Dear Government of Sweden …By Michael Moore

 

December 16th, 2010 9:17 PM

 By Michael Moore 

Dear Swedish Government:

Hi there — or as you all say, Hallå! You know, all of us here in the U.S. love your country. Your Volvos, your meatballs, your hard-to-put-together furniture — we can’t get enough!

There’s just one thing that bothers me — why has Amnesty International, in a special report (described in detail here by Naomi Wolf), declared that Sweden refuses to deal with the very real tragedy of rape? In fact, they say that all over Scandinavia, including in your country, rapists “enjoy impunity.” And the United Nations, the EU and Swedish human rights groups have come to the same conclusion: Sweden just doesn’t take sexual assault against women seriously. How else do you explain these statistics from Katrin Axelsson of Women Against Rape:

** Sweden has the HIGHEST per capita number of reported rapes in Europe.

** This number of rapes has quadrupled in the last 20 years.

** The conviction rates? They have steadily DECREASED.

Axelsson says: “On April 23rd of this year, Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs [newspaper] that ‘up to 90% of all reported rapes [in Sweden] never get to court.’”

Let me say that again: nine out of ten times, when women report they have been raped, you never even bother to start legal proceedings. No wonder that, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, it is now statistically more likely that someone in Sweden will be sexually assaulted than that they will be robbed.

Message to rapists? Sweden loves you!

So imagine our surprise when all of a sudden you decided to go after one Julian Assange on sexual assault charges. Well, sort of: first you charged him. Then after investigating it, you dropped the most serious charges and rescinded the arrest warrant.

Then a conservative MP put pressure on you and, lo and behold, you did a 180 and reopened the Assange investigation. Except you still didn’t charge him with anything. You just wanted him for “questioning.” So you — you who have sat by and let thousands of Swedish women be raped while letting their rapists go scott-free — you decided it was now time to crack down on one man — the one man the American government wants arrested, jailed or (depending on which politician or pundit you listen to) executed. You just happened to go after him, on one possible “count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape (third degree).” And while thousands of Swedish rapists roam free, you instigated a huge international manhunt on Interpol for this Julian Assange!

What anti-rape crusaders you’ve become, Swedish government! Women in Sweden must suddenly feel safer?

Well, not really. Actually, many see right through you. They know what these “non-charge charges” are really about. And they know that you are cynically and disgustingly using the real and everyday threat that exists against women everywhere to help further the American government’s interest in silencing the work of WikiLeaks.

I don’t pretend to know what happened between Mr. Assange and the two women complainants (all I know is what I’ve heard in the media, so I’m as confused as the next person). And I’m sorry if I’ve jumped to any unnecessary or wrong-headed conclusions in my efforts to state a very core American value: All people are absolutely innocent until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. I strongly believe every accusation of sexual assault must be investigated vigorously. There is nothing wrong with your police wanting to question Mr. Assange about these allegations, and while I understand why he seemed to go into hiding (people tend to do that when threatened with assassination), he nonetheless should answer the police’s questions. He should also submit to the STD testing the alleged victims have requested. I believe Sweden and the UK have a treaty and a means for you to send your investigators to London so they can question Mr. Assange where he is under house arrest while out on bail.

But that really wouldn’t be like you would it, to go all the way to another country to pursue a suspect for sexual assault when you can’t even bring yourselves to make it down to the street to your own courthouse to go after the scores of reported rapists in your country. That you, Sweden, have chosen to rarely do that in the past, is why this whole thing stinks to the high heavens.

And let’s not forget this one final point from Women Against Rape’s Katrin Axelsson:

“There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women’s safety. In the south of the US, the lynching of black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. Women don’t take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.”

This tactic of using a rape charge to go after minorities or troublemakers, guilty or innocent — while turning a blind eye to clear crimes of rape the rest of the time — is what I fear is happening here. I want to make sure that good people not remain silent and that you, Sweden, will not succeed if in fact you are in cahoots with corrupt governments such as ours.

Last week Naomi Klein wrote: “Rape is being used in the Assange prosecution in the same way that ‘women’s freedom’ was used to invade Afghanistan. Wake up!”

I agree.

Unless you have the evidence (and it seems if you did you would have issued an arrest warrant by now), drop the extradition attempt and get to work doing the job you’ve so far refused to do: Protecting the women of Sweden.

Yours,
Michael Moore

Wikileaks: A Big U.S. Government Con Job

Politics / US Politics
Dec 13, 2010 – 10:53 AM

The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to a gigantic cyber “leak,” unless the President leaves Julian Assange and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.

It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.

Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.

He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.

Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.

Not so secret cables…

The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.

Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document,[1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.[2]

Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.

But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, send dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.

Excuse to police the Internet?

What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.

The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.

The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?

Notes

1. BBCNews, Siprnet: Where the leaked cables came from, 29 November, 2010, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618

2. Ken Dilanian, Inside job: Stolen diplomatic cables show U.S. challenge of stopping authorized users, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2010, accessed in http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1130-hackers-20101129,0,6716809.story

U.S. Dollar Forecast 2011, Ways to Profit Despite the Greenback’s Expected Struggles

Currencies / US Dollar
Dec 13, 2010 – 11:07 AM

By Larry D. Spears writes: The U.S. dollar faces a long list of challenges in the New Year.

The U.S. greenback could strengthen in 2011-but only against the European euro and other currencies with heavy exposure to the European debt crisis, including the British pound sterling. Against virtually every other currency, however, the U.S. dollar is likely to be the loser.

In short, the outlook for the dollar in the New Year depends almost entirely on which currencies you’re comparing it with.

Euro Madness
Not surprisingly, the euro is in for a rough time.

In a just-released survey conducted by Bloomberg, the three currency strategists with the best track record over the last 18 months say that the worst is yet to come for the euro in relation to the dollar.

In fact, these strategists expect that the euro’s slide will continue into the middle part of next year – extending what’s already been the worst year for that currency since 2005.

Top-rated forecaster Standard Chartered Bank, which has operations in 70 countries around the world, predicted the euro could weaken to less than $1.20 by June, down from about $1.33 now. The No. 2- and No. 3-ranked analysts – Australia’s Westpac Banking Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC) – both said they were “bearish in the short term,” with Wells Fargo actually cutting its 2011 outlook for the euro on Dec. 3.

Gold and Silver Rise on Higher Chinese Inflation

Gold and Silver Rise on Higher Chinese Inflation
Commodities / Gold and Silver 2010
Dec 13, 2010 – 11:19 AM

WHOLESALE PHYSICAL GOLD hit a 3-session Dollar high in London on Monday morning, rising together with equity and commodity prices on what one trader called “relief” that Beijing did not hike Chinese interest rates as expected at the weekend.

The Euro also rose to its best level since Thursday vs. the Dollar, capping the gold price in Euros at Friday’s finish beneath €33,750 per kilo – its second-highest ever weekly finish.

Western government bonds extended their fall, driving yields higher across the board.

“The physical market is very good,” says Hong Kong head of dealing Peter Fung at Wing Fund Precious Metals.

“Bullion traders and some jewellers are buying, as well as some individual customers who prefer to sell currency and buy gold.

But “The potential for further tightening in China remains a risk,” says a Beijing commodities trader, speaking to Bloomberg.

That “could affect demand for commodities, and gold could be caught in a sell-off,” says Ong Yi Ling at Philip Futures in Singapore, speaking to Reuters.

Still following what the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog calls China’s “anything-but-rate-hikes strategy”, Beijing’s annual economic planning meeting closed Sunday with promises but no further action to stem inflation – now rising at a 28-month record of 5.1% per year.

The bulk of China’s massive household savings are currently kept in cash accounts, and bank-deposit interest rates are currently just 2.25%.

China’s private demand to buy gold rose by more than a fifth in the 12 months to end-Sept. according to data compiled for market-development group the World Gold Council.

“Consumer prices will be stable as long as ministries and regional authorities earnestly implement the central government’s measures,” says state statistician Sheng Laiyun, speaking to the official Xinhua news agency.

“Gold is rising along with other commodities as investors buy raw materials in anticipation of even higher prices,” reckons Liu Yangyi at Zhong Jing He Investment in Beijing.

“Chinese [traders] were actively buying gold and Japanese traders buying platinum overnight in Asia,” agrees a London dealer.

Tokyo gold futures contracts rose 0.5% overnight – coming within 1% of last week’s new 27-year highs – as the Japanese Yen also rose vs. the Dollar.

Silver prices extended Friday’s late rally, regaining half of last week’s near-9% drop at $29.47 per ounce.

“We see support [for silver prices] at $27.90 and the 4-month bull channel comes in at $26.51,” says the latest technical analysis from Scotia Mocatta.

“We suggest the [speculative] market will remain long while the trend line holds.”

“Compared with gold, the price of silver still has a long way to go,” reckons Ronald Leung, director of Lee Cheong Gold Dealers in Hong Kong, quoted by the Economic Times of India.

But “Gold will outperform silver,” believes technical analyst Stephanie Aymes at Societe Generale in London, after the cheaper metal hit a four-year high relative the gold price last week.

“The gold-silver ratio reached an important support at 47.5/46,” she says, forecasting a drop in silver’s relative price to “56 or 58” per ounce of gold.

Banking Sector Financial Crisis 2011, The Real Reason Why the Fed May Go For QE3

Shah Gilani writes: Ben Bernanke has a secret. And it’s a secret that very likely terrifies him and his policymaking brethren at the U.S. Federal Reserve.

That secret has to do with his latest round of “quantitative easing,” a liquidity-push known as “QE2.”

What Bernanke & Co. don’t want Americans to know is that painfully slow growth – or even a double-dip recession – isn’t their greatest fear. Bernanke’s greatest fear is that without this liquidity, one or more of the massive, already-bailed-out U.S. banks could stumble and once again undermine the global financial system.

And this time around, the outcome would be much, much uglier.

Raising Questions
If you think about it, the proof of what I’m saying is right in front of each of us. You just have to take a step back and look at it objectively.

Last Sunday, in an appearance on CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” Bernanke said he could raise interest rates in 15 minutes if inflation ever became a problem. Not to worry, there’s no sign of inflation, at least according to him.

Well, there’s no sign of deflation either, and thanks to Fed policies, interest rates are at historic lows. So why embark upon “Round Two” of quantitative easing (known as “QE2″) and state on one of the nation’s most-watched television news programs that additional rounds might follow?

I’m going to break the magician’s code and tell you what the trick is and how it works.

Financial Sleight of Hand
The “outward” trick the Fed is pulling off is adding massive liquidity to the U.S. banking system to tide the big banks over in case they face insolvency issues in the near future.

Remember, most of these big banks were in the “too-big-to-fail” category. That’s why back in 2008-09 they got all that bailout money: Given their size and influence, the worry was that should one or more of these fail, the whole financial system could come crashing down.

But here’s the problem. Since that time, many of those big banks have gotten bigger. And their risks have been steadily increasing: Many of them now face litigation, as well as the balance-sheet, credit and liquidity risks that could cause any one of them to fail – which could take the financial system down with them.

What the Fed is hiding under its cloak is the inside knowledge of:

•What the banks still have on their balance sheets in the way of so-called “toxic assets” – for starters, $2.4 trillion in mortgages and more than $1 trillion in mortgage-backed-securities.
•How the banks have been able to juggle accounting rules to make their books look better.
•How they’ve made their recent profitability look robust by moving loan-loss reserves back over into the revenue columns of their income statements – booking that as top-line growth.
•And the onslaught of litigation banks now face that could force them to mark down their assets at the same time that they will have to buy back tens of billions of dollars of non-performing mortgages they originated and securitized.
Banks are subject to “put-backs” or “buybacks” of the mortgages they place into securities if it can be proven that the quality of the mortgages weren’t what they were represented to be when the securities contracts were originated. That’s not hard to prove.

Regulators are very worried about the size of the put-back problem. In an attempt to assess the put-back risk faced by individual banks, the Fed has embarked on internal investigations.

When asked in recent testimony about the depth of the problem, Fed Governor Dan Tarullo, while not willing to quantify banks’ put-back risk, termed it “substantial.”

Put-back risk is one key reason the Fed will be conducting another round of stress tests on the country’s 19 biggest banks. Only this time they’re keeping the results to themselves.

That’s frightening.

But, that’s only the beginning.

Toxic Mess
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating the banks for their part in falsely – if not fraudulently – spreading their toxic financial Kool-Aid around to other institutions.

Hints that a settlement was in the works last week quickly got squashed. Besides costing the banks penalties in settling charges, by settling and admitting any kind of guilt, they would be subject to lawsuits for decades to come. And since the litigation costs and the damages themselves could reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars, banks would have to set aside capital and reserves against future liabilities.

Now that this cat is out of the bag, it’s doubtful that the SEC can let the banks off that easily.

•The bottom line here is that banks are facing years of possible litigation and massive potential losses – just as their revenue will be squeezed by the many reforms laid out in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Additionally, new Basel III international capital standards are being imposed on banks, which will mean changes in how they classify the risk profile of various assets over time and how much capital will have to be held in reserve. (A recent report in The Financial Times suggested that U.S. banks – related to Basel III alone – face a $100 billion shortfall.)

And while all this is happening, the U.S. Treasury Department sold its Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) stake for a tidy little profit (thanks to the Fed’s easy money-inflating equity prices) and banks are saying they’re planning on raising dividend payouts in 2011.

The Ultimate Objective
It’s a high-stakes poker game. The Fed is bluffing and the banks are playing their hands – and will be big beneficiaries if the central bank pulls this off.

Just this Tuesday, at the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) financial services conference in New York, Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan said the big bank has fixed its balance sheet and is planning to raise its dividend next year.

And, Wells Fargo’s CEO John Stumpf projected confidence about growing market share in 2011 and said the bank “was optimistic it can steal loan customers from community banks that are retrenching after overextending themselves before the downturn,” according to an American Banker story on the meeting.

That brings us to the trick behind the trick. What QE2 and any subsequent quantitative easing actions (as well as the original quantitative easing move that was worth $1.7 trillion) really does is create a direct liquidity lifeline into the big banks.

The big banks got to stuff themselves with liquidity to enhance their capital ratios and balance sheets. And when that money had no place to go (it wasn’t being lent out), it found its way into the stock and bond markets, giving them a very nice run.

But small U.S. community banks got nothing.

In fact, they got less than nothing.

Community banks got overly cautious regulators from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC). Those OCC and FDIC visits sucked the life out of the community banks because, after missing all the banking problems that led to the credit crisis in the first place, bank examiners are now erring on the other side of caution.

There’s no question that things are bad at community banks. But while big banks reap the benefits of the Fed’s direct triage efforts, community banks are being left for dead. That works out fine for the big U.S. banks. They want to grab market share, and can do so in a big way when these community workhorses are put out to pasture.

The difference between big banks and community banks comes down to economies of scale and size. Big banks want to serve big clients with big loans and capital markets services. They don’t want little-guy loans, they’re too small to be profitable relative to the allocation of resources.

Now, more than ever, that’s especially true. With all the problems inherent in the securitization market, big banks aren’t interested in small loans because they can’t package them into big loans and offload them to investors.

It’s going to be a long time before securitization of small loans from disparate originations makes sense again to investors.

Community banks could be facing planned extermination. Of course, the big banks will say that community banks did it to themselves. Without the necessary support to backstop their shaky balance sheets and with capital so difficult to raise because of their weak future prospects, community banks are in great jeopardy.

Since all real estate is “local” and job growth comes from small businesses, who better than community banks to take back the high ground of personal-relationship banking to serve local banking needs that can be better assessed by local bankers?

If we want to empower small businesses to take chances, they need a more-direct access to capital. Since that capital isn’t coming from the big banks, we better take another look at whom quantitative easing is benefiting and whom it is hurting.

If the Fed really wanted to shore up community banks, it could backstop most of the “local” commercial real estate and local commercial and industrial loans at community banks with less than $100 billion in assets.

That would give the community banks room to breathe and money to lend to local small business start-ups. Some of the 18 million unemployed folks in America could sure use that kind of backstopping.

If you couldn’t initially see the ultimate objective in the QE2 trick, you could be forgiven. But now you know. The fact is that banks are being made to look healthy by means of massive liquidity thrown at them. To foster that “illusion,” the U.S. Treasury is cutting them free, and the banks themselves are talking about a future bright with dividends and buyouts.

But they’re doing this without really knowing what their liabilities, capital requirements and future revenue will actually be.

And that says it all.

[Editor's Note: Shah Gilani, a retired hedge-fund manager and renowned financial-crisis expert, walks the walk. In a recent Money Morning exposé, Gilani warned that high-frequency traders (HFT) were artificially pumping up market-volume numbers, meaning stocks were extremely susceptible to a downdraft.

When that downdraft came, Gilani was ready - and so were subscribers to his new advisory service: The Capital Wave Forecast. The next morning, because of that market move, investors were up 186% on a short-term euro play, and more than 300% on a call-option play on the VIX volatility index.

Gilani shows investors the monster "capital waves" now forming, and carefully demonstrates how to profit from every one.

But he doesn't stop there. He's also the consummate risk manager. As the article above demonstrates, Gilani also makes sure to highlight the market pitfalls that can ruin years of careful investing and saving.

Take a moment to check out Gilani's capital-wave-investing strategy - and the profit opportunities that he's watching as a result. And take a look at some of his most-recent essays, which are available free of charge. Those essays can be accessed by clicking here.]

Phase Two Of Greater Depression II Begins Now

Phase Two Of Greater Depression II Begins Now

We all know what caused the 2008 banking crisis killing Lehman and others. It was reckless lending, too low interest rates, loosy-goosy credit for consumers and most of all, instigation of derivatives by greedy bankers hungry to make billions on the quick. Now that central banks have bailed them out of their insolvency and replenished minimum capital standards by stealing TARP funds from taxpayers, we find the next LARGER MESS looming on the horizon. Governments grasping for tax income will be grubbing, and taking all at a new furious pace. Consumers that are able will simply drop-out of the system and down-size.

If you thought Lehman was fun get ready to see new price controls and acceleration of existing capital controls, with inflation that will knock your socks off. We have at least two to five more years of crash and burn in the financial markets before a new base is found. Then, toxic trade policies and old grudges open the door to a new World War, which obviously no one can afford. This is simply historical fact and not any wild forecasting by me although some may consider me crazy.

COP 16, Cancun:Pablo Solon Responds to Secret U.S. Manipulation of Climate Talks Revealed in WikiLeaks Cable

 

Pablo Solon Responds to Secret U.S. Manipulation of Climate Talks Revealed in WikiLeaks Cable

December 6, 2010 in News, UN climate change negotiations

In an in depth interview with Democracy Now, Ambassador Pablo Solon shares:

• Bolivia’s perspective on wikileak revelations on US use of blackmail to secure support for Copenhagen Accord,
• the lack of progress so far in Cancun as Developed Countries try to reduce responsibilities and impose them instead on Developing Nations
• why Bolivia will not walk out on negotiations

Watch the clip on Democracy Now

President Morales speaking at COP16 in Cancun

December 9, 2010 in News, UN climate change negotiations

Some select quotes from President Evo Morales’ speech and press conference at the UN climate talks in Cancun today. You can watch the press conference at http://webcast.cc2010.mx/webmedia_en.html?id=248 and the speech (in Spanish) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVv3s4uST-k

On what the goal of the summit should be:

“Our aim here is to look at how to cool down planet Earth. Our planet has a high temperature, it is wounded, and we are witnessing the convulsions of planet Earth. We have an enormous responsibility toward life and humanity. … I call on leaders to take responsibility, and make history by responding to the demands of the people.”
 

On the experience of Bolivians of climate change:

“It causes me a lot of a pain as President to listen to my brothers and sisters talking about permanent droughts…  Without water, there is no production, and without production we lack food. It may be easy for us here in an air-conditioned room to continue with the policies of destruction of Mother Earth. We need instead to put ourselves in the shoes of families in Bolivia and worldwide that lack water and food and suffer misery and hunger. I feel that many delegates here have no idea what it is like to be a victim of climate change.”

On the need to tackle the causes of climate change:

“We talk about the effects and not the causes of the multiple crises we face: the climate crisis, the food crisis, the energy crisis. The climate crisis is one of the crises of capitalism. If we discuss and address these crises, we are are being responsible to our children, grandchildren and future generations.”

On the Kyoto Protocol:

“If, from here, we send the Kyoto Protocol to the rubbish bin we are responsible for ecocide and genocide because we will be sending many people to their deaths.”

On the consequences of an approach based on the Copenhagen Accord:

“According to the proposals from some powers, they are happy to put forward measures that would lead to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius and some think even of increases to 4 degrees. Imagine what our planet would look like with an increase in temperature of 2 degrees or 4 degrees, given that at 0.8 degrees we already have serious problems in the world.”

On the need to discuss the rights of nature:

“In past decades, the United Nations approved human rights, then civil rights, economic and political rights, and finally a few years ago indigenous rights. In this new century, it is time to debate and discuss rights of Mother Earth. These include the right to regenerate biocapacity, the right to life without contamination.”

On the need for new enforcement mechanisms to hold those responsible for climate change accountable:

“Laws must be complied with, which is why with much wisdom, the people have proposed creating an International Climate Justice Tribunal. We all know how important it is to create one to ensure compliance with the Kyoto Protocol.”

Against the use of carbon markets to prevent deforestation:

“We came to Cancun to save nature, forests, planet Earth. We are not here to convert nature into a commodity. We have not come here to revitalize capitalism with carbon markets.”

On the need for governments to respond to peoples’ demands:

“I am convinced that if presidents take on their responsibility, not to certain powers such as multinational companies, but instead to peoples and social movements, we can advance. Why don’t states here go to the Peoples’ Summit in Cancun, and listen to the concrete proposals of social movements who come here in representation of the victims of global warming? Why don’t we agree to a global referendum; take the historic decision of practicing global democracy, submitting ourselves to the demands of the people struggling against climate change and for life? If governments don’t act, it will be the people who will force their governments to act.

On Bolivia’s ‘radical’ position:

We are familiar with the slogan “Country or Death,” but it is better now to talk about “Planet or Death.” To try and look for an intermediary solution is to trick people. It is the major powers here that need to abandon their arrogance in the face of the peoples of the world. My experience as a social movement leader has been one of frequent attempts to isolate me by the major powers – something I am proud to do – but I will never isolate myself from the peoples.”

December 9, 2010
Cancun, Mexico

Countries Most Affected by Climate Change Make Final Appeal for an Ambitious Agreement in Cancun

 

Countries Most Affected by Climate Change Make Final Appeal for an Ambitious Agreement in CancunDecember 10, 2010 in UN climate change negotiations

PRESS RELEASE (Download PDF)

Cancun, Mexico (12/10/10) – As the final hours of the COP16 conference approached, representatives of countries most affected by climate change came together to make an appeal to developed countries “to do what is right” by fulfilling an ambitious second period of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and providing new and additional aid for climate adaptation and mitigation.

Bruno Sekoli, Chair of the Least Developed Countries Group (LDCs) said: “The situation for us is extremely desperate. Our countries are already fighting for survival. Tuvalu could be swept under the water at any time. It is very worrying to imagine what will happen ten years from now at the current rate of emissions.”

Sekoli stressed the importance of maintaining and extending the Kyoto Protocol: “We have a mechanism, the Kyoto Protocol, which was developed and invested in over a long time and which remains the only document on the table. We can improve it through amendments, but any effort to work against it is not available to the LDCs.”

Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, Chair of the African Group, said that 75 to 100 million people in Africa will face water shortages and that crop yields could fall by a third by 2025.

“I appeal to developed countries to do what’s right. They have shown us political, economic, even military leadership at times. It’s time for them to show climactic leadership by doing what’s right,” Mpanu said.

Mpanu stressed the importance of a binding agreement saying, “A new paradigm based on an accord that was only taken note of does not keep Africa safe. It is nothing more than a pledge club.” Appealing to Japan after its public refusal to make a second period of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, Mpanu said: “I understand Japan has a strong tradition of honor. They should not dishonor their commitment to Kyoto Protocol if honor is important to them.”

Pablo Solon, Ambassador to Bolivia and member of the Latin American ALBA group concluded: “Here we have the countries that will suffer most if there are no strong commitments to reduce emissions and global temperatures. Finance must be based on new and additional funds that can really go to the people that are suffering and the governments that have to respond on the ground to the serious impacts of climate change.”

“What’s decided in this conference today will impact especially those countries that are represented here. We call on developed countries to seriously consider the impact of their decisions,” Solon said.

COP 16, Cancun:Bolivia Decries Adoption of Copenhagen Accord II Without Consensus

 

December 11, 2010 in UN climate change negotiations | Leave a comment

Press Briefing (Download PDF)

December 11, 2010 (Cancun, Mexico) – The Plurinational State of Bolivia believes that the Cancun text is a hollow and false victory that was imposed without consensus, and its cost will be measured in human lives. History will judge harshly.

There is only one way to measure the success of a climate agreement, and that is based on whether or not it will effectively reduce emissions to prevent runaway climate change. This text clearly fails, as it could allow global temperatures to increase by more than 4 degrees, a level disastrous for humanity. Recent scientific reports show that 300,000 people already die each year from climate change-related disasters. This text threatens to increase the number of deaths annually to one million. This is something we can never accept.

Last year, everyone recognized that Copenhagen was a failure both in process and substance. Yet this year, a deliberate campaign to lower expectations and desperation for any agreement has led to one that in substance is little more than Copenhagen II.

A so-called victory for multilateralism is really a victory for the rich nations who bullied and cajoled other nations into accepting a deal on their terms. The richest nations offered us nothing new in terms of emission reductions or financing, and instead sought at every stage to backtrack on existing commitments, and include every loophole possible to reduce their obligation to act.

While developing nations – those that face the worst consequences of climate change – pleaded for ambition, we were instead offered the “realism” of empty gestures. Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change. When Bolivia said we did not agree with the text in the final hours of talks, we were overruled. An accord where only the powerful win is not a negotiation, it is an imposition.

Bolivia came to Cancun with concrete proposals that we believed would bring hope for the future. These proposals were agreed by 35,000 people in an historic World People’s Conference Cochabamba in April 2010. They seek just solutions to the climate crisis and address its root causes. In the year since Copenhagen, they were integrated into the negotiating text of the parties, and yet the Cancun text systematically excludes these voices. Bolivia cannot be convinced to abandon its principles or those of the peoples we represent. We will continue to struggle alongside affected communities worldwide until climate justice is achieved.

Bolivia has participated in these negotiations in good faith and the hope that we could achieve an effective climate deal. We were prepared to compromise on many things, except the lives of our people. Sadly, that is what the world’s richest nations expect us to do. Countries may try to isolate us for our position, but we come here in representation of the peoples and social movements who want real and effective action to protect the future of humanity and Mother Earth. We feel their support as our guide. History will be the judge of what has happened in Cancun.