A Small But Significant Symbolic Victory At Bali

Even the Bush administration it seems, when faced with the overwhelming opposition of the representatives of 190 countries representing most of the human race (it couldn't accuse them all of harboring weapons of mass destruction and terrorists and invade them, or use butterfly ballots and poorly constructed punch card ballots to claim that its positions had won out) can retreat on a major issue, sort of.

The public conclusion to the Bali Conference was really unprecedented for virtually any international conference anywhere, reminiscent of a Dodger Giant baseball game in the Ebbets Field of my youth, with the
U.S. delegation as the Giants. According to press reports, speakers criticizing tU.S. policy(and there were apparently many) were cheered enthusiastically and the head of the U.S. delegation booed loudly when
she spoke. Even U.S. military and political allies remained silent, rather like Giant fans keeping their mouths shut in the bleachers. A delegate from New Guinea was cheered lustily when he said to the U.S. delegation "if you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way."

The issue was in part what an old political scientist once called a "battle of thesauruses," meaning conflicts over the specific wording of legislation. The U.S. strongly opposed a substitute motion by India on the placement of the words, "measurable, reportable, and verifiable" which was strongly supported by developing nations, since the Bush administration policy has been to a. deny until very recently the science concerning the dangers of global warming and b. pass the buck to developing nations, portraying them as the contemporary and future source of the problem, if there really is one.

But battles over language and wording are important, since they point the way to policy. As for the concrete results, the Bush administration failed to remove the loose commitment to a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emission by the developed countries by 2020 and a 50% reduction by 2050, but relegated them to the footnotes of the agreement, not to what most delegates had wished would be a "road map" for a global policy. However, as Al Gore said to the conference, the U.S. will hopefully be playing a very different role on this issue after the Bush administration finds itself in the toxic waste dump of history.

As an amusing and, for the Bush administration, well deserved retort, Xie Zhinhua, the head of the Chinese delegation (Bush has particularly tried to shift blame to China on the issue of greenhouse gasses) welcome
the Bush administration . joining in the agreement which China supporting by welcoming the U.S. "onto the bus," but added that "the United States is not in the drivers seat," an understatement to say the very least

Norman Markowitz

Petition - Keep Dennis Kucinich In the Debates

To Political Affairs Blog Readers.

I am forwarding this appeal to keep Dennis Kucinich in the debates so that the recent Iowa exclusions not be repeated. Not giving Kucinich a chance to speak in the debates is censorship of the crudest sort.

Norman Markowitz

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=fZMojmpKuhKit8XvgU4BWuCb3iuUCJsM>

*I'm writing to you to ask for your help in keeping the presidential primary debates open.*

*This week the Des Moines Register excluded Congressman Dennis Kucinich from the Iowa debates* -- despite the fact that he met all of their published criteria.

Given the challenges America faces right now, we need more debate and dialogue - not less. Yet the party insiders are moving to shut things down.

Independent voters and independent-minded Democrats and Republicans aren't going to let them.

*PS*. Can't see the link above? Copy and paste this link into your browser: http://petition.independentprimary.com

No Child Left Behind & Educational Reform

Words of wisdom from the past. With respect to both the national obsession with standard test scores due to Bush's educational policies, and the New York City grading of schools, I thought these words from Bertrand Russell in 1917 to be apropos:

“The first thing to observe is that, in any very large organization, and above all in a great state, officials and legislators are usually very remote from those whom they govern, and not imaginatively acquainted with the conditions of life to which their decisions will be applied. This makes them ignorant of much that they ought to know, even when they are industrious and willing to learn whatever can be taught by statistics and blue-books.

“The one thing they understand intimately is the office routine and the administrative rules. The result is an undue anxiety to secure a uniform system. I have heard of a French minister of education taking out his watch, and remarking, ‘At this moment all the children of such and such an age in France are learning so and so.’

“This is the ideal of the administrator, an idea utterly fatal to free growth, initiative, experiment, or any far reaching innovation.

“The energetic official inevitably dislikes anything that he does not control. His official sanction must be obtained before anything can be done.

“Whatever he finds in existence he wishes to alter in some way, so as to have the satisfaction of feeling his power and making it felt.

“If he is conscientious, he will think out some perfectly uniform and rigid scheme which he believes to be the best possible, and he will then impose this scheme ruthlessly, whatever promising growths he may have to lop down for the sake of symmetry.

“The result inevitably has something of the deadly dullness of a new rectangular town, as compared with the beauty and richness of an ancient city which has lived and grown with the separate lives and individualities of many generations.

What has grown is always more living than what has been decreed; but the energetic official will always prefer the tidiness of what he has decreed to the apparent disorder of spontaneous growth.”

Ideology: Why Bush Won't Deal with Climate Change

By Joel Wendland

So the Bush administration has admitted that global warming is real and that something must be done to scale back human contributions to our certain destruction – to the chagrin of his supporters who for years have joined him to either block serious discussion of global warming or who vigorously denied its reality.

But now that the US has a chance to do something about the problem at the Bali conference, Bush blocked every measure being offered.

Media reports indicate that countries like China and India and others are prepared to agree to international standards on greenhouse emissions, so Bush can't use them as an excuse anymore.

Still he has refused to accept standards.

Up to this point Bush attempted to scuttle serious discussion on climate change and controlling carbon emissions by holding his own conference and attempting to create side agreements that allow countries to voluntarily control emissions. This of course was no serious plan.

Everyone has to do it or doesn't work.

So once again we're treated to a dismal Bush administration policy failure: no action for a serious global problem that threatens humanity (reminds one of Bush's response to Katrina, the health care crisis, economic problems, budget deficits, the sub-prime mortgage problem).

But the fact is that, in addition to the corporate interests that back Bush and that view international standards on carbon emissions as cap on their profit margins, a straight line can be drawn from Bush's right-wing ideology of free markets, anti-government sophistry, obsession with war, and refusal to cooperate with the international community – hallmarks of Republican Party politics (see also McCain, Huckabee, Tancredo, Thompson, Romney, Paul, etc.) – to his refusal to make a serious effort to address real problems.

He and his right-wing cronies in the FOX media echo chamber would rather invent crises with Iran and immigrants, or even with the "war on Christmas."

This serious inability to live in and deal with reality is probably a key reason why US voters have begun the process of dumping Republican one-party rule, and will finish the job in November 2008.

Al Gore Bravely Tells It Like it Is In Bali

by Norman Markowitz

Having written about the Bali conference for the Blog earlier in the week, I found the most recent developments a further example of deepening conflict between the Bush administration and much of the rest of the world and the irrelevance of the administration's policies to global issues. I also found Al Gore's statement as he arrived at the conference remarkable for an establishment American politician.

First, the European Union, hoping to use Bali to go forward with policies to strengthen the Kyoto Accord, is actively rebelling against the confidence game that the Bush administration, which never signed the Accord, is playing in Bali.

Humberto Rosa, both the Portuguese delegate and present President of the European Union said in response to the U.S. stalling on any concrete agreement to reduce greenhouse gasses that the meeting that the Bush administration hopes to call in Hawaii next month to "continue" discussions (which many environmentalists see as a continuation of its do nothing policies) would be "meaningless" without an agreement.

The German minister for Environment, Sigmar Gabriel, was even more blunt: "no result at Bali means no major Economies meeting."

It should be noted that Russia, India, and China have all been critical of the push by environmental activists through the world to establish clear numerical goals (the basis of any planning for anything) to reduce greenhouse gasses, but those issues, particularly if the conference follows the lead of the United Nations Intergovernmental Committee on Climate Change by developing different but complementary plans for developed and developing nations, is manageable.

The Bush administration's opposition in effect creates a stalemate and prevents the world community from acting now to deal with a crisis that science tells us represents a clear and present danger to the planet and all species who inhabit it. Kevin Knoblach, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists stated the obvious when he said that "the best we hoped for was that the U.S would not hobble the rest of the world from moving forward.... our delegation here from the States has not been able to meet that low level of expectation."

Al Gore's arrival from Oslo, where he accepted the Nobel Prize for his work to foster a progressive global environmental policy, provided a very different American presence for the delegations of 190 nations attending the conference than the official U.S. delegation. Gore did what few major U.S. politicians have ever had the courage to do, that is, directly and clearly criticize U.S. policy to an international audience. "My own country, the United States," Gore said, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali, an obvious statement that few of his political colleagues would make, especially abroad.

Gore went on to say to the delegates "over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now....You must anticipate that," a clear call to the world community to look toward a post Bush America that will be an ally rather than an enemy of a global environmental policy.

I hope my final remarks don't lead to polemical attacks from inside or outside of this blog, since that would be pointless, but as I look at Al Gore and compare him to the field of Democratic candidates who have a serious chance to gain the nomination, from the front-runner Hillary Clinton to present major contender Senator Obama, to the lesser contender but possible nominee John Edwards, to the rest, including Dennis Kucinich (clearly the best on the greatest number of issues by far) who are not given any chance to gain the nomination, I see Gore as not only the strongest Democratic candidate to win and win a decisive victory if he would decide to run, (stronger than Clinton or Obama) but also the best Democratic candidate in that he is, of all likely nominees (assuming he would decide to run, which of course he has refused to do) most likely to provide leadership for a progressive majority on a variety of issues, not only environment, which Franklin Roosevelt, and in a lesser and much more flawed way, Lyndon Johnson did in the past, responding respectively to the labor and civil rights movements in the midst of great crises.

Although it may be an exercise in futility, if I were in Bali today (it is raining and snowing here in New Jersey so that wouldn't be too bad in and of itself) I would say "Run, Al Run" and win the presidency you really did win in 2000.

People's Weekly World Takes on Top Stories of 2008

The corporate-owned media is pretty much 95-98% of everything you hear, read, or listen to. But the media giants have all been going through some huge changes and shifts in production recently.

read more | digg story

Political Affairs to Cover African National Congress Meeting

The African National Congress (ANC) will meet for its 52nd national congress beginning December 16th in the Limpopo province of South Africa to both chart its political course and to elect its new leadership collective.

read more | digg story

Huckabee and the Double Standard

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, is doing well in the Republican primaries, appealing to the religious right. Huckabee according to the press contributed a hockey rink to the late Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, a school that is considered an international joke (what do you expect when the claim to have fossils that prove the biblical story to be correct). A student of mine went there briefly for personal reasons and realized where she was (she has not only secular but progressive views) and got out quickly, only to be told by her fellow students who initially welcomed her because they thought she was one of them that she would go to hell.

Huckabee also admires the "left behind" books, fundamentalist melodramas about those unfortunates who will not do to heaven after the last judgment.

Huckabee is entitled to his beliefs and his support of hockey among fundamentalists , although what that means as qualifications for a president is very questionable (separation of church and state must trouble those who care about the U.S. Constitution) but what interests me is the revelation that Huckabee, as governor of Arkansas, used his influence to directly commute the sentences of prisoners and indirectly influence parole boards to parole prisoners. One of those prisoners, Wayne Dumond, accused of rape and murder, was removed from the state (he was white and had supporters) only to rape and kill again, at least once, for which he was convicted (he subsequently died in jail, and authorities believe he was responsible for at least one other murder).

Remember the Republicans notorious racist Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis in 1988. William Horton was Black (the Republicans made sure to call him Willie in order to highly his ethnicity) and committed a heinous crime after he had been released on a work release program in Massachusetts which Dukakis, the governor, supported (even though he was not directly involved in the case). Dukakis was vilified for being soft on crime. Huckabee, as a right religious Republican isn't getting too much flak on that issue. Instead he is being attacked by Mitt Romney, another former governor of Massachusetts and would-be spokesmen for the religious right (as a Mormon he has some difficulties in that respect, for being soft on illegal immigrants, letting them get all sorts of state services as they were over-running Arkansas.

The Republicans sink deeper and deeper into a vat of political chicken fat, caricaturing themselves as they appeal to constituencies that they assume will go for the lowest and most absurd common denominator. Given their campaign, it becomes harder and harder even to satirize them, since they are doing such a good job of that themselves.

Norman Markowitz

Politics of Race and Gender in 2008: Will the Bradley Effect Hold Sway?

By Joe Sims

Will the “Bradley Effect” affect Barack Obama’s campaign for presidency? What is the Bradley effect? Tom Bradley ran twice for Governor of California and in the first contest narrowly lost despite having been widely projected as the winner. The term then refers to a tendency in some white voters to say one thing to pollsters, but do the opposite in the voting booth. It suggests that some with lukewarm support for a candidate or who say they are undecided are more conservative and end up voting that way. An a article published a year ago quoted a Newsweek story stating that a similar phenomenon occurred in the Virginia race of Doug Wilder:

“Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland was at Wilder's hotel as a projected easy victory turned into a nail-biter. That is a night "I'll never forget," says Walters, who thinks it "naive" to believe that things have changed very much. He believes that some percentage of whites—perhaps 5 percent or so, intent on being seen as less biased than they may be—will claim to support a nonwhite candidate when they actually do not.
Other political observers think the effect may have diminished over time. "We may be seeing the turning of this," says Ed Sarpolus, vice president of EPIC-MRA, a Michigan-based polling firm.”

Has such a turning point been reached? Only time will tell. Yet another question if a similar phenomenon will hound Hillary Clinton. I spoke with someone today who quoted a mid-Western labor leader as saying, if was their belief that ultimately the election will hinge around who voters think can win against a Republican and that won’t be an African American or a woman. An older African American veteran said as much today when leaving work, however, giving her nod to Clinton: because the main issue is defeating the Republicans.

Andrew Young according to a Washington Post newspaper column voiced similar concerns urging Obama to wait until 2016. Right now Young argued, Obama would be crucified if elected. Young, a veteran of the civil rights campaigns and an associate of Dr. King, grew more conservative with the passing of years as exemplified by an unflattering stint as the US representative at the UN. No surprise there. Yet many African Americans are wondering whether the Bradley effect still holds true.

Human Evolution Accelerating: Still Hope For Racist James Watson (who has Black Genes)

By Joe Sims

Today’s news features a fascinating article on human evolution. It suggests that humanity is still evolving – thank God! This is heartening news: the continuing spate of suicides bombings, random killings of innocents by gun-toting lunatics in the US west, and the racist ravings of Charles Murray, James Watson and others had one almost losing hope.

BBC carried a story yesterday on “political correctness” and gave a platform to Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous Bell Curve, who functioned as an ideological defense attorney to the recently fired Watson. When asked if Watson was right in his assertions that Africans were intellectual inferior, Murray replied, “I don’t know” and then suggested that test scores indicate that “something” is going on.

In this regard it was interesting to see a recent scientific study of James Watson’s genetic profile. The study determined that Watson must have had very recent Black ancestors as 16 percent of his DNA was African. The likelihood is that he had an African American great-grandparent. Can you imagine?

The new evolutionary evidence reported in today’s LA Times, posits that with the introduction of widespread agriculture, the pace of evolution accelerated “100 times historical levels.” Staff writer Karen Kaplan continues, “the research team was able to conclude that infectious diseases and the introduction of new foods were the primary reasons that some genes swept through populations at such speed.” These genes allowed circumstances in which natural selection was able to occur.

The research determined that “race” as it is presently manifest today didn’t exist “until 20,000 years ago, when genes involved in skin pigmentation emerged … Paler skin allowed people in northern latitudes to absorb more sunlight to absord vitamin D.

The study suggested that that the “fastest-evolving genes were those related to brain development, but the researchers aren’t sure what made them desirable.”

Interesting stuff, especially when one considers that the Watson claimed that within ten years researchers would discover the “intelligence” gene, a project it seemed that was underway at the Cold Harbor Lab, he headed.

I’ve often wondered what humankind was evolving toward. What factors, known and unknown are effecting our genetic destiny and how will that effect appearance, shape etc. 20,000 years is just a second in a species evolution: how will we fare – if we fare at all – in another 20,000?