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LIVING FOR CHANGE
"Seattle" Goes To Copenhagen
By Grace Lee Boggs
Ten years ago in the “Battle of Seattle,” more than 50,000 Americans. Including steel workers, women, people of color, environmentalists, and just plain citizens, closed down the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle because they recognized that We, the People, can no longer depend upon the U.S. government to protect us from global corporations bent on turning all our human relationships into commercial relationships.
Small affinity groups were also created by the diverse participants in the historic action to assure that decisions were made democratically.
The success of the November-December 1999 Battle of Seattle inspired the World Social Forum (WSF) movement, begun at Porte Alegre in 2001, to proclaim that “Another World is Necessary! Another World is Possible! Another World is Already Happening!” The WSF movement brought together people from all over the world to successive gatherings in Porte Alegre and Mumbai. In turn the WSF inspired the United States Social Forum (USSF) movement which held its first gathering in Atlanta in 2007 and will bring 20,000 people to Detroit for the 2nd USSF in June 2010.
A few weeks from now representatives of 192 nations will gather in Copenhagen for the Climate Change Conference convened by the United Nations so that governments can pledge the emissions reductions necessary to stem the global warming threatening the extinction of all life on our Planet.
Meanwhile, over the last few years it has become abundantly clear, especially from the actions of the U.S., the world’s leading emitter of climate altering gases, that we can no longer depend upon governments, even relatively progressive ones like Obama’s, to stop global warming. They are all too beholden both to the corporations, most responsible for pollution, and to the World Bank, most responsible for fossil-fuel financing. The best that can be expected of them are terribly weak targets and market mechanisms like carbon trading that appease polluting capitalists.
As a result, activists from around the world are preparing to gather at Copenhagen to make clear that the people, and not governments, are now the only ones who can preserve Life on Earth.
It is a sign of the revolutionary movements of our time that the most contentious issue at the Copenhagen Summit is the moral responsibility of the people of the Global North to the people of the Global South.
Because of our consumerist/materialist lifestyle, we, the people of the Global North, are the ones most responsible for environmental degradation and climate change. But it is the peoples of the Global South who suffer the worst consequences of our irresponsibility. UN experts, for example, predict that 90% of the African peasantry will be out of business by 2100 due to drought, floods, extreme weather events, disease and the resulting political instability.
The 2009 Climate Change Vulnerability Index lists 22 African countries out of 28 at “extreme risk,” whereas the United States is near the bottom of the world rankings of countries at risk, even though it is the leading per capita contributor to climate change.
Restorative Justice demands that those most responsible for global warming should pay climate reparations.
On September 2, the World Council of Churches (WCC) members adopted a formal statement on the North’s “deep moral obligation to promote ecological justice by addressing our debts to peoples most affected by ecological destruction and to the earth itself.”
University of KwaZulu-Natal honorary professor Dennis Brutus has proposed that we “Seattle” Copenhagen.
African Union insiders, he says, should work with massed protesters outside to prevent the North from doing a deal in its interests and against Africa’s and the planet’s.
This kind of “Seattle Goes to Copenhagen” organizing is what we need in the age of Obama. The activists at Seattle in 1999 and at Copenhagen in 2009 represent the Sovereign People of the world establishing the Justice which flows from the Humanity we share on Planet Earth.
THINKING FOR OURSELVES
Corrupting Ourselves
By Shea Howell
This week Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). Unsurprisingly the report concluded that public sector corruption in Afghanistan has worsened over the past two years. Afghanistan is now considered to be more corrupt than any other country in the world except for Somalia.
“Examples of corruption range from public posts for sale and justice for a price to daily bribing for basic services,” the watchdog group said of Afghanistan. “This, along with the exploding opium trade–which is also linked to corruption–contributes to the downward trend in the country's CPI score.”
The CPI scores countries on a scale of zero to 10, with zero indicating high levels of corruption, and 10 indicating low ones. Over the last three years of the 180 countries ranked, Somalia has come in last, this time with a score of 1.1.
Afghanistan had the second worst ranking at 1.3. Over the last three years Afghanistan’s scores have been worsening. In 2007 it rated at 1.8 and in 2008 at 1.5.
In assessing the levels of corruption around the world the report notes “Fragile, unstable states that are scarred by war and ongoing conflict linger at the bottom of the index.”
The widely respected Transparency International report brings additional pressure on the Afghan government. On Monday President Karzai announced he would form a new anti-corruption unit to investigate high-level graft. However, Karzai has formed such committees before, with no effect. This time, under intense pressure from the U.S., the new anti-corruption unit will be part of the Attorney General’s department and would be able to prosecute public corruption cases involving government officials and other major crimes. Prosecutors would be trained by EU police as well as by Britain and U.S. forces.
Much of the corruption is associated with the opium trade, a business that Karzai and his top allies are fully engaged in supporting. President Karzai and his Finance Minister Hazrat Omar Zakhilawal refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for the corruption, saying that Western countries must share much of the blame because of their mismanagement of billions of dollars in aid.
While much of this is posturing by President Karzai to protect himself, he raises an often overlooked reality. War not only corrupts those “fragile, unstable states that are scarred by war.” War corrupts those who wage it.
On the same day that Transparency International released its CPI, major news sources reported on a Kuwaiti company accused of defrauding the U.S. of tens of millions of dollars by exaggerating the cost of providing food to troops in Iraq, Kuwait and Jordan. Prosecutors charged the Public Warehouse Company with six counts of fraud, saying it had “grossly overcharged” the military.
Last week Blackwater, now Xe, the US security company implicated in some of the deadliest killings in Iraq, was accused of paying $1 million in bribes to buy the silence of Iraqi officials in order to protect its contracts. KBR, the largest contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, improperly billed the Pentagon $103 million for armed security guards and is currently resisting paying back the money owed.
War has always made money for a few.
But there is a deeper corruption that affects all of us. War becomes a way to justify, endure, ignore and ultimately accept brutality towards one another. Under phrases like “acceptable costs” and “collateral damage,” we hide from ourselves the actions we engage in that reflect the worst human beings are capable of doing to one another. There is no easy index to the corruption of our own souls as we allow such wars to continue.
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