Elsewhere Today 488
Aljazeera:
Haiti rocked by storm 'catastrophe'
Thursday, September 04, 2008
22:56 Mecca time, 19:56 GMT
Haiti's president has said his country is facing a "catastrophe" after being hit by three storms in as many weeks, leaving more than 60 people dead.
Tropical storm Hanna swept across Haiti for four days before roaring along the edge of the Bahamas on Thursday.
Most storm-hit areas in Haiti remain underwater and many of the thousands of people who fled to rooftops and higher ground have gone without food for days and drinking water is scarce, rescue workers said.
The storm was moving away from Haiti on Thursday, carrying near-hurricane winds towards the southeastern US coast.
Forecasters have warned that a fourth storm, Hurricane Ike, could hit the Western hemisphere's poorest country next week.
City 'cut off'
More than 20 of the deaths in Haiti were in the northern city of Gonaives, which has been almost entirely cut off by floodwater, civil protection department spokesman Abel Nazaire said.
Haiti's government has been hard-pressed to help people stranded in Gonaives and rescue convoys have been blocked by lakes that formed over roads.
The Gonaives area, where about 160,000 people live, accounted for most of the 2,000 victims of Tropical Storm Jeanne in 2004.
Some residents said the current flooding was at least as bad, and criticised the government for failing to implement safety measures in the past four years.
'Great panic'
"It is a great movement of panic in the city," Bien-Aime said.
Businesses were closed, both because of flooding and for fear of looting, and supplies were running short, he said.
People in water up to their knees shouted to peacekeepers to give them drinking water, and women on balconies waved empty pots and spoons.
At least 5,000 people in Les Cayes were in shelters, said Jean-Renand Valiere, a co-ordinator for the civil protection department.
The US embassy in Port-au-Prince declared a disaster situation, freeing $100,000 in emergency aid, spokeswoman Mari Tolliver said.
She said hygiene kits, plastic sheeting and water jugs for up to 5,000 families are expected to be sent from Miami.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/09/20089419444715571.html
AllAfrica: LNG – American
Admits Bribing Nigerian Officials
By Constance Ikokwu
St Paul, Minneapolis
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
5 September 2008
A former executive of Houston-based Global Engineering, Constr-uction and Services company, Albert Stanley, has pleaded guilty to bribing Nigerian officials in order to secure contracts to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities in Bonny Island, THISDAY has learnt.
Stanley admitted before the United States (US) District Court in Houston, Texas, that he paid $182 million in bribe to secure engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contracts thereby violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the Justice Department said.
The LNG project was valued at more than $6 billion. The company was part of a four-company joint venture awarded four EPC contracts by Nigeria LNG Limited (NLNG) between 1995 and 2004.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was the largest shareholder of NLNG with 49 per cent.
Acting Assistant Attorney-General Mattew Friedrich of the criminal division announced that Stanley conspired to commit wire and email fraud in a decade-long grand kickback scheme.
He added: "The Department of Justice is committed to aggressively enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Today's plea demonstrates that corporate executives who bribe foreign government officials in return for lucrative business deals can expect to face prosecution," said Friedrich.
Stanley admitted that two consultancy agents were hired at his behest to pay bribes to Nigerian government officials in order to secure EPC contracts.
He also confessed that he and others met top office holders from the executive branch of government.
The Justice Department statement reads: "Stanley also admitted at crucial junctures before the award of the EPC contracts that he and others met with three successive former holders of top-level offices in the executive branch of the Nigerian government to ask the office holder to designate a representative with whom the joint venture should negotiate bribes to Nigerian officials."
According to the criminal information to which Stanley pleaded guilty, the joint venture paid approximately $132 million to Consulting Company A and more than $50 million to Consulting Company B during the course of the bribery scheme. Stanley admitted that he had intended for the agents' fees to be paid, in part, for bribes to Nigerian government officials.
Stanley entered the plea before District Judge Keith P. Ellison.
He pleaded guilty to two-count criminal information charging him with conspiracy to violate the FCPA and conspiracy to commit email and wire fraud.
He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of $500,000.
But under his plea agreement with the court, he faces seven years in prison and payment of $10.8 million in restitution.
He also admitted to receiving some $10.8 million in kickbacks from a consultant hired at his behest in connection with the LNG projects.
In a related civil action, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged Stanley with violating anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA and other provisions of the federal securities laws.
SEC's Director of Enforcement, Linda Chatman Thomsen, stated that the case "demonstrates that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is committed to holding violators accountable when they engage in illegal conduct to obtain business in foreign countries."
A sentence date is yet to be set.
Copyright © 2008 This Day. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200809050001.html
AlterNet: Boatloads of Trouble:
How We Are Importing Our Way to Destruction
By Stan Cox, AlterNet
Posted on September 5, 2008
Nineteen hundred miles of railroad track separate Gardner, Kan., from the seaports of Southern California. But through the miracle of global trade, Gardner will soon be transformed into a Los Angeles suburb.
Over the next decade, an "intermodal and logistics park" will be built on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway at the southern edge of Gardner. It's needed to handle goods imported from Asia via the Los Angeles and Long Beach seaports. Gardner could eventually find itself playing host to as many as 30 freight trains per day, each a mile and a half long, along with thousands of big-rig trucks.
The community of 16,000, just across the state line from Kansas City, Mo., will eventually be sandwiched between 7 million square feet of warehouses in the logistics park to the south and 4 million to 5 million square feet in an industrial park to the north. The total warehouse floor space easily exceeds that of all the housing in Gardner.
And Claud Hobby, who will be living about three-fourths of a mile from the new facility, can already feel the burn of diesel fumes in his nostrils. The pollution will be growing thicker over his neighborhood with each passing year, but he's trying to keep his sense of humor. He says, "They talk about making Kansas a smoke-free state, but it looks like Gardner's going to be the designated smoking section."
With environmentalists devoting most of their efforts in recent years to sounding the alarm on global climate change, local pollution isn't always getting the attention it deserves. But if you share your neighborhood with the sprawling - and growing - infrastructure that moves imported goods from seaports to retailers, you can't help but pay attention. You don't need to be reminded that air pollutants, even when they're not warming the planet, can threaten your health and even your life.
Along the cancer trail
Economists, bureaucrats and investors rejoiced late last month when the Commerce Department announced that U.S. exports in June were up sharply, $28.8 billion higher than in June 2007. The department made less noise about the rising tide of imports, which were up $26.4 billion.
Leaving aside that portion of the increased import bill that was due to rising oil prices, the nation's seaports, airports, railways and highways were still faced with moving an additional $40 billion worth of stuff in and out across our borders, on top of the $330 billion worth of stuff that's already going in and out each month.
Imports - mostly consumer and industrial goods, not oil - continue to dominate over exports in America's trade equation. Hunger for imports keeps rising, and the nation's capacity to manufacture those products keeps shrinking. So hauling, sorting and delivering foreign-made goods has evolved into a fast-growing, high-tech, high-profit industry.
The American Association of Port Authorities says the nation's seaports are now handling 1.4 billion tons of goods annually and that waterborne container traffic will double by 2020. These days, as every shopper knows, a big share of that traffic is coming across the Pacific from Asia.
Seattle and Oakland handle some of those Asian goods, but most enter the United States through the twin seaports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Together, they comprise the third-largest container-handling facility in the world, receiving 40 percent of all imports entering the country. Traffic through the two ports is expected to triple within 15 years.
At those cargo bottlenecks where ships, trains and trucks converge, the air can kill you. Oceangoing ships burn the lowest of low-quality diesel oil, and the fuel used by locomotives isn't much better. Trucks burn a greater quantity of fuel per ton hauled, with correspondingly high emissions.
According to Los Angeles and Long Beach authorities, the movement of cargo through their ports was responsible in 2005 for emissions laden with 6,000 tons of particle matter - soot, smoke, dust, organic matter and other microscopic flecks that can invade deep into the lungs - and more than 46,000 tons of nitrogen and sulfur oxides.
In and near the world's ports and coastal sea lanes, emissions from oceangoing vessels caused 60,000 premature deaths in 2002. With increasing trade, the number of such deaths is projected to rise 40 percent by 2012. Ships' crews, dock workers, truckers, other port personnel and local residents are all vulnerable.
The particulate matter produced by burning diesel has been associated with lung cancer, asthma, chronic bronchitis, cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, decreased lung function in children and infant mortality.
Currently, according to the California Air Resources Board (CARB), a relatively small community of 50,000 people living on the fringes of the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports suffers 25 new cases of cancer each year because of diesel pollution from ships, trucks and dock equipment. Similar cancer risks were found for people living near rail yards. Within a "several mile" radius of the ports, estimates CARB, the air pollutants kill about 75 people per year.
The great indoors
Given the rate at which shiploads, trainloads, truckloads and planeloads of goods have been arriving from abroad in the past eight months, 2008 is on track to set an all-time record for imports, topping $2 trillion for the first time. (Not counting oil, imports will amount to more than $1.8 trillion, also a record). Clearly, recent economic pain and soaring diesel fuel prices have not diminished Americans' appetite for imported merchandise.
That merchandise never sits in one place for long. It is moved out of the ports, sorted at sophisticated warehouse complexes known as "logistics facilities," and distributed throughout the country as quickly as possible. In recent years, California's Inland Empire, lying east of Los Angeles in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, has already seen construction of logistics warehouses covering 330 million square feet.
To get a mental picture of the massive extent of roofing and concrete that requires, imagine 7,300 football fields paved and enclosed (or have a look at these images.) Similarly vast acreages surrounding the warehouses are paved as well. And remember, goods traffic in the area could triple in coming decades.
In a 2006 commentary, Andrea Hricko, associate professor at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, cited an example of a doll, made in an Asian sweatshop and destined to sell for $9.97 at one of Chicago's big-box discount stores. By the time the doll reaches Chicago, notes Hricko, "she has traveled more than 8,000 miles - on diesel-burning conveyances the whole way." And she will have left a dark trail of pollution in the ports and communities she passed through.
Hricko's doll, more than likely, arrives at the Los Angeles or Long Beach port and rides the Burlington Northern railway to the Elwood, Ill., intermodal terminal outside Chicago, where it is transferred to a truck. Once the intermodal facility in Gardner, Kan., goes into operation, the doll may end its train journey there and, after a quick rest in a warehouse, take a truck ride past Hobby's house on its way to Wal-Mart somewhere in the nation's midsection. From there, it will land in a child's bedroom for a while before going to the basement or garage and, eventually, a landfill.
Hobby visited Elwood last year to get a glimpse of his own future, and it wasn't pleasant: "With so many trucks in the area, they had three police officers on the roads directing traffic, and it still took me 30 minutes to drive one mile."
With a rising tide of imports from China and other countries choking the ports of Southern California and the roads around Chicago, the goods-transport system is looking for alternate routes, and Mexico stands ready to help. In contrast to the mythical "NAFTA superhighway," the rail lines from Mexico are very real, and they're humming. Month by month, more Asian goods are making landfall at the port of Lazaro Cardenas on southern Mexico's Pacific coast and riding the Kansas City Southern railway northeast for 2,200 miles.
To unload merchandise at the other end, the railway and its corporate partners will be developing yet another intermodal hub, south of Kansas City and east of Gardner. It will have the potential for 23 million square feet of warehouse space on its 970 acres of land.
The Kansas City Star reported in March that the developments at the intermodal hub are "all part of the railroad's strategy to encourage companies and ocean carriers to ship goods from Asia to Lazaro Cardenas and on into the United States." According to a transportation analyst quoted by the paper, "More than two-thirds of intermodal shipments are consumer goods. They (Kansas City Southern) have to convince the Wal-Marts, the J.C. Penneys and Home Depots to use the Mexico-U.S. corridor. ... The longer the haul, the better the margins and the greater the revenues (for the railway)."
Constitutional chicanery
The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have announced a "Clean Air Action Plan," characterized as "the most comprehensive strategy to cut air pollution and reduce health risks ever produced for a global seaport complex." The goal is to reduce emissions of diesel pollutants by almost 50 percent in five years.
As part of the program, starting Oct. 1, trucks entering either of two big Southern California ports will have to comply with new rules on emissions and safety, and older trucks with poorer pollution controls will be banned. On top of that, the Los Angeles port has decreed that only drivers who are employees of trucking firms, not independent contractors, will be allowed to enter the port. American Trucking Associations (ATA), which represents most of the nation's trucking companies, has sued to block the new rules.
The lever the ATA is employing in its effort to overturn the Clean Air Action Plan is the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. That clause, it is claimed, prohibits states and localities from interfering with interstate trade. Economist John Husing of Redlands, Calif., who has done analyses of the region's goods-transport industry under contracts with the ports and the Southern California Association of Governments, believes that the industry's constitutional argument will succeed.
Says Husing: "The trucking companies don't want every Podunk city in America to be able to say, 'You can't drive through our town,' and the courts will agree."
The commerce clause is also having an impact in Gardner, Kan., where a city clean-air ordinance prohibits truck drivers from letting their engines idle for more than 10 minutes. "But that's just window dressing," says Hobby. "We can't do anything about trucks on railroad property (in the intermodal park)." There, the commerce clause rules, and Gardner residents will just have to live with the drifting smog.
Nevertheless, says Jane Anne Morris, author of "Gaveling Down the Rabble: How Free Trade is Stealing Our Democracy," it is important to challenge all attempts by corporations and the federal courts to use the clause as a weapon against environmentally essential laws. "We would not have the problems we have now if thousands of good, promising, strong laws had not been declared unconstitutional under the commerce clause since 1879," she says.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), with headquarters in Washington, D.C., and an office in Los Angeles, has filed a "motion to intervene" in opposition to ATA's lawsuit. Other groups, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, are part of a coalition with NRDC to support the new environmental regulations at the Southern California ports.
NRDC spokesperson Jessica Lass makes the case this way: "We support the plan because more management oversight is needed at the ports, to improve efficiency. Trucks need to be fully loaded, to minimize the number of trips in and out. And we need to be sure they are fuel-efficient and well maintained."
Controlling pollution from oceangoing ships will be even more difficult than regulating trucks. Ninety percent of the bunker-fuel-burning, fume-belching vessels coming into the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports are foreign-owned and -flagged. "Ships are under international control, and that's the hardest problem to solve," laments Husing.
The Environmental Protection Agency has a voluntary program under which some ships will use better grades of fuel in their auxiliary engines (which they switch to when they're in and around ports), reduce their speed near ports, and plug into shore-based power sources when at dock. NRDC hails the program as a step forward, but Husing doesn't see it going very far: "We regard EPA as useless. What they are doing is lame at best."
The purchase-driven life
The sheer volume of imports, growing by the day, threatens to overwhelm all attempts to clean up the environment along trade routes. The value of goods being imported nationwide has risen 68 percent just in the past decade; that's after adjustments for inflation, and it excludes oil imports.
Halting that growth or even making deep cuts in imports would not only help clear the air, it would make it easier to clean up the toxic water pollution that accumulates in sea lanes and ports; it would curb the noise pollution that can do serious damage to human health and interfere with communications among marine mammals; and it would stop the headlong rush to pave more land for logistics parks.
Slashing imports would address those and a host of other environmental and human-rights problems created by overproduction and overconsumption. But with an increasingly fragile economy that depends so heavily on consumer spending, politicians and economists continue to call for more trade, not less.
That's certainly the case on the 2008 campaign trail. The presidential candidates express concern over imports only when urging "independence from foreign oil." Republican John McCain, a committed free-trader, saluted June's strong trade report, saying that it "provided an important reminder of the role that exports play in our economy."
Democratic candidate Barack Obama's campaign Web site says, "Obama believes that trade with foreign nations should strengthen the American economy and create more American jobs." In practice, he appears to vacillate between advocating mild trade regulations (for which critics repeatedly brand him as a "protectionist") and flirting with "strong dollar" policies that would bring in even higher volumes of imports.
Some of the flow through our ports seems almost circular - trade for the sake of trade. In some of the categories that the U.S. Census Bureau uses to tally trade, such as "pleasure boats and motors," "toiletries and cosmetics" and "medicinal equipment," the dollar values of goods coming in and going out are strikingly similar.
All that activity, both inbound and outbound, generates profits along with pollution. As a consequence, no one on either side of the battle over pollution control around ports, roads and railways seems to be urging a rollback of imports.
Husing, in his economic analysis of goods traffic in California, urged aggressive expansion of the industry as the only viable job-creation strategy. He explains, "In this region, 44 percent of the population has a high school education or less. People need blue-collar jobs without barriers to entry. Manufacturing is in decline. Construction is in the toilet. But logistics and distribution is growing fast. With tracking technology, it's an information-intensive sector and pays at least as well as manufacturing, better than construction."
Says Husing, "For a while there I was Public Enemy Number One in the environmental movement's eyes. They are concerned about people's health. I argued that poverty is a public health issue, and they didn't like that. But they seem to be coming around."
On the issue of ports and distribution centers, environmentalists are focusing on pollution control, while assuming that consumption of imported goods will continue to grow. Asked if the root of the problem is simply that we're importing too much stuff, NRDC's Lass changed the subject back to efficiency: "We don't want to stand in the way of progress. We need a way to expand our ports in an environmentally sustainable manner and create more jobs."
In Kansas, too, the debate is over how to deal with the surge of imported goods, not how to curtail it. Hobby says that the Burlington Northern facility should be built in an area 14 miles farther south of Gardner, where there's plenty of open land: "We've had this thing thrown into our backyard. Instead, they should put it where growth can move toward it. Then any people or companies who don't mind being near this thing can buy land and move in around it."
A deep recession or depression could disrupt the "purchase-driven life" that fuels the American economy. Until then, it appears, the quest for more efficient methods of importing ever-greater tonnages will continue.
A clean-running economy that can thrive on less production and less importation of consumer goods would look very different from today's economy. It may be out there somewhere in the future, but it's hard to see through the clouds of diesel exhaust.
Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kan. His book, Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, was published by Pluto Press (2008).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/97496/
Asia Times:
Palestinians play a wild card
By Mark LeVine
Sep 5, 2008
Lost in the international uproar over Russia's Olympic Games-eve invasion and occupation of Georgia and now the political and meteorological storms sweeping across the United States is a seismic shift in the dynamics of another conflict, one which offers a similarly vexing challenge to the core policy goals of the United States, Europe and many Middle Eastern governments to that posed by a newly belligerent Russia.
Largely unreported in the American and Western media, on August 10, two days after the start of both the Russian invasion and the Olympics, Palestinian lead negotiator Ahmed Qurie declared that if the peace process did not advance towards a final settlement soon, Palestinians would stop pursuing a two-state solution and demand the establishment of a bi-national state with Israel.
After the Annapolis peace conference held last November in the United States, Israel and the Palestinians agreed to form two negotiation teams to reach an agreement on major permanent status issues before the end of this year. Hopes are fading for any agreement within this timeframe, especially on statehood, which makes Qurie's comments all the more pertinent.
Qurie, better known as Abu Alaa, explained, "The Palestinian leadership has been working on establishing a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders ... If Israel continues to oppose making this a reality, then the Palestinian demand for the Palestinian people and its leadership [would be] one state, a bi-national state."
In effect, pressure would be put on Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to halt all negotiations and demand that Israel annex the Palestinian territories with all their residents. Indeed, Abbas has hinted he might dissolve the PA and demand a bi-national state if progress is not made soon.
According to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, a forum has begun activities in the Occupied Territories and the Palestinian diaspora aimed at dismantling the PA and the return of responsibility for the territories to Israel. A petition in this regard was published this week in the London-based, Arabic-language al-Hayat daily newspaper.
To date, Israel's leadership has refused to get excited by the Palestinian threat of a bi-national state. "It's all a tactic," said a senor government official was quoted in the media as saying this week. "I would not bet on it in a casino."
All the same, the issue represents a sea-change in Palestinian attitudes towards the peace process. Even at its lowest ebb, former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat threatened merely to declare a state within the West Bank and Gaza.
Today the mere possibility of a bi-national solution so frightens Israel's leaders that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert equated it with apartheid, warning that if the two-state process failed, Israel would "face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished".
The reason Israel would be "finished" is clear: given the current state of relations between Jews and Palestinians it is difficult to envision Jews maintaining control over the territory, holy places, military, economy and immigration of Israel/Palestine in a bi-national state, especially after the demographic balance shifts in favor of Palestinians, as many experts believe it is close to doing.
In such a situation, Israel as a Jewish state would either "vanish from the pages of time", as Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has infamously advocated, or an all-out civil war would erupt that would likely result in the exile of the vast majority of Palestinians from both Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Despite these apocalyptic possibilities, the peace process today stands close to the bi-national abyss. The more Palestinians feel they have nothing left to lose, the more likely it becomes that they will press for "one person, one vote", returning in essence if not rhetoric to the Palestinian Liberation Organization's pre-1988 advocacy of a "secular democratic state" in all of pre-1948 Palestine.
In reality, this turn of events should not surprise anyone. Already a generation ago, Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti argued in his 1987 West Bank Data Base Project that by the mid-1980s, the Occupied Territories had become so integrated into Israel that it was no longer possible to separate them. By the time Palestinians and Israelis were ready to negotiate a "divorce" in the early 1990s it was too late to do so.
Israelis certainly wanted peace, but they weren't prepared to make the huge territorial, political and economic sacrifices that was necessary to allow for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Instead, under the guise of a "New Middle East" Oslo reinforced rather than ameliorated the most basic dynamics of the occupation.
Benvenisti described the conglomeration of Israel and the Occupied Territories "a bi-national entity with a rigid, hierarchical social structure based on ethnicity ... The only reason this has not been universally acknowledged is that the territories have not been formally annexed".
In the decade and a half after Benvenisti wrote these words the number of settlers doubled, land confiscations continued apace, and the ties between the settlements and Israel proper grew ever more deep, a phenomenon that continued during the eight-year long al-Aqsa intifada. The PA became increasingly corrupt and paralyzed during Oslo, while Hamas failed to move beyond terrorism even though it reinforced the occupation.
With Palestinians wielding bi-nationalism as a threat and Israelis imagining it as a curse, it's not surprising that the idea still has relatively few supporters. But what if a bi-national state was re-imagined as a positive development, one that allows for the greatest possible realization of both Jewish and Palestinian aspirations? Indeed, the idea had this connotation for progressive Zionists such as the Brit Shalom movement during the pre-1948 period, and an increasing number of Israeli academics and activists are giving the idea a second look today.
Even Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), in Zionism's ur-text, Altneuland (The Old New Land), describes the future Jewish state as one in which Jews and Palestinians have equal rights and responsibilities in the civic and economic life of the country.
Of course, Herzl also imagined "spiriting" Palestinians "across the border" to ensure the creation of a Jewish state. And it is precisely such paradoxical sentiments towards Palestinians - wanting to live with them as good neighbors and wanting to get rid of them in order to ensure unfettered possession of the land - that has defined the serpentine trajectory of Zionism during the past century.
Today it seems we are back to Herzl's Old-New Land, with no one sure which path will lead to a peaceful future. One thing that is certain, however, is that in the interregnum between the death of the two-state solution and emergence of a workable alternative much blood will be shed, with increasingly dangerous consequences for the stability of the Middle East at large, and with it, for the security of the United States.
Mark LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and author of half a dozen books, including Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, in press).
Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JI05Ak02.html
Clarín:
El bueno, el feo y el malo
La última vez que el crecimiento del mercado del arte se consideró, como ahora, desorbitado, fue en los años ochenta. Tres décadas más tarde, como todo mercado globalizado, el arte contemporáneo esta continuamente ampliando sus fronteras buscando nuevos suministros. ¿Por qué los centros de atención del coleccionismo son los países con economías en expansión?
04.09.2008 | Arte
Para los ibéricos es fácil acordarse de la última crisis inflacionaria del arte, porque fue la primera vez que España tomó parte en el auge y caída del mercado artístico internacional. De hecho, el arte español, como consecuencia del cambio de régimen y la revitalización económica, era uno de los focos de atención de ese mercado que, entonces, se limitaba a los países occidentales. Treinta años después, la penúltima novedad ha sido el arte chino y la última, el arte ruso.
La diferencia con otros booms anteriores es que ahora se afirma que la crisis económica producto de las subprimes no ha afectado al mercado del arte. Aunque esto no es cierto en muchos niveles del mercado, si es cierto que en otros, como las subastas, la crisis no se ha notado. La razón parece estar en lo numerosos que son los nuevos coleccionistas. La privatización de lo público que el capitalismo neoliberal promueve deja enormes sumas de dinero en manos privadas. Sólo en Brasil, el año pasado hubo 60.000 nuevos millonarios. Las cifras en China, India o Rusia son mayores, y coleccionar es una actividad llena de recompensas. Además del reconocimiento social, están los viajes a las ferias de arte y las grandes exposiciones, con sus cenas de preinauguración y las fiestas exclusivas; la red de contactos VIP, que incluye el acceso a los artistas y, además. una buena inversión. Las ferias de arte, junto a las subastas, son los escenarios donde se actúa y se difunde el poder social del arte.
Las subastas, que hace treinta años eran negocios algo esnobs de las clases altas británicas en los que comprar se consideraba una actividad semiprivada, se han convertido en grandes corporaciones que a través de los medios vocean el precio de las obras y el nombre del propietario, convirtiendo a artista y coleccionista en celebridades mundiales. Por otro lado, las altísimas cifras que alcanzan las obras no hacen sino confirmarnos que el arte no tiene precio. El arte se ha convertido en el gran fetiche del capitalismo del conocimiento. Es lo más sagrado de nuestra cultura materialista, precisamente porque su valor es sobre todo simbólico. Capital simbólico para el resto del mercado, el arte es un buen socio. Para las marcas, que ahora son entes alegóricos a los que atribuimos virtudes y defectos, invertir publicitariamente en arte, con su capital simbólico y su relación con las elites y las celebridades, les asegura entrar en la esfera de la alta cultura y además el interés de los medios. Los conglomerados del lujo, propietarios de las industrias de la moda, son conscientes de esto, pero sus deseos van más allá de pulir su imagen: la moda quiere ser parte del arte. No es sólo que lo afirmen reiteradamente los modistos mientras los medios hablan de maridaje de disciplinas, sino que los grupos del lujo y la moda están invirtiendo en las estructuras mismas. Ya no se trata de exposiciones de modistos en los museos financiadas por sus firmas. Ni premios para artistas con su nombre. Los grupos empresariales del lujo construyen grandes museos para sus colecciones y son los actuales propietarios de las casas de subastas. Frank Gehry construye, en París, el museo que albergará la colección de Bernard Arnault. Su grupo, LHVM, es dueño de la casa de subastas Phillips de Pury & Co y tiene participaciones en Sotheby's. Su competidor François Pinault, dueño del grupo PPR, prepara museo en Venecia, donde ya posee el Palacio Grassi, y su grupo es dueño de Christie's. Ambos grupos rivales, a través de sus marcas, utilizan a los artistas para el marketing de sus productos. Chanel, por ejemplo, ha patrocinado un pabellón móvil, diseñado por Zaha Hadid, que viajará por diversas ciudades del mundo. Dentro se muestran obras como el filme de Nobuyoshi Araki de una mujer atada con cadenas (Chanel, por supuesto) o los cerdos disecados con tatuajes en la piel y los bolsos a juego de Wim Delvoye. El recorrido por este pabellón hightech que la marca describe como una experiencia artística es según un espectador "como estar dentro de un súperelaborado anuncio de Chanel". Quizás la marca que más ha jugado con el potencial simbólico de los artistas ha sido Louis Vuitton: Olafur Eliasson ha diseñado sus vitrinas, Vanessa Beecroft hizo una de sus características performance con modelos para su tienda en París y Richard Prince inspiró un desfile y diseñó bolsos. El bolso, ese accesorio que dura más de una temporada, es el objeto donde se han dado más colaboraciones.La más reciente, entre John Armlender y Puma (ahora del grupo PPR), se presentó en Zurich, en lo que se considera la preinauguración de la feria de Basilea, y tuvo a Hans Ulrich Obrist como maestro de ceremonias. Pero el gesto más llamativo es haber instalado una tienda Louis Vuitton en el MOCA de Los Ángeles y en el Brooklyn Museum de Nueva York durante la exposición de Takashi Murakami (la exposición, tienda incluida, viajara al Guggenheim de Bilbao). Aunque el trabajo de Murakami se ha desarrollado a través de firmas como Vuitton, el gesto, como reconoció Paul Schimmel, comisario de la muestra, es una provocación sobre los límites entre mercado y arte culto. El debate es interesante porque, más allá de la boutade de considerar los bolsos de Murakami como arte, son los museos (como los que se están construyendo los grupos del lujo) junto a los críticos, universidades, revistas, bienales, etcétera. los que determinan el valor simbólico del arte. Este valor simbólico es el que les sirve a las industrias de la moda para vendernos millones de bolsos o gafas iguales que prometen hacernos diferentes. Porque estas industrias de lo exclusivo se sustentan en la venta masiva de accesorios. Si tienen tanto éxito es porque más que estimular el deseo del consumo lo que hacen, con un poder de seducción enorme, es conformar las subjetividades. Condenados como estamos a crear sentido a través del consumo, es difícil sustraerse a la fascinación de pertenecer, y para elaborar las frágiles cartografías de nuestras identidades cada vez nos identificamos más con el mundo de la subjetividad-lujo, fuera del cual se corre el riesgo de la exclusión social. El arte, que antes se consideraba un espacio de microlibertad, es ahora en nombre de la creatividad y el maridaje de disciplinas un aliado en la alineación constitutiva del sujeto.
"Las modas son una droga para compensar los fatales efectos de olvidar a escala colectiva" decía Walter Benjamin. Una de las cosas que vamos camino de olvidar es el pacto simbólico por el que el arte se diferencia de la pura y simple producción de valores estéticos, que es todo aquello que llamamos cultura, como por ejemplo la moda.
* Helena Tatay es comisaria independiente y crítica de arte
Copyright 1996-2008 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/notas/2008/09/04/_-01753333.htm
Guardian:
Maliki drops the mask
With his tough stance on US withdrawal, Sunni militias and the Kurds Iraq's leader risks doom
Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
The Guardian,
Friday September 5 2008
What's up with Nouri al-Maliki? As security anxieties subside in this slowly calming city, political speculation has rarely been so intense. First, it was Maliki's demand that all US troops leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Then came signs that his government wants to undermine the Sunni tribal militias, known as the Awakening councils, on whom the Americans have relied to defeat al-Qaida in Iraq. Now there are moves to take on the powerful Kurdish peshmerga troops and push them out of disputed areas in the strategic central province of Diyala.
Why is the prime minister doing this? Is "the puppet breaking his strings", as one Arab newspaper put it? Or is the more appropriate metaphor "dropping the mask"? Those who knew Maliki in exile in Syria during Saddam Hussein's time now recall that he opposed the US-led invasion. His Daawa party did not attend the eve-of-invasion conference of US- and UK-supported exiles in London, and he opposed the party's decision six months later to join the hand-picked "governing council" set up by the first occupation overlord, Paul Bremer.
Maliki's new line has discomforted the Americans. Some officials put on a brave face, saying it is a sign of Iraqi confidence in their own sovereignty, a development that, of course, they support as proof that the Bush administration's strategy of rebuilding a proud country is succeeding. Others say it reflects overconfidence, even hubris, as Iraq is a long way from being able to survive without US military protection.
Either way, playing the nationalist card has huge potential consequences in Iraq. With provincial and parliamentary elections expected next year, it will sharpen the struggle for dominance in the Shia community. It is designed to undercut the appeal of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a consistent opponent of the occupation who is re-profiling his movement on the lines of Lebanon's Hizbullah. Its Mahdi army militia will be slimmed into a group of experienced resistance fighters, kept in reserve for action against US troops rather than to fight Iraqi Sunnis, while the rest of the movement goes into communal politics.
Posing as the nationalist who managed to get the US to accept a timetable for withdrawal (the tense negotiations could yet founder) allows Maliki to distance himself from his main Shia allies in government, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), seen as keen backers of the occupation. It also diverts attention from the chronic power cuts and other economic troubles. Every government has to fight on its record in office, but, by turning himself into a patriotic Iraqi hero, Maliki may sidestep this. Some observers suggest he may even go to the elections on a "prime minister's list", to redefine himself as no longer a Shia or a political Islamist, so as to win support from Iraq's secular and non-sectarian urban middle class. But there are uncomfortable echoes here of the effort by Ayad Allawi, the prime minister appointed by the US in 2004, to project himself in the December 2005 elections as a strong man. His vote total fell a long way below his expectations.
But if Maliki wants to present a new image as a man who stands up to the Americans, why does he choose this moment to go after Sunnis and Kurds? The principle of disarming all militias, and not just those of his Shia rivals, such as Sadr, may be laudable but the timing is highly risky and threatens to overload the circuits. Going after the Sunnis and Kurds may fail, dooming Maliki to defeat. Many Sunnis already believe he is a tool of the Iranians. Now they say his sudden anti-Americanism is no proof of Iraqi patriotism, but just shows he is a tool of Tehran. The Iranians want the US out of Iraq, not only in order to undermine US credibility in the region. They interpret Washington's support for the Awakening councils as a tilt towards the Sunnis and an effort to re-balance Iraqi politics from the Shia dominance of the early post-invasion period.
Maliki's tough stance towards the US could doom him personally. The US toppled his predecessor, Ibrahim Jaaferi, and, even though US power in Iraq has declined since then, it may find a way to remove Maliki too. It would not demand that the prime minister go, as it did in 2006, but could undermine his parliamentary majority. The US has alternative candidates, including the ambitious vice-president, Adel Abdel Mahdi, and the Sunni defence minister, Abdul Qader al-Obeidi, who told the New York Times in January that US troops would be needed for another 10 years.
Whatever his motives, Maliki's move has certainly shaken up Iraqi politics and forced the issue of a clear US departure timetable on to the agenda. The Iraqi prime minister has put Bush and McCain on to the back foot, and given help to Obama. Whether Maliki or Bush blinks first remains to be seen.
j.steele@guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/05/iraq.middleeast
Jeune Afrique: L'opposant Ibni serait mort
après son arrestation, selon la commission d'enquête
TCHAD - 4 septembre 2008 - par AFP
L'opposant Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh, disparu depuis le 3 février après l'attaque rebelle sur N'Djamena, est selon toute vraisemblance "décédé" après avoir été arrêté à son domicile par des militaires tchadiens, selon le rapport de la commission d'enquête rendu public mercredi.
Attendu depuis sa remise au président tchadien Idriss Deby Itno le 5 août et après de nombreuses tergiversations au moment de la création de la commission en mars et avril, le rapport -200 pages- ne fait pas "toute la lumière" sur la disparition du porte-parole de la Coordination des Partis pour la défense de la démocratie (CPDC), "regrettent" l'Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) et l'Union européenne (UE).
Selon le rapport, "aucune information ou élément de preuve n'ont pu être obtenus sur le sort d'Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh, le seul des opposants politiques enlevés le 3 février à ne pas avoir réapparu. Les gens pensent qu'il serait désormais décédé".
C'est la première fois que l'hypothèse de sa mort est évoquée officiellement. Jusqu'à présent, elle n'était avancée qu'en privé par des opposants et observateurs par respect pour la famille.
Le rapport attribue l'arrestation d'Ibni à l'armée tchadienne: il a été "arrêté à son domicile à N'Djamena le 3 février 2008 vers 19h30 (18h30 GMT), par huit éléments des force de défense de sécurité (...) circulant dans un pick-up Toyota neuf couleur armée". "Aucune information ou élément de preuve n'ont pu être obtenus sur le lieu ou les lieux de sa détention et les conditions dans lesquelles elle s'est déroulée", conclut le rapport. Les "enquêtes" de la commission ont aussi "révélé des lieux de détentions non officiels où croupissent des détenus qui échappent à tout contrôle judiciaire".
La famille de M. Ibni, l'opposition et la communauté internationale se sont montré critiques de la commission malgré les 1.500 personnes interrogées.
Mohamed Saleh, son fils, a estimé que le rapport était "une parodie pour amuser la galerie". "Le commanditaire de la mort de mon père c'est Deby. Beaucoup de gens sont impliqués et il veut mettre ça sur le dos de militaires tchadiens dont il veut se débarrasser", a-t-il déclaré, réclamant que "Deby réponde de ses actes devant la justice".
"C'est la Garde républicaine qui a arrêté mon père sur ordre de Deby. Mon père a été emmené au palais présidentiel. Il y a été torturé et il a été tué. Ils (les autorités) savent où est le corps. On veut la dépouille de notre père", a-t-il conclu. M. Ibni avait été arrêté dans des conditions similaires à celles de deux autres figures de l'opposition, l'ancien président Lol Mahamat Choua et le député fédéraliste Ngarlejy Yorongar. Ceux-ci ont recouvré la liberté quelques semaines plus tard dans des conditions controversées.
Le député et figure de l'opposition Saleh Kebzabo, porte-parole adjoint de la CPDC, assure que "la Commission n'a pas mené les investigations nécessaires pour une conclusion sérieuse". Salibou Garba, rapporteur de la CPDC, "craint que le pouvoir n'ait trouvé, à travers cette commission, le moyen d'endormir la famille d'Ibni, ses amis politiques, M. Sarkozy, l'UE, l'Union africaine, l'OIF, bref toute la communauté internationale. Pour mieux rouler tout le monde dans la farine". L'OIF et l'UE soulignent que "la manifestation de la vérité" n'a pu être établie et "appellent les autorités tchadiennes à engager de nouveaux efforts".
Lors de l'attaque, la rébellion tchadienne, venue du Soudan, a été à deux doigts de renverser Idriss Deby, acculé dans son palais présidentiel.
Selon le rapport, près de 1.000 personnes sont mortes et 1.800 blessées sur "l'ensemble du territoire" du 28 janvier au 8 février. Le rapport fait également état de 380 personnes détenues au cours de ces événements et d'une trentaine de viols.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP42428loppoetuqne0
La Repubblica: Schiave del sesso globalizzate
così il crimine cambia il mercato
L'Antimafia: "Spariscono le vecchie aste di donne, sostituite
da nuove forme di traffico". Dove la violenza è "solo" psicologica
Dalle donne vendute all'ingrosso nel cuore dell'ex Jugoslavia
alla tratta "fai da te" da parte di tanti criminali "normali"
di RANIERI SALVADORINI
4 settembre 2008
FINO a poco tempo fa le ragazze venivano sequestrate con la forza e poi vendute all'asta, e da lì smistate sui marciapiedi di tutta Europa. Un 'lavoro' decisamente rischioso per i malviventi e che ha finito per esporli alle polizie di tutti i Paesi. Il racket, in risposta a questa repressione su larga scala, ha scelto la strada dell'evoluzione: oggi è quasi soft, la violenza è sfumata nelle forme e la catena reclutamento-vendita-trasferimento delle ragazze non viene più gestita da grosse concentrazioni di criminali ma da un immenso arcipelago di piccoli gruppi. Insomma, il meccanismo è esploso, ed è rinato sparpagliandosi sul territorio. Per questo la tratta delle donne è ancora più difficile da contrastare. Il 23 agosto l'Organizzazione internazionale del lavoro ha celebrato la "Giornata internazionale contro la schiavitù". Proviamo adesso, con l'aiuto di alcuni esperti dell'Antimafia e delle Ong, a ricostruire queste nuove forme di schiavitù sessuale e la loro evoluzione.
Il "Mercato Arizona". E' di pochi anni fa - poco dopo il 2004 - lo smantellamento del 'Mercato Arizona'. Era un centro di smistamento "all'ingrosso" di donne, droghe e armi e si trovava in zone impervie nei boschi al confine tra Serbia e Croazia. "All'Arizona Highway", spiega l'economista ed esperta in terrorismo Loretta Napoleoni, "i mercanti ordinavano alle ragazze di spogliarsi e quelle rimanevano nude sul ciglio della strada: gli uomini si avvicinavano, le toccavano, ispezionavano la pelle e controllavano perfino la bocca prima di fare l'offerta". In quegli anni era Israele il maggior acquirente di slave, "molto ricercate da una clientela di ebrei ortodossi" che, spiega Nissan Ben-Ami, dirigente di Awareness Centre, un'Ong israeliana che lotta contro il traffico e la prostituzione, "per motivi religiosi non possono masturbarsi e sprecare sperma: devono farlo per forza con una donna". Spiega la Napoleoni nel libro "Economia canaglia": "In Israele le donne sono trafficate per il 'corridoio' Egitto-Striscia di Gaza: da Rafah, infatti, si snodano complicati labirinti di sotterranei di cui si servono terroristi e anche trafficanti, anche di donne".
La violenza non "rende" più. Visto che l'efferatezza degli anni Novanta aveva provocato una risposta dura dell'antimafia, anche in Italia il crimine ha abbandonato la violenza che "accende i riflettori" per dare il via a una vera e propria mutazione. Il nuovo sfruttamento è "dolce" e poco visibile. Proprio così. Un quadro della situazione attuale su cui sono d'accordo due autorità nella lotta alla tratta delle donne: il magistrato antimafia della Procura di Lecce, Cataldo Motta, uno degli uomini-chiave della Dia (Direzione investigativa antimafia) e il sociologo Pino Arlacchi, esperto mondiale di mafia, ex sottosegretario generale delle Nazioni Unite e direttore, dal 1997 al 2002, sempre per l'Agenzia internazionale, dell'Undccp (l'ufficio Onu per il controllo delle droghe e la prevenzione del crimine).
Il crimine impara a negoziare. Spiega Motta: "Il fenomeno si è modificato, va detto che i criminali sono riusciti a neutralizzare le misure di contrasto con nuove modalità di reclutamento. Gli sfruttatori si sono fatti più morbidi e ora le ragazze non parlano più, grazie a una maggiore partecipazione agli utili e a maggiori margini di movimento". Questa l'istantanea di Arlacchi: "Nonostante la presenza di un forte elemento di costrizione - motivo per cui non si può certo parlare di vero "accordo" - è stato introdotto un minimo di elemento volontario".
"Schiavismo moderato". "Questa nuova forma di "semi-schiavitù" - prosegue il sociologo - se da un lato riduce la dimensione dello sfruttamento - che però rimane - dall'altro consente un allargamento del mercato a nuove vittime". Il cosidetto 'reclutamento morbido', facendo leva su incentivi che spengono il moto di ribellione nelle ragazze, rende inadeguate molte delle norme antimafia. Certo, un forte elemento di coercizione non è cambiato: il sequestro dei documenti per "mantenere le ragazze in uno stato continuativo di ricattabilità e vulnerabilità", spiegano gli esperti riportando le parole stesse del Protocollo contro la tratta. "I grossi numeri si stanno spostando verso questa nuova forma di dominanza", evidenzia Arlacchi, "si può affermare che almeno due casi su tre avvengono secondo le nuove modalità di reclutamento. Prima la violenza caratterizzava tutta la filiera della tratta, ora le ragazze vanno incontro a dure sanzioni fisiche qualora si ribellino e violino l'accordo".
Schiave del sesso globalizzate così il crimine cambia il mercato
E che le modalità più "crude" siano in via di sparizione lo testimoniano gli stess operatori di Ong che lavorano a contatto con le ragazze sfruttate: "Poco tempo fa abbiamo trovato una giovane ragazza albanese quasi-morta, con evidenti segni di tortura e sevizie: un un orecchio mozzato, bruciature ovunque e segni di percosse di ogni tipo. Ma gli episodi di efferatezza sono residuali, appartengono ormai agli anni Novanta", spiega Marco Bufo, coordinatore dell'Ong "On the road". "Proprio per questo", sottolinea, "la situazione è più complicata, il fenomeno è sempre meno visibile e al tempo stesso più ampio".
Le speranze delle schiave.
Sono sempre meno le donne a essere sequestrate e tenute in scacco con la violenza: oggi nella fase di reclutamento le ragazze contraggono un debito verso i trafficanti, che gli procurano documenti falsi in cambio di quelli veri e le portano a destinazione. Ma le "trattenute" sul lavoro delle ragazze sono alte, che riconquisteranno la libertà e i veri documenti solo una volta saldato il debito. Un debito che in genere i trafficanti tendono a gonfiare nel tempo più che possono. "Se la situazione che viene prospettata alle ragazze per il pagamento del debito - un costo variabile da etnia a etnia, ma che si aggira sui 50-60 mila euro - è a "tempo determinato", queste possono sempre pensare: "Tutto questo un domani finirà" - spiegano Stefano Volpicelli e Sara Maggi, curatori della campagna di sensibilizzazione di respiro europeo Tratta NO! Insomma, si convincono di aver a disposizione sempre una seconda possibilità. "Nel frattempo - proseguono i due esperti - "prostituendosi possono mandare soldi alle famiglie, mantenere i figli che spesso lasciano nelle case d'origine e sperare di sollevarle dalla miseria e dall'indigenza. Rispetto all'inferno da cui scappano, anche le condizioni di sfruttamento peggiore finiscono per essere accettate".
Schiave del sesso globalizzate così il crimine cambia il mercato
La "vecchia scuola". Nigeria, Albania e Moldava hanno fatto scuola in fatto di strumenti efferati di reclutamento: violenze, mutilazioni, lo sterminio delle famiglie, l'uso sistematico della violenza, dello stupro e, sopratutto, racconta Arlacchi "l'umiliazione". "La violenza caratterizzava qualsiasi momento della vecchia filiera della tratta", spiega. Al tempo stesso gli esperti concordano: non si può affatto escludere che, specie in paesi dove la legge non c'è, l'efferatezza sia lo strumento principe della coercizione. "Come in certe zone della Russia, dell'Albania o dell'Africa", aggiunge Arlacchi.
Quell'articolo è obsoleto? Con l'introduzione dell'articolo 18 della legge Turco-Napolitano contro la tratta il grande traffico ha subito un grosso colpo, prima di "polverizzarsi in un arcipelago di piccoli gruppi", dice Arlacchi". Il reato di tratta è violazione dei Diritti umani e la sanzione arriva fino a 18 anni. "Le strategie di contrasto hanno funzionato", dicono all'unisono Motta e Arlacchi, sottolineando: "L'articolo 18 è fatto molto bene" ma la struttura del traffico si è talmente fluidificata che, spiega Motta, "non si riesce più ad arrivare alla configurazione del reato, e l'articolo 18 viene neutralizzato". In una parola: la realtà cambia velocemente e le norme faticano a comprenderla.
E l'Europa che fa? Alla già difficile situazione di una normativa poco adeguata ai tempi, si aggiungono rallentamenti dovuti alla complessità delle procedure europee: "In Europa la posizione delle polizie rispetto alle vittime è diversa da paese a paese", spiega Carla Olivieri, Project Manager di "Tratta NO!", una campagna di sensibilizzazione europea realizzata in collaborazione con il Ministero delle Pari Opportunità. Sottolinea la Olivieri: "Nel resto d'Europa non c'è l'obbligo della denuncia da parte delle vittime. In Italia si, e questo è uno snodo fondamentale: perché se la denuncia è volontaria, come nella maggioranza dei paesi, mette in pericolo le ragazze e soprattutto le loro famiglie all'estero". Sempre la Olivieri evidenzia che anche se "la Convenzione di Varsavia del 2005 auspica una maggiore coerenza normativa da parte di tutti i paesi e un allineamento delle legislature, fino a ora quasi nessun paese, Italia inclusa, ha ancora ratificato la Convenzione, perché la ratifica implicherebbe l'adeguamento normativo obbligatorio". Anche queste complicazioni di procedura, di tipo tecnico, semplificano la vita al crimine.
Il crimine "fai da te". L'indentikit degli sfruttatori offre una sorpresa. "Quelle che organizzano il traffico sono persone assolutamente normali", spiega Arlacchi. "Questa nuova forma di assoggettamento apre il mercato a imprenditori del traffico 'fai da te'". E' una delle conseguenze della mutazione del mercato del sesso, che trova riscontri nelle considerazioni della prima linea dell'Antimafia. Spiega il Procuratore di Lecce: "Nascono 'piccole libere iniziative', perché non c'è più bisogno di entrare in contatto con la grande criminalità organizzata, un tempo l'unica 'agenzia di servizi' per la gestione degli ingressi in Europa". In poche parole: finché la mafia albanese era capace di passare il Canale d'Otranto utilizzandolo come ingresso per l'Europa era inevitabile che avesse rapporti solo con altre grandi reti criminali. Adesso però, conclude Motta, "le vie di ingresso sono le più disparate e il controllo è diventato complicatissimo". Così il grande crimine si è decentralizzato.
Il commercio è al dettaglio ma i numeri restano all'ingrosso. Ma quanto denaro muove questo traffico? Fare stime è quasi impossibile per la natura sommersa e continuamente mutevole del fenomeno del traffico e per i diversi criteri adottati da stato a stato per tentare di quantificarne i flussi. Eppure qualcosa si può dire. Secondo complesse stime dell'Ilo (Organizzazione internazionale del lavoro), che molti ritengono al ribasso, sono trafficate nel mondo almeno 1,7 milioni di schiave del sesso e il trend è in crescita. Per quel che riguarda il mercato italiano Transcrime - il Centro interuniversitario di ricerca sulla criminalità transnazionale dell'Università degli Studi di Trento e dell'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, che collabora sulla tratta con il Parlamento Europeo - ha stimato in quasi 6 miliardi di euro gli introiti tra il 2004 e il 2005. Con un traffico stimato di donne che varia tra 18.000 e 36.000. Introiti che, sottolineano sempre gli esperti, finiscono quasi per intero nelle tasche dei trafficanti.
Nuovi problemi per l'antimafia. "Da quando la violenza è sparita non riusciamo più a far collaborare le ragazze, il lavoro si è complicato, anche per le stesse unità di strada", spiega Motta, "prima alla violenza le donne finivano per ribellarsi e collaboravano, e questo è indispensabile per ricostruire la filiera criminale, ma oggi - prosegue il magistrato - basta osservare che tra il 2007 e il 2008 non si è avuto nemmeno un solo procedimento per tratta di esseri umani". Infatti "i procedimenti penali, a fronte dei successi ottenuti negli anni scorsi, sono crollati e questo può dar conto di quanto la situazione adesso sia molto più complicata". Lo stesso, continua Motta, si riscontra dalle intercettazioni telefoniche: "Non c'è più traccia, oggi, dei resoconti di violenza inaudita degli anni Novanta."
Insistono sia Arlacchi che Motta: la violenza logora la "merce" e al tempo stesso espone chi la esercita a rischi continui. "Comprare un essere umano e trattarlo come "merce", spiega Arlacchi, non conviene: gli esseri umani non sono come un pacco di droga proprio perché non sono una merce: vanno gestiti, nutriti e, alla fine, e questo è incontrovertibile, l'essere umano si ribella, sempre".
http://www.repubblica.it/2008/08/sezioni/esteri/
tratta-anniversario/tratta-anniversario/tratta-anniversario.html
Mail & Guardian:
Storm-hit Haitians starve on rooftops
Sep 05 2008
News | World | North America
Haiti was reeling on Thursday night from a series of tropical storms which devastated crops and infrastructure and left bodies floating in flooded towns. Three storms in three weeks unleashed "catastrophe" and submerged much of the impoverished Caribbean nation, said President Rene Preval. A fourth storm, Ike, was gathering force in the Atlantic and could strike next week.
More than 120 people have died, thousands are homeless and agriculture and transport networks have been washed away, prompting calls for emergency international aid.
"There are a lot of people who have been on top of the roofs of their homes over 24 hours now," said the Interior Minister, Paul Antoine Bien-Aime. "They have no water, no food and we can't even help them."
Haiti, vulnerable because of its flimsy dwellings and soil erosion, has been the worst affected by the tempests that have battered the Caribbean and United States Gulf coast. Parts of Cuba have also been devastated, prompting Fidel Castro to compare the impact to a nuclear attack.
Tropical storm Fay started the crisis three weeks ago. Hurricane Gustav wreaked havoc last week by uprooting trees and triggering floods and mudslides that killed dozens.
Tropical storm Hanna struck on Tuesday with 104km/h winds, killing at least 61 people and flooding the northern Haitian city of Gonaives with two metres of water. Corpses and the carcasses of donkeys and cows - flies swarming over them - bobbed down streets turned into rivers.
"I saw 10 bodies float in the flooded streets of the city," the police commissioner, Ernst Dorfeuille, told the local Radio Metropole.
Gonaives lies in a flat river plain between the ocean and deforested mountains that run with mud even in light rains.
With roads impassable and winds too strong for helicopters, United Nations peacekeepers reached the city on inflatable boats. They found hundreds of survivors clinging to rooftops, begging for water and food - women on balconies waved empty pots and spoons.
"I lost everything, even the baby's clothes," Jezula Preval, one of 1 500 people huddled in the a desolate shelter nicknamed the "Haiti Hilton", told the Associated Press. She gave birth to a healthy boy on Tuesday, after floodwaters swallowed her house.
Patients in a flooded hospital had crowded into an upper floor room. At the church about 100 people huddled on a balcony, waiting for the water to recede.
"There is no food, no water, no clothes," said the pastor, Arnaud Dumas. "I want to know what I'm supposed to do ... we haven't found anything to eat in two, three days. Nothing at all."
The UN soldiers secured a warehouse in preparation for food distribution, but could not impose order on the chaos. "It is a great movement of panic in the city," the interior minister said from an inflatable speed boat.
The US embassy in Port-au-Prince declared a disaster situation, freeing $100 000 in emergency aid, a spokesperspm, Mari Tolliver, said. She said hygiene kits, plastic sheeting and water jugs for up to 5 000 families were being sent from Miami.
Some officials feared that the toll of casualties and damage would be on a par with tropical storm Jean, which left 2 000 dead in 2004.
Cuba was also counting the cost on Thursday. Officials said the onslaught from Gustav in the western province of Pinar del Rio and the Isle of Youth was equivalent to the past 14 storms combined. "There are severe damages to the electrical system. It's practically on the floor," said the Vice-President, Carlos Lage. "In terms of buildings and homes, roofs are generally gone. The island is exposed to the sky."
Effective organisation minimised loss of life in Cuba, but could not save property. State media reported that 503 schools and 100 000 homes were affected. About 3 306 tobacco curing barns were destroyed, along with thousands of tonnes of tobacco leaves, coffee and grapefruit.
Castro, the former president, said the damage was immense. "The photos and videos transmitted on national television reminded me of the desolation I saw when I visited Hiroshima."
Forecasters do not know if Ike, a category-four storm advancing from the east, will make landfall. With winds of 124km/h it could be disastrous. Ike is the third major hurricane of the Atlantic season, which runs from June to November. - guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
Source: Mail & Guardian Online
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-09-05-stormhit-haitians-starve-on-rooftops
New Statesman:
Decline and fall?
With the peaceful end of the Cold War, the United Nations seemed poised to preside over a new and stable world order. Since then, events in the Balkans, in Rwanda and elsewhere have shown how vain these hopes were. How did the UN become so ineffectual? And can it ever recover?
Carne Ross
Published 04 September 2008
New World Disorder: the United Nations After the Cold War - An Insider's View, David Hannay, I B Tauris & Co, 336pp, £25
The United Nations is in bad shape. The Security Council is divided over many crucial issues - Darfur, Iran, Burma, Zimbabwe, and now, of course, Georgia. And this is only a partial list. Stymied in doing anything useful, the council keeps itself busy inventing ever more formats of meeting and forms of expression (it now has three different ways of making a press statement, would you believe). The rancour over the unequal nature of its membership, dominated as the organisation has been since 1945 by the so-called permanent five (P5) countries, poisons discussion across much of the UN system. Efforts at reform are nowhere to be seen. Leadership, from the UN Secretariat or the leading states of the UN, including the UK, is notable only by its utter absence.
You could do worse than to read this book to understand how things came to this pass. David (now Lord) Hannay was Britain's UN ambassador for much of the early 1990s, a period of success and disastrous failure at the UN. He is a measured guide to the institution and its problems. When I was a young diplomat in that period (in my case, in Germany), Hannay was regarded as the king of the Security Council, and his careful, accurate prose helps explain his stellar reputation as one of the leading diplomats of his generation. However, concealed unconsciously within his account is one of the reasons why things are such a mess today.
Hannay's account is an episodic one, relating year by year the travails and challenges of the UN, from Cambodia through Macedonia and Bosnia to Iraq. In a way, this approach hinders a deeper analysis of each of these problems, but that is not Hannay's purpose, which is instead to chart the life and realities of the UN as an in stitution and to try to convey what it is really like to do business there. In this goal, he is successful. Perhaps too successful, because the book is occasionally a little dry for the non-specialist. Hannay's style reminded me of the ambassadorial despatches sent at end of year to London, and, indeed, quotations from his own such despatches sprinkle the text.
It was one hell of a period, literally. Mass murders in Bosnia and Rwanda were the low points. High points are hard to find in contrast - success in avoiding war in Macedonia, containing Iraq, ending civil war in Mozambique. Hannay outlines these events with a diplomat's detachment, describing the manoeuvring in New York as pieces on a chessboard, while, offstage, blood is shed in large quantities. His measured approach - indeed, reserve - applies also to finger-pointing. The UN Secretariat's (abject) failure to inform the Security Council of the genocidal preparations of the Hutu Interahamwe militias in Rwanda is remarked upon in one sentence. The responsible official, Kofi Annan, then head of peacekeeping, is not named.
As for Bosnia, Hannay details the Security Council's failure to agree for more than three bloody years, and perhaps 200,000 deaths, an effective response to Serbian aggression and mass murder. But his discussion of why this happened is superficial. The west was unable to agree a response, he says, and he often blames confused US policy. Others are less circumspect. In Bosnia, many hold British officials, Hannay among them, directly responsible for the failure to deal more robustly with Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and their murderous cohorts.
In his introduction, Hannay describes the role of UN ambassador as that of a mere exponent of his government's wishes. This suggests that he adheres to the "empty vessel" philosophy of diplomacy - that the diplomat is there merely to serve and advise, not to shape. I found the reality, both on the Security Council and in the field with the UN, rather different. And there are many critics of Britain's Bosnia policy who charge that Hannay was a key shaper, not merely an exponent, of Britain's reluctance to take firm action, preferring a depiction, echoed again in this book, of a morass of warring factions, each one in part to blame for the killing. Of this controversy, there is disappointingly little mention in the book.
Hannay is a believer in the UN, and a large part of the book is taken up with discussion, much of it quite technical, on what might be done to sort things out. He was the British member of Kofi Annan's high-level panel on threats, challenges and change, which produced a hundred pages of largely sensible and well-considered recommendations on everything from reform of the Security Council to nuclear proliferation. These proposals lie largely unimplemented. It is sobering to consider why.
In the 1990s, for all the failures related by Hannay, there was a real sense that the west, "we", were winning in promoting the rule of law, human rights and democracy. This ascendancy was illustrated particularly by the idea of "humanitarian intervention", whose prime example was Nato's intervention in Kosovo - the idea that the outside world had a right and duty to intervene to stop a government repressing its population. As Darfur, but also Burma and Zimbabwe, tragically show, that idea is now pretty much a dead duck. The recapitulation of the idea into a more universalist framework, the Responsibility to Protect (or R2P), has not resulted in much more enthusiasm for it.
The 2003 Iraq War is perhaps the biggest reason for this failure, seen as it was by most of the world as a deliberate and even mendacious abuse of international law and the Security Council's authority by two of its permanent members, the US and the UK. Also important, however, are the new-found assertiveness of both Russia and China, and the growing economic and strategic self-confidence of other countries (including Sudan) too - a multipolar world, in short. Meanwhile, conflicts dealt with by the UN are increasingly located inside rather than between states, where international law and the right course of action are altogether less clear than in "traditional" war. Things are a lot more complicated today than they were even in the 1990s, and they were complicated enough then.
It is surprising, therefore, that in such circumstances the book pays so little attention to the international architecture with which the world is managed. Gordon Brown's call in a 2007 speech for wholesale reform of the world's multilateral institutions has been followed up by precisely nothing in the way of British efforts to reform, in even the most unambitious fashion, the UN. Hannay, like his contemporary equivalents, just doesn't seem to see how resented is the west, including the UK, for the privileged position it holds at the UN and the way that it handles it. I don't particularly blame him, or them. If you are a British diplomat, other diplomats want to get things out of you, and so tend not to ventilate the bile they may feel. I realised the depth of this resentment only when I left the Foreign Office and was forced at last to hear the unalloyed opinions of those who had been obliged to suck up to me, merely because of my status as a P5 diplomat.
There is scant leadership elsewhere, either. The secretary general seems to have been appointed (by the P5, of course) on the understanding that he is not to offer a firm steer, either on political issues or the UN's necessary reform. Of the US presidential candidates, one - John McCain - is openly flirting with the idea of a community of democracies to replace, it seems, the UN with something he hopes (but few believe) would be more effective. Quite rightly, Hannay says that both the US and the UN need each other.
In its way, unintentionally, this book neatly shows why such political leadership is hard to come by. The UN is now fearsomely complicated. The fixes to its institutional problems, including in the Security Council, are going to be horribly difficult to achieve, requiring as they do consensus among a large group of disparate countries, all with very different interests. And despite its continued centrality in diplomatic life, and in the world's peace and security, its institutional and decision-making structures are woefully detached from the realities they are supposed to be dealing with.
I felt this acutely as a diplomat on the Security Council. The people we were discussing had no voice, and little place, in our deliberations, much to the detriment to them (of course) but also, less obviously, to the quality of our decisions.
This can be solved. The UN can be made more open, accountable and just better. But it will require a very determined and sustained effort to do this, and few countries, including our own, show any willingness to take on this unglamorous burden. Instead, most seem content to let the UN slowly deteriorate into sclerosis. The suffering masses of the world are already paying a price for this neglect.
Carne Ross is a former British diplomat who has also worked for the UN. He now runs Independent Diplomat, a non-profit diplomatic advisory group: http://www.independentdiplomat.com
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/09/hannay-world-rwanda-british
Página/12:
“Una denuncia poco creíble”
Por Laura Vales
Viernes, 5 de Septiembre de 2008
El pulóver rojo, la bufanda roja, la cara también a tono, Pino Solanas contestó a Aníbal Fernández en el hall del cine Gaumont, donde anoche, en una coincidencia impensada, se estrenaba su nuevo documental, La próxima estación. Dijo que las acusaciones le parecían “una vergüenza”. “Yo denuncio en la película el vaciamiento de los ferrocarriles por una mafia armada entre los concesionarios y funcionarios del gobierno, y ellos han querido armar una suerte de complot para ensuciar el estreno y minimizar su responsabilidad. No es casual que el mismo empresario a quien Menem le dio la concesión del Ferrocarril Sarmiento, el señor (Claudio) Cirigliano, siga hoy, después de cinco años de gestión kirchnerista”, replicó el cineasta antes de entrar a la proyección.
Solanas contó que estaba en su casa, cambiándose para ir al estreno, cuando lo empezaron a llamar las radios y lo pusieron al tanto de que en la conferencia de prensa el ministro de Justicia, Aníbal Fernández, había responsabilizado de los incidentes a militantes del PO, el MST y Proyecto Sur, su partido. “Me pareció lamentable, una denuncia poco creíble que apunta al ciudadano desinformado.”
Mientras hablaba con los medios echando pestes contra el Gobierno, en el hall del Gaumont había algún dirigente K como Humberto Tumini, de Patria Libre. Lleno a tope, en el lugar también se apretaban los delegados ferroviarios que actúan en la película, como Rubén “Pollo” Sobrero, de la comisión interna del Sarmiento. Sobrero se sumó a la críticas de Solanas: “Este gobierno nos mandó a juicio el mismo día que teníamos elecciones en el gremio, para ayudar a la Unión Ferroviaria”, apuntó mientras el malón empezaba a entrar a la sala. Ente el público estaba también gente del Movimiento Salvemos al Tren y el embajador de Venezuela, Arévalo Méndez Romero, que conversó unos minutos con Solanas.
El celular del director no paró de sonar con llamados de radios. Solanas, que sostuvo que el Gobierno ha tenido en relación a los ferrocarriles “una política que ha sido la continuidad de los noventa”, recordó que en el gobierno de Menem sufrió un atentado por denunciar las políticas de vaciamiento. Y le devolvió la pelota a Aníbal Fernández con la acusación de que en este gobierno “hay mafias enquistadas”. “Hace dieciséis años denuncié a Menem y él me amenazó, me persiguió con juicios y me terminaron dando seis tiros en las piernas. Todas mis denuncias fueron verdad. Espero, señor ministro de Justicia, que con esto no me pase lo mismo.”
La proyección empezó con 45 minutos de retraso hasta que Pino apagó el teléfono y entró en la sala. Adentro hizo una corta presentación del documental. Habló del tren “que tuve la suerte de conocer, que era un tempo en una cultura, una manera de comunicarse” y auguró que el servicio va a ser recuperado porque sigue teniendo ventajas incomparables. No hizo alusiones a los hechos del día, pero sí a la gestión de la Casa Rosada frente al desguazamiento de los ferrocarriles y el maltrato a los usuarios, “que en estos cinco años de gobierno el kirchnerismo ha desoído permanentemente”.
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-111038-2008-09-05.html
Página/12:
Viva la vida
Por Rodrigo Fresán
Desde Barcelona
Viernes, 5 de Septiembre de 2008
UNO
Viva la vida es el título del nuevo disco de Coldplay y ahí –en la canción que le da nombre a todo el asunto– un exultante y juvenil Chris Martin se cubre por un puñado de minutos con la capa de un anciano monarca modelo Lear temeroso de escuchar, muy prontito, el eco de ese “¡El rey ha muerto! ¡Larga vida al rey!”. Y el tema de esta semana es la vejez, el crepúsculo, el largo adiós y el afán de los mortales de negarlo a toda costa para así intentar parecerse, cada vez más, a divinas maquinarias de combustión eterna. Algo así.
DOS
Las crisis continúan, los números no sólo no cierran, sino que derriban las puertas a las patadas, continúan las investigaciones por la tragedia aérea, la princesa Letizia estrenó nariz nueva, el juez Garzón se propone censar e identificar de una buena vez a todos los muertos en la Guerra Civil Española, se acabó la contratación de mano de obra importada y la gente vuelve de las vacaciones y se parapeta detrás de los sillones a la espera de que lleguen los sobres con las facturas de las tarjetas de crédito. Y –misteriosamente o no tanto– no dejan de difundirse noticias sobre la prolongación de la vida, el fin de la vejez, el advenimiento del súper-hombre. La biomedicina. Leo en El País un artículo de Milagros Pérez Oliva que arranca con estas palabras: “Todos lo tienen ya muy claro: este siglo que acaba de comenzar será sin duda el de las ciencias de la vida. La revolución de la biología nos va a dar por primera vez la posibilidad de crear nuevos seres en el laboratorio que trabajen para nosotros y hasta de rediseñar nuestro propio cuerpo. El que vamos a emprender ahora es un viaje por las fronteras de la ciencia, allá donde la ola del futuro rompe con el presente y la ciencia-ficción se convierte en realidad. Será también un viaje al interior de nuestro cuerpo y de nuestro cerebro. Vamos a ver cómo la ingeniería de tejidos prepara las herramientas para crear y reparar órganos, cómo los biólogos crean animales capaces de producir energía y medicamentos para nosotros y cómo los neurocientíficos no sólo son capaces de leer lo que ocurre en nuestro cerebro, sino de modificar nuestro pensamiento. Y vamos a hacerles preguntas de largo alcance: ¿cómo será nuestro cuerpo dentro de 200 años? ¿Es inevitable que envejezcamos? ¿Hasta cuánto podemos vivir?”.
Después, a continuación, la implacable enumeración de avances, pronósticos y hallazgos y –tiemblo– comprendo que yo pertenezco a la que probablemente sea y vaya a ser la última camada de ancianos auténticos y puros.
TRES
Y está claro que no se trata de un temblor novedoso: en la Edad Media uno podía considerarse afortunado si llegaba más o menos en buen estado a la provecta edad de 35 años (para longevidades, había que irse para el lado de los elfos o hobbits) y el hombre más sabio y culto era el que había conseguido leer, digerir y reflexionar un número de páginas equivalentes a las de la contundente edición dominical de cualquier periódico importante.
Mucho más cerca, la cosa era muy diferente antes de la penicilina. La gente moría como esos experimentados ratones experimentales que, leo, ahora viven más que nunca gracias a algo que se conoce como “restricción calórica” y que no es otra cosa que el comer muy poco sin que esto signifique caer en la malnutrición; y hacia allí van e irán, supongo, flamante hordas de raquíticos de luxe en busca de la vida eterna. Otros, en cambio, observan detenidamente los hábitos del camaleón Furcifer labordi como modelo perfecto de administración de calendario a lo largo de un año de existencia. Es poco tiempo, sí, pero perfectamente estructurado y se trata de estudiarlo y emularlo y de advertir los riesgos que pueden resultar de prolongar ciertas edades por encima de otras o de alterar el balance de cuotas demográficas. “Una de las cosas más sólidas que hemos concluido con la teoría de la historia de la vida es que existen las compensaciones. Si aumentamos el número de jóvenes, el precio suele ser un envejecimiento. Si consigues algo que viva más tiempo, los precios a pagar aparecen antes en la vida, con una fertilidad menor e incluso esterilidad”, precisa Steven N. Austad, autor del libro Why We Age en una entrevista de The New York Times. Mientras tanto y hasta entonces, ahí están todas esas propagandas de cosméticos y antiarrugas varios con dicción de futurismo absurdo y nombres complicados y gráficos incomprensibles. Y el otro día alguien me comentó, con aire conspirativo, que luego de demasiadas aplicaciones el botox acaba alcanzando las playas del cerebro y afectando su ecosistema. Lo que no sé si es cierto pero explicaría, por ejemplo, una canción tan espantosa como “Spanish Lesson” de Madonna.
CUATRO
Y el tema está lejos de ser nuevo. Ahí están los matusalénicos patriarcas del Antiguo Testamento, los héroes germánicos bañándose en la blindante sangre del dragón y las sombras victorianas de Drácula, Ayesha, Peter Pan y Dorian Gray más o menos enorgulleciéndose de la perfección de su cutis. Pero hay algo perturbador en este cada vez más constante e indiscriminado bombardeo de noticias en los que la vejez es presentada como enfermedad curable y la obligación de alegrarnos porque las páginas de la revista Nature predican la buena nueva de que “en levaduras, en la mosca de la fruta y en el gusano Caenorhabditis elegans un compuesto llamado resveratrol presente en la piel de las uvas, en el vino tinto y en las nueces afecta la actividad de un gen implicado en la longevidad”. Yupi.
Leo y escribo todo esto en un continente envejecido en el que cada vez nace menos gente. Y transcribo data contenida en un artículo de Mónica Salomone en El País de este jueves: “La esperanza de vida en el mundo desarrollado ha aumentado unos siete años en las últimas tres décadas y el último informe de Eurostat, publicado hace unos días, dice que los mayores de 65 años constituyen ahora el 17,1 por ciento de los europeos, y serán el 30 por ciento en 2060. También serán más los octogenarios: del 4,4 por ciento actual al 12,1 por ciento. Los demógrafos son los primeros sorprendidos. “La mortalidad de los mayores no se estanca, sino que baja. Esto era totalmente inesperado”, dice Julio Pérez Díaz, del Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Lo inquietante de todo esto es que –al menos durante varias generaciones– aquellos que tengan acceso a selectivos y carísimos métodos y sistemas de fabricación de ultrajóvenes o power-viejos serán, inevitablemente, privilegiados de clases privilegiadas. Lo que convertirá a los ancianos en pobres involucionados a segregar y perseguir. La Guerra del Cerdo y todo eso y tal vez habría que ponerse a reflexionar sobre el viejísimo tema de la calidad versus la cantidad y a qué dedicar todo ese tiempo que se ganaría siempre y cuando fuera un tiempo soleado y sin nubes ni enfermedades. De lo contrario, no seremos más que eternautas de nuestro descontento en cámara lenta. Vivir de sobra para hacer menos o deshacer y deshacernos de más.
El otro día me enteré de que, parece, el Homo-Sapiens, contrario a lo que se venía asegurando, se impuso sobre el Neanderthal no por haber sido más inteligente, sino más fuerte. De ser así, estamos en problemas: alcanza con ver y padecer lo que le vienen haciendo al cuerpo del planeta nuestros nuevos y revolucionarios avances científicos.
Tal vez, ya que estamos, tendríamos que empezar a preocuparnos para buscar y encontrar fórmulas no para ser más duraderos, sino para ser un poco más inteligentes.
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar |Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-110980-2008-09-05.html
The Independent:
McCain: I'll fight for American values
PA
Friday, 5 September 2008
John McCain urged Americans to fight for their country, to make history, and to rid Washington of its "constant partisan rancour" as he accepted the Republican Party's presidential nomination.
The 72-year-old Arizona senator declared "change is coming" as he vowed to "recover the people's trust by standing up again for the values Americans admire".
Mr McCain said America needed to "catch up to history" and "change the way we do business in Washington".
"Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight," he said.
"Nothing is inevitable here. We're Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.
"Fight with me. Fight with me. Fight with me. Fight for what's right for our country."
Mr McCain, who will be the oldest first-term US president if elected in November, was speaking a day after his surprise running mate Sarah Palin electrified the convention floor with strong attacks on Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama, portraying herself as a "pit bull in lipstick".
Several political pundits have since compared her with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Referring to Mrs Palin, Mr McCain said she would "shake up Washington" and that he could not wait to introduce her.
"Let me offer an advance warning to the old, big spending, do nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd," he said.
"Change is coming. We need to change the way government does almost everything."
Mr McCain, who has spent more than two decades in Washington, said: "The constant partisan rancour that stops us from solving these problems isn't a cause, it's a symptom.
"It's what happens when people go to Washington to work for themselves and not you."
He added that as president he would "reach out my hand to anyone to help me get this country moving again".
"I have that record and the scars to prove it," he said.
"Senator Obama does not.
"We're going to finally start getting things done for the people who are counting on us - and I won't care who gets the credit."
It was a clear attempt to dismiss Mr Obama's claim that Mr McCain would represent a third term of the failed policies of the Bush administration.
"I don't work for a party. I don't work for a special interest. I don't work for myself. I work for you," Mr McCain, a maverick whose campaign is reaching out to independents and swing voters, said.
President George Bush, one of the most unpopular presidents in US history, played a diminished role at this year's convention in St Paul, Minnesota, appearing only briefly via satellite from the White House on Tuesday.
But Mr McCain did pay tribute to him "for leading us in those dark days following the worst attack on American soil in our history".
The Republican presidential nominee was briefly interrupted by anti-war protesters and the crowd chanted "USA, USA" in an attempt to drown out the demonstration.
Mr McCain received a rousing standing ovation when he talked about his experiences as a Vietnam prisoner of war, which he said had made him "hate war".
"It is terrible beyond imagination," he said.
"I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's.
"I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again.
"I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's."
Mr McCain received some of the loudest applause of the day when he declared that a McCain presidency would "stop sending 700 billion US dollars a year to countries that don't like us very much" and would produce more energy at home.
"We will drill new wells offshore, and we'll drill them now," he said.
He also talked about national security, naming al-Qa'ida, Iran, and Russia, and said that, while he would work to establish good relations with Russia, "we can't turn a blind eye to aggression and international lawlessness that threatens the peace and stability of the world and the security of the American people".
"We face many threats in this dangerous world, but I'm not afraid of them," he said.
"I'm prepared for them."
Setting out his aims for low taxes, less government spending and more jobs, he criticised many of the Obama campaign's policies, but also praised the 47-year-old Illinois senator and his supporters.
"We'll go at it over the next two months," he said.
"That's the nature of this business, and there are big differences between us."
But he added: "Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans."
But he said: "Let there be no doubt, my friends, we're going to win this election."
Mr McCain's political attacks on Mr Obama were also more measured than Mrs Palin's.
"I'm not running for president because I think I'm blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need," he said.
"My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it.
"And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God."
Convention organisers moved the stage to centre of the hall for Mr McCain's speech, with campaign aides saying he wanted a conversation with Americans, rather than to simply talk at them.
As tens of thousands red, white and blue balloons cascaded from high above the convention floor, Mr McCain and Mrs Palin were joined by their families on stage before walking into the crowd where they were embraced by the jubilant throng.
In style and presentation, it was a stark contrast to Mr Obama's acceptance speech, which was delivered in front of a raucous crowd of more than 80,000 people on a stage featuring faux columns which resembled a Greek temple, but were meant to suggest the gravitas of a federal building in Washington DC.
©independent.co.uk
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/
americas/mccain-ill-fight-for-american-values-919904.html
The Nation:
New Orleans: The City That Won't Be Ignored
Lookout
By Naomi Klein
September 3, 2008
The early results are in: Hurricane Gustav has helped John McCain's bid for the White House. This is nothing short of incredible.
In the combination of New Orleans and hurricanes, we have the most powerful argument possible for the necessity of "change." It's all there: gaping inequality, deep racism, crumbling public infrastructure, global warming, rampant corruption, the Blackwater-ization of the public sector. And none of it is in the past tense. In New Orleans whole neighborhoods have gone to seed, Charity Hospital remains shuttered, public housing has been deliberately destroyed-and the levee system is still far from repaired.
Gustav should have been political rat poison for the Republicans, no matter how well it was managed. Yet, as Peter Baker noted in the New York Times, "rather than run away from the hurricane and its political risks, Mr. McCain ran toward it." If this strategy worked, it was at least partly because Barack Obama has been running away from New Orleans for his entire campaign.
Unlike John Edwards, who started and ended his nomination bid surrounded by the decay of New Orleans's Ninth Ward, Obama has shied away from the powerful symbolism the city offers. He waited almost a year after Hurricane Katrina to visit New Orleans and spent just half a day there ahead of the Louisiana primary. During the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden made no mention of New Orleans in their keynotes. Bill Clinton spared just two words: "Katrina and cronyism."
In his Denver speech, Obama did invoke a government "that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes." But that only scratches the surface of what happened to New Orleans's poorest residents, who were first forcibly relocated and then forced to watch from afar as their homes, schools and hospitals were stolen. As Obama spoke in Denver, families in New Orleans were already packing their bags in anticipation of Gustav, steeling themselves for yet another evacuation. They heard not even a perfunctory "our thoughts and prayers are with you" from the Democratic candidate for President.
There are plenty of political reasons for this, of course. Obama's campaign is pitching itself to the middle class, not the class of discarded people New Orleans represents. The problem is that by remaining virtually silent about the most dramatic domestic outrage in modern US history, Obama created a political vacuum. When Gustav hit, all McCain needed to do to fill it was show up. Sure, it was cynical for McCain to claim the hurricane zone as a campaign backdrop. But it was Obama who left that potent terrain as vacant as a lot in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Until now, Obama's supporters have largely accepted the campaign's assessment of the compromises necessary to win, offering only gentle prodding. The fact that the Republicans have managed to turn New Orleans to their advantage should put a decisive end to this blind obedience.
Republicans have a better attitude toward their candidate. When they don't like McCain's positions, they simply change them. Take the hottest-button issue of the campaign: offshore oil drilling. Just four months ago, it was not even on the radar. During the Republican primary, the issue barely came up, and when it did, McCain did not support it. None of this bothered former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his newly minted American Solutions for Winning the Future. Gingrich waited patiently for what his party loves most: a crisis. It arrived in May, when oil approached $130 a barrel. First came a petition to lower gas prices by opening up domestic drilling (nonsense). Next was a poll, packed with laughably leading questions: "Some people have suggested that, to combat the rising cost of energy and reduce dependence on foreign energy sources, the United States should use more of its own domestic energy reserves, including the oil and coal it already has here in the United States. Do you support or oppose this idea?" You can guess what people said. Two weeks later, McCain flipped on offshore oil drilling.
There was always a risk attached to making offshore drilling the centerpiece of the McCain campaign, since it is not nearly as safe as its advocates claim. Environmentalists have been trying to point this out, but nothing makes the case quite as forcefully as a Category 5 hurricane rocking oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, forcing evacuations and raising the specter of a serious spill.
Gustav was one of those rare moments when political arguments are made by reality, not rhetoric. It was the time to simply point and say: "This is why we oppose more drilling." It was also the time to recall that during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the official Minerals Management Service report found more than 100 accidents leading to a total of 743,400 gallons of oil spilled throughout the region. To put that figure in perspective, 100,000 gallons is classified as a "major spill." If one is feeling particularly bold, a Category 5 hurricane is also an opportune time to mention that scientists see a link between heavier storms and warming ocean temperatures-warmed in part by the fossil fuels being extracted from those fallible platforms.
Obama was not able to make these kinds of arguments when Gustav hit. That's because his campaign had made another "strategic" decision: to compromise on offshore oil drilling. Again a vacuum that had been opened up was rapidly filled by the Republicans, who instantly (and absurdly) linked the hurricane to the need for "energy security." The morning after Gustav made landfall, Bush called for more drilling. Earlier, McCain had visited the hurricane zone with his new running mate, Sarah Palin, whose sole prior claim to national fame was telling cable shows that "we need to drill, drill, drill."
In moments of crisis, it is possible to speak hard truths with great force and clarity. But when the truth has gone silent, lies, boldly told, work almost as well.
About Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). more...
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080922/klein
ZNet:
The Problem Is Empire
By Tom Hayden
September, 04 2008
Tom Hayden delivered these remarks to a gathering of activists at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. It appears as part of the Moral Compass series, focusing on the spoken word.
Let me tell you some of my story and lessons I have learned over these past five decades. I have always tried to improve my country, always trying from the places around me.
I was smart and ambitious and athletic, but something never felt right in my suburb, school and church. I felt more at home with the underdogs and misfits than with the authorities. I was Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye against Alfred E. Newman at Mad magazine.
I editorialized against overcrowded classes in high school. I editorialized against racist fraternity discrimination at the university. I went to the Democratic Convention in 1960 and was moved by Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, and a new student movement.
I moved to Georgia, became a Freedom Rider, got beaten up for civil rights. I helped start a movement on campuses called Students for a Democratic Society that believed in what we called participatory democracy, the right of everyone to a voice in the decisions affecting their lives. We wanted to bring the spirit of the Southern movement to the North.
I left graduate school and became a community organizer in the slums of Newark for four years. During that time the US government, led by the Democratic Party, invaded Vietnam with hundreds of thousands of troops after promising not to. The draft started up, and I was classified IY, the category for potential troublemakers.
Watts blew up in 1965. My Newark neighborhood became an occupied war zone in 1967, and that was it for the war on poverty. I wanted to know who we were really fighting, so I went to North Vietnam in December 1965, my first trip outside America. I was shocked at the civilian destruction, and the brave resistance of a small nation of peasants. I came back and immediately lobbied for a negotiated withdrawal, and got nowhere.
Now I was living in two worlds, still knocking on doors in Newark and opposing a war that was ending the war on poverty I believed in. The contradictions becoming too much, I helped organize antiwar protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Nixon, the FBI and even Lyndon Johnson said we were part of an internationally funded communist conspiracy. I was still fighting against wrongdoing at home, while my father's generation thought we were pawns of an enemy abroad.
I went back to Berkeley set on organizing youth and student communities. I was yanked away to be indicted by the Nixon government for the street riots in Chicago. I spent about five years, including five straight months on trial, living under a cloud, until the courts threw out the case of the Chicago 8. I really didn't know if we were descending into a police state or not. During our trial, one defendant, Bobby Seale, was chained and gagged, and two Panthers working on his legal defense were shot with ninety police rounds while sleeping in their apartment.
I went back to mainstream antiwar work trying to defund the Indochina war, from 1972 until 1976. I supported George McGovern as a peace candidate, Vietnam veterans against the war like John Kerry, the Berrigan brothers' civil disobedience, and those who went underground to Canada. I didn't join them, but I thought the Weather Underground was completely predictable and understandable.
After the long radicalizing interruption of the war, I tried to combine community organizing and electoral politics. I served in the California legislature for eighteen years, once again returning to local and state issues. Based on the early vision of participatory democracy, and building on the progress towards political rights like voting, I helped build a statewide grass roots campaign for economic democracy, pressuring the great corporations to become accountable.
Some of the issues we worked on were these:
• Protecting the right to local rent control, which saved Santa Monica residents alone about $500 million over little more than a decade.
• Stopping a nuclear power plant in Sacramento by a democratic vote of the people.
• Stopping a Liquified Natural Gas terminal on Indian land in Santa Barbara.
• Empowering neighborhoods to bargain effectively with big developers. Saving the oldest building in LA from the wrecking ball.
• Saving salmon, stream beds, wetlands, deserts and redwood forests from the power of developers and special interests.
• Trying to replace the war on gangs, mass incarceration and unconstitutional police misconduct, with gang peace processes and employment opportunities, from LA to El Salvador.
• Involvement in over fifty political campaigns at local levels, including some of the earliest elections of feminists, gays and lesbians, renters, Asian-Americans and former '60s radicals.
• Getting Hollywood celebrities engaged in supporting political causes and candidates.
It was said by Washington consultants that we had the greatest grassroots organization in the national Democratic Party. But it was also the '80s, and Ronald Reagan was invading Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and placing nuclear missiles in Europe. My world of domestic issues became small and secondary again, like my days in Newark when Vietnam was escalating. And I noticed that our foreign policy interventions were creating a wave of new refugees who could be exploited either as cheap labor or scapegoated as my Irish ancestors were the century before.
And so it has gone. Even when the Soviet Union collapsed. Even when Bill Clinton was elected on the strategy of "it's the economy, stupid," we soon were bombing the Balkans, inventing new doctrines of humanitarian war and expanding NATO. By carving Kosovo out of the former Yugoslavia, we were creating an incentive for Georgia to invade South Ossetia-and try to reignite the cold war.
Then came 9/11, and a legitimate security crisis was transformed into the invasion of Iraq along with the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and perhaps soon Iran. The neocons and hawks applauded and funded Israel's ill-considered war with Hezbollah and Lebanon, completing a new battlefield of the war on terrorism to replace the cold war.
So there you are. We will have to go back to the lessons Roman and British empires to learn the painful lessons of imperial overextension. The lessons in blood bravely shed in lost or dubious causes. The lesson of a weakened capacity to fund healthcare, education, our children's futures. The lesson that democracy is diminished as the secrecy of the warmaking state expands. The lesson of being hated in a world where alliances are a necessity, not a choice.
For too long we have divided our movement labor between domestic and foreign policy issues. Sometimes there are contradictions, for example, when the cold war liberals-today's humanitarian hawks-believed we could have both guns and butter, the world's most massive arsenal, fueled by oil, combined with robust domestic initiatives on healthcare or the environment or inner city jobs. It just hasn't worked out that way. The richest country in the world still lacks a national healthcare program, still is pockmarked by ghettos and barrios, still has massive school drop out rates combined with the largest incarceration rate in the whole world.
And despite any evidence of significant success, the wars go on, the war on terror, the war on drugs and the war on gangs.
Despite the evidence, the organized peace movement is weaker than any other social movement, or network of NGOs, in America. The peace movement is a mainly voluntary expression of antiwar feeling that rises and falls depending on the body counts and media coverage. The peace movement is not institutionalized, not in comparison with the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement. It is not funded by the great liberal foundations nor by the wealthy liberals of Hollywood or other moneyed circles.
The point I am making is that our progressive priorities are wrong. Any hope for transformational domestic change depends on reversing the entrenched interests driving the dual agenda of military and corporate empire, including the Pentagon and the oil industry and the narrow elitist thinking of most national security and economic experts.
The battle is between the empire, or whatever euphemism by which is goes, and participatory democracy.
Our adversaries, who once favored monarchy and then white supremacy, have done a successful makeover and attempted to steal the banner of democracy. For example, they are exuberant about imposing democracy by force across the Middle East and to the borders of Russia, but they show no enthusiasm for the democratic process sweeping away the former dictatorships that our government backed in Latin America. Our government is opposed to democracy on our borders if those democracies reject our military bases, our special forces and our corporate dominance over their resources and services. Venezuela, Bolivia and, of course, Cuba are being targeted for isolation and subversion, while Colombia is the American spear in the Andes.
Latin America is the brightest democratic spot on the planet today. But its democratic revolution is not enough; an enormous shift in global finance, investment and trade policies is needed to address underdevelopment and poverty. The resources to build a movement here against military intervention in Latin or Central America are sorely needed. An alternative to the Monroe Doctrine is sorely needed. An alternative to the top-down secretive WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA and FTAA models is sorely needed. The movement for immigrant rights and labor rights is where domestic policy and Latin American policy should meet.
I am campaigning for and voting for Barack Obama not because I agree with him on every foreign policy issue but because I think we need to unleash the energy of those who fight for justice and housing and healthcare and jobs and the environment here at home. The Obama movement is registering and mobilizing millions of new voters, young people, working class, people of color and poor. The mere fact of their being mobilized will create a pressure for new priorities on the economic home front against the present priorities of militarization abroad. The fact that Obama rose to his present position on the tide of antiwar sentiment forces Obama and the Congressional Democrats to pay greater attention to our needs at home or pay a political price. If he expands the quagmires in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we will have to oppose those wasteful wars as well.
So I am saying that domestic groups-organized around issues from civil rights to the environment-cannot afford to leave peace simply to the peace movement. And the peace movement has to point every day to the domestic costs, including energy costs, of the Iraq War and the larger empire. And we must define an alternative vision to the undemocratic structures of corporate and military power that promise security but bring us war, that promise jobs but lower our standard of living. We need a new model of political economy that is equitable and sustainable, not one that expects every country in the world to meet our needs, including our appetite for their resources. And finally, we must build a progressive movement inside and outside the Democratic Party, one that respects the autonomy of single-issue movements, that brings our community organizing experiences to bear on this frustrating political process, that can build and strengthen a progressive power base that can fight everyday for our needs, not the empire's needs.
It is not enough to liberalize the empire; the task is to peacefully and steadily bring it to an end, making democracy safe for the world as some organizers said fifty years ago. In place of empire, we need to understand the world as a multipolar one, and drive it towards participatory democracy through social movements. Those social movements will not only pressure their existing governments but energize a global civic society that can achieve enforceable new norms on human rights, a global living wage and corporate accountability, a healthy environment instead of global warming, and the steady reduction of nuclear weapons.
Tom Hayden is the author of many books. His most recent are Voices of the Chicago Eight: A Generation on Trial and Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader both published earlier this year by City Lights Books, www.citylights.com.
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18693
posted by attilav at 18:32
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