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The Real Scandals of Obama's Latin America Summit |
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Saturday, 21 April 2012 09:56 |
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Goodman writes: "The two main pillars of US foreign policy - increasing neoliberalism and increasing militarism around drugs - continue. They feed off of each other and have created a crisis in that corridor, running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico."
A US-trained 'jungle commando' disembarks from a Blackhawk helicopter, while a crop-spraying plane flies past, during an anti-drug operation in an illegal coca plantation, in 2000, under the US-backed, billion-dollar Plan Colombia. (photo: Reuters/Eliana Aponte)
The Real Scandals of Obama's Latin America Summit
By Amy Goodman, Guardian UK
21 April 12
 resident Barack Obama's re-election campaign launched its first Spanish-language ads this week, just after returning from the Summit of the Americas. He spent three days in Colombia, longer than any president in US history. The trip was marred, however, by a prostitution scandal involving the US military and secret service. General Martin Dempsey, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, said:
"We let the boss down, because nobody's talking about what went on in Colombia other than this incident."
Dempsey is right. It also served as a metaphor for the US government's ongoing treatment of Latin America.
The scandal reportedly involves 11 members of the US secret service and five members of the US Army special forces, who allegedly met prostitutes at one or more bars in Cartagena and took up to 20 of the women back to their hotel, some of whom may have been minors. This all deserves thorough investigation, but so do the policy positions that Obama promoted while in Cartagena.
First, the war on drugs. Obama stated at the summit:
"I, personally, and my administration's position is that legalization is not the answer."
Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told me that, despite Obama's predictable line, this summit showed "the transformation of the regional and global dialogue around drug policy …":
"This is the first you've had a president saying that we're willing to look at the possibility that US drug policies are doing more harm than good in some parts of the world."
He credits the growing consensus across the political spectrum in Latin America, from key former presidents like Vicente Fox of Mexico, who supports legalization of drugs, to current leaders like Mexico's Felipe Caldéron, who cited the rapacious demand for drugs in the US as the core of the problem. Nadelmann went on:
"You have the funny situation of Evo Morales, the leftist leader of Bolivia, former head of the coca growers' union, lecturing the United States about – essentially, sounding like Milton Friedman – that 'How can you expect us to reduce the supply when there is a demand?'
"So there's the beginning of a change here. I don't think it's going to be possible to put this genie back in the bottle."
Then, there is trade. Obama and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos also announced that the US-Colombian Free Trade Agreement would take full force 15 May. Colombian and US labor leaders decried the move, since Colombia is the worst country on Earth for trade unionists. Labor organizers are regularly murdered in Colombia, with at least 34 killed in the past year and a half.
When Obama was first running for president, he promised to oppose the Colombia FTA, "because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements." That year, 54 Colombian trade unionists were killed. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said the announcement "is deeply disappointing and troubling". Republicans, on the other hand, are offering grudging praise to Obama for pushing the FTA.
On Cuba, Obama took the globally unpopular position of defending the US embargo. Even at home, polls show that a strong majority of the American people and businesses support an end to the embargo. The US also succeeded, once again, in banning Cuba from the summit, prompting Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa to boycott the meeting this year.
Responding to overall US intransigence, other western hemisphere countries are organizing themselves. Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at New York University, told me:
"Latin Americans themselves are creating these bodies that are excluding the United States, that are deepening integration, political and economic integration. This seems to be a venue in which they come together in order to criticize Washington, quite effectively."
Grandin compared Obama's Latin America policies to those of his predecessors:
"The two main pillars of US foreign policy – increasing neoliberalism and increasing militarism around drugs – continue. They feed off of each other and have created a crisis in that corridor, running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. That's been a complete disaster, and there's no change."
It will take more than a prostitution scandal to cover that up.
• Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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A Stain That Won't Wash Away |
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Friday, 20 April 2012 15:35 |
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Lustgarten writes: "Two years after a series of gambles and ill-advised decisions on a BP drilling project led to the largest accidental oil spill in United States history and the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, no one has been held accountable."
The oil may wash away, but the stain will not. (photo: Getty Images)
A Stain That Won't Wash Away
By Abrahm Lustgarten, The New York Times
20 April 12
 wo years after a series of gambles and ill-advised decisions on a BP drilling project led to the largest accidental oil spill in United States history and the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, no one has been held accountable.
Sure, there have been about $8 billion in payouts and, in early March, the outlines of a civil agreement that will cost BP, the company ultimately responsible, an additional $7.8 billion in restitution to businesses and residents along the Gulf of Mexico. It's also true that the company has paid at least $14 billion more in cleanup and other costs since the accident began on April 20, 2010, bringing the expense of this fiasco to about $30 billion for BP. These are huge numbers. But this is a huge and profitable corporation.
What is missing is the accountability that comes from real consequences: a criminal prosecution that holds responsible the individuals who gambled with the lives of BP's contractors and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. Only such an outcome can rebuild trust in an oil industry that asks for the public's faith so that it can drill more along the nation's coastlines. And perhaps only such an outcome can keep BP in line and can keep an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster from happening again.
BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences, and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.
Before the gulf blowout, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil, BP was convicted of two felony environmental crimes and a misdemeanor: after it failed to report that its contractors were dumping toxic waste in Alaska in 1995; after its refinery in Texas City, Tex., exploded, killing 15, in 2005; and after it spilled more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil from a corroded pipeline onto the Alaskan tundra in 2006. In all, more than 30 people employed directly or indirectly by BP have died in connection with these and other recent accidents.
In at least two of those cases, the company had been warned of human and environmental dangers, deliberated the consequences and then ignored them, according to my reporting.
None of the upper-tier executives who managed BP - John Browne and Tony Hayward among them - were malicious. Their decisions, however, were driven by money. Neither their own sympathies nor the stark risks in their operations - corroding pipelines, dysfunctional safety valves, disarmed fire alarms and so on - could compete with the financial necessities of profit making.
Before the accident in Texas City, BP had declined to spend $150,000 to fix a part of the system that allowed gasoline to spew into the air and blow up. Documents show that the company had calculated the cost of a human life to be $10 million. Shortly before that disaster, a senior plant manager warned BP's London headquarters that the plant was unsafe and a disaster was imminent. A report from early 2005 predicted that BP's refinery would kill someone "within the next 12 to 18 months" unless the company changed its practices.
Such explicit flirtation with deadly risk was undertaken as part of Mr. Browne's effort while chief executive to expand BP as quickly as possible. Mr. Browne relentlessly cut costs, including on maintenance and safety. Then he hastily assembled a series of acquisitions and mergers between 1998 and 2001 that added tens of thousands of employees, blurred chains of command and wrought chaos on his operations. His methods - and the demands of Wall Street - became overly dependent on quantitative measures of success at the expense of environmental and human risk.
After each disaster, Mr. Browne pledged to refresh his focus on safety, investment in maintenance and commitment to the environment. His successor, Mr. Hayward, followed suit, saying that BP's culture had to change. But the Deepwater Horizon tragedy - which bears many of the same traits as the company's past accidents - shows how difficult it has been for the company's leaders to shift BP's corporate values and live up to their promises.
The question becomes, did they try hard enough, and did the mechanisms of oversight, regulation and law enforcement work sufficiently to provide a recidivist organization the deterrent that could guarantee its compliance?
After its previous convictions, BP paid unprecedented fines - more than $70 million - and committed to spending at least $800 million more on maintenance to improve safety. The point was to demonstrate that the cost of doing business wrong far outweighed the cost of doing business right. But without personal accountability, the fines become just another cost of doing business, William Miller, a former investigator for the Environmental Protection Agency who was involved in the Texas City case, told me.
The problem then (and perhaps now) is that it is the slow pileup of factors that causes an industrial disaster. Poor decisions are usually made incrementally by a range of people with differing levels of responsibility, and almost always behind a shield of plausible deniability. It makes it almost impossible to pin one clear-cut bad call on a single manager, which is partly why no BP official has ever been held criminally accountable.
Instead, the corporation is held accountable. It isn't clear that charging the company repeatedly with misdemeanors and felonies has accomplished anything.
At more than $30 billion and climbing, the amount BP has paid out so far for reparations, lawsuits and cleanup dwarfs the roughly $8 billion that Exxon had to pay after its 1989 spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. And BP will very likely still pay billions more before this is finished.
And yet it is not enough. Two years after analysts questioned whether the extraordinary cost and loss of confidence might drive BP out of business, it has come roaring back. It collected more than $375 billion in 2011, pocketing $26 billion in profits.
What the gulf spill has taught us is that no matter how bad the disaster (and the environmental impact), the potential consequences have never been large enough to dissuade BP from placing profits ahead of prudence. That might change if a real person was forced to take responsibility - or if the government brought down one of the biggest hammers in its arsenal and banned the company from future federal oil leases and permits altogether. Fines just don't matter.
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FOCUS: Is Vermont's Governor Surrendering to Monsanto? |
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Friday, 20 April 2012 13:32 |
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Excerpt: "Vermont's governor has 2 weeks to stand with 90 percent of his constituents who favor labeling genetically engineered foods, or cave to Monsanto."
90 percent of citizens in Vermont support mandatory labeling for genetically engineered foods. (photo: Friends Eat)
Is Vermont's Governor Surrendering to Monsanto?
By Will Allen, Ronnie Cummins, AlterNet
20 April 12
 ermont Governor Peter Shumlin has less than two weeks to either stand with the 90 percent of his constituents who support a mandatory labeling bill for genetically engineered foods - or cave in to Monsanto's threat to sue the state if legislators pass H.722.
If the Governor's words this past week are any indication, he's already surrendered to Monsanto. But Vermonters, not known for backing down from a fight, are challenging legislators to take on the biotech industry. They're even offering to raise money for the state's defense.
Last week thousands of Vermonters flooded the Governor's office with petitions, phone calls and emails, to make the case for GMO labeling of all food sold in Vermont and to demand a vote on the bill. Under Vermont's constitution, the Governor can extend the state's legislative session indefinitely, ultimately forcing a vote on the bill. If he doesn't extend the session, or urge legislators to vote on the bill, it will die in committee.
But while supporters were emailing and phoning and signing, Governor Shumlin was sending out a canned response to the thousands of supporters who emailed his office. In the Governor's own words:
Dear Friend,
Thank you for contacting me about labeling genetically modified foods. I agree with those who advocate for clear labeling of genetically modified foods. GMO labeling makes sense and would give Vermonters key information about their food choices. However, we know from attempts to pass similar legislation in the past that such a requirement would not stand up to federal legal scrutiny. I don't think it is fair to ask Vermonters to bear the burden of the cost of those legal challenges...
On April 12, in the hope once again of forcing a vote, more than 300 people packed the Vermont statehouse for public testimony on H.722, with more than one hundred of them testifying - every single one in favor - of passing the bill. When legislators brought up the burden of a potential legal battle, supporters of the bill called for a legal defense fund - not a retreat.
However, a bill that once appeared destined to pass on the merits of scientific evidence, overwhelming public support, and support of the majority of Vermont's progressive legislators, now appears doomed - unless Vermont voters succeed in changing the Governor's mind.
A brief history of Vermont H.722
In mid-December, a coalition of farmers and Vermont NGOs asked the state to revive a GMO labeling bill that in 2011 had stalled in the house agricultural committee. Supporters proposed revising the bill's language to conform to language in a similar bill currently being proposed in California, through a citizens' ballot initiative process. Both Carolyn Partridge, chairman of the House agricultural committee, and Will Stevens, a member of the agriculture committee, responded favorably. Several legislators stepped forward to sponsor and co-sponsor the bill.
Despite the support of Partridge, Stevens and the majority of Vermont voters, the committee didn't even begin hearings on the bill until March. Finally, during the first round of testimony the legislature heard from pro-labeling witnesses including organic farmers concerned about seed contamination, consumers worried about food safety, and scientists who refuted Monsanto's claims that genetically engineered food is perfectly safe. Still, no vote. Instead, the committee called for more hearings.
Although Partridge publicly voiced support, privately she told Andrea Stander, executive director of Rural Vermont, that H.722 was a "hot potato" that she got "stuck" with because no other committee wanted to host it, according to Stander.
How does a bill backed by strong scientific evidence and 90 percent of the voters become a "hot potato"? When Monsanto threatens to sue the state if it passes. It's now common knowledge that Vermont officials are worried about the cost of a legal battle with Monsanto. Last week, the online newspaper VTdigger.org reported: "Rachel Lattimore, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who has represented the Biotechnology Industry Association, Monsanto, and other biotechnology companies, told the committee and one of its attorneys that Vermont would face a lawsuit from the industry if it passed this bill."
Monsanto's intimidation tactics appear to have succeeded. However, Vermont voters continue to pressure Governor Shumlin to sit down with his lawyers and the lawyers who drafted Bill H722 to determine, after a careful legal analysis, if he wants to promote the bill or obstruct it.
In support of Vermont farmers and consumers, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) has launched its own offensive, in the form of a legal defense fund for Vermont and any other state Monsanto threatens to sue over mandatory GMO labeling laws. The OCA is a nationwide organization of organic farmers and consumers that has fought for consumers' right to know about GMOs for more than a decade. According to Katherine Paul, OCA fundraising coordinator, "Over the past four days we've already received commitments of more than $50,000 to defend Vermont or any other state that passes a GMO labeling bill. The only way to back down a legal bully like Monsanto or the Biotechnology Industry Organization is with a bigger legal stick and the moral high ground. Let's make sure we have both of those."
Fifty countries have passed GMO labeling laws, in large part based upon peer-reviewed studies suggesting that GMO crops and foods are hazardous to animal and human health and the environment. Recent GMO feeding studies have found liver abnormalities in 30.8 percent of the female test animals, kidney abnormalities in 43.5 percent of the male test animals, and a thickening of the stomach lining in almost all the tests. These results and results from numerous other tests were troubling enough for all these other countries to label genetically engineered foods so that there was traceability and so that consumers could make a choice.
Currently in the U.S., consumers are not allowed to choose whether they want to be part of a vast GMO feeding experiment. If they become ill or have an allergic reaction to a food product that has been genetically engineered, they cannot trace it back to the source. Consumers have no way of knowing which foods contain genetically modified ingredients and which do not. Most have no idea that 75 percent or more of non-organic processed foods do contain GMOs. Even fewer understand that thousands of foods labeled or advertised as "natural" or "all natural" contain genetically modified ingredients.
Vermont, perhaps more than any other state, has traditionally done the right thing to protect its citizens and the environment. This time fear of Monsanto and the other gene giants has sapped the courage and commitment of the current Governor and the legislature.
Please call Governor Shumlin (802 828-3333) and tell him to stand up to Monsanto bullying. Tell him to publicly speak out and encourage the House and Senate to speed up the review process, pass the GMO labeling bill, and sign it before the legislative session ends on May 1.
And please support the OCA's "Millions against Monsanto" campaign so that Governor Shumlin and all the other states can feel secure in fighting Monsanto in court. If the Governor and legislators surrender now, they will perpetuate claims that progressive politicians are good at promising change, but lack the backbone to follow through on their rhetoric. If they show real courage and pass H.722, they will send a strong message to Monsanto and Big Biotech that the growing Millions against Monsanto movement will do whatever it takes - including mounting a legal defense - to stop the corporate bullying and take back our food supply.
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American Nuns Busted for Being a Crazy Bunch of Radical Feminists |
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Friday, 20 April 2012 10:08 |
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Intro: "The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an umbrella group representing most of America's 55,000 nuns, is in trouble with the Vatican because they've apparently have not been vocal enough in their opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and women's ordination."
The Vatican has decided to crack down on American nuns. (photo: Jezebel)
American Nuns Busted for Being a Crazy Bunch of Radical Feminists
By Cassie Murdoch, Jezebel
20 April 12
 ffering further proof that the world is becoming an increasingly weird place, the Catholic Church has decided to crack down on American nuns who, as anyone who has been around a nun recently knows, are a bunch of freewheeling party sisters. Wait, what? Yes, the Vatican has just taken disciplinary action against a group of American nuns who they say are proponents of "certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith." Oh no?
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an umbrella group representing most of America's 55,000 nuns, is in trouble with the Vatican because they've apparently have not been vocal enough in their opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and women's ordination. So now it's not enough to just be opposed to things the church is against? You also have to stand up and yell about it? That's some bullshit right there. As far as those radical feminist ideas they've been spreading, that evil has supposedly been taking place at conferences sponsored by the LCWR.
This directive came as the result of a two-year-long investigation - excellent use of resources, boys - and appears to be part of what is seen as the church veering into more conservative territory. You might not think nuns would be the obvious target of any investigations, considering it's the priests who've been causing most of the actual problems the church has faced recently, but of course organized religion never lets a little thing like logic get in the way.
In terms of the Vatican's specific issues with the LCWR, it appears they're mostly angry because the nuns have been "silent on the right to life from conception to natural death." Also they maintain the LCWR hasn't taken certain things seriously enough:
[T]he church's biblical view of family life and human sexuality, are not part of the LCWR agenda in a way that promotes church teaching. Moreover, occasional public statements by the LCWR that disagree with or challenge positions taken by the bishops, who are the church's authentic teachers of faith and morals, are not compatible with its purpose.
How dare a sister challenge a bishop! Anyway, it seems that one of the Vatican's main objections is with a smaller group of nuns called Network, which pushes progressive causes in Washington. Some feathers were ruffled when LCWR and Network endorsed President Obama's health care reform even though the bishops objected to it. The two nuns' groups have also recently endorsed Obama's compromise with the bishops over the contraception coverage mandate - even though the bishops are still fighting about it... And somewhere God is rolling his eyes.
For its part, the LCWR does not believe it's done anything wrong, and they say they don't intentionally invite speakers to their conferences who will oppose a teaching of the church "when it has been declared as authoritative teaching." The LCWR gave no official comment on the charges, but Sister Simone Campbell, who is the executive director of Network said she's "stunned" to have been singled out by the Vatican, and she says, "It concerns me that political differences in a democratic country would result in such a a censure and investigation." She also maintains that LCWR is not a bunch of militant feminists:
I know LCWR has faithfully-served women religious in the United States and worked hard to support the life of women religious and our service to the people of God.
But it's not enough to serve people, you have to indoctrinate them too, don't you see? And that appears to be at the heart of this controversy. As David Gibson points out in the Washington Post, many nuns have traditionally seen their role more as one of serving others, not so much adhering to the letter of Catholic doctrine - and to that end many nuns have felt comfortable openly disagreeing with church leaders on some controversial issues.
The LCWR investigation took place from 2008 to 2010, but in 2009 a separate, larger investigation - called a visitation - was launched by the Vatican to examine the commitment of American nuns to church doctrine and to find out why their numbers were falling so dramatically. As you might expect, the nuns weren't too pleased with being checked up on. The results of that probe haven't been released yet, so it's possible the nuns are in for even more censure in the near future. Though it seems likely that they're tough enough to take bit of a licking from the Vatican and keep on ticking.
Vatican orders crackdown on American nuns [Washington Post]
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