Features

COP 19: TRUE CRIME

carbon

by Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice

This is crime at a level never before seen in human history. Star culprits include Chevron Texaco, Exxon/Mobil, and BP. Co-conspirators include your daily newspaper and evening news broadcasts. Hundreds of millions of people have shared the bounty of this ongoing depravity. Billions are now at risk of losing their homes, their livelihoods, and even their lives.

The latest chapter of this saga took place in Warsaw earlier this month at the "COP 19" global governmental meeting on climate change. The big news, and this is news, is that once again, nothing of substance happened.

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MORE MARKET, MORE DICTATORSHIP

China's Third Plenum Signals New 'Paramount Leader'
Tiananmen

from chinaworker.info

"More market, less freedom, and much more power to Xi Jinping"—this was the verdict of Beijing-based journalist Ola Wong, on the decisions of the recently concluded third plenary meeting of the CCP's 18th Central Committee. Third Plenum meetings have a special status in China's authoritarian system, because of the key 1978 meeting (11th Central Committee's Third Plenum), which sealed the triumph of Deng Xiaoping over Mao Zedong's designated heir Hua Guofeng and launched the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) onto the path of pro-capitalist "reform and opening." Expectations among the capitalists in China and globally have accordingly been high.

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URANIUM MINING AND NATIVE RESISTANCE

For the Uranium Exploration and Mining Accountability Act
Lakota

by Curtis Kline, Intercontinental Cry

Native Americans in the northern Great Plains have the highest cancer rates in the United States, particularly lung cancer. It's a problem that the United States government has woefully ignored, much the horror of the men and women who must carry the painful, life-threatening burden. The cancer rates started increasing drastically a few decades after uranium mining began on their territory. 

According to a report by Earthworks (PDF), "Mining not only exposes uranium to the atmosphere, where it becomes reactive, but releases other radioactive elements such as thorium and radium and toxic heavy metals including arsenic, selenium, mercury and cadmium. Exposure to these radioactive elements can cause lung cancer, skin cancer, bone cancer, leukemia, kidney damage and birth defects."

Today, in the northern great plains states of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, the memory of that uranium mining exists in the form of 2,885 abandoned open pit uranium mines. All of the abandoned mines can be found on land that is supposed to be for the absolute use of the Great Sioux Nation under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States.

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SYRIA: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

The Grassroots Civil Opposition Survives

by Leila Shrooms, Tahrir-ICN

The discourse on Syria has been dominated by discussions of militarization, Islamization, sectarianism and geopolitical concerns. Conversely there has been relatively little focus on Syria’s grass roots civil opposition. This has led to a lack of knowledge outside of Syria for activists who want to stand in solidarity with Syria’s revolutionaries but don’t know where to start. This article attempts to provide an introduction to some of the many civil resistance initiatives taking place on the ground and efforts at revolutionary self-organization. 

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BOLIVIA: THE POLITICS OF EXTRACTIVISM


Geopolítica de la Amazonía:
Poder hacendal-patrimonial y acumulación capitalista
by Alvaro García Linera
La Paz, Bolivia: Vicepresidencia del Estado, 2012

by Devin Beaulieu and Nancy Postero, Against the Current

Geopolítica de la Amazonía: Poder hacendal-patrimonial y acumulación capitalista (Geopolitics of the Amazon, Landed Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumulation, 2012) is the latest defense of the politics and policies of Evo Morales' leftist government by its premier intellectual, vice-president Alvaro García Linera. As the eloquent public spokesman for Morales' governing strategy since the election of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) in 2005, García Linera has made a name for himself in Latin American leftist thought and political theory.

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BURMA: OPEN FOR BUSINESS OF GENOCIDE

by Burkely Hermann, World War 4 Report

"It's not ethnic cleansing. The world needs to understand that the fear is not just on the side of the Muslims, but on the side of the Buddhists as well."

No high-ranking US State Department official spoke these words. It was Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, in an interview with BBC, dismissing credible claims of the genocide of Burma's Muslim Rohingya people, put forward by Genocide Watch, Foreign Policy in Focus, UN Dispatch, Der Spiegel writer Jürgen Kremb, the Kassandra Project, Ramzy Baroud of the Pakistani publication The Nation, and many others. Suu Kyi continued, saying that she condemns "any movement that is based on hatred and extremism," that "the reaction of Buddhists is also based on fear," that the government should deal with these extremists so it isn't her responsibility, and finally that "Burma now needs real change…a democratic society." These comments are deeply disturbing coming from someone given the Nobel prize in 1991 for "her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights." Some have even asked if she should be stripped of her Peace Prize for statements such as this one.

The struggle of the two stateless peoples in Burma—the Rohingya and Shan—and broader geopolitical issues such as the race for dirty energy tie into one central question: is Burma really open for the business of exploitation and genocide?

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GLOBAL WARMING AND THE END OF GROWTH

Earth
by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, World War 4 Report

Two landmark scientific reports on climate change have just been published. File them under "H" for "horror."

The first one is a digest of the most recent findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was formed in 1988 to advise the United Nations on all scientific information relevant to the implementation of the UN Climate Change Convention. The Panel periodically publishes a summary of the latest climate science for policymakers, which is subject to line-by-line approval by the 195 participating governments.

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INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE RECOVERY IN PERU

An Interview with Miryam Yataco
Miryam Yataco
by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today Media Network

Miryam Yataco—educator, language rights advocate and an expert in intercultural bilingual education—has been involved in crafting language recovery efforts for the Indigenous Parliamentary Group in the Peruvian Congress, and as a consultant to Peru's Vice-Ministry of Intercultural Affairs. The daughter of a Quechua-speaking mother originally from the Áncash region and a Spanish-speaking father of Quechua background from Ica region, she grew up in Lima, where her experiences with language discrimination shaped her life's work. She currently divides her time between Peru and New York. ICTMN spoke with her at her apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

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