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Door: Tadzio Mueller and Frieder Otto Wolf, turbulence

A Green New Deal is on everybody’s lips at the moment. Barack Obama has endorsed a very general version of it, the United Nations are keen, as are numerous Green parties around the world. In the words of the ‘Green New Deal Group’, an influential grouping of heterodox economists, Greens and debt-relief campaigners, such a ‘deal’ promises to solve the ‘triple crunch’ of energy, climate and economic crises. Frieder Otto Wolf, an eco-socialist and early member of the German Green Party, argues that the challenge for the global movements is to hijack the Green New Deal, rather than reject it. Tadzio Mueller, an editor of Turbulence, and involved in the Climate Justice Action network, begs to differ. He looks instead to an emerging movement for ‘climate justice’. Turbulence sat the two of them down for a chat, and kicked off the debate by suggesting that a Green New Deal might actually offer a weak looking global left a great opportunity.

Door: Juan Cole, Informed Comment Thursday, January 07, 2010

 
In the past three weeks, Iran observers have been baffled by the range of opinion appearing on the op-ed page of The New York Times concerning Iran, and the uneven reporting on that country. Before the holidays, Alan Kuperman, a political scientist at the University of Texas Austin, called for bombing Iran-- becoming the first respectable academic in the US to take a position usually associated with discredited angry Neoconservatives such as John Bolton. Kuperman's argument is wrong in almost every particular, and that the NYT editors published it was considered alarming by many Iranists. We all remember how the newspaper printed a long series of bald-faced lies and easily disproved fantasies about 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq in 2002, which certainly helped legitimate and pave the way for war on that country. We worried that the fix was in against Iran.

Op weg naar Kopenhagen:
Zondag begon ik naar Kopenhagen te liften. Dit heeft, naast veel buiten in de kou wachten, ontmoetingen met de volgende mensen opgeleverd:
-Een vrouw met 3 leuke, ongelofelijk eigenwijze en nieuwsgierige kinderen,.die onderweg waren naar een feestje.
-Een voormalige vrachtwagenchauffeur die nu aan het schilderen was geslagen en vanwege de winter 4 maanden vakantie had gekregen.
-Een Duitse lifter

Door Sarah Sexton/The Corner House Globalinfo

kleine actie in Kopenhagen aan de vooravond van de klimaattop ging ongemerkt aan de meeste berichtgeving voorbij. Een dertigtal actievoerders heeft een zaal bezet in een hotel in het centrum van Kopenhagen waar de Britse club Optimum Population Trust (OPT) een bijeenkomst wilde houden. De bijeenkomst moest daardoor afgelast worden. De OPT is een typisch voorbeeld van zo'n keurige anti-bevolkingsgroei-lobbygroep die door veel milieuorganisaties als informatiebron gebruikt wordt. Een van de prominente leden is de beroemde natuurdocumentairemaker David Attenborough. Doel van de OPT is om de wereldbevolking te halveren, want dat, hebben ze berekend, is het 'optimum'. Daarbij hebben ze ook bedacht dat er geen migranten meer toegelaten moeten worden tot Groot-Brittannië. Of zoals ze dat noemen: "environmentally unsustainable migration". In een verklaring feliciteren ze de Britse minister (van Immigratiezaken, toevallig daarvoor van Milieu) Woolas dat die nu eindelijk ook besloten heeft actiever bevolkingsbeleid te gaan voeren.

By Chris Mooney Discover

You won't find geoengineering on the official agenda at the climate summit in Copenhagen. But for anyone watching the trajectory of the climate change debate, the controversial notion of intentionally modifying the planet or its climate system to counteract the effects of global warming is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Attracting almost no attention, Russia may have already conducted the first-ever geoengineering field trial. And if the climate talks at Copenhagen fail, it could give geoengineering advocates the lucky break they've been waiting for.

By by Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?

Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

By
Faiz Shakir, The Progress Report

As delegates from countries across the globe gather at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, the world is waiting to see if international leaders will commit to the bold reductions in carbon emissions needed to curb the effects of global warming. One group of individuals who is doing everything it can to prevent progress is the climate change deniers -- a coalition of dirty energy-funded groups and their political allies on the far right.

Door: by Bill McKibben Tomdispatch.com

Most political arguments don’t really have a right and a wrong, no matter how passionately they’re argued. They’re about human preferences -- for more health care or lower taxes, for a war to secure some particular end or a peace that leaves some danger intact.  On occasion, there are clear-cut moral issues: the rights of minorities or women to a full share in public life, say; but usually even those of us most passionate about human affairs recognize that we’re on one side of a debate, that there are legitimate arguments to the contrary (endless deficits, coat-hanger abortions, a resurgent al-Qaeda). We need people taking strong positions to move issues forward, which is why I’m always ready to carry a placard or sign a petition, but most of us also realize that, sooner or later, we have to come to some sort of compromise.

Door: Peter Tom Jones en Vicky De Meyere uit Uitpers

Met nog minder dan zes weken te gaan vooraleer de ‘beslissende’ VN-klimaattop in Kopenhagen van start gaat, verdwijnt langzaamaan de hoop dat de wereld erin zal slagen een krachtdadig internationaal klimaatakkoord tot stand te brengen. Zo’n nieuw akkoord dient als opvolger voor het Kyoto-Akkoord dat in 2012 afloopt. Een succesvol akkoord vereist dat er op zijn minst op vier vlakken doorbraken worden geforceerd: verregaande emissiereductiedoelstellingen (mitigatie), adaptatiemaatregelen, technologieoverdracht en de financiering van dit alles.

Door: Jeremy Scahill uit The Nation

An elite division of Blackwater plans targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. And everyone's denying it.

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.