Global Policy Forum
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In mid-May, the “Small Five,” Jordan, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Guatemala, and Singapore) called for the reform of the SC working methods. On May 16, Patricia O’Brien, the top lawyer for the UN Secretary General, “effectively killed” the resolution by recommending that the resolution have the support of 2/3 of the UN membership instead of the usual simple majority. Ambassador Seger of Switzerland, speaking on behalf of the group, withdrew the resolution, stating that “with all due respect, [this recommendation is] utterly wrong and biased.”
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The US finds itself preoccupied with how best to exploit China’s labor market, while pretending to care for the well-being of its people. Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese activist, has received international media attention for his escape from house arrest, and his sanctioning in the US embassy. While Chen’s work to promote women’s rights is certainly admirable, his situation has complicated diplomatic relations between China and the US. Politicians in the US, like Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, support Chen’s rights with great rhetoric in acts of political theater. Meanwhile, US corporations abuse Chinese factory workers, who work in inhumane conditions to keep the US consumer industry afloat.
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Watch Christopher Hayes on the subject:
“What we talk about when we talk about China . This week, in China , a tense and awkward bit of sublimated confrontation between the American and Chinese governments after blind Chinese lawyer and dissident Chen Guangcheng escaped from house arrest, fled to Beijing and enter the U.S. embassy , seeking refuge. This unfolded on the eve of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ‘s trip to China , making the situation all more fraught. And, first, it appeared as if the U.S. and China had cut a deal to release Chen , with assurances that he would not be in prison or harassed. But that deal fell apart. Chen ‘s friends and allies took to Twitter to express concern that he would be double-crossed. And now, it looks like China will grant Chen a visit to come study law in the U.S. But the basic contours of the story have triggered a predictable round of campaign recrimination. It’s hard not to view the tale in deeply moral terms. Here’s a lawyer taking on the powerful Chinese state for its forced abortions and sterilizations, who is so desperate for freedoms, he climbs a wall, even though he’s blind, badly injures his foot and limps his way to the U.S. embassy , hoping against hope to be welcomed into the free world, only to find himself caught up in the delicate, torturous calculation of interest that characterizes the two countries’ relationship. And so, it’s more or less a lay-up for Mitt Romney to take to the microphones and stay stuff like this.
MITT ROMNEY (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Some of the press reports coming from China suggest that we may not have been as effective in protecting his freedom as we should have been. And if those reports are true, that would be a dark day for freedom .
HAYES: The stories we tell ourselves about China tend to be closely bound up in our own myths about American exceptionalism and fears of American decline. Which means that in American politics , the nation of China with its 1.3 billion people serves as a kind of funhouse mirror, in which we see our own fears and neurosis about what we see reflected back at us. Both sides of the political spectrum see in China a grim, dystopic vision of where the United States is headed and what it might be one day become. For those on the right, particularly the religious right, China is the natural endpoint of America ‘s slide towards a godless nanny state , a tyrannical, authoritarian, communist regime that suppresses religious expression and forces women to have only one child. For the left, China is the corporatist neoliberal nightmare that we’re in the process of becoming — a place where the force of the state is used to suppress dissent and aid the oligarchs who run sweat shops where millions of poor workers with rights working in grinding misery to produce goods for us to consume. For establishment elites like Tom Friedman , China offers a model to be feared and emulated, an efficient technocratic burg that can win the future without dealing with the frustrating roadblocks of democracy and progress. When China needed to relocate 1.4 million people to build the Three Gorges Dam , they just did it. Because China confound our domestic ideological assumptions and divisions, the only reliable rule of our domestic politics is that the party out of power will happily condemn Chinese abuses and taunt the party in power for its cowardly appeasement. Here’s Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign.
BILL CLINTON, THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I would be firm, I would say if you want to continue most- favored nations status for your government -owned industries as well as your private ones, observe human rights in the future. Open your society.
HAYES: Less than two years later, President Clinton renewed China ‘s most favored nations training status over strenuous congressional objections. Then in 2000 , George W. Bush had to say.
GEORGE W. BUSH, THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The current president has called the relationship with China a strategic partnership. I believe our relationship needs to be redefined as one as competitor. Competitors can find areas of agreement. But we must make it clear to the Chinese that we don’t appreciate any attempt to spread weapons of mass destruction around the world.
HAYES: Of course, during Bush ‘s tenure, the trade deficit with China hit a new record, his administration tried to tamp down Taiwan ‘s anti- Beijing rhetoric and even attended the 2008 Olympics there with Mitt Romney , who even before the Chen Guangcheng episode also made getting tough on China a recurring campaign theme.
ROMNEY: I will China as a currency manipulator. We’ve got to clamp down on nations like China that are cheating, stealing our intellectual property. The time has come for a president that will stand up to China .
HAYES: And we can expect that were he to be re-elected or elected, Romney would go inevitably the way of Clinton and George W. Bush , in the careful and diplomatic Obama administration. Because as much as we’re convinced of our own might and influence, we need to recognize head on that the United States government will not be the ones to change China , not be the ones to bring democracy or protection of rights or accountability to its people. The Chinese people will do that. And if there’s a hopeful sign, it’s that all over the country, Chinese people are pushing back against their government and demanding accountability from their leaders. From the estimated 500 protests there every day, to the new Internet -savvy dissidents who have found increasingly ingenious ways to evade censors and the great firewall like these Chinese activists who posted pictures of themselves wearing sunglasses on Twitter in solidarity with Chen . They’re going to be the ones to make the new China . Not Barack Obama , not Mitt Romney.”
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Noam Chomsky on the History of the US Economy and its Decline
“The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.
The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.”
Click here to read the full story from TomDispatch.
In this talk, Glenn Greenwald argues that “humanitarian intervention” has been used historically to justify war, and that proponents are naïve to think military intervention could control and resolve complex conflicts. Humanitarianism has justified the US invasion of Iraq to “free” oppressed Iraqis, Gaddafi’s support of violent militias, and Hitler’s campaigns to “liberate” Germans from oppressive rule in Lithuania and Ukraine. While people under oppressive regimes may benefit from outside intervention, the ripple effects of a “humanitarian” war, such as in Libya and Iraq, show that no foreign military intervention is authentically humanitarian.
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye discovered remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles in the village of al Majala bearing the label “Made in the USA.” The missiles were said to be part of Yemeni strikes targeting “al Qaeda insurgents.” But many civilians were killed from those strikes, including 21 children. Shaye determined that the strikes were from the US, and WikiLeaks corroborated his assessment. Shaye was reporting facts that both Yemeni and US governments wanted to suppress. He continues to be confined in a Yemeni prison under the request of President Obama.
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Shahzad Akbar has been campaigning for years on behalf of noncombatant civilians who have been killed by the CIA’s covert drone warfare program in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Pakistanis in Khyber Pakhtonkhwa have very little means of raising international awareness of their situation, let alone obtaining justice for the harm done to them. Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer and founder of Foundation for Fundamental Rights, is suing the CIA for their actions.
Drones have become the signature weapons of the US covert air strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and three other sovereign states. But the use of drones in undeclared wars violates both the US Constitution and international law. Drone strikes are carried out without due process, and do not discriminate between intended targets and bystanders. Those responsible for drone strikes are miles away and receive impunity for their attacks. Legal campaigns against drones, like Akbar’s, bring attention to those killed by the CIA, and provide some legal protection to targeted civilians.
“I wanted to tell the American people about the human stories behind these strikes,” says Akbar, who is trying to expose the false narrative that drones provide “precision strikes” against “high-value targets.” “They think the American war on terror is making America safe, but it is not making America safe. It is creating enemies.”
Akbar explains that terrorist organizations reach out to the families of innocent civilians killed by US drones, since these civilians are more likely to sympathize with terrorist causes. In this way, the US drone operation is creating more terrorists and justifying more strikes in a vicious and violent cycle.
The London based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has documented over 160 cases of children out of 800 unarmed civilians who were killed by CIA operated drone strikes. Pakistanis who live in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa cannot afford to relocate their families away from US-targeted areas, and most feel helpless because of it.
The CIA and the US government have been trying to silence Akbar’s campaign, even though Akbar has worked with the US government and the FBI in the past to investigate terrorism in Pakistan. The US initially refused to grant him visas to speak at both the Columbia University Law School and the International Drone Summit in Washington DC. The US government barred him from entering the US specifically to prevent him from sharing his work with the US public.
Codepink and other organizers of the Drone Summit put pressure on the US government and Consul General Steve Maloney to grant Shahzad Akbar a visa, and they succeeded. Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Codepink and author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, will be in dialogue with Shahzad Akbar in a public event hosted by Global Policy Forum at the UN Church Center on May 2nd.
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Sources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/26/obama-drone-strikes-human-cost
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/13/lawyer-victims-cia-drone-pakistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/24/lawyer-cia-drones-visa-granted
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/29/cia-drone-strike-civilian-victims
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/articles/2011_05_12_Shahzad_CIA_drone_victims/
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/drone_activist_denied_visa/
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GPF will be hosting Medea Benjamin and Shahzad Akbar in a public event at the United Nations. Click here for more information.
G4S is a private military and security company (PMSC) that employs senior politicians and diplomats to lobby for contracts with the UK government. The UK outsources 1 billion dollars a year to G4S for work in the public sphere, such as guarding prisons, escorting refugees, and general policing. G4S’ most recent partnership with the UK Border Agency to manage asylum-seeker housing has been met with public outrage. Demonstrations and marches in Sheffield drew attention to G4S’ abuses, including charges of corporate manslaughter. Why is the UK spending taxpayer money to fund PMSCs with questionable human rights records?
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“The United States is a bit like a 375-pound, middle-aged man with a heart condition walking down a city street at night eating a Big Mac. He’s sweating profusely because he’s afraid he might get mugged. But the thing that’s going to kill him is the burger.
Since the end of the Cold War, America has been on a relentless search for enemies. I don’t mean a search in the sense of ferreting them out and defeating them. I mean that America seems to have a visceral need for them.
Many in the United States have a rampant, untreated case of enemy dependency. Politicians love enemies because bashing them helps stir up public sentiment and distract attention from problems at home. The defense industry loves enemies because enemies help them make money. Pundits and their publications love enemies because enemies sell papers and lead eyeballs to cable-news food fights…”
Click here to read more by David Rothkopf on foreignpolicy.com.
On April 23-25, hundreds of institutional investors will gather at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City for a conference on “Global AgInvesting 2012.” For a fee of $3,000, participants - including university endowment funds, public sector pension funds and charitable foundations - will hear about lucrative new investments in agricultural land and commodities.
This conference promotes the large scale acquisition of land by foreign investors, a dangerous practice known as “land grabbing” that is leading to record levels of hunger, skyrocketing food prices and environmental degradation.
The organizers, HighQuest Partners, are advertising agricultural “assets” in Africa, Asia, South America and Eastern Europe as a route to high returns. But wherever land grabs have taken place they have led to displacement, loss of livelihood and often death in the communities affected.
GPF has been working on land grabbing since 2008. We regularly feature the issue on our website and have put it at the center of our advocacy efforts at the UN. Time and again, we have exposed the dangers. Proponents claim that investments will help feed a growing world population and promote development. In fact, these schemes do not contribute to rural well-being. Far from increasing food production for local consumption, land grabbing usually results in export crops, including biofuel feedstocks and cut flowers. Land grabbing has already caused the violent displacement of tens of millions of small producers, worsening poverty and hunger and driving waves of migration. Women farmers, the majority of smallholders, suffered especially.
One billion people - one human being in seven - are hungry and millions more have been pushed into poverty by rising food prices. Well-heeled investors hope to take advantage of still further price increases.
GPF is opposing these destructive trends. We have sent an open letter to the Presidents of Harvard, Princeton and Yale - three of several universities participating in the conference - urging them to reconsider irresponsible land grabbing investments. And on Tuesday, April 24th, we will be protesting outside of the Waldorf Astoria with many others, including Occupy Wall Street.
GPF needs your support to continue this important work. As an independent organization, GPF does not take money from corporations or agro-industry foundations. Your contribution makes our work possible. With your help, we will continue this campaign through our website, media interviews, public events and joint efforts with many partners.
Please make a tax-deductible online donation to GPF now. Every dollar will go a long way!
And for those of you based in New York, join us at 10.30am on Tuesday April 24th in front of the Waldorf Astoria to say “No!” to land grabbing
Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! covers the Kony 2012 campaign.
There is a fine line between raising awareness and promoting propaganda, especially if “awareness” is not paired with critical reflection. While we can all agree that Joseph Kony and the LRA should be brought to justice, it is important not to go berserk about it, and consider the best possible strategies.
In 2011, Invisible Children, the non-profit organization behind Kony 2012, encouraged President Obama to deploy 100 military advisers into Uganda. But to find Joseph Kony, advisers may have to cross the Democratic of Congo or South Sudan, completely disregarding international law. Invisible Children’s and Obama’s intentions were unclear to the public: did the US want to kill Kony, or capture him for trial in the International Criminal Court whose mandate the US does not recognize? GPF criticized part 1 of Kony 2012 for failing to consider the human, legal, and geopolitical consequences of sending military troops into sovereign states.
Then part 2 came out, where Invisible Children (with more media savy, sans Jason Russell) relentlessly argued that “awareness” and vandalism by legal minors in US suburbia would translate into an effective military regime in Sub-Saharan Africa.
When Ugandans were shown part 1, they were offended by Invisible Children’s video, so much so that they threw rocks at the screen and turned the viewing into a riot.
Imagine how they would react if shown Invisible Children’s original 2006 campaign:
Small-scale farmers and their supporters are celebrating the international day for peasant’s struggle. La Via Campesina, a coalition of 148 organizations, is holding over 250 events around the world, ranging from university lectures to grassroots protests against corporate agribusinesses. Click here for more information on how you can participate.
