System Change Not Climate Change

by A.A. French

After being in Copenhagen for five days now, there are some thoughts running through my head that I’d like to express and share with y’all. This is going to be short, and probably not all that eloquent, but it will help me get some points across that I think are really important at this critical moment in the fight for our climate. I do want to say that while this post is critical of the way things are happening at COP15, I still deeply respect the youth of all delegations who are inside this conference, trying to scrap out a decent deal for the world. I thank them for all their efforts, but am coming from a different perspective here.

I came to Copenhagen hesitant and nervous….not wanting to place too much hope into the talks that had effectively been castrated by the UNFCCC leadership and Yvo de Boer. But I still wanted to be here all the same; after all, it’s supposedly the climate party of the century! So I hooked up with some French activists and an amazing organization called Climate Justice Action and planned on doing all that I could during the two weeks of the conference. I wanted to rally, protest, take part in negotiations, have my voice heard and above all- help bring a fair, ambitious and binding treaty out of Copenhagen. But upon arriving in Denmark, I entered a catatonic state of dumbfoundedness… having finally come to the realization, like so many others (James Hansen, Breakthrough Institute etc), that these talks were doomed to fail and there was nothing anyone could do about it. As quickly as it had come, my dream of that fair, ambitious and binding treaty that we’ve all been working towards disappeared in a smoggy cloud of yen, dollars, euros and political and moral weakness.

Since 2006, I’ve been a part of the youth climate movement and I always believed that it was possible to achieve the sort of change we needed through the United States Congress, the United Nations Conference of Parties or other governmental bodies. To put it short and use that worn out term, I believed in “the system”. I believed that governments did have the power to stop climate change and did in fact want to stop climate change. I thought COP 15 would be a conference of folks dedicated to doing whatever was necessary to solve the climate crisis, regardless of money, corporate influence or politics.

I was wrong.

The first five days of the conference have been full of back door dealings by Annex 1 countries, oppression of “developing” countries like Tuvalu by official delegations and a lack of desire for a legitimate deal in Copenhagen by members of the US delegation. So, even with tens of thousands of people working on a global climate treaty for the past fifteen years, we have yet to reach any sort of legitimate, legally binding treaty that addresses climate change and climate justice while refusing to give into corporate and big business pressure. You would think that when you put the world’s top negotiators, scientists, governmental representatives and UN hot shots together for 15 years, they’d at least be able to figure something out right?

Cuba’s other revolution is green, not red

In Copenhagen they are debating how to end deforestation, but in Cuba’s Pinar del Río they were replanting 50 years ago, creating lush, unspoilt valleys

Cuban hills ... typical bungalows in Las Terrazas, Sierra del Rosario Nature and Biosphere Reserve, Pinar del Rio. Photograph: John Harden/Robert Harding/Rex Features

Birds and butterflies are swooping above us and, as our taxi reaches the summit of this forest road just 40 minutes from the heat and noise of Havana, the view opens to an undulating landscape painted every shade of green. Before Castro these hills were dusty yellow and brown scrub.

If Copenhagen needs a model, this is the most eloquent I know, a visionary example of reforestation and the long term benefits it brings. While the rest of the world is ripping up forests in the name of minerals and wood, Cuba has been replanting its tropical forests in the name of jobs, the environment and a lush holiday destination for decades. This policy has worked so well that in 1984 Unesco gave biosphere status to 26,686 hectares of forest in the western region of Pinar del Río, where I am heading to stay at Las Terrazas, 50km from Havana.

Facebook faces criticism on privacy change

Digital rights groups and bloggers have heaped criticism on Facebook’s changed privacy policy.

Critics said the changes were unwelcome and “nudged” people towards sharing updates with the wider web and made them findable via search engines.

The changes were introduced on 9 December via a pop-up that asked users to update privacy settings.

Facebook said the changes help members manage updates they wanted to share, not trick them into revealing too much.

“Facebook is nudging the settings toward the ‘disclose everything’ position,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the US Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic). “That’s not fair from the privacy perspective.”

Epic said it was analysing the changes to see if they amounted to trickery.

Afghans’ anger at Obama’s Nobel peace prize win

Barack Obama, the US president, is due to receive the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo – days
after he ordered an escalation of US involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

In making Obama the third sitting US President to win the award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Obama’s co-operative approach to global issues.

But many critics say that Obama’s resume is too thin to stand scrutiny with other Nobel peace laureates.

And for many Afghans, Obama’s strategy of even more troops does not fit into their vision of what will
bring peace. From Kabul, Steve Chao reports.

Cartoon of the week

Cartoon by Leon Kuhn

Addicted to Nonsense

Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars”?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives-the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke-doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

The Legendary Godfather of Rap Returns – Gil Scott-Heron Interview

In early 2010 Gil Scott-Heron will release a brand new album entitled ‘I’m New Here’ on XL Recordings. For more info and to download the track ‘Where Did The Night Go’ for free go to http://imnewhere.net/

Originally broadcast on BBC2 on Monday 16th November 2009

Bala Fria on Twitter

Gil Scott-Heron – ‘I’m New Here’ out early 2010.

In early 2010 Gil Scott-Heron will release a brand new album entitled ‘I’m New Here’ on XL Recordings.

Here are four excerpts from his first album of new material since 1997; ‘A.M.’, ‘I’m New Here’, ‘Me And The Devil’ and ‘I’ll Take Care Of You’. These tracks have been recorded in New York over the past 18 months.

Live review: Gil Scott-Heron at the El Rey and new album

October 5, 2009 |  3:25 pm

“For those of you who believed I wouldn’t be here,” Gil Scott-Heron told the El Rey crowd with an amiable smile Sunday night, “you lose.”  It was the 60-year-old poet, musician, spoken-word sage and hip-hop harbinger’s first show in L.A. in several years. After decades of parsing media mirages in song, it was as if Scott-Heron’s mere appearance onstage were his latest political provocation. He said nothing about the drug- and health-related predicaments that had kept him from performing in the U.S., except to suggest that the rumors on the Internet had been, to borrow the words of another humorous and acutely race-conscious American raconteur, Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.  The message was simply this: Gil Scott-Heron is still here.

Seated behind a keyboard, Scott-Heron introduced himself to the audience with a freewheeling and amusing monologue that took in the ludicrousness of CNN-commissioned “experts,” the trick of finding your own “-ology” and the problems with February as Black History Month and calendars in general. He announced a new record (his first in more than a decade and a half) to be released next year, “I’m New Here,” which he joked would surprise listeners as much as “the old ones you have not bought,” and a book, “The Last Holiday,” chronicling Scott-Heron and Stevie Wonder’s 1980s campaign to make the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

Scott-Heron began the set by himself, with his song dedicated to voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in honor of her Oct. 6 birthday, “95 South (All of the Places We’ve Been).” He was then joined by his band,  including saxophonist Leon Williams, guitarist Ed Brady, bassist Robert Gordon, keyboardist and vocalist Kim Jordan and drummer Kenny Powell. They launched into another song, “We Almost Lost Detroit” (also from the 1977 album “Bridges”), after Scott-Heron’s shout-out to a “brother named Common” who sampled the song for 2007’s “The People.”

It was a meditative and exuberant night. The set continued with the rousing rebuke to “the military and the monetary” in “Work for Peace,” the vivacious musicological query “Is That Jazz?,” his stirring national elegy “Winter in America” and “Your Daddy Loves You,” which Scott-Heron dedicated to his own daughter in the audience.  The singer who boldly derided Ronald Reagan in “B Movie” and “Re-Ron” refrained from mentioning any specific political figures. This was not an evening for discussion of how “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” or an open letter to rappers in a “Message to the Messengers.”

Capitalism – A Love Story

Michael Moore: Capitalism – A Love Story 2009

South of The Border

Oliver Stone’s South of the Border 2009

Royal Mail: a battle for us all

The postal workers’ fight is crucial for every worker, student, pensioner and unemployed person in Britain.

It is part of a much bigger war – over public services, jobs, union rights, and pay and conditions at work. It’s about who will be made to pay for the economic crisis.

A victory for the postal workers would show everyone else that resistance is possible and that workers can win. It would help develop the strength needed to beat back the assaults.

A defeat would encourage further attacks.

The End of Murdoch’s London Paper!

News International announced last week that it planned to close its afternoon freesheet, the London Paper having lost £12.9m in year to end of June 2008. The last edition will likely be printed on September 18th 2009.

The announcement signals an end to the London freesheet wars, which began almost exactly three years ago in August 2006.

Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Murdoch???

(Laugh? I nearly cried!!…)

James Murdoch, The Chairman and Chief Executive for Europe and Asia of News Corporation and son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, speaking last week at the Edinburgh International Television Festival attacked the BBC and its online expansion claiming it is a threat to “independent journalism”, and called for an “overhaul of regulation”.

Mr Murdoch also said in his lecture that the BBC is “dominant” and that its “income is guaranteed and growing.”…

John Pilger – Obama Is A Corporate Marketing Creation

John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. He has twice won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US.

See also:

• Murdoch’s War on Journalism
• Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire
• The Rising of Latin America – The Genesis of the ‘War on Democracy’
• The War on Democracy by John Pilger
• War By Media
• Stealing  A Nation – The Story of Diego Garcia and the Chagossian People
• The Truth Game

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

By the author: “The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world.”

See http://www.crisisofcredit.com

To watch this short animation in HD click here http://www.vimeo.com/3261363

Murdoch’s War On Journalism

Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire has been built on a pattern of viciousness and deceit–aided at every step of the way by the politicians.

August 4, 2009

John Pilger

I MET Eddie Spearritt in the Philharmonic pub overlooking Liverpool. It was a few years after 96 Liverpool football fans had been crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, on April 15, 1989. Eddie’s son, Adam, aged 14, died in his arms. The “main reason for the disaster,” Lord Justice Taylor subsequently reported, was the “failure” of the police, who had herded fans into a lethal pen.

“As I lay in my hospital bed,” Eddie said, “the hospital staff kept the Sun away from me. It’s bad enough when you lose your 14-year-old son because you’re treating him to a football match. Nothing can be worse than that. But since then I’ve had to defend him against all the rubbish printed by the Sun about everyone there being a hooligan and drinking. There was no hooliganism. During 31 days of Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry, no blame was attributed because of alcohol. Adam never touched it in his life.”

Three days after the disaster, Kelvin MacKenzie, Rupert Murdoch’s “favorite editor,” sat down and designed the Sun front page, scribbling “THE TRUTH” in huge letters. Beneath it, he wrote three subsidiary headlines: “Some fans picked pockets of victims”…”Some fans urinated on the brave cops”…”Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.” All of it was false; MacKenzie was banking on anti-Liverpool prejudice.

When sales of the Sun fell by almost 40 percent on Merseyside, Murdoch ordered his favorite editor to feign penitence. BBC Radio 4 was chosen as his platform. The “sarf London” accent that was integral to MacKenzie’s fake persona as an “ordinary punter” was now a contrite, middle-class voice that fitted Radio 4. “I made a rather serious error,” said MacKenzie, who has since been back on Radio 4 in a very different mood, aggressively claiming that the Sun’s treatment of Hillsborough was merely a “vehicle for others.”

When we met, Eddie Spearritt mentioned MacKenzie and Murdoch with a dignified anger. So did Joan Traynor, who lost two sons, Christopher and Kevin, whose funeral was invaded by MacKenzie’s photographers even though Joan had asked for her family’s privacy to be respected. The picture of her sons’ coffins on the front page of a paper that had lied about the circumstances of their death so deeply upset her that for years she could barely speak about it.

Such relentless inhumanity forms the iceberg beneath the Guardian’s current exposé of Murdoch’s alleged payment of $1.7 million hush money to those whose phones his News of the World reporters have criminally invaded. “A cultural Chernobyl,” is how the German investigative journalist Reiner Luyken, based in London, described Murdoch’s effect on British life.

Tensions Rise in Latin America over US Military Plan to Use Three Bases in Colombia

The Colombian government has agreed to grant US forces the use of three Colombian military bases for South American anti-drug operations. The move has heightened tensions between Colombia, the largest recipient of US military aid in the Americas, and its neighbors, particularly Venezuela and Ecuador. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warned that the US Army could invade his country from Colombia.

Clip courtesy of Democracy Now

Chávez Urges Obama To Change His Ambiguous Discourse

Venezuela’s President blamed the CIA for the coup in Honduras

President Hugo Chávez urged his US counterpart Barack Obama’s Administration to stop shilly-shallying and condemn the coup d’état against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.

During his weekly radio and TV program Aló Presidente (Hello President) last Sunday, Chávez avoided holding the US ruler responsible for the events in Honduras. He rather pointed to “the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US Department of State and the Pentagon,” Efe reported.

Chávez claimed that if Obama moved to withdraw the US troops from the Honduran military base of Palmerola, revoke the visas and seize the properties that the members of the de facto government own in the United States, the situation for the coup leaders would become untenable.

Obama “is not going to trick us with an ambiguous discourse or with a smile,” warned Chávez. He added that Obama wants to be seen “as a peaceful dove, as an innocent lamb.”

The Venezuelan ruler said that he would rather deal with former US President George W. Bush than with Obama. In Chávez’s words, “you better face the head of the empire assuming his role as such, than face someone who is off and on.”

Chávez recalled that US President John F. Kennedy was killed by US “imperial” forces. “I hope they do not kill Obama, because Obama is biting off more than he can chew.”

Furthermore, the Venezuelan ruler admitted that he has “talked with several Honduran military officers.” He said that he knows that middle and low rank officers in the Honduran Army are unhappy with the current situation. Therefore, Chávez predicted that Zelaya would return to his country.

“Zelaya will return to his country. The government of Honduras will decide whether to kill him or not. He is willing to die,” the Venezuelan Head of State said.

Finally, he drew the attention of the de facto government about the arrest of a group of Venezuelan journalists in Honduras. Chávez said that “if anything happens” to the staff of the Venezuelan TV channels who are currently working in Honduras, the de facto authorities shall take responsibility for their actions.

Chávez added that despite the US military power, political changes in Latin America will not cease.

“The process of change in Latin America is not going to stop, President Obama. You can send the Fourth and the Sixth Fleet, or the world’s largest bombers, but changes will not end,” Chávez said.

Translated by Gerardo Cárdenas

Source: El Universal