Ranjit Devraj writes for IPS Terra Viva at the UN that the BASIC Group meeting concluded with an amazing – ‘Copenhagen Accord Not Legal, Kyoto Protocol Is.’ Nevertheless Brazil, South Africa, India and China – will submit their plans for voluntary mitigation actions by the Jan. 31, 2010 deadline stipulated by the Copenhagen Accord. That amounts to positive participation and denying it also.
 http://ipsterraviva.net/UN/currentNew.as…

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 2010

‘Copenhagen Accord Not Legal, Kyoto Protocol Is’
Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jan 26 (IPS) – While the BASIC bloc countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – will submit their plans for voluntary mitigation actions by the Jan. 31 deadline stipulated by the Copenhagen Accord, they have taken care to emphasise that the agreement, reached at the end of the December climate change summit in the Danish capital, has no legal basis.

Addressing a joint press conference after a meeting of concerned BASIC ministers on Sunday, India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh said: “We support the Copenhagen Accord. But all of us were unanimously of the view that its value lies not as a standalone document but as an input into the two- track negotiation process under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).”

Ramesh explained that the Accord was not a legal document and that the “understanding reached at Copenhagen was that the accord will facilitate the two-track negotiating process which is the only legitimate process to reach a legally binding treaty in Mexico.” The two-track negotiation process was agreed upon at the December 2007 Bali conference, pertaining to Long-Term Cooperative Action under the UNFCCC and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The BASIC meeting and the press conference were attended by Carlos Minc, the Brazilian environment minister, his counterpart from South Africa, Buyelwa Sonjica, and the vice-chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Xie Zhenhua.

At the press conference, Xie said that the BASIC group’s objectives were consistent with the interests of the developing countries. “BASIC will take the lead in large-scale emission reduction and also stick to the policy of common but differentiated principle.” Sonjica said BASIC would not make any decision outside the Group of 77 (G-77) countries. “We see ourselves as adding value to the proposals of G-77,” she said.

Siddharth Pathak, a member of the international environmental group Greenpeace’s policy division, told IPS that the willingness of the BASIC group to support vulnerable countries by ensuring their participation in open and transparent negotiations and plans to provide technological and financial support was commendable. “We hope that this support will become tangible by the group’s next meeting in April.”

Pathak said that while BASIC appeared keen to consolidate itself as a group and also take along the G-77 countries, it needed to “demonstrate leadership, both in furthering negotiations on a fair, ambitious and legally binding agreement, and in terms of pushing industrialised counties to urgently reduce GhG (greenhouse gas) emissions and make their own appropriate contributions.”

Other analysts said the BASIC meeting had the potential of cementing differences both within and outside the bloc.

“What is crucial now is to see whether China and India will stick to carbon intensity figures in their action plans, as they announced before the Copenhagen meet,” said Siddharth Mishra, director at CUTS International, a leading economic policy and advocacy group. Carbon intensity is a measure of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of production.

“This will suit China well because it is already on a trajectory of lowering its energy intensity and it has voluntarily announced cuts of 40-45 percent before Copenhagen,” said Mitra. “India, too, can reduce the trend of the growth of its emissions and specify domestic regulations to ensure reductions in emissions from its dirty industries,” Mitra told IPS.

Mitra added: “We don’t know what the back-of-the-envelope calculations are, but both China and India may benefit from the pledge of 100 billion U.S. dollars by the end of the decade for developing countries to adapt to climate change and limit the global rise in temperatures, since industrialisation began, from exceeding two degrees Celsius.”

Denmark, as president of the Conference of Parties (CoP), has been asked by the BASIC ministers to convene immediately meetings of the two negotiation groups for the Kyoto Protocol and the Long-Term Cooperative Action in March and ensure that they meet on at least five more occasions before the 16th CoP in December.

After the BASIC countries joined hands with the United States in negotiating the Copenhagen Accord, at the end of the summit in the Danish capital, several developing countries expressed fears that the document would become legal and dilute the Bali two-track process.

BASIC ministers have also asked the rich nations to speedily distribute the 10 billion dollars they had pledged to the least developed countries and the islands to address climate change this year.

Brazil’s Minc said at the press conference that BASIC had decided to create its own fund to help small island states and the least developed countries. “The actual contributions will be decided at the next meeting of the BASIC in South Africa,” he said.

A day before the BASIC meet, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh let it be known that he had reservations over pressure from Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for follow-up action on the Copenhagen Accord and get results by the Jan. 31 deadline.

While the Accord had called for “economy-wide emission targets” by 2020 by the Annex-1 (rich countries) and the other countries to submit “mitigation actions,” Rasmussen and Ban had written separately to all heads of state and governments on Dec. 30, urging them to submit their commitments by Jan. 31.

Their joint letter was silent on the Kyoto Protocol, raising suspicions. Mitra said that such suspicions first surfaced after the UNFCCC executive secretary, Yvo de Boer, failed to mention the Kyoto Protocol at a press conference held soon after the Copenhagen Accord. “The impression that there is a plan afoot to bury Kyoto is not helped by the fact that the European Union is pushing it as a first step to new negotiations.”

The Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only legally binding agreement, required 37 wealthy nations to cut GhG emissions by 2012, but asked for no commitments from developing countries. In contrast, the Copenhagen Accord does not talk of mitigation goals for the developed countries and is seen to be acting to lower the bar in climate negotiations when scientists warn that the climate is changing more rapidly than estimated earlier.

The Accord was opposed by Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Sudan on both substantive and procedural grounds. For that reason, it could not be accepted or endorsed by the CoP, which only “took note” of it, denying the document status at the U.N.

In an editorial on Tuesday, the respected ‘The Hindu’ newspaper commented that the response of BASIC “underscores the view of the developing world that the Copenhagen Accord chose to give insufficient importance to the central tenet of “common but differentiated responsibilities” outlined in the UNFCCC.

The Hindu editorial said one positive outcome of the “common strategy” adopted by BASIC countries was the fostering of “active South-South cooperation” to advance science. “Given that intellectual property rights on technology remain a major barrier to achieving higher energy efficiencies, such joint efforts involving India and China hold great promise.”

Exporting Misery to Haiti.
By James Ridgeway, Reader Supported News
Monday, 18 January 2010

“Le ou malere, tout bagay samble ou,” says one of the Creole proverbs that are a staple of Haitian popular culture. When you are poor, everything can be blamed on you. It’s a truth we can see played out in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake.

Exporting Misery to Haiti: How Rice, Pigs, and US Policy Undermined the Haitian Economy.

è ou malere, tout bagay samble ou, says one of the Creole proverbs that are a staple of Haitian popular culture. When you are poor, everything can be blamed on you. It’s a truth we can see played out in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake. While many Americans are reacting to the disaster with genuine compassion and generosity, there’s another kind of response afoot as well – one that extends well beyond the sickening remarks made by Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh.

Why can’t the Haitians ever seem to take care of themselves? ask the denizens of web chat rooms and radio call-in shows. The place was a mess before the earthquake, and nothing we do ever seems to help – so why bother? In more elevated circles, the comments are more subtle: “Development efforts have failed there, decade after decade,” noted a piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, “leaving Haitians with a dysfunctional government, a high crime rate and incomes averaging a dollar a day.” With rescue efforts still underway, it said, “policymakers in Washington and around the world are grappling with how a destitute, corrupt and now devastated country might be transformed into a self-sustaining nation.”

You’d never guess, from this discourse, how much US policy has actually undermined Haiti’s ability to be a “self-sustaining nation,” especially its ability to feed itself. America’s history of invasion, occupation, and intervention into Haiti’s political and economic life stretches back two centuries, with plenty of help from homegrown Haitian despots. But since the 1980s, in particular, the United States has helped turn a nation of low-tech subsistence farmers into a dumping ground for American agribusiness.

The most glaring example of this trend is rice, which was once a staple crop. Today, little rice is grown in Haiti; instead, the nation is a market for the subsidized rice crop grown in the United States. Human Rights lawyer Bill Quigley, now at the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote about this trend in the spring of 2008, as food riots shook Haiti and other parts of the developing world:

In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The US has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF. “American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti, in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.

Quigley interviewed Father Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest and human rights advocate. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it,” Fr. Jean-Juste said. “Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.” By 2008, Haiti was the world’s third largest importer of US rice, receiving some 240,000 tons that year alone.

US rice growers are heavily subsidized by the government. Between 1995-2006 they received $11 billion. The American rice industry is also protected by tariffs – the same sorts of tariffs the IMF demanded Haiti remove. With the average family income standing at about $400 a year, most Haitians couldn’t afford to pay international prices for a product they once grew for themselves – so they had to have aid. The US sponsored the aid, but half the money didn’t go to buy the food; it went to US farmers, to processors and to shipping companies, because the food had to be transported in US ships. A good part of the so-called handout to Haiti actually went to US agribusiness, which needed markets for its overflowing bins of farm products.

Another infamous “aid” story involves the destruction of native pig farming in Haiti, following an outbreak of swine fever in the late 1970s. As described by Paul Farmer, the physician and anthropologist legendary for his work among Haiti’s poor, pigs were once a centerpiece of Haiti’s peasant economy, providing a reliable source of income and an insurance policy against hard times. The hardy Haitian creole pigs seemed to be remarkably resistant to swine fever. But American agriculture experts feared that Haiti’s pigs could spread the disease to the United States and destroy its massive hog business, and bankrolled a $23 million “extermination and restocking program.”

By 1984, all of Haiti’s 1.3 million pigs had been killed. USAID and the Organization of American States thereupon announced a plan to replace the Creole pigs with brand new Iowa pigs – provided that the peasants committed to building pigsties to US standards and demonstrate they had enough money to buy feed. Even the peasants who could afford these “free” pigs found that they couldn’t flourish under Haitian conditions. The fragile kochon blan (“foreign” or “white” pigs) frequently fell ill and had to go to the vet; they wouldn’t eat scraps and required expensive feed; and they had few litters. Soon, the project was abandoned – leaving Iowa hog farmers enriched, and hundreds of thousands of Haitian families without a key means of survival.

These changes in many ways served US economic interests in the Caribbean, which since the 1980s have been oriented towards knitting the area into a common free trade zone, first in the Caribbean Basin Initiative and then under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Forced out of small-scale farming by the elimination of two basic staples, Haitians moved to the cities, where they were available to work in sweatshops producing panties, bras, and dresses for such places as Sears, WalMart, and JC Penney. US aid programs have supported the effort to turn countries such as Haiti into low wage assembly platforms that supply a cheap, easily exploitable workforce for American and international business – and at the same time, relieve pressure on immigration by keeping the desperate Haitians working at home for what is barely a living wage.

After coming to Haiti en masse in the 1980s and 1990s, some of these companies moved on to even cheaper – and more “stable” – countries. Yet recent development initiatives, including the US’s HOPE II program to encourage duty-free trade with Haiti, continued to emphasize the low-wage, export-oriented garment industry over sustainable agriculture or other projects that would build Haiti’s self-reliance. At the same time, Western companies looked toward the prospect of an expanded tourist industry, owned by foreigners and once again exploiting cheap labor. The purported return of the luxury tourist hotels targeted such places as Jacmel, which now lie in ruins.

Even before the earthquake, these economic actions, driven by outside economic forces, offered little promise of restoring and reinvigorating indigenous farming, or providing any sort of real, homegrown economic base for Haiti. Such has been the nature of the US’s “help” to its impoverished Caribbean neighbor.

As the Haitians say, Bel dan pa di zanmi. A beautiful smile doesn’t mean he’s your friend.
————–
James Ridgeway, an investigative journalist, is senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones. His books include “The Haiti Files,” an anthology of history, politics and culture.

William J. Antholis of The Brookings Institution, Washington DC, comes to the UN Headquarters to Discuss “Climate Change: Between Trust and Trade” – hosted Friday, January 29, 2010 by UNU-NYO and open to all.

January 29, 2010 – from The UN University – New York Office:

“Climate Change: Between Trust and Trade” with Dr. William Antholis, Managing Director of Brookings Institution.

Date: Friday, January 29, 2010
Time: 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Venue: Conference Room D, Temporary North Lawn Building, UN Headquarters, First Avenue, New York City.

Speaker Profiles: William J. Antholis, Managing Director, Brookings Institution.

Moderator Profile: Jean-Marc Coicaud, Director, UNU-ONY

————————

Please contact:
Nika Naiyi ZHU
Junior Professional Fellow
United Nations University
Office at the UN, New York
2 UN Plaza, DC2-2060
New York, NY 10017
tel: 212-963-6387
fax: 212-371-2144
email:  unu.edu
web: ony.unu.edu

Disaster in Haiti – French Minister Criticizes US Over Haiti Aid.

PARIS (Jan. 18) AP – The United Nations must investigate and clarify the dominant U.S. role in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, a French minister said Monday, claiming that international aid efforts were about helping Haiti, not “occupying” it.

U.S. forces last week turned back a French aid plane carrying a field hospital from the damaged, congested airport in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, prompting a complaint from French Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet. The plane landed safely the following day.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned governments and aid groups not to squabble as they try to get their aid into Haiti.

“People always want it to be their plane … that lands,” Kouchner said Monday. “(But) what’s important is the fate of the Haitians.”

But Joyandet persisted.

“This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti,” Joyandet, in Brussels for an EU meeting on Haiti, said on French radio.

In another weekend incident, 250 Americans were flown to New Jersey’s McGuire Air Force Base on three military planes from Haiti. U.S. forces initially blocked French and Canadians nationals from boarding the planes, but the cordon was lifted after protests from French and Canadian officials.

The U.S. military controls the Port-au-Prince airport where only one runway is functioning and has been effectively running aid operations. However, the United Nations is taking the lead in the critical task of coordinating aid.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Saturday the U.S. government had no intention of taking power from Haitian officials. “We are working to back them up, but not to supplant them,” she said.

Joyandet said he expects a U.N. decision on how governments should work together in Haiti and that he hopes “things will be clarified concerning the role of the United States.”

Other French officials sought to calm diplomatic tensions over aid. French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero insisted the plane incidents were “minor problems” to be expected during such a difficult relief mission and said that Kouchner and Clinton have been working since the quake on coordinating help.

Both nations have occupied Haiti in the past.

France occupied Haiti for more than 100 years, from 1697 to independence in 1804 after the world’s first successful slave uprising. More recently, U.S. Marines occupied the country from 1915 to 1934 to quiet political turmoil.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he intends to travel to Haiti “in the weeks to come,” though no date has been set. Former Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has cautioned that Sarkozy shouldn’t go too soon because it could divert attention from aid efforts.

U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said, “Clearly it can be a problem if every leader in the world wants to turn up. It will inevitably cause problems, particularly for the leadership of these operations, although not, of course, for the humanitarian workers on the ground.

————–

MORE TOP NEWS
AP

Haiti chaos hampers aid delivery; death toll rises.
6 minutes ago
Haitians fleeing capital in search of food, safety.
6 minutes ago

Considering the large number of clicks on our postings about the Haiti catastrophe we decided to continue monitoring the situation from pure humanitarian angles – but true to our website we will look also at what the world must learn from its reaction to the goings-on in this stricken half of the Hispaniola Island and about the ways this reflects on the UN, the US, Brazil and the ALBA States. Will we realize that even without seeing any connection between this earthquake and climate change, though we did see connections between the Asian plates tectonic rim and the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, we do not see this here. But we see the denuding of the island from trees – this in order to have created the sugar cane and other plantations, as a clear contributing factor to global warming that caused the enhancement and increased frequency of the Hurricanes.

We know that the interest in our postings has to do also with our suggestion that Haiti is now the chance for Brazil to prove that they have arrived to the point that they should be considered as members of the small club of Nations that willl make a difference in the 21st century.

Brazil, that joined the powers that were on the winning side of WWII only close to the end, was nevertheless recognized by being posted as first speakers at the yearly UN General Assembly meeting. It was clear that the size of the country, and its tremendous potential, will bring it to the forefront of the new developing, post-war, world. OK – it took 60 years – but now they are there. Their history of colonizers in the Caribbeans is zero, but their background started with lots of similarities and to its advantage, it was distance wise very remote from Europe so it could breeze easier. Big Brazil and small Haiti have both much to owe to African culture and Europe induced agriculture. Yes – sugar cane, coffee, black slaves, sunny weather and so on. There was a time that in both countries life was easy as the Gershwins sing in Porgy and Bess. But Haiti fell behind.

Haiti is the world’s pits. An island South East of Puerto Rico, with a tremendous history of having been the second independent state of the Western Hemisphere, and the only one created by a rebellion of black slaves, with a French culture and lots of Voodoo, and some sons and daughters that did very well outside the country at times the country fell under local dictatorship or US invasions, has never become, just  like Cuba, a working US dependency. Perhaps this is thanks to the Americans not being able to stomach this entrenched different culture mix and the realization that it could “dilute” the white protestant US culture. While the top layer of sugar-cane growers did very well, denuded the western part of the Hispaniola island of trees and increased their bank-holdings on the back of their brothers that spiralled into abject poverty – to the dishonor of being the only western hemisphere State  that is on the UN list of the 50 least prosperous countries in the world. Actually – they are on the bottom of that list and even have the added disadvantage of being battered by natural disasters – one after another – in this last decade – three major Hurricanes and this last major Earthquake with its 7.0 epicenter just 10 miles from their capital.

Now, does the world owe them rescue? As a humanitarian obligation the answer is obviously a very strong YES. From the climate change / environmental angle – sure a clear YES with a but. Now, let us write about the BUT.

- THE NEW YORK TIMES January 17, 2010, QUOTATION OF THE DAY -

“Their priorities are to secure the country, ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync.”
- JARRY EMMANUEL, the air logistics officer for the World Food Program, after his group’s planes were diverted so the United States could land planes with troops and equipment.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/world/…

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As the focus on Saturday turned away from
Haitians lost to those trying to survive, a sprawling assembly of
international officials and aid workers struggled to fix a troubled
relief effort after Tuesday’s devastating earthquake.

While countries and relief agencies showered aid on Haiti, only a
small part of it was reaching increasingly desperate Haitians without
food, water or shelter. “We see all the commotion, but we still have
nothing to drink,” said Joel Querette, 23, a college student camped
out in a park. “The trucks are going by.”

Hunger drove many to swarm places where food was being given out.
Reports of isolated looting and violence intensified as night
approached, and there were reports of Haitians streaming out of the
capital.

Still, recovery and aid efforts were widening. And even the
distribution problems in the country stemmed in part from good
intentions, aid officials said: Countries around the world were
responding to Haiti’s call for help as never before. And they are
flooding the country with supplies and relief workers that its
collapsed infrastructure and nonfunctioning government are in no
position to handle.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Port-au-Prince,
met with President René Préval for an hour and assured Haitians that
the United States “will be here today, tomorrow and for the time
ahead.” And in Washington, President Obama stood with former
Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who will lead a national
drive to raise money to help the survivors.

But with Haitian officials relying so heavily on the United States,
the United Nations and many different aid groups, coordination was
posing a critical challenge. An airport hobbled by only one runway, a
ruined port whose main pier splintered into the ocean, roads blocked
by rubble, widespread fuel shortages and a lack of drivers to move the
aid into the city are compounding the problems.

About 1,700 people camped on the grass in front of the prime
minister’s office compound in the Pétionville neighborhood, pleading
for biscuits and water-purification tablets distributed by aid groups.
A sign on one fallen building in Nazon, one of many hillside
communities destroyed by the quake, read: “Welcome U.S. Marines. We
need help. Dead Bodies Inside!”

Haitian officials said the bodies of tens of thousands of victims had
already been recovered and that hundreds of thousands of people were
living on the streets. A preliminary Red Cross estimate put the total
number of affected people at 3.5 million.

The United Nations also confirmed the death of three of its most
senior officials in the quake: the secretary general’s special
representative for Haiti, Hédi Annabi; his deputy, Luiz Carlos da
Costa; and the acting police commissioner for the peacekeeping force,
Doug Coates of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They were meeting
with eight members of a Chinese police delegation in the agency’s
headquarters, the Christopher Hotel, when it collapsed on Tuesday.

Even as the United States took a leading role in aid efforts, some aid
officials were describing misplaced priorities, accusing United States
officials of focusing their efforts on getting their people and troops
installed and lifting their citizens out. Under agreement with Haiti,
the United States is now managing air traffic control at the airport,
helicopters are flying relief missions from warships off the coast and
9,000 to 10,000 troops are expected to arrive by Monday to help with
the relief effort.

The World Food Program finally was able to land flights of food,
medicine and water on Saturday, after failing on Thursday and Friday,
an official with the agency said. Those flights had been diverted so
that the United States could land troops and equipment, and lift
Americans and other foreigners to safety.

“There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an
incredible amount for a country like Haiti,” said Jarry Emmanuel, the
air logistics officer for the agency’s Haiti effort. “But most of
those flights are for the United States military.

He added: “Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to
feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync.”

American officials said they were making substantial progress. Mrs.
Clinton said the military was beginning to use a container port in Cap
Haitien, in northern Haiti, which should increase the flow of aid.

The United States Agency for International Development was helping
choose sites and clear roads for 14 centers for the distribution of
food and water. Rajiv Shah, the agency’s administrator, said the
United States had moved $48 million of food supplies from Texas since
the quake and distributed 600,000 packaged meals. It has also
installed three water-purification systems capable of purifying
100,000 liters a day.

Yet problems remain. American officials said that 180 tons of relief
supplies had been delivered to the airport, but much was still waiting
for delivery. While the military has cleared other landing sites for
helicopters around the capital, they are thronged by people looking
for help, making landings hazardous.

Fuel shortages were mounting. At several gas stations around
Port-au-Prince, attendants or customers said that even though the
stations had fuel left in their tanks, there was no electricity to
work the pumps.

Some aid workers were critical of the United Nations, as well, arguing
that the agency had the most on-the-ground experience in Haiti and
should be directing efforts better.

But many United Nations employees were killed in the earthquake. And
Stephanie Bunker, the spokeswoman for the United Nations humanitarian
relief effort, said Saturday that a United Nations logistics team was
trying to coordinate with other agencies, and that the peacekeeping
forces were trying to clear roads.

Criticism of the United Nations “may reflect people’s frustrations
with the entire effort because it is such a grueling effort,” she
said. “It takes a long time for all this stuff to be cleared up and
fixed.” She noted that all modes of transportation — air, road and sea
— were still limited. A shortage of trucks remained a problem.

Michel Chancy, appointed by Mr. Préval to coordinate relief, said that
much of the aid to Haiti was coming to a government that was itself
under siege.

“The palace fell,” he said. “Ministries fell. And not only that, the
homes of many ministers fell. The police were not coming to work.
Relief agencies collapsed. The U.N. collapsed. It was hard to get
ourselves in a place where we could help others.”

At the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince, American rescue teams
continued to roll out of the gate. Most of their equipment had
arrived, and at any given time, the teams were working on several
different piles of rubble throughout the city.

“People need to get the message, we’re out, we’re doing stuff,” said
Craig Luecke, a coordinator with the search and rescue team from
Fairfax County, Va., who has been tracking American efforts in advance
of Mrs. Clinton’s arrival here. “My Google Earth map is filled with
American activity.”

Though the numbers are fluid, he said four American teams had helped
pulled nearly two dozen survivors from the rubble. The State
Department said 15 Americans were confirmed dead in the earthquake.

Some airplanes, after circling the capital’s airport, have been
turning back or landing in Santo Domingo, in the neighboring Dominican
Republic. Its airfield was growing ever more crowded with diverted
flights.

“We’re all going crazy,” said Nan Buzard, senior director of
international response and programs for the American Red Cross. “You
don’t have any kind of orderly distributions of food, water, shelter,
clothing. The planes are in the air, the materials are purchased. It
remains a profoundly frustrating situation for everyone.”

Among the aid groups avoiding the logjam in Port-au-Prince by entering
Haiti from the Dominican Republic was International Federation of Red
Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

A caravan of eight trucks from the federation was creeping toward the
Haitian border on Saturday morning, carrying medical equipment and aid
workers.

The group had originally planned to touch down in Haiti, but the
delays at the airport forced them to divert to Santo Domingo, delaying
their arrival in Haiti by about 12 hours, said Paul Conneally, a Red
Cross spokesman who was traveling with the convoy.

“Every minute counts, I know that, but we cannot be on standby to land
at Port-au-Prince because it may not be for two or three days,” he
said. “It’s problematic to go across roads, but it’s a small price to
pay.”

Mr. Préval, speaking at the airport, now the effective seat of the
Haitian government, urged patience. He showed a map covered with red
dots, indicating the worst-hit areas. When the earthquake struck, he
said, “We in Haiti thought it was the end of the world.”

Mr. Préval said he was making food, water, medical supplies and the
re-establishment of communication the priorities for his government.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

From COHA – THE COUNCIL ON HEMISPHERIC AFFAIRS – The Washington based center for the Western Hemisphere.
 http://www.coha.org/brazil’s-inescapab…

Brazil’s Haitian Cross
by COHA Research Fellow Thomaz Alvares de Azevedo

After a promising beginning that included, among other accomplishments, being the second country in the Americas to achieve independence and the first and only to do so after a slave revolt, Haiti’s prospects soured so precipitously that by the end of the millennium it was being dubbed the failed state of the Western Hemisphere. Thus, one can hardly imagine a country that, even with the support of the international community, would take longer to bounce back from the catastrophic earthquake just witnessed on the island. If in the past, Haiti has almost chronically relied on foreign aid and debt relief, the devastating ramifications of this natural disaster will demonstrably increase this dependency. Brazil, which in recent years has maintained a strong presence in Haiti, might prove to be a favored source of such aid.
For the past two decades, Brazil has been working to expand its voice in the hemisphere. Thus, it was only natural that when the United Nations decided to replace its decade-long stretch of failed Haitian initiatives with a newly formed stabilization mission, Brasilia seized the opportunity. Since 2004, Brazil has headed the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which mandates securing and stabilizing the environment, advancing the political process, as well as monitoring Haiti’s human rights situation.
Brasilia’s Road to MINUSTAH
The United Nations presence in Haiti dates back to 1993. Since then, the United Nations has undertaken four missions in Haiti: the United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH), the United Nations Support Mission in Haiti (UNSMIH), the United Nations Transition Mission in Haiti (UNTMIH), and the United Nations Civilian Police Mission in Haiti (MIPONUH). The situation worsened after the 2000 presidential election, in which reports indicate that turnout may have been as low as 10%. While Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas party claimed victory, opposition members accused the government of manipulating the electoral environments in Aristide’s favor. Internal political relations deteriorated, and in February 2004 vicious violence broke out. As insurgents increasingly took control of the northern part of the country, President Aristide was induced by his political foes to flee the island for exile in Africa. In a bold move, the succeeding interim government requested international troops to be sent to Haiti to help to stabilize the country, and the Security Council promptly authorized a Multinational Interim Force (MIF) to be deployed there. This initial MIF was then replaced by the present multidimensional stabilization operation, known as the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti.
Brazil’s willingness to get so involved with MINUSTAH was, at first, surprising. Holding one of the temporary seats in the Security Council during the 1990s, Brasilia had not voted in favor of the peacekeeping operations in Haiti. But now, Brazil volunteered to lead the military part of the mission. This took place after Brazilian officials made the argument that, unless there was a formal request from the Haitian President, sending a military force to Haiti would clearly violate the country’s sovereignty. This condition was not satisfied until 2004, when Haiti’s President Boniface Alexandre made the request.
Brazil’s determination to lead the mission indicates a noticeable change in its foreign policy orientation. Where Brasilia had previously demonstrated some mistrust in multilateral organizations like the Security Council, suddenly there was a willingness to work within multilateral institutions in order to better establish Brazil’s growing relevance at the international level. By hinting that its involvement in the MINUSTAH would serve as a measure of Brazil’s capacity and willingness to take on international responsibilities, Brazil’s Itamaraty would be taking on a risk. Now President Lula’s government hopes to parlay the putative success of the mission to justify its demand for a more prominent international role.
Brasilia’s Reaction to the Disaster
Brasilia has been appropriately active in its rapid response in the aftermath of Haiti’s ongoing tragedy. President Lula increased Brazil’s official presence in the area almost immediately, by boosting its diplomatic staff in the adjoining Dominican Republic—taking advantage of its common border with Haiti—and sending the Minister of Defense, Nelson Jobim, to Port-au-Prince. But even more relevant than such political moves, shortly after the disaster hit the island, the Lula administration announced a 10 million dollar contribution to humanitarian aid, a relatively high figure for the country. An air force plane with 13 tons of food and water was dispatched to Port-au-Prince, and another aircraft with 50 medical personnel and medicine is expected to take off soon. However substantial Brazil’s initial response has been, it still is insufficient in the face of the unimaginable losses caused by the earthquake. The Red Cross has already estimated that up to 3 million of Haiti’s population of 9 million ultimately may have been profoundly affected by the earthquake. Although the ongoing chaos makes it difficult to estimate the extent of the destruction, material damage to the island’s infrastructure can be expected to reach astronomical proportions, and the estimated toll of human loss, in the tens-of-thousands, already is massive.
In the face of such a raw tragedy, Brasilia must show that it can not only talk the talk, but is also prepared to embrace a leadership role. Its readiness to rise to this challenge may be a signal of Brazil’s maturity as a regional leader, but this may also be far from sufficient. It is the quality and consistency of support that will ultimately determine if Brazil, whose credentials are still waiting to be made, has the necessary dirt to throw behind the international status to which it so deeply aspires.

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HAITI
Brazil’s Moment to Lead
Posted By Joshua Keating, Foreign Policy,   Friday, January 15, 2010

Countries around the world are frantically searching for their citizens in Haiti, but this week’s events have been particularly hard on Brazil, which had a big footprint in the country before the quake. At least 14 Brazilian troops were killed in the quake with four more still missing. Brazil is the leader and largest troop contributor to the UN’s MINUSTAH peacekeeping force. The famous Brazilian doctor Zilda Arns Neumann — sometimes called Brazil’s Mother Teresa — was also killed.

But Brazil has also been on the frontlines of the response. In a telling sign of the priority the country is giving the disaster, Brazilian defense minister Nelson Jobim is on the ground in Haiti with a delegation to assess the situation and devise a recovery strategy. President da Silva has been in communication with President Obama and former President Clinton to coordinate the aid effort. The Brazilian government has pledged $15 million in aid and its military cargo planes are flying in supplies. Additionally, Foreign Minsiter Ceslo Anorim is arguing that MINUSTAH’s mandate be expanded to assist with the recovery effort.

With the already rickety Haitian state essentially dealt a knockout punch this week, the country is going to need an unprecedented level of international assistance in the years to come. The United States is understandably taking the lead in the immediate rescue effort, but given its nation-building commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and history of frequently occupying Haiti, the U.S. may not be the best candidate for the long-term stabilization effort.

Brazil, on the other hand, is already involved Haitian security, and as others on this site have written,  has been increasingly looking to act as a global player. The Haitian crisis is an opportunity for the rising superpower to take a leadership role in regional security. And lord knows Haiti will need the help.

Two Great Articles in the LIFE & ARTS Section of the Martin Luther King Weekend’s Financial Times.

They are about the BRICS (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa) Economies that we keep on our website on the separate buttons for Russia and the IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa.

The Term Brics or BRICS was coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs who by the end of the first decade of the 21st century also spoke about a lost decade – but the decade was not lost by everybody – See how O’Neil’s idea did not colapse as the credit crisis hit – actually the Brics emerged relatively well from it and can thus continue their strive for greater development.

The article about the Moscow formerly domesticated dog’s return to a semi-status of human dependent wolfs hit us as another example of strive to sustainability. The Muscovite’s respect for these animals embodying a mutual relationship that can be viewed also in terms of the evolution of the power of the BRICS. We just posted the article that Brazil can be expected to take on a leading position after the Haiti catastrophe. The US can be expected to be more and more in a special relationship with the IBSA and, as we wrote about it earlier – the EU might some day include also Russia as one of its top tier members.

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 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/112ca932-00ab-…

The story of the Brics.
By Gillian Tett
Published: January 15 2010 17:01 | Last updated: January 15 2010 17:01

On the desk of Jim O’Neill, chief economist for Goldman Sachs, stand four flimsy flags. They look out of place among the expensive computer terminals of the investment bank’s plush London office, like leftovers of a child’s geography homework or cheap mementos from backpacking trips to exotic parts of the world. But these flags hint at a more interesting story – of the latest way in which money and ideas are reshaping the world. The small scraps of fabric are pennants for big countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China. And almost a decade ago, O’Neill decided to start thinking of them as a group – which he gave the acronym Bric.

It was a simple mental prop. The bolder move was to predict – publicly, and in Goldman’s name – that by 2041 (later revised to 2039, then 2032) the Brics would overtake the six largest western economies in terms of economic might. The four flags would come to represent the pillars of the 21st-century economy.

At the time, many scoffed at this idea. The predictions turned conventional western wisdom on its head; and O’Neill hardly seemed an obvious champion of the concept. A large man with working-class Manchester roots, he does not exude the aura of any globetrotting elite. His office is decorated with splashes of cherry red memorabilia from Manchester United Football Club, and he still speaks with the thick, flattened vowels of his childhood. Indeed, when O’Neill coined the term Bric in 2001, he had never properly visited three of the four countries (the exception was China), and spoke none of their languages. Yet, notwithstanding those unlikely beginnings, in the past decade, Bric has become a near ubiquitous financial term, shaping how a generation of investors, financiers and policymakers view the emerging markets: companies ranging from Nissan to media group WPP have developed Brics business strategies; several dozen financial institutions now run Brics funds; business schools have launched Brics courses; and this April Phillips de Pury will be holding a Brics-themed auction. “The Brics concept … that O’Neill created … has become such a strong brand,” says Felipe Góes, adviser to the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, who is organising the first Brics think-tank.

O’Neill speaks in smaller spheres for a moment: “It has transformed my life,” he says.

To some critics, the fuss about Brics is overblown. The term is hype, spin, from a bank and banking industry accustomed to disguising such guff as genuinely new ideas and concepts – the better to profit from them. “Brics is really just marketing – it’s nonsense!” says Charles Dumas, a London-based economist who disputes many elements of the Brics concept, such as the idea that these countries will keep growing inexorably into the future. Others are more cynical still, arguing that Goldmans Sachs has used the concept to extend its global power, and thus turbo-charge its formidable profit-making machine. O’Neill denies this latter accusation. “I really believe in this idea of Brics, that this idea can make the world a better place – it’s what drives me,” he says.

But even if Brics is self-interested spin, such spin – an idea in itself, really – can sometimes take on a life of its own, beyond what its creators expect or even hope for. By creating the word Brics, O’Neill has redrawn powerbrokers’ cognitive map, helping them to articulate a fundamental shift of influence away from the western world. And if you believe that the way humans think and speak not only reflects reality, but can shape its future path too, then this Brics tag has itself come both to reflect and drive the change – albeit from some unlikely beginnings.

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The rise of the non-western world

The way O’Neill, 52, tells the tale of how he developed the Brics – and he is a born raconteur – starts, a touch melodramatically, on the day terrorists flew aircraft into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, killing thousands of people.

The son of a postman, O’Neill grew up in south Manchester, where he studied at the local comprehensive (Oasis’s Noel and Liam Gallagher were pupils there too, albeit later) and spent much of his time playing football. After school, he decided to study at Sheffield University, partly because it offered easy access to watch Manchester United. (Today, he has a season tickets at Old Trafford, and leaves spare tickets behind the bar at a local pub, for childhood friends to use.) During his time there, between “getting drunk and playing football”, O’Neill discovered a passion for economics. And after completing a doctorate in the subject, he worked as a foreign exchange analyst at a series of City banks, eventually joining Goldman in 1995 as co-head of economics. In the summer of 2001, Gavyn Davies, O’Neill’s highly respected co-chief, announced his departure – leaving O’Neill the sole leader, and under huge pressure to perform. “I thought: “Oh my god, I have got to put my imprint on this department,” he recalls. “I was searching for a theme and a new idea.”

“What 9/11 told me was that there was no way that globalisation was going to be Americanisation in the future – nor should it be. In order for globalisation to advance, it had to be accepted by more people … but not by imposing the dominant American social and philosophical beliefs and structures”
Inspiration came – a bittersweet gift. On September 11, as the first aircraft approached the Twin Towers, where he had delivered a lecture a few days earlier, O’Neill was hosting a global video conference call. Halfway through, the New York faces vanished from the screen. O’Neill later learnt the staff had been safely evacuated from their offices, but he still reeled in shock at the events. In the days that followed, his mind began to whir. As a foreign exchange analyst, O’Neill had always been a passionate advocate of globalisation, and was fascinated by the rising power of Asia. And to him, the horror in Manhattan was a powerful demonstration of exactly why the non-western world was starting to matter more and more – albeit in a negative way. However, O’Neill also believed – or hoped – that this shift in power could be seen in a more positive sense, too. “What 9/11 told me was that there was no way that globalisation was going to be Americanisation in the future – nor should it be,” he says. “In order for globalisation to advance, it had to be accepted by more people … but not by imposing the dominant American social and philosophical beliefs and structures.”
In practical terms, O’Neill decided, that meant economists had to look more closely at how non-western economies could wield more power in the future. As he scoured the globe, he became increasingly fascinated by four countries: Brazil, India, Russia and China. In one sense, the four seemed disparate, separated geographically and culturally; they had never acted as a bloc in any way, never conceived of themselves as a unit. Yet what they all shared in 2001 were large populations, underdeveloped economies and governments that appeared willing to embrace global markets and some elements of globalisation. To O’Neill, these characteristics made them natural sisters: they all had the potential for rapid future growth.

Excited, he tried to work out how to label this bunch. Since China was easily the largest, it made sense to put its name first. “Lloyd Blankfein [Goldman Sachs’s chief executive] always teases me about it – he says I should have called the group the Cribs,” O’Neill recalls. But O’Neill thought that a word linked to babies would seem patronising. So on November 30 2001, he launched his Big Idea: Goldman Sachs’s Global Economic Paper #66, “Building Better Global Economic Brics”. He predicted, soberly, that “over the next 10 years, the weight of the Brics and especially China in world GDP will grow” – and warned, perhaps a little less soberly, that “in line with these prospects, world policymaking forums should be reorganised” to give more power to the group he had now dubbed Brics.

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Welcome to Briclife

The paper immediately sparked interest among Goldman Sachs’s corporate clients, particularly those already selling – or trying to sell – consumer products to the emerging markets. “I found the Bric thing fascinating right from the start,” says Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP. “It tapped into what we had been already discussing.” But to many investors and bankers – including some inside Goldman Sachs – it all seemed rather fanciful, particularly given that countries such as Brazil had recently experienced hyperinflation. “When I first spoke at a big group in Rio [after the paper was published], it was to around 1,000 investors from all of Latin America,” recalls O’Neill. “The guy who was introducing me whispered in my ear as he went to the podium, ‘we all know that the only reason the B is there is because without it there is no acronym.’”

But O’Neill kept discussing the concept with colleagues and in 2003 his team produced the next offering: a paper called “Dreaming with Brics: The Path to 2050”. It boldly declared that by 2039 the Brics group could overtake the largest western economies in scale. “The list of the world’s 10 largest economies may look quite different in 2050,” it said. That prediction launched O’Neill’s team into what he calls Briclife. Within days, Goldman economists were flooded with e-mails from executives at companies ranging from mobile telecoms group Vodafone to miner BHP Billiton to Ikea and Nissan. By luck – or insight – O’Neill had produced this tag just as many western businesses were trying to hone their strategies to sell products to the non-western world, or to use regions such as China as a manufacturing base. And in a world where corporate boards face information overload, Brics suddenly provided executives with a snappy way of discussing strategy. Better still, unlike phrases such as “emerging markets” or “developing world”, Brics did not sound patronising, or unpromising; it was neutral, strong, politically correct.

Soon rivals, such as HSBC and Deutsche Bank fund unit DWS, were launching dedicated investment funds marketed under the label of Brics. “We asked our lawyers if we could trademark the word Brics, but they said not – apparently it’s not a product,” O’Neill recalls. Steadily, the brand spread, taking on a life beyond Goldman. Initially, most hedge funds ignored the concept as marketing hype. But as investors began to purchase assets specifically linked to the rise of Brics, the hedge-funders recognised that the way that China, say, was making cars could affect demand for Brazilian copper. New correlations were developing in asset prices, amid strong investment flows (since 2003, the Brics stock markets have risen from 2 to 9 per cent of global market capitalisation, and O’Neill forecasts they will represent almost 50 per cent of global market capitalisation in 2050).

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Who’s in, who’s out?

Unsurprisingly, O’Neill’s rivals started to snipe. Some economists said it was ridiculous to make forecasts as far out as 2050, particularly since many of O’Neill’s projections seemed to involve extrapolating current growth on a straight line. Others took issue with the idea that the four Bric countries could – or should – be described as a group. “Economically, financially and politically, China overshadows and will continue to overshadow the other Brics,” analysts at Deutsche Bank argued. Some banks tried to ban their employees from using the B word. “Why the hell should we do Goldman’s marketing for it?” says the chief executive of one of the world’s biggest investment banks. Meanwhile, out in the market, some investors suggested it would be better to talk about Bricks (with Korea included), or Brimck (with Mexico as well) or even Abrimcks (chucking in the Arab region and South Africa). One market wag joked that somebody should start trading the Cement bloc (Countries Excluded from the Emerging New Terminology).

O’Neill fought back. The Goldman team started to crank out Bric research, looking at everything from the future size of the Indian middle class to car use in Brazil. In an effort to soothe some ruffled feathers, in 2005 O’Neill tried to explain why Korea and Mexico had not been included in his big idea (the rather arbitrary-sounding reason was that they were members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). He also tried to placate some of the non-Brics by offering a new term: the “N-11”, or Next Eleven nations on the list to emerge as powers. This was a confusingly broad club, encompassing Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam, but within months companies such as Nissan and WPP were bandying “N-11” around their boardrooms. Another marketing tag – or boundary on a cognitive map – had been born.

Nor was it just the corporate world getting excited. O’Neill heard that politicians in Nigeria were slapping the term on their internal propaganda campaigns, redefining some of the slogans for their own ends; it was uncannily reminiscent of how 19th-century Nigerians once transposed the language of the Anglican Church to their own cultural traditions.

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The Teflon term

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of O’Neill’s golden child is what it didn’t do: collapse under scrutiny as the credit crisis hit. Over the past two years, many of Wall Street’s big ideas have been exposed as woefully ill-conceived at best, utterly fallacious at worst. However, during the great re-reckoning, the Brics concept has flourished. Most of the Brics and N-11 emerged from the crisis well, relative to the economies of the western world. Their banking systems are intact, and their economies are growing at breakneck speed. “As a result,” wrote O’Neill in a recent paper, “we think our long-term 2050 Bric ‘dream’ projections are more, rather than less, likely to materialise.” More specifically, Goldman now predicts that China’s economy will become as big as the US’s by 2027, while the total Brics group will eclipse the big western economies by 2032 – almost a decade sooner than first thought.

That, O’Neill argues, will overturn many western assumptions about how the world works. These days, Goldman aggressively recommends that investors decide which western companies to invest in based on whether they are selling to the Brics and N-11, rather than just western consumers. (In another piece of neat cultural transposition, Goldman recently dubbed this strategy “investment in the Brics Nifty 50” [companies which sell to the Brics region] – a reference to the “nifty 50” of big western companies that were beloved by investors back in the 1970s, when it was presumed that the US and Europe would provide the engines of growth.) “We estimate that two billion people could join the global middle-class by 2030, mainly from Brics,” Goldman’s latest research note trills.

The argument is beloved by some investors. “Had you heeded O’Neill’s work and gotten invested in the stock markets of those four nations [back in 2001], you’d have made more money this past decade than by doing virtually anything else conceivable,” declared Joshua Brown, an influential investment commentator, on his Wall Street blog last month. (O’Neill brushes off the praise as “somewhat embarrassing”.) Others fear it is the next big bubble. To some, the exclusion of countries such as South Africa – or even Indonesia – looks increasingly odd. And the inclusion of Russia is presenting an ever-greater headache, given that the Russian economy was the one Bric to take a real fall in the credit crisis – so severe, in fact, that some investors (and even a few bankers inside Goldman) suspect it is now time to kick Russia out of the group.

Unsurprisingly, O’Neill is reluctant to undermine Goldman’s relations with Moscow by doing that. Although he admits that Russia has “disappointed”, he also insists that if the country “recovers strongly and quickly in 2010 and 2011, as we expect, we believe it will deserve its Bric status”.

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Back to reality

In the early years of Bric-dom, the four countries chosen by O’Neill had reactions ranging from bafflement to indifference. But soon the countries began to embrace the designation, and use it to get their voices heard on the world stage
But now another Brics-related phenomenon is emerging. In the early years of Bric-dom, the four countries chosen by O’Neill had different reactions to the designation. There was delight in Russia, bafflement in China, cynicism in Brazil and indifference in India. Now, the countries are using the idea to forge tentative links in reality – not just the world of investment ideas. In May 2008, Russia hosted the first formal Bric summit, a meeting of Bric foreign ministers in Yekaterinburg. In July 2009, it followed this with a formal gathering of all four Bric heads of state.
As meetings go, these were symbolic, not substantive. Although the four countries discussed how they could better co-ordinate their affairs to gain greater influence – and seek alternatives to the dollar – they did not agree any tangible steps. But this year in the early summer, the four countries will meet again, this time in Brazil. In anticipation, the Brazilian authorities are establishing a group of academics and a formal think-tank to brainstorm how to develop the Brics agenda. As part of that, they plan to host a conference next month in Rio – with the participation of O’Neill himself. McKinsey, which has used a version of the Brics concept in its consulting strategy, will also be involved.

It might seem ironic that the four countries would choose a term created by an American bank to define themselves but it is not unprecedented. When countries such as India first developed their sense of national identity and rebelled against the British – or when Soviet republics such as Uzbekistan developed a similar nationalism – they did so using the borders that had also been imposed, artificially and arbitrarily, by an outside power. When the cognitive map is redrawn by a dominant power – even in the world of marketing and investment bank “spin” – it tends not to be erased so much as appropriated.

“Is there much evidence that the Brics countries are collaborating today in practical terms?” O’Neill asks. “Not really, no. But that could change in the future – you look at how Brazil supplies commodities which China needs … or the fact that they all have quite similar ideas about how to manage their economies.”

Or as Felipe Góes, the Brazilian official in Rio charged with setting up the world’s first Brics think-tank, says: “It is somewhat ironic [that we use the word Brics] … but that reflects the fact that in the modern world it is people like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey who have the resources and minds to develop ideas.” Indeed, what makes a large institution such as Goldman so influential these days is not simply its trading acumen and political connections, but also its ability to invest heavily in what bankers sometimes call “thought-leadership”, by funding analysis and ensuring it is read around the world.

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At home abroad

Back in New York, some of Goldman’s older managers are aware of the cultural ironies of the Brics boom. During the first 120 years of its history, Goldman made most of its profits from American markets, and today the firm is often viewed as the most politically well-connected of the US banks. If you step into the office of its headquarters at 85 Broad Street, in downtown Manhattan, the first thing that you see is a vast American flag, looming over the dull brown marble lobby. Yet appearances can deceive. While O’Neill has spent the past decade trying to carve out his own intellectual niche by promoting the Brics, so too – far more discreetly – Goldman has been remaking itself, building activities outside the American heartland to capture the growth that O’Neill forecasts. In the past decade, the bank has opened more offices across the world than in the whole of its previous history, and while revenues from the Americas accounted for 60 per cent of its earnings 10 years ago, they now represent about half (and far less if Latin America is excluded). Indeed, senior Goldman executives expect that within a few years, profits that are “made in America” will be a minority of total earnings.

That pattern is certainly not unique to Goldman Sachs: most other western banks have also been expanding across the globe in the past few years. Deutsche Bank, for example, has been deftly building an emerging markets derivatives franchise, while HSBC is now so convinced that its future lies in Asia that Michael Geoghegan, chief executive, recently relocated to Hong Kong from London.

Still, the swing is particularly striking at Goldman, given its all-American past. These days, one of the buzzwords at 85 Broad Street is “domestification”, or the idea that the bank must build businesses around the world that provide local clients not simply with international services, but also with services in their local markets. Rather than treating non-western countries as far-flung frontiers or pawns in a trading game, the new corporate rhetoric insists that the Brics (and other non-western countries) are markets in their own rights. Thus in Brazil, Goldman recently started selling Brazilian investment funds to Brazilians. In Japan, there are staff who speak barely speak a word of English. And in China – where Goldman Sachs most certainly does not fly a big US flag – the bank is sponsoring a Chinese business school, to ensure access to a stream of authentically local Chinese students.

This drive is going hand in hand with a complex process of cultural engineering. As the bank acquires more non-western staff, it is devising programmes to rotate its locally hired employees through headquarters, to ensure that they learn “Goldman values”. It also takes care to send staff from New York and London out to the regions, and to shuffle different ethnic groups between different regions.

As its sponsorship of Chinese business schools shows, Goldman is trying to raise a new generation of local leaders. “If you look at the history of the London office of Goldman, you can see how over a decade or two, you can have locals rise to the top,” says one top executive. “That is our goal across the world. The idea is to get embedded, to show that we are there for the long term … but also to ensure that our Goldman values are everywhere in the world.”

It all might sound reminiscent of the way the British empire operated in the 19th century – or the way the Russian Communist party once tried to knit the diverse peoples of the Soviet Union into a single ideologically based nation. Only this time, it is MBA programmes and Goldman training courses, rather than British public schools or communist training camps, that provide the cultural glue. And – perhaps most important of all – Goldman Sachs (unlike earlier empires) is not overtly acting with a nationalist or political agenda; insofar as it has a real loyalty, it is to its own bottom line and its ability to make profits.

Put it another way: Goldman will keep flying Old Glory only as long as it believes that there is profit to be made under that banner. No wonder a senior member of the US government remarked a couple of years ago, partly in jest, that sooner or later, Goldman “is going to have to choose whether it wants to really be American or not”. If O’Neill is even half-right in his predictions, it may not be a straightforward choice.

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Gillian Tett is the FT’s capital markets editor.

Her last piece for the magazine was about the JP Morgan bankers who invented the credit derivative’ – and their reactions to the derivatives-induced financial crisis. Read it at www.ft.com

On Monday, the FT begins a five-part series on Bric consumers – who they are, what they buy, who is selling to them and what their rise means for the global economy

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 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/628a8500-ff1c-…

Moscow’s stray dogs
By Susanne Sternthal
Published in the Financial Times -  January 16 2010.

Russians can go nutty when it comes to dogs. Consider the incident a few years ago that involved Yulia Romanova, a 22-year-old model. On a winter evening, Romanova was returning with her beloved Staffordshire terrier from a visit to a designer who specialises in kitting out canine Muscovites in the latest fashions. The terrier was sporting a new green camouflage jacket as he walked with his owner through the crowded Mendeleyevskaya metro station. There they encountered Malchik, a black stray who had made the station his home, guarding it against drunks and other dogs. Malchik barked at the pair, defending his territory. But instead of walking away, Romanova reached into her pink rucksack, pulled out a kitchen knife and, in front of rush-hour commuters, stabbed Malchik to death.

{Photo – The statue of Malchik erected by well-wishers after his death.}
Romanova was arrested, tried and underwent a year of psychiatric treatment. Typically for Russia, this horror story was countered by a wellspring of sympathy for Moscow’s strays. A bronze statue of Malchik, paid for by donations, now stands at the entrance of Mendeleyevskaya station. It has become a symbol for the 35,000 stray dogs that roam Russia’s capital – about 84 dogs per square mile. You see them everywhere. They lie around in the courtyards of apartment complexes, wander near markets and kiosks, and sleep inside metro stations and pedestrian passageways. You can hear them barking and howling at night. And the strays on Moscow’s streets do not look anything like the purebreds preferred by status-conscious Muscovites. They look like a breed apart.
I moved to Moscow with my family last year and was startled to see so many stray dogs. Watching them over time, I realised that, despite some variation in colour – some were black, others yellowish white or russet – they all shared a certain look. They were medium-sized with thick fur, wedge-shaped heads and almond eyes. Their tails were long and their ears erect.

They also acted differently. Every so often, you would see one waiting on a metro platform. When the train pulled up, the dog would step in, scramble up to lie on a seat or sit on the floor if the carriage was crowded, and then exit a few stops later. There is even a website dedicated to the metro stray (www.metrodog.ru) on which passengers post photos and video clips taken with their mobile phones, documenting the savviest of the pack using the public transport system like any other Muscovite.

Where did these animals come from? It’s a question Andrei Poyarkov, 56, a biologist specialising in wolves, has dedicated himself to answering. His research focuses on how different environments affect dogs’ behaviour and social organisation. About 30 years ago, he began studying Moscow’s stray dogs. Poyarkov contends that their appearance and behaviour have changed over the decades as they have continuously adapted to the changing face of Russia’s capital. Virtually all the city’s strays were born that way: dumping a pet dog on the streets of Moscow amounts to a near-certain death sentence. Poyarkov reckons fewer than 3 per cent survive.

. . .

Poyarkov works at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in south-west Moscow. His office is small, but boasts high ceilings and tall windows. Several wire cages sit on a table in the centre of the room. Inside them, four weasels scurry through tunnels and run on a wheel. Poyarkov and I sit near the weasels and sip green tea.

Biologist Andrei Poyarkov – He first thought of observing the behaviour of stray dogs in 1979, and began with the ones that lived near his apartment and those he encountered on his way to work. The area he studied came to comprise some 10 sq km, home to about 100 dogs. Poyarkov started making recordings of the sounds that the strays made, and began to study their social organisation. He photographed and catalogued them, mapping where each dog lived.
He quickly found that the strays were much easier to study than wolves. “To see a wild wolf is a real event,” he says. “You can see them, but not for very long and not at close range. But with stray dogs you can watch them for as long as you want and, for the most part, be quite near them.” According to Poyarkov, there are 30,000 to 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow, while the wolf population for the whole of Russia is about 50,000 to 60,000. Population density, he says, determines how frequently the animals come into contact with each other, which in turn affects their behaviour, psychology, stress levels, physiology and relationship to their environment.

“The second difference between stray dogs and wolves is that the dogs, on average, are much less aggressive and a good deal more tolerant of one another,” says Poyarkov. Wolves stay strictly within their own pack, even if they share a territory with another. A pack of dogs, however, can hold a dominant position over other packs and their leader will often “patrol” the other packs by moving in and out of them. His observations have led Poyarkov to conclude that this leader is not necessarily the strongest or most dominant dog, but the most intelligent – and is acknowledged as such. The pack depends on him for its survival.

Moscow’s strays sit somewhere between house pets and wolves, says Poyarkov, but are in the early stages of the shift from the domesticated back towards the wild. That said, there seems little chance of reversing this process. It is virtually impossible to domesticate a stray: many cannot stand being confined indoors.

“Genetically, wolves and dogs are almost identical,” says Poyarkov. “What has changed significantly [with domestication] is a range of hormonal and behavioural parameters, because of the brutal natural selection that eliminated many aggressive animals.” He recounts the work of Soviet biologist Dmitri Belyaev, exiled from Moscow in 1948 during the Stalin years for a commitment to classical genetics that ran counter to state scientific doctrine of the time.

Under the guise of studying animal physiology, Belyaev set up a Russian silver fox research centre in Novosibirsk, setting out to test his theory that the most important selected characteristic for the domestication of dogs was a lack of aggression. He began to select foxes that showed the least fear of humans and bred them. After 10-15 years, the foxes he bred showed affection to their keepers, even licking them. They barked, had floppy ears and wagged their tails. They also developed spotted coats – a surprising development that was connected with a decrease in their levels of adrenaline, which shares a biochemical pathway with melanin and controls pigment production.

“With stray dogs, we’re witnessing a move backwards,” explains Poyarkov. “That is, to a wilder and less domesticated state, to a more ‘natural’ state.” As if to prove his point, strays do not have spotted coats, they rarely wag their tails and are wary of humans, showing no signs of affection towards them.

. . .

The stray dogs of Moscow are mentioned for the first time in the reports of the journalist and writer Vladimir Gilyarovsky in the latter half of the 19th century. But Poyarkov says they have been there as long as the city itself. They remain different from wolves, in particular because they exhibit pronounced “polymorphism” – a range of behavioural traits shaped in part by the “ecological niche” they occupy. And it is this ability to adapt that explains why the population density of strays is so much greater than that of wolves. “With several niches there are more resources and more opportunities.”

The dogs divide into four types, he says, which are determined by their character, how they forage for food, their level of socialisation to people and the ecological niche they inhabit.

{Photo: A dog seeking warmth near Moscow’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.}
Those that remain most comfortable with people Poyarkov calls “guard dogs”. Their territories tend to be garages, warehouses, hospitals and other fenced-in institutions, and they develop ties to the security guards from whom they receive food and whom they regard as masters. I’ve seen them in my neighbourhood near the front gate to the Central Clinical Hospital for Civil Aviation. When I pass on the other side with my dog they cross the street towards us, barking loudly.
“The second stage of becoming wild is where the dog is socialised to people in general, but not personally,” says Poyarkov. “These are the beggars and they are excellent psychologists.” He gives as an example a dog that appears to be dozing as throngs of people walk past, but who rears his head when an easy target comes into view: “The dog will come to a little old lady, start smiling and wagging his tail, and sure enough, he’ll get food.” These dogs not only smell who is carrying something tasty, but sense who will stop and feed them.

The beggars live in relatively small packs and are subordinate to leaders. If a dog is intelligent but occupies a low rank and does not get enough to eat, he will separate from the pack frequently to look for food. If he sees other dogs begging, he will watch and learn.

The third group comprises dogs that are somewhat socialised to people, but whose social interaction is directed almost exclusively towards other strays. Their main strategy for acquiring food is gathering scraps from the streets and the many open rubbish bins. During the Soviet period, the pickings were slim, which limited their population (as did a government policy of catching and killing them). But as Russia began to prosper in the post-Soviet years, official efforts to cull them fell away and, at the same time, many more choice offerings appeared in the bins. The strays flourished.

The last of Poyarkov’s groups are the wild dogs. “There are dogs living in the city that are not socialised to people. They know people, but view them as dangerous. Their range is extremely broad, and they are predators. They catch mice, rats and the occasional cat. They live in the city, but as a rule near industrial complexes, or in wooded parks. They are nocturnal and walk about when there are fewer people on the streets.”

My neighbourhood is in the north-west of Moscow and lies between a large wooded park and one of the canals of the Moscow river. Leaving the windows open once the thaw of spring finally took hold, I found myself pulled out of a deep slumber by a cacophony that sounded as if packs of dogs were tearing each other apart in the grounds of our apartment complex. This went on for weeks. I later learned that spring is when many strays mate – “the dog marriage season”, as Russians poetically call it.

. . .

There is one special sub-group of strays that stands apart from the rest: Moscow’s metro dogs. “The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,” says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology, who has worked with Vladimir Putin’s black female Labrador retriever, Connie (“a very nice pup”). “This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.

Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.

“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their biological clocks.”

The metro dog also has uncannily good instincts about people, happily greeting kindly passers by, but slinking down the furthest escalator to avoid the intolerant older women who oversee the metro’s electronic turnstiles. “Right outside this metro,” says Neuronov, gesturing toward Frunzenskaya station, a short distance from the park where we were speaking, “a black dog sleeps on a mat. He’s called Malish. And this is what I saw one day: a bowl of freshly ground beef set before him, and slowly, and ever so lazily, he scooped it up with his tongue while lying down.”

. . .

Stray dogs evoke a strong reaction from Muscovites. While the model Romanova’s stabbing of a stray demonstrated an example of one extreme, the statue erected in his memory depicts the other. The city government has been forced to take action to protect the strays, but with mixed results. In 2002, mayor Yuri Luzhkov enacted legislation forbidding the killing of stray animals and adopted a new strategy of sterilising them and building shelters.

But until Russians themselves adopt the practice of sterilising their pets, this will remain only a half-measure. One Russian, noting that my male Ridgeback is neutered, exclaimed: “Now, why would you want to cripple a dog in that way?” Even though the city budget allocated more than $30m to build 15 animal shelters last year, that is not nearly enough to accommodate the strays. Still, there is pressure from some quarters to return to the practice of catching and culling them. Poyarkov believes this would be dangerous. While the goal, he acknowledges, “is to do away with dogs who carry rabies, tapeworms, toxoplasmosis and other infections, what actually happens is that infected dogs and other animals outside Moscow will come into the city because the biological barrier maintained by the population of strays in Moscow is turned upside down. The environment becomes chaotic and unpredictable and the epidemiological situation worsens.”
Alexey Vereshchagin, 33, a graduate student who works with Poyarkov, says that Moscow probably could find a way of controlling the feared influx. But that doesn’t mean he thinks strays should be removed from the capital. “I grew up with them,” he says. “Personally, I think they make life in the city more interesting.” Like other experts, Vereshchagin questions whether strays could ever be eliminated completely, particularly given the city’s generally chaotic approach to administration.

Poyarkov concedes that sterilisation might control the number of strays, if methodically conducted. But his work suggests that the population is self-regulating anyway. The quantity of food available keeps the total steady at about 35,000 – Moscow strays are at the limit and, as a result, most pups born to strays don’t reach adulthood. “If they do survive, it is only to replace an adult dog that died,” Poyarkov says. Even then, their life expectancy seldom exceeds 10 years. Having spent a career studying the stray dogs of Moscow and tracing their path back towards a wilder state, he is in no hurry to see them swept from the streets.

“I am not at all convinced that Moscow should be left without dogs. Given a correct relationship to dogs, they definitely do clean the city. They keep the population of rats down. Why should the city be a concrete desert? Why should we do away with strays who have always lived next to us?”

————–
Susanne Sternthal is a writer living in Moscow

from: Perry Gottesfeld

Madhu Gurung
New Delhi, January 14, 2010
IT was in 2002 that Perry Gottesfeld, a public health professional, started Occupational Knowledge (OK) International in San Francisco in the US.

His outfit helps developing countries curb illnesses caused by exposure to hazardous materials and environments in places of work.

To fulfill its mission, OK International assists NGOs in checking industrial pollution and preventing workers from falling ill. Accordingly, Gottesfeld put out a request for proposals – offering technical assistance and a grant of $1,000.

“We got 60 responses from all over Asia and Africa,” he says outside the conference room in Delhi’s Qutub Hotel, “ but what caught our interest was one from a small NGO in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, the Jeevan Rekha Parishad (JRP). They had seen a proliferation of stone-crushers where the national highway was being built, leading to huge dust problems, but had no expertise to deal with it.”

OK International and the Public Health Foundation, New Delhi, organised a Silica Hazard in Construction and Mining Conference in Delhi on 11 and 12 December. The meeting, which was sponsored by the Central Pollution Control Board and the National Human Rights Commission, brought together public health experts, urban planners, medical research agencies and government officials.

Gottesfeld, MR Mishra, president of the Jeevan Rekha Parishad, and Dr Bipin Patnaik, president of the Orissa Stone-Crusher Federation explained at the meeting how they successfully put in place dust mitigation measures and created a safer working environment for workers and their children.

The stone-crushing industry in India has grown quickly due to increasing demand from construction agencies. Rapid urbanisation has seen small towns enhance infrastructure and build new roads, changing the face of cities around the country.

“Stone-crusher units were established in the 1960s and since then have grown in number. Orissa has 1,200 to 1,500 units,” says Dr Bipin Patnaik. “In the 1960s when this industry started, there were no pollution laws. The Act came in only in 1998 and was enforced in 2002. In this labour intensive industry, there were little guidelines towards the exposure of workers to silica dust during stone – crushing operations.”

The problem is that workers in industries like stone-crushing, mining, construction and many others face exposure to silica dust. Breathing air laden with silica causes silicosis, a debilitating disease which scars the lungs. There is no cure for silicosis. It is a death sentence. And it increases, by three times, the risk of developing tuberculosis.

Gottesfeld recalls that OK International started by asking the NGO what exactly were the levels of exposure to silica dust? They drew a blank as Jeevan Rekha Parishad had no means or expertise to test for such a hazard. With donated equipment, the NGO trained volunteers to collect air samples from Khurda district of Orissa. These were taken to the US and tested.

“We found that exposures averaged five times above the regulatory level,” explains Gottesfeld. “Respirable crystalline silica dust generated during stone-crushing operations is linked to silicosis and an increased risk of tuberculosis. While the government spends 70 million dollars on treatment for tuberculosis, there is nothing being spent on its prevention. Most stone-crushing mills operate without dust control.”

OK International decided to enhance the capacity of Jeevan Rekha Parishad and started a small pilot project to mitigate dust in two or three stone-crushing mills in Khurda district. But the owners of these mills were very resentful. They did not want to spend money on any technology. No worker had ever complained of dust pollution, they said. The owners paid Rs 100 as daily wages and washed their hands off any responsibility towards their workers.

Instead of taking on the owners of the stonecrushing mills, Jeevan Rekha Parishad changed tack. They began welfare programmes like health camps and crèches and schools for the children of workers. The emphasis was on creating a safe environment.

“It was in the second year that Jeevan Rekha Parishad began making inroads. Two mill-owners installed the water-spraying system. The specially designed equipment removes respirable size particles, using what looks like an irrigation hose with special nozzles, characterised by spray patterns. This process makes the dust wet and suppresses it from rising. These nozzles reproduce a fine mist and are useful for respirable dust control,” said Gottesfeld.

After the two mill-owners installed the watersprinkling system, 40 more voluntarily followed suit. “We have seen an 80 per cent drop in respirable silica dust generation, so there is bound to be an appreciable health benefit. It has been a process. It is not destroying business but creating awareness and building the capacity of people to bring about a change in the lives of poor communities,” he said.

The technology has been rather successful in Orissa. About 40 per cent of mill-owners have adopted it. “There was opposition also because people felt that selling wet chips did not have the same get up and look as the one which was traditionally done,” said Gottesfeld.

The conference discussed other dust mitigation methods and came up with recommendations to prevent, identify and eliminate silicosis.

OK International hopes that similar pilot projects will be undertaken in India. Already the group is planning to enhance the capacities of local NGOs in Jajpur (Orissa), Jhansi (MP) and Hubli (Karnataka), to tackle exposure to silica by getting quarry owners to induct the water-spray technique. It can be combined with rainwater harvesting where water is scarce.

Says Gottesfeld of the Orissa experience: “It’s a low hanging fruit, its benefits are there for all to see. We hope that it is taken up at the national level.”

From Civil Society January 2010 Edition
 http://www.civilsocietyonline.com/jan10/…

Follow OK International on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/occupknowledge

———————-
Perry Gottesfeld
Executive Director
OK International
4444 Geary Street, Suite 300
San Francisco, CA  94118  USA

1+415-221-8900

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Posted in California, India, UN Commission on Sustainable Development

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China is the size of a continent, has 1.3 billion people, with a quite high percentage who are indeed participating in a growing economy, and show thus blooming numbers of internet connections that have increased from 100 million in 2005 to over 300 million in 2009; but China’s leaders demand control over internet content if you want to do business in the country.

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 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ba665a50-00ad-…

‘We’re being kept in the Stone Age’
By Kathrin Hille in Beijing
Published The Financial Times: January 14 2010

Google’s threathas heightened fears among Chinese internet users that the country could be on its way out of the global network.

“This is not an issue of Google abandoning China, but one of China abandoning the world,” one prominent blogger, Hecaitou, said on Twitter. Hecaitou’s blog was recently blocked in a growingclampdown.

Beijing has increased surveillance and regulation of the web during the past year. Last month, the Ministry for Industry and Information Technology announced that it would start requiring all sites to register their domain names with the government. Analysts say the move could transform China’s web into a vast intranet.

It is not yet clear how fully the regulators intend to implement the new rule. But strict enforcement would amount to creating a list of “allowed” websites inside China. It would put all foreign content appearing on domain names registered in other countries out of reach of Chinese users.

“The Chinese are being kept in the internet’s Stone Age,” said Xie Wen, a prominent web commentator.

Although Google’s China-based service filters its search results according to the requirements of the Chinese government, its self-censorship has been less strict than the one applied on many Chinese search engines or portals.

Observers believe that Beijing would be likely to block Google.com at least partially, as it did before the US company agreed to operate a censored service from servers in China in 2006. If the new rules on domain names are strictly enforced, Google.com and other foreign sites would be totally blacked out.

Mr Xie said: “We are not allowed to play along with web 2.0. Maybe the Chinese will become second-class citizens of the internet world. That is a real possibility. To put it more straightforward, some want to transform the internet into a national intranet.”

The Holocaust is not over and the Jewish people as a whole ought to embrace tragedies visited on peoples like the Native Americans, Armenians, and Rwandans  as their own. Israel should make the  Holocaust the basis for a new universalism that respects the human  rights of all peoples and treats atrocities inflicted on anyone as  atrocities inflicted on all.

As our title shows, we believe that having been at the short end of the experience of inhumanity of man to man, Israel and World Jewry are best placed in figuring out what is not acceptable human behavior. As such, as much as we sympatise with Avraham Burg’s frustration with his fellow Israelis, we nevertheless find unacceptable the conclusion that “The Holocaust is Over.”

The reality is that the Holocaust is with us daily – Just listen to Ahmedi-Nejad’s ranting.

But, having said that, we are ready to cross the line and ask from Israel and World Jewry to do more and make sure that we always raise the flag for good causes – this without looking side-wise at what others do or not do. A case in point – very prominent on our web – we were asking for years from Israel to move towards the front of the line on Climate Change Activism.

Climate Change / Global Warming are issues that cause great misery and world wide deaths. The reliance on fossil carbon including the petroleum source causes deaths, but it took Israel years to go beyond short sighted economic calculations – that like in any other capitalist country – this even that they actually stood much more to gain by taking the right positions.

So, we believe that having experienced the Holocaust, Israel and World Jewry can use the experience distilled into the “Light to the World” as per the Biblical texts that Avraham Burg and his father before him, are known for keeping very close to their hearts.

The original article we received follows:
“The Holocaust is Over”

by Roberto Savio of “Other News” www.other-net.info
“The Holocaust Is Over, We Must Rise From Its Ashes” is the title of Avraham’s Burg controversial book, which has been published in Israel in Hebrew and is about to come out in the United States. The book is a brave and groundbreaking rethinking of the most basic tenets of  Zionism and Israeli identity by a pillar of Israel`s political  establishment.

Burg is a longtime Israeli politician and former Speaker of the Knesset whose father, Yosef Burg, was a prominent
founding father of the Jewish state. But in recent years he has caused an uproar within Israel with his increasingly heterodox views about  Zionism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the legacy of the  Holocaust. His book, originally published in Hebrew in 2007, marks the culmination of a political and ideological odyssey that has carried  him far from the Israel`s political mainstream — but which may hold  the key to a better future for the country and its neighbors.

Central to Burg`s reinterpretation of Zionism is his belief that  Israel has become imprisoned by the legacy of the Holocaust. To this  day, Burg argues, the Holocaust remains the central theme of Israeli  identity, with debilitating effects on the country`s political life.

The first stop for every prominent visitor is Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and Israeli teenagers travel to the death camps  upon their high school graduations, just before their induction into  the army. Israelis are taught to view their enemies as reincarnations  of the Nazis, unable to be reasoned with and dead-set on their  destruction. The constant fear of a second Shoah, Burg claims, is  crippling Israeli cultural life and destroying the possibility of a  normal Israeli politics.

More controversially, Burg argues that Israeli society in the early  twenty-first century bears a marked similarity to German society in  the early twentieth century. He does not, to be sure, compare Israel  to Nazi Germany, but he notes a strong resemblance to Wilhelmine  Germany — the state whose collapse paved the way first for the Weimar Republic and then for the Third Reich. Like early-twentieth century  Germany, Israel is a state dominated by the military and infused with  an ethos that prizes martial superiority above all else. Describing  the growing fear and hatred of Arabs and the increasingly aggressive  nationalism that has taken root in Israeli society, Burg expresses his  fear that Israel, like Wilhelmine Germany, will descend into darker times.

The Jewish people had a chance to make the catastrophe of the Holocaust the basis of an inclusive and universalist ethos, Burg  argues, but instead they have chosen exclusivity and sought to  denigrate the tragedies of others.

Rather than insisting on the historical uniqueness of the Shoah, and in the process downplaying the horrors visited on peoples like the Native Americans, Armenians, and Rwandans, he suggests that Israel and the Jewish people as a whole should embrace these tragedies as their own. Israel should make the  Holocaust the basis for a new universalism that respects the human  rights of all peoples and treats atrocities inflicted on anyone as  atrocities inflicted on all.

Only by transcending the particularistic and the ethnocentric, he  argues, can Israel move forward from domination by the memory of the  Holocaust and attain a more optimistic future. And it is only by doing  so that Israel can finally resolve its own lingering conflicts with  the Palestinians and with its Arab neighbors. Once Israel escapes from a form of militaristic ethnic nationalism stemming from the Holocaust, Burg suggests, it will finally be able to end its occupation of  Palestinian lands and achieve a truly democratic polity that  enfranchises its Palestinian citizens.

From a man who came from the very center of the Israeli establishment, Burg`s book is a courageous  plea for human rights universalism that offers a way forward in bleak  times.
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*Roberto Savio has founded numerous news and information projects, always with an emphasis on the developing world: Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency. He is now IPS President Emeritus.He is co-founder of Media Watch International, based in Paris, of which he is Secretary General, and founded the Internet service, Othernews, which distributes daily analysis on international issues, particularly the themes of global governance and multilateralism, to several thousand of policy-makers, and leaders of civil society.

This and all “other news” issues can be found at http://www.other-net.info/index.php

This was received from Sudha Ravi from the Indian Consulate, New York, Trade Commission  commerce at indiacgny.org

and here we learn two things:

(1) that the Indians are proud og having earned a green future contest that was set up by Mayor Bloomberg

(2) that the immigration regulations will make it difficult for the US to take maximum benefit from the participation of bright minds from developing countries. The loser will thus be the US.

Mayor: Difficulty Teams Now Face Obtaining Visas and Launching Plans Highlights Need for Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG ANNOUNCES WINNER OF “NYC NEXT IDEA” GLOBAL BUSINESS PLAN COMPETITION: ENTREPRENEUR TEAM FROM INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

January 7, 2010
No. 07
 The NYC Next Idea competition was announced in February 2009 as part of a suite of initiatives dedicated to strengthening New York City’s entrepreneurial community. The competition was launched to raise the visibility of the City as an international center for innovation and entrepreneurship and showcase the talent from business and engineering schools around the world, while also encouraging innovative business ventures that can launch and operate here. The Mayor was joined at the announcement at Columbia Business School, which helped administer the competition, by Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert C. Lieber, New York City Economic Development Corporation President Seth W. Pinsky, Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Fatima Shama, Columbia University Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin, Laura Resnikoff, director of the Columbia Business School Private Equity Program and the three finalist teams from India, Spain and France.

The teams were judged in the final round by FirstMark Capital CEO and Managing Director Lawrence Lenihan, RRE Ventures General Partner Will D. Porteous, Greycroft LLC Partner Andrew B. Lipsher, Ascent Biomedical Ventures Partner Arthur Tinkelenberg, Ph.D, and NYCEDC Executive Vice President Steven Strauss, Ph.D. Columbia Business School alumni including W Capital Partners Vice President Eugene Song, Latin America Venture Capital Association Director of Strategy and Product Development Ariel Muslera, and Greenhill Capital Partners Vice President Somak Chattopadhyay judged the second round. This week, NYCEDC  released a Request for Proposals today to solicit a university partner for NYC Next Idea 2010-2011. Information on the RFP will be available at www.nycedc.com

In the last year alone, the City has announced more 50 initiatives to address a wide range of obstacles faced by the small- and medium-size businesses throughout the five boroughs who are creating the building blocks of our new economy. These range from lowering taxes, to increasing capital availability, to starting training and networking programs, to providing opportunities to secure thousands of discounted work stations across the five boroughs.
Below are summaries of the finalist plans provided by the three teams:

——

BIOFONT

·        University: INSEAD: Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires (European Institute for Business Administration) – FRANCE
·        Team members: Harleen Jolly and Ankit Bisht
With pandemic outbreaks of infections increasing in frequency, there is a clear need for screening tools to detect individuals with infectious diseases, especially in densely populated and highly interconnected urban areas such as New York City. BioFont is a biotechnology proposal that has developed a ground-breaking product that can be used to screen individuals for infectious diseases in an expeditious and accurate manner. Though methods exist to screen large numbers of people for potentially contagious illnesses, none are affordable, quick, or easily used without detailed training.
BioFont is taking advantage of the latest breakthroughs in biotechnology, and the major paradigm shift in the healthcare sector away from laboratory table-top blood analyzers to develop a product that is affordable, simple to use, and provides accurate and quick results. The product is a combination of a portable electronic analyzer and disposable test strips, which process and display results in a simple yes/no format. Beyond the healthcare sector, BioFont envisages a demand for this product in New York City’s schools, airports, public places, households, and workplaces.

——

NYCYCLING
·        University: IESE: Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa (Institute of Higher Business Studies) – SPAIN
·        Team members: Patricia Bayley, Adrian Lui and Martin Mazza
NYCycling is an innovative zero-emission bike-share program designed to transport users from one destination to the next within New York City. This new, clean and healthy transportation alternative is composed of a system of self-service stations at which users can rent bicycles, ride them to their destination, and return them to the nearest station. The program offers a creative solution that alleviates transportation bottlenecks and utilizes the existing infrastructure in New York City’s current transportation system – over 600 miles of bike paths traversing the metropolis.
Learning from established bike-share programs, NYCycling aims to offer a high service level for a responsible price to cyclists in New York City.  Through partnerships with corporations, non-profits, and law enforcements, NYCycling also aims to become a successful and publicly appreciated alternative form of local transportation.

——-
GREENEXT TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
·        University: IIT: Indian Institute of Technology Madras – INDIA
·        Team members: Aashish Dattani, Sriram Kalyanaraman and Vinayshankar Kulkarni
Greenext Technology Solutions is clean-technology proposal that is pioneering specialized software and hardware solutions to utility companies, renewable energy producers, energy storage manufacturers, and energy traders. Their product, XEstor, serves as a common interface to store energy from any source across New York City into large battery storage sites. The product communicates with the electric grid and combines real-time consumer demand information with current energy prices to charge or discharge electricity into the grid. This flexible mechanism to produce or store energy based on demand can act as a backup power source to bridge supply gaps and maintain the grid’s reliability through ancillary services such as regulation and emergency response.

The Greenext Technology Solutions team strongly believes that today’s challenges in the energy sector can be addressed through clean-technology solutions such as smart grids that hold the potential to meet growing energy demands. Greenext Technology Solutions team is convinced that with energy demand continuing to rise rapidly on the one hand and both energy availability and supply efficiency struggling to meet it on the other, financial incentives and deregulation of electricity markets will make their solution a highly viable one in the future.  And New York City is a prime locale for such technology because of its burgeoning population and energy needs, as well as an electric grid in need of innovative upgrades.

Contact:
Stu Loeser/Andrew Brent                                             (212) 788-2958
David Lombino/Libby Langsdorf (NYCEDC)               (212) 312-3523

Warm Regards

Sudha Ravi
Commerce & Economic Wing
Consulate General of India
3 East 64th Street
New York 10065
T: 212-774-0610
F: 212-734-4980
E:  commerce at indiacgny.org

from:  mkuttan at yahoo.com

As we pick up our lives and work in the aftermath of Copenhagen, many of us are trying to distill the impact and implications of the conference.  While a number of you have contributed thoughtful pieces on COP 15 through your organizations, we at the Journal of Environmental Law and Policy (JELP) at the UCLA School of Law would like to put out a call for post-Copenhagen submissions for our Spring 2010 issue.  JELP is a premiere legal journal covering a variety of timely environmental policy and legal issues.  Our Spring 2009 issue focused on US state climate policy and included articles from leading policy-makers in the field.  In light of the world’s attention to Copenhagen and the uncertain impacts and opportunities resulting from the conference, we would like to open the forum for thoughtful examination of the challenges, failures, successes and future direction of climate policy.  Articles should be between 20-40 pages in length and include footnotes, but we are open to a variety of disciplines and formats.

Please submit your article to  jelp at lawnet.ucla.edu with the subject “Post-Copenhagen” and include your contact information and CV if possible.

Thank you for your engagement and best of luck with your work.

Sincerely,

Alexa Engelman & Maya Kuttan
Chief Articles Editors
 jelp at lawnet.ucla.edu
Journal of Environmental Law & Policy
UCLA School of Law

GLOBAL WARMING IGNITES BORDERS AS WELL

By Manuel Manonelles, BARCELONA, (IPS) Posted by Other News January 3, 2009.

Little by little, it is being confirmed that the melting of the polar ice caps, whether in Antarctica or the Arctic, is happening significantly faster than initially predicted. The consequences of this for peace, one of the main victims of climate change, are enormous.

Glaciers and areas of high-altitude mountains that were previously considered zones of perpetual snow are now melting. A paradigmatic case is that of the alpine border between Switzerland and Italy where during a recent routine verification, certain sections of ice or perennial snow that had been on the map since 1861 were found to be missing. In this case, the two countries have enjoyed long periods of peaceful coexistence and are approaching the problem in a logical and cordial fashion, forming a commission to find a technical solution.

However, the possible implications of cases like this in other geographical areas are very worrisome. The destabilising potential of a similar development on the India-Pakistan border would be enormous, particularly in the zone of Kashmir or the Siachen glacier, where more than 3000 soldiers of both countries have died since 1984. The same is true of the tense China-India border, or the deeply problematic border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which will grow increasingly porous with melting, contributing to a rise in destabilisation in what are already two of the most unstable countries on the earth.

Another major effect of global warming is the gradual opening of major global shipping lanes in areas that had previously been impassable because of ice. The Northeast Passage along the north of Russia, used recently for the first time in history, shortens travel between the ports of China, Japan, and Korea and Hamburg, Rotterdam, and South Hampton by 4,000 kilometres. With the Northwest Passage along northern Canada, travel between the China and the ports of the eastern United States is similarly shortened.

The opening of these new routes will completely change the dynamics of intercontinental trade and might render irrelevant places that until now were considered geostrategically essential, such as the Panama and the Suez Canal.

Add to this the draw of massive reserves of raw materials expected to be present in the Arctic, ever more accessible as the ice recedes, which is provoking a race for control of the area – including an arms race – and is stoking tensions particularly between Russia, Norway, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The Russian news agency TASS has calculated oil reserves in the area at over 10 billion tonnes. Last year Canada approved an extraordinary 6.9 billion dollar arms bill to strengthen its military presence in its arctic zone, while Russia has resumed tactical flights of nuclear bombers in its polar region, triggering the protests of numerous countries.

This also explains, in part, the speed with which the European Union is processing the application for EU membership of bankrupt Iceland, which would place the body in the best possible position for future negotiations and territorial claims in the area with regard to future access to the “Arctic banquet”.

The melting of the ice caps is also the major cause of rising sea levels, which have other irreversible territorial, social, and economic consequences, such as the physical disappearance -partial or total- of certain small island states of the Pacific likely to occur within a few years -the Maldives, Samoa, Kiribati, among others. Obviously the implications are vast, including – in addition to the personal, environmental, cultural, and national trauma – the political and legal status of future states that have no territory. The principal components of the global infrastructure, from ports and refineries to airports and nuclear plants, are also seriously at risk, and will find themselves near or at or even below sea level.

It is important to note in this context that the majority of the global population lives in areas close to the sea, starting with megacities like Mumbai, London, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires, and densely-populated areas like the Ganges delta in Bangladesh, where rising sea levels are already wreaking havoc in the form of water pollution and related effects. Recent studies indicate the possibility of some 200 million new environmental refugees in coming years -refugees who would only increase the already considerable humanitarian pressures and tensions in these areas and exacerbate existing or latent conflict.

The Global Humanitarian Fund issued a report this year that shows unequivocally that climate change today is responsible for some 300,000 deaths per year. Numbers for the medium and long-term are even higher. In this context, the urgency of fighting climate is a pre-condition for a peaceful future. Therefore, the international community has no other option, specially after the fiasco in Copenhagen, to spring into action as soon as possible. It is about climate, but also about peace and human lives.

—————-

This and all “other news” issues edited by Roberto Savio can be found at http://www.other-net.info/index.php

This amazing article was penned by Fidel Castro himself, then later we watched how Presidents Morales of Bolivia and Chavez of Venezuela spoke in the Copenhagen plenary similar words to these, in the name of the ALBA group of Latin and Caribbean States, on that very important Friday-the eighteenth.

Today, when finally writing about this, I also wonder if besides Simon Bolivar and Jose Marti, Chavez is not ready to accept also Abraham Lincoln as a third member of a historic triumvirate intended to set the Western Hemisphere apart from global machinations, provided President Obama does indeed stretch out a friendly hand to Cuba? I believe that this is within the realm of possibilities, and perhaps the easiest way for the US to free itself of the tyranny of oil and the influence of the oil lobby of Washington. I believe that our times start looking more and more like the pre-WWII days. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade that went to Spain had among its people some of the best the US had to offer. They were not stupid and recognized the Stalinist stealth-riders, as well as the fascist opponents, and remained true to democracy ideals that brought them there. Climate change provides the world the same opportunity as fighting for democracy did in those years. If Obama is ready to rein in the US extremists when it comes to economic relations with the countries of the Southern part of the Western Hemisphere, new line-ups are possible based on new agreed common goals of helping in the sustainable development of these countries, rather then continuing to regard them only as source of raw materials. Had the US done so earlier the world might have been a friendlier place to America – at least in that part that fell into the geopolitical Western Hemisphere Monrovian design.

Clearly, Castro and Chavez will criticize the US when being held at bay by the stick of US corporations, but when approached as partners for change they might actually be ready for political compromise. The reality is that even though they do not apply democracy to their States, the did eradicate analphabetism, hunger, and established health care systems, ahead of the US. Venezuela can help fund such positive activities thanks to its income from oil, but they seem ready to help fund also other positive activities if offered a place at the American table. The way they show pride in their baseball culture that derived from the US via Cuba, shows to me that I am not dreaming about pie in the sky.

———–
 http://monthlyreview.org/castro/2009/10/…

Reflections of Fidel: The ALBA and Copenhagen.

The festivities associated with the 7th ALBA Summit, held in the historic Bolivian region of Cochabamba, showed the rich culture of the Latin American peoples and the joy elicited in children, young people and adults in general by the singing, the dancing, the costumes and rich expressions of the human beings of all ethnic groups, colors and shades: aborigine, black, white and mixed people. We could see there thousands of years of human history and precious culture that explain the determination with which the leaders of various Caribbean, Central and South American peoples convened that summit.

The meeting was a great success. Bolivia was the venue. I recently wrote on the excellent prospects of that country, an heir to the Aymara-Quechua culture. A small group of peoples from that area are bent on proving that a better world is possible. The ALBA – created by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Cuba, inspired by Bolivar’s and Marti’s ideas, as an unprecedented example of revolutionary solidarity- has showed how much could be done in barely five years of peaceful cooperation. This started shortly after Hugo Chavez’s political and democratic victory. Imperialism underestimated him, and deliberately tried to oust him and remove him. The fact that for a good part of the 20th century Venezuela had been the world’s largest oil-producer, practically owned by the Yankee transnationals, made the chosen path particularly rough to pursue.

The powerful adversary had neoliberalism and the FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas]; two instruments of domination always used after the Cuban Revolution to crush resistance in the hemisphere.

It is irritating to think of the shameless and disrespectful way in which the US administration imposed the government of millionaire Pedro Carmona and tried to have elected President Hugo Chavez removed, at a time when the USSR had disappeared and the People’s Republic of China was a few years away from becoming the economic and commercial power it is today, after two decades of over 10 percent growth. The Venezuelan people, like that of Cuba, resisted the brutal thrust. The Sandinistas recovered, and the struggle for sovereignty, independence and socialism gained ground in Bolivia and Ecuador. Honduras, which had joined the ALBA, was the target of a brutal coup d’etat inspired by the Yankee ambassador and propelled from the US military base in Palmerola.

Today, there are four Latin American countries that have completely eradicated illiteracy: Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. A fifth country, Ecuador, is quickly advancing towards that goal. The comprehensive healthcare programs are underway in the five countries at an unprecedented pace in the Third World. The programs of economic development with social justice have become projects of these five states, which already enjoy great prestige in the world for their brave position in the face of the empire’s economic, military and media power. Three English speaking Caribbean countries of black ancestry, determined to fight for their development, have also joined the ALBA.

This alone would be a great political merit if in today’s world that were the only big problem of man’s history.

The economic and political system that in a short historical period has led to the existence of more than one billion hungry people, and many more hundreds of millions whose lives are hardly longer than half the average of those in the wealthy and privileged countries, was until now the main problem for mankind. But, a new and extremely serious problem was strongly discussed at the ALBA Summit: climate change. A danger of such magnitude had never been known in human history.

As Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Daniel Ortega waved the people goodbye in the streets of Cochabamba yesterday, Sunday, that same day, according to news spread by BBC World, Gordon Brown was chairing in London a session of the Major Economies Forum mostly made up by the highest developed capitalist countries, the main culprits for the carbon dioxide emissions, that is, the gas causing the greenhouse effect.

The significance of Brown’s remarks is that they have not been made by a representative of ALBA or one of the 150 emerging or underdeveloped countries on the planet but of Great Britain, the country where industrial development started and one of those which have released most carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The British Prime Minister warned that if an agreement is not reached at the UN Summit in Copenhagen, the consequences will be ‘devastating.’

Some of the ‘catastrophic’ consequences would be floods, droughts and lethal heat waves claimed the environmental group Nature World Fund referring to Brown’s assertion. “The climate change will be out of control within the next five to ten years if the CO2 emissions are not drastically cut down. There will not be a plan B if Copenhagen fails.”

The same news source claims that: “BBC specialist James Landale has explained that not everything is happening as expected.”

Newsweek reported that “it seems more unlikely every day that the states will commit to something in Copenhagen.”

According to reports from the major American press outlet, the chairman of the session, Gordon Brown, said that “if no agreement is reached, there is no doubt that the damage of the uncontrolled emissions will not be repaired with a future agreement.” He then went on to mention such conflicts as “unchecked migration and 1.8 billion people afflicted by water shortage.”

Actually, as the Cuban delegation claimed in Bangkok, the United States led the highest industrialized countries most opposed to the necessary reduction of emissions.

At the Cochabamba meeting, a new ALBA Summit was convened. The timetable will be: December 6, elections in Bolivia; December 13, ALBA summit in Havana; December 16, participation in the UN Copenhagen Summit. The small group of ALBA nations will be there. The issue is no longer “Homeland or Death”; it is truly and without exaggeration a matter of “Life or Death” for the human race.

The capitalist system is not only oppressing and plundering our countries; the wealthiest industrial nations wish to impose to the rest of the world the bulk of the burden in the struggle on climate change. Who are they trying to fool with that? In Copenhagen, the ALBA and the Third World countries will be struggling for the survival of the species.

Fidel Castro Ruz
October 19, 2009
6:05 PM

His latest book is The Post-petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, published in 2006.^[2] In it Bates examines the transition from a society based on abundant cheap petroleum to one of “compelled conservation.” The book looks at the ways of preparing for this transition. He regards the coming change as an opportunity to “redeem our essential interconnectedness with nature and with each other.”

In his introduction, Bates outlines the realities of declining fossil energy and global climate change. He puts forward a “twelve step petrochemical recovery program,” from post-growth economics through methods to conserve fresh water, manage wastes, generate energy, produce and store food, and travel without the aid of fossil fuels. As a review by Ryan McGreal states: “The central message in this book is sustainability and permaculture. A recurring theme is that every waste product is something else’s food, and that the most sustainable arrangement works with the prevailing conditions, not against them.”^[3] McGreal summarizes Bates’ proposals for human adaptation as follows:

“Instead of wasting energy trying to fight nature, it makes more sense to understand nature and use it to your mutual benefit. This, of course, means the end of one-size-fits-all industrial solutions and a return to decentralized, idiosyncratic plans based on local conditions.”^[3]

1. ^ Ecovillage Training Center. The Farm, Summertown, TN. Retrieved on 20067-06-22.
2. ^ .The Post-petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times (2006). New Society Publishers.
3. ^ ^{a b} McGreal, Ryan (January 10, 2007) “Reviews.” Raise the Hammer, Hamilton, Ontario. Retrieved on: February 25, 2007.

Bates went to Copenhagen and posted a list of 16 daily reports on his blog as posted on Jan Lundberg’s www.CultureChange.org

We will re-post here two of that series of 16 articles – the last one #16, and the the #13 article of his series, the one about Christiania, which is a part of Copenhagen that started going green before this was even made fashionable through Agenda 21 – at the UN conference on the Environment and Development of the Rio 1992 fame. In effect it was Christiania that became an example for Agenda 21.

by Albert Bates

22 December 2009

My COP15 Journal: Day Sixteen, Dec. 19

“Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest; it was nice knowing you, not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.” — George Monbiot, The Guardian, Dec. 18, 2009

Last Day: When we arrived in Copenhagen 16 days ago, we were met by Ross and Hildur Jackson, our hosts at a farm near Birkerød, just outside the city. Hildur had been organizing the Windows of Hope meeting at Christiania and Ross had been drafting white papers and talking points for the Global Ecovillage Network to share with delegates during the negotiations. Ross intends to expand his central position paper, The Breakaway Strategy, into a book soon, and the core of that document turned out to be remarkably prescient as to the outcome of COP-15.

In The Breakaway Strategy, Ross prescribed the ideal components of a fair and binding climate treaty:

1. It should guarantee that the adopted CO2 emissions target will be met with 100% certainty. We will not have two chances to avoid runaway warming. We must get it right the first time;
2. It should be effective and cost-efficient;
3. It should be equitable in order to get the backing of all 7 billion world citizens who are the ultimate owners of the biosphere; and
4. It should be simple and transparent.

The “Kyoto approach” of negotiating CO2 reduction targets, credit bargaining, technology transfer and who pays what to whom — fails all four criteria. If there was any doubt, we need only revisit these past two weeks.

Ironically — and the irony was heightened by the decision of the Danish government 4 days ago to exclude the non-governmental organizations (“NGOs”) from the Bella Center — at least three proposals had been put forward by the NGO community over the last two years that fulfill all four criteria. They are:

1. The Earth Atmospheric Trust: earthinc.org
2. Kyoto2: kyoto2.org
3. The Carbon Board*

To Ross’s three we would add two Irish NGO proposals, Cap and Share and the Carbon Maintenance Fee, based on New Zealand’s prototype Land Use and Carbon Analysis System (LUCAS) to provide a robust and comprehensive carbon reporting and accounting system. Admittedly both of these additions involve more government involvement (and potential for corruption) than the simpler Carbon Board solution cited in The Breakaway Strategy.

The strategy has two components, a top-down political initiative, and a bottom-up civil society initiative. Recognizing that the major powers are locked into a national interest battle and unable to act in the global interest, the strategy turns to some of the smaller nations, such as Maldives and Tuvalu, that are freer and more committed to take on leadership. The Carbon Board, which allocates pollution on a per capita rationing system, is just one example of how such a partnership can function in practice. It administers a reward and punishment system for policing the atmosphere, but could as easily be applied to rationing everything humans are ruining or depleting to extinction — fisheries, food, water, or phosphorus, for instance.

The first step would be for the organizers to leave the World Trade Organization (WTO), hence the name breakaway. The WTO is a major part of the problem because it prevents individual nations from introducing environmentally friendly production methods and subsidizing industries that go green.

From the start of the COP-15 meetings it became evident that a very different agenda was being worked than the Kyoto, multilateral, inclusive, transparent, “shared but differentiated” commitment process that had evolved since the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972.

Within hours of the opening, the buzz in the halls was all about the secret text that Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen had been circulating to just the G8 parties. Inexplicably, the UN had begun to function like the WTO. Some called it an “Am-Bush.” Others called it “Kyotic.”

Rasmussen, as head of Venstre, the right wing party, and a coalition including the rabid anti-immigrant party in Denmark, had become the official host of the meeting. Until midway through the second week of the COP, that role had fallen on the more capable shoulders of Denmark’s former environmental minister, Connie Hedegaard. With years of experience at the UN, and in the Kyoto process particularly, Hedegaard knew the players, the positions, and was respected as fair and impartial.

Rasmussen would, in contrast, become known for high-handed demands, back-room wheeling and dealing, mass arrest and detention of protestors on suspicion of future traffic obstruction, demoting Hedegaard on the eve of the final high-level talks, and then abruptly bringing her back in to try to salvage a deal, barring the civil sector IGOs and NGOs from the meeting midway through the second week, after putting them through torturous and repeated dawn-till-dark outdoor linestandings in freezing cold and blowing snow, and then breaking with the EU and G-77 to back the USA’s “coalition of the willing” approach.

Leaving the NGOs out in the cold — literally — meant that none of civil society’s detailed ideas could rise to the surface when they were most needed to break out of government sector’s impasse. Instead, the US came in and tried to bully China, and China, in a geopolitical-orbit-shifting rebuke, stood firm and did not blink. The US limped home with a spin-doctored document, while China was revealed as the emerging world power to be reckoned with. Some of that had to do with China’s massive investments in Africa and the two-thirds world over the past decade, which had built it a large store of political capital. Unfortunately, it spent a big hunk of that when it sold out Africa to the 5-party outcome.

Naomi Klein said, “Africa was sacrificed. The position of the G77 negotiating bloc, including African states, had been clear: a 2C increase in average global temperatures translates into a 3–3.5C increase in Africa. That means, according to the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, ‘an additional 55 million people could be at risk from hunger,’ and ‘water stress could affect between 350 and 600 million more people.’”

Rasmussen and the G8 powers led by the Obama delegation, made their case for colonialism. What was being colonized and divided between occupying powers was not the G77, but the sky. For a mere ten billion dollars per year, G8 shareholders were sold a carbon market worth $1.2 trillion per year. Matthew Stilwell of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development said that rich countries were allowed to exchange “beads and blankets for Manhattan,” adding, “[They]‘ve carved up the last remaining unowned resource and allocated it to the wealthy.”

With a $100 billion/year buy-out (first payment — 2020, a US election year) — or one army-year in Kabul, shared out between 193 countries, citizens from the Maldives will be offered hotel rooms in Houston the way New Orleans hurricane refugees were.

Greenpeace Executive Director Kumi Naidoo said, “In a cruel irony I have just learned that the three Greenpeace activists who, posing as world leaders, entered the Danish Palace for the State Dinner on Thursday night to unfurl a banner calling for a real climate deal are to spend the next three weeks in jail. They will be away from their families over Christmas and the New Year. The real leaders, who attempted to get real action are now in jail, while the alleged ‘leaders’ got clean away, and are fleeing the Copenhagen climate crime scene in private jets and 747s.”

In the end, just five countries signed the “Copenhagen Outcome,” a mushy mishmash of voluntary pledges. They left some serious heavy lifting for November 2010, when COP-16 convenes in Mexico. There the chair will be Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa, a man to whom Lars Lokke Rasmussen must surely have looked to as a role model to guide him on steering a fractious political process to the safe harbor of crystal chandeliers, overstuffed chairs before the fire, a snifter of Cognac, and a good cigar — perhaps Cuban.

If anyone can keep those solution-oriented NGO ideas out of the process at COP-16, it will be Felipe Calderón.

* Ross Jackson, “An Ideal Climate Agreement?” (Permaculture Magazine, UK, no.58 Winter 2008). See www.ross-jackson.com (Articles, English), “Climate Solutions: Part I, Comparisons” and “Climate Solutions: Part 2, The Carbon Board.

* * * * *

Follow Albert’s adventures in Copenhagen and Hopenhagen on his blog. For more on his peak oil work, see the Culture Change article Albert Bates, guide for our post-petroleum, globally warmed future. For more articles on or by Albert on this website, visit this listing

* * * * *

Christiania: Copenhagen’s Funky Jewel of Sustainability - by Albert Bates

SIXTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENVIRONMENTAL, CULTURAL, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL 
SUSTAINABILITY 
University of Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador 
5-7 January 2010 
http://www.SustainabilityConference.com 

The International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability aims to develop a holistic view of sustainability, in which environmental, cultural and economic issues are inseparably interlinked. It works in a multidisciplinary way, across diverse fields and taking varied perspectives in order to address the fundamentals of sustainability. 

The Sustainability Conference is held annually in different locations around the world. The Conference was inaugurated in 2005 at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, USA. It was held at Hanoi and Ha Long Bay, Vietnam in 2006; University of Madras, Chennai, India in 2007; Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Kuala Terengganu  Malaysia in 2008 and the University of Technology, Mauritius in 2009. We are pleased to hold next year’s Conference at the University of Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador. In 2011, the Sustainability Conference will be held 5-7 January at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. 
The 2010 Conference features the following Plenary Speakers: 
* Natarajan Ishwaran, UNESCO/University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia 
* Lucía Astudillo Loor, ICOM/University of Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador 
* Katya Gonzalez Ripoll, Ministry of Culture, Bogota, Colombia 
* John M. Whiteley, University of California, Irvine, USA 
* Douglas Worts, Worldviews Consulting, Toronto, Canada 
For more information about these Speakers, please visit the Conference website: 
http://onsustainability.com/conference-2010/plenary-speakers. 

In addition to Plenary Presentations, the Conference includes Parallel 
Presentations by practitioners, teachers and researchers. We invite you to 
respond to the Conference Call-for-Papers. Presenters submit their written 
papers for publication in the refereed International Journal of Environmental, 
Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability. If you are unable to attend the 
Conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you 
to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in the Journal. 

The deadline for the final round in the call for papers (a title and short 
abstract) is 15 December 2010. Proposals are reviewed within two weeks of 
submission. Full details of the Conference, including an online proposal 
submission form, may be found at the Conference website: 
http://www.SustainabilityConference.com/. 

In 2011, the Sustainability Conference will be held 5-7 January at the 
University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Located on New Zealand’s north 
Island, the city of Hamilton is an important center for manufacturing, research 
and education. The University of Waikato includes the internationally recognized 
School of Maori and Pacific Development, which plays an important role in 
sustaining Maori culture. For more details on the 2011 Conference, please visit 
the Conference website: http://onsustainability.com/conference-2011/. 

Yours Sincerely, 

Lucia Astidillo 
University of Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador 
For the Advisory Board, International Conference and Journal on Environmental, 
Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability

Latest News from the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Harvard Kennedy School
December 7, 2009

———-
BREAKING THE CLIMATE IMPASSE WITH CHINA: A GLOBAL SOLUTION

By Kelly Sims Gallagher

The paper is aimed at finding a partial solution that would be likely to bring both the United States and China into an international climate change mitigation regime. It proposes a “deal,” whereby all major-emitting countries, including the United States and China, agree to reduce emissions through implementation of significant, mutually agreeable, domestic emission-reduction policies. To resolve competitiveness and equity concerns, a proposed Carbon Mitigation Fund would be created.

More: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/19698

——————————–

CREATING A CLIMATE POLICY REVIEW MECHANISM

By Michael A. Levi

International climate negotiations are becoming increasingly focused on suites of emissions-cutting policies and measures, rather than solely on traditional targets and timetables, particularly for developing countries. This approach raises at least two important challenges. First, how can negotiators judge whether states’ proposed policies and measures are commensurate with ambitious global goals for controlling emissions? Second, how can policymakers evaluate whether climate policies and measures (in both developed and developing countries) are succeeding?

More: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/19738
——————————–

CLIMATE FINANCE: KEY CONCEPTS AND WAYS FORWARD

By Richard B. Stewart, Benedict Kingsbury, Bryce Rudyk

The Copenhagen process must, at a minimum, reach agreement on a comprehensive framework and set of principles for both public and private climate finance, as well as an agenda for future elaboration and implementation. Such agreement (which should include credible arrangements for significant adaptation as well as mitigation funding) is essential to winning developing country trust and engagement and providing resources sufficient to curb, and adapt to, anthropogenic climate change. This Viewpoint examines some of the key issues facing negotiators.

More: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/19772

——————————–
ROBERT STAVINS TO BLOG FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES FROM COPENHAGEN

Professor Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, will be blogging periodically from Copenhagen for the Financial Times. Prof. Stavins will offer his analysis of the key issues before the climate negotiators in response to questions from the Financial Times’ editors and reporters. Prof. Stavins’ posts can be viewed at the Financial Times – http://blogs.ft.com/energysource –
or at his own blog, An Economic View of the Environment – http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/analysis/stavins/

from: event secretary to Climate, Hiraoka.Hisaka. — We thank him for taking the event outside the Bella Center compound where it would have been closed to the real people. Let others also open the meeting to the world electronic press.

Dear Climate-L readers,

Please join us in the afternoon of Monday 7 December for COP15 Side-event Symposium: “Towards Green Growth & Green Innovation: Environmental Science and Technology Cooperation between Developed and Developing Countries.”

This symposium co-hosted by JICA and JST is about how to achieve both emissions reductions and economic growth through environmental S&T cooperation between developed and developing countries.

Dr. R.K. Pachauri (Director-General of TERI, India) will make the keynote speech.

Representatives from AU, Brazil, China, EC, Japan, US, and media will also be speakers/discussants.

Monday, December 7th, 2009, 14:00-16:45 (Doors open at 13:30)
Venue: Reykjavik Conference Room, Radisson SAS Scandinavia Copenhagen, Denmark
<Topics> “Strategies and Initiatives for Green Growth” and “International Collaboration on Environmental R&D for Green Innovation”

<Languages> English
<Admission> Free (no pre-registration); sandwiches and coffee/tea will be served

For more details, please refer to the event homepage:
 http://www.jst.go.jp/global/sympo091207/…

Please feel free to forward this email to those who may be interested.

Yours Sincerely,

Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)
Event Secretariat
……………………………………….
S&T Research Partnership for Sustainable Development Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)
Address: 5-3, Yonban-cho, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo 102-8666, Japan
Phone: +81-3-5214-8085
E-mail:  g_events at jst.go.jp
URL: http://www.jst.go.jp/global/english/

Our website dealt already with the topics brought forward and the persona of Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish idol of the American right. We keep wondering who actually supports his activities – could it be that the support comes just from pay by lobbying-for-business-interests media like The Wall Street Journal, that hired him for an Opinion Column? Could it be that this paid-for Opinion Column actually stands in for the previous paid-advertisement quarter-page by Mobil Oil, then ExxonMobil, that used to be part of that page?

It is quite interesting how Professor Lomborg manages to support philanthropy ideas as long as he manages to extricate corporations from public scrutiny. He is ready to have the world throw money at the poorest part of humanity as long as the richest corporations can avoid scrutiny for the full impact of their ways of doing business. He never considers full costing effects that include what business used to call externalities – the punishment on all of us for letting them make their huge profits, and then give away those profits to their own management, to the politicians that do not investigate them, and eventually, from their tax-deductions, some small change to the poor.

As the argument goes, instead of spending money on new technologies that are less polluting and have less of an impact that results in climate change, we should rather keep the old technologies in place and spend money – government money that is – on the direct needs of the poor – feed them, help them build schools and sanitation systems.

We post the attached article from today’s WSJ as a good example of the Bjorn Lomborg argument. It is important to read this right this coming week, right before the start of the Copenhagen Conference, as we might find soon that many country leaders, recipients of Foreign Aid funding, will also argue – “gimme direct support money” because our private banking accounts, where we put those funds we took from you, have lost in value in the latest series of crises. The people of the valley Lomborg wants to help, benefited practically very little from the system that did not speak of global warming, while not minding damage to the environment – local and global -  and we believe that the poor could get out more from our addressing global issues directly.

We worry about the eventual Copenhagen Consensus concept, and would not like to see Professor Lomborg monopolize or even copyright those words.

——————-

Climate Change and Melting Glaciers: Nepal’s poor have more pressing problems.
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424…

By BJØRN LOMBORG, IN OPINION, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Global warming has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series leading up to the December United Nations conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:

Nine years ago, Maya Bishwokarma moved with her family to Kathmandu from Trisuli, a remote village in the hilly Nepal countryside. Their search for a better life has proved elusive. She and her husband and two sons live in a small, two-room house with her brother-in-law’s family, near the bank of a small stream that has been converted into an open sewer.

“The life of the poor is more miserable here [than in the countryside],” Mrs. Bishwokarma told a Copenhagen Consensus researcher in June. “Our kids are suffering.” The family cannot afford to send their children to a good school.

One of the visible signs of this family’s hardship is the lack of basic amenities. Their hut has electricity, but rolling blackouts mean there is no power for as much as 16 hours a day. Even during the wet season, Mrs. Bishwokarma must line up with other local residents to collect water handed out every six days by government officials. Due to a long drought, the price of vegetables and food has soared.

The lack of water in the shadow of the Himalayas may seem like a strong argument for drastic, short-term reductions in carbon emissions. Indeed, the plight of people like the Bishwokarmas has been used by Al Gore and other campaigners to argue for just such cuts. Climate activists argue that there is a link between melting glaciers in the Himalayas and water shortages elsewhere.

On the surface, this makes sense. But when we dig deeper, we find that the Himalaya glaciers are difficult even for scientists to understand. Most suggestions of rapid melting are based on observations of a small handful of India’s 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers. A comprehensive report in November by senior glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, released by the Indian government, looked more broadly and found that many of these glaciers are stable or have even advanced, and that the rate of retreat for many others has slowed recently.

Jeffrey S. Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona, declared in the Nov. 13 issue of Science that these “extremely provocative” findings were “consistent with what I have learned independently,” while in the same issue of the magazine Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist at Wilfrid Laurier University, agreed that “there is no evidence” to support the suggestion that the glaciers are disappearing quickly.

When glaciers thicken and expand, the summer runoff into rivers decreases. In other words, when climate change does increase glacial melting, the flow of water to poor people like the Bishwokarmas will increase for several decades.

This does not mean that we should cheer on climate change, which will affect the planet in a myriad of complex and challenging ways. It does cast new light on one argument for drastic, short-term carbon cuts. It is important, after all, that we base our response to global warming on the most solid scientific expectations.

What did Mrs. Bishwokarma have to say about such questions? Several times, she asked the Copenhagen Consensus researcher to explain what “climate change” was. When it was explained, she agreed that it was a concern.

But she added that the government of Nepal and others should spend money “first on our everyday problems, then on global warming.” To her, with the perspective of living in a slum and unable to send her children to good schools, that prescription makes a lot of sense.

Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank, and author of “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” (Knopf, 2007).

Looking through clippings from 2009:

Can Condoms help fight climate change?  Yes, and they should, wrote an editorial  of  medical journal Lancet!

In addition to boosting the health, standard of living and human rights of women, encouraging the use of contraception also will help save the planet. The calculus is simple: preventing unwanted pregnancies — especially in the developing world — translates into reduced demand for increasingly scarce and energy-intensive resources like food, water and shelter.

More than 200 million women around the world would like access to modern contraception, and their lack of it leads to 76 million unintended pregnancies each year, according to Lancet.

Thomas Wire, a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, came to essentially the same conclusion. In a report titled “Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost,” Wire calculated that if present trends continue, the planet is on track to have 338 billion “people-years” lived between 2020 and 2050. But if contraception were available to every woman who wanted it, so many pregnancies would be averted that the number of people-years would fall to 326 billion.

That reduction of 12 billion people-years would save 34 gigatons of carbon dioxide that would otherwise cost at least $220 billion to produce. In other words, each $7 invested in contraception would buy more than 1 ton of carbon dioxide emissions.

Among the first 40 developing countries to submit global warming adaptation plans to the U.N.  Framework Convention on Climate Change, 37 linked population growth to global warming. But only six of those countries incorporated contraception into their plans, according to Lancet. That should change, the editorial says.

and from a second source: “The world’s population is expected to reach more than 9 billion people by 2050, with 95 percent of this growth in developing countries. Those in support of investing in reproductive health services and contraception to combat climate change argue that having fewer children means less carbon emissions and less strain on diminishing natural resources.

An editorial in the medical journal Lancet last month called attention to the links between rapid population growth and increased vulnerability to the consequences of climate change, such as food and water scarcity and environmental degradation. It suggested that by reducing unintended pregnancies, we could slow the high rates of population growth and possibly ease pressure on the environment. The Lancet says that over 200 million women want, but currently lack, access to modern contraceptives, resulting in 76 million unintended pregnancies every year.

An economic case was made for investing in reproductive health by a recent study from the London School of Economics (LSE) and commissioned by the UK-based Optimum Population Trust. It showed that contraception is almost five times cheaper than leading green technologies, such as wind and solar power and hybrid or electric cars, to combat climate change. Specifically, the study found that each $7 (£4) spent on basic family planning over the next four decades would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by more than a ton, but it would cost a minimum of $32 (£19) to achieve the same result with low-carbon technologies.”