Clinton urges India to cut Iranian oil
Al Akhbar – May 7, 2012
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a plea to energy-starved India on Monday to reduce its Iranian oil imports, as Washington struggles to get Asia’s economic powerhouses on board with its sanctions.
A US ban on Iranian oil is due to come into force at the end of June, with countries potentially facing sanctions if they continue to trade with the Islamic republic.
New Delhi has been hesitant to back the ban and is planning to trade in currencies other than dollars, therefore avoiding US sanctions.
Clinton told a town hall meeting in the eastern city of Kolkata that there’s an adequate supply in the market for India to find alternative sources of oil.
She noted India has taken some steps to reduce its imports from Iran, but said the US wants to see more.
“If there weren’t an adequate supply… we would understand, but we believe that there is adequate supply,” she said.
India, with an economic growth rate of about 7 percent, has an insatiable need for oil. About 9 percent of its oil imports are from Iran, though officials say it has reduced its dependency on Iranian oil in recent months.
“We appreciate what has been done and, of course, we want to keep the pressure on Iran,” Clinton said.
India remains dependent on the imports, and Iran is its second largest oil supplier after Saudi Arabia.
India and Iran reached an agreement earlier this year that would allow India to pay for about 45 percent of the purchases in rupees.
Tehran would then use the Indian currency to buy goods from Delhi.
Clinton said the US remained focused on putting global pressure on Iran.
“We believe, at this moment in time, the principle threat is a nuclear-armed Iran,” she said. “We need India to be part of the international effort.”
Clinton will head to Delhi later Monday, where she is expected to press India to push ahead with an economic program that would open the way to US conglomerates such as Walmart entering the fragile market.
The prime minister’s chief economic adviser said last month that no new reforms were likely before the next election in 2014.
(Al-Akhbar, AFP)
Iran welcomes Tajik proposal for railroad link to China
Press TV – May 6, 2012
Iran’s Minister of Road and Urban Development Ali Nikzad says Tehran welcomes a proposal by the Tajik government to connect the Iranian rail network to the city of Kashgar in China via Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
In a meeting with the visiting Tajik Minister of Transportation and Communications Nizam Hakim Oaf on Sunday, Nikzad said the 392 kilometers (km) long rail corridor will connect Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and China.
“It will increase trade exchange and export volume, reduce transit costs among these countries and facilitate the transport of cargo and passengers in the region,” he added.
The Iranian minister also pointed to the 15,000 km railroad tracks in Iran, saying the country’s railroads are currently connected to Turkmenistan through Gorgan city, to Iraq via Shalamcheh border crossing, to Azerbaijan through Astara port city, and also to Afghanistan through Khaf-Herat railroad.
The Tajik minister, for his part, said the most complicated part of the project is a 270 km-long section that includes 16 km of tunnels and 47 bridges, and needs about USD 8-10 million for every kilometer of the line.
He added that the first phase of the project is 335.4 km and will cost USD 169.5 million while the second phase needs USD 96.4 million in investment. The final stage, Hakim Oaf said, which includes building anti-avalanche structures, will cost USD 30 million.
The Tajik minister of transportation and communications is currently in Iran to take part in a two-day international conference dubbed “South Khorasan, Transit and Development of East Axis.” The event will open in Iran’s eastern city of Birjand on Monday, April 7, attended by participants from 18 countries.
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Colombia’s Patriotic March
By CHRIS GILBERT | CounterPunch | May 4, 2012
Colombia’s highly restricted democracy got a good slap in the face two weeks ago when 100,000 protesters entered the capital city and filled to overflowing the giant plaza that spreads out before the Congress and the Palace of Justice. In fact, just looking at the hurried reactions of president Juan Manuel Santos – new cabinet appointments, launching a populist housing project, and buying more arms from the US – one would know something serious is afoot.
But what, precisely, is it? The protesters call themselves the Patriotic March and were born with a more or less spontaneous celebration of the Colombian bicentennial two years ago. At that moment, in 2010, there was an earlier and likewise massive march to Bogotá plus the formation of cabildos (open councils) to treat questions of urgency in Colombian politics and life (such as human rights).
Today the marchers’ two principal slogans are innocuous enough: one the one hand, the effort to bring about a second and definitive independence and on the other hand peace; that is, a political and negotiated solution to the country’s 50-year conflict, a peace with of social justice. So what is all the fuss?
In fact, only in Colombia are the search for peace and sovereignty themes to which the state generally responds with massive repression, even approaching genocide. Some twenty-five years ago Colombia’s longest lasting guerrilla, the FARC-EP, opted for a peaceful rather than armed expression of its non-conformity. This led to the systematic assassination of something like 4,000 of the unfortunate cadres of the Patriotic Union who thought there might be a space for a strictly political opposition in Colombia’s much touted democracy, which seems to have durability rather than authenticity as its principal characteristic.
Though strictly speaking it may not be a world that has lived 100 years of solitude, Colombia’s politics has its very specific and even archaic qualities. For example, one of the principal struggles still seems to be that which takes place between city and country. Superficially at least, most of the patriotic marchers are people of rural origin: small or displaced farmers. Likewise there is an obvious racial or color element; the marchers tend toward brown and black while Power in Colombia tends to be white – except of course for the sepoy police and armed forces.
The marchers are clearly that group or class which Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called “the nobodies… who don’t speak language but dialects… who don’t have culture but folklore” (and “cost less than the bullet that kills them”). But that doesn’t keep them from being very clear about what they want and need. “We’re being displaced by transnationals and the national government,” said one small-scale miner from the Bolivar department, “and participating in the march is the only way we will be heard”. Almost to a man, they are clear that their government is a puppet, militarist regimen in which the White House, if it doesn’t call all the shots, is at least consulted on most of them.
The march, patriotic and gutsy given the conditions in which it must operate, is one of those events that show that class struggle cannot be eliminated from any context, even by the most aggressive and totalitarian state tactics. There comes a point in which – as Martin Luther King said – one cannot not go on. The marchers have reached that point. They cannot be willed or dispelled away by even the most powerful mediatic wands (the mass media seems to insist contradictorily both that they don’t really exist and that they are very dangerous).
One of their repeated claims – that passes from the mouth of the inimitable ex-senator Piedad Córdoba to almost every spokesperson – is that the March, come what may, will go forward. That means that it will and has taken the form of a political movement and that it will try to take state power, as every responsible political movement tries to do. That claim, when it comes from the mouth of someone with Córdoba’s mettle, and when backed up by such conscious and committed social bases, is enough to make even the most ruthless politician of the establishment tremble. And some of us, one must say, tremble with delight.
Chris Gilbert, professor of Political Science in the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, formed part of the international delegation that accompanied the Patriotic March, between April 21 and 23, in the formation of the National Patriotic Council.
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Study: CEO pay now 200 times more than a worker
Press TV – May 3, 2012
Compensation for chief executives at American companies grew 15 percent in 2011 after a 28 percent rise in 2010, part of a larger trend that has seen CEO pay skyrocket over the last three decades. Workers, on the other hand, have been left behind.
Since 1978, CEO pay at American firms has risen 725 percent, more than 127 times faster than worker pay over the same time period, according to new data from the Economic Policy Institute:
From 1978 to 2011, CEO compensation increased more than 725 percent, a rise substantially greater than stock market growth and the painfully slow 5.7 percent growth in worker compensation over the same period.
In 1978, CEOs took home 26.5 times more than the average worker. They now make roughly 206 times more than workers, EPI found. The pay isn’t always tied to the performance of their businesses – as ThinkProgress has noted, CEOs at companies like Bank of America often pocket huge pay increases even as the company’s stock price plummets and jobs are cut.
As a result, American income inequality has skyrocketed, growing worse than it is in countries like Pakistan and Ivory Coast. Wealth inequality is worse than it was even in Ancient Rome. And, as pay skyrockets and tax rates fall for the richest Americans, the rising inequality has left the bottom 95 percent of Americans saddled with more debt than ever before. – thinkprogress.org
Workers’ wages aren’t tied to productivity either. Despite substantial gains in productivity since the 1970s, worker pay has remained flat. According to Labor Department data cited by the Huffington Post, inflation-adjusted wages fell 2 percent in 2011. – thinkprogress.org
Working and middle-class Americans have seen their debt balloon since the 1980s. Today, Americans owe some $704 billion in credit card debt, and more than that in both auto loans and student borrowing. CNN
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South American Fiber Optic Ring
By Raúl Zibechi | Americas Program | May 2, 2012
On March 9th, the Ministers of Communication from 12 countries that make up the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR, for its acronym in Spanish) made the decision to build a fiber-optic ring that created a direct connection between countries in the region without relying on the United States. The network will be completed in 18 months and they will begin laying ocean cables between South America, Europe, the United States and Africa.
The initiative originated from Brazil’s government, which took the proposal to the South American Council on Infrastructure and Planning (Cosiplan, for its acronym in Spanish). This body, which began operations in 2010, is one of the 8 sectoral councils at the departmental level in Unasur for political and strategic debate of programs and projects that promote the regional integration of infrastructure. During the first meeting, it put forth a Plan of Action that sought to “substitute the logic of exportation with one of regional development,” according to Joao Mendes Pereira, Coordinator of Latin American Economic Affairs in Brazil’s State Department.
This fiber optic ring is beginning to loosen one of the many knots that tie the region to the influence of the Global North, and in particular, the United States. It may not be a great work or a radical step forward, but Unasur’s decision illustrates two points: first, the way in which relations with the central powers weaken and fragment marginalized regions; and second, the existence of the political will to make concrete advances towards building autonomy.
South-South Connection
In South America, communication via internet takes a strange and irrational journey. Emails sent between two neighboring cities in Brazil and Peru, such as the capital of Acre, Rio Branco, and Puerto Maldonado, travel all the way to Brasilia, leave Fortaleza via submarine cable, enter the United States through Miami, pass by California descending down the Pacific to Lima, and continue on their way to Puerto Maldonado: a 8,000-kilometer trip between two points only 300 kilometers apart. On a basis like this, it is impossible to speak of sovereignty and integration.
There is also a dependence on European countries. In order to connect some sites between Brazil or Argentina and Ecuador or Colombia, the connection must cross the Atlantic to Europe and return to the continent. A country like Brazil, which is already an emerging global power and will become the world’s 5th-largest economy this year, lives in a situation of dependence on communication: 46% of its international internet traffic comes from outside of the country, and of that 90% makes a pit stop in the United States.
With respect to the region as a whole, 80% of international data traffic from Latin America passes through the United States, double that of Asia and four times the percentage from Europe. This excessive dependence makes communication more expensive. After the meeting at Asunción, the Minister of Industry and Energy in Uruguay, Roberto Kreimerman, stated that between 30% and 50% of connection costs correspond to payments to companies offering connection services to developed countries.
The first step approved by Cosiplan is to survey and chart all the existing networks in each country. After that, three steps of development have been established: first, the connection of physical points located on every border, some of which will be finalized this year, such as in Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Uruguay. Second, state-owned telecom companies, like Telebras of Brazil and Arsat of Argentina, as well as private companies, will lay the foundational framework for the networks. In the third stage, they will extend the cables to neighboring borders.
At each border, internet exchange points will be created to support the companies. The fiber-optic ring will extend 10,000 kilometers and be managed by state-owned companies from each country to keep communications safe and cheap. According to Paulo Bernardo, Minister of Communication in Brazil (and head the agency that came up with the project), the ring “reduces our vulnerability to an attack and the safety of state or military secrets.”
The direct link will increase the connection speed between South American nations 20% to 30% and will decrease costs. Investments at this stage will be very low, around $100 million, which begs the question why it wasn’t done before.
Autonomy and Sovereignty
The project will be complete after the installation of various submarine cables. One will lie between Brazil (the country most interested in the project) and the U.S., entering Miami, Jacksonville or Virginia and passing through the Caribbean, which allows Colombia and Venezuela to be connected. Another will unite the continent with Europe directly passing through Cabo Verde and preferably entering via Amsterdam. A third will connect Fortaleza (northern Brazil) with Angola (Africa) branching off to Argentina and Uruguay.
This part of the project will be realized by Eletrobras, the Brazilian state company in charge of the National Broadband Plan, the federal government’s initiative to broaden access to the entire population before the 2014 World Cup. The objective is to provide 40 million citizens with broadband access and 60 million with broadband mobile access.
Until now Brazil has had only four submarine cable links in Fortaleza, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro and Santos that connect South America with the U.S. Each is operated by private companies, which, from a strategic perspective, causes the country to lose part of its sovereignty. The rest of the countries in the region have access to these cables, but some either lack international fiber optic networks or have overloaded existing ones. That explains why the international “link” represents 45% of the cost of broadband.
At the same time, Brazil is negotiating with the United Nations to democratize internet management which is currently in the hands of American companies who control the IP addresses, URLs and domain names. The spokesperson for the Minister of Foreign Relations, Tovar da Silva Nunes, explained that “the management of the flow of information is very concentrated” because “the internet domain is under the auspices of the U.S. government …it is not safe, fair or desirable.”
For this reason, Brazil and other emerging nations, in addition to some European countries, support the creation of a global convention for access to information at Rio+20 that allows the democratization of the control of communication. Such a framework must include the construction of a fiber optic ring as a physical infrastructure for collaborative communication.
New Risks
The region is living a new reality that shows it is possible to advance in a type of collaboration that goes beyond free commerce to promote equal development in the region. Nonetheless, there remain many doubts and uncertainties. Many processes progress quickly, like the fiber optic ring, highways and hydroelectric dams, while others sink, like the southern gas pipeline that would have created an energy interconnection. Meanwhile, others creep along at a slow pace, like Banco del Sur which promotes a new financial framework in the region.
Brazil is interested in releasing itself from the grip of the Global North and promoting these policies in the region. However, it does not have as much interest in promoting other initiatives like Banco del Sur since it already possesses a powerful development bank, the BNDES, which is handling finances for a good part of infrastructure works in the region.
Given this sentiment, it was Unasur who laid out the objective of providing continuity to the “successes and advances” of the Initiative for the Integration of Regional South American Infrastructure (IIRSA), to the project it considers “a consensus response to the challenges of effective integration and growing necessities for infrastructure in South America initiated in 2000.”
Accordingly, Unasur picks up where IIRSA left off, which has been seriously criticized by social movements. In its 10 years of existence it has picked up 524 projects with investments totaling 100 billion dollars. In January, 2011, there were 53 completed projects, almost 200 in the execution phase and 150 in the preparation phrase. 85% of the projects are transport-related while 12% are in energy.
In 2010, Cosiplan laid out a Plan of Action that urges “building a strategic and integral South American perspective of regional infrastructure favorable to balance and territorial cohesion as well as human development in harmony with nature.”
This new “strategic vision” is a positive one in that it responds to the interests of the South American people. On the other hand, it may reproduce old forms of suppression since it was born from the interests of one country and multinational corporations. The works of IIRSA-Unasur are being challenged by those citizens who feel affected, as happened with the highway that was proposed to cross the TIPNIS in Bolivia and the energy agreement that Peru and Brazil signed in 2010, which foresaw the construction of five dams in the Inambari River.
Apart from the dams to be built in Brazil’s rivers in the Amazon, the state company Eletrobras plans on constructing 11 dams in Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Uruguay with an installed power of 26,000 MW, almost double that of Itaipu which supplies 17% of energy consumption to Brazil. The energy and highway projects that are currently being postulated by Unasur tend to replicate the same structures that until now had been the cause of Latin America’s dependence.
It may be that the Fiber Optic Ring presents these same characteristics since it was proposed and designed by Brazil and it tends to serve Brazil’s interests. The exit route of the most important submarine cables will stay on Brazil’s coasts. The connection with Africa foments the multiple commercial and corporate interests that Brazil has on that continent. Eletrobras is the company in charge of a good part of the optic ring and its financing is controlled by BNDES.
That is why we can say that initiatives, like the fiber optic interconnection, are a step towards regional autonomy although it may be laying the foundation for new inequalities. It will be up to the governments and people of the region to debate the benefits of these projects.
Raul Zibechi is an international political analyst from the weekly Brecha de Montevideo, a professor and researcher on grassroots movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and adviser to many grassroots groups He writes the monthly “Zibechi Report” for the Americas Program.
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The Waldorf Astoria conspiracy
By Kian Mokhtari | Press TV | May 3, 2012
Some of the largest hedge funds, private equity groups, university endowment managers, and other high rollers have met at New York’s up market Waldorf Astoria Hotel to facilitate “the next big thing in finance.”
The event, organized by HighQuest Partners, a heavy hitter in the hedge fund market of big agro, bio-tech and bio-fuel companies charged entrance fees of $3,000. But the sinister undercurrents of the meeting have not been lost on some people.
The money managers attended because they had been promised to make between 25-40 percent returns on short-term investments in areas of the world weighed down by incredible food insecurity or weak or subservient political systems. Corrupt dictators with no moral qualms about displacing millions of souls from their ancestral lands have become the new Bourgeoisie for the Western elite.
In 2009 alone, nearly 60 million hectares of arable land – an area the size of France – was purchased or leased, 70 percent of it in Africa. It’s impossible to acquire that much of land without the continued taking of land previously held by small indigenous farmers. That number has only been increasing as more and more land has been leased off to Western companies in Africa by corrupt governments. In a 2011 post on their website, HighQuest partners bragged about representing $3.5 trillion in aggregated institutional assets and 25 million acres under cultivation alone: the figure is expected to double by the end of 2012.
However the above is only the farming angle on the issue. There is an even more sordid action plan in operation as we speak.
The real estate market has taken a beating courtesy of the toxic assets and mortgages debacle in the US and the West. So the focus of the murky business has shifted abroad. Shady deals with real estate owners in the developing and the Third World countries have ensured a minimum of 40 percent rise in property prices in places where the average annual income is well below $5000 per year. This means a Western land grabber can, vis-à-vis local landowning gangs, invest in real estate futures in countries that even on the face of it are politically opposed to the West. The insider gangs fix prices on the population and ensure 25-40 percent returns every other year for themselves and their Western patrons.
Talk about making a killing!
Colonialism is making a return via a backdoor to blight lives and relieve the world population of what small chances of leading healthy and productive lives they have left. The new techniques of the 1% combined with the human tendency for corruption is the next big danger for humanity.
Think about it: An investor at a luncheon in Waldorf Astoria Hotel could double his or her money every four years via dodgy land investments while not a blade of grass is cultivated or a room for living is built in the developing and Third World countries.
This policy will make a desert out of the world bar where the elite choose to take up residence, which for the moment is in the Western Hemisphere.
~
A former editor for the Jane’s Information Group in the UK, Nader (Kian) Mokhtari is a foreign policy specialist, columnist and political commentator with 15 years of experience in the field. He’s also worked as a lecturer at the Tehran School of Media Studies. Mokhtari is a frequent contributor to Press TV.
Kian Mokhtari
South African telecom to face US sanctions over Iran, Syria operations
Press TV – May 2, 2012
Africa’s largest mobile telecommunications company, the MTN Group, is reportedly in danger of being subjected to sanctions by the United States over its telecom activities in Iran and Syria.
According to a report published by the South Africa-based Mail and Guardian newspaper on April 30, US President Barack Obama issued an executive order last week that allowed American authorities for the first time to impose sanctions on individuals or entities providing technological services to Iran and Syria.
Under the order, the new sanctions would include a US visa ban and financial restrictions against agencies and individuals.
The South Africa-based MTN Group had announced in early March that it had no plans to abandon its operations in Iran despite facing difficulties over the US-led sanctions against Tehran.
“We are guided by [the] South African government policies internationally, in the same way US companies are prohibited from doing business in Iran. Unless the government says (otherwise), we will just have to manage,” the company’s boss Sifiso Dabengwa said.
The United States has already subjected to sanctions foreign entities that are in various forms of business with Iran.
On March 30, US President Barack Obama gave the green light for the previously-announced sanctions against foreign banks and other financial institutions by or through which Iran’s oil is purchased.
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IMF rejects call to cut ties with Iran
Press TV – May 1, 2012
The International Monetary Fund has rejected a call by a US-based anti-Iranian group to cut its ties with the Central Bank of Iran.
The IMF said on Tuesday that its relationship with the Central Bank of Iran is based on its constitution, noting that Iran’s membership does not contravene US or EU sanctions on Tehran, AFP reported.
The anti-Iranian group also criticized IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde over her meeting with Central Bank of Iran Governor Mahmoud Bahmani on the sidelines of the semiannual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington in late April.
The US-based anti-Iranian group consists of former US diplomats and government officials.
IMF spokesman William Murray said, “According to our constitution… the IMF’s holdings of each member’s currency are maintained with the central bank of the relevant member, including Iran… There is nothing in the EU or US sanctions regimes that is inconsistent with these arrangements.”
Headquartered in Washington, the IMF is an organization of 188 countries working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.
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The Costs of War
By Ron Paul | April 30, 2012
This month Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki announced the addition of some 1,900 mental health nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers to its existing workforce of 20,590 mental health staff in attempt to get a handle on the epidemic of suicides among combat veterans. Unfortunately, when presidents misuse our military on an unprecedented scale – and Congress lets them get away with it – the resulting stress causes military suicides to increase dramatically, both among active duty and retired service members. In fact, military deaths from suicide far outnumber combat deaths. According to an article in the Air Force Times this month, suicides among airmen are up 40 percent over last year.
Considering the multiple deployments service members are forced to endure as the war in Afghanistan stretches into its second decade, these figures are sadly unsurprising.
Ironically, the same VA Secretary Eric Shinseki was forced to retire from the Army by President Bush for daring to suggest that an invasion and occupation of Iraq would not be the cakewalk that neoconservatives promised. Then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who is not a military veteran, claimed that General Shinseki was “wildly off the mark” for suggesting that several hundred thousand soldiers would be required to secure post-invasion Iraq. Now we see who was right on the costs of war.
In addition to the hidden human costs of our seemingly endless wars are the economic costs. In 2008, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.” Stiglitz illustrates that taking into account the total costs of the war, including replacing military equipment and caring for thousands of wounded veterans for the rest of their lives, the Iraq war will cost us orders of magnitude greater than the 50 billion dollars promised by the White House before the invasion. Add all the costs of Afghanistan into the mix, wrote Stiglitz, and the bill tops $7 trillion.
Is it any wonder why our infrastructure at home crumbles, healthcare is more expensive and harder to come by, and unemployment together with inflation continue their steady rise? Imagine the productive power of that seven trillion dollars in our private sector. What could it have done were it in private hands; what may have been discovered, what diseases might have been cured, what might have been built, how many productive jobs created?
With the bills coming due for our decade of reckless military action, the cuts rarely come from the well-connected military industrial complex with their lobbyists and powerful political allies. In President Obama’s 2013 budget, troop strength is to be cut significantly while enormously expensive and largely superfluous weapons systems emerge essentially unscathed. As defense analyst Winslow Wheeler wrote this month, costs of the “next generation” fighter, the F-35, will increase by another $289 million. This despite the fact that the fighter is badly designed and already outdated, a “virtual flying piano” writes Wheeler.
The military contractors building monstrosities like the F-35 are politically connected and thus protected. Unfortunately, returning military veterans are less so. In the same 2013 budget, the White House proposes to increase medical and pharmaceutical costs paid by veterans while reducing their cost of living increases. And how many years of increasingly alarming mental illness and suicide statistics has it taken for the modest increase in resources to be made available?
Those who predicted the real costs of our decade of global military conquest were ridiculed, scoffed at, and fired. History has now shown us that much of what they warned was correct. America is clearly less secure after a decade of unnecessary wars. It is more vulnerable and closer to economic collapse. Its military is nearly broken from years of abuse. Will we come back to our senses?
Hundreds of Economists: Marijuana Prohibition Costs Billions, Legalization Would Earn Billions
By Ezekiel Edwards and Rebecca McCray | ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project | April 26, 2012
Over 300 economists, including three Nobel Laureates, recently signed a petition that encourages the president, Congress, governors and state legislatures to carefully consider marijuana legalization in America. The petition draws attention to an article by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, whose findings highlight the substantial cost-savings our government could incur if it were to tax and regulate marijuana, rather than needlessly spending billions of dollars enforcing its prohibition.
Miron predicts that legalizing marijuana would save $7.7 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement, in addition to generating $2.4 billion annually if taxed like most consumer goods, or $6 billion per year if taxed similarly to alcohol and tobacco. The economists signing the petition note that the budgetary implications of marijuana prohibition are just one of many factors to be considered, but declare it essential that these findings become a serious part of the national decriminalization discussion.
The advantages of marijuana legalization extend far beyond an opportunity to make a dent in our federal deficit. The criminalization of marijuana is one of the many fights in the War on Drugs that has failed miserably. And while it’s tempting to associate only the harder, “scarier” drugs with this botched crusade, the fact remains that marijuana prohibition is very much a part of the battle. The federal government has even classified marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance (its most serious category of substances), placing it in a more dangerous category than cocaine. More than 800,000 people are arrested for marijuana use and possession each year, and 46 percent of all drug prosecutions across the country are for marijuana possession. Yet this costly and time-consuming targeting of marijuana users by law enforcement and lawmakers has done little to quell use of the drug.
The criminalization of marijuana has not only resulted in a startlingly high number of arrests, it also reflects the devastating disparate racial impact of the War on Drugs. Despite ample evidence that marijuana is used more frequently by white people, Blacks and Latinos account for a grossly disproportionate percentage of the 800,000 people arrested annually for marijuana use and possession. These convictions hinder one’s ability to find or keep employment, vote or gain access to affordable housing. The fact that these hard-to-shake consequences – bad enough as they are — are suffered more frequently by a demographic that uses marijuana less makes our current policies toward marijuana all the more unfair, unwise and unacceptable.
Our marijuana policies have proven ineffective, expensive and discriminatory. Our courtrooms, jails and prisons remain crowded with nonviolent drug offenders. And yet, the government persists in its costly, racist and counterproductive criminalization of marijuana. We learned our lesson decades ago with alcohol prohibition; it is long overdue for us to do the same with marijuana prohibition. In the face of Miron’s new report, and its support from hundreds of economists, we are hopeful that not only will the national conversation surrounding marijuana change, but so will our disastrous policies.
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Somnambulant in Cartagena
By ROBERT SANDELS | CounterPunch | April 27, 2012
“I watched Obama closely at the famous ‘summit gathering.’ Fatigue sometimes overcame him, he involuntarily closed his eyes and occasionally slept with his eyes open.”
– Fidel Castro [1]
The Sixth Summit of the Americas, held April 14 and 15 in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia was supposed to be about what President Barak Obama wanted to talk about; instead it was about everything he didn’t want to hear.
The theme of the summit was “Connecting the Americas: Partners for Prosperity,” but what most of the 33 leaders present wanted to discuss with Obama was decriminalizing drugs, supporting Argentina’s claim to sovereignty over the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands) and an end to US exclusion of Cuba from the summits.
Having no good answers on these and other matters Obama shut down, — if Fidel observed correctly — put his mouth on auto pilot, recited the words to the anthem about free trade, national security, and prosperity for all and then refused to sign the final declaration.
The US agenda of prosperity through promotion of market capitalism, asymmetric free trade agreements, privatizations, unfettered flow of capital, and excessive protection of intellectual property rights is currently out of favor in most of the region.
Free trade of the kind pedaled by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush is no longer a regional issue. In a sense, all of these summits have been pointless if one recalls their main purpose. When Clinton convened the first one in Miami in 1994, it was not to address the forever problems of the region but to follow up on the successful negotiation of a dubious free-trade agreement with Mexico (NAFTA) by extending US commercial and financial penetration into the rest of the region under a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). That drive was stopped cold at Mar del Plata, Argentina during the 2005 summit.
Led by Brazil, – the largest regional economy and the “B” in the BRICS — many leaders in Cartagena saw Obama’s free trade and monetary obsessions as his way to help resolve US economic problems but not theirs. The cheap-dollar strategy may help US exports, job growth and narrow its trade deficit but those gains are seen as other people’s losses.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve makes nearly interest-free dollars available to financial institutions that then can engage in the lucrative carry trade – moving cheap dollars to places like Brazil where, perforce, interest rates are higher.
Brazil’s President Dilma Rouseff has complained to Obama’s face that the Fed’s actions have caused a “monetary tsunami” and are driving up Brazil’s currency. [2] The central bank has tried to reduce upward pressure on the Brazilian real through capital controls and dollar purchases, a situation that seems at odds with Obama’s “partnership for prosperity.”
Cuba: the Phantom of the Summit
Most or all the delegates (except Obama and his faithful Canadian companion Stephen Harper) wanted an end to the US policy of excluding Cuba from the summits and to the 50-year old blockade of the island. The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), which includes Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela, had already formally demanded that Cuba be invited to Cartagena. Ecuador’s President Evo Morales reported that it was not just ALBA but Rouseff and other leaders in the Caribbean and South America who were saying, “there will not be another summit without Cuba.” [3]
In his speech opening the Cartagena summit, host President Juan Manuel Santos said that another summit without Cuba was ”unacceptable.” [4]
Of all the speeches and rumors of speeches in this hermetically sealed summit perhaps Santos’ remarks were the most striking. Here was a conservative president of one of the few loyal US allies left in Latin America, the recipient of billions in US aid to fight a proxy war on Colombia’s coca leaves under Clinton’s 1999 Plan Colombia, one of the few countries to sign a free trade pact with the United States and host to US troops on seven Colombian military bases telling Obama that his views on Cuba were based on an “outmoded ideology.” It was a “cold war anachronism,” he said. [5]
The Cuba issue could not have taken Obama by surprise. What did he expect after it was pounded into him when the previous summit foundered on the issue? At the 2009 summit in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, his colleagues wanted to talk about readmitting Cuba to the OAS. The summit ended with no agreement on the final declaration, which only the host government signed, but there was consensus that Cuba could re-apply for admission. That is not going to happen because Cuba does not want to rejoin the OAS and even if it did, Obama could impose the majority-crushing one-country veto arguing that Cuba isn’t democratic.
The constant harping about the lack of democracy in Cuba seems especially odd considering that the US government has never paid attention to the annual lopsided vote in the UN condemning the blockade. And in this very summit there was little exercise of majority rule when the United States and Canada blocked agreement on a final declaration because it contained inconvenient resolutions.
Obama, in office only a few weeks when he went to Port of Spain in April 2009, was well regarded in the region. He talked about cooperation and admitted that mistakes were made by his predecessors. He was generally praised for dropping Bush’s harsh restrictions on Cuban-American travel to Cuba. He has tried to live on those meager crumbs ever since, pretending that by reverting to the travel rules in play under Clinton he was “easing” Cuba policy when in reality the policy has remained the destruction of the Cuban revolution.
Soon after Port of Spain, however, Obama supported the June 2009 Honduran coup that followed the arrest and defenestration of President Jose Manuel Zelaya — who of course was democratically elected. Then as now Obama never tired of calling upon Cuban President Raul Castro to hold elections, without which, the island could never attend a Summit of the Americas.
Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, the direct beneficiary of that coup, attended the summit.
The lesson of Port of Spain was that John F. Kennedy’s 1962 expulsion of Cuba from the OAS was now reversed. The lesson of Cartagena was that there wouldn’t be any more of these summits without Cuba.
Who said summits are pointless?
A war on the war on drugs
Latin American leaders of all political hues have been murmuring recently about legalization or decriminalization of drugs. Guatemala’s President Otto Perez Molina is probably the furthest to the right in that group, which includes ex-presidents Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox of Mexico and current Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who, against a background of some 50,000 deaths in his militarized war on drugs, has lately suggested the idea should be on the table.
Appearing slightly flexible on the issue, Obama told Univision News, “I don’t mind a debate around issues like decriminalization,” but added, “I personally don’t agree that’s a solution to the problem.” [6]
Whether or not there was a debate on drugs during the closed-door sessions, Vice President Joe Biden had already made the rounds in Mexico and Central America to promise there would be no legalization while Obama was in office.
And, as if to drive the point home, the summit had barely closed when General Douglas Fraser, chief of the US Southern Command, (Was there a democratic vote among the peoples of the region to include themselves in a US military zone?) made it clear that what Obama doesn’t like, the United States doesn’t like. The general called for greater cooperation from the region on planning for the naval side of the war on drugs. It seems that Operation Hammer, which will cover the Caribbean coast of Central America and the Pacific coast of South America, is about to begin and he wants “the naval forces of all the region” to get with the plan. [7]
If Obama’s views on legalization were not clearly spelled out in Cartagena, they are in his 2012 National Drug Control Strategy, which “rejects the false choice between an enforcement-centric ‘war on drugs’ and the extreme notion of drug legalization.” [8]
His 2012 budget to pay for that strategy authorizes $15.1 billion for traditional enforcement methods and $10.1 billion for prevention and treatment. The Marijuana News and Information blog notes that the percentage for enforcement is the same or higher than what Bush proposed spending. [9]
While hinting at flexibility on the drug issue, Obama announced at the summit that the United States was increasing funds for the foreign war on drugs led by “our Central American friends” and pledged more than $130 million dollars for it in 2012. [10]
As for the Malvinas, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner argued for inclusion in the final declaration of Argentina’s claims of sovereignty.
Pressed to declare himself, Obama pleaded neutrality. That’s a “no.”
There was a certain airy dismissiveness about Obamas demeanor at the summit. He danced away from the serious issues and, apparently forgetting he was the U.S. president, said, “I’m not somebody who brings to the table here a lot of baggage from the past, and I want to look at these issues in a new and fresh way.” [11]
That was a curious, even astonishing statement by a man who has willingly shouldered a good deal of imperial baggage. Of course the baggage is his to dump or carry: 54 years of it since Dwight Eisenhower tried to block Fidel from taking power, 51 years of it since the Bay of Pigs, 50 years of it since JFK got Cuba kicked out of the OAS and now nearly four years of Obama continuing the blockade, instituting his own cyber warfare against Cuba and continuing to pay Cubans to act as agents of US policy inside the island.
What baggage has he not made his own?
The other summit
Obama’s election-year intransigence on the issues at Cartagena has badly damaged and probably sunk the Americas summitry and with it maybe even the OAS. The best thing for Obama is to let the summits die and blame it on Fidel and Raul Castro (also on Santos, Rouseff, Morales, Rafael Correa, among many others).
Waiting to take its place is the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), inaugurated in Caracas last December as an OAS without the United States and Canada.
Behind it is ALBA, which held its own, little noticed meeting in Caracas just before the Cartagena summit. It was the summit that most of the Cartagena delegates most likely would have preferred. Its final declaration supported Argentina on the Malvinas, condemned the blockade of Cuba and called the exclusion of Cuba from the Americas summits “unacceptable.” [12]
“Perhaps,” wrote Fidel, “CELAC will become what it should be, a hemispheric political organization without the United States and Canada. The decadent and unsustainable empire has earned the right to rest in peace.” [13]
Robert Sandels is a writer for Cuba-L and CounterPunch.
Notes.
[1] Fidel Castro, Reflexiones, Granma, 04/17/12,
http://www.granma.cu/espanol/reflexiones/17abril-reflexiones.html.
[2[Reuters, 04/14/12,
<http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Scandal+mars+Obama+wooing+Latin+America+wi
th+video/6473757/story.html>.
[3] ALBA-TCP website, http://www.alianzabolivariana.org/modules.php?
name=News&file=article&sid=8495.
[4] La Jornada (Mexico), 04/14/12,
http://www.lajornadajalisco.com.mx/2012/04/14/inaceptable-una-nueva-cumbre-s
in-cuba-santos/.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Interview, Univision News, 04/14/12,
http://univisionnews.tumblr.com/post/21081359245/obama-dont-mind-debating-le
galization-of-drugs.
[7] United States Southern Command website, 04/18/12,
http://www.southcom.mil/newsroom/Pages/Western-Hemisphere-Defense,
-Security-Leaders-Gather-to-Discuss-Transnational-Organized-Crime-in-Central
-America.aspx.
[8] White House,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/2012-national-drug-control-strategy.
[9] Marijuana News and Information, 04/20/12,
http://www.theweedblog.com/obamas-2012-drug-strategy-is-a-reminder-the-feds-
are-addicted-to-the-drug-war/.
[10] Xinhua, 04/14/12,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-04/15/c_131527076.htm.
[11] Washington Post, 04/15/12,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/obama-concludes-summit-of-t
he-americas-on-the-defensive-about-inviting-cuba/2012/04/15/gIQAVrgAKT_story
.html.
[12] Granma Internacional, 04/18/12,
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/cuba-i/18abr-17gobierno.html.
[13] Fidel Castro, Reflexiones, Granma Internacional, 04/17/12,
http://www.granma.cu/espanol/reflexiones/17abril-reflexiones.html.
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From the Archives
Genetic baloney in thick slices
MAYBE COULD BE INC.
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021
Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…
Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.
Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?
Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”
And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.
This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”
This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue
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