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Aljazeera:
Bush adviser announces resignation

MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2007
12:35 MECCA TIME, 9:35 GMT

Karl Rove, a political adviser to George Bush, the US president, will leave the White House at the end of this month, Rove told the Wall Street Journal.

"I just think it's time," he said in an interview with the newspaper published on Monday.

"There's always something that can keep you here, and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of my family."

The newspaper said Rove's resignation as White House deputy chief-of-staff would become effective on August 31.

Rove, who masterminded president Bush's political campaigns in 2000 and 2004, has been under fire since 2003.

Tensions began when Joseph Wilson, a retired US diplomat, claimed Rove had illegally leaked to the media the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a covert employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Wilson stated the leak had been planned in retaliation for his The New York Times article, in which he refuted a claim by the Bush administration that the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein had explored ways of purchasing uranium ore from Niger.

The claim, made by Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, was widely used to justify the subsequent invasion of Iraq.

An investigation into the Plame leak led to perjury and obstruction of justice charges, and subsequent conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a former chief-of-staff for Richard Cheney, the vice-president.

But prosecutors determined last year there was no reason to charge Rove with any wrongdoing.

Asked in the interview if he felt he had committed any mistakes during his White House tenure, Rove said: "I'll put my feet up in September and think about that."

Source: Agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/651A99C6-9265-434D-AF7C-688E73029CFB.htm

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AlterNet: The Real Reason
Why Fewer U.S. Soldiers Are Dying in Iraq

By Robert Parry, Consortium News
Posted on August 13, 2007

The number of U.S. military fatalities declined to 80 in July after three months of a death toll in the triple digits (104 in April, 126 in May, and 101 in June). The lower death toll has been cited by some U.S. commanders in Iraq and Bush administration supporters in Washington as a sign that President George W. Bush's "surge" of U.S. troops is working.

But the sources told me that the lower death toll reflects not some impending victory but just a slowdown in the U.S. ground offensive after the early phases of the surge, which poured more than 20,000 additional troops into Iraq. The sources cited a variety of factors contributing to the decline in U.S. casualties.

One U.S. military source said the American troops have not pushed as far from their forward operating bases as the U.S. news media has been led to believe. When Bush unveiled the surge, a key goal was to get American forces out of their secure bases and into small police outposts in Iraqi neighborhoods.

The exposure of U.S. troops to the additional hazard of such front-line assignments was a factor in the upswing of American deaths in the early months of the surge. This forward positioning also presented risks for U.S. logistical personnel who had to brave roadside bombs and ambushes to supply these isolated units.

Further complicating those assignments was the brutal summer heat - reaching temperatures of 130 degrees - at a time when electricity in many Iraqi neighborhoods is spotty at best. By slowing or postponing these deployments, the dangers to the troops - not to mention their discomfort - were reduced.

Still, this source said the decline in violent incidents involving U.S. troops could be viewed as a combination of two factors - a drop-off in activity by the Iraqi insurgency as well as a pull-back by the Americans.

Another source said the precise reason for the reduced U.S. military activity inside Iraq wasn't entirely clear, but noted that the slowdown in the Iraqi theater was in sharp contrast to more aggressive operations in Afghanistan.

A decline in American activity in Iraq also has been noted by Israeli intelligence, another source said, raising some concern in Tel Aviv that the U.S. military was shying away from offensive operations to avoid higher casualties that would further undermine political support for the war in the United States.

The source said some Israeli officials want the Americans to keep taking the fight to the enemy.

July heat

It's also possible that the brutal heat has a lot to do with the slower pace of the fighting, by discouraging operations by both guerrillas and U.S. troops. Since the war began, July has been one of the least deadly months for U.S. troops.

Indeed, compared to earlier July casualty reports, the July 2007 death toll of 80 was the worst of the war for U.S. troops. In July 2003, 48 American soldiers died; in July 2004, the death toll was 54; in July 2005, it was 54; in July 2006, it was 43.

U.S. military officials and Bush administration war supporters, however, have cited the decline in American deaths this July - compared with the previous three months - as one of several positive indicators that Bush's surge strategy is making progress.

These supporters also have hailed signs of increased cooperation with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province, once considered an insurgent stronghold. Over the past few weeks, the U.S. military has escorted analysts from several Washington think tanks to areas of relative calm in Iraq, leading to some glowing reports.

Typical was an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institution, who portrayed themselves as tough critics of the Bush administration's strategy who, after a visit to Iraq, concluded that Bush's surge was succeeding.

"As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with," O'Hanlon and Pollack wrote in an article entitled "A War We Just Might Win."

Yet the authors - and the New York Times - failed to tell readers the full story about these supposed skeptics: far from grizzled peaceniks, O'Hanlon and Pollack have been longtime cheerleaders for a larger U.S. military occupying force in Iraq.

Pollack, a former CIA analyst, was a leading advocate for invading Iraq in the first place. He published The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq in September 2002, just as the Bush administration was gearing up its marketing push for going to war.

British journalist Robert Fisk called Pollack's book the "most meretricious contribution to this utterly fraudulent [war] 'debate' in the United States." (Meretricious refers to something that is based on pretense, deception or insincerity.)

Cautious report

Another think tank analyst, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, returned from the same trip with a somewhat less optimistic assessment.

Cordesman wrote: "From my perspective, the U.S. now has only uncertain, high-risk options in Iraq. It cannot dictate Iraq's future, only influence it, and this presents serious problems at a time when the Iraqi political process has failed to move forward in reaching either a new consensus or some form of peaceful coexistence. …

"So far, Iraq's national government has failed to act at the rate necessary to move the country forward or give American military action political meaning."

Nevertheless, the Bush administration seems certain to tout whatever fragile positive developments can be discerned, to secure a new round of funding from Congress in September.

But the détente with those Sunni tribal leaders may turn out to be short-lived, especially if they conclude the U.S. occupation is helping the Shiite majority consolidate its power in Baghdad and its control over the nation's oil wealth.

The Shiite-dominated government is showing little inclination to make meaningful concessions to the Sunnis. Despite stern warnings from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Iraqi parliament adjourned for a month-long recess, leaving unresolved legislative disputes about sharing oil revenues and giving Sunnis a bigger stake in the government.

The grim future of Iraq might be foretold by conditions in the southern Shiite city of Basra, which once was regarded as a success story. As British forces were driven back into fortresses - and now are eying a full-scale withdrawal - the region became a battleground with various Shiite factions at war.

As the Washington Post reported, "Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil revenues, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national government will turn on one another once U.S. troops begin to draw down.

"Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city [of Basra] in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets."

To sustain even a modest degree of public support for the war, President Bush increasingly has relied on the argument that - as bad as the situation on Iraq is now - it would get worse if U.S. forces left.

Yet, however one cuts it, the future of Iraq looks bleak. In one telling passage from Cordesman's trip report, he described plans to address the disorder in Iraq by locking up tens of thousands of Iraqis, overwhelmingly Sunnis.

"The detainees have risen to over 18,000 and are projected to hit 30,000 (by the U.S. command) by the end of the year and 50,000 by the end of 2008," Cordesman wrote. "Shiite detainees are often freed while Sunnis are warehoused."

In other words, Bush's policy in Iraq appears headed toward replacing Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated police state which persecuted Shiites with an even more expansive police state run by the Shiites persecuting Sunnis.

Once the Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar get a whiff of what's in store for their religious brethren, they might reverse themselves again on their attitudes toward their new American friends.

In his report, Cordesman also put the Iraqi death toll from the war at more than 100,000. However, some estimates that count Iraqis who died unnecessarily due to the war's chaos have put that total at more than a half million.

If Bush's Iraq policies continue much longer - and the war turns even uglier - those staggering numbers could represent just a down payment in blood and misery. Years from now, the American people may find little solace from the pro-war spin point that the July 2007 death toll for U.S. troops was only 80.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered atneckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, "Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq" and "Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'" are also available there.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/59514/

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Asia Times:
Taliban a step ahead of US assault

By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Aug 11, 2007

KARACHI - The ongoing three-day peace jirga (council) involving hundreds of tribal leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan is aimed at identifying and rooting out Taliban and al-Qaeda militancy on both sides of the border.

This was to be followed up with military strikes at militant bases in Pakistan, either by the Pakistani armed forces in conjunction with the United States, or even by US forces alone.

The trouble is, the bases the US had meticulously identified no longer exist. The naive, rustic but battle-hardened Taliban still want a fight, but it will be fought on the Taliban's chosen battlegrounds.

Twenty-nine bases in the tribal areas of North Waziristan and South Waziristan on the border with Afghanistan that were used to train militants have simply fallen off the radar.

The US had presented Islamabad with a dossier detailing the location of the bases as advance information on likely US targets. But Asia Times Online has learned that since early this month, neither the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led coalition in Afghanistan nor Pakistan intelligence has detected any movement in the camps.

Human intelligence on both sides suggests the bases have been dismantled, apart from one run by hardline Islamist Mullah Abdul Khaliq. All other leading Taliban commanders, including Sirajuddin Haqqani, Gul Bahadur, Baitullah Mehsud and Haji Omar, have disappeared. Similarly, the top echelons of the Arab community that was holed up in North Waziristan has also gone.

The new battlefield
The al-Qaeda leadership (shura) has apparently now installed itself in Jani Khel village in the Bannu district of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). This includes Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The Taliban leadership, most prominently Haqqani, is concentrated in the Afghan provinces of Khost and Gardez, where much fighting is expected to take place.

A spillover of al-Qaeda's presence in Jani Khel is likely to spread to Karak, Kohat, Tank, Laki Marwat and Dera Ismail Khan in Pakistan. Kohat in NWFP is tipped to become a central city in the upcoming battle, as the office of the Pakistani Garrison commanding officer is there and all operations will be directed through this area. In addition, Kohat is directly linked with a US airfield in Khost for supplies and logistics.

A second war corridor is expected to be in the Waziristans, the Khyber Agency, the Kurram Agency, Bajaur Agency, Dir, Mohmand Agency and Chitral in Pakistan and Nanagarhar, Kunar and Nooristan in Afghanistan.

The fiercest battleground, however, will be in Khost and Gardez, making the previous Taliban successes in Helmand and Kandahar during the spring offensive of 2006 a distant memory.

The Taliban's evolution
The death in May of Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah in Afghanistan during a coalition raid set in motion a major change within the Taliban's command structure.

The loss of the heroic commander was a huge blow for the Taliban in southwestern Afghanistan, as a major symbol of success had been killed - and there was no one of his stature to replace him, as another top Taliban commander, Mullah Akhtar Osmani, had earlier been killed in Helmand.

Amid the demoralization, the entire Taliban leadership left Helmand, Urzgan, Zabul and Kandahar and sat idle in Satellite Town in Quetta, Pakistan, for several weeks.

# Finally, in June, Taliban leader Mullah Omar outlined new guidelines, which included: No members of the central military command would work in southwestern Afghanistan.
# Group commanders would be given control of specific districts and be allowed to develop their own strategy.
# This strategy would be passed on only to the Taliban-appointed "governor" of the area, who in turn would relay it to the Taliban's central command council. From these various inputs, the council would develop a broader strategy for particular regions.
# The Taliban would discourage personality cults like Dadullah's, as the death of a "hero" demoralized his followers.
# Four spokesmen were appointed to decentralize the Taliban's media-information wing. Each spokesman would look after only a specific zone so that in case of his arrest, only information about that zone could be leaked. They also have all been given the same name, at present it is Qari Yousuf Ahmedi.

This "unschooled" program produced results within weeks as the Taliban gained new ground in Helmand and Urzgan through widespread grassroots support, and Jalaluddin Haqqani's commanders gained prominence.

Where does Pakistan stand?
Pakistan's stance throughout the "war on terror" has been problematical, especially with regards to the Taliban, whom its intelligence agency had long nurtured. Certainly Islamabad distanced itself from the Taliban after their fall in 2001, and has periodically cracked down on them in Pakistan, but sections in the military, intelligence agencies and general public remain sympathetic.

But once the peace jirga concludes this weekend, a war has to be fought: the US is simply running out of patience.

Pakistan has said it is committed to such a battle against Taliban and al-Qaeda elements on its soil. Interestingly, though, of late the military establishment has activated its anti-American segment in the ruling coalition.

First, the secretary general of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, Mushahid Hussain Syed, called for a crushing response in the event of any US attack in Pakistan. Then retired Major Tanveer Hussain Syed, secretary for the parliamentary committee on defense, said ties with the US should be severed and the Taliban should be promoted in Afghanistan. Minister of Religious Affairs Ejaz ul-Haq weighed in by calling for a review of Pakistan-US relations and the country's participation in the "war on terror".

One can dismiss this as rhetoric. Washington might consider, though, that Pakistan has changed horses in midstream many times before.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at .
saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IH11Df01.html

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Clarín:
Defiendan a Günter Grass

Desde que Günter Grass confesó su participación en las filas de la Waffen SS nazi en "Pelando la cebolla", la polémica no ha cesado. En este texto, John Irving reivindica al Premio Nobel alemán: "Lo más sobrecogedor de esta autobiografía es la honestidad de Grass respecto de su deshonestidad", afirma. También subraya que su valor como escritor y ciudadano alemán se acrecienta con esta reciente revelación.

John Irving
11.08.2007 | Clarin.com | Revista Ñ

En mis años de estudiante universitario decidí pasar un año en el exterior, en un país germanoparlante, porque en 1961 y 1962 había leído dos veces El tambor de hojalata. Entre los catorce y los quince años había leído Grandes expectativas dos veces. Dickens me llevó a querer ser escritor, pero fue la lectura de El tambor de hojalata, a los diecinueve y los veinte años, lo que me mostró cómo hacerlo. Fue Günter Grass el que me demostró que era posible que un autor actual escribiera con el amplio espectro de emociones y la infatigable verborragia de Dickens. Grass escribía con furia, con amor, con ironía, comicidad, patetismo; y todo ello con una conciencia implacable.

En el otoño de 1963 viajé a Viena, donde me convertí en alumno del Instituto de Estudios Europeos. Aprendí alemán y leí literatura alemana. Quería leer Die Blechtrommel tal como Grass lo había escrito, en alemán. Tenía veintiún años. (Nunca aprendí lo suficiente de alemán como para leer a Grass. Incluso ahora, él me escribe en alemán y yo le contesto en inglés. De todos modos, fue en mi época de estudiante en Viena cuando empecé a verme como escritor de novelas.) Había marcado algunos pasajes de Die Blechtrommel y había memorizado la traducción de los mismos al inglés. Resultó ser una buena forma de conocer chicas.

"Polonia está perdida, pero no para siempre; todo está perdido, pero no para siempre; Polonia no está perdida para siempre".

El protagonista de la novela, Oskar Matzerath, se niega a crecer. Como sigue teniendo el aspecto de un niño -chico y en apariencia inocente-, puede mantenerse al margen de los acontecimientos políticos de los años del nazismo mientras los demás mueren. Como le advierte a Oskar la enana Bebra: "Preocúpate siempre de estar sentado en la tribuna y nunca de pie ante la misma".

Oskar puede sobrevivir como una persona pequeña, pero no evade la culpa. Arrastra a su madre a la tumba, es responsable de la muerte de su tío (el padre biológico de Oskar) y hace que su presunto padre se ahogue con su emblema del partido nazi mientras los soldados rusos ametrallan al cornudo. Al terminar la guerra Oskar vuelve por fin a crecer, en un vagón de carga. Tiene un talento innato para tocar el tambor y se presenta en un club nocturno llamado "El sótano de cebolla", donde los invitados pelan cebollas para llorar. Pero Oskar Matzerath no necesita cebollas para llorar: le basta con tocar el tambor y recordar las muertes que presenció. "Bastaban unos pocos recaudos especiales para que Oskar se deshiciera en llanto".

El tambor de hojalata fue la novela más aclamada de la Alemania de posguerra. La negativa de Oskar Matzerath a crecer se convirtió en un símbolo de la culpa del país. En el penúltimo párrafo de la novela, que se extiende una página y media, se menciona "el jugo de cebolla que arranca lágrimas", apenas una de una larga lista de imágenes memorables.

En esa extraordinaria primera novela -que se publicó en 1959 en Alemania-, el propio Grass parecía tener mucho que expiar. En El tambor de hojalata, la voz siempre se relaciona con la expiación a medida que pasa una y otra vez -a veces en la misma frase- del narrador en primera persona a la narración en tercera persona. Pero Grass nació en Danzig (ahora Gdansk) en 1927. Tenía diez años cuando se incorporó a la Jungvolk, una organización que alimentaba a la Juventud de Hitler. Era apenas un soldado de diecisiete años en 1944, cuando los estadounidenses lo hicieron prisionero. (En la actualidad, el inglés americano de Günter sigue siendo mejor que mi alemán, cuando nos encontramos hablamos sobre todo en inglés, con ocasionales incursiones mías en el alemán.)

Grass no era más que un chico cuando Alemania invadió Polonia. Me preguntaba de qué tenía que sentirse culpable. ¿La carga de culpa presente en El tambor de hojalata era la llamada culpa colectiva alemana? Cuando estudiaba en Viena leí sobre esa culpa en los diarios. Lo que sabía sobre lo sucedido a los polacos -la muerte de Jan Bronski en el ataque al Correo Polaco-, lo sabía por El tambor de hojalata. La población de Gdansk nombraría luego ciudadano honorario a Grass. ¿Y por qué no? La historia de Oskar Matzerath -en mi opinión, hasta su negativa a crecer- era heroica.

Novelas de expiación

Un frío día de invierno en Viena, cuando nadie que estuviera del todo en sus cabales se habría sentido inclinado a desnudarse, me presenté en la academia de arte de la Ringstrasse y ofrecí mis servicios como modelo para las clases de dibujo. "Tengo experiencia en los Estados Unidos", dije, pero quería ser modelo porque Oskar Matzerath es modelo. Resultó ser otra forma de conocer chicas.

En algún momento de aquel año académico 1963-1964, antes de irme de Viena, un amigo estadounidense me mandó la traducción al inglés de la segunda novela de Grass, El gato y el ratón. Esta vez había una narración en primera persona constante, pero el narrador permanece en el anonimato durante más de cien páginas. Se identifica a Mahlke, el personaje principal, en la primera frase, pero se hace referencia a él tanto en la tercera persona como en la segunda. El evasivo narrador expresa sus sentimientos de culpa por lo que le pasa a Mahlke al comienzo, cuando un gato se siente atraído por su nuez de Adán ("el gato saltó a la garganta de Mahlke; o uno de nosotros tomó al gato y lo sostuvo ante el cuello de Mahlke; o (...) tomé al gato y le mostré el ratón de Mahlke"). Más adelante, cuando detienen a un maestro ("probablemente por motivos políticos"), el narrador, todavía innominado, escribe: "Interrogaron a algunos de los alumnos. Espero no haber declarado en su contra". Y vuelven las cebollas para referirse a la culpa colectiva: "Tal vez si frotara la superficie de mi máquina de escribir con jugo de cebolla podría transmitir algo del olor a cebolla que en aquellos años contaminaba toda Alemania (...) evitando que el olor de los cadáveres se impusiera por completo". ¿Qué pasa con las cebollas? me pregunté.

¿Y qué quería decir Grass con el silencio? "Desde ese viernes sé qué es el silencio. El silencio se instala cuando las gaviotas se alejan. Nada puede crear más silencio que una dragadora en funcionamiento cuando el viento se lleva sus ruidos de hierro".

El gato y el ratón se lee como una confesión, pero el crimen (si es que lo hay) es de omisión. No vemos todo lo que le pasa a Mahlke. Sólo sabemos que es otra víctima de la guerra. Contamos a Mahlke entre los ausentes. "Pero no apareciste", concluye la novela. "No emergiste".

A fines del verano de 1964 abandoné Viena con mi joven esposa, que estaba embarazada. La locadora entró en mi dormitorio con el futuro comprador de mi motocicleta, que había puesto en venta para pagar el alquiler. En la mesa de luz tenía la edición alemana de Die Blechtrommel, con las puntas de muchas páginas dobladas, llena de marcas, pero sin leer. A la mujer le sorprendió que me llevara tanto tiempo leer la novela. Como no quería admitir mis problemas con el alemán, le pregunté qué pensaba de Günter Grass. Tanto el comprador de la motocicleta como yo éramos estudiantes y creíamos, con cierta presunción, que Grass era propiedad exclusiva de los que estudiábamos. Por otra parte, no me parecía que mi locadora fuera una gran lectora. Años después, sin embargo, alguien de su generación me asombró al repetir exactamente lo que ella me había dicho sobre Grass: "Er ist ein bisschen unhöflich" ("Es un poco descortés").

Fue el primer indicio que tuve de que el público austríaco y alemán -sobre todo los que tenían edad suficiente como para recordar la guerra-, consideraba que Grass era más que un escritor respetado y famoso en todo el mundo. Muchos austríacos y alemanes veían a Grass como un juez implacable y una autoridad moral. No sólo sus novelas eran actos de expiación, sino que era un severo crítico de la Alemania de posguerra: censuraba a todos, no sólo a los políticos. (Y no sólo a los alemanes, como descubriría después.)

En 1979 Grass escribió: "No hay escasez de grandes figuras de Führer; un predicador intolerante en Washington y un filisteo enfermizo en Moscú". En 1982, luego de un viaje a Nicaragua, Grass dijo que se sentía avergonzado de que los Estados Unidos fueran aliados de su país. ("¿Qué tan empobrecido tiene que estar un país para que no sea una amenaza para el gobierno de los Estados Unidos?") En uno de los ensayos recopilados en Sobre la escritura y la política, señala: "Las personas cristianas y los grupos cristianos resistieron el nazismo con gran valor, pero la cobardía de las iglesias católica y protestante en Alemania las hizo cómplices tácitas". En Partos mentales, libro sobre el que escribí en Saturday Review en 1982, Grass seguía censurándose: "Fue un error creer que El gato y el ratón liberaría mis penas de escolar". Culpa y más culpa, y más expiación. ¡Este tipo sí que se fustiga! pensé.

Un héroe a mis ojos

Es importante entender que el hombre se granjeó enemigos. Veinticinco libros y un Premio Nobel (en 1999) preceden la autobiografía de Grass, Pelando la cebolla, que el año pasado se publicó en alemán (Beim Häuten der Zwiebel) y generó gran controversia.

Si bien a los que criticaban a Grass les resultaba aceptable que se hubiera ofrecido como submarinista voluntario a los quince años de edad, la revelación de que lo habían reclutado en la Waffen SS, la fuerza de combate de la SS, en 1944, cuando tenía diecisiete años, fue todo un golpe. Grass pasó los últimos meses de la guerra en la fuerza, a la que luego el tribunal de Nuremberg condenó en masa por crímenes de guerra.

¿Por qué esperó tanto para contarlo? preguntaron los críticos. (¡Como si hubiera existido un momento en el que no se lo hubiera criticado por ello!) En el Frankfurter Allgemeine, un historiador se preguntó por qué la revelación se había hecho "de forma tan torturada". (¡Como si no hubiera amplias pruebas de lo "torturado" de Grass en todos los libros anteriores!) Otro escritor del Frankfurter Allgemeine conjeturó que la última -y frustrada- misión de la división Frundsberg de tanques de Grass era sacar a Hitler de Berlín. ("En otras palabras, Grass podría haber liberado a Hitler".) Un escritor de Die Tageszeitung acusó a Grass de "calcular": ¿No debería haber escrito a la Academia sueca para ofrecer una renuncia? ("Nunca se habría tenido en cuenta para ese premio a un ex integrante de la Waffen SS".) Haciendo referencia a Grass, un artículo de Neue Zürcher Zeitung señaló: "Adoptando la pose de moralista...", etc. Tanto el Süddeutsche Zeitung como el Frankfurter Rundschau condenaron el carácter tardío de la admisión. Pero los buenos escritores escriben sobre las cosas importantes antes de hablar de las mismas. ¡Los buenos escritores no cuentan las historias antes de escribirlas!

Escribí un artículo para el Frankfurter Rundschau; en defensa de Grass, por supuesto. También le escribí a Günter. Protesté por el "desmantelamiento mojigato" de su vida y su trabajo por parte de los medios alemanes "desde la cobarde posición de la retrospectiva". Escribí: "Usted sigue siendo un héroe a mis ojos, como escritor y como referencia moral. Su valor, como escritor y como ciudadano de su país, es ejemplar, y es un valor que se ve acrecentado y no disminuido con su reciente revelación".

Volker Schlöndorff, el director de la película basada en El tambor de hojalata, expresó compasión por su amigo en Der Tagesspiegel. También Salman Rushdie habló en defensa de Grass. Tilman Krause escribió en Die Welt: "Admirar la profunda honestidad de su forma rigurosa de pelar la cebolla o condenarla como algo que habríamos preferido no saber es una decisión que dependerá de lo que sintamos por el autor, de si deseamos que le vaya bien o no". En el Süddeutsche Zeitung, el escritor Ivan Angel, que es judío (y que se ocultó en Hungría mientras su contemporáneo Grass servía en la Waffen SS), manifestó comprensión por el carácter tardío de la confesión de Grass: "Yo no tenía motivos para sentir vergüenza -después de todo, fui uno de los perseguidos-, a pesar de lo cual no pude hablar de eso durante cincuenta y cinco años. Entiendo a Günter Grass, que sólo ahora puede hablar sobre su vergüenza, su oprobio. La vida no es un libro de consulta que uno puede abrir a voluntad; no es un manuscrito terminado que se puede publicar en cualquier momento".

En mi opinión, el más desafortunado de los ataques contra Grass fue la declaración de Lech Walesa de que se alegraba de no conocer a Grass y, por lo tanto, de no haberle dado la mano, algo que el ex presidente polaco aseguró que no haría. En agosto de 2006 Walesa también pidió que Grass renunciara a su condición de ciudadano honorario de la ciudad de Gdansk, distinción que se había concedido al escritor por la forma en que había rendido homenaje al sufrimiento de Danzig en El tambor de hojalata. Walesa pronto se retractó de sus declaraciones, que calificó de "apresuradas". Cuando estuve en Varsovia a principios de setiembre del año pasado, mi editor me dijo que los polacos estaban "divididos" respecto de la revelación de Grass. Lo que advertí en Varsovia fue que los lectores asiduos de Grass ya se habían reconciliado con él. Los que no lo habían leído, o los que sólo habían leído El tambor de hojalata, eran los únicos que pedían que devolviera el Premio Nobel.

Una autobiografía fascinante y ardua

No conozco a nadie que después de haber leído Pelando la cebolla quiera que Grass devuelva el Nobel. La autobiografía es tan buena como las mejores novelas de Grass, y tiene una frase inicial que explica algo que, en sus trabajos anteriores, los lectores podrían haber tomado por un recurso estilístico, tal como me pasó a mí. "Hoy, como en años pasados, la tentación de camuflarse en la tercera persona sigue siendo muy grande: Tenía casi doce años, pero le seguía gustando sentarse en la falda de su madre..." Grass establece desde el primer momento que "la memoria es como una cebolla". También afirma: "Mi breve inscripción reza: Guardé silencio". Grass admite que en su infancia y adolescencia tenía un objeto de culto. "Los noticieros: era presa fácil de la 'verdad' dulcificada en blanco y negro que nos proporcionaban". La autobiografía es una confesión dolorosa. "Una y otra vez, autor y libro me recuerdan qué poco entendía en mi juventud y qué limitado es el efecto que puede tener la literatura". Danzig quedó reducida a escombros sobre el fin de la guerra, y los primeros capítulos del libro se concentran en "el muchacho que abandonó la ciudad cuando sus torres y fachadas seguían intactas".

Al recordar la violación de la viuda Greff por parte de soldados rusos en El tambor de hojalata, Grass relata que su propia madre no le dijo nunca dónde ni cuántas veces la habían violado los rusos. "Sólo después de su muerte me enteré -y sólo de forma indirecta, a través de mi hermana- de que, para proteger a su hija, se había ofrecido a los soldados. No hubo palabras". La hermana de Grass se convirtió en monja y luego en partera. "La fe infantil que perdió ante la violencia de los soldados al final de la guerra, se había restablecido".

La fe del autor no se recupera. Admite que consideraba a la Waffen SS "una unidad de elite". Camuflándose una vez más en la tercera persona, Grass escribe: "Es probable que al muchacho, que se consideraba un hombre, lo que más le preocupara fuera la rama de servicio: si no lo destinaban a los submarinos, que ya casi habían desaparecido de los boletines radiales, entonces sería artillero de tanque". Luego admite: "Lo que había aceptado con el orgullo estúpido de la juventud, quise ocultarlo después de la guerra debido a un recurrente sentimiento de vergüenza. Pero el agobio persistía, y nadie podía mitigarlo". Del diario que perdió en la guerra sólo dice: "No es una pérdida fácil que pueda minimizarse: con frecuencia hizo que me sintiera perdido ante mí mismo".

Si bien Grass señala que "nunca observé por una mira, nunca toqué un gatillo y, por lo tanto, nunca disparé". Dice que el cambio de su uniforme de la Waffen SS, con "esos ornamentos" (la doble runa) en el cuello, por "una chaqueta común de la Wehrmacht" fue obra de un soldado mayor que tomó bajo su protección a Grass -que tenía diecisiete años- y fue el primer "ángel de la guarda", si bien no el último, del futuro escritor. Pero el soldado que organizó el cambio de uniforme de Grass pierde ambas piernas y Grass resulta herido. "No emití sonido; me quedé ahí parado en mis pantalones empapados de orina, mirando las entrañas de un muchacho con el que había estado charlando momentos antes. La muerte parecía haber encogido su rostro redondo".

Es después de la guerra cuando el artista observa: "Todo el que haya visto no sólo cadáveres aislados sino cadáveres en pilas toma cada día como un regalo". Como prisionero de guerra, cuando le muestras imágenes de Bergen-Belsen, Grass se limita a decir: "No podía creerlo". Escribe: "Incredulidad primero, cuando las imágenes en blanco y negro de los campos de concentración me sobresaltaron; después, estupefacción".

A los dieciocho años, cuando los estadounidenses lo dejan en libertad, Grass confiesa aquí que no sentía culpa alguna. Se desliza una vez más hacia la tercera persona y se refiere al "cliente del mercado negro a la deriva que llevaba mi nombre". Habla de sus tres hambres: el común, la necesidad de comer (pasó hambre en el campo de prisioneros), "el deseo de amor carnal" y su hambre de arte ("ese deseo de conquistar todo con imágenes").

Sólo mucho después surge la necesidad de hablar. En Tel Aviv, en 1967, recuerda, "Tenía treinta y nueve años (...) y fama de alborotador, debido a mi tendencia a decir públicamente lo que se había barrido bajo la alfombra". El ir y venir entre ocultamiento y revelación hace que Pelando la cebolla resulte fascinante y ardua. "Yo, el muchacho de la guerra, consumido y por lo tanto inexorablemente unido a la contradicción", se describe. "Todo lo que tuviera algún tufillo nacional me resultaba repugnante".

Los que lo critican deberían sentirse avergonzados

Cerca del final del libro, Grass declara abiertamente: "Practiqué el arte de la evasión". Lo más sobrecogedor de esta autobiografía es la honestidad de Grass respecto de su deshonestidad. Desde "Mi propia existencia y las concomitantes cuestiones existenciales me absorbían por completo, y la política cotidiana no podía importarme menos", has ta "Debo admitir que tengo un problema con el tiempo: muchas cosas que tuvieron un comienzo o un final precisos no me quedaron registradas hasta mucho después".

A lo largo del libro se suceden los orígenes, las fuentes reales, de detalles que los lectores recordarán de las novelas de Grass. La referencia a Oskar Matzerath, que "consiguió un trabajo de modelo", tiene para mí un significado especial. También está la aparición (en una pequeña ciudad de Suiza) de "un niño de unos tres años de edad (...) con un tambor de hojalata colgado del cuello" -que basta para que los lectores de El tambor de hojalata sientan escalofríos- o esta observación: "Uno nunca sabe qué es lo que va a convertirse en un libro".

Es la certidumbre moral, la rendición de cuentas, lo que hace que esta autobiografía tenga tanta resonancia. Los primeros amores, la primera esposa y todo lo que lleva a la escritura de su primera novela; todo eso está presente pero, como siempre, Grass da lo mejor de sí cuando se trata con rigor: "Incluso si un autor termina por volverse dependiente de los personajes que crea, debe responder por sus actos y sus errores".

Si bien la autobiografía termina en forma abrupta con la publicación de El tambor de hojalata en el otoño de 1959, cuando el joven novelista y su mujer fueron a la Feria del Libro de Francfort y bailaron "hasta la mañana", cuesta pensar que habrá una continuación. Grass encuentra una forma elocuente de ponerle fin: "de ahí en más viví de página en página y entre un libro y otro, mi mundo interior aún rico en personajes. Pero no tengo cebolla para hablar de todo eso, ni deseos de hacerlo".

En agosto leí en Spiegel Online las reflexiones de un ex miembro de la Waffen SS llamado Edmund Zalewski, que había llevado a cabo una investigación propia al enterarse de la revelación de Grass. (Ninguna de las personas con las que habló Zalewski recordaba a Günter Grass.) Después de la guerra, Zalewski "nunca perdió contacto" con sus ex colegas de la SS. Sigue siendo secretario de la Fraternidad de Frundsberg, un grupo de veteranos cuyos integrantes se reúnen todos los años en distintos lugares que tuvieron importancia durante la guerra. "A esta altura quedamos sesenta compañeros", declaró Zalewski. "Antes era diferente, por supuesto, pero ahora todos tenemos por lo menos ochenta años".

¡Grass sigue sintiéndose culpable por haber integrado la Waffen SS a los diecisiete años mientras algunos de sus compañeros soldados mayores de la división de tanques de Frundsberg asisten a reuniones! Sin embargo, el crítico más egregio de Grass -Christopher Hitchens, en Slate- lo califica de "charlatán y farsante, y también hipócrita". Son los que critican a Grass con cobardía -el fatuo de Hitchens entre ellos- los que deberían sentirse avergonzados.

Este otoño Günter Grass cumplirá ochenta años. Habrá celebraciones en toda Alemania. Ya me enteré de una en Göttingen y otra en Lübeck. Pienso ir a la fiesta de Göttingen, si es que no voy también a la de Lübeck.

La dedicatoria de Pelando la cebolla reza: "Dedicado a todos aquellos de quienes aprendí". En mi opinión, todo escritor que haya leído a Günter Grass está en deuda con él. Sé que yo lo estoy.

(c) The New York Times y Clarín

Traducción de Joaquín Ibarburu

Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2007/08/11/u-03411.htm

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Guardian:
Revealed: cover-up plan on energy target

Ministers urged to lobby for get-out on renewables

Ashley Seager and Mark Milner
Monday August 13 2007

Government officials have secretly briefed ministers that Britain has no hope of getting remotely near the new European Union renewable energy target that Tony Blair signed up to in the spring - and have suggested that they find ways of wriggling out of it.

In contrast to the government's claims to be leading the world on climate change, officials within the former Department of Trade and Industry have admitted that under current policies Britain would miss the EU's 2020 target of 20% energy from renewables by a long way. And their suggestion that "statistical interpretations of the target" be used rather than new ways to reach it has infuriated environmentalists.

An internal briefing paper for ministers, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, reveals that officials at the department, now the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, think the best the UK could hope for is 9% of energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar or hydro by 2020.

It says the UK "has achieved little so far on renewables" and that getting to 9%, from the current level of about 2%, would be "challenging". The paper was produced in the early summer, around the time the government published its energy white paper.

Under current policies renewables would account for only 5% of Britain's energy mix by 2020, the document says. The EU average is 7%; Germany is at 13%. It acknowledges that Germany, unlike Britain, has built a "strong and growing renewables industry".

EU leaders agreed the 20% target for the bloc in spring. The European Commission is working out how to reach this .

DBERR officials fear that Britain may end up being told to get to 16%, which it describes as "very challenging". The paper suggests a number of ways ministers could wriggle out of specific commitments. It also suggests ministers lobby certain EU commissioners and countries such as France, Germany, Poland and Italy to agree to a more flexible interpretation of the target, by including nuclear power, for example, or investment in solar farms in Africa.

Officials ask ministers to examine "what options there are for statistical interpretations of the target that would make it easier to achieve".

They suggest the target lacks credibility because it is so ambitious, while acknowledging that the Germans will be difficult to persuade because the Chancellor Angela Merkel is the champion of the 20% target and wants to commit Germany to 27%.

"These flexible options are ones that may be difficult to negotiate with some member states such as Germany, who we expect to resist approaches that may be seen to water down the renewables target," the briefing says.

Environmentalists were shocked. "This briefing reads like a 'wriggle and squirm' paper," said Andrew Simms, director of the New Economics Foundation. "It combines almost comic desperation from civil servants suddenly realising that they actually have to do something to promote renewable energy, with a breathtaking cynicism as they explore every conceivable get-out clause to escape the UK's international commitments."

A spokesman for DBERR said he would not comment on leaked documents, but added: "This government is committed to renewables and reducing emissions in line with EU targets."

The Conservative's shadow secretary of state, Alan Duncan, said: "This is a staggering revelation and shows the government has known all along it won't meet its targets but has deliberately avoided admitting it. They have been living a lie."

The Lib Dem environment spokesman, Chris Huhne, agreed: "This news confirms that the government has said yes to an EU target of 20% of renewable energy without any visible means of achieving it. If the government's policy is now to have any credibility and not be seen as a cynical attempt to woo green opinion, ministers must stop fudging and start acting."

The paper reveals an aversion to renewables on the basis of perceived cost, arguing that they are a more expensive way of reducing carbon emissions than the European Emissions Trading Scheme. It estimates that getting to 9% by 2020 could cost the economy £4bn a year.

Environmentalists reject the idea that renewables are too expensive. Even £4bn a year is only about one third of the 1% of gross domestic product rich countries were recommended to spend a year combating climate change.

The paper also reveals that carbon capture and underground storage of CO2 emissions from new coal-fired power stations is projected to make little contribution before 2020. "This is betrayal of the highest order," said Rajiv Bhatia, head of renewable energy distributor Alternergy.

Jeremy Leggett, of solar energy company Solarcentury, said: "It would not surprise me if this delay in renewables deployment was the tactical objective all along for some senior officials in DTI. Serving on the government's Renewables Advisory Board from 2003 to 2006, I witnessed what cynics could easily have mistaken for a deliberate campaign of delay, obfuscation, and the parking, if not torpedoing, of good ideas coming from industry members of the board."

* Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/aug/13/renewableenergy.energy

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Harper’s Magazine:
A Cartoon

Posted on August 10, 2007. By Mr. Fish.



This is A Cartoon, a cartoon by Mr. Fish, published August 10, 2007. It is part of The Cartoons of Mr. Fish: a Selection, which is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.

Written By
Fish, Mr.

Permanent URL
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000843

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Jeune Afrique: Sahara occidental:
le Polisario rejette "la paix des braves" proposée par Rabat

MAROC - 12 août 2007 - par AFP

Les Sahraouis rejettent la proposition de "paix des braves" de Rabat, a déclaré dimanche le représentant en Algérie du mouvement indépendantiste du Front Polisario Mohamed Yeslem Beyssat.

"Les Sahraouis rejettent la proposition de la +paix des braves+ formulée par le Maroc", a déclaré M. Beyssat lors d'une conférence à l'université d'été de l'Union nationale des étudiants algériens (UNEA) à Boumerdès.

La "paix des braves" est une formule employée pour la première fois par le général Charles de Gaulle pour une paix de compromis avec le Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) algérien pour mettre un terme à la guerre d'Algérie (1954-1962).

Le Maroc avait appelé à une "paix des braves" lors de l'ouverture vendredi de la deuxième série de négociations directes avec le mouvement indépendantiste Front Polisario sous l'égide de l'ONU à Manhasset près de New York.

Cette "paix des braves" doit se réaliser sur la proposition d'une autonomie pour le Sahara occidental sous souveraineté marocaine, selon Chakib Benmoussa, ministre de l'Intérieur et chef de la délégation marocaine, dont les propos étaient rapportés par l'agence Map.

L'autonomie "reste la voie judicieuse vers la paix des braves", avait dit le ministre marocain.

Le Polisario a rejeté la proposition marocaine d'autonomie et réclame l'organisation d'un référendum d'autodétermination dans l'ancienne colonie espagnole, qui donnerait aux Sahraouis le choix entre trois options: le rattachement au Maroc, l'autonomie ou l'indépendance.

M. Beyssat a par ailleurs estimé qu'il était "prématuré de juger les négociations avec le Maroc", qui doivent reprendre avant la fin de l'année en Europe. Il a estimé néanmoins que "le débat ainsi instauré entre les deux parties" (Maroc et Polisario) "est susceptible de déboucher sur la satisfaction de la revendication sahraouie d'autodétermination".

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP94657sahartabarr0#

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New Statesman:
The Arctic killers

Marek Kohn
Published 09 August 2007

The scramble for the Arctic's oil and gas has begun. Marek Kohn reports exclusively from Svalbard on how, in this most sensitive of environments, the plunderers count on climate change for help

The first thing you see of Barentsburg is a frayed plume of black smoke, and this also turns out to be one of its few signs of life. Although the town ranks as the second largest settlement in the Svalbard archipelago, far to the north of Norway and just to the south of the Arctic ice, it can muster only about 900 inhabitants. Many are underground, mining the coal they burn to keep the place going. This is an offshore Russian colony, hanging on in an undead Soviet town as the coal reserves run out.

On this particular Saturday afternoon, the population is swelled by about 10 per cent because of a party of British teenagers who have won a trip to Svalbard in Ice Edge, a competition for environmental projects organised by Edge, the educational foundation. They have come to meet scientists from different nations, see polar bears and stand on the rim of the polar ice, but today they are being reminded that underneath the northern quest for scientific knowledge lies the search for fossil fuel.

A bust of Lenin glares at them from a distance, as the guide points out "the only forest on Svalbard" - a fading mural of Russian birches, to help the miners feel at home. Those men did not really come all this way to dig coal, but to fly the flag. Under the Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920, Norway has sovereignty over the archipelago, but the other signatories have rights of access. During the Soviet period, the state's principal strategic interest in the region was military; today it is the fields of gas and oil through which Russia intends to assert its global influence. Nearly a quarter of Russia's reserves lie off its northern coasts, and it hopes to gain ten billion tonnes more by demonstrating that its continental shelf is 1.2 million square kilometres bigger than is accepted at present. That is why, a few days ago, a Russian vessel, visiting the North Pole as part of International Polar Year, sent down mini-submarines to plant a titanium Russian flag on the ocean floor. This old-fashioned gesture made headlines around the world.

Poisoned winds

Industry is already inescapable up here. At Ny-Ålesund, a cluster of international scientific stations - from Chinese to Dutch, the latter represented by a man in yellow clogs who studies geese - the school students meet Geir Gabriel sen, an ecotoxicologist. He tells them how the Arctic is becoming a "sink" for pollutants from the south, which build up in the fatty tissues of Arctic seabirds, polar bears and other predators. These days, the winds from the south are blowing for longer, increasing the exposure of Arctic wildlife to toxins from Europe and elsewhere.

Wildlife may also be exposed increasingly to industrial chemicals from closer at hand. Arctic technologists at Svalbard's University Centre are studying the properties of ice to assess the prospects for pipelines and drilling rigs. Offshore gas and oil extraction in the Arctic will push the limits of technology in an environment that is both extreme and fragile.

The current centre of attention in the Arctic energy landscape is the Shtokman field, off north-west Russia in the Barents Sea. Russia's energy giant Gazprom has selected Total, the French oil concern, as a partner in exploiting the reserves, which it plans to start piping in 2013. Shtokman is big, but its 3.7 trillion cubic metres of gas are only a small part of Russia's immense hydrocarbon deposits, which amount to 45 per cent of the world's known gas reserves and a fifth of the world's oil. Its Arctic regions also contain deposits of precious and base metals.

Looking at a map of the Arctic with the North Pole at the centre, one sees that this is Russia's natural hemisphere. Looking at the distribution of its Arctic mineral resources, one can imagine a Russian drive to intensify the industrialisation of this frontier as global warming thaws it. Similar opportunities may open up all around the hemisphere. At the first Arctic Frontiers conference, in Norway in January, Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environment Agency, warned against "another Klondike" in the Arctic.

Indeed, all across the top of the world, the encroachment of industry into the permafrost is well under way. On the Russian Sakhalin peninsula, north of Japan, Shell is pursuing oil and gas extraction in the habitat of the world's last hundred or so Pacific grey whales. In partnership with Gazprom, Mitsubishi and Matsui, it is constructing two further oil platforms, two 800km pipelines and an LPG processing plant. Environmentalists claim the development has destroyed fishing areas and, with the influx of male workers, brought a wave of prostitution and HIV.

The Yamal peninsula in north-western Siberia holds Russia's largest natural gas reserves. Gazprom hopes to start extracting from the Bovanenkovskoye deposit by 2011-2012. "At Yamal, we are seeing serious environmental effects, with roads being driven through the reducing permafrost," says Rasmus Hansson of WWF Norway. "There are huge oil leaks as pipelines start to sink into the melting frost. The ecological consequences are massive."

The going is slow for Russia's hydrocarbon industry in the high north, and the industry is also coming under scrutiny in North America, which consumes more than 25 per cent of the world's oil. Last year, BP had to close the Alaskan Prudhoe Bay oilfield, 250 miles inside the Arctic circle and the largest reserve of oil in the US, after a spill caused by corroded pipelines. For environmentalists, the silver lining is that it makes drilling in the neighbouring Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - a long-held ambition of congressional Republicans - politically impossible for now.

Frederic Hauge, president of the Oslo-based environmental organisation Bellona, sees such industrial difficulties as a valuable respite. "The Arctic is struggling with nuclear contamination, toxins, pollution and climate change," he says. "Oil and gas exploration puts a huge amount of pressure on an extremely stressed ecosystem. The Arctic is like a canary in a coal mine: we see the effects of global warming there earlier than anywhere else. It's very scary. Oil and gas companies face a moral responsibility to act: we need to combat climate change with all the weapons we have. Norway faces a global responsibility to the world as guardian of this precious ecosystem: we simply can't look at this in terms of regional and personal gain. My hope is that oil and gas companies can be held off a little longer . . . Keeping oil and gas out of the Arctic is the single most important thing we can do."

Political stresses

When Americans looked at northern polar maps in the 1950s, they saw the Soviet Union reaching round the globe to encircle them. Today, the global threat arises wherever people burn carbon, but it would be unwise to overlook the potential political stresses in the Arctic. Across the Russian half of the hemisphere, a political-industrial complex appears to be taking shape in which state and commercial interests are in tegrated. Norway will also keep StatoilHydro, its major energy player, under state control. The Arctic states have a strong sense of their national interests in the region, and may not always live together as harmoniously as the international scientists at Ny-Ålesund do, eating together in the mess hall.

Not all the effects of climate change in the Arctic are yet clear. There may be more snow in future, for instance, and that might protect the remaining ice by reflecting the sun's light away. As the glaciers melt, pouring fresh water into the sea, they may slow the great ocean circulation that bathes Europe in warm water from the south, offsetting the greenhouse effect. The effects on sea level are another matter again. Recently the Nasa climate scientist James Hansen and his colleagues warned of an "imminent peril" that melting in the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets might run beyond human control, leading to "devastating" sea level rises of several metres per century.

What is clear, however, is that the Arctic sea ice is shrinking, at its summer minimum, by about 8 per cent per decade: about 500,000 square miles have gone since the late 1970s. Svalbard's university is on the shore of Isfjorden ("ice fjord"), but for the past two winters it has been free of ice, and as its annual report notes, the university's supplies have been delivered by sea. The average temperature last year was 5° higher than the average over the past 50 years. As the research results come in from the International Polar Year, the world's polar scientists will map the changes that have occurred since the results from its predecessor, the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, in unprecedented detail. According to Hansson, the environmental hazards facing the Arctic can still be countered. "A growing num ber of governments are admitting a problem," he says. "Although the problem is increasingly serious, there is increased reason for optimism."

The fjord and the polluted wildlife show how everything is amplified here. Animals, needing protection against the cold, have more fatty tissue, in which toxins accumulate. Climate modelling indicates that if the world as a whole gets 2°C warmer, the average temperature in the Arctic will rise by over 6°C. As the scientific briefing for the International Polar Year points out, changes happen earlier at the poles. The Arctic may be a "sentinel" for the planet, where scientists can ob serve tomorrow's changes today.

As the ice recedes, the forests will march north. There may never be real birches at Barentsburg, but trees will replace tundra across much of northern Canada and Arctic Russia. Much of the remaining tundra will become "polar desert". According to a WWF speaker at the Arctic Frontiers conference, some 60 per cent of the tundra will be lost one way or the other, and the reindeer herds with it. That will put paid to what remains of the traditional way of life for those of the Arctic's four million inhabitants who still herd the reindeer. It will also destabilise the foundations of the modern way of Arctic life, with buildings collapsing and roads fragmenting as the permafrost melts.

Tourist footprints

The tourists are heading north, as well as the engineers and the forests. At Ny-Ålesund, the northernmost settlement in the world, the Ice Edge students have to wait for two large cruise ships to move away before they can land. Each time these ships visit, the scientists' environ mental measurements are spoiled by a tourist spike. We all arrive with green intentions, but can't help leaving our footprints.

The students have ideas for reducing their carbon footprint, from domestic energy monitors to blinds fitted with solar panels. Most are green, but one is yellow. Nathan Allen, Chris Balding and Jess Fok of Eltham College in south London suggest that infernal element, sulphur, as an alternative to coal. They've got it all worked out - immense reserves, high efficiency, huge demand for the acid by-product and, in a nice biotech flourish, bacteria from Icelandic volcanoes to digest the sulphur back out of the leftover acid.

At Barentsburg, this bold flight of chemical imagination strikes a chord - with Philip Pullman's reimagined Svalbard in Northern Lights, in which Tartar slaves work the "fire-mines" for the ruling polar bears, who in battle launch flaming sulphur from their "fire-hurlers". The mine itself stands as a reminder of some unpleasant truths about burning carbon.

During their trip, the students see one polar bear, stalking the shore in the all-night sun. In the real Arctic, the prospects for its kind are about as gloomy as Barentsburg's. As the ice goes, so will the seals, which need ice floes on which to pup; and as the seals go, so will the bears that feed on them. And as the ice goes, the more oil and gas will be extracted from under the sea, to make its contribution to global warming, which will melt more ice, and so on. Not only will it become easier to drill for oil and gas, but it will also become easier to transport extracted fuels and minerals across the Arctic by sea. The Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific could become a commercially viable route, as could a Northeast Passage north of Russia. If warming continues, as some forecasters fear, ships could eventually sail straight over a watery North Pole, with no icebreakers required.

Additional research by Matthew Holehouse

http://www.newstatesman.com/200708090023

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Página/12:
Una ley que privatiza el petróleo de Irak

DE SER APROBADA, LEGALIZARA LA APERTURA DEL PAIS A LAS COMPAÑIAS EXTRANJERAS

La controvertida norma redibuja radicalmente la industria del crudo iraquí. Bush necesita que el Parlamento de Irak la apruebe antes de septiembre, fecha en que el ejército estadounidense debe presentar un nuevo informe de la situación en el país ocupado. Los sindicatos y los expertos se le oponen.

Lunes, 13 de Agosto de 2007

Los tiempos se aceleran y Estados Unidos necesita irse de Irak con algo más seguro bajo el brazo. Es por eso que busca a toda costa implementar la ley de hidrocarburos, discutida a puertas cerradas durante casi un año y aprobada por el gabinete iraquí en febrero. La idea es que los grandes pulpos petroleros de Occidente puedan tener una cuota garantizada de dividendos a largo plazo, luego de la inversión militar y económica que han hecho los países que integran la ONU para mantener una invasión cada vez más cuestionada. Pero la sanción final de la medida no es fácil. Tras varias manifestaciones, los sindicatos iraquíes no están dispuestos a la “privatización” de la industria petrolera, así como expertos y legisladores se oponen a la propuesta oficial, de la que se enteraron en el momento de su aprobación parcial. En tanto, Bush necesita que el Parlamento de Irak la apruebe antes de septiembre, fecha en que el ejército estadounidense debe presentar un nuevo informe de situación a la Casa Blanca.

La ley petrolera no surgió de un repollo, aunque así haya aparecido para sus opositores desde que la propuesta oficial se hiciera pública en febrero de este año. Antes de la guerra en Irak, el grupo Política para el Desarrollo de Energía Nacional, conocido como Energy Task Force, reunió en 2001 al vicepresidente Dick Cheney y ejecutivos petroleros para discutir el control de los campos petroleros de Irak, informó el diario The New York Times. Un año después, por la presión de un tribunal estadounidense, los participantes de esa comisión tuvieron que hacer público que más de 60 firmas de 30 países estarían involucradas en proyectos con Bagdad, como la empresa francesa Total Elf y la rusa Luckoil. El organismo recomendaba a los países de Medio Oriente “la apertura de sus sectores energéticos a la inversión exterior”, informó el medio norteamericano. Un consejo que se haría realidad.

En enero de 2007, el diario británico The Independent reveló que un empleado de Bearing-Point, una compañía norteamericana encargada de asesorar al gobierno de ese país en la reconstrucción de Irak, fue responsable de asesorar al Ministerio de Petróleo iraquí en la confección de la ley de hidrocarburos. La empresa de Estados Unidos es conocida por financiar las campañas de 2000 y 2004 del Partido Republicano de Bush, según la denuncia del Center for Responsive Politics, un grupo de control ciudadano.

Fuertemente presionado por los gobiernos estadounidense y británico, el gobierno de Irak ahora espera que el Parlamento apruebe cuanto antes la controvertida ley que redibujaría radicalmente la industria petrolera iraquí y abriría las puertas de la segunda mayor reserva de petróleo en el mundo, después de Arabia Saudita.

Con el apoyo del Banco Mundial, el FMI y la ONU, la ley “escrita en Estados Unidos”, como la llaman los sindicatos iraquíes, permitiría la primera operación a gran escala de compañías de petróleo extranjeras en Irak, informó el citado medio británico. Mediante acuerdos de producción compartidos (PSA), las firmas obtendrían un 12,5 por ciento de las ganancias, mientras que los ingresos sobrantes serían distribuidos por el gobierno iraquí y las provincias tendrían libertad para autorizar contratos de exploración y producción, según la cadena de noticias árabe Al Jazeera. La Constitución de Irak permite a los gobernadores formar regiones semiindependientes, con un control total de sus recursos naturales. En su defensa, el gobierno advierte que no habrá privatización. “Bajo ninguna circunstancia Irak renunciaría a su autoridad, su responsabilidad es tener el control de los recursos naturales del país”, dijo en mayo el ministro del Petróleo, Hussein Shahristani, a la prensa. Sin embargo, la Empresa Nacional de Petróleo de Irak pasaría a controlar sólo 17 de los 80 pozos descubiertos, dejando más de dos tercios de los mismos y de las reservas por descubrir bajo potencial control extranjero durante un período de entre 20 y 35 años, informó el Times.

La nueva legislación sería una desviación radical de las leyes de los países en vías de desarrollo, ya que naciones productoras de Medio Oriente como Arabia Saudita e Irán tienen un estricto control sobre sus industrias a través de compañías estatales sin ninguna colaboración exterior de importancia, señaló The Independent. En 1961, Irak expropió las concesiones de las transnacionales que en ese entonces abarcaban un 95,5 por ciento del territorio iraquí, según la Federación General de Trabajadores de Irak. Y en 1972, Exxon, Bp, Shell y Chevron perdieron el control del recurso al nacionalizarse la industria en su totalidad. Recién en 1990, las compañías extranjeras recuperaron terreno gracias al gobierno de Saddam Hussein que otorgó PSA con ganancias del 10 por ciento a firmas de China y Rusia, informó Al Jazeera. “Ese año, Estados Unidos y sus aliados hicieron lobby para profundizar las sanciones de la ONU en contra de Irak, mientras ese país se apoyaba en Rusia y China para remover o al menos suavizar el escarmiento”, señaló al medio árabe el ex ministro de Petróleo de Irak, Issam al Chalabi, un crítico de los PSA.

Frente a un gobierno favorable a la ocupación y acusado de corrupción, la oposición al proyecto oficial es amplia. La semana pasada, cientos de obreros volvieron a movilizarse en Basora, al sur de Irak, luego de una importante huelga en junio en la que cortaron la producción y exportación de combustible en el sur del país, mientras tropas militares rodeaban la manifestación bajo el vuelo amenazante de aviones de guerra. “La protesta expresa la unidad de los sindicatos del puerto, electricidad, servicios, mecánicos, municipales en solidaridad con los trabajadores del sector petrolero que piden discutir la ley de hidrocarburos, los precios del combustible, y para plantear nuestros reclamos”, dijo Hussein Fadil, el dirigente de la federación de trabajadores. En los días previos a la marcha, la central sindical, que tiene su mayor peso en Basora, había exigido la renuncia del ministro de Petróleo, la libertad de organización gremial ante los intentos de arresto del gobierno, el rechazo de los dictados del FMI y la aceleración de la construcción de refinerías de petróleo para no depender de los derivados importados.

Por su parte, Hassan Jumaa Awad al Assadi, líder del sindicato de petróleo que representa cerca de 26 mil trabajadores, viaja a mediados de julio a Inglaterra y Estados Unidos para hacer campaña contra la ley. “No es lógico que Estados Unidos venga con las manos vacías y quiera llenárselas con petróleo iraquí, que representa entre el 85 y 90 por ciento de los ingresos de nuestro país. Criticamos que la ley se haya elaborado en forma secreta, por eso va a tener que aprobarse cuando tengamos plena soberanía y podamos manifestarnos”, advirtió en Londres, según el diario británico The Guardian.

Mientras tanto, un grupo de expertos también critica el proyecto oficial. Tras realizar un simposio en febrero junto a los sindicatos petroleros, partidos políticos opositores y ONG, los estudiosos presentaron una carta al presidente y a los miembros del Parlamento donde sugerían “no apurar” la ley y pedían un mayor control estatal. “Lamentamos que la autoridad del consejo de representantes (Parlamento) esté restringida sólo a la aprobación de la ley”, señalaron. “Además enfatizamos la necesidad de que la compañía estatal de petróleo tome la responsabilidad de manejar toda la producción y los pozos descubiertos para resguardar los derechos del pueblo de Irak y no dejarlos en entidades extranjeras”, dijeron los expertos.

Si bien la ley podría ser aprobada antes del informe que espera el Congreso de Estados Unidos en septiembre, los legisladores –chiítas, sunnitas y kurdos– tienen diferencias entre sí. “El hecho es que los bloques políticos no llegaron a un acuerdo”, dijo al diario estadounidense Chicago Tribune Ayad al Samarrai, uno de los líderes de Tawafiq, el bloque sunnita con mayor representación en el Parlamento, que dispone de 275 asientos. Para peor, la coalición sunnita Frente del Consenso Iraquí (FCI), aliado esencial del gobierno de mayoría chiíta del primer ministro, Nuri al Maliki, abandonó el Ejecutivo a fines de julio. El alejamiento de este sector político y la postura de una facción dura de los chiítas, aliada al clérigo antiestadounidense Moqtada al Sadr, dificultarían muchas de las leyes a aprobarse, entre ellas la de hidrocarburos.

Por otra parte, el gobierno autonómico kurdo pone barreras a la legislación petrolera, ya que vería infringido su derecho constitucional a disponer un mayor control de las reservas y los ingresos de su región, donde se concentra una cantidad importante de los pozos, al norte del país. Sin embargo, el 5 de agosto, como codazo a sus contrapartes en Bagdad, que se tomaron un descanso de verano, “el Parlamento kurdo en Irbil aprobó su propia ley de petróleo y también presentó una lista de 40 pozos de exploración en la región kurda que presentará a la oferta”, dijo el diario mexicano Milenio. “No queremos ser afectados por la parálisis política en Bagdad”, advirtió Ashti Hawrami, ministro de Recursos Naturales del gobierno regional de Kurdistán. “Pensamos que los acuerdos de producción compartida son la mejor manera de avanzar y ayudar no sólo a los kurdos sino a todos los iraquíes”, añadió. Luego de que los kurdos abrieron las puertas a los inversionistas extranjeros, Bagdad intenta reafirmar el control central de las reservas manejadas por las autoridades de Kurdistán. Según el periódico mexicano, en esa región ya está operando TTopco, una empresa conjunta entre Genel Energie, una compañía turca, y Addax Petroleum, una firma independiente de exploración y desarrollo que cotiza en las Bolsas de valores de Londres y Toronto.

En las últimas semanas, el embajador de Estados Unidos, Ryan C. Crooker, trató de mostrar calma frente al desafío de lograr que la legislación iraquí sea aprobada antes de septiembre, una meta imprescindible para el gobierno de Bush que cuenta con más 150 mil militares en el país invadido. “Como yo lo veo, las metas legislativas, los hidrocarburos y la reconciliación son importantes, pero por Dios que son puntos muy complicados”, dijo en una entrevista. “Y francamente no sé si estoy seguro de si es razonable esperar que resuelvan estas cosas en poco tiempo. Nosotros tuvimos nuestras propias dificultades con las reformas de salud, seguridad social e inmigración”, añadió.

Informe: Juan Manuel Barca.

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The Nation:
The NAFTA Superhighway

by CHRISTOPHER HAYES
[from the August 27, 2007 issue]

When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts.

And this NAFTA Superhighway, as it is called, is just the beginning, the first stage of a long, silent coup aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States with a multinational North American Union.

Even as this plot unfolds in slow motion, the mainstream media are silent; politicians are in denial. Yet word is getting out. Like samizdat, info about the highway has circulated in niche media platforms old and new, on right-wing websites like WorldNetDaily, in the pages of low-circulation magazines like the John Birch Society's The New American and increasingly on the letters to the editor page of local newspapers.

"Construction of the NAFTA highway from Laredo, Texas to Canada is now underway," read a letter in the February 13 San Gabriel Valley Tribune. "Spain will own most of the toll roads that connect to the superhighway. Mexico will own and operate the Kansas City Smart Port. And NAFTA tribunal, not the U.S. Supreme Court, will have the final word in trade disputes. Will the last person please take down the flag?" There are many more where that came from. "The superhighway has the potential to cripple the West Coast economy, as well as posing an enormous security breach at our border," read a letter from the January 7 San Francisco Chronicle. "So far, there has been no public participation or debate on this important issue. Public participation and debate must begin now."

In some senses it has. Prompted by angry phone calls and e-mail from their constituents, local legislators are beginning to take action. In February the Montana state legislature voted 95 to 5 for a resolution opposing "the North American Free Trade Agreement Superhighway System" as well as "any effort to implement a trinational political, government entity among the United States, Canada, and Mexico." Similar resolutions have been introduced in eighteen other states as well as the House of Representatives, where H. Con Res. 40 has attracted, as of this writing, twenty-seven co-sponsors. Republican presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire now routinely face hostile questions about the highway at candidate forums. Citing a spokesperson for the Romney campaign, the Concord Monitor reports that "the road comes up at town meetings second only to immigration policy."

Grassroots movement exposes elite conspiracy and forces politicians to respond: It would be a heartening story but for one small detail.

There's no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway.

Though opposition to the nonexistent highway is the cause célèbre of many a paranoiac, the myth upon which it rests was not fabricated out of whole cloth. Rather, it has been sewn together from scraps of fact.

Take, for instance, North America's SuperCorridor Organization (NASCO), a trinational coalition of businesses and state and local transportation agencies that, in its own words, focuses "on maximizing the efficiency of our existing transportation infrastructure to support international trade." Headquartered in borrowed office space in a Dallas law firm, the organization, which has a full-time staff of three, advocates for increased public expenditure along the main north-south Interstate routes, including new high-tech freight-tracking technology and expedited border crossings. It has had some success, landing federal money to pilot cargo management technologies and winning praise from the Bush Administration. Speaking at a NASCO conference in Texas in 2004, then-Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta congratulated the organization for its efforts. "The people in this room have vision," Mineta said. "Thinking ahead, thinking long term, you began to make aggressive plans to develop...this vital artery in our national transportation system through which so much of the NAFTA traffic flows. It flows across our nation's busiest southern border crossing in Laredo; over North America's busiest commercial crossing, the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit; and through Duluth and Pembina, North Dakota, and all the places in between."

A few years ago NASCO put on its home page a map of the United States that more or less traced the flow that Mineta describes: Drawn in bright blue, the trade route begins in Monterrey, Mexico, runs up I-35 and branches out after Kansas City, along I-29 toward Winnipeg and I-94 toward Detroit and Toronto. The colorful, cartoonlike image seemed to show right out in the open just where NASCO and its confederates planned to build the NAFTA Superhighway. It began zipping around the Internet.

The organization soon found itself besieged with angry phone calls and letters. "I think the rumor going around was that this map was a blueprint and it was drawn to scale," says NASCO executive director Tiffany Melvin. (Given the size of the route markings, that would have heralded highways fifty miles wide.) Ever since the map went live, NASCO has spent a considerable amount of time attempting to refute charges like those made by right-wing nationalist Jerome Corsi, whose recent book The Late Great USA devotes several pages to excoriating NASCO for being part of the vanguard of the highway and the coming North American Union. Until recently, NASCO's website contained the following FAQs:

Is NASCO a part of a secret conspiracy?

Absolutely not... We welcome the opportunity to share information about our organization....

Will the NAFTA Superhighway be four football fields wide?

There is no new, proposed NAFTA Superhighway....

Is the map on the website an approved plan for the proposed NAFTA Superhighway?

There is no proposed NAFTA Superhighway.... The map is not a plan or blueprint of any kind.... They are EXISTING highways.

The Trans Texas Corridor is the first section of the proposed, new NAFTA Superhighway....

There is no proposed, new NAFTA Superhighway.

But NASCO is just one part of what Corsi and his ilk view as a grand conspiracy. There's also a federal initiative called the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which they portray as a Trojan horse packed with globalists scheming to form a European Union-style governing body to manage the entire continent. The reactions of those in SPP to this characterization seem to range from bemusement to alarm. "There is no NAFTA Superhighway," Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Market Access and Compliance David Bohigian told me emphatically over the phone. Initiated in 2005, the SPP is a relatively mundane formal bureaucratic dialogue, he says. Working groups, staffed by midlevel officials from all three countries, figure out how to better synchronize customs enforcement, security protocols and regulatory frameworks among the countries. "Simple stuff like, for instance, in the US we sell baby food in several different sizes; in Canada, it's just two different sizes."

Another star in the constellation of North American Union conspiracies is the Mexican deep-water port of Lázaro Cárdenas. Located on the Pacific coast of the state of Michoacan, the port is undergoing a bonanza of investment and upgrades. According to a 2005 article in Latin Trade, the port is adding a terminal that could provide enough capacity to process nearly all of the cargo that comes into Mexico, making it "the logical trade route connecting the United States and Asia," in the words of the Mexican officials overseeing its overhaul. Since it's the only Mexican port deep enough to handle Super Panamax container ships from China-the most efficient means of shipping products across the Pacific-it's an attractive alternative to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which are unionized and increasingly congested. (More than 80 percent of Asian imports come in through these two ports.)

Of course, if cargo switches from Los Angeles to Lázaro Cárdenas, more and more manufactured goods will have to travel through Mexico to reach their US destination, and there will be a significant uptick in the northbound overland traffic. The Kansas City Southern Railroad company is already betting on that eventuality, spending millions of dollars to purchase the rail routes that run from the port up to Kansas City. At the same time, a business improvement group called Kansas City SmartPort, whose members include the local chamber of commerce, is pushing for Kansas City, which is already a transportation hub, to transform itself fully into a "smart port," a kind of intermodal transportation and cargo center. The group recently advocated a pilot program that would place a Mexican customs official in Kansas City to inspect Mexico-bound freight, relieving bottlenecks at the border. The notion of a Mexican customs official on American soil fired the imaginations of those already disposed to see a North American Union on the horizon, and SmartPort staff have been fending off angry inquiries ever since.

In his essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Richard Hofstadter famously sketched the contours of the American tradition of folk conspiracy-a tradition that has, at different times, seen its enemy in Masons, Jesuits, immigrants, Jews and Eastern bankers. There's certainly a strong continuity between that tradition and the populist/nationalist ire that drives the NAFTA highway myth. Hofstadter's original essay was motivated in part by the activities of the John Birch Society, which today is one of the leading purveyors of the highway myth.

But there's something more. The myth of the NAFTA Superhighway persists and grows because it taps into deeply felt anxieties about the dizzying dislocations of twenty-first-century global capitalism: a nativist suspicion of Mexico's designs on US sovereignty, a longing for national identity, the fear of terrorism and porous borders, a growing distrust of the privatizing agenda of a government happy to sell off the people's assets to the highest bidder and a contempt for the postnational agenda of Davos-style neoliberalism. Indeed, the image of the highway, with its Chinese goods whizzing across the border borne by Mexican truckers on a privatized, foreign-operated road, is almost mundane in its plausibility. If there was a NAFTA highway, you could bet that Tom Friedman would be for it-what could be more flattening than miles of concrete paved across the continent?-and Lou Dobbs would be zealously opposed. In fact, Dobbs has devoted a segment of his show to the highway, its nonexistence notwithstanding. "These three countries moving ahead their governments without authorization from the American people, without Congressional approval," he said. "This is as straightforward an attack on national sovereignty as there could be outside of war."

Though the story of the highway has been seeded and watered in the fertile soil of the nationalist right wing-promoted by Birchers and Corsi, co-author of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's book about John Kerry-it also stretches across ideological and partisan lines. Like immigration and the Dubai ports deal, it divides the Republican coalition against itself, pitting the capitalists against the nationalists. And more than a few on the center-left have voiced criticisms as well: Teamsters president James Hoffa wrote in a column last year that "Bush is quietly moving forward with plans...for what's known as a NAFTA superhighway-a combination of existing and new roads that would create a north-south corridor from Mexico to Canada.... It would allow global conglomerates to capitalize by exploiting cheap labor and nonexistent work rules and avoiding potential security enhancements at U.S. ports." Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Boyda, from eastern Kansas, invoked its specter early and often in her improbably successful 2006 campaign against Republican incumbent Jim Ryun. A campaign circular inserted in local newspapers warned that "if built, this 'Super Corridor' would be a quarter-mile wide and longer than the Great Wall of China." Boyda told me that her attacks on the highway "hit a real nerve because enough people had the same concerns."

What might at first have been a niche obsession has bled, slowly but surely, toward the mainstream. "The biggest problem of these conspiracy theorists," says Robert Pastor, a professor of international relations at American University and a leading proponent of increased North American integration, "is that they are having an effect on the entire debate."

Add up all the above ingredients-NASCO, SPP, Lázaro Cárdenas, the Kansas City SmartPort, the planned pilot program allowing Mexican truckers to drive on US roads-and you still don't have a superhighway four football fields wide connecting the entire continent. Which is why understanding the persistence of the NAFTA highway legend requires spending some time in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry and his longtime consigliere, Texas Department of Transportation commissioner Ric Williamson, are proposing the $185 billion Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), 4,000 miles of highway, rail and freight corridors, the first of which would run up from the border through the heavily populated eastern part of the state. Plans for the TTC call for it to be up to four football fields wide at points, paving over as much as half a million acres of Texas countryside. The first section will be built and operated by a foreign enterprise, and when completed it would likely be the largest privatized toll road in the country.

And unlike the NAFTA highway, the Trans-Texas Corridor is very, very real.

In 2003, amid a dramatic drawn-out battle over a legally questionable GOP redistricting plan, the Texas state legislature passed House Bill 3588. At 311 pages, it's unlikely that many of those who voted for the bill had actually read it (and many have come to regret their vote), but it received not a single opposing vote. The bill granted the Texas Transportation Commission wide latitude to pursue a long-term plan to build a series of corridors throughout the state that would carry passenger and commercial traffic and contain extra right-of-way for rail, pipelines and electric wires.

What first triggered opposition was that under the plan, the new TTC roads would have tolls, something relatively novel in Texas. The state's Department of Transportation-known as TxDot-pointed out that the state's gasoline tax, which pays for road construction and maintenance, hadn't been raised since 1991, while population and commercial traffic were growing at a dizzying pace. Tolls, the governor and his allies argued, were the only solution. (Many TTC opponents propose raising the gasoline tax and indexing it to inflation.)

But opposition quickly spread, from those in metro areas concerned about the cost of their daily commute to ranchers angry that their land might fall under the TTC hatchet. According to Chris Steinbach, chief of staff for rural Brenham's Republican State Representative Lois Kolkhorst, when people in the district heard about the plan they responded by asking, "'Why would you want to do that?' It was a real front porch, rocking chair kind of question."

Meanwhile David and Linda Stall, a Republican couple from Fayetteville, Texas, began actively organizing opposition to the proposal. As early as 2004, they started bringing friends out to local TxDot hearings and launched the website Corridor Watch. By the time the 2006 gubernatorial election rolled around, a wild four-way race with incumbent Rick Perry pitted against three challengers, the TTC had become one of the most controversial issues of the campaign. Perry was re-elected with 39 percent of the vote, but with all three of his opponents campaigning passionately against the TTC, it was hardly a popular endorsement of the plan.

What was once scattered resistance is now a full-fledged rebellion. The Stalls have pushed through a plank in the state's GOP platform opposing the corridor, which means the governor is now at odds with the official position of his own party. In March thousands of Texans from across the state attended an anti-TTC rally on the Capitol steps, and liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans came together to co-sponsor a moratorium on the plan. It passed the House and Senate, only to be vetoed by Governor Perry. (A considerably weaker version was ultimately signed into law.)

Perry's continued support of the TTC in the face of mounting opposition is more than just a political liability; it's begun to resemble Bush's Iraq policy in its obstinate indifference to public opinion. This, along with the fact that the federal government sent a letter to the state warning it not to pass a moratorium on the project, has fueled conspiracy speculations about what the real goal of the TTC is. Kelly Taylor, a John Birch Society member and Austin-based freelance contributor to its magazine, has been working hard to connect the dots between the TTC and the NAFTA Superhighway. "It first surfaced because it was a local toll issue," she told me over coffee. "That, in and of itself, was alarming enough-all the corrupt politics that happened to make it come about. Then we thought, Wait a minute, something's not right here, this is bigger than just a local toll issue."

Taylor may represent a certain fringe of the anti-TTC efforts (her name prompted some eye-rolling among other activists), but there's a whole lot of cross-pollination between local concerns about the TTC and the growing North American Union mythology. When I asked David McQuade Leibowitz, a Democratic State Representative from San Antonio, why the governor was so determined to build the TTC, he put his boots up on his desk, leaned back in his chair and said, "I think Texas is the first link in the highway to run from South America to Canada. One nation under God. We see bits and pieces of it. We don't see it all. It makes us cringe and sick to our stomachs."

Texas Transportation commissioner Ric Williamson is one of those Texas personalities who seem almost self-consciously to will themselves toward caricature. One Democratic staffer in the Capitol casually referred to him as Darth Vader; Texas Monthly recently called him "the most hated person in Texas." Owner of a natural gas production company before becoming a state legislator in 1985, he has lately been reincarnated as a transit policy wonk, a role he plays as a cross between mid-twentieth-century road builder Robert Moses and J.R. Ewing from Dallas: the planner as good old boy. He does not suffer from a lack of confidence. "We're the greatest state agency you'll ever interview," he told me at one point. With his good friend Governor Perry hemorrhaging political capital, it's fallen to Williamson to advocate for the corridor and draw fire from its opponents.

At first the press contact for TxDot told me Williamson wouldn't be available, but after I informed her I'd lined up dozens of interviews with TTC opponents, she called me back a week before my trip to Texas for this article to set up an interview. When I was ushered into Williamson's office, he was in the midst of a discussion with one of the four staffers who flanked him. At my appearance in the doorway, he made no move to acknowledge my presence other than slightly pulling out the chair next to him, where, apparently, I was to sit.

Williamson's case is straightforward: The state needs a whole lot of new roads it can't pay for. The sheer population growth in Texas, particularly in the urbanized area in the eastern part of the state that contains San Antonio, Dallas, Houston and Austin, combined with the projected increase in commercial traffic, has precipitated what Williamson says is an impending crisis. The TTC would provide the necessary increase in capacity at the low, low price the state can afford. "Our view is, you can run from the corridor if you want to," he told me, smiling, "but that's eventually what we'll build. Because that's where the fricking people live!" At that he shot up to walk over to a map of the state hanging on one wall, patting my shoulder with paternal authority as he passed. "It's so logical to me it drives me nuts."

He's right about the challenges the state faces, but it's a long jump from the diagnosis to the cure. Opponents of the plan point out that, as conceived, the corridor will run parallel to the existing Interstate, possibly far from the same cities where it's supposed to relieve congestion. (TxDot says state law will require the roads to connect to Interstates, which connect to cities.) On top of that, the current plan employs a novel privatized financing mechanism that has many crying foul.

Under a comprehensive development agreement (CDA) signed in March 2005, the Spanish concern Cintra (in partnership with Texas-based Zachry Corp.) will pay the state for the right to develop the roads along the corridor, where it will be able to collect tolls and establish facilities within the right-of-way for fifty years. This kind of road-building deal is commonplace in other parts of the world, often in places where government lacks the ready capital necessary to develop large infrastructure projects. It's called a BOT, for build, operate, transfer. Until recently it was unheard of in the United States.

The arrangement has been heavily criticized for a number of reasons. The CDA includes a noncompete clause that could conceivably prevent the state from building necessary roads in the future because they would "compete" with a stretch of the privatized TTC. It's also expensive. A recent state auditor's report estimated the cost for just the first section of the corridor at $105 billion. TxDot portrays the deal as a clever way of getting the private sector to pay for public roads, but eventually the total cost of the project, plus a layer of profit for Cintra-Zachry, will be coming out of the pockets of Texas drivers. Finally, the timeline for development of the project, which will be constructed piecemeal, is based on which sections of the corridor Cintra has identified as "self-performing," according to Williamson-in other words, those sections that contain a high enough volume of toll-paying passengers that they will turn a profit.

Williamson argues that the state simply has no choice. Or, as he put it to one reporter, "If you aggressively invite the private sector to be your partner, you can't tell them where to build the road." But this seems, to put it mildly, pretty ass-backward. The point of transportation planning is to provide the infrastructure for people to move efficiently, safely and quickly from point A to point B, not to maximize the profits of some conglomerate that managed to win a state contract. You wouldn't want to place, say, fire stations across a city using the same logic that guides the placement of Starbucks. But that's more or less the way the TTC is unfolding.

"I always think of the corridor as a payday loan," said Kolkhorst's chief of staff Chris Steinbach. "You're going to get a little money up front, but you're losing the long-term gain you're charged by the people to oversee." As he said this I noticed his computer's screensaver, which featured an image of the Texas Capitol dome with a bright red banner Photoshopped in that read Everything Must Go!

In my conversations with people in Texas, it seemed that the privatized nature of the road was what got folks the angriest. Bad enough that drivers would face tolls, that ranchers would have their land cut out from under them, but all for the financial gain of a foreign company? "If you liked the Dubai ports deal, you'll love my TTC land grab," taunts an animated Rick Perry on one anti-TTC website. The cartoon goes on to portray Cintra as conquistadors clad in armor riding in to steal Texans' treasure.

"What really drives this is economic," activist Terri Hall told me. "It's about the money. We're talking about obscene levels of profit, someone literally being like the robber barons of old. And this is one thing that government actually does well, build and maintain roads."

Hall is an unlikely defender of the public sphere. A conservative Republican and an evangelical Christian who home-schools her six children, she first got interested in road policy when TxDot announced plans to toll the road near her house, which runs into San Antonio. Outraged, she brought it up with her local State Rep, and when that didn't work, she began organizing. She founded the San Antonio Toll Party (like the Boston Tea Party, she notes) by pamphleting at intersections and calling friends. "It's really like the old days, during the American Revolution...just fellow citizens trying together to effect change."

Hall soon became part of the broader anti-TTC effort, and though she originally thought she was just fighting a corrupt local government, she's come to view her battle in a much broader context. "There are big-time control issues," she said. "Someone is really jockeying around to control some things here in America. It explains the open borders, it explains our immigration issues, it explains our free-trade issues, what it's doing to the middle class.

"It really all started with NAFTA," she continued. "There've been people like Robert Pastor and the Council on Foreign Relations. All these secretive groups." She laughed nervously and apologetically. "It sounds like a conspiracy. But I do know there are people who have tried for a long time to go to this global governance. They see there's a way to make it all happen by going to the heads of state and doing it in a secretive way so they can do it without a nasty little thing called accountability. So they won't have to listen to what We the People want."

Hall had arranged to meet me in the San Antonio exurbs, in a home design center that doubled as a cafe. Outside, a thunderstorm lashed the windows with rain. As she spoke, her newborn son propped next to her swaddled and napping, it occurred to me that she was living the twenty-first-century version of the American dream. She and her husband had moved to Texas from California in pursuit of cheap housing, open space and a place to raise their family. Their web-design business was successful; their children healthy. Why, I found myself thinking, was she so upset about a road?

Ric Williamson must often ask himself the same thing. Just as the White House was blindsided by the opposition to the Dubai ports deal, just as NASCO was shocked to find that a simple schematic map attracted angry phone calls, just as the Commerce Department was shocked to find a simple bureaucratic dialogue the subject of outrage, so too have Perry and Williamson seemed ambushed by the zealous opposition of people like Hall.

But what people like Williamson don't seem to understand is how disempowered people feel in the face of a neoliberal order whose direction they cannot influence. For corporatists within both parties (Williamson, it should be noted, was a Democrat while in the Statehouse), selling port security or road concessions to a multinational is inevitable, logical, obvious. To thousands of average citizens in Texas and elsewhere, it's madness or, worse, treason. Both the actual TTC and the mythical NAFTA Superhighway represent a certain kind of future for America, one in which the crony capitalism of oil-rich Texas expands to fill every last crevice of the public sector's role, eclipsing the relevance of the national government as both the provider of public goods and the unified embodiment of a sovereign people.

For Williamson, this is progress; for Hall, it's an outrage and a tragedy. "We have so little control over our own government," she told me, the alienation audible in her voice, thunder punishing the air outside. "We are really the last beacon of freedom in the world-the land of the free and home of the brave-and we're letting it slip away from under our noses."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/hayes

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ZNet | Economy
Subprime or Subcrime?

Time To Investigate and Prosecute

by Danny Schechter; Alternet; August 12, 2007

There comes a time when the frame of a news story changes. It happened in Iraq when the "war for Iraqi freedom" became seen as a bloody occupation, not a beneficent liberation. It is happening as the war on terror is increasingly perceived a war of error and when voting problems are reframed as electoral fraud.

And it will happen in the economic arena too, when we see the "subprime" credit crunch for what it is: a sub-crime ponzi scheme in which millions of people are losing their homes because of criminal and fraudulent tactics used by financial institutions that pose as respectable players in a highly rigged casino-like market system.

Suddenly, after years of denial and inattention, the press has discovered what they call "the credit crisis." Vague words like "woes" are still being used to mask a financial calamity that some analysts are already calling an apocalypse as lenders go under and the Stock Market melts down.

A French bank froze billions Thursday saying, ""The complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the U.S. securitization market has made it impossible to value certain assets." Translation from the French: We are all in deep shit.

On Thursday morning, President Bush was asked about this at a press conference. He blamed borrowers for not understanding the documents they signed. But if you have ever tried to read the documents banks prepare for mortgage closings, you will know that they are written by risk-minimizing lawyers and are too long and dense to be understood. (Later in the day, the market reacted to Bush's upbeat assessment with the Dow plunging 387 points.)

The financial insiders who watched were more than skeptical. Here are some quotes from a discussion on the Mi-implode Web site. One of the discussants calls our fearless leader, "President Pumpkinhead:"

Why'd president pumpkinhead have a news conference in the morning? Probably hoping no one would see it and he wouldn't have to lie to as many people.

Another described what he was watching with more than disbelief:

"He's being hit with a lot of questions on mortgages, credit crisis, and the economy ... and of course the economy is 'in for a soft landing,' he's been assured by the treasury that 'there is plenty of liquidity,' yadda-yadda-yadda.

But he is stumbling over his words more then usual, not making eye contact, not finishing his sentences ... and when he wonders a bit, he quickly goes back on script. It is very odd to watch, to say the least."

"Odd?" Not for him, but, of course, there is more than one man to hold accountable. This is a deeper structural problem that implicates a whole industry and the process of "financialization" it promotes. This crisis is an example of what goes around comes around as the companies that suspended their usual "standards" and "rules" and self-styled "due diligence" knowingly sucked money out of people with poor credit records and who now find their own companies imploding and collapsing worldwide. Many of the victims are people of color. They were targeted by predators.

Underscore that this was done deliberately, with forethought and malice, a well orchestrated plan to create armies of "suckers" and steal - yes, I said it - their monies to leverage even bigger deals. Their greed had no limits, until the scheme collapsed.

Behind it all were the so-called "Masters of the Universe," the wise men of Wall Street who worked behind the scenes to turn mortgage brokers and small lenders into part of what will one day be seen as a criminal network worthy of prosecution under the RICO conspiracy laws used against the mob and drug dealers. Read this account from the Wall Street Journal:

Lou Barnes, co-owner of a small Colorado mortgage bank called Boulder West Inc., has been in the mortgage business since the late 1970s. For most of that time, a borrower had to fully document his income. Lenders offered the first no-documentation loans in the mid-1990s, but for no more than 70% of the value of the house being purchased. A few years back, he says, that began to change as Wall Street investment banks and wholesalers demanded ever more mortgages from even the least creditworthy - or "subprime" - customers. "All of us felt the suction from Wall Street. One day you would get an email saying, 'We will buy no-doc loans at 95% loan-to-value,' and an old-timer like me had never seen one," says Mr. Barnes. "It wasn't long before the no-doc emails said 100%."

You don't read many accounts like this of businessmen bashing Wall Street in the business press. Could it all have been stopped? Of course, if there were real regulators and rules protecting consumers and the public interest. And if there were a social movement that championed economic justice.

And also, if there were investigative journalists like the ones who just wrote a series on the "debacle" of the "debt bomb" in the Journal - but after the collapse, not before. And what do they admit now? That this is not just a subprime problem but far more serious and global.

They note that "credit problems once seen as isolated to a few subprime mortgage lenders are beginning to propagate across markets and borders in unpredicted ways and degrees. A system designed to distribute and absorb risk might, instead, have bred it by making it so easy for investors to buy complex securities they didn't fully understand. And the interconnectedness of markets could mean that a sudden change in sentiment by investors in all sorts of markets could destabilize the financial system and hurt economic growth."

Will the rest of the media follow up and explain what is really going on?

This is very serious, but far too many progressives, activists and politicians alike haven't spoken out about the crime behind this rolling scandal. We should be calling for major debt reform in America like Bono advocates for Africa. We should demand criminal penalties for the profiteers who started out to enrich themselves and seem to have ended up destroying the very system they misused. We should press the Congress to use its subpoena power to investigate the corporate criminals and their government enablers.

When they propose a bailout, we should demand a "jailout." The Washington Post reports that the US has started a bailout "pumping more than $150 billion into the financial system to keep it operating smoothly." Where is this money coming from? Not from the military budget you can be sure.

Blogger Carolyn Baker writes that we all must become more engaged with these issues saying she is "aware of the role of economic issues - perhaps more than militarism, health care, education, politics, or any other institution, in the dead-ahead demise of empire.

"I also notice that few in the left-liberal end of the political spectrum have a firm grasp on economic issues which I suspect comes from a fundamental polarization between activism and financial intelligence," she writes.

Reviewing conservative author Michael Panzer's book, Financial Armageddon, she criticizes his analysis as limited, and by extension, the left's avoidance of these issues as well.

"What is most disturbing to me," she writes, "about the book is what appears to be a total lack of perception regarding the role of fraud, theft, and malicious intent in the American and global financial train wreck which has been exacerbating over recent decades."

Indeed! What are we going to do about this? How about starting with becoming more aware?

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and directed the new film "In Debt We Trust: America Before The Bubble Bursts." To get involved, visit Stopthesqueeze.org.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=13508