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May 18, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
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May
18, 2002
The Kyoto Protocol
Canada's Faltering Green Epic
From
natural environmentalist beacon to major environmental polluter,
NAFTA's success is proving to be its bitter pill
By Norman Madarasz
There's little over a month left before the Kyoto
Protocol is to be ratified. As things stand right now it may
instead go down as the late 20th century's grandest testament
to good intentions. In preparation for that fateful moment, the
Federal government of Canada unveiled its long-awaited Kyoto
technical paper on May 15, dealing with some of the economic
stakes involved in caring for ecology.
The "Discussion Paper on Canada's
Contribution to Addressing Climate Change" has the stated
aim of seeking public and business consultation in order to decide
on whether to ratify the agreement. In it, four different "options"
or strategies are given equal importance. Yet, even before the
Bush Administration turned its back on the environment, Ottawa
was not hiding its preference for the fourth one: a credit system
that would allow as much as 30% of its Kyoto commitment to be
drawn from so-called "clean energy" sources.
Sounds good. So where's the catch? As
Greenpeace-Canada has been quick to point out, Option-4 does
not exist in the Protocol. The government will try to convince
Europeans, who have already indicated they're unfavorable to
this option, that it's entitled to get credit for the cleaning-power
of its forests and the remote curbing influence of natural gas
exports. However, it proposes no contingency plan for penalizing
use or exports of energy known to produce greenhouse gas emissions.
As for the three other options, the government
seems to have counted them out from the start. They would involve
the delicate matters of either raising gasoline and energy prices.
Their results would financially hurt the treasuries. Or, worse,
they would pave the way to a doomsday scenario: the entire economy
would be hit hard.
Option-4 does however make clear who
the Canadian government's partners are. As quoted in "The
Globe and Mail" on May 15, the "Discussion Paper"
contends that Option-4 "would appear to have the potential
to reduce Canada's [greenhouse-gas emissions] in a reasonably
cost-effective way and provide the flexibility to capture the
ideas and contributions from the provinces, territories and stakeholders."
It's high time it be known that Canada,
the perennial green country, has skirted the issue of being the
world's No. 2 polluter per capita (roughly 4.42tons accounting
for 133.9m tons of carbon dioxide produced in 1997). The Kyoto
Protocol calls for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to below
1990's level. Yet the country's emissions are 20% higher now.
This means that leaning on Option-4 in the "Discussion Paper"
is tantamount to doing nothing in real collective terms on curbing
emissions.
What's more, Option-4 would also exempt
Canada from developing energy sources known to emit greenhouse
gases so long as it were to export them, here complying with
the wishes of fossil fuel rich Alberta. Though this province
stands opposed to the Protocol it would still like to see exemption
for its plans to exploit local tar sands for petrol in case Kyoto
does live.
Faced with the constraints of the Protocol,
the U.S. and other countries have pleaded for the misguided idealism
of former leaders, when it hasn't simply rejected the agreement.
This can hardly be the case of Canada's Liberal government. In
power since 1993, its Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, has adorned
many political robes. What he could never be is an environmentalist.
Chretien's team has continually stated
their commitment to ecology, as it has for public education,
scientific research, artistic creation, health care, farm help
and other items on the social agenda. Meanwhile, the cabinet
keeps delegating real implementation to provincial governments
financially strapped due to the fed's shortening arms. For the
role of environmental liquidation through limitation, Chretien
has chosen the right man. David Anderson is to lull a disenchanted
nation as it lives out the denouement of a faltering epic.
Mr Anderson looks like everything a green-friendly
country would expect from the caretaker of its holiest mounds.
Originating amongst the majestic redwood standing tall in the
coastal rainforests of the West, he has been Minister of the
Environment since 1999. Prior to appointment, he received recognition
for working on conserving salmon stock in the waters of British
Columbia. In pop terms he's a typical West-coaster, i.e. he looks
ecological. Were it not for his seat in the Federal common house,
Mr Anderson would surely flinch at an invitation to change from
his lumberjack shirt and Birkenstocks into suit-and-tie.
Vancourites and residents of the Gulf
islands are generally the most laidback of Canadians, drawing
liberally from the relaxing effect of potent greenery. Graced
with Orca-filled waters, the area's the only part of Canada basking
in a microclimate reminding residents of the tropical world curving
concavely below. Yet elating relaxation is not what marks the
features of Mr Anderson's otherwise clean-air filtered face.
Like most urban Canadians, which generally means central-east
city dwellers, he no longer knows how or what to think of the
nation's natural spaces.
A PEACEFUL
BUT UNLIVABLE LAND
Internationally, Canada's surely recognized
as one of the greenest of states. For its citizens, it's become
a defining image of its youthful mingling among the mighty. Yet,
prior to the 1960's, Canada was still little known outside of
its national boundaries, save for its past as England's proudest
colony. Its history, grandiose in close detail, in fact follows
so much of the plight of the colonial venture in the Americas.
The territory known as 'Nouvelle France' fell into Britain's
dominion in the 1760's. Unlike other American tales, the French-speaking
population perdured. The term used to refer to this period, 'The
Conquest', is still ignored by most 'Anglos', not to mention
unacknowledged by most indigenous natives who lend to it a quite
different meaning.
Many regions west of the US Prairies
are striking by their majesty. Canada's lake-studded Great Shield
never could reflect the manifest destiny of John Ford's epics
of Far West conquest, or the perdition of Euclides de Cunha's
time-exposed strata clashes amidst the Brazilian highlands as
they erode into the drought-ridden backlands. Canada's winter
deflects and keeps repelling epic narratives into the indeterminacy
of boundless unvanquished terrain best captured by painters like
Lorne Harris. It's not only Nature's chill that has brought Canadians
to the humbleness of respect. It's their environment's Being.
After the land had been colonized into
a nation, its proximity to two Anglo powers prompted affiliation
to the struggle in Europe during the two world wars. Canada's
real promotion to the international stage would still have to
wait for the naming of future Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson
as Laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. Pierre Elliott
Trudeau, his minister of justice and successor as Prime Minister,
exploded what had stayed locked in the shell of provincialism
in Pearson's commitment to international peace. After all, Pearson
had about-faced during his tenure in the top job in support of
the U.S.'s nuclear arms race. Although Trudeau got his hands
dirty in the hysterical reaction to the nationalist violence
of the FLQ by imposing the War Measures Act and suspending civil
liberties in the fall of 1970, his Canada kept its image as a
broker for international peace. It's an image it has jealously
conserved up to present times.
Recent decades have shown that remaining
a peace-loving nation becomes complex when you benefit from one
of the world's most privileged standards of living. Trudeau was
an indignant, but careful opponent of the Cold War. A non-aligned
leader in thought, he befriended Fidel and was a catalyst to
Nixon's meeting with Mao. For all his independence, he could
not fail to recognize that the romanticism of Canada's ties to
England had shriveled at amazing pace in contrast to its love
affair with its southern neighbor. If those of English, Scottish
and Irish stock generally stood up for what it meant to be Canadian,
few French Canadians did, and even less the Eastern European
and East Asian immigrants and their offspring. For them, the
dream was to watch the border be transfigured into the promise
of a secure economic American future.
During the seventies and early eighties,
Canada managed to maintain its independence from US militarism,
so long as it agreed to partake of NORAD and NATO. The trade-off
meant allowing extension of the American military-industrial
economy well into national territory. Peace and social democracy
still withstood changing times, but Trudeau's retirement from
politics in 1984 ushered in the challenges that were already
gnawing at Canada's nationhood.
FROM INTERNATIONAL
PEACE TO ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
Canadians often describe the essence
of their country as a brew consisting of two conflicting cultures,
the French and English. No matter how one wishes to reconcile
the distinctions separating these two solicitudes, they remain
locked in self-dependency. The diversity that Canada really is,
its indeterminacy and expanse, is firmly rooted in its environment,
its Nature, 'ses grands espaces'.
You can blame the weather, you can cite
stiff immigration conditions and quotas, you can even accuse
French Canadian separatism, but Canada, including Quebec, are
vastly under-populated lands. At barely 30m, its population remains
a speck in the second largest country in the world territorially,
though it frugally enjoys living off the world's 8th GDP, being
comfortably snuggled in the Top-10 rank of Purchasing Power Parity.
Canada's main player in this economy, and its overriding source
of wealth, remains its natural resources.
Even as the Cold War raged under Reagan,
Canada turned environmentalist pride into a world political stance.
The country exalts no national 'parks' the way the US does: the
nation is but an unfolding part of the Nature that only arbitrarily
bears its name. Which is why, notwithstanding the birth of GreenPeace
in British Columbia in 1971, there has seemed to be no need for
a dominant 'Green' party in its political world. Environmentalism
simply blended in with the country's social democratic history.
The recent collapse of its provincial namesake, in the British
Columbian provincial elections of all places, perpetuates this
distance.
Soon enough, Canadian citizens began
taking stands internationally on environmental questions. A moment
of naive arrogance came with the ambiguous global drive to preserve
the Amazon rain forest as those involved stupidly tended to override
the sovereignty Brazil holds over the region. There was a chance
for reparation at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro itself
in 1992. Thereafter the spirit slid into remission and the nation
further saw itself undergo what had been occurring with greater
pressure since opening to international currents.
In a rebound, environmentalists renamed
BC's coastal temperate jungles as 'rainforests'. Awareness grew
that the ecology battle was homeward bound where nothing original,
neither Nature nor Natives, was living as happily as had seemed.
But Canada still saw itself as a country that made ecology a
priority over the economy-- an unconscious extension of its debt
to the First Nations. As the effort to care was twisted by business
at the expense of others, the environment began facing off with
economic concerns.
Such tension may have very much to do
with how oblivious the electorate is to Green and green-determined
economic policies and programs. Even so, most of the country's
political parties do not fail to address the multiple facets
of ecological issues. When Ontario's Conservative provincial
government did, it wound up with 7 deaths and 2 300 illnesses
at a small town called Walkerton in 2000. E-coli has contaminated
the town's drinking-water system. Owing to mismanagement and
budget-strapped environmental controllers, it was left to fester
there for months before brutally striking.
By then, Canadians sensed there had been
a change in global perception of their stance toward the gift
bestowed by the Great Chief Above. As Green activists were castigated
for their unconvincing economic analyses, Walkerton proved that
the environment had been shifted to the intensive care of another
political practice: public cutbacks and downsizing of skilled
staff.
ECOLOGY HIT
BY ECONOMIC ENFORCEMENT
The business and political classes, thriving
through late-nineties growth, saw with conviction that the source
of future wealth increasingly lay in the service sector. They
caught upon the wave that the public would best gobble this idea
were its ties to heavy industry downplayed. Little had changed,
despite its decorative "consumer" driven dynamic.
The players in this 'new economy' or
'e-economy' may well be living in increasingly urbanized city
centers, but their generative force lies in the backlands. The
need to drive the service sector at speeds approximate to the
US's has to rely on energy generation from sources far beyond
what the voting majorities ever have to see. As a background,
government, motivated by NGOs, raised the question of developing
"efficient" energy generation from "renewable"
sources. Despite the tuned-in ears of public interest, the fact
is that, so far, efficiency has never been implemented on even
a minor scale in Canada.
As the economy heated up at a pace unseen
since the early 1970's, so did the environmental feed providing
the fodder. The Toronto Stock Exchange 100 Index blew through
the ceiling, passing the NYSE's DJIA in 1998 and moving above
the 10K point volume in every bit the same type of fantasy on
which the southern economy was surfing.
With the quick wealth available to market
players and stock option draped executives, the population confided
in its business elite in a way perhaps only Torontonians or Albertans
had in the past. Former conservative Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney,
even saw fit to try to definitively clean his name from kickback
allegations by emerging from his smoke-screened limousine. He
reminded us that NAFTA stood as the raison d'etre of Canada's
prosperity, and happened to be passed through the wisdom of the
government he had led.
With money to spend from the electronics
and bank sector booms, Nature became a cottage playground when
it wasn't being transformed into other material for industry
in less regenerative ways. As it did, its useful "consumer"
products, automobiles and airplanes first among them, were engulfed
in an overwhelming amount of greenhouse emissions. With the economy
going strong, Canada moved into its last international conference
as a world environmental leader: Kyoto, 1997.
Western economies hung on for another
two years before finally starting to slip up. The Stock Market
boom turned out to be a bubble after all. Ever since, countless
Pension Funds invested in the pride of Canada's economy, John
Roth's Nortel electronics, have been dragged down the slopes
of the earnings inverse-pyramid right into the maze of the funeral
chambers. As a provider of fiber optics hardware, the market
slump that hit Nortel in the fall of 1999 was but the tip of
an iceberg that is still veering uncertainly out of the subsidiary-free
market. By Amsterdam 2000, Canada suffered the final blow to
its green prestige, crowned by environmental activists as one
of the world's biggest polluters.
TIGHT INTERESTS
AND A TIGHT UPPER CLASS
Everyday, five and a half million Torontonians
awake under a sky thick with smog. And they're not alone. Air
pollution has been affecting life in many of the country's major
cities. In addition, bio-invasion has begun afflicting wildlife
and shellfish stocks.
Like the rest of the world, Canada has
not been spared freak climatic phenomena, all regularly cited
as effects of global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions.
Unending rain in the Prairie provinces in 1999, unusually warm
winter weather in the Saint Lawrence river valley between Toronto
and Montreal, and the most troubling symptom: streaks of warming
air in the Arctic. More shameful is what UNEP GEO-2000 has cited
as the regional and world environmental stress that Canada and
the US are responsible for as a whole. With barely 16% of the
world's entire population, it is estimated that their car, airline
and industry-heavy territories produce more than 70% of the world's
pollution.
One of the long-standing truths, or half-truths,
of economics may be that only with prosperity does philanthropy
grow. Never mind: ecology is a matter of philosophical wisdom,
not philanthropic pretension. For all the talk of globalization
and world markets, Canada has balked severely at recognizing
its international responsibilities and growing liabilities. In
this sense, it's merely aping the US.
Canadians can seldom be as up-front and
confrontational as Americans. On May 15, the federal government
basically confirmed suspicions of underhandedness. It has not
come out explicitly to say it would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
But its "Discussion Paper" places acceptance conditions
on Option-4 that the international community is not likely to
accept.
That the government can act this way
lies largely in the way the idea of citizenship has evolved in
Canada. The thinking Canadian has too often mortgaged criticism
to either determinist visions or statistical facts. In the ecological
spectrum, the options presented either try to reduce Green voices
to economic myopia, or economists to the moral obsessions of
scientists. After years of touting globalization, the time has
come to bring that hijacked idea back to its origins in internationalism.
That's because being the enlightened
polluter it is, Canada cannot not afford to let its educated
conscience assume its responsibilities. But far into the winter
hinterlands, tuning Canada to the agenda of a global village
has not been as forthcoming as one would expect from the people
that brought the world Marshall McLuhan.
If there were an overriding problem with
Kyoto, it has to do with a missing clause on how the environment
is not something to be protected only in times of prosperity,
while reneging on commitment during others. The Rio Earth Summit
had included a clause in which rich countries pledged support
for developing ones to help them implement environment-friendly
technologies. Little has been done in that way, though Mexico
has benefited strongly from cleaner technologies thanks to NAFTA.
Still, W. Bush's refusal to ratify Kyoto is tantamount to declaring
economic war on the world.
As for the damaging problem of the susceptibilities
of consumers who don't see reduced energy use as a matter of
citizenship, let them provide some answers. Namely: why wouldn't
certain consumers be hit harder by Kyoto exigencies than others?
Why is it that countries as whole have to apply for green credits,
but citizens who make no concerted commitment to curbing greenhouse
gas emissions are treated on par with those who do?
Many Establishment consultants argue
that in a country like Canada, one can only make enemies by enforcing
restrictions on automobile and especially SUV use. SUV owners
are becoming the National Rifle Association among 4-wheelers.
It's time that Canadians and Americans realize that the same
applies in every country. You can find the automobile industry
pretending everywhere, through the slick absurd images of smart
marketers, that their products add to environmental cleanliness.
No matter how you try to square the equation of increasingly
efficient car engines, the number of cars on the road worldwide
more than doubled between 1970 and 1990 to about 560 million.
This is why politically and environmentally
aware citizens have every right to expect recognition for using
public transport. They cannot be wrong in demanding that governments
increase aid to companies likely to suffer from ecological enforcement.
There's been far too many and far too liberal tax-credits given
to only the most profitable corporations. Now they're asking
for ecology credits. Executive management has their part to play
as well in this collective effort for the future. Show us your
conscience.
ECONOMIC POLLUTION
One of the effects of globalization has
been the fading of national economic control under the intense
amount of cross-border and off-shore capital transactions. While
this powerlessness may not be entirely accurate, being often
hijacked by politicians as better reason to return campaign-funding
favors, it does underscore a vital point. Economic decisions
no longer merely affect the current state of one nation's economy,
culture or territory.
Nor is a country a business. And the
drawbacks of having manager-like politicians running the nation
like scaled-down reengineered versions of G.E. has bared its
fruits: increased profits for executives, lack of innovation
among staff, downsizing in crisis times.... Canadian cities,
with the direct assistance of both federal and provincial governments,
must now begin to invest again in public transport on a large
scale. The federal government must stand by its commitment to
the Kyoto Protocol and take leadership over polluters-- regardless
of the costs. They're being paid to govern for the people: we're
expecting innovative funding schemes for pollution control, not
some sad-faced story about the billions and billions of lost
corporate income. If that's the only alternative, it's the whole
economic system that's the cause of the pollution. That's where
the buck must stop.
The "free" market picture has
hit full steam into an illusion festering at the highest tiers
of the economy. The time has come for the American corporate
consultant, posing as experts on international news programs,
to quit weaving the free market fantasy. W. Bush's protectionism
has even eliminated the need to call its bluff. Steel import
tariffs, $70billion agriculture subsidies all added to October's
$600billion increase in the US defense budget in a time of recession!
All without tax increases!
The US administration is putting the
future of the US and its world domain on credit. It's a system
in which only the wealthiest individual investors stand to profit.
As a population, though, Americans are bound to benefit from
it more than others. Countries with poor fiscal policies, or
poor countries period, are already enslaved to the absurd interest
that American bank-funded multilateral organizations such as
the IMF are charging them. Emerging nations haven't seen anything
yet as subsidy-raised cheaply priced products begin to flood
their domestic markets, sending manufacturers into ruin by being
forced to seek out handouts or loans.
Canada is unreasonably reliant on that
economy, as far as a sovereign nation is concerned. It would
be hasty to dismiss its sovereignty here, but the Canadian politician
is hedging on the bet that innovative politics doesn't pay. Health
care will have to take up the fiscal slack in the future due
to the side effects of uncontrolled air and water pollution.
But who cares, Canadian public healthcare will be privatized
by then, too.
Cynics from the US are adding insult
to injury. V-P Cheney sent awe-inspiring insults to the South
when calling for Latin American economies to withdraw from subsidizing
their own industries, after being forced to swallow the recent
wave of U.S. protectionism. On this, Canadians have given up
asking the right questions. Although this is assuming that at
this point they have any remaining control over their own government.
Kyoto is an investment for Canada's future,
and the fact that Canada will inevitably be led back into massive
debt due to the current conduct of the American government, it
would be wise to at least be a debtor nation with a population
that's as healthy as possible. Economic recovery and performance
depends also on a nation's physical and moral health.
There are some smart events occurring
in the flux, which will have to be dealt with in a subsequent
article. To the government's credit, though hushed up at home,
the "Jornal do Brasil" reported on May 9 that Canada
has moved to engage in bilateral trade negotiations with the
Mercosul, the South American free-custom zone. Thanks to the
Cheney-clan, the FTAA can only be said to have died. This time
it's happened regardless of the protests in Quebec City. It's
happening because of economic cynicism. Canadians have got to
keep their eyes open.
To Americans, it has to be made clear
that their jobs are at risk not owing solely to environmental
concerns, though it is that too, but to the lack of state and
federal social planning essential to living a healthier future.
To Canadian politicians: remember your
vocation, not your campaign financers. Even with the money of
the latter, you depend on the votes of the former.
The bitter irony to this fading epic
is that the more Canada turns inward upon itself the more its
loses its distinction and claims for sovereignty in the eyes
of the world. Without ratifying its Kyoto commitments, the Canadian
government is opening the environment to intense commercial exploitation
at the hands and ownership of Americans and Germans, the silent
amigo. The malaise and illness to which it is prepared to subject
its population may ultimately be slight in comparison with the
long-term collective effects of an erased border and the forgotten
distinction of once having been an environmental beacon.
Norman Madarasz
is a philosopher, and a Canadian. He welcomes comments at: normanmadarasz@hotmail.com
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