help the planet. “Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run.” He attempts to show that Wal-Mart, Coca Cola and Chevron are transforming their production practices to reflect their concern for the natural world (and that this also improves their bottom line, so it’s a big win-win).

His actual agenda is revealed in the last paragraph, which is partly a plea for the government to give corporations incentives like tax breaks and money for research to facilitate these changes. But if they’re already modifying production practices to help the environment because that is good for profits, then why do they require incentives? I don’t get it.

Mainstream liberal environmentalist groups lack credibility among real environmentalists for many reasons, one of which is the presence of corporate executives on their boards, and another of which is the huge amounts of money that they accept from corporations. The World Wildlife Fund, for example, landed a $3 million contract with Chevron in the early 1990s to implement an “Integrated Conservation and Development Project” in Papua New Guinea, where Chevron’s oil drilling was vehemently resisted by the affected indigenous people. (See “Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond Greenwasher”).

Diamond happens to serve on the WWF board. I’m sure it’s purely by coincidence that he praises Chevron’s efforts to improve the environment in his book “Collapse,” and again in this NYT op-ed piece. I can imaging him hanging out with his fellow board members, business execs who complain of being misunderstood while sending him meaningful glances brimming with unspoken promises of millions of dollars in donations. I can imagine him deciding, “Hey, these guys aren’t so bad! I’m going to convince the American people to give them some love, damn it!”

In his op-ed piece he states, “I … have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies.”

In contrast, he seems to have carefully avoided speaking with even one of the countless victims of these companies. There’s not a single quote by an indigenous person in the Amazon whose forest home was leveled for oil exploration and contaminated by oil spills. Not a single statement by a farmer in India whose crops died because Coca-Cola depleted and contaminated the village ground water. Not a peep from a single exploited factory laborer in China suffering with illnesses caused by the pollution generated by producing cheap plastic crap for Wal-Mart to import and sell to us.

Counterpunch for more

Krypton trapped in Earth’s mantle appears not to have been captured from the sun, as some models would predict

By John Matson

LIFE LINE: Earth’s atmosphere, as seen from space, allowed life to thrive on the planet, but how it originated and evolved remains an open question.
NASA

A precision analysis of gases from Earth’s mantle collected at a geologic formation in the U.S. Southwest points to a source for the gas that more closely resembles carbonaceous meteorites than it does the sun. If confirmed by further research, the new study would challenge a theoretical model for atmosphere formation in which Earth began with two reservoirs of solar gas captured during the planet’s formation and youth—one surrounding the planet, the other buried beneath the surface.

Greg Holland, a postdoctoral researcher in isotope geochemistry at the University of Manchester in England, and his colleagues measured the amounts of various isotopes of noble gases in the Bravo Dome gas field in New Mexico, where magmatic gases—primarily carbon dioxide—that allow the mantle to be sampled are buried hundreds of meters below. (Isotopes are species of the same element, albeit with different numbers of neutrons and hence different atomic masses.) The prevalences and isotope ratios of the noble, or inert, gases, such as neon, argon, krypton and xenon, provide a valuable tracer of ancient processes, because they are chemically nonreactive and so do not change much over time. In the December 11 issue of Science, Holland’s group outlines its findings and how they might rule out some theories of the way Earth formed its atmosphere as the planet coalesced some 4.5 billion years ago.

There are many possible sources for the components of Earth’s primordial atmosphere, from the so-called solar nebula, a cloud of dust and gas leftover from the sun’s formation, to comets and other impactors that may have delivered significant amounts of chemicals to Earth during or after the planet’s formation. Similarly, there are myriad ways that planets can lose their atmospheres, through stripping by the solar wind, baking by the sun’s radiation or catastrophic impacts by comets or asteroids.

By comparing Earth’s present atmosphere with the composition of solar gases, previous researchers have developed a model by which a pair of distinct solar-acquired gas reservoirs would evolve into the present-day atmosphere. “If you look at the atmosphere today, it turns out that it is emphatically nonsolar in composition,” says Robert Pepin, an emeritus physics professor at the University of Minnesota who did not contribute to the new research. “And the diagnostic clue is that all of the isotope ratios for neon, argon, krypton, xenon, nitrogen, what have you, look as if they have suffered an escape process in which the lightest isotope escaped preferentially relative to the heavier ones”—a process called fractionation. In other words, the noble gases of the atmosphere are isotopically heavier than those of the sun.

Modeling the turbulent processes—giant impacts and extreme ultraviolet radiation, for instance—that could drive xenon fractionation leads to what Pepin calls a “krypton problem.” The same fractionation process that could turn a solar sample of xenon into a modern-day atmospheric sample of xenon would leave a deficit in light isotopes of krypton, compared with what is found in Earth’s present atmosphere. But Pepin and his colleagues realized that if another source of solar gas were available—say, one trapped in Earth’s mantle from the planet’s early days—it could bring the elements back into balance as it outgassed into the atmosphere. “It so happens that if you bring a solar component in and mix it with that fractionated krypton, you get the present atmospheric composition,” Pepin explains.

Scientific American

By Kerem Oktem

The new chill between once close middle-eastern neighbours reflects both Ankara’s desire to chart a new course and structural changes in the region’s geopolitics. The outcome of both shifts remains open, says Kerem Oktem.

The states of Turkey and Israel have a lot in common, notwithstanding their many differences – in size, history, political background, social character, and religious composition:

• they were founded and built by old-style ethno-nationalists – Zionists in Palestine, Kemalists in Anatolia – inspired by a desire to create homogeneous nation-states
• they are the only two democracies – incomplete and contested, yet lively – in a region of authoritarian regimes and brutal dictatorships
• they have the two strongest armies in the middle east and host the region’s largest non-oil economies
• they have been staunch military allies whose foreign policies were until recently guided by a securitised perception of their neighbourhood; a culture of power-politics; and a degree of discomfort with their Arab neighbours
• they share a sense of isolation and fear, which permeates their domestic and international politics.

These structural overlaps underpin the good relations that Turkey and Israel have enjoyed, which however really took off only after the Israeli-Palestinian peace-process reached a new point with the Oslo accords of 1993. In the ensuing period a common strategic culture that perceived its immediate Arab surroundings in terms of security threats helped to create a sense of shared enemies. This was especially true of the two countries’ military elites, and arms-deals between the Israeli and the Turkish military underlined the strategic (and the skewed) dimension of this partnership.

A whiff of cynicism also blew through Turkey’s successful efforts to enlist parts of pro-Israel opinion in the United States to support – at least by non-involvement on the other side – its campaign to thwart recognition by the US congress of the Armenian genocide.

The lead actors of this strategic partnership were politicians, generals, arms- dealers and lobbyists. Theirs was a marriage of convenience – based on perceptions of shared threats and risks, secret politics and big money. It is now – if the growing number of enraged columns in the Jerusalem Post and the alarmist coverage of Turkey’s perceived “drift to the east” in current-affairs journals is an accurate guide – a marriage in tatters. The partners may be still – just – speaking, but the romance is over. What happened?

The screaming-match

Open Democracy for more

Courtesy Nature and World Science staff

Despite popular conceptions about the hormone testosterone, in women, at least, the substance actually may promote fair, conciliatory behavior, researchers say.

But the myths about testosterone are so powerful that women in a study started acting less fairly if they thought they had received a dose of it, whether they had or not.

Such are the findings of a study appearing in the Dec. 8 advance online issue of the research journal Nature.

Testosterone is often called the “male” hormone and is popularly associated with aggression. Women have some testosterone also, though.

Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues set up a bargaining game in which female participants were given a pill either of testosterone or of a neutral substance, called a placebo.

Those that received testosterone showed a “substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour,” leading to better social interactions, the researchers wrote. But women who thought that they received testosterone, whether or not they actually did, “behaved much more unfairly” than those who thought that they received placebo.

So, the negative, antisocial connotation of increasing testosterone levels seems to be strong enough to induce negative social behaviour even when the biological result is actually the opposite, the scientists remarked.

Evidence from animal studies does show that testosterone causes aggression toward other members of the species, Fehr and colleagues wrote. Popular wisdom tends to assume humans work the same way. But it has been unclear whether this is correct.

Studies have indeed found that male and female prisoners with violent histories have higher salivary testosterone levels than nonviolent prisoners, the researchers noted. But this does not show that the testosterone actually caused the violence.

A competing idea, they observed, is that testosterone motivates people to seek high social status. Depending on the situation, they may try to achieve that either through violence or through fairness.

In the context of the experimental bargaining game, fairness tended to help protect social status, according to Fehr and colleagues.

World Science for more

Text by Vanessa Baird. Illustrations by Kate Charlesworth

We should thank Bernard Madoff – the Wall Street broker with ‘impeccable credentials’ – who is charged with having swindled investors (including some of his best friends) to the tune of $50 billion. Few individuals have so eloquently exposed how easily gulled are the supposed experts of the financial world.

Madoff highlighted a simple truth: that one of the best ways to fool people is to make things appear rather complicated. Vanity kept ‘sophisticated investors’ from admitting that they didn’t really understand the intricacies of Madoff’s get-richer-even-quicker scheme. Greed and laziness kept them from asking the crucial questions. As long as the money came rolling in – and at 15 per cent the returns were abnormally high – who cared?

There are elementary lessons to be learned from this story – like ‘don’t just trust the experts’ and ‘don’t be scared of asking simple questions’. In the next few pages we will be doing just that. Some of the questions may seem quite naïve. We don’t mind. To be radical you need to get down to the roots of things. And simplicity can be the best tool for doing this – especially in an era that has been dominated by those who trade in obfuscation.

By getting down to the roots we can start to think again about how things should, could be. Suppose, for example, we grew an economic system that put people and planet before pollution and profiteering? For real change to happen it’s got to start now. We need to pluck up the courage to step out from the rubble of the current system and enter an age of possibility.

1 What are BANKS for?

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By Poh Soo Kai

A Historical Perspective

We all know that when a glass of tea is three quarters full, it is also one quarter empty. I would like to dismiss the empty part of this dialectic first, the history that pertains to the self, to me, and then to talk a bit more of the history concerning the problems we face today — the history that concerns our society, the substantive portion, the tea.

I grew up in a colonial society. I was one of the privileged few who were able to study at the local higher educational institutions, set up essentially to train locals so that the exploitative colonial system could be facilitated and perpetuated. Knowledge however has its unforeseen effects. I studied medicine and as a medical student saw patients with beri-beri. We were taught the cure was to administer vitamins. The question that arose was: is vitamin a drug, a medicine, like antibiotics, the administration of which cures the disease, or should it be regarded and classified as food, the lack of which causes the disease? I regarded vitamins as food, and when one took this view, other questions arose, like why was there a shortage of food, why should there be such poverty? Thus I began a step forwards on the socialist road.

A Bit More on the Substantive Part of the Dialectic

I came of age at the end of the Second World War, a time of political ferment. Oppressed peoples the world over were struggling and fighting for independence, struggling to get rid of foreign masters and for a better life. I joined the anti-colonial struggle. In any fight you would like to know your opponent, what it is you are facing and fighting against. You would also want to be clear what it is you are fighting for and sacrificing for. For some it was just Malayanisation — the replacement of the foreigner with the native. But for others, the basic undemocratic exploitative system has to be changed, changed to a system that works for the interests of the people as a whole, and not just for the interests of the few. Colonial exploitation is just a manifestation of capitalism.

Anti-colonial days presented one advantage. In industrial disputes it was easier to relate the exploitative colonial system with the struggle for better wages and conditions of work. The state machinery, the police that broke up the strikes, the riot police that clubbed your children, the judiciary that sent protesters to prison were rightly and easily identified with the colonial regime and thus with capitalism. Today, it is easier to separate the political and economic aspects in a dispute. Thus instillation of political consciousness among your supporters would be more difficult for you.

The Legacy of Colonialism

Fifty years of merdeka [independence] is a good time to talk of the legacy of colonialism. Apart from the perpetuation of the capitalist system, there are three key political areas which need attention and solution. They are communalism (or ethnic problems); the Internal Security Act (ISA); and the unity of Malaya (or Malaysia) and Singapore.

Communalism

After the war, the political scene was dominated by radical nationalists, people who demanded independence and also the uplift of society as a whole. There was consensus that economic growth for the people can only come about with the termination of colonialism. They had a vision of a nation, a nation united in this effort, and not split up into ethnic groups struggling against each other. Compromise was necessary.

The political expression of this strong movement was the AMCJA-PUTERA [All-Malaya Council of Joint Action-Pusat Tenaga Raayat] coalition. The trade union movement, the Federation of Trade Unions, representing estate workers, railway workers, and urban workers, was a major force in this coalition. It was demanding better wages, better working conditions, and freedom to organize.

Nationalizing foreign investments so that the country’s wealth could be directed to local development was in the air. Ethnic problems, problems left by history, were played down for the common good. Compromises were reached, and the People’s Constitution drafted by lawyers in the Malayan Democratic Union (MDU) — part of the coalition — setting out the guidelines for a future Malayan State was proposed. It had widespread support as evidenced by the success of the ‘hartal’ [general strike].

Mrzine for more

By Joseph Ball

Mizzima News – Of the multitude of flaws commonly leveled against the standing 2008 constitution, typically at or near the top of the list is the 25 percent of reserved seats in parliament for appointees of the armed forces. Reasoning follows that the parameter was included as a means of safeguarding the interests of the armed forces. A bloc of military parliamentarians it is presumed will vote as a single entity. But, is this a realistic assumption? And should the inclusion of the clause be deemed a non-starter by the democratic opposition?

Put succinctly, the military in parliament must not be approached as an infinite, absolutist bloc. Just as representatives within a functioning multiparty democratic apparatus cannot be 100 percent relied upon to blindly follow the national party’s line, neither should a military bloc in parliament be expected to automatically hold rank.

Further, the situation in Burma necessitates a high level of security sector reform. This should be a crucial task assigned parliament. However, the lead in this goal – though by no means the sole prerogative, likely falls under the jurisdiction of the armed forces. As de facto political actors, implementation of security sector reform in regional cases has conformed to this trend.

Not only were “the Habibie administration’s most assertive strides towards democratization taken, ironically, by two generals with hardline reputations: Lt. Gen. Syarwan Hamid and Lt. Gen. Yunus Yosfiah,” according to Indonesian security expert Peter O’Rourke, a similar observation can be made of the actions of military appointed parliamentarians and proxy parties both during and post-Suharto rule.

While still in power, Suharto’s political support base within the armed forces and Golkar, essentially a political organization invented to serve the establishment, split on the question of whether to use force in quelling domestic unrest. Following Suharto’s fall, the military’s representation in the MPR, People’s Consultative Assembly, showed that it was in fact anything but a tool in the hands of the establishment. When Habibie, the hand picked successor of Suharto, came up against a no-confidence measure, significant numbers of seated military representatives chose not to support the government.

Vocal in their support of security sector reform, the armed forces representation in the MPR nominally decreased from 75 to 38 seats, before being phased out – ahead of schedule – in its entirety in 2004.

The deal struck that permitted the above scenario to play itself out, however, was contingent upon the armed forces themselves being authorized to formulate their own reform agenda. This right, in turn, was only agreed upon confirmation of the military committing to eventually remove itself from the overt political process. The removal of the military from appointed positions within parliament was a vocal demand of the reform-minded democratic opposition in Indonesia – as it is in the case of Burma.

Mizzima for more

By Atiya Khan

(May Day rally of 200 union workers in 2009 in the city of Hyderabad, Sindh. Led by former General Secretary of the Communist Party of India, Jam Saqi, this was one of 42 such rallies held across the country. Their banner reads, “Workers of the World Unite! Red Salute to the Martyrs of Chicago! Pakistan Trade Union Defense Campaign”)

Life in contemporary Pakistan is marked by a sense of despair and helplessness. A report commis­sioned by the British Council based on research con­ducted by the Nielsen Company recently found that only a third of the Pakistanis surveyed thought democracy was the best system for the country, a ratio roughly equal to that preferring sharia. The findings amounted to what David Martin, director of the British Council in Pakistan, called “an indictment of the failures of democracy over many years.”[1] Add to this the weak economy, mounting unemployment rates, the ongoing war in neighboring Afghanistan, the looming threat of the spread of the Taliban, and the massive displacement of population resulting from the military’s ham-fisted “war” against the militants. In the face of all this, combined with the legacy of deteriorating schools, overburdened and out­dated infrastructure, and the permanent war with India over Kashmir, the common Pakistani woman is caught between corrupt “democracy” and Islamist “justice.” She has learned the true meaning of the neoliberal creed “there is no alternative”: All alternatives are equally intolerable.

After all, if electoral politics is the sole measure of the restoration of secular democracy, then how might we explain the rise of the Taliban in the past two decades, the ambivalence that Pakistani citizens seem to have toward democratically elected governments, and, in some cases, their unswerving loyalty for the exponents of sharia? Ahmad is unable to reconcile this problem, being wholly unable to see anything but the humanitar­ian crisis caused by American unmanned drone missile strikes in the country’s lawless, or rather Talibanized, “tribal” belt along the border with Afghanistan. Moreover, his explanation of the current crisis in Pakistan is, as we shall see, completely at odds with the fact that it was Benazir Bhutto who, during her first premiership in 1988, was complicit in nurturing the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Paradoxically, the project of Islamization initiated by Zia ul-Haq was fulfilled by Benazir who, in an ironic twist, became a victim of the Taliban in 2007. Ahmad cannot, it seems, bring himself to mention the catastrophic destruction unleashed by the Taliban, particularly in the northern areas of Pakistan, and the continuous suicide bomb explosions in all the country’s “vibrant” major cities. More shockingly, Ahmad was ap­parently not pressed by the editors of the standard-bearer of the American liberal Left to so much as touch on the atrocities the Taliban committed in Swat and Waziristan: the public flogging of men and women after summary “trials” in which semi-educated fanatics dispense justice according to medieval law; the decimation of schools, printing presses, radio, and TV stations; and, of course, the brutal murder of those who attempted to oppose the Taliban’s political values or their authority. As anyone who has the stomach for the news coming out of Pakistan this year knows, the desecrated corpses of these dissenters were piled on the roadside or hung from lampposts to ensure that the message of terror was legible even to the most wretchedly poor and illiterate person. But none of this concerns Ahmad. Rather, he denies the Taliban pose any threat, instead claiming that “the Taliban operating in the north and southwestern regions were and are still an amorphous, ill-defined lot, ideologically and politi­cally diverse—from jihadists to secular subnationalists to tribalists.”[3]

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(Submitted by reader)

By Manan Ahmed

The Taliban are “60 Miles From Islamabad,” declared an alarmist editorial in the New York Times on April 27. A report that month from General Petraeus implied Pakistan was in grave danger. Pakistanis, according to the conventional wisdom at the time, were simply unable to understand their existential peril. Hence, the imperative rested with the United States to force the Pakistani army into action, and to redouble its own efforts to strike at the Taliban threat. After some dithering, and an appropriate amount of new military aid, the Pakistani army finally launched Operation Rah-e Rast (Operation Righteous Path) in Swat, which halted the Taliban “advance” but in actuality has resulted in millions of internally displaced civilians and a widening humanitarian crisis.

Simultaneously, the United States increased its unmanned drone missile strikes on specific targets, resulting in measured success (the reported killing of Baitullah Mehsud in August) but exacting a growing list of civilian casualties and widespread condemnation of the United States across Pakistan. Neither the Pakistani military operation in Swat nor the US drone attacks have produced any improvement in the stability or security of Afghanistan, while Pakistan is now mired in one of the most substantial humanitarian crises of its history.

Let us return, however, to earlier this year. Was Pakistan really in danger of falling into the hands of the Taliban — a danger averted only by the assault on Swat? Reading the reporting from the region (the Pakistani army is operating under a media blackout) and published testimonies from displaced citizens, the clear answer is no. The Taliban operating in the north and southwestern regions were and are still an amorphous, ill-defined lot, ideologically and politically diverse — from jihadists to secular subnationalists to tribalists. There was no logical path by which they would have been able to overwhelm a nation of nearly 180 million, a standing army of more than 600,000, vibrant megacities and an established civilian infrastructure.

Chapati Mystery for more

By Katherine Hoyt

Any objective assessment of Daniel Ortega’s government in Nicaragua must take into account the programs it has put in place that are improving the lives of the poor. The Nicaragua Network recently sponsored a ten-person delegation to the country led by my colleague Chuck Kaufman and me. Within the country we were confronted with claims about Ortega’s anti-poverty programs that strongly contradicted one another. We heard severe criticisms of the programs from some but found that in practice the criticized programs were making a difference, albeit with problems recognized by the people involved in implementing them.

In Managua, Moisés López of Nicaraocoop (a union of 41 cooperatives) explained to us how the money earned from the domestic sale of Venezuelan oil under the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) is routed to benefit Nicaragua’s poor. The oil comes to the mixed company Albanisa, which is 60% Venezuelan and 40% Nicaraguan. Nicaragua pays 60% up front for the Venezuelan oil and the remainder is financed with a loan to be repaid over 25 years at 2% interest. The profit from the sale of that 40% of Venezuelan oil goes into a fund for social needs. It is divided among the ALBA Fund for Rural Credit (ALBA-CARUNA), the Zero Hunger and Zero Usury programs, and the internationally acclaimed Project Love program to address the problem of child labor. López said that Nicaracoop has benefited from ALBA funds, which have helped provide access to markets for many small farmers.

We heard some criticism that ALBA funds aren’t part of the national budget. Evidently Ortega knew he could not get a majority in the National Assembly for the distribution he wanted. Thus, ALBA funds go to individual non-governmental projects but are not the only ones to do so. The U. S. Millennium Challenge Account money has gone to agricultural and road building projects in the Departments of Leon and Chinandega without passing through the National Assembly.

López said that ALBA, which is a collaborative trade and cooperation agreement among Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Honduras, Dominica, Ecuador and Nicaragua, had brought about an ideological change toward fair trade and fair prices, toward solidarity and complementarity. He said, however, that there have also been some people who have thought of ALBA as just another opportunity to make money and have power. And he expressed concern about the lack of information available to the public about just what ALBA is accomplishing in the area of small-scale agriculture.

Minister of Education Miguel de Castilla told us that the first thing the current Ortega government did upon taking office was to declare an end to IMF-World Bank mandated school fees and work to lower the rate of illiteracy among those who had missed out on school during the previous years. In 2007, more than 100,000 new students registered in the public schools, he said, adding that by 2012 he hoped that Nicaragua would meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of having almost all school age children in school. He said that one million students receive a meal (breakfast or lunch) each day at school. However, he said that Nicaragua’s teachers’ salaries were “among the lowest in Latin America and a national embarrassment.” The Ortega government’s Literacy Campaign is on target to make Nicaragua the fourth country in Latin America to meet UN requirements as “illiteracy free.”

In Matagalpa, Alejandro Reyes of the Ministry of Agriculture explained that Zero Hunger is a program that has as its goal helping Nicaragua achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of poverty reduction by providing rural women with a “production package” of animals and seeds, materials, technical training and a savings program. Reyes said that 32,000 women and their families have benefited from the program so far. He said that all animals and materials are provided in the name of the woman to ensure that benefits will go to all the members of the family, especially the children.

We traveled with the agricultural extension workers of the town of San Ramón to visit the small farms of two women who have benefited from the program. Pilar V., a widow, said that she and her sons had planted corn, beans, yucca, taro root, and bananas. She said that she has learned to care for her animals from the training she has received from regular meetings and visits from the agricultural extension workers. This is the first time her family has had farm animals.

NACLA for more