At the end we have the UPDATE Of May 19, 2013!

Reader Supported News | 11 May 201

Jonathan Chait | Obama Might Actually Be the Environmental President.

President Obama spoke during a tour of a solar energy firm in Acadia, Fla., last fall. He has focused on renewable power and energy security. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, May 11, 2013.

Chait writes: “All the myths of the presidency we cling to are perfectly useless here. The heavy lifting will be, by conventional political terms, invisible. There is no need for Johnsonian arm-twisting or Sorkin-esque rhetorical uplift. The fight of Obama’s second presidential term – the much-mocked fight to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet – requires only the simple exercise of power.”
READ MORE

Dr. James Hansen | Norway, Canada, the United States and the Tar Sands
Dr. James Hansen, Reader Supported News
Dr. Hansen writes: “The common presumption that President Obama is going to approve the Keystone XL pipeline is wrong, in my opinion. The State Department must provide an assessment to President Obama. Secretary of State John Kerry is expert on the climate issue and has long been one of the most thoughtful members of our government. I cannot believe that Secretary Kerry would let his and President Obama’s legacies go down the tar sands drain.”
READ MORE

Obamacare Is Already Forcing Private Insurers to Lower Their Premiums
Sy Mukherjee, ThinkProgress
Mukherjee writes: “As Thursday’s development shows, that public information empowers consumers by forcing insurers to compete with one another to attract customers. Or to put it another way – and contrary to conservative fear-mongering about the law – Obamacare is working exactly as it was intended to.”
READ MORE

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tate of the Union addresses are wearying rituals, in which stitched-together lists of never-gonna-happen goals are woven into idealistic catchphrases, analyzed as rhetoric by an unqualified panel of poetry-critic-for-a-night political reporters, quickly followed by a hapless opposition-party response, and then, in almost every case, forgotten. This year, plunked into the midst of the tedium was a gigantic revelation, almost surely the most momentous news of President Obama’s second term. “I will direct my Cabinet,” he announced, “to come up with executive actions we can take now and in the future to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

Here was a genuine bombshell. It sounded a little vague, and the president did not explain precisely what he intended to do or how he would pull it off. But a handful of environmental wonks had a fairly strong grasp of the project he had committed himself to, and they understood that it was very, very real and very, very doable. If they were to have summarized the news, the headline would have been OBAMA TO SAVE PLANET.

Few outside the green community grasped the meaning of the revelation, and it sank beneath the surface with barely a ripple as bored reporters quickly turned to other matters. Several elements of the Obama agenda – immigration reform, gun control, the budget wars – have since churned busily away in plain view, while his climate pledge has generated no visible action. (Which, as we’ll see, may be just how the administration wants it.)

More than anything, though, Obama’s announcement was shrouded in the pervasive miasma of failure, the stench of too little, too late, that has surrounded his climate agenda. Obama’s election “was accompanied by intense hope that many things in need of change would change,” lamented Al Gore in a 2011 Rolling Stone essay. “Some things have, but others have not. Climate policy, unfortunately, is in the second category.” Matters appear only to have gotten worse since then, especially as climate activists chain themselves to the White House gate to protest the president’s likely approval of the Keystone pipeline. Obama himself has taken an apologetic tone, telling green-minded donors that the politics “are tough,” as people “struggling to get by” care more about providing for their immediate needs than forestalling long-term environmental degradation and climate change.

The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann recently wrote a eulogy for the environmental movement, using the 2010 disintegration of cap-and-trade legislation in Congress as the culmination of failure. “The movement had poured years of effort into the bill, which involved a complicated system for limiting carbon emissions. Now it was dead, and there has been no significant environmental legislation since,” he wrote. “Indeed, one could argue that there has been no major environmental legislation since 1990 … What went wrong?”

The pervasive “what went wrong?” narrative contains a series of assumptions: that Obama can prevail only by winning over public opinion and Congress, that the fate of his climate policy hinged on the cap-and-trade bill, and that the primary question hanging over his environmental record is how to apportion blame. None of these assumptions is correct.

The assumption that Obama’s climate-­change record is essentially one of failure is mainly an artifact of environmentalists’ understandably frantic urgency. The sort of steady progress that would leave activists on other issues giddy does not satisfy the sort of person whose waking hours are spent watching the glaciers melt irreversibly. But there is a difference between failing to do anything and failing to do enough, and even those who criticize the president’s efforts as inadequate ought to be clear-eyed about what has been accomplished. By the normal standards of progress, Obama has amassed an impressive record so far on climate change.

There are two basic ways to measure this, which must be taken together. The first, and simplest, is to ask: How much carbon are we emitting into the atmosphere? In the first year of Obama’s presidency, the United State pledged that by 2020 it would reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 17 percent (starting from the level set in 2005). That 17 percent reduction is the brass ring of the environmental movement. It is the target the cap-and-trade legislation was designed to hit. It is also the target that Obama must be able to claim he is on track to reach by the time of the next international climate summit in 2015. That occasion, most observers agree, will probably be the world’s last chance to sign an accord that averts catastrophically and permanently higher temperatures.

As it happens, after decades of rising, carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States started falling in 2008. They have kept falling. By the end of last year, emissions had fallen almost 12 percent below the 2005 level. That is to say, with 12 percent of the 17 percent drop having already occurred, and seven more years to go until the target date, the U.S. is two-thirds of the way to its environmental goal after just one-third of the time has passed. If you follow this measure, climate policy looks like a runaway success.

This metric isn’t entirely fair, of course, because most, though not all, of this drop occurred for reasons having nothing to do with Obama. About half of the emissions drop can probably be attributed to the recession. (When people cut back on their spending, they do less driving, don’t run the air conditioner as high, and so on.) Another portion of the decline occurred because the fracking boom flooded the market with cheap natural gas, which replaced much dirtier coal. These trends will probably level off, as the price of natural gas has plunged so quickly drillers have already scaled back their production. Still, even if the progress was temporary and mainly a result of luck, it has provided Obama with breathing room that most observers haven’t been willing to grant him.

The second way to measure Obama’s climate-change record is: What has he done? He has done quite a bit, probably far more than you think, and not all of it advertised as climate legislation, or advertised as much of anything at all. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was many things – primarily, a desperate bid to shove money into enough Americans’ pockets to prevent another Great Depression – but one of them was a major piece of environmental reform. The law contained upwards of $90 billion in subsidies for green energy, which had a catalyzing effect on burgeoning industries. American wind-power generation has doubled, and solar power has increased more than six times over. As Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald detailed in his book The New New Deal, the new law suddenly transformed the Department of Energy, previously a sclerotic backwater charged mainly with overseeing the nuclear-weapons cache, into a massive new engine of cutting-edge environmental science.

The stimulus had the misfortune of absorbing the brunt of the public’s dismay with the economic crisis, and Republicans successfully turned Solyndra, an anomalous case of a green-energy subsidy that went bust, into a symbol that rendered the whole law so unpopular Democrats quickly grew afraid to tout it. Even a close observer like Lemann has forgotten that it was indeed “major environmental legislation.” And yet, the wave of innovation – new fuels, plus turbines, energy meters, and other futuristic devices – will reverberate for years. Envia Systems, a stimulus-financed clean-energy firm in Silicon Valley, has developed technology for electric-car batteries three times as efficient as the technology in the Volt, capable of shaving $5,000 off the sticker price of an electric car when it comes to market in 2015. Just a few weeks ago, the Times reported on a new stimulus-financed research project to increase the energy content (and thus reduce the emissions) of natural gas.

The administration has also carried out an ambitious program of regulation, having imposed or announced higher standards for gas mileage in cars, fuel cleanliness, energy efficiency in appliances, and emissions from new power plants. In aggregate, they amount to a major assault on climate change. Some environmentalists judge them to be insufficient – a fair critique – but many more Obama supporters aren’t even aware that they exist. This is likely because none of these regulations produced any political theater. There was no legislation, no ponderous Sunday-morning talk-show chin-scratching, no dramatic wrangling of votes on the House floor. Just the issuing of a new regulation, a smallish one-day story.

Last August, for instance, the administration announced it was ratcheting up vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, from 29.7 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon. The news barely got a day of coverage, coming as it did during the first day of the Republican National Convention. About six weeks ago, the administration announced new standards for cleaner gasoline. “There is not another air-pollution-control strategy that we know of that will produce as substantial, cost-effective, and expeditious emissions reductions,” cooed the executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. Remember that?

The political theater has instead played itself out in two episodes in which Obama has appeared impotent, or even indifferent, in the face of climate change. Currently, we are in the midst of the drama over the proposed Keystone pipeline, which Obama has hinted he will approve. NASA scientist James Hansen has proclaimed the pipeline, which would carry oil from the Canadian tar sands, “game over” for the climate. Most analysts, though, don’t support Hansen’s apocalyptic view. A survey of studies conducted by the Congressional Research Service found that the pipeline would increase carbon emissions by anywhere from 0.06 percent to 0.3 percent per year. (Note that emissions dropped 3.7 percent – twelve times the high-end estimate – last year.) Wonkblog reporter Brad Plumer called the pipeline “a slight step in the opposite direction” of meeting Obama’s climate goals. The pipeline’s outsize role in the presidential campaign, and the noisy protests it inspires, have elevated it far beyond the scale of more consequential environmental decisions.

The central environmental drama of the Obama years was the failure of the cap-and-trade bill in 2010. Both Obama and the environmentalists had invested all their soaring hopes in that bill. Its failure, a months-long slow bleed of wavering coal-state Democrats and hardening Republican intransigence, amounted to a kind of psychological torture for environmentalists. Cap-and-trade’s demise came to emblematize environmental policy in the Obama era. Ryan Lizza, in a lengthy 2010 New Yorker reportorial narrative, tabbed it “perhaps the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era.”

It was not the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era. There is one more.

On December 31, 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. The dispatches from that era feel unfathomably remote. The law passed Congress with Pearl Harbor war-resolution levels of support: In the House, 374 members favored it, with just one Nebraska Republican opposed. The Senate passed it 73-0. “Anti-pollution laws,” explained the Times, “did not excite political rivalry.” The law embodied a sweeping brand of environmental absolutism that would make Al Gore blush. It mandated that power plants use the best available technology, with no apparent thought given to the cost.

Obviously, nothing remotely like such a law could pass either chamber today. (Even Democrats favor more-cautious approaches to limiting pollution.) But the four-decade-old law has gained a new relevance to the climate crisis through a cascading, often dramatic series of recent events. The law requires the EPA to regulate “air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Scientists at the time did not recognize that carbon dioxide contributed to global warming; they were more concerned with the human health effects of carbon monoxide and other chemicals. But as the scientific case for climate change hardened, environmentalists filed suit to force the EPA to regulate carbon emissions like other pollutants. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in the environmentalists’ favor. In 2008, the agency officially deemed carbon dioxide a pollutant, and sent its finding to the White House. The Bush administration refused to open the e-mail, thus, incredibly, running out the clock on any legal obligation.

The coming of the Obama administration, with its greater affinity for opening e-mails and lower affinity for fossil-fuel industries, resolved the question of whether Washington had an obligation to regulate carbon emissions. After Obama’s original cap-and-trade plan failed, he started using the agency regulatory powers directly. (This is how Obama has been able to issue new regulations on cars, fuel, appliances, and future power plants.)

So far, there is one hole in his regulatory agenda: power plants that currently exist. This is, unfortunately, a very large hole, as these plants, mostly coal, emit 40 percent of all U.S. carbon emissions. Coal is so inherently dirty that no available technology can prevent a plant from emitting unacceptable levels of greenhouse gases. You can require more-efficient cars or more-efficient refrigerators, and the industry will respond. You can’t really require coal plants to be anything more than slightly cleaner; it’s just physically impossible. The only meaningful standard one could impose for a coal plant would result in all of America’s coal plants shutting down – which, even if phased in slowly, would carry large costs and likely provoke a revolt from people suddenly staring at huge electric bills. The EPA’s choice, as environmental writer David Roberts has put it, appears to be “either a firecracker or a nuke.”

During Obama’s first term, the nuke was useful, as nukes tend to be, only as a threat. The idea was so abhorrent to power companies and some Republicans that it brought them to the bargaining table during the cap-and-trade negotiations. When negotiations collapsed, the prevailing assumption was that the ability to regulate existing plants had become a useless tool, paradoxically too powerful to actually deploy.

Then, a few weeks after last year’s election, the Natural Resources Defense Council published a plan for the EPA to regulate existing power plants in a way that was neither ineffectual nor draconian. The proposal would set state-by-state limits on emissions. It sounds simple, but this was a conceptual breakthrough. Much like a cap-and-trade bill, it would allow market signals to indicate the most efficient ways for states to hit their targets – instead of shutting coal plants down, some utilities might pay consumers to weatherize their homes, while others might switch some of their generators over to cleaner fuels. The flexibility of the scheme would, in turn, reduce the costs passed on to consumers. Here is a way for Obama to use his powers – his own powers, unencumbered by the morass of a dysfunctional Congress – in such a way that is neither as ineffectual as a firecracker nor as devastating as a nuke: The NRDC calculates its plan would reduce our reliance on coal by about a quarter and national carbon emissions by 10 percent.

This is the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era. The prospect, for environmentalists, is exhilarating but also harrowing. The struggle will be lengthy, waged largely behind closed doors, and its outcome won’t be known until the Obama presidency is nearly over.

In the second week of April, the acting administrator of the EPA told reporters that a state-based plan to regulate existing power plants – that is, something like the Natural Resources Defense Council plan – is “certainly something that will be on the table in this next fiscal year.” That was a gaffe. Officially, the Obama administration has no such plan, and the agency issued a quick official correction, a masterpiece of the passive voice: “To assert that any decision on any additional action has been made would be incorrect.”

The official administration line holds that Congress should pass a cap-and-trade law. In his State of the Union address, Obama prefaced his threat of executive action with a conditional “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.” The if is obviously preordained – no possible scenario, not even if John Boehner were ordered to pass a cap-and-trade bill by a returning Jesus Christ, bearing legislative text, could result in Congress’s passing a cap-and-trade law.

And within the environmental world, it is essentially a given that Obama will enact some version of the NRDC plan. Dan Lashof, its lead author, told me, “We are hearing that they’re looking quite seriously at our proposal.” A “person familiar with the matter” told the Wall Street Journal, “You will ultimately see a proposal from EPA to regulate existing power plants.” A group of electric utilities has already circulated a paper predicting that the EPA will do just that.

New regulations would have to withstand a certain legal challenge from the energy industry – though, crucially, implementation would not have to wait as cases wind their way through the courts. The EPA’s authority has withstood several high-profile challenges before, because the law is so broadly written; on the other hand, the challenges to Obamacare remind us that precedent cannot fully predict the behavior of agitated conservative judges. Also like the Obamacare challenge, the legal fight will play out against the backdrop of political war. Republicans in Congress have proposed barring the EPA from using its powers – in Senator James Inhofe’s formulation, “Put Congress, not unaccountable bureaucrats, in charge of deciding the nation’s energy policy.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page has described Obama’s threat to regulate carbon emissions as something akin to the action of a “dictator.”

So the administration and its allies have been mobilizing for combat. It’s not insignificant that Obama chose Denis McDonough, who has a deep background in climate change, to be his second-term chief of staff, or that he promoted Gina McCarthy, who oversaw the rewriting of EPA regulations in his first term, to run the department. Democratic Senators are vowing to block any House Republican attempt to handcuff the EPA. Working in Obama’s favor is the fact that Americans, while disturbingly blasé about climate change, favor federal regulation of greenhouse gases by huge majorities.

Lashof predicted the following sequence of events. The agency will finish drafting its regulation scheme by the end of the year. It will then take about a year of public comments and revisions, at which point it will finalize its rule. That will be the end of 2014, just after the midterm elections. Another nine months to a year will be required to carry out the rule, which will get us to the end of 2015 – and the international climate summit.

The administration’s refusal to publicly commit itself to this strategy, just as it risks losing supporters over the Keystone decision, is in some ways an odd political choice. But it makes sense as a strategy to win the inevitable conflict. The charade of asking Congress to pass new climate legislation demonstrates to the public – and to the courts, inevitably – that the administration is not trying to usurp Congress’s role and will take action on its own only as a final resort.

The timing of a drawn-out regulatory process also dovetails with the progression of Obama’s second-term agenda. The administration needs to cooperate with Republicans to pass immigration reform and harbors at least faint hopes for a budget accord. A muscular exercise of administrative power over environmental policy may reignite the raging anti-government paranoia that made any bipartisan cooperation impossible during Obama’s first term. Far more sensible to pass whatever laws can be passed first.

One also gets the sense, though, that even if Obama shouted his regulatory plans from the rafters, it wouldn’t do much to change the narrative. Outside the narrow energy-and-environment community, few major national reporters or pundits have keyed in to Obama’s strategy. They habitually equate progress with the passage of laws, and the absence of a legislative agenda means the lack of any agenda at all. “Many took note of Mr. Obama’s promise to tackle global warming in his inaugural address,” Edward Luce wrote mournfully in the Financial Times last week. “That was the last anyone heard of it.” The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza is typical: “[G]iven the fraught politics around doing anything major on the issue … it seems likely that Obama will go small-bore rather than major overhaul if he wants to get something through Congress.” Note the assumption that doing anything major requires getting it through Congress.

Senator Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, chided reporters earlier this year: “A lot of you press me … on: ‘Where is the bill on climate change? Where is the bill?’ There doesn’t have to be a bill.”

She’s right. We don’t need a law, because Richard Nixon and his Congress, filled with what we today would call wenvironmental wackos, already passed it 40 years ago.

All the myths of the presidency we cling to are perfectly useless here. The heavy lifting will be, by conventional political terms, invisible. There is no need for Johnsonian arm-twisting or Sorkin-esque rhetorical uplift. The fight of Obama’s second presidential term – the much-mocked fight to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet – requires only the simple exercise of power.

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and a few of the comments:

Small Family Farmer 2013-05-11 11:52

A lot has happened in the last week. The Earth hit the 400 parts per million CO2 threshold for the first time in human history. Scientists tell us this is bad news if we want to prevent runaway climate change. “If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades,” scientist Michael Mann told Democracy Now! “We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate.”

 

 

 

May 17, 2013  | from Tara Lohan on AlterNet

If you didn’t know this already, we should be listening to Mann and to other scientists. I thought this was settled a long time ago, but someone keeps giving print space to climate deniers, so a new survey of 12,000 peer-reviewed studies on the climate was just completed and the not-so-shocking conclusion was this, as Mother Nature Network reports:

Published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the analysis shows an overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are a key contributor to climate change, while a “vanishingly small proportion” defy this consensus. Most of the climate papers didn’t specifically address humanity’s involvement — likely because it’s considered a given in scientific circles, the survey’s authors point out — but of the 4,014 that did, 3,896 shared the mainstream outlook that people are largely to blame.

In light of this news, it makes it even more infuriating to see that the Obama administration has spent the week prostrating to the fossil fuel lobby. Here are four disturbing things the administration’s been up to.

1. Moniz Hearts Fracking

Obama tapped nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Energy Department and the Senate gave a big thumbs-up to Moniz on Thursday. Many environmental groups had concerns that Moniz was too pro-fracking, and those concerns are clearly warranted. Moniz’s first order of business Friday was to clear the way for 20 years of liquified natural gas exports via Freeport LNG Terminal on Quintana Island, Texas.

Of course, we’ve already been sold the story that we’re suposed to frack the crap out of the country in the name of energy security, but we knew all along it was for industry profit, right? Brad Jacobson recently detailed for AlterNet about how Congress members are clamoring for export plans to be fast-tracked — although what Americans will get out of the deal
will be higher gas prices and less energy security.

2. Thanks for Nothing, Sally

While the nomination of Moniz disappointed many environmentalists, some were cheered by REI exec Sally Jewell taking over the Interior Department. Those same folks might not be cheering after Jewell announced the Bureau of Land Management’s newest regulations (or lack thereof) for fracking on our public lands.

As Sierra Club’s Michael Brune reported Friday:

The new rules are disappointing for many reasons: Drillers won’t be required to disclose what chemicals they’re using, there is no requirement for baseline water testing, and there are no setback requirements to govern how close to homes and schools drilling can happen. Once again, though, the policy documents an even bigger failure to grasp a fundamental principle: If we’re serious about the climate crisis, then the last thing we should be doing is opening up still more federal land to drilling and fracking for fossil fuels.

3. No Time for Farmers

The group Bold Nebraska reported this week that Obama turned down an invitation to hear from Nebraska farmers and ranchers about their concerns that the Keystone XL pipeline could destroy their livelihoods. Of course, the President is a busy guy, right? And besides, the White House said he was not “taking any meetings on the pipeline.”

Or is he? The group writes:

Bold Nebraska was therefore surprised the President is meeting with staff at Ellicott Dredges, a company that just testified in Congress in support of Keystone XL and makes equipment that creates the tailing ponds, which are massive bodies of polluted water and a byproduct of the tar sands mining process.

“I simply do not understand why President Obama can find the time to visit a company that helps hold 12 million liters of toxic tar sands water but cannot find the time to visit ranchers who put over $12 billion of Nebraska-grown food on Americans’ dinner tables every year,” said Meghan Hammond, a young farmer whose family land is at risk with the current route in Nebraska.

4. Who Needs the Arctic? (Hint: We Do)

Subhankar Banerjee, a photographer and longtime Arctic activist, was recently appalled by a new report from the Obama administration on the future of the Arctic. And the rest of us should be, too. Banerjee writes about the report:

“Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.”

In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.”

Of course the report mentions protecting the environment, but gives no specific details.

We know that Obama talks a good talk about climate protection, but his second term has proven thus far that he’s completely out of touch with reality. You can’t hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think “all of the above” is a rationale energy strategy.

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UNITED NATIONS, May 1, updated 7:59 pm — They say a sucker is born every minute, but this takes the cake. Someone has bid over $20,000 for an unpaid six week “internship at the UN in New York City working for the UN-NGO Committee on Human Rights.” Click here.

What will the UN say about a position in its “august” hall being auctioned off? This UN has put up with many conflicts of interest, for example envoy Tony Blair being paid $11 million by Kazakhstan.

By giving the first question only to UN Correspondents Association who pay $70 dues, the UN has allowed a “pay to question” system. But this?

It’s on the website “CharityBuzz,” to raise funds for the “RFK Young Leaders.” It is a new low.
Bids close May 14. So you can still bid for it!

Update of 7:59 pm: the UN finally came back (for now) with this:

Subject: Re: Your question today
From: UN Spokesperson – Do Not Reply [at] un.org
Date: Wed, May 1, 2013 at 7:53 PM
To: Matthew.Lee [at] innercitypress.com

Internships at the United Nations are not for sale and cannot be put up for auction. We are trying to find out the details of how this came about and have contacted ‘charitybuzz.com

=============================================

After ICP Exposes Sale of UN Internship at UN for $20,000, UN Contacts CharityBuzz

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive

UNITED NATIONS, May 1 — What does the UN do when it is shown that an internship at the UN is being sold, online, for more than $20,000?

  First it jests, then it asks. But the position remains for sale, with bids open until May 14, here.

  On the morning of May 1, Inner City Press exposed a “bid over $20,000 for an unpaid six week ‘internship at the UN in New York City working for the UN-NGO Committee on Human Rights’… This UN has put up with many conflicts of interest, for example envoy Tony Blair being paid $11 million by Kazakhstan. By given the first question only to UN Correspondents Association who pay $70 dues, the UN has allowed a ‘pay to question’ system. But this?”

  After publishing this article, Inner City Press asked Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Martin Nesirky at the May 1 noon briefing (video here, from Minute 13:42)

Inner City Press: there is a UN internship that’s being auctioned off online. I am not assuming that you’d know of this, but I have seen it, I have written an article about it –

Spokesperson Nesirky : Well, you want it? You want it or something?

Inner City Press: No, no, not at all, I wanted to know if it is legal. They are saying that people should pay $22,000 to work in the UN, it’s for the UN NGO Committee on Human Rights, for six weeks. They are auctioning it off openly to benefit something called the RFK Young Leaders Foundation. But, it seems to smack of… it says, you’ll learn how the UN really works. I am wondering if the UN is comfortable with positions inside the building being sold for money online.

Spokesperson Nesirky: I’ll have to look into that; I am not aware of that particular unusual story, Matthew. But, I am happy to look into it.

Inner City Press: Thank you.

  Throughout the afternoon, Inner City Press received responses from all over. But from the UN Spokesperson, nothing until after 7:30 pm:

Subject: Re: Your question today
From: UN Spokesperson – Do Not Reply [at] un.org
Date: Wed, May 1, 2013 at 7:53 PM
To: Matthew.Lee [at] innercitypress.com

Internships at the United Nations are not for sale and cannot be put up for auction. We are trying to find out the details of how this came about and have contacted ‘charitybuzz.com’

  Well, that’s something. But RFK’s Michael Sandel was asked; later, Inner City Press asked the RFK Center’s Sierra Ewert:

“I am a journalist who covered the UN; this morning I wrote a story, then asked the UN a question, about the RFK Center’s RFK Young Leaders role in the auctioning off of a “UN internship” for over $20,000 on CharityBuzz.com. I want to ask you, on deadline, what the RFK Center’s knowledge of, involvement in, and position on this auctioning off of an internship at the UN is. Please respond ASAP.”

=====================================

After ICP Asks of Sale of Internship AT UN, UN SpinsIt’s Not a UN Internship

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, May 2 — Yesterday morning Inner City Press published an expose that an internship at the UN was and is being sold, online, for more than $20,000. Then at the May 1 UN noon briefing, Inner City Press asked the UN to justify that

Inner City Press: people should pay $22,000 to work in the UN, it’s for the UN NGO Committee on Human Rights, for six weeks. They are auctioning it off openly to benefit something called the RFK Young Leaders Foundation. It says, you’ll learn how the UN really works…. I have written an article about it… I am wondering if the UN is comfortable with positions inside the building being sold for money online.

Spokesperson Nesirky: I’ll have to look into that; I am not aware of that particular unusual story, Matthew. [Video here, at 13:42]

  Nearly eight hours later after some others jumped on that story if only on Twitter, some far away giving credit or hat tips and some closer at hand troublingly not, the UN sent Inner City Press this answer:

Subject: Re: Your question today
From: UN Spokesperson – Do Not Reply [at] un.org
Date: Wed, May 1, 2013 at 7:53 PM
To: Matthew.Lee [at] innercitypress.com

Internships at the United Nations are not for sale and cannot be put up for auction. We are trying to find out the details of how this came about and have contacted ‘charitybuzz.com’

Inner City Press immediately published this answer, in a second story noting that it had asked the RFK Center’s Sierra Ewert:

“I am a journalist who covers the UN; this morning I wrote a story, then asked the UN a question, about the RFK Center’s RFK Young Leaders role in the auctioning off of a “UN internship” for over $20,000 on CharityBuzz.com. I want to ask you, on deadline, what the RFK Center’s knowledge of, involvement in, and position on this auctioning off of an internship at the UN is. Please respond ASAP.”

  The RFK Center has yet to respond; some have come to its defense, or to the defense of Bruce Knotts. But is that the point?  Inner City Press put in other requests for comment.

   For what it’s worth, the bidding started at $500 then got into a contest between “m.alam” and “Aygul,” with the latter the interim (Young?) leader at $22,000.

  The UN, after publication of Inner City Press’ second story, sent a “further to” clarification:

“Further to the earlier email, just to add that we do not believe that the internship in question is a UN internship. As mentioned, we are trying to establish the details of this case and have contacted ‘charitybuzz.com.’”

  It was at this point, using precisely this “further to” language from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson’s office, that another slowly came to the story. How did it happen?

 What was the role of the spokesperson’s office, which just last week didn’t answer Inner City Press’ April 25 noon briefing question about Ban meeting with former French president (and now investment adviser for Qatar) Nicolas Sarkozy — then gave the answer to Agence France Presse? There is a growing pattern of this.

  The auctioned internship story has hit a nerve given the parallel debate about the ethics of unpaid internships; some have become aware of it through that world, and that’s good. But in the smaller world of those who cover the UN, there are troubling developments on which we have also put in questions. In the UN fUN-house it is “World Press Freedom Day;” one would expect answers.

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T H E    U P D A T  E :

Internship at UN, Bid Up to $26,000 As UN Can’t or Won’t Act on Auction.

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, May 3 — Now the UN insists its Office of Legal Affairs is working hard on the “unusual” auction, now for $22,000, of a “internship at the UN.” But how can it be that the UN and OLA have accomplished nothing? Inner City Press first wrote about this on the morning of May 1 and asked about it at that day’s noon briefing.

Since then Inner City Press reported that a bidder named “Aygul” was ahead, bidding $22,000. The RFK Center, for which the auction is being conducted, has not provided any explanation.

Yet again at the May 3 noon briefing, the UN said it was still trying to figure out what was going on, and told Inner City Press not to be critical of the lack of results. (TNRS coverage).

And alongside Inner City Press’ May 3 noon briefing questions, the bidding on the “internship in the UN building” went higher, with a bid by “m. alam” for $26,000. From the UN’s May 3 transcript:

Inner City Press: On this internship question, I am assuming that when you have more you will say more, but yesterday I was saying, that they could contact NGO, and I am looking again at this page. It seems pretty straightforward that an NGO that is accredited to the UN shouldn’t be offering an internship at the UN for $22,000; and the bidding is still open. So, does the UN intend to somehow take action on this while the bidding is open? Can the person who is currently bidding $22,000 actually enter the UN as an intern under the terms that were offered?

Spokesperson Martin Nesirky: Matthew, we have said very clearly that internships at the United Nations are not for sale. Internships at the United Nations, United Nations internships, are unpaid. I also said yesterday that the Office of Legal Affairs is looking into it, and that includes contacting a number of people. You seem to assume what is and is not being done. And I don’t think that is right to do that. They are doing their job to find out. It obviously does look unusual, to say the very least, and we are trying to find out the full details. And once we have something further to say, we will. But just to repeat that United Nations internships are simply not for sale. And furthermore, they are unpaid.

But again, this is the same UN Office of Legal Affairs which after 15 months of delay tersely ruled that all claims about the UN bringing cholera to Haiti were “not receivable.” So, no, we do not have confidence in them cleaning this up.

350NYC

United Against Pipelines, Forward on Climate!  Tomorrow, Monday May 13th,  New Yorkers will march and rally to greet President Obama when he attends a fundraiser in NYC––his first visit since his post-Sandy inspection. In his Inaugural Address just a few months ago, Obama promised “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”
Yet he continues to promote an “All of the above” energy policy that includes coal, tar sands, and fracked shale gas.

Join us if you stand against fossil fuel pipelines, against fracking, against tar sands, and FOR a country powered by wind, water and solar.

Gather in Bryant Park starting at 5 (meet near the fountain off 6th avenue at 41st Street). Reverend Billy and his choir will lead us off with a rousing blessing and song. We’ll begin to march at 5:30, then rally in front of the Waldorf Astoria at 6:30.

If you can, please wear yellow and orange (the colors of Occupy Sandy) to demonstrate your support for a clean energy future.
act.350.org/signup/NYC_Unites_Against_Pipelines/.

Event Partners: 350 NYC, 350 NJ, 350.org, Brooklyn For Peace, Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline (CARP), CREDO, CUNY Divest, Food & Water Watch, Global Kids Inc., Green Party of NY, Human Impacts Institute, NYC Friends of Clearwater, NYU Divest, Occupy the Pipeline, Occupy Sandy, Restore the Rock, Sane Energy Project, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, Sierra Club National, United for Action, World Can’t Wait, WESPAC, YANA (You Are Never Alone).

Our website has proposed that geopolitics are headed to a new structure were it is needed to have a billion people in order to be considered a World Power. As such we proposed that besides China and India, the other World powers will be -

- an Anglo-American Block led by the US and that will include also the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and as well Mexico and Japan;
- a European Block led out of Brussels by a more united and reorganized EU and that will include Russia but not the UK;

- an Islamic Block led by Turkey or Indonesia that will stretch from Mauritania to Indonesia;

- and a block “Of the Rest” that will be led by Brazil and include, with a few exceptions based on the US led Trans-Pacific Partnership (the TPP) , Latin America, Africa, the SIDS, parts of Asia.
It is this last Block that will become the new Third World – that is the Sixth World of those outside the China, India, US, EU, and Islamic Blocks.

We see the recent news of Brazil defeating Mexico for the leadership of the WTO as an important step in above direction.

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Brazil Wins Leadership of the World Trade Organization

Brazilian Roberto Azevêdo has been chosen over Mexican candidate Herminio Blanco as the newest director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on May 7. El Palenque, AnimalPolitico’s debate forum for experts, discusses the effects this win will have on Mexican diplomacy, Brazil’s role in trade liberalization, and the prominence of the BRICS on the world stage. Azevêdo will be the first Latin American to head the WTO.

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The Financial Times wrote May 7, 2013:

So, Roberto Azevêdo, Brazil’s candidate for director general of the WTO, has pipped his rival Herminio Blanco of Mexico for the job.

But there is still a question to be answered: Who won? The man or the country?

Between Azevêdo and Blanco, there may not be much to choose. Both have impressive credentials. Azevêdo, a career diplomat in one of the world’s most polished diplomatic services, has been Brazil’s ambassador to the WTO since 2008. He knows the organisation inside out. Blanco is a businessman steeped in trade, a trade consultant who was formerly Mexico’s trade minister and its chief negotiator during preparation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

If the race was between two technocrats, it must have been a photo finish.

But what if the WTO members voted for the country, not the man? Then, it was a matter of chalk and cheese. Disgruntled Mexicans – whose pride will have taken a severe knock – will call this a victory of protectionism over free trade.

It will also be a victory of the developing world over the developed one.

Mexico, which has free trade agreements with 44 different countries, is the new poster child of developed world policies at work in the developing world. Brazil has free trade agreements with nobody, and has shown a tendency to renegotiate what agreements it does have as soon as they become inconvenient – not least its auto agreement with Mexico. Many developing countries – in Africa and Asia as well as in Latin America – will have felt the Brazilian was much more likely to protect their fledgling manufacturers and farmers than was the Mexican. Many of those countries, especially in Africa, already have closer ties with Brazil than they do with Mexico.

In an interview with Reuters, Azevêdo played down the issue of nationality:

“I, as candidate and as director of the WTO will not be representing Brazil,” Azevedo told Reuters in a phone interview on Tuesday.

“I made it to the final round in the election with those complaints on the table, and that doesn’t change things. It means there is an understanding between WTO members that the candidate must be independent from his country and be evaluated according to his skills.”

Asked if he considered Brazil was protectionist, he declined to comment.

To those who say that, under Azevêdo, the WTO will lose sight of its mission to promote free trade, others will reply that it never had one in the first place.

But Tuesday’s decision will make a big difference. No matter how pure a technocrat he is, Azevêdo will find it hard to fend off the influence of Brasília. It was the Brazilian that won, and not the Mexican.

Related FT reading:
Brazil wins battle for WTO leadership, FT
WTO chief must show relevance by making progress on global pact, FT
WTO candidates adopt varying stances on trade, FT
Questions for the world’s next trade chief, FT
Herminio Blanco: status quo is not an option for the WTO, beyondbrics

SO, WE WILL SAY – THE FT AGREE WITH OUR POINT OF VIEW THAT THE US CANDIDATE – MEXICO – LOST TO THE CANDIDATE OF THE THIRD WORLD – THAT IS OUR TRUE SIXTH WORLD – WHO WILL STAND UP TO THE BIGGER BOYS OF THE OTHER FIVE WORLDS – SPECIFICALLY THE US – WHO BLATANTLY USE THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS FOR THEIR OWN GOOD – EXCLUSIVELY!!!

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FURTHER NEWS OF RELEVANCE TO THE NEW WORLD IN THE MAKING:

Clinton Global Initiative to Launch Latin America Program in Rio

Former President Bill Clinton announced on May 6 that the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) would be expanding to Latin America in December 2013, with its first meeting set to launch in Rio de Janeiro. He was joined by Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes in making the announcement at the mid-year meeting for his annual conference.

Brazil Starts Small Business Ministry

President Dilma Rousseff announced the start of a small business ministry on May 6, saying that government banks will provide up to $7,500 to small businesses in 2013 and will reduce the public loan interest rate from 8 percent to 5 percent beginning on May 31. “The question of small business is indispensable for the country’s future and present,” said Rousseff. Brazil’s estimated 6 million micro and small businesses accounted for 40 percent of the country’s 15 million new jobs from 2001 to 2011.

Cuba to Send 6,000 Doctors to Brazil

Brazil plans to hire approximately 6,000 Cuban doctors to work in the country’s rural areas, said Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota on May 6. The Federal Medical Council­–a Brazilian doctor’s organization–questioned the island nation’s medical qualifications, but Patriota called Cuba “very proficient in the areas of medicine, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology.” President Dilma Rousseff began the talks in January 2012, and both countries are currently consulting with the Pan American Health Organization to move forward.

A Bright Outlook for Latin American Economies?

The International Monetary Fund’s May 2013 Regional Economic Outlook predicts Latin America’s growth to increase approximately 3.5 percent by the end of the year. But, in an article for The Huffington Post, Director for the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department Alejandro Werner questions whether countries in the region will be able to “adjust policies to preserve macroeconomic and financial stability” after the near-future external benefits, such as easy external financing and high commodity prices, begin to decline.

Volcanoes and Geysers Could Fuel Chilean Energy

Chile will partner with New Zealand to develop its deep exploration drilling and to develop its geothermal energy production. Chile is home to 20 percent of the world’s active volcanoes, which can be harnessed for geothermal energy. However, only 5 percent of the country’s electrical power is attributed to renewable energy resources, reports IPS News.

The Pacific Alliance Creates a Legislative Committee

Heads of Congress from Pacific Alliance members Chile, Colombia, México, and Perú signed an accord to form a Pacific Alliance Inter-Parliamentary Committee on May 6, reports La República. The committee would serve as the legislative arm of the Alliance by developing a framework to approve free trade agreements and distribution of goods, services, and capital under the Alliance. The committee will be officially presented to the Alliance at a legislative session in Chile in June.

Washington to Host Chilean and Peruvian Presidents

Chile’s President Sebastian Piñera and Peru’s President Ollanta Humala will visit Washington D.C. in June to discuss economic relations with President Obama. Piñera’s visit will take place on June 4, and Humala will visit one week later on June 11. The agenda will likely touch on negotiations with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as all three countries hope to develop closer economic ties to Asian markets.

By Mitch Ginsburg May 9, 2013, The Times of Israel

Some look at the upheaval in Syria through a religious lens. The Sunni and Shia factions, battling for supremacy in the Middle East, have locked horns in the heart of the Levant, where the Shia-affiliated Alawite sect has ruled a majority Sunni nation for decades.

Some see it through a social prism. As they did in Tunis with Muhammad Bouazizi — an honest man who couldn’t make an honest living in this corruption-ridden part of the world — the social protests that sparked the war in Syria started in the poor and disenfranchised parts of the country.

Others look at the eroding boundaries of state in Syria and other parts of the Middle East as a direct result of the sins of Western hubris and Colonialism.

Professor Arnon Sofer has no qualms with any of these claims and interpretations. But the upheaval in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, he says, cannot be fully understood without also taking two environmental truths into account: soaring birthrates and dwindling water supply.

Over the past 60 years, the population in the Middle East has twice doubled itself, said Sofer, the head of the Chaikin geo-strategy group and a longtime lecturer at the IDF’s top defense college, where today he heads the National Defense College Research Center. “There is no example of this anywhere else on earth,” he said of the population increase. Couple that with Syria’s water scarcity, he said, “and as a geographer it was clear to me that a conflict would erupt.”

The Pentagon cautiously agrees with this thesis. In February the Department of Defense released a “climate-change adaptation roadmap.” While the effects of climate change alone do not cause conflict, the report states, “they may act as accelerants of instability or conflict in parts of the world.” Predominantly the paper is concerned with the effects of rising seas and melting arctic permafrost on US military installations. The Middle East is not mentioned by name.

But Sofer and Anton Berkovsky, who together compiled the research work of students at the National Defense College and released a geo-strategic paper on Syria earlier in the year, believe that water scarcity played a significant role in the onset of the Syrian civil war and the Arab Spring, and that it may help re-shape the strategic bonds and interests of the region as regimes teeter and borders blur. Sofer also believes that a “Pax Climactica” is within reach if regional leaders would only, for a short while, forsake their natural inclinations to wake up in the morning and seek to do harm.

Syria is 85 percent desert or semi-arid country. But it has several significant waterways. The Euphrates runs in a south-easterly direction through the center of the country to Iraq. The Tigris runs southeast, tracing a short part along Syria’s border with Turkey before flowing into Iraq. And, aside from several lesser rivers that flow southwest through Lebanon to the Mediterranean, Syria has an estimated four to five billion cubic meters of water in its underground aquifers.

From 2007-2008, over 160 villages in Syria were abandoned and some 250,000 farmers relocated to Damascus, Aleppo and other cities. The capital, like many of its peer cities in the Middle East, was unable to handle that influx of people. Residents dug 25,000 illegal wells in and around Damascus, pushing the water table ever lower and the salinity of the water ever higher.

For these reasons the heart of the country was once an oasis. For 5,000 years, Damascus was famous for its agriculture and its dried fruit. Since 1950, however, the population has increased sevenfold in Syria, to 22 million, and Turkey, in an age of scarcity, has seized much of the water that once flowed south into Syria.

“They’ve been choking them,” Sofer said, noting that Turkey annually takes half of the available 30 billion cubic meters of water in the Euphrates. This limits Syria’s water supply and hinders its ability to generate hydroelectricity.

In 2007, after years of population growth and institutional economic stagnation, several dry years descended on Syria. Farmers began to leave their villages and head toward the capital. From 2007-2008, Sofer said, over 160 villages in Syria were abandoned and some 250,000 farmers – Sofer calls them “climate refugees” – relocated to Damascus, Aleppo and other cities.

The capital, like many of its peer cities in the Middle East, was unable to handle that influx of people. Residents dug 25,000 illegal wells in and around Damascus, pushing the water table ever lower and the salinity of the water ever higher.

This, along with over one million refugees from the Iraq war and, among other challenges, borders that contain a dizzying array of religions and ethnicities, set the stage for the civil war.

Tellingly, it broke out in the regions most parched — “in Daraa [in the south] and in Kamishli in the northeast,” Sofer said. “Those are two of the driest places in the country.”

Professor Eyal Zisser, one of Israel’s top scholars of Syria, agreed that the drought played a significant role in the onset of the war. “Without doubt it is part of the issue,” he said. Zisser did not believe that water was the central issue that inflamed Syria but rather “the match that set the field of thorns on fire.”

Rebel troops transporting two women to safety along the Orontes River, which has shrunk in recent years and grown increasingly saline (Photo credit: CC BY FreedomHouse)

Since that fire began to rage in March 2011, the course of the battles has been partially dictated by a different sort of logic, not environmental in nature. “Assad is butchering his way west,” Sofer said. He believes the president will eventually have to retreat from the capital and therefore has focused his efforts on Homs and other cities and towns that lie between Damascus and the Alawite regions near the coast, cutting himself an escape route.

Sofer and Berkovsky envision several scenarios for Syria. Among them: Assad puts down the rebellion and remains in power; Assad abdicates and a Sunni majority seizes control; Assad abdicates and no central power is able to assert control. The most likely scenario, Sofer said, was that the Syrian dictator would eventually flee to Tehran. But he preferred to avoid that sort of micro-conjecture and to focus on the regional effects of population growth and water scarcity and the manner in which that ominous mix might shape the future of the region.

Writing in the New York Times from Yemen on Thursday, Thomas Friedman embraced a similar thesis, noting that the heart of the al-Qaeda activity in the region corresponded with the areas most stricken by drought. Sofer published a paper in July where he laid out the grim environmental reality of the region and argued that, as in Syria, the conflicts bedeviling the region were not about climate issues but were deeply influenced by them.

Egypt, Sofer wrote, faces severe repercussions from climate change. Even a slight rise in the level of the sea – just half a meter – would salinize the Nile Delta aquifers and force three million people out of the city of Alexandria. In the more distant future, as the North Sea melts, the Suez Canal could decline in importance. More immediately, and of greater significance to Israel, he wrote that Egypt, faced with a water shortage, would likely grow more militant over the coming years. But he felt the militancy would be directed south, toward South Sudan and Ethiopia and other nations competing for the waters of the Nile, and not north toward the Levant.

The Nile River, the lifeblood of Egypt’s 82 million people (Photo credit: CC BY Simona Scolari, Flickr)

As proof that this pivot has already begun, Sofer pointed to Abu-Simbel, near the border with Sudan. There the state has converted a civilian airport into a military one. “The conclusion to be drawn from this is simple and unequivocal,” he wrote. “Egypt today represents a military threat to the southern nations of the Nile and not the Zionist state to the east.”

The Sinai Peninsula, already quite lawless, will only get worse, perhaps to the point of secession, he and Berkovsky wrote. Local Bedouin will have difficulty raising animals in the region and will turn, to an even greater degree, to smuggling material and people along a route established in the Bronze Age, through Sinai to Asia and Europe.

Syria, even if the war were swiftly resolved, is “on the cusp of catastrophe.” Jordan, too, is in dire need of water. And Gaza, like Syria, has been battered by unchecked drilling. The day after Israel left under the Oslo Accords, he said, the Palestinian Authority and other actors began digging 500 wells along the coastal aquifer even though Israel had warned them of the dangers. “Today there are around 4,000 of them and no more ground water. It’s over. There’s no fooling around with this stuff,” he said.

Only the two most stable states in the region – Israel and Turkey – have ample water.

Turkey is the sole Middle Eastern nation blessed with plentiful water sources. Ankara’s control of the Tigris and the Euphrates, among other rivers, means that Iraq and Syria, both downriver, are to a large extent dependent on Turkey for food, water and electricity. That strategic advantage, along with Turkey’s position as the bridge between the Middle East and Europe, “further serves its neo-Ottoman agenda,” Sofer said.

He envisioned an increased role for Turkey both in the Levant and, eventually, in central Asia and along the oil crossroads of the Persian Gulf, pitting it against Iran. Climate change, he conceded, has only a minor role in that future struggle for power but it is “an accelerant.”

Israel no longer suffers from drought. Desalination, conservation and sewage treatment have alleviated much of the natural scarcity. In February, the head of the Israel Water Authority, Alexander Kushnir, told the Times of Israel that the country’s water crisis has come to an end. Half of Israel’s two billion cubic meters of annual water use is generated artificially, he said, through desalination and sewage purification.

For Sofer, this self-sufficiency is an immense regional advantage. Israel could pump water east to Jenin in the West Bank and farther along to Jordan and north to Syria. International organizations could follow Israel’s example and fund regional desalination plants, which, he noted, cost less than a single day of modern full-scale war.

Instead, rather than an increase in cooperation, he feared, the region would likely witness ever more desperate competition. Sofer said his friends see him as a sort of Jeremiah. But the Middle East, he cautioned, is a region where “leaders wake up every morning and ask what can I do today to make matters worse.”

Arnon Sofer, a longtime professor at the IDF’s National Defense College, sees a link between the war in Syria and the water shortages there (Photo credit: Moshe Shai/ Flash 90)

from NYU School of Continuing & Professinal Studies – Global Affairs Division: scps.global.affairs@nyu.edu
that years ago made it possible for us to introduce Sustainable Development to the Achademe.

LEARN FROM THE EXPERTS

Our faculty are practitioners and experts in their field.
They bring their real-world experience to life for their students.
Join them this summer!

World Politics: Confrontation or Cooperatiion? (GLOB1-CE9284)
Multiple sections, 8 weeks, begins May 14

Ralph Buultjens is a historian, author, and the former Nehru Professor and Professorial Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He was awarded the Toynbee Prize for Social Sciences in 1984. He is a well known media commentator featured on major networks such as the BBC, CNN, and ABC. He has also served as a consultant to the United Nations and major international organizations. At the Carnegie Council, Professor Buultjens served as trustee from 1978 to1984 and was Senior Fellow for several years. His numerous publications include: Conceptualizing Global History (with Bruce Mazlish, 2004) The Destiny of freedom: Political Legacies of the Twentieth Century (Louis Nizer lecture on public policy, 1999) Politics and History: Lessons for Today (1986), and The Secret Life of Karl Marx (1985).

Superstorm Sandy, NYC, and Climate Change (GLOB1-CE9023)
Saturday, June 15, 9am-5pm

Jesse Cameron-Glickenhaus is a former climate change advisor to Palau Mission to the UN. While at the Mission, he worked closely with Ambassador Stewart Beck to draft, advocate for, and pass the first United Nations General Assembly Resolution to recognize climate change as an issue of international peace and security. He is currently pursuing his J.D. at NYU School of Law where he served as the Staff Editor for the Environmental Law Journal in 2012-13 and currently serves as the Journal’s Submissions Editor. He received the Guarini Center on Environmental and Land Use Law Summer Internship for 2013. As a legal intern for the Environmental Defense Fund, Cameron-Glickenhaus researched and drafted memos and an amicus brief related to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proceedings.

The United Nations‘ Role in the War on Terror (GLOB1-CE9998)
Mondays, 6:45-8:50pm, 8 weeks, 6/3-7/22

Howard Wachtel is a Franklin Fellow in the Political Section (Sanctions Unit) of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, where he focuses on the al Qaeda/Taliban, Cote d‘Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Iraq sanctions regimes. During the course of the year, Howard will be monitoring each of these regimes, attending Security Council sanctions committee meetings, and contributing to the negotiation and drafting of Security Council resolutions related to each regime. He comes to the U.S. Department of State from Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLP, where he is a litigation associate. Mr. Wachtel is primarily responsible for USUN’s interaction with the Security Council on issues related to al-Qaeda/Taliban sanctions (the “1267 regime“). He is responsible for providing guidance and recommendations regarding the strategic direction of the 1267 regime, including new measures to address recent litigation challenging the regime and to ensure that the regime adapts to the evolving nature of the terrorist threat.

Creating a Nonprofit in a Global Landscape:
A Comprehensive and Practical Approach (GLOB1-CE9943)
Monday-Friday – June 17-21, 2013 (one week intensive)

Brad Heckman is the founding Chief Executive Officer of New York Peace Institute, one of the nation’s largest community dispute resolution and mediator credentialing agencies. Previously, he served as Vice President of Safe Horizon, New York’s leading victims services and violence prevention agency. In that capacity, he oversaw the agency‘s Mediation, Families of Homicide Victims, Legal Services, Anti-Trafficking, Batterers Intervention, and Anti-Stalking Programs. Mr. Heckman served as International Director of Partners for Democratic Change, for which he developed community peacebuilding centers throughout Eastern Europe, the Balkans, South Caucasus, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. He received NYU-SCPS’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012, and serves on the boards of the National Association for Community Mediation, the New York City Peace Museum, and the New York State Dispute Resolution Association.

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 TODAY – LAST EVENT OF THE SEMESTER!

In Print with James F. Hoge, Jr.

Featuring Michael Levi, David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future

TONIGHT!
Thursday, May 9
6.30-7.45pm
RSVP here

(illustration: Solar News)

The Incredible Shrinking Cost of Solar Energy.

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment on Reader Supported News.

04 May 13

ob Wile uses a graph to point out the obvious, the dramatic fall in the cost of solar power generation. In many countries– Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal — and in parts of the US such as the Southwest, solar is at grid parity. That means it is as inexpensive to build a solar plant as a gas or coal one. The pace of technological innovation in the solar field has also accelerated, so that costs have started falling precipitously and efficiency is rapidly increasing.  

By 2015, solar panels should have fallen to 42 cents per watt.

Reneweconomy.com says that the best Chinese solar panels fell in cost by 50% between 2009 and 2012. That incredible achievement is what has driven so many solar companies bankrupt– if you have the older technology, your panels are suddenly expensive and you can’t compete. It is like no one wants a 4 year old computer.

Conservatives shed no tears when better computers drive slower ones out of the market, but point to solar companies’ shake-out as somehow bad or unnatural. No wonder US solar installations jumped 76% in 2012.

The reductions in cost over the next two years are expected to continue, at a slowing but still impressive 30% rate:

Construction has begun on the world’s largest solar plant. MidAmerican Solar and SunPower Corp. are building a 579 megawatt installation, the Antelope Valley Solar Project, in Kern and Los Angeles counties in California. That is half a gigawatt, just enormous. It will provide electricity to 400,000 homes in the state (roughly 2 million people?), and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 775,000 tons a year. The US emits 5 billion metric tons a year of C02, second only to China, and forms a big part of the world’s carbon problem all by itself. We just need 645 more of the Antelope Valley projects.

Important new research also shows that hybrid plants that have both solar panels and wind turbines dramatically increase efficiency and help with integration into the electrical grid. Earlier concerns that the turbines would cast shadows and so detract from the efficiency of the solar panels appear to have been overblown. Because in most places in the US there is more sun in the summer and more wind in the winter, a combined plant keeps the electricity feeding into the grid at a more constant rate all year round, which is more desirable than big spikes and fall-offs.

That Germany, then China, then the US are the world’s largest solar markets is no surprise. But that number 17 Japan will increase its solar installations by 120% in 2013 and so may be the second hottest solar market, just after China, this year, would mark a big change. Japan may well have 5 gigawatts of solar installed by the end of this year, even though the relatively new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is no particular friend of the renewables. In my own view, if Japan made the right governmental and private investments, it could overtake China in the solar field and reverse its long post-bubble stagnation.

ABB has been commissioned a large solar electricity generating plant on the edge of the Kalahari Desert near Cape Town, South Africa. It will supply the electricity needs of around 40,000 persons and reduce annual emissions by 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide. South Africa emits 500 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, and is third in the world for per capita emissions. (Still, it only emits a 10th as much over-all as the US). But they just need a thousand more plants like the Kalahari one, and voila! South Africa is also imposing a carbon tax, which will hurry things along. (At the moment, South Africa is far too dependent on dirty coal plants, which not only fuel climate change but also spew deadly toxins such as mercury into the atmosphere, whence it goes into human beings.

Because of South African and Israeli demand in particular, demand for solar panels in the Middle East and Africa has risen over 600% during the past year. Saudi Arabia’s announced plans to save its petroleum for export by going solar at home will add a great deal to regional demand if it sticks to those plans. (In most countries, petroleum isn’t used much for electricity generation as opposed to transportation, but in oil states such as Saudi Arabia it often is used in power plants; but that cuts down on foreign exchange earnings.)

The two Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan are emerging as the solar giants in India, with each having now passed half a gigawatt in solar electricity generation capacity. The two account for some 88% of all of India’s solar power. But Rajasthan may soon outstrip Gujarat, given the state’s solar-friendly commitments, its ample amounts of scorching sunlight, and its vast deserts.

FROM MOJO (MOTHER JONES):

Shutterstock

Back in 2011, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) declared war on energy-efficient light bulbs, calling “sustainability” the gateway into a dystopic, Big Brother-patrolled liberal hellscape. When the lights went off during Beyoncé’s halftime set at the last Superbowl, conservative commentators from the Drudge Report to Michelle Malkin pointed blame (erroneously) at new power-saving measures at New Orleans’ Superdome. And one recent study found that giving Republican households feedback on their power use actually encourages them to use more energy.

Why do conservatives, who should have a natural inclination toward conservation, have a beef with energy efficiency?              It could be tied to the political polarization of the climate change debate.

A study out today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined attitudes about energy efficiency in liberals and conservatives, and found that promoting energy-efficient products and services on the basis of their environmental benefits actually turned conservatives off from picking them. The researchers first quizzed participants on how much they value various benefits of energy efficiency, including reducing carbon emissions, reducing foreign oil dependence, and reducing how much consumers pay for energy; cutting emissions appealed to conservatives the least.

The study then presented participants with a real-world choice: With a fixed amount of money in their wallet, respondents had to “buy” either an old-school light bulb or an efficient compact florescent bulb (CFL), the same kind Bachmann railed against. Both bulbs were labeled with basic hard data on their energy use, but without a translation of that into climate pros and cons.

When the bulbs cost the same, and even when the CFL cost more, conservatives and liberals were equally likely to buy the efficient bulb. But slap a message on the CFL’s packaging that says “Protect the Environment,” and “we saw a significant drop-off in more politically moderates and conservatives choosing that option,” said study author Dena Gromet, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

The chart below, from the report, shows how much liberals and conservatives value each argument for efficiency:

While liberals (gray) valued all three equally, conservatives (white), were significantly less moved by and most at odds with liberals over the carbon-saving argument.

Courtesy Gromet

Gromet said she never expected the green message to motivate conservatives, but was surprised to find that it could in fact repel them from making a purchase even while they found other aspects, like saving cash on their power bills, attractive. The reason, she thinks, is that given the political polarization of the climate change debate, environmental activism is so frowned upon by those the right that they’ll do anything to keep themselves distanced from it.

“When we’re given an option where the choice is made to represent a value that we don’t identify with or that our ideological group doesn’t value,” she said, “this can turn the purchase into something undesirable.

By making [the environment] part of the choice, even though they might see the economic benefit, they no longer want to put their money toward that option.”

This graph, lifted from the report (on the x-axis, -1 is liberal and 1 is conservative), shows the damage the wrong messaging can do: With no messaging, roughly 60 percent of all participants picked the CFL; a pro-environment message boosted support in liberals but cut it sharply in conservatives:

Courtesy Gromet

That gap could represent real lost opportunities in the private sector: the EPA’s Energy Star label, for example, perhaps the most prominent label for energy-efficient products, puts greenhouse gas savings front and center in its packaging, and proudly boasts that products with the label helps Americans “protect our climate.”

This isn’t just a problem for businesses trying to push energy-efficient products, but also for environmentalists and policymakers pushing to write efficiency or other climate-friendly policies into law, said Jessica Goodheart, director of RePower LA, which advocates for energy-saving practices in the Los Angeles power utility. Goodheart said while tackling climate change is driving force behind her lobbying, she more often finds herself talking about jobs and the economy, especially when addressing small business owners.

“It’s always important to speak to people where they are, and with energy efficiency there are so many positive messages you can use,” she said.

And there’s no shortage of opportunities to roll those messages out: Last week, Energy Department researchers found that rules requiring utilities to use renewable energy were under attack in over half the states they exist in; such laws might have better luck fending off Bachmann-esque fusillades if they re-focus their rhetoric around their cost-savings, energy independence, or other benefits, Gromet’s research suggests, especially in conservative states.

That doesn’t necessarily mean green advocates need to somehow cover up the environmental benefits of a policy or product: A study from Stanford psychologists released last December found that re-framing environmental messaging in terms of preserving the “purity” of the natural world resonated morally with conservatives.

“There’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all message that will appeal equally,” Gromet said. “It’s important to know the market you’re appealing to; there are some messages you may want to avoid.”

Tim McDonnell is Climate Desk‘s associate producer. For more of his stories, click here. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email at tmcdonnell [at] motherjones [dot] com. RSS | Twitter

==============

Saudi Kingdom to halt wheat production by 2016

The Kingdom is likely to totally depend on wheat imports starting from 2016, says Waleed El-Khereiji, head of Grains and Silos Flour …

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Saudi- ‘Big opportunity’ in SR 1 bn biscuit market
Saudi Arabia is one of the primary emerging markets for top biscuits maker Britannia and it sees big opportunities in the Kingdom because …

AFRICA. DIMENSIONS OF A CONTINENT

Dienstag, 16. April 2013, 19.00 Uhr

Bruno Kreisky Forum für internationalen Dialog | Armbrustergasse 15 | 1190 Wien

Anmeldungen unter: Tel.: 3188260/20 | Fax: 318 82 60/10 | e-mail: einladung.kreiskyforum@kreisky.org

Buchpräsentation – “AFRIKA UND KLIMAWANDEL. DER DRUCK STEIGT.”

Irene Giner-Reichl, Botschafterin Österreichs in China – presently Austria Ambassador to China but previously steeped in Development and Climate Change work with much experience at the UN on issues of Africa.

Stefan Mielke, CARE-Österreich

Elfriede-Anna More, BM für Land- und Forstwirtschaft, Umwelt und Wasserwirtschaft – Head of the International Environment Topics at the Austrian Life Ministry that includes the activities at the UN in handling the post-Rio Era, at a time that Austria will be Joining ECOSOC.

präsentieren die deutsche Version des Bandes Africa and Climate Change, der im Dezember 2011 aus Anlass der Klimakonferenz in Durban im Passagenverlag Wien erschien und diskutieren über die Arbeit von Hilfsorganisationen, den Gesellschaften in den betroffenen Ländern bei der Bewältigung der Folgen zu helfen.    —–    Which is the Book-presentation the NGOs had prepared for Rio 2012.

Die Auswirkungen des Klimawandels werden Afrika am stärksten betreffen. Welche Analysen gibt es von afrikanischen Experten und Entscheidungsträgern? Bereits heute sind am afrikanischen Kontinent ernste Auswirkungen des Klimawandels festzustellen. Niederschlagsmuster verändern sich, extreme Wettersituationen – Dürren wie Überschwemmungen – werden häufiger. Die Anpassung an den Klimawandel könnte eine der größten Herausforderungen für die Länder und Volkswirtschaften Afrikas werden.

Der vorliegende Band präsentiert afrikanische und internationale Stimmen zu einer der heißesten globalen Fragen mit signifikanten Auswirkungen auf den afrikanischen Kontinent.

Für die globale Hilfsorganisation CARE sind Klimawandel und seine Auswirkungen bereits seit Jahren ein zentrales Thema ihrer Arbeit weltweit und in Afrika, wo schon jetzt vor allem die Armen betroffen sind, und das auf dem Kontinent der den Klimawandel am wenigsten verursacht hat.

=================================================================

Thursday, April 18 2013, 7 p.m.

Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue | Armbrustergasse 15 | 1190 Wien

R.s.v.p.: Tel.: 3188260/20 | Fax: 318 82 60/10 | e-mail: einladung.kreiskyforum@kreisky.org

Anna Lindh Foundation Common Action Joint with The Austrian Institute for International Affairs (OIIP).

THE MISSING SENSE OF TOGETHERNESS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SPACE AND ITS BORDERS.

Najat Abdulhaq, Historian and Economist, University Erlangen / Nürnberg

André Azoulay, President of ALF (tbc)

The Anna-Lindh Foundation (ALF) aims to bring people from across the Mediterranean together. Its objective is promoting intercultural dialogue and mutual respect between cultures.  Since its launch in 2005, the Anna Lindh Foundation has launched and supported action across fields impacting on mutual perceptions among people of different cultures and beliefs, as well as developing a region-wide Network of over 3000 civil society organizations. The Common Action of the Austrian ALF Network has been planned, organized and implemented by different member institutions. Our aim is to raise awareness for the challenges and chances in regard to the EuroMed Region and increase the visibility of Anna Lindh and its activities.

===================================

Karin Mendel
Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue
1190 Vienna, Armbrustergasse 15

www.kreisky-forum.org

WHAT:  Panel:  “Dethroning GDP:  A Conversation on the Global Movement for New Measures of Progress”

SPONSORS:  World Policy Institute, CUNY’s Murphy Institute and Demos

WHEN:  Wednesday, April 10, 2013; 9:00 – 10:30 am

WHERE:  Demos, 220 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor

SPEAKERS:  Lorenzo Fioramonti is Jean Monnet Chair in Regional Integration and Governance Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pretoria (South Africa), where he directs the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation.  He is the author of Gross Domestic Problem: The Politics Behind the World’s Most Powerful Number. Lew Daly is Director of the Sustainable Progress Initiative at Demos and author of Beyond GDP: New Measures for a New Economy.  Peter Marber is author of Seeing the Elephant: Understanding Globalization from Trunk to Tail.  He is Chief Business Strategist for emerging markets debt and currencies at HSBC Global Asset Management and serves on the World Policy Institute Board of Directors.

BACKGROUND:  For decades, rising GDP was considered key to improving society, but today that view is increasingly debated by policy experts, political leaders, and even economists.  Demos has led an effort to challenge the dominance of GDP in the nation’s economic and policy debate.  This discussion will explore Demos’ Beyond GDP project, a multi-year campaign to push for implementation of alternative measures to GDP at the federal and state level.

Search Results

1. News for Did a Saudi judge order paralysis ?

   
   
   1. Saudi judge orders man surgically paralyzed to pay for childhood stabbing

      New York Daily News ?- 1 day ago

      A Saudi court has ordered that 24-year-old Ali Al-Khawahir be surgically … I think about my son’s fate and that he will have to be paralyzed.” …
   1. Eye for Eye Punishment: Saudi Judge Orders Man Paralyzed for Stabbing

      KSEE? – 6 hours ago
   2. Saudi court orders man to be paralyzed as an Islamic punishment

      NBCNews.com (blog)? – 1 day ago
2. Saudi court orders man to be paralyzed as an Islamic punishment …

   worldnews.nbcnews.com/_…/17601030-saudi-court-orders-m...

   1 day ago – A young Saudi man faces being forcibly paralyzed as a punishment under … she did not have even a fraction of this money, meaning the court …

3. Saudi Arabian court orders man to be surgically paralysed in ‘eye for …

   www.independent.co.uk › … › World › Middle East

   by Robert Williams – in 25 Google+ circles – More by Robert Williams 2 days ago – A Saudi Arabian court has ruled that a man should be paralysed as punishment for … but your IP address will be logged to prevent abuse of this feature. … Amnesty claims that the paralysis sentence would contravene the UN …

4. Saudi court orders criminal to be surgically paralyzed – The Globe …

   www.theglobeandmail.com › News › World

   2 days ago – Saudi court orders criminal to be surgically paralyzed Add to . … A government-approved Saudi human rights group did not respond to requests …

5. Saudi judge orders man surgically paralyzed to pay – Mixed Martial …

   www.mixedmartialarts.com/mma.cfm?go=forum...

   1 day ago – A Saudi court has ordered that 24-year-old Ali Al-Khawahir be surgically paralyzed as … A decade later and he will now be paralyzed for life.

6. Surgical Paralysis Ordered in Saudi Arabia as Punishment for …

   www.usnews.com › News › Newsgram

   by Steven Nelson – in 59 Google+ circles – More by Steven Nelson 1 day ago – Surgical Paralysis Ordered in Saudi Arabia as Punishment for … Ali Al-Khawahir, 24, is awaiting court-ordered surgical paralysis in Saudi Arabia for an … and said the defendants did not have legal representation during court …

7. Saudi court sentences man to paralysis

   www.philly.com/…/20130404_Saudis_sentence_man_to_paral…

   1 day ago – Unless he can quickly raise $270,000, a Saudi man will soon face court-ordered surgical paralysis from the waist down, Amnesty International …

8. Britain ‘concerned’ after Saudi Arabia ‘orders man to be paralysed …

   www.telegraph.co.uk › … › Middle East › Saudi Arabia

   1 day ago – Saudi Arabian court ‘orders man to be paralysed’ … has sentenced a man to be paralysed in retribution for causing the paralysis of a friend when he was fourteen years old. … John Kerry: US will ‘empower’ Syria opposition …

9. Saudi judge orders man surgically paralyzed to … – Contacto Latino

   contacto-latino.com/…/saudi-judge-orders-man-surgically-para…

   Saudi judge orders man surgically paralyzed to pay for childhood stabbing. By NY Daily News Latino | Published: 2013-04-04 19:47:21 UTC | Read more, click …

10. Saudi judge orders man surgically paralyzed to … – One News Page

    www.onenewspage.us › US

    1 day ago – Saudi judge orders man surgically paralyzed to pay for childhood … his friend in the back and paralyzing him will be surgically paralyzed …

Reports of Saudi Paralysis Sentence (Taken Question)

Taken Question

Office of the Spokesperson

Washington, DC

Question Taken at the APRIL 5, 2013 Daily Press Briefing at US Department of State

April 5, 2013

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Question: What is the U.S. response to reports that a Saudi judge gave a court order for a prisoner to be surgically paralyzed?

Answer: If these reports are true, they would be incredibly disturbing. We expect the Saudi Government to respect international human rights norms. We regularly make this point as part of our bilateral dialogue.

PRN: 2013/0374

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Texas Refinery Is Saudi Foothold in U.S. Market.

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

The Motiva refinery in Port Arthur, the largest in the United States, ensures a bigger market for Saudi crude and a stronger global voice for the kingdom.

 

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www.timesofisrael.com/report-shell-to-dump-firm-over-its-ties-to-israel/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=004fe980fe-2013_04_05&utm_medium=email

 

This can now be seen in context!

 

Jewish Times // The Times of Israel

‘Shell to dump energy firm over its ties to Israel’

Australia’s Woodside Petroleum has a 30-percent interest in Israel’s Leviathan natural gas field

April 5, 2013, 3:28 pm 2

 

Related Topics

• Royal Dutch Shell
• divestment
• Commonwealth Bank of Australia

THE HAGUE (JTA) – Royal Dutch Shell declined to comment on reports that it will divest its stake in an Australian energy firm because of that firm’s investment in Israel’s gas fields.

According to the RTL Dutch television network, a spokesperson for Shell said on Wednesday that he had no comment on a report by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia which said Shell would likely dump its 23.1-percent stake in Australia’s Woodside Petroleum.

The report said Shell planned the move to avoid the risk of boycott by Arab countries following Woodside’s agreement to purchase a 30-percent interest in Israel’s Leviathan natural gas field. RTL reported that Shell’s stake in Woodside is worth more then $7 billion.

Last year, Shell said that involvement with Woodside was “incompatible” with Shell’s “long-term plans.”

The following is a presentation of facts that cannot be ignored anymore. Deserves close reading by those in the North that thought you can bumble your way through without creating a real union capable of calling out “it is all for one and not just one for all!” The EU is not just the fulfilling of the German dream of takeover of Europe by peaceful means. Cyprus dreaming of being the Mediterranean base of Russia? What else? Austria a bridge to the East? Yes, but only after twinning up with Finland.
The article does not mention the UK even once – we interpret this as a sign it has crystallized as the island off-shore that ought to partner with the US and stop bothering the decision making process of the continent at large. It was the UK interest that created Cyprus in the first place by not letting it split and join Greece and Turkey. Who needed two weak Greek States in the Union? Malta? another UK invention? Slovenia was good – why not also a Catalunya or Catalonia?

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Everyone learned a lesson from the “bail-in” of the Cypriot banks: Russian account holders who’d laundered and stored their money on the sunny island; bank bondholders who’d thought they’d always get bailed out; Cypriot politicians whose names showed up on lists of loans that had been extended by the Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank but were then forgiven and written off. Even brand-new Finance Minister Michael Sarris who got axed because he’d been chairman of Laiki when this was going on. His lesson: when a cesspool of corruption blows up, no one is safe. And German politicians learned a lesson too: that it worked!

“With the Cyprus aid package, it was proven that countries like Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland, if they stick together, are able to push for a strict stability course,” Hans Michelbach told the Handelsblatt. The chairman of the finance committee in the German Parliament and member of the CSU, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition partner, called for deeper collaboration of the triple-A countries in the Eurozone “to strengthen the confidence of citizens and investors in the common currency.”

There are still five in that euro triple-A club: Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, and Luxembourg. “It would be good if we could also convince Luxembourg to participate more strongly in this stability collaboration,” he said. It would be in the best interest of Luxembourg as major financial center, he added. A reference to Luxembourg’s precarious status, as Cyprus had learned, of being a tiny country with banks so large that it can’t bail them out by itself.

To protect the euro, the alliance of the triple-A countries must be united firmly against large euro countries like Italy and France, he said. “Strong signals of stability would be of great importance for the Eurozone,” particularly now, given the “unclear situation” in Italy, renewed doubts about Greece, and the failure of the French government in its stability policies.

Exactly what French President François Hollande needs: the euro triple-A club breathing down his neck. He’s already in trouble at home. To reverse the slide, he got on state-owned France 2 TV last Thursday to speak to the French people so that they could see how his sincerity, wisdom, and economic policies would stop the country from sinking ever deeper into a quagmire.

And a quagmire it is: double-digit unemployment, a Purchasing Managers Index just above Greece’s, new vehicle sales that plunged almost 15% so far this year, a budget deficit that refuses to be brought under control…. He has tweaked some policy measures here and there. And he dug up a new version of the 75% income-tax bracket that had been squashed by the Constitutional Court. But Jérôme Cahuzac, the Budget Minister who’d tried to get the first version through the system, went up in flames over allegations of tax fraud and “tax fraud laundering.”

Now the people have had it. After the TV appearance, his approval rating, ten months into his term, plummeted another 6 points to 31%, a low that scandal-plagued Nicolas Sarkozy took four years to reach. And only 27% approved of his economic policies. “The French simply don’t want austerity,” lamented an unnamed government insider.

France was suffering the consequences of the “socialist experiments” of its government and was becoming less and less competitive, explained Michelbach. He emphasized that France would remain an important partner of Germany. He wasn’t kidding: France buys 10% of Germany’s exports and is crucial to the German economy. But if France didn’t change course, he said, that could become a “serious problem” for the Eurozone.

As opposed to the mere hiccups of Cyprus or Greece. More banks and more countries will require bailouts­Slovenia, Spain, Italy, and Malta are on the list. And no one wants to see France on that list. Even Italy is too large to get bailed out by other countries­though it’s rich enough to bail itself out, à la Cyprus [ A "Politically Explosive" Secret: Italians Are Over Twice As Wealthy As Germans].

But in Germany, a revolt against these save-the-euro bailouts has been brewing for a while. With elections in September, it’s taking on volume and voices, and the structure of a political party, the Alternative for Germany, not unpalatable radicals but the educated bourgeoisie, and they want to stop the bailouts and dump the euro.

The government is feeling the heat. No one can afford to lose votes. Michelbach’s triple-A club, a line of demarcation in the Eurozone, is one of the reactions. Merkel might benefit from it in the elections. The other four countries might find if appealing, though it will be of dubious appeal in the rest of the Eurozone. But if efforts fail to fix the Eurozone’s problems­and the Eurozone lumbering that way­a tightly knit triple-A club could weather the storm together, more stable and more unified than the Eurozone ever was. And Michelbach had just floated a version of that idea.

Every country in the Eurozone has its own collection of big fat lies that politicians and Eurocrats have served up in order to make the euro and the subsequent bailouts or austerity measures less unappetizing. Here are some from the German point of view…. Ten Big Fat Lies To Keep The Euro Dream Alive

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    *    www.testosteronepit.com    www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
 twitter.com/TestosteronePit

Wolf Richter wrote also – “White House Hypocrisy And Trade Sanctions Against China.” -  Practically every car sold in the US contains Chinese-made components. But suddenly, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign, the Obama administration decided to do something about it.

Wolf Richter is a  San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience.

In www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/w… he explains “Having worked a bit on international deals, and for companies operating in foreign markets, cross border transactions have an even lower success rate than domestic ones. The big reason is the one mentioned here, which is marked cultural incompatibility between the seller and buyer. Here the Chinese did less badly than they could have (they could have tried forcing Chinese practices on the German operation, which would have destroyed the value of the asset). But the logic of the transaction was unclear. Was it technology transfer? Consolidation? It appears both might have been goals, and neither happened very much.

But I find it intriguing that as lousy as the Japanese were at doing deals  (they found it hard to understand that the contract was the deal, and were too inclined to overpay), they were good at managing workers in manufacturing operations (service businesses were another kettle of fish, there they tended to drive Americans crazy).  This is a skill the Chinese will have to master, since they desperately need to re-invest their surpluses, and they are trying to acquire more real-economy assets.”    FASCINATING.

His insights in Wall Street machinations are also very good.

Agreement for the export of Iraqi oil through Jordan within days

He and Iraqi Oil Minister Abdul Karim and coffee yesterday that the next few days will witness the signing of the Jordanian-Iraqi transport …

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Baghdad warns of Kurdistan oil pipeline to Turkey
Oil Ministry has warned the Turkish side of the Iraqi oil pipeline from the Kurdistan region through its territory without the consent of the government …

Dear Pincas,

This year, the Climate Reality Project will conduct trainings around the world for the next generation of Climate Leaders, who will in turn become part of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps. Already, more than 4,000 Climate Leaders from 58 countries are educating people about the climate crisis and how we can solve it. I want to personally invite you to join this global community of change-makers.

Click here to learn more about the Climate Reality Leadership Corps and apply to become a Climate Leader and join this global community today.

More than ever before, the climate crisis is creating a new reality for millions around the world. From Australian farmers losing their crops to bushfires, to New Yorkers rebuilding neighborhoods devastated by Superstorm Sandy, to crippling droughts throughout Central and Eastern Asia, Mexico and the Southwestern U.S. that are compromising the regions’ food security—the consequences of the climate crisis are growing more intense. Even as the severity of the climate crisis grows, many people don’t yet understand how it touches them personally or what they can do about it.

We need more Climate Leaders across the world to lead a carbon conversation about solutions and spread the truth about the climate crisis. Join us to become one of these leaders today.

In a three-day training, including sessions that I lead, Climate Leaders learn the latest climate science and best practices for connecting the dots between the facts about climate change and the daily lives of their audiences, in simple and accessible terms. They emerge as energized and skilled communicators with the knowledge, tools, and passion to educate and empower diverse audiences and communities to help solve the climate crisis. I invite you to become a part of this network.

Click here to apply for our training in Istanbul in June or in Chicago in July.

Together, we have an enormous opportunity to communicate the reality of climate change. With your help as a Climate Leader, we can do this person by person, family by family, and city by city. I have faith that when enough minds are changed, we will cross a threshold, and we can accomplish this goal together. Apply to join us today.

Sincerely,

Al Gore
Chairman, The Climate Reality Project

===================================================

Dear Pincas,

In order to win the fight to protect our climate, we have to change the climate in our government. 

Kick dirty energy money out of the State House in Albany

Big Money from Big Polluters has polluted our democracy. The coal, fracking, and other big polluting industries have spent approximately $10 million since 2000 writing checks to politicians[1] to try to get their way.

And just yesterday we get another huge scandal involving campaign finance in Albany and New York City.[2] Governor Cuomo and state legislative leaders have already expressed their desire to pass legislation that would fix these problems. Major newspapers have even said this is the next big fight in Albany.[3] But for our leaders to act, they need to hear from you that we are ready to stand up and fight for it.

Tell our leaders — get money out of politics in Albany now!

A coal-fired power plant or fracking well might give us asthma, heart attacks, or cancer. But the money those same polluters spend on politicians is just as damaging — causing gridlock in Albany, giving them permission to pollute more, and preventing New York from moving to the clean energy, 21st century economy that we deserve.

Getting big money out means your voice, and the voice of other average New Yorkers, will be heard above the lobbyists and big donors.

Clean up New York politics – tell Governor Cuomo and your legislators to support fair elections reforms.

Fair Elections will transform how Albany does business by empowering small donors, lowering campaign contribution limits, ending lobbyists’ pay-to-play schemes, and encouraging stronger enforcement and transparency. Our leaders want to take the necessary next steps, but they need to hear you are behind them.

Hundreds of you joined Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director, and Governor Andrew Cuomo last month as they told New Yorkers how fair, citizen-funded elections can put environmental priorities on the level with the fracking lobbyists and corporate polluters. Dozens of other good government, labor, environmental and social justice organizations are collecting signatures on the same petition. Together we can make fair elections a reality. 

Add your voice to theirs in Albany by sending a message to your representatives to support fair elections.

Thanks for all you do to protect the environment,

Jennifer Tuttle
Organizing Representative
Sierra Club

P.S. After you take action, be sure to forward this alert to your friends and colleagues!

References

[1] National Institute on Money in State Politics, FollowtheMoney.org “Industry Influence – New York – Energy & Natural Resources Contributions to All Candidates and Committees 2000 – 2012“
[2] William K Rashbaum and Marc Santora, New York Times “Lawmakers Charged in Plot to Buy Spot on Mayoral Ballot” April 2, 2013.
[3] Albany Times Union, “Now Fix Those Elections!” March 31, 2013.

The FPA and the United Nations Department for Public Information-NGO section invite you to attend a special screening of Great Decisions in Foreign Policy on PBS, followed by a Q&A about the eurozone crisis with experts from the program and from the UN.

DATE: Monday, May 6, 2013  

TIME:   3:15 pm – 4:45 pm

LOCATION:  Dag Hammarskjöld Auditorium, 760 UN Plaza, New York City   

REGISTER

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