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New US Regulations on Ivory Sales Are Great - but They Don't Go Far Enough |
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Wednesday, 06 July 2016 08:11 |
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Flocken writes: "The final US regulations that just came out - while very strong on limiting commercial ivory imports, exports, and interstate trade - fall short in one key regard: sport-hunted elephant trophies."
More than 100 tons of ivory and 1 ton of rhino horn are set ablaze in Nairobi National Park, Kenya, in April 2016. (photo: Mwangi Kirubi/Wikimedia Commons)
New US Regulations on Ivory Sales Are Great - but They Don't Go Far Enough
By Jeff Flocken, Scientific American
06 July 16
The U.S. should also ban the importation of all trophies from elephant hunting
 n early June, the Obama Administration at long last finalized its new regulations on ivory sales in the U.S. The comprehensive package—years in the making—aims to close a market that significantly contributes to global demand for ivory, which in turn drives elephant poaching in Africa and Asia at catastrophic levels. Wildlife conservation and animal protection NGOs responded positively by and large, although a vocal minority of Americans who profit from ivory sales reacted with disappointment and anger. What wasn’t picked up though by US media was the reaction of the world’s largest consumer of ivory: China. At the U.S./China Strategic & Economic Dialogue, which (not coincidentally) happened just one week prior to the U.S. announcement, China’s pointed response could be summed up in a few words: “That’s great, but what are you doing about your sport-hunted elephant trophies?”
Many would take issue with this reply given China’s well known consumption of imperiled species for traditional Asian medicines, luxury goods, and exotic cuisine. However, it is just the most recent in a string of tit-for-tat political call-outs by the U.S. and China, both pushing the other to go further and faster in cleaning up their ivory markets. It started in November 2013, when the U.S. crushed six tons of confiscated ivory in Denver; just two months later China crushed six point one tons in Guangzhou. The U.S. quickly followed this with several ivory policy revisions in February 2014 (the first stage in the rule changes that culminated last month). In September 2015, President Obama and China President Xi jointly pledged to enact “near-total bans” on ivory sales, imports and exports. Three weeks later, China took its first step with a one-year ban on imports of sport-hunted African elephant ivory, and most recently, announced that they will provide a timeline for implementing their own ban on domestic ivory markets by the end of this year.
Meanwhile, the final US regulations that just came out—while very strong on limiting commercial ivory imports, exports, and interstate trade—fall short of China in one key regard: sport-hunted elephant trophies. The new U.S. rules merely limit hunters to bringing back no more than two trophy elephant specimens (or up to four tusks) annually. And while this is better than the previous unlimited import quota, it is arguably unreasonable to allow any elephant trophies into the U.S., given our widely proclaimed commitment to protecting what is left of the plummeting global elephant population.
It is hard to deny that the U.S. has a trophy hunting problem. A report issued last month by my organization, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, found the U.S. imports more hunting trophies than any other nation in the world, by a large margin: some 150,000 hunting trophies between 2004-2013, accounting for a staggering 71 percent of global imports, or about 15 times more than the next nation on the list. We outpaced the field on elephant trophies, too—10,240 imported between 2003 and 2012, or over 1,000 per year on average. All those needlessly dead elephants killed by Americans are members of a species we have publicly vowed to protect from extinction.
To be clear: managed hunting of elephants is not a primary cause of the current crisis—poaching linked to illegal ivory markets is the main culprit. But there is a cognitive dissonance in our policy of allowing elephant trophy imports during this dire time, which undermines our efforts overseas. When we willfully allow rich Americans to go to Africa and shoot—for fun—the same animals that we are trying to shield from poachers, our message of conservation rings hollow. To be sure, there are strong connections between poachers and militant groups in many regions of Africa, but poachers are, just as often, local villagers desperately in need of the money. Poverty is not solved by poaching, and it is not solved by trophy hunting, which is built on shaky economic theory. To say nothing of the animal welfare implications of allowing an intelligent, social, long-lived, slow-reproducing, and family-oriented creature to be killed for sport—even if it’s “only” one or two a year per hunter.
The new U.S. ivory regulations accomplish much of the Administration’s stated goal: they minimize the U.S. role in the global elephant poaching crisis by restricting our domestic ivory markets. The rules halt all commercial ivory imports (and most commercial exports) and limit interstate sales to genuine antiques and certain other older items with minimal amounts of ivory. These are strong and necessary actions. But the Administration did not take advantage of the opportunity to fully ban the import of elephant trophies, and China is right to call us out on it, just as we are justified in continuing to pressure them to close the considerable commercial ivory markets still operating within China.
The global community has come to the aid of these remarkable creatures because they cannot stand seeing them brutally killed—and an elephant slain for ivory by poachers is no more or less dead than one shot down by vainglorious foreigners for sport. The difference that trophy advocates would draw is a false one, and the U.S. must tell sport hunters that killing imperiled elephants for fun is wrong, just as poaching them for ivory is wrong, and neither should be tolerated any longer.
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Bernie Sanders Scores Big Wins With Democratic Platform |
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Tuesday, 05 July 2016 13:19 |
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Benen writes: "After the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses wrapped up last month, Bernie Sanders and his campaign team had a decision to make: pick the next goal. Despite months of chatter about the senator urging party insiders to overturn voters' will, Team Sanders didn't seriously consider such an approach, knowing it wouldn't work anyway."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)
Bernie Sanders Scores Big Wins With Democratic Platform
By Steve Benen, MSNBC
05 July 16
 fter the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses wrapped up last month, Bernie Sanders and his campaign team had a decision to make: pick the next goal. Despite months of chatter about the senator urging party insiders to overturn voters’ will, Team Sanders didn’t seriously consider such an approach, knowing it wouldn’t work anyway.
Instead, the Vermonter and his aides turned their attention to the Democratic platform, launching a spirited fight to move the document to the left. As of late last week, there can be little doubt that Sanders has succeeded: as MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald reported, Dems are moving forward with “what is almost certainly the most progressive platform in the party’s history.”
The draft platform states Americans should earn $15 per hour and have a right to join a union, and it supports a so-called “model employer executive order” to raise standards for federal government contractors. It calls for the complete abolishment of the death penalty, stating, “It has no place in the United States of America.”
On Wall Street, the platform lays out a number of reforms proposed by Clinton, Sanders and other Democrats, and states the party “will not hesitate to use and expand existing authorities as well as empower regulators to downsize or break apart financial institutions,” it states.
The document, which is available in its entirety, is surprising in its audacity on everything from free community college to expanding Social Security, overturning Citizens United to banning assault weapons, criminal justice reform to repealing the Hyde Amendment that prevents public funding of abortion.
There can be little doubt that many of these provisions and more – reforming the carried-interest loophole, postal banking, the industry ties of Federal Reserve board members – can be attributed directly to the Sanders campaign’s role in negotiating the terms of the platform. The senator and his team made a concerted effort to move the document to the left, and they achieved their goals in dramatic fashion. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted late last week, shortly before the platform draft was released, that Sanders has won “some big victories,” and that’s absolutely true.
The question is whether that will be enough.
Thus far, officials with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC have been working with Sanders’ team, but the senator hasn’t won every fight. He wants the platform to oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership, which Democrats are unwilling to put in the document since President Obama supports and negotiated the trade agreement. Sanders also fought for an endorsement of single-payer health care and a new tax on carbon, but the party wasn’t prepared to go along with these provisions, either.
That said, as an objective matter, Sanders has had at least as much of an impact on the Democratic platform as any second-place finisher in modern times. The senator may have come up short in the national race, but he nevertheless succeeded in his principal, short-term goal.
And yet, over the holiday weekend, Sanders wrote an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer arguing that his victories aren’t enough: the platform, he said, “needs to be significantly improved.”
The senator has said more than once during his candidacy that he’s prepared to do everything within his power to defeat Donald Trump and elect the Democratic ticket. And while it’s very likely that Sanders will follow through on that commitment, it’s unclear when, exactly, he’ll start pursuing this goal.
We’ll never know for sure, but part of me wonders what the presidential race would look like right now if Sanders, once the race for the Democratic nomination wrapped up, had quickly endorsed Clinton, helped unite progressive voters, and focused his energies less on the platform and more on becoming one of the party’s leading anti-Trump voices – all while positioning his movement as a powerful contingent in Democratic politics.
Would his role on the team have produced his platform victories, anyway? Would Clinton’s lead in national polling be considerably larger?
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Despite What Media Says, TPP Isn't About Free Trade - It's About Protecting Corporate Profits |
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Tuesday, 05 July 2016 13:10 |
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Jilani writes: "The news media and advocates of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement have repeatedly described opponents of the deal as 'protectionist' or opposed to trade itself."
Cancer patients and survivors protested drug policy changes the TPP could bring in February outside the headquarters of the drug industry's lobbying operation in Washington, D.C. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Despite What Media Says, TPP Isn't About Free Trade - It's About Protecting Corporate Profits
By Ziad Jilani, The Intercept
05 July 16
 he news media and advocates of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement have repeatedly described opponents of the deal as “protectionist” or opposed to trade itself.
For instance, after Donald Trump pressed Hillary Clinton to swear off passage of the deal, the New York Times reported that Trump was embracing “nationalistic anti-trade policies.” The Wall Street Journal said Trump expressed “protectionist views.” President Obama warned that you can’t withdraw “from trade deals” and focus “solely on your local market.”
But opposition to the TPP is not accurately described as opposition to all trade, or even to free trade.
In fact, the deal’s major impact would not come in the area of lowering tariffs, the most common trade barriers. The TPP is more focused on crafting regulatory regimes that benefit certain industries.
So the most consequential parts of the deal would actually undermine the free flow of goods and services by expanding some protectionist, anti-competitive policies sought by global corporations.
“We already have trade agreements with six of the 11 countries. Canada and Mexico — our two biggest trading partners — are in there. The tariffs are almost zero [with those countries] anyhow,” Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told The Intercept. “What’s in the deal? Higher patent and copyright protection! That’s protectionism.”
The U.S. International Trade Commission’s own report on the agreement notes that “few tariffs remain between the United States and its existing [free trade agreement] partners,” which compose a majority of TPP countries.
It’s true that past trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have dramatically lowered tariffs, freeing companies to move manufacturing jobs out of the country. And as a result, the very notion of trade agreements has left many Americans understandably skeptical.
Concerns that the TPP would lead to even more job losses “are real and I think that the political discussion is responding to those concerns from both parties,” Melinda St. Louis, director of international campaigns at Public Citizen, told The Intercept. But, she noted, “I do think that the trade aspects of the TPP are a small part of it. It’s only six of 30 chapters that have to do with trade and goods really at all. The rest of it is about setting global rules.”
One of the proposed TPP rules, for instance, involves the expansion of copyrights, which would impose anti-competitive costs on economies.
The agreement has been harshly criticized by humanitarian organizations like Doctors Without Borders, which deploys thousands of doctors overseas to offer medical care to those who cannot afford it, because it expands monopoly protections and patents for various pharmaceutical drugs.
For instance, the agreement requires the countries involved to offer eight years of market exclusivity, or five years plus other mechanisms, to assure “comparable market outcome” for a class of pharmaceutical products called biologics. These cutting-edge, biologically manufactured drugs have been used to treat Crohn’s disease, arthritis, and other common ailments — and expanding market exclusivity means there is less room for competitors to produce lower-cost generic drugs to compete.
“We do not have a position on the TPP as a whole, we’re not anti-trade, we’re a humanitarian organization,” Judit Rius Sanjuan, a legal policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders explained. “Some of the provisions in the text will also make it much more difficult to have innovation, because they create patent monopolies for big pharmaceutical companies.”
The TPP also seeks to strengthen and extend monopoly patents for the entertainment industry.
In a victory lap early this year, Disney CEO Bob Iger wrote to company employees boasting about the role his company played in expanding the intellectual property provisions in the TPP, saying Disney was able to “advocate successfully for a strong IP chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations.”
Disney played a major role in lobbying for a 1998 law that extended copyrights for media creations.
Congress’s 1998 rule change was a boon to Disney, which was due to lose its Mickey Mouse copyright in 2003. Thanks to this law change, which opponents derided as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” Mickey’s copyright was extended to 2023.
The TPP seeks to expand on that, establishing a global Mickey Mouse Protection regime. U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman made a trip to Hollywood in May to remind a trade group that the TPP would require countries to lift their copyright terms to the 70-year standard in the United States. This would be an increase from 50 years, the current standard in many of the countries that are part of the negotiation.
Froman pointed to films such as Sound of Music and Dr. Zhivago, noting that these films are “1966 vintage, which without TPP will be off protection next year.”
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Life After the Massacre: A View From Oaxaca |
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Tuesday, 05 July 2016 12:58 |
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Larson writes: "'I thought that it was raining,' education students wrote the day after police killed as many as 12 and injured dozens at protests in the majority- indigenous southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on June 19. 'But Oaxaca is crying.'"
Fake coffins and a sign reading 'It was the state' are seen during a teachers' protest in downtown Oaxaca, Mexico, June 21, 2016. (photo: Patricia Castellanos AFP/Getty Images)
Life After the Massacre: A View From Oaxaca
By Eric Larson, NACLA
05 July 16
 thought that it was raining,” education students wrote the day after police killed as many as 12 and injured dozens at protests in the majority- indigenous southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on June 19. “But Oaxaca is crying.”
The heavy evening rain that followed the massacre accentuated the atmosphere of mourning and resignation – but also rage and resilience – the following day. Rarely have I seen so many stores closed in Oaxaca City, even in 2006, when a similar pattern of protest and repression led to the six-month popular takeover of Oaxaca City to protest the state government’s repression of striking education workers. Some residents feared a federal police assault on the central city plaza (Zócalo), where education workers and supporters continued to hold an occupation (plantón). The movement’s main demand: the end of the neoliberal “education reform” enacted in 2012, which eliminated the constitutional guarantee of a free public education established in Mexico after the Mexican revolution 100 years ago.
Other residents took the day to march in protest against the federal police’s armed intervention. The blunt rhythm of their chant— “Assassins! Assassins! Assassins!”— ricocheted off the stone buildings of the central plaza, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Though education workers and supporters staged a large mega-march a week earlier, before the killings, this march sent an even stronger message to the state and federal governments. Protesters continued to stream into the plaza more than two hours after the first ones had arrived. Some education workers I spoke with had left the rural district of Putla at 3 A.M. to arrive in Oaxaca City in time for the protest. Others had slept overnight in the Zocálo.
In indigenous towns elsewhere in the state, families held public funerals for the slain.
"In Mexico education is not free. It is paid for with life and with freedom.”
Much like in 2006, the street art that blossomed on the streets of downtown Oaxaca City after the killings captured essential truths in a moment when official voices offered orchestrated untruths. The prior day, the Mexican Secretary of the Interior affirmed that the Mexican federal police were unarmed, even as photos circulated on social media showing them with high-caliber firearms, and witnesses saw bodies fall.
On social media, at least one federal police officer postured and bragged, sending images of bloodied Oaxacan bodies as trophies and threats.
Oaxaca has proven to be one of the last strongholds in resisting a global wave of similar education reforms in the last two decades, and its state-wide local union (Sección 22) is one of the most radical in the hemisphere. It successfully resisted the reform until last year, when a sophisticated and extensive mass media campaign demonized Oaxacan teachers and smoothed the way for the state government to suddenly impose many of the reform’s measures. The social movement that has emerged against the reforms, which are sponsored by a host of national and international corporations and financial institutions, rejects the policy as a back-door way to discipline and shrink the educational labor force, require local residents to pay for education, sell access to schools to foreign corporations, and absolve the federal government of responsibility for educating its citizens.
As in 2006, few predicted the nature and breadth of the popular groundswell that has risen to support education workers as they contended with violent repression. In 2006, then-governor Ulises Ruíz broke with the routinized pattern of mobilization and negotiation, in which Sección 22 presented its annual demands in February, and then launched an occupation of the central plaza in May as it negotiated with the state government. Ruíz Ortiz refused to negotiate, and attempted to evict education workers from their customary plantón. Social and indigenous organizations, along with Oaxaca City residents and education workers, helped form the backbone of the 2006 movement as they created the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO).
In 2016, the support looks different, yet recent events make evident its breadth. Oaxaca City is no longer the main site of contention. While Sección 22 has called for strategic road blockades in Oaxaca, the union’s state assembly itself never actually called for the takeover of the main highway to Mexico City at Nochixtlán, as Luis Hernández Navarro has noted. Parents and supporters in this highly indigenous (Ñuu Savi) town helped lead the way, and they are now demanding explanations for why the federal police chose to attempt an eviction on the town’s market day, when thousands of regional residents visit the town to buy and sell. As the police attacked on the June 19, officers peppered their tear gas volleys with racial slurs.
In nearby Chiapas, another majority-indigenous state, education workers have also stood up to the reform, and teachers reported that police called them “damn monkey-eaters.” Since the killings, Mexican supporters have staged marches everywhere from Cancún to conservative Chichuahua and Monterrey, and numerous cities across the globe have been witness to local actions. The United Nations is investigating the attack in Nochixtlan for excessive use of state force and in denying medical care to civilian victims, an international war crime. Many in the area report that the main hospital attended only wounded police. One Oaxaca City doctor told me doctors who came to help were retained at regional police checkpoints.
The repressive strategies of the state and federal government resemble those in 2006, but also differ in significant ways. In 2006, residents prevented the police from controlling the city for six months until the federal police arrived. In 2016, state and federal governments sent in the federal police after only one month. As Scott Campbell has noted, no single day in 2006 was as fatal as June 19, 2016. In the evening after the murders, as movement supporters built barricades around the Zocálo in light of what seemed to be an eminent attack, federal police helicopters swept slow and low over downtown streets, intimidating locals with the thunder of their engines. Earlier that day, helicopters had veered, extra-low, into the sea of protesters, repelling them with the sheer force of the air currents produced by rotor blades, much like the water cannons used against them in 2006. In blockades in the Isthmus region, education workers reported spy drones circling their encampment.
Yet other control strategies, like the terror inspired by selective killings, closely resemble those of 2006. On Sunday, a community journalist and anarchist was killed in Huajapan (near Nochixtlán), where he long supported the radio station Tu un Ñuu Savi (Voice of the People of the Rain), which played a critical role in spreading information on the 19th. In Oaxaca City, armed porros (hired thugs) roamed Radio Universidad in the nights after the 19th, and movement supporters guarding the radio de-escalated confrontations. As in 2006, the state government has successfully blocked the frequency of Radio Plantón, the union’s radio station, leaving Radio Universidad as the sole radio voice of the movement in the capital city. In Nochixtlán, the mayor-elect has affirmed that locals live in a kind of psychosis. Many injured by firearms are scared to seek medical help for fear of being captured by police. Likewise, in 2006, some teachers buried documents that identified them as teachers for fear of being persecuted.
The local media has also contributed to the fear by inspiring public anxiety about the movement itself. The PRI-supporting El Imparcial has followed the governor’s lead in distinguishing “good” protesters from “bad” ones as a divide-and-control strategy. According to the media, the downtown barricades the night of the 19th were populated by “common criminals” and people dedicated to “assault,” the newspaper claimed, and locals were terrified of being out at night. Yet a friend and I spent several hours walking around the perimeter of the Zocálothat evening and into the early morning of June 20, at one point stopping for tacos at a taqueria open less than 100 feet from a barricade. I spent time at the downtown plantón after midnight several nights last week, and I have observed that a significant percentage of those occupying the plaza at night are women.
The militancy of the regional roadblocks, many of which are supported by local municipal authorities, is particularly threatening to the government, as it indicates the depth of popular antagonism. Government officials and cooperative media have tried to claim the roadblocks reflect the union’s lack of concern for Oaxacans in general, since they are causing a dangerous scarcity of goods in Oaxaca. Yet my conversations with locals in both central Oaxaca City and in outlying areas over the last week reveal the exaggerations of government claims, at least as they pertain to the central valley of the state. Sección 22 has repeatedly focused on blocking corporate goods, like Coca-Cola, at roadblocks, and Coca-Cola distribution was limited last week. While price upticks for products like chicken and avocado from central Mexico undoubtedly affected many, my conversations with working-class locals have also revealed a pride in the self-sufficiency of the state in the face of crisis. Shelves in small stores and food markets were full, they reiterated, and several joked about the presumed inability of Oaxacans—many of whom come from rural, farming families who have endured centuries of racial discrimination —to take care of themselves. In 2006, many striking teachers survived because family members sent food from their farms; in some cases, they lent land to striking education workers, who themselves took to cultivating crops.
“Urgent! Urgent! Evaluate the President!”
I spent much of June conducting interviews with working-class residents of Oaxaca City’s outer neighborhoods, and the slogan above — a chant often heard at education workers’ marches— nicely captures the double standards that outrage many of these residents feel.
Why do teachers face stringent standardized evaluation exams, but not politicians like the President, long ridiculed for being unable to list three books that have influenced him? How can the government arrest and detain union leaders for corruption and other charges, when major political bosses – including Ulises Ruíz – commit mass fraud and violence, but are politically rewarded rather than punished?
Many Oaxacans have invested time and money in their local schools. Many helped to physically build them. On weekends, through collective work arrangements called tequio, they help maintain and beautify schools. They have done so even though the federal constitution guaranteed free public education. While the June 19th killings reiterated for many Oaxacans the Mexican government’s willingness to write off their lives and labor, they also helped bring together a wide range of popular and indigenous struggles in the state, particularly around mining and energy projects. Until double standards about government treatment of elites and everyday citizens, including union members, are addressed, life in Oaxaca after the June 19 massacre will likely continue to be defined by the wide-ranging movement against neoliberal education reform.
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