So who even uses the word “Negro” anymore, much less the phrase “Negro dialect”? Apparently Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in a conversation with reporters before Barack Obama became president.
To be sure, one has to wonder whether a guy who uses that kind of outmoded language has other anachronistic notions about us Negroes. But let’s look at the substance of what Reid actually said—then apologized for:
First, that Obama is lighter skinned, and therefore likely more acceptable to the broader public, than darker skinned African Americans. Obama’s skin color is a fact. And, sadly, lots of social science research and practical experience supports Reid’s conclusion about how the public receives and perceives African Americans of different hues.
This is a quick hit posing as a diary, but the article it draws attention to is just not a news event, but an analysis of why Obama seems to be screwing up on the Israeli-Palestinian peace front. Well, apart from the fact that he has most of Israel against him, then George Mitchell's threat to cut loan guarantees to Israel (which in any case support Israel's colonialism), and the blowback from Israel's finance minister who said, "who needs you," the article asks whether Obama know what the hell he is doing?
The end of a year – and especially the end of a decade – warrants both retrospective reflection and predictions of what is to come. Currently there seems to be much consensus, especially around the 2000s as a decade of struggle and decline for the US. There is a silver lining, however, in the cautious optimism around the issue of race relations. As the decade comes to a close, it is still clear that the US is entering the 2010s with much work to do, particularly with the economy and unemployment. Below is recent public opinion on the past decade, the current climate, and what may be in the next ten years.
1. I will inspire. I am one of the most charismatic orators of our generation, but as president, I’ve moved away from that critical element of my leadership.
While my speech to the Muslim world in Cairo and onreproductive rights at Notre Dame were inspirational—if I do say so myself—I haven’t brought that eloquence to my key domestic agenda items, or to my broader vision and goals as president. In 2010, I’ll recapture my eloquent voice, communicating the core values and human outcomes of my policies and presidency, then (and only then) explaining how the wonky details will help to achieve them. The values that I led with in my campaign were Community—the idea that we’re all in it together and share responsibility for each other—and Opportunity—the idea that everyone deserves a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential. Those values will return to prominence in my second year as president, and be joined by the values of Peace and Security in our foreign affairs and national defense. I may even dust off Hope and Change.
After two stolen elections by Bush-Cheney, an election of Grandpa John "Bomb Bomb Iran" McCain and his sorority president sidekick -- whether honest or blatantly stolen and tolerated -- would have said something hugely depressing and debilitating about the American people. But arguably it could have saved a great many lives around the world. Here's how.
Bailouts and political connections go hand in hand according to a just released academic study. The study, which was conducted by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan researchers, shows concretely that lobbying, campaign contributions, and the finance/federal government revolving door has helped the most damaging banks despite the dangers they pose to our economy.
In the age of the bailout, blaming the revolving door between corporate lobbying and politics is so obvious that it has become almost cliche. But the reason why it is one of the greatest handicaps to our political system is critically important. The revolving door turns "survival of the fittest" on its head by masking failure, propping up underperforming companies, and hiding inefficiencies in the markets. The new study shows the extent to which political connections influenced how TARP bailout funds were paid out.
The researchers found that there was a 31% increase in the likelihood of receiving bailout funds at financial companies whose executives had served on the board of the Federal Reserve. Banks that had connections with members of Congress who serve on key finance committees were found to be 26% more likely to receive bailout funds than banks without those kinds of connections. It is the revolving door between lobbyists and politicians that undermine a fair and accurate system for determining healthy policy.
But the research hits just the tip of the iceberg. Zach Carter at The Nation recently reported on a much deeper case of how the revolving door shapes U.S. policy. Our "too-big-to-fail economy" was developed in large part by one of the country's current top bank regulators; someone who has major conflict of interest with the banks he is supposed to regulate, Carter reports. John Dugan is now chief regulator of the largest US banks at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In one of his former positions at the Treasury, he was a chief architect of the three most influential pillars of banking deregulation that have been blamed for causing the financial meltdown last year (hat tip The Big Picture). In 1991, Dugan published a 750-page book where he successfully pushed for policies allowing banks to operate in multiple states without additional regulatory oversight, to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act allowing safe commercial banks to merge with risky investment and insurance companies, and to allow corporations like General Electric and Sears to own banks.
"[Dugan's book] was unquestionably the blueprint for the major Clinton-era deregulation," says Arthur Wilmarth Jr., a longtime banking scholar at George Washington University Law School. "It was the first real recipe for too big to fail."
A few years after publishing his book, Dugan was out of government and in a new job as a lobbyist with the American Bankers Association working his political connections to help pass the financial deregulatations he described in his book. From his earlier years in government, he had enough pals in Congress and the Clinton administration to get many of his policies enacted. Now he's back playing the game from the government side as one of the country's chief regulators. Same guy, same mind, same mission; just working from the inside at the moment. Indeed, "as head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Dugan played a leading role in gutting the consumer protection system, allowing big banks to take outrageous risks on the predatory mortgages that led to millions of foreclosures," Carter reports.
The revolving door actively hurts our economy because it puts our country on a path of survival of the richest, most connected lobbyists with cover-ups of market inefficiencies and bad consumer products. Dugan helped dangerous-for-the-consumer, highly-profitable-for-the-bank consumer products pop up throughout the 90's as subprime and adjusted rate loans. The Ross researchers agree that "the effects of political ties on federal capital investment are strongest for companies with weaker fundamentals, lower liquidity and poorer performance - which suggests that political ties shift capital allocation towards underperforming institutions." When money determines political power, the political system itself encourages corporations to put profit and lobbying above developing consumer products people actually need.
Dugan's role in aiding the creation of too-big-to-fail banks was born out of industry. Because Dugan has a highly influential political position, his weaving of politics and private interests which has spanned a career is problematic: "Over the course of nearly a quarter-century, Dugan has proved himself a staunch ally of the American financial elite as a Senate staffer (1985-89), a Treasury official (1989-93) and a lobbyist (1993-2005), building a career that culminated in 2005 when George W. Bush appointed him comptroller of the currency. When the financial system finally succumbed to its own excesses in September 2008, Dugan's fingerprints were all over the economic wreckage, but almost nobody noticed." Dugan's work is exemplary of the phenomena of policy being determined by webs of influence.
To be fair, lobbying presents opportunities for busy politicians to learn about issues. But, unfortunately the weaving of long tentacles in private and public sectors is a prerequisite to effective lobbying. Last week in DC, I met young career politicos who saw Capitol Hill jobs as a first stop on the road to high-paying lobbying jobs later on. Their political connections are golden resume nuggets. This complicated climb to the top is bearing down on policies we see today - President Obama made a campaign promise to keep out the lobbyists in his administration and failed, but the disheartening part is the bottom to top entrenchment of Citigroup executives and lobbyists and their work on financial reform policy.
At its inception, corporations were allowed to exist when they served the public's interest; the Supreme court ended that in the 1800-1900's . No longer bound by public duty, shareholders' returns have become a singular goal in the free market and politics race to the top - Congress seems to have understood less and less the impact these policies have on the economy at large. The money and secret inner circle of influence in DC is unfair because it creates a snowball effect of making the powerful more powerful and policy less about policy. Thus lobbying and its powerful cousin, the revolving door serve to prop up companies that may be weak or have bad products, leading to an economy that is more likely than not to become fractured or in other words, too big to fail.
I don't know if you get to read incoming e-mail. I doubt it, as I know the value of your time in running the country and still finding some room for your wife, children and dog. However, I would like to offer you a couple of points from my not-so-unique position as an unemployed American with two college degrees who worked on your campaign steadily for many months last year... and who is now getting more and more disappointed in your progress, or lack thereof.
The Senate voted this morning and got a healthcare bill out of their chamber. Now key people from the House, the Senate, and the White House are going to meet to hash out the differences. And I am hoping - for substantive policy reasons, contrary to rumors that any progressive opposing the Senate bill is either an idiot or acting in bad faith - that we end up closer to the House version, because the Senate version of the bill does not address the single biggest issue with healthcare in this country, nor does it put us on a path to do so.
Until we get our hands around the problem of paying twice as much as the rest of the world for healthcare that doesn't keep us as healthy as people who pay half as much, we're not actually fixing the real problem with healthcare. We are merely putting bandaids on bullet wounds and pretending like that's all we need to do.
So indulge me in a metaphor, if you will. Imagine you have a leak in your roof. If you fix it now, it's going to cost you $500. If you don't fix it, the water getting into your attic will eventually breed mold, which will cost many thousands of dollars to mitigate - if it hasn't already gotten to the point where your house is unsalvageable.
So what do you do? Do you spend the $500 to fix the leak, or wait and pay the thousands of dollars later?
If you plan on living there for the rest of your life, you will fix the roof now. But what if you know you are going to move next year? Do you hope that the prospective buyer doesn't notice the leak? That by the time the mold sets in, it isn't your problem anymore?
The tenets of capitalism suggest you should defer - you have, after all, deniability. "A leak? Thanks for catching that! It could have ruined the whole house!"
That's exactly the behavior the insurance companies engage in. This kind of distortion of incentives is at the heart of the problem with our healthcare system. They don't do the relatively inexpensive things that would keep Americans healthy, because they figure they won't be the ones footing the bill later when people need really expensive care.
And the current Senate bill isn't going to fix it.
As the climate conference in Copenhagen hobbled towards a close Friday night, the United States, in a strong-arm move, slammed through the “Copenhagen Accord" – a weak, loose, and potentially backstepping agreement negotiated by a small subset of nations involved in negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The process for striking this accord was so undemocratic and peripheral to the official UN process that in the end, the parties to the UNFCCC didn’t even know what to do with it, and finally decided to “take note” of the accord. The implications of “taking note” will be discussed and hashed out by lawyers for days, if not months, to come.
OBAMA'S GAME OF BRINKSMANSHIP
The way this agreement came into being is a study in political brinksmanship. Around 9 p.m. Friday, President Obama announced to an exclusive group of reporters that an agreement had been reached. After the story that the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa had struck a deal circulated in a number of online news stories, the United States called a press conference and President Obama announced publicly that a deal had been reached, and that “most of the text has been completely worked out.” He then left to go back to Washington in advance of the imminent snow storm that hit on Saturday. It turned out that President Obama had called it a done deal before any agreement was actually reached. All these announcements seem to have happened before some countries had even had a chance to see the text under discussion.
When the text was finally presented, a number of countries spoke out strongly against it – and particularly against the manner in which it was determined by a few countries behind closed doors and then thrust upon the 192 countries participating in the official plenary session. Into the morning on Saturday, the plenary adjourned and reconvened, attempting to determine what had happened and what the implications were.
Now that the conference is offically over, those implications are still not entirely clear. It looks like a number of countries will flat out refuse to sign the Accord. The UN operates by consensus -- and there's certainly no consensus that this weak accord is the best way forward.
WHAT'S IN THE COPENHAGEN ACCORD?
While the Accord endorses the two existing tracks of negotiations that are the focus of the UN process, it appears to set its own course when it comes to how countries would actually move forward on the key issues on which those tracks are supposed to yield agreement, including pledges for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and pledges to provide financial support to developing countries so they have the capacity to deal with the impacts of climate change.
All in all, the Accord looks like a deal that requires nothing.
More details on exactly how hollow it is in the extended version.
Like most of Paul's articles these are very thought provoking. But there's more to be said. It's certainly true that right-wing organizations have out-organized us, but they have a lot more money and that's really what it comes down to. We certainly need better organizing, but we have to face reality. And the reality is encouraging as well as depressing, because there ARE serious cracks in the armor of our enemies and serious divisions among them that cannot be papered over.
With respect to the Tea Parties and especially the summer's town-hall meetings, a key corporate titan appears to be Koch Industries of Wichita, Kansas. Fred Koch (pronounced "coke") founded the company in 1940 as an oil business but it has expanded into natural gas, pharmaceuticals, fertilizer, and many other areas. He helped create the John Birch Society in the late 1950s and died in 1967. His two sons who run the business now, David and Charles, have foundations that donate millions to conservative and libertarian causes and groups, including notably the Cato Institute. One Koch-funded group used to be called Citizens for a Sound Economy. It became Americans for Prosperity (AFP) in 2003, a group that has advocated limited government and opposed climate change legislation. Earlier this year, Americans for Prosperity launched a Web site called Patients United Now, which ran frightening television ads opposing health care reform (showing, for example, a Canadian woman who supposedly couldn't get treatment for a brain tumor in her native country). . . . The AFP helped distribute signs and talking points at a town-hall event hosted by Virginia Congressman Tom Perriello. . . .
This dovetails very nicely with corporate lobbying groups whenever there is a need to block progressive reforms:
It isn't just conservative (c)4 groups that backed the town halls. America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, is the enormous lobbying organization for private health insurance companies headed by Karen Ignagni, who makes frequent television appearances discussing health care. According to ThinkProgress's Lee Fang, AHIP mobilized 50,000 of its employees to attend town-hall meetings and otherwise lobby against the inclusion of a public health insurance option in the reform. AHIP's effort was coordinated by Democracy Data & Communications (DDC), which has helped various corporate clients set up front groups. DDC is headed by B.R. McConnon, who was once an employee of the Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy.
This one-two punch is what's really effective. Normally, business and conservative groups are subsumed into the Republican party. However, in 2008 something new happened that hadn't happened since 1965: an actual "liberal" Democrat took office with the intention of enacting some progressive legislation -- and he was popular!
You see the immediate result. The instant that Obama tried to operate within the institutional framework that existed up till 2008 he found himself fighting an unprecedented coalition of business groups who refused to be bought off, and right-wing political activists like Grover Norquist.
That is what makes this current compromise surrender to special interests so doubly tragic. Like any exercise in legislative sausage making, near infinite deals and trade offs went into crafting the piece of Health Care Reform legislation that lies in front of us today. From day one Liberals went along with many of them only as a way to preserve a viable public option within the overall Health Care Reform package, since you have to give up something to get something blah blah. For one thing, sundry formulas that directly impact private industry's bottom line were negotiated and agreed upon early in the process on terms Liberals might not have ordinarily agreed upon, with the understanding that there would be a real public alternative preserved as a result of those concessions, one that would offer real competition to private industry, forcing it to think long and hard about continuing to price gouge their policy holders.
What resulted was a classic shell game. All of the liberal concessions went right to the bank and got cashed, while liberals held onto their legislative I.O.U. Now the shuffling has stopped and the shells have been lifted and there is no Public Option under any of them, let alone a robust one. There is no medicare buy in either. Instead we find restrictive language on abortions.
In his reaction to Obama's speech in Copenhagen announcing the postponement of any legally binding treaties, climate campaigner Bill McKibben said that Obama "chose the Senate over the UN tonight."
Obama told the world tonight that the US had come to the table "with an ambitious plan to reduce our emissions" but that the US also couldn't "turn on a dime" and so refused to make any commitments that it might not be able to keep. Yet as Naomi Klein said tonight, he could easily have used the stimulus money to jumpstart a clean economy in a way that would have given the US "inspiring emissions cuts" to show the world and chose not to.
Though Obama made comments about wanting to act based on the science and leave a better world for our children and grandchildren, his refusal to commit to a firm target kept the rest of the world from doing so. Now, the agreement will include only voluntary goals from each country that will be added in an appendix to the document.
Klein said that while the Obama administration was trying to make much of his having brought China, India, Brazil and South Africa along on an agreement, it had been their position from the beginning that they didn't want to be spoilers and would agree to binding cuts if the US was willing to do so.
Klein pointed out that in spite of Obama's claim not to want to move things backwards, the world went from having a legally binding agreement signed by most countries to a non-binding agreement signed by four countries. Obama may not have wanted to create "frustration and cynicism", but McKibben added that there wasn't even a numerical target in the new document and that he doubted George Bush could have gotten away with so forcefully brushing aside the UN.
While complaining about logjams and looking backwards, Obama said that the world needed more time to build trust and that the "US was coming to this with ... a clean slate." And at that point, there was a shocking sense for me of campaign deja vu, where women and the LGBT community and social justice advocates were told to look forward and forget old divisions. Then once he got into office, all that talk of hope was replaced with using fine words to smooth over the continuing sell out of the poor to the powerful. wash, rinse, repeat. At least he's consistent.
Phil Bloomer of Oxfam commented earlier today that rich countries' governments were captured entirely by "massive, vested interests" and that wealthy countries "care more about their banks than ... our shared destiny." Rarely has this been more on display than in this president, tonight, who acted, as Avaaz' Ben Wikler said today that the US often did, to lower our national ambitions based on the power of the coal and oil industries.
Obama said tonight that, "climate change threatens us all." Yet he seemed frankly more afraid of letting anyone in the US think he'd signed up to an international treaty, closing by very awkwardly noting that there was a question of whether there even could be a signature on a document that wasn't legally binding.
In the past week the Obama administration has taken steps to clarify and disseminate its policy with respect to the promotion of human rights and democracy. Following on the heels of an administration that liked to define the purpose of U.S. foreign policy as expanding freedom around the world and ending tyranny, the Obama administration has looked for a different approach and a different vocabulary to describe the place of human rights promotion in the foreign policy mix.
At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (Cop15), global leaders aren't just negotiating a climate deal-they're positioning to avoid blame if the talks fail.
David Corn reports for Mother Jones that as soon as U.S. climate change envoy Todd Stern arrived at the Bella Center this Wednesday, he quickly listed all of the Obama administration's actions to address climate change: The Clean Air Act, the proposed reduction in emissions, boosted fuel economy standards, and so on. Stern then changed the subject to China, observing that "by 2020, China's emissions will top those from the United States' by 60 percent, and then by 80 percent in 2030."
Stern's message is clear: If the talks don't succeed, it's not America's fault. Corn writes that "with fundamental questions unresolved-particularly the obligations of China and the other major developing nations-it's quite possible the talks could collapse and yield an orgy of accusation. Thus, the need for governments to fret about Plan B, as in Plan Blame. The real problem is, if such a worst-case scenario does occur, each of the major players will indeed have plenty of cause to point fingers at the others."
But are we really in a position to point fingers? The United States spent an average of $130 billion a year on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2003 to 2009. The Obama administration has requested $138.6 billion for 2010, plus approximately $30 billion more for the additional troop surge.
When the Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of a climate bill several months ago, it came up with a dramatically different sum: $22 billion per year.
As Matthew Yglesias writes for The American Prospect, "the United States has in the recent past undertaken initiatives that cost dramatically more than a strong climate initiative. We did it because we could afford it, and because the political elite in the United States takes military ventures seriously and wants to see them succeed. Well, averting catastrophic climate change is important too. ... Whether we leave a legacy of leadership that meets that challenge will be determined largely by what happens at Copenhagen and what the Senate does to live up to whatever commitments the Obama administration makes there."
The final deal needs to be inclusive of all people. Mantoe Phakathi of Inter Press Service writes that the deal needs to account for gender rather than simply classifying women as "vulnerable groups," a term used in climate change policies in many countries, including South Africa and Kenya.
"Gotelind Alber, a researcher for the U.N.'s agency for housing, UN-HABITAT, said women in city slums are more vulnerable after natural disasters-women are often last to hear warnings of coming disasters, unable to move quickly while safeguarding children in their care, and in the breakdown of order that typically follows, exposed to violence."
Finally, in the largest demonstration so far at Cop15, hundreds of youth created a "climate storm" inside the Bella Center yesterday, as Joshua Kahn Russell reports for Grist. The young activists clapped, snapped, and pounded their feet in representation of the typhoons and hurricanes that have ravaged communities around the world this year [Video below].
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Over 15,000 people from 192 countries began to work towards an international climate deal today in Copenhagen. These discussions are part of the largest and most important United Nations climate change summit in history. After two years of contentious negotiations, heads of states are convening through Dec. 18 to curb greenhouse gases, encourage the development of clean energy, and transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to help developing nations curb climate change.
It's going to be a lively 11 days. Jacob Wheeler has already posted video of a demonstration to save the climate for In These Times' blog, The ITT List. For live coverage of the Cop15 summit, make sure to check out video streams hosted by The UpTake and OneWorld.
Robert Eschelman reports in The Nation that Cop15's probable outcome will be a draft agreement. But what will this potential deal look like? "Four issues will dominate the negotiations taking place inside Copenhagen's Bella Center. First, developed nations, such as the United States, must commit to significant reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions. Second, developing countries like India and China will have to reduce the rate at which their emissions increase over the next several decades. Third, developed countries will have to provide clean energy technologies and funding to developing nations as they address the effects of climate change. And, finally, negotiators will have to agree on how to monitor and enforce an international climate agreement."
The U.S. has taken some good first steps to reaching such an agreement. Last week, President Barack Obama announced the country's commitment to a global fund that will mobilize $10 billion per year by 2012 to support developing countries that are already experiencing the effects of climate change. It's an important first step. But as Yes! Magazine reports, using the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to manage this money isn't a good idea. "Both have track records of saddling poor countries with debt, requiring government spending cuts that undermine national economies, and handing lucrative contracts to transnational corporations."
President Obama has also changed the timing of his Copenhagen visit from this Wednesday, Dec. 9, to the conference's big finale on Friday, Dec. 18. Grist consulted with a panel of experts regarding the significance of the schedule switch. They all agree: It's a big deal. Obama's arrival on the last day "changes the game," according to Kenneth P. Green, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "It suggests that a 'deal' is already in the bag, and Obama's expecting that he'll get to bask in the glow of a new global agreement, flagrantly repudiating the position of the Bush administration in previous climate negotiations." Andrew Light, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, believes that Obama's appearance at the end of the conference will "transform the Copenhagen climate conference into the largest summit yet of world leaders focused on global warming."
Scientists warn that without such an agreement in Copenhagen, the Earth will face ever-rising temperatures, flooding of coastal cities (about half of the human race lives within 100 miles of a coastline), more extreme weather events, and the spread of diseases.
Air America features a comprehensive look at what's at stake in Copenhagen. "The change in U.S. administrations a year ago had aroused hopes the long-running climate talks might finally produce an all-encompassing package in 2009 to combat global warming and help its victims. Too little time and too little agreement, however, especially between rich and poor countries, mean the 192-nation Copenhagen conference is likely to produce, at best, a framework - a basis for continuing talks and signing internationally binding final agreements next year."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
....seeking to reverse Obama's backtracking from his Cairo speech, in particular, contradicting a later statement that Palestinian East Jerusalem is part of the unified capital of Israel, an issue yet to be negotiated.
This gesture is sucking up to the right wing Likud government of Bibi Netanyahu at a time when Netanyahu seems to be putting Obama in his place. Who the hell does he think he is, Bill Clinton once said of the arrogant Bibi.
On issue after issue, President Obama is locked in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the American people. At issue-transcending health care reform, economic stimulus, the bailout of banks and automakers, and beyond-is the role of government in our society.
The president is well aware of the terms of this struggle. As he told NBC News in September, "It's an argument that's gone on for the history of this republic, and that is, 'What's the right role of government? How do we balance freedom with our need to look out for one another?' . . . This is not a new argument, and it always evokes passions."
It's been ten years since the massive WTO demonstrations that rocked Seattle and the world. While the global justice movement has been successful in preventing further WTO expansion, President Obama has still not committed to fulfill his campaign promises on fair trade and launch a WTO turnaround. Read this exclusive report from our own Lori Wallach, who is on the ground in Geneva at the moment, and then take a moment to let President Obama know that you demand a WTO turnaround at www.WTOTurnaround.Org.
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Dispatch: Lori Wallach. Location: Geneva, WTO Ministerial.
It's late afternoon here in Geneva as the 7th ministerial of the WTO is opening - 10 years to the day that the Seattle WTO protests rocked the world.
Ten years after the world's most powerful governments and corporations failed to launch a massive WTO expansion at the 1999 Seattle WTO Ministerial, there still is not WTO expansion. BUT, there also is still no WTO turnaround - and the current rules are causing major damage on many fronts.
In fact, the damaging outcomes of the WTO's radical financial service deregulation requirements, agribiz-written food trade rules and more have resulted in most of the WTO member countries favoring negotiations to fix the existing WTO rules.
Thus, it was not surprising that the 300-plus press and civil society representatives who were just in a briefing presented by WTO Director General Pascal Lamy burst into repeated bouts of laughter when Lamy declared in short order that the WTO and the version of corporate globalization it implements had absolutely NOTHING to do with, respectively, the world financial crisis, the world food crisis or growing unemployment in numerous countries. In fact, the WTO was part of the cure to all of the above - oh, and the climate crisis also.
This after the WTO Director General had been directly contradicted on the financial deregulation the day before at a public event that included Lamy and the trade ministers of various countries, including Brazil and South Africa. Meanwhile, yesterday the G-33 bloc of countries focused on the food crisis also explicitly fingered the current WTO rules as a cause of the crisis, not a solution.
Lamy's comments came in response to questions about HOW the WTO intended to change its current rules to address their untenable outcomes. Instead, we were treated to the bizarre notion that the "Doha Round" - a watered-down-from-the-Seattle-plan-but-nonetheless-dangerous WTO expansion - is the answer to all ills. Yup, MORE WTO financial service dereg as the answer. More corporate control of food production and distribution as the answer.
Meanwhile, the topic of the WTO Doha Round is too toxic to put on the agenda here. Yes, this is a WTO summit at which negotiation is not on the agenda. The WTO boosters knew that one more collapsed WTO summit, and the WTO expansion idea would certainly be toast. But, it's been too dangerous to get together for FOUR years, and this has caused an increasing crisis of legitimacy for WTO which is supposed to met biannually in a conference of minister-level officials who, per WTO mythology, set the organization's agenda and lend it the credibility of their governments. So, here we are.
No country is willing to be blamed for officially pulling the plug on the Doha Round, yet many would be extremely relieved if some other country or bloc of countries did so. The speeches now being given at the opening ceremony are a bit Alice in Wonderland with calls for completion of the Doha Round based on terms and conditions not related to what is on the table. Perhaps the most interesting point raised by a trade minister here came yesterday from Brazil's Celso Amorim, who asked why almost a year into the Obama administration, the U.S. WTO representatives were continuing to push the same extreme GOP WTO agenda.
This Tuesday Obama is supposed to announce his decision on troops and Afghanistan (the last guess I heard was 30,000 as opposed to the 40,000 the General asked for) and we will once again see our middle-east battle commitment increase.
But is there a reason why the President didn't turn the problem over to the State Department for a negotiated solution? Sherwood Ross in OpEdNews writes an extended article on why diplomacy wasn't even considered. here's a clip:
On Wednesday, President Obama pledged to cut U.S. carbon emissions "in the range of" 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Obama also confirmed that he will attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen next month, as Aaron Wiener notes for the Washington Independent. But here's the catch: It's a one-day deal. Obama is only planning to stop by Copenhagen on Dec. 9 before flying to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize. The climate talks, on the other hand, span Dec. 7 to Dec. 18.
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So indulge me in a metaphor, if you will. Imagine you have a leak in your roof. If you fix it now, it's going to cost you $500. If you don't fix it, the water getting into your attic will eventually breed mold, which will cost many thousands of dollars to mitigate - if it hasn't already gotten to the point where your house is unsalvageable.
