climate change summit, with many of the same dynamics that
surrounded the WTO meetings in Seattle, exactly a decade ago.
That is, in importance to the world and a popular response which
will transform the meeting inside and out, where masses have
already begun gathering. Consciously and dynamically, all of it
will be impacted and educated by what happened in the Battle for
Seattle; discussed tomorrow. Here's the outline:
Terrence McNally
310-476-4999 / C: 310-486-3691
temcnally@post.harvard.edu
Sunday 12/06 1pm
Free Forum w Terry McNally / KPFK LA, WBAI NY
Byline: alternet.org/authors/5358
terrencemcnally.net / a world that just might work
This past week marked the ten-year anniversary of the World Trade
Organization's meeting in Seattle which was met by 50,000 protestors against
corporate globalization. Free Forum looks back at Seattle and the ten years
in between with two guests who played important roles.
First, Norm Stamper, who was Seattle's police chief at the time, and oversaw
the police response to the demonstrations. We talk with him about those
events and about his life and work in the decade since, which will probably
surprise those who confronted his forces in 1999. Now retired, Stamper wrote
the book, BREAKING RANK: A TOP COP's EXPOSE OF THE DARK SIDE OF AMERICAN
POLICING and has become a prominent spokesman for LEAP, Law Enforcement
Against Prohibition.
Second, Kevin Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange and founder of the
Green Festivals. Kevin was intimately involved in organizing for the Seattle
WTO teach-ins and protests and co-edited (with Roger Burbach) Globalize
This!: The Struggle Against the World Trade Organization and Corporate Rule.
His latest books are The Green Festival Reader: Fresh Ideas from Agents of
Change, and Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots.
On Free Forum we explore the lives, work and ideas of individuals who offer
pieces of the puzzle of a world that just might work. We look at new,
innovative and provocative approaches to business, environment, health,
science, politics and media.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/world/americas/05briefs-Honduras.html?ref=world
Honduras: U.S. Urges Support of Neighbors for New Leader
By GINGER THOMPSON
NY Times: December 4, 2009
The United States urged members of the Organization of American States to
put the coup in Honduras behind them and support the efforts of the newly
elected president to heal the politically divided country. At a meeting on
Friday in Washington, Ambassador Carmen Lomellín told her counterparts that
the presidential election Sunday showed that Hondurans "wish to move forward
and re-establish democratic normality." Most other countries were not
convinced, saying they would not recognize elections held by an illegitimate
government. "In our judgment, Honduras is not free," Ambassador José E.
Pinelo of Bolivia said. "In our countries leaders govern, not puppets."
***
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009124902/imperial-blues-0
Imperial Blues
By Robert Borosage
Campaign for America's Future: December 2, 2009
..."[O]ur troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended -- because
the nation that I am most interested in building is our own."
-President Obama
But Afghanistan comes first?
President Obama made the best possible case for dispatching more troops to
Afghanistan last night. But his speech left me with a haunting foreboding.
Surely this is the way that great imperial powers decline. Their soldiers
police the ends of the earth. There is always another enemy, always a
threat-sometimes imagined, often real-that must be faced. And meanwhile, the
productive economy declines, the rich live increasingly off investments
abroad, the poor depend on public sustenance, the middle declines. No battle
is so costly that it cannot be afforded; no battle so unimportant that the
nation must not be mobilized. The soldiers become professionals,
"volunteers" in our terms. The institutions of the Republic-the Congress,
the Senate-are scorned, often deservedly so. The executive decides the
questions of war and peace. The secret state expands. The country finds
itself constantly at war. New presidents inherit the wars of their
predecessors. They are faced not with deciding to go to war, but whether to
accept defeat in one already in progress.
And slowly, the great power declines from the inside out. The wars are
costly, running up national debts. Vital investments are put off. Schools
decline. Sewers leak. For a long time, circuses distract from the spreading
ruin. Other societies become productive centers, capturing the new
industries. Some begin providing better education and support for their
citizens. Their taxes, not drained by the cost of wars past and present, can
be devoted to what we used to call "domestic improvements."
The escalation in Afghanistan, so inevitable, so logical, so thoughtfully
considered, surely is but a chapter in this saga. The president committed
the country to spend about $250 billion in Afghanistan over the next 18
months. For a wealthy country, this isn't a lot. We can afford it. We will
chase the devil in South Waziristan. Our soldiers will repel the Taliban,
providing a "breathing space" for a corrupt government whose writ barely
reaches the outskirts of the capital city.
On Thursday, the President will convene a jobs summit. Already, his aides
have sent out the word that deficits will limit what can be done. Or as the
head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, Christine Roemer
writes in The Wall Street Journal today, "Given the budget deficits this
administration inherited, it is critical to leverage scarce public funds."
The collapse of revenues at the state and local level will force states to
make cuts and layoffs that are projected to cost another 900,000 jobs over
the next year. But more aid to the states and localities, unpopular in the
polls, is apparently not on the president's agenda. Anyone traveling in
America runs into the growing costs of our aging and outmoded
infrastructure, from collapsing bridges to exploding sewer pipes, to slow
trains on bad tracks, to schools in such disrepair that they pose dangers to
the students. But a bold program of investment in our infrastructure is
considered a bridge too far.
Far worse in many ways than the money squandered on wars abroad is the
attention consumed, the values distorted. This president understands that
Americans are focused on the economic troubles here at home. In his speech
last night, he argued "as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan
responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity
provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It
underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people and allows
investment in new industry. And it will allow us to compete in this century
as successfully as we did in the last."
Note the order of priority. Our "strength here at home" is needed because it
(1) is the foundation of our power; (2) pays for our military; (3)
underwrites our diplomacy. It also taps the potential of our people and
allows us to compete globally. Stunningly absent in that martial list is any
sense of creating a society that has eradicated hunger and poverty, that has
secured the American dream for its citizens.
This attention disorder undermines our security as well. Next week the
president will travel to Copenhagen, where he will boldly call for setting
standards on carbon emissions, in essence promising to deliver a Congress
that is not nearly ready to make that commitment. This president, more than
any other, has the vision and the capacity to rally this country to meet the
real security challenge posed by catastrophic climate change and to grasp
the vital economic opportunity of leading the impending green industrial
revolution. The speech to the cadets of West Point might have dramatically
made that national security case, begun a campaign to run up to the
Copenhagen global summit and culminated in a Nobel Peace Prize address that
framed the new challenge. Instead, the president had little choice but to
focus his attention and his speech on Afghanistan, with critics already
accusing him of dithering, daring to question the generals' "requirements."
This is a very rich country, despite the years of conservative misrule. But
even wealthy countries must choose. We can afford to police the word-to
sustain 800 bases across the globe, to station troops in Korea, in Japan, in
Bosnia, in Europe, fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sustain fleets to
police the seas.
In his speech, the president called us to that mission:
"The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and
it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan... unlike the great power
conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the 20th century, our
effort will involve disorderly regions and diffuse enemies.... We will have
to be nimble and precise in our use of military power. Where al-Qaida and
its allies attempt to establish a foothold-whether in Somalia or Yemen or
elsewhere they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong
partnerships."
South Waziristan, Yemen, Somalia, Kosovo, the Taiwan straits, the North
Korean border, the seven seas-we can do this. But the result is that we are
continually at war. And the wars cost-in money, in lives, in attention.
Inevitably, domestic priorities, as well as emerging security threats that
have no military answers, get ignored. A rich country, Adam Smith wrote, has
a lot of ruin in it. We seem intent on testing the limits of that
proposition.
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