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| UN DEVELOPMENT GOALS vs. THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX by Carla Stea |
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Monday, June 09 2008 @ 08:56 AM EDT
UNITED NATIONS’ MULTINATIONAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS: A PROGNOSIS
By Carla Stea, May 28, 2008
United Nations Press Conference, April 1, 2008 entitled: “On Achieving Millenium Development Goals,” with speakers: UN General Assembly President Srgjan Kerim and UN Foundation Chairman Ted Turner:
While the United Nations General Assembly held a special debate on “Removing Obstacles That Are Slowing Progress on the Millenium Development Goals,” General Assembly President Srgjam Kerim stated: “eradication of poverty, provision of education and health care are fundamentally related to the values of the United Nations. Mr. Kerim emphasized, most importantly, that “Security does not begin with peacekeeping, but with development.” Mr. Turner then stated: “Not only is the United States not meeting our moral obligations and obligations we made to the Millenium Development Goals, we are not paying our dues in peacekeeping” he said, adding: “I guess we are too busy bombing Iraqis to be able to afford to pay our dues.” A few weeks later The New York Times, front page, Saturday, May 17, 2008 headlined: “Famine looms as wars rend Horn of Africa: climbing global prices add to a food crisis. Dagaari, Somalia: The global food crisis has arrived at Safia Ali’s hut. She cannot afford rice or wheat or powdered milk anymore. At the same time a drought has decimated the family’s herd of goats, turning their sole livelihood into a pile of bleached bones and papery skin. The result is that Ms. Safia, a 25 year old mother of five, has not eaten in a week. Her one year old son is starving, too, an adorable listless boy who doesn’t even respond to a pinch….A recent headline in one of Kenya’s leading newspapers blared: “25,000 villagers risk starving, referring to a combination of drought, higher fertilizer and fuel costs and postelection violence that displaced thousands of farmers. ‘These places aren’t on the brink,’ said United Nations adviser Jeffrey D. Sachs, ‘They’ve gone over the cliff.’ Many Somalis are trying to stave off starvation with a thin gruel made from mashed thorn tree branches. Some village elders said their children were chewing on their own lips and tongues because they had no food.”
In a question to Mr. Turner, I quoted Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Garwin, who had asked, at a March 25, 2008 conference at Yale University, entitled: Nuclear Weapons: The Greatest Peril to Civilization: Dr. Garwin: “If I look back to the Reagan administration I see that the Bureau of the Budget wanted to tax all the money, put it into defense, so that we wouldn’t be spending it on social goals. We have that problem – we cannot make up our mind. We have earmarks go to individual districts, but we have great difficulty deciding how to spend the money that we can raise from the population. What do you think we can do about that if we reduce the defense budget?” I then paraphrased Richard Garwin’s question, and asked Mr. Turner how he would advise reallocating funds to global humanitarian development needs, (our obligation under the Millenium Development Goal commitment), when confronting fierce opposition from the military-industrial complex. Turner gasped, uttered “Holy Smoke,” and then stated: “The military budget of the United States is, yearly, 500 billion dollars, half of the world’s total military expenditures, and 20 times more than the military budgets of the Russian Federation or China. All the world’s problems, including universal health care, could be solved by $100 billion yearly, or one tenth of the global military budget. Moreover, the Americans had been defeated in Vietnam, and the Russians in Afghanistan. If superpowers could no longer overcome little developing countries, it was better to spend the money on preparing to live, rather than on preparing to die.”
Nobel Laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz states, in his new book “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” “By now it is clear that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake…Nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have been killed, and more than 58,000 wounded. A further 7,300 troops have been wounded in Afghanistan. Iraq’s chaos (as a result of the U.S. invasion) has made the country a magnet for terrorists of all stripes…When the full price of the war has been paid, trillions of dollars will have been added to our national debt. In fact, the war has turned out to be hughly costly in both blood and treasure. We estimate that the total budgetary and economic cost to the United States will turn out to be around $3 trillion, with the cost to the rest of the world perhaps doubling that number again.” On page 160 Stiglitz comments: “America’s standing in the world has never been lower…By 2007 confidence in President Vladimir Putin’s leadership exceeded that of President Bush in Canada, Britain, Germany and France. In Chapter 1 we noted that citizens of many countries see America in Iraq as a greater threat to global peace than Iran. More remarkable, another recent Pew survey showed that in every country surveyed, the U.S. presence in Iraq was viewed as a greater threat to world peace than North Korea. In short, all over the world, the United States was viewed as a greater danger than the countries George Bush included in his ‘axis of evil.’ In Islamic countries majorities (in some cases large majorities) see America’s motives as dominating the world and gaining control of Middle East oil. Most disturbing is that America is no longer seen as a bastion of civil rights and democracy. The Iraq war ‘for democracy’ has almost given democracy a bad name….Even among our former allies in the United Kingdom and Germany, America was seen as doing a bad job in advancing human rights…Why does this matter? In earlier chapters, we discussed how changing perceptions of America have hurt U.S. businesses and the U.S. economy. It is inevitable that those who see the Bush administration and its conduct of war unfavorably also begin to see America and its conduct of business in the same light…But there is a far larger cost. Globalization has made countries more interdependent. Many of the world’s most pressing problems – from climate change to the AIDS pandemic to poverty – are global in nature and cannot be solved by any one country acting alone. Wars and conflict in one part of the world can easily spill over to another. The Iraq war has shown that even the sole remaining superpower, a country that spends almost as much on defense as all other countries combined, cannot impose its will on a country with 10 percent of the population and 1 percent of its GDP.”
In a February, 2008 United Nations press briefing, the formidably brilliant United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development Jomo Kwame Sundaram presented the “Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific, 2008.” In his forward, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon comments: “Over 600 million of the world’s poor still live in Asia, nearly two thirds of the global total and mainly in rural areas. Other statistics are equally staggering. Ninety-seven million children remain underweight. Four million children die before reaching age five. While the region is well prepared to ride the current turbulence in the global economy, even smaller economic shocks can severely affect the most vulnerable people. The long term impact of these shocks in terms of poverty, unemployment and inequality is of deep concern.” This report states, page 124: “With limited resources, farmers depend on borrowed money to purchase seeds and other inputs and to farm their land. A drop in their farm income could lead to indebtedness. In India, for example, the distress in rural areas is reflected in the high number of suicides by farmers: 86,922 during 2001-2005 (Government of India, 2007). Sharma (2004) puts the blame on a shift toward commercial agriculture and more liberal imports. Farm debts and suicides are also reported in China (BBC News 2007), Sri Lanka (MONLAR 2005) and Thailand (Asian Farmers Association for Sustainable Development). Page 126, Box 3.1: “Growing farm debt increasing distress in Indian agriculture. Rising farm debt and its tragic consequences are major concerns in many developing countries in the region. According to a recent report,(Government of India 2007), Indian agriculture faces a crisis from debt, especially since the mid 1990’s, evident in the large number of farmer suicides in some regions…Of the estimated 89.3 million farmer households in 2003, 43.42 million (48.6%) were indebted (Government of India 2006)..Also evident is relationship between farm debt and suicides. In all states that reported suicides among farmers, debt incidence and debt per farmer household were high. During 2001-2006, 86,922 farmers committed suicides, 54% from Andra Pradesh, Kamataka, Kerala and Maharashtra. Driving the distress were declining profitability, growing production and marketing risks, an institutional vacuum and lack of alternative livelihood opportunities.”
Stiglitz and Bulmes, Page 116: “Many people around the world, not just in the Middle East, believe the U.S. government went to war because it wanted to get its hands on Iraqi oil. It is enough to say that if America went to war in the hope of securing cheap oil, we failed miserably. We did, however, succeed in making the oil companies richer. Exxon-Mobil and other oil companies have been among the few real beneficiaries of the war, as their profits and share prices have soared. Meanwhile the economy as a whole has paid a high price.” On page 14: “Excess costs to the government are reflected in excess profits to the defense contractors, who have been (along with the oil companies) the only real winners in this war. Halliburton’s stock price has increased – by 229 percent since the war began, exceeding even the gains by other defense firms, such as General Dynamics (134 percent), Raytheon (117 percent), Lockheed Martin (105 percent), and Northrup Grumman (78 percent). In America, corruption takes on a more nuanced form that it does elsewhere. Payoffs typically do not take the form of direct bribes, but of campaign contributions to both parties. From 1998 to 2003 Halliburton’s contributions to the Republican Party totaled $1,146,248.00 and $55,650.00 went to the Democratic Party. Halliburton received at least $19 billion in lucrative single source contracts….At the beginning of the second Bush administration, the president talked about the seriousness of the country’s Social Security crisis. But instead of paying for the war in Iraq, we could have fixed the Social Security problem for the next half century…Today a web site run by the National Priorities Project describes the current and direct military costs of the war. A trillion dollars could have built 8 million additional housing units, could have hired some 15 million public school teachers for one year, could have paid for 120 million children to attend a year of Head Start, or insured 630 million children for health care for one year, or provided 43 million students with four year scholarships at public universities. Now multiply these numbers by three. …If some of the money spent on research were devoted to alternative energy technologies, or to providing further incentives for conservation we would be less dependent on oil.” Page XVI: “For sums less than the direct expenditures on the war, we could have fulfilled our commitment to provide 0.7 percent of our gross domestic product to help developing countries – money that could have made an enormous difference to the well being of billions today living in poverty. The United States gives some $5 billion a year to Africa, the poorest continent in the world: that amounts to less than 10 days fighting. Two trillion dollars would enable us to meet our commitments to the poorest countries for the next third of a century.”
Professor Jeffrey Sachs is a dazzling speaker, with a breathtaking command of information and a passionate commitment to fulfilling the Millenium Development Goals. Now halfway to the target date of 2015 for halving world poverty, Sachs has expressed anger and what sounded like pessimism – and which he described as “frustration” – at the failure of many wealthy, developed countries, including the United States, to fulfill their commitment of 0.7% of Gross Domestic Product to the Millenium Development Goals. Sachs also frequently cites the exorbitant cost of the disastrous Iraq war, a tiny percentage of the cost of which would help alleviate global destitution, and not incidentally, a destitution providing a fertile breeding ground for terrorist recruitment. Sachs’ argument is logical, but quixotic, and it is difficult to understand how a brilliant, Harvard trained social scientist could ignore the fact that the governments he correctly berates for their failure to meet their 0.7% GDP commitments (to the Millenium Development Goals) are all capitalist countries, and capitalism is an irrational system, which obeys a dynamic indifferent to, and often opposed to fulfillment of human need. Sachs is, in effect, expecting an elephant to ride a bicycle (with apologies to Isadora Duncan). The crude maximization of profit (which almost always requires plundering the environment and ruthless exploitation of human beings), is the sole priority of monopoly capitalism, which in its extreme form morphs into oligarchy and fascism. Princeton University economist Paul Krugman warns of this tendency and its alarming consequences within our own government Perhaps the only leader who succeeded in taming (at least for a time) the ravages of capitalism was that titanic genius, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was adored by the millions of Americans to whose lives he brought a modicum of economic security (“social security”), with the dignity only such economic security made possible, a president revered by the majority of Americans, and reviled by the small minority of the economically privileged, who so stupidly despised him as a “traitor to his class.” But President Roosevelt’s loyalty was to all humanity, which has, does and will forever honor him. Against the savage opposition of a reactionary and short-sighted establishment which essentially controlled the Supreme Court and much of Congress, Roosevelt’s heroic compassion and realism forced capitalism to bend to the needs of the American people whose lives were being shattered by one of the inevitable crises of capitalism, the great Depression. President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” helped to resuscitate our economy, and ultimately saved our country from destruction, establishing a healthy and realistic pattern of government intervention and responsiveness to human need, a policy which was carried forward by President Johnson’s establishment of Medicare, and later by our government’s assertion that every American has a right to own their own home. Recognizing that capitalism’s “ free-market” was unreliable, unpredictable and often brutally irrational, President Roosevelt demanded that our government be responsible for guaranteeing fulfillment of the basic human needs of all citizens, and it was obvious to him that private charity could not possibly guarantee economic security, the sine qua non of human rights. But capitalism does not for very long tolerate curbs on its rapacious excesses, and today, as our country confronts another of the inevitable crises of capitalism, without a leader of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s great stature, millions of American citizens have lost their homes to foreclosure, the skyrocketing price of food is rapidly making essentials for survival beyond the reach of poor, middle class and many elderly Americans, and the economic crisis within the American economy is rapidly contaminating, impoverishing, and dangerously destabilizing the world.
In a remarkably prescient column, Paul Krugman anticipates that in a McCain presidency, the United States will undertake wars on so reckless and vast a scale that the trillions of dollars required to finance such wars will plunge our country into such debt that McCain will finance the cost of his expanded wars by eliminating Social Security and Medicare, completing the dismantlement of the New Deal (which certain elements in our country have always considered anathema), ultimately condemning the majority of Americans, especially the poor and middle class, to destitution, transforming the United States into a Banana Republic. Krugman stated, in a May 26th op-ed piece in The New York Times: “Indeed, John McCain has shed whatever maverick tendencies he may once have had, and become almost a caricature conservative – an advocate of lower taxes for the rich and corporations, a privatizer and shredder of the safety net.” I was working as a reporter in Moscow when, in 1992 I attended a press conference at the Russian Foreign Ministry Press Center, where Jeffrey Sachs berated the Russian people for their reliance on Socialism’s provision of free health care, free education and job security; and the implication of Professor Sachs’ chastisement was that such expectation of government provided social benefits was a manifestation of deplorable sloth in the Russian people. At that time Sachs, the Harvard Institute for International Development, Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais advocated “shock therapy,” the immediate demolition of the social safety nets provided by the Soviet Socialist economy, and the immediate imposition of free-market capitalism. In an impressive analysis of this policy, by George Washington University Professor Janine R. Wedel, entitled “Collision or Collusion: the Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe,” Professor Wedel states, page 125: “Many experts believed that shock therapy contributed significantly to the subsequent hyperinflation of 2,500 percent in Russia. One result of the hyperinflation was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of ordinary Russians. By November 1992, Gaidar was under attack for his failed policies.”
When I first visited the Soviet Union in 1984, one ruble was worth $1.60, and if you owed or were owed a ruble, it was serious. I witnessed the illegal devaluation of the ruble on the black market in 1989, and the further, official, devaluation of the ruble following the collapse of the Soviet Union. When I returned to Russia in 1994, one dollar was worth 5,000 rubles, a staggering, incomprehensible disaster for the majority of the Russian people. The pensions, the savings, the future lives of the majority of Russian citizens were decimated, and Russian society collapsed, as the new Russian gangs of criminal capitalists plundered the former Soviet state of resources that had previously provided the social safety nets and decent lives for Soviet citizens. Rampant alcoholism AIDS, suicides, contract killings, resistant strains of tuberculosis, prostitution, demoralization and despair replaced Socialism, as the population of Russia declined drastically, along with their trust in Western advisers, Western values and Western motives. By 1998, President Putin inherited a country and citizenry arguably as devastated as that confronted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, and Putin’s success in restoring some semblance of dignity and a modicum of prosperity and economic security to the lives of many citizens of Russia has earned him the gratitude of the Russian people. Professor Sachs has also clearly recognized the bankruptcy of “shock therapy,” and his admirable advocacy and stewardship of the United Nations Millenium Development goals may have resulted from his experience and acknowledgment of earlier policy mistakes.
However, at the April 2, 2008 United Nations Thematic Debate on “Recognizing the Achievements and Addressing the Challenges and Getting Back on Track to Achieve the Millenium Development Goals by 2015,” Indian Ambassador Nirupam Sen eloquently stated: “MDGs are a mitigation of present deprivation but can create a more just world only if combined with removing the institutional and economic causes of poverty. Bretton Woods Institutions need fundamental reform…Many of the poorest developing countries remain caught in the trap of an agricultural and raw materials economy with minimal industry. That is why, as several economists have noted, they are offered debt cancellation instead of economic development enabling debt servicing; mosquito nets instead of eradication of malaria. Unless therefore the UN and its institutions go beyond MDGs, poverty and hunger cannot be eliminated in an enduring way. MDGs would then run the danger of becoming a kind of permanent disaster relief, and even what one economist has called ‘welfare colonialism.’” “The answer therefore to questions posed in the background papers is that economic growth by itself is not sufficient and that separate action is required on poverty and hunger, education, employment and health, science and technology, free from external conditionalities or prescriptive advice. Above all, popular participation is essential. Then only would MDGs be achieved in a society, rich, as the great Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire says, with the productive power of modern times, warm with the fraternity of olden days.”
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| UN CALL TO BAN SPACE WEAPONS - Carla Stea |
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Thursday, November 29 2007 @ 08:22 AM EST
UN Conference Calls for Treaty to Ban Weapons in Space
Special War & Peace Report
by Carla Stea |
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| read more (7454 words) |
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| Where ar the Lawyers of America? - Ralph Nader |
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Thursday, October 11 2007 @ 09:38 AM EDT
Where are the lawyers of America?
The rogue regime of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney—so widely condemned for its unconstitutional, criminal Iraq war, its spying on Americans illegally, its repeated illegal torture practices, its arrests and imprisonment of thousands in this country without charges and its pathological secrecy and corporate corruption—still has not felt the heat of the 800,000 practicing lawyers and their many bar organizations.
Lawyer jokes aside, the first defense outside of government against the rejection of due process, probable cause and habeas corpus should come from the officers of the courts—the attorneys of America. With few exceptions, they have flunked, asleep at the switch or loaded with excuses.
The exceptions are a number of law professors such as David Cole (Georgetown University) and Jonathan Turley (George Washington University) and the magnificent one-year presidency of Michael Greco at the conservative American Bar Association.
Mr. Greco, appalled at the outlaw nature of the Bush White House, now wallowing in the pits of the public opinion polls, organized former counsel to the CIA, the National Security Agency and the FBI, among others, to produce detailed reports and resolutions assailing the Bush government for repeatedly violating the constitution in numerous ways. (http://www.abanet.org/)
Reports were sent to Mr. Bush personally. He did not even bother to acknowledge receipt. The ABA has over 400,000 members and is the largest bar association in the world. Not even a courtesy reply from George Bush, the American Caesar.
Unfortunately, the courage of Greco and his colleagues has not been contagious with hundreds of thousands of lawyers throughout America or the 50 state bar associations who might have taken some action or position to stand after the ABA stood tall in 2005-2006.
Mind you, the climate for lawyers defending the rule of law is quite enabling. Seventy percent of the American people want out of Iraq and nearly as many would like to see this Presidency end. A poll of soldiers in Iraq back in January 2006 registered 72% of them wanting the U.S. out of Iraq within six to twelve months.
In addition, scores of former Generals and high military officers, retired intelligence officials and diplomats have openly criticized the intransigence, incompetence and harm to the U.S. national security. These leaders include the national security advisers to Bush’s father, Brent Snowcroft, the anti-terrorism advisor to George W. Bush, Richard Clark, and many others who served in high government office.
With all this in mind, I have been asking lawyers why they do not become directly active in challenging what they themselves believe is a reckless above-the-law Presidency and its enormous concentration of unlawful power. Here are some examples of their replies.
--real estate attorney with a sterling civil liberties background says “I am just too busy.”
--numerous retired lawyers of considerable accomplishment simply say they are retired.
--mid-career business attorneys say they have too many clients who might object (too much wheeling and dealing to uphold the rule of law in Washington, D.C.).
--public interest lawyers say it is not within their declared mission—eg. environmental, consumer, poverty or law reform work.
--“Too controversial,” and “I’m not up to it,” announced a prominent trial lawyer.
--“I wouldn’t know where to start and I just need my leisure time,” replied a highly specialized estate and trusts attorney.
And so it goes. Too preoccupied, too many deals in the works, too controversial, too retired…
The Democratic leadership in the Congress has given Bush/Cheney a giant nod by taking a pass on holding them accountable through impeachment, through conditions in budget bills, through making them answer subpoenas by playing hardball on Bush’s nominees, such as his new choice for Attorney General.
It is up to the lawyers to rally for the Republic. This is deep patriotism, for without upholding our constitution, and the laws of the land, what will become of our country?
What will our children and their grandchildren inherit—a bankrupt government that contracts out more and more of its core functions to staggeringly expensive giant corporations seeking limitless profits, while they finance and corrupt politicians to turn their back on the peoples’ needs?
Lawyers are supposed to know how to apply law to raw power. They know how to use the courts, lobby (there are hundreds or thousands of attorneys in each of most Congressional Districts). They can cut through the arcane camouflage of legalese. They know when the laws are being violated and what the remedies are for the violators. They know how to draft legislation. They have contacts and money and are not supposed to be frightened of conflict. The super-lawyers invariably get their calls returned.
Where are the lawyers of America?
Two major terrorist strikes, with a messianic, compulsively-obsessed President, can do to America what 9 months of nightly bombing by the Nazis could not do to England—move us much closer to a police state.
Where are the stand-up lawyers of America? |
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