Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 4:50 pm Posts: 3955 Location: Leaving Here
I've noticed threads regarding G8 and One and Africa getting closed.... are we forbidden to discuss that current political/social/economic situation, or are they all being consolidated into a single thread?
Post subject: Re: So, we're not allowed to G8 debate?
Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 7:43 pm
too drunk to moderate properly
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
cltaylor12 wrote:
I've noticed threads regarding G8 and One and Africa getting closed.... are we forbidden to discuss that current political/social/economic situation, or are they all being consolidated into a single thread?
Could someone let me know please?
c-
They both have links to other threads where the debate already exists.
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
cltaylor12 wrote:
Oh, okay, so which thread is "the" thread we should frequent?
c-
The G8 stuff got merged into the Global Warming thread. Go click on the locked One.org thread, I linked to related threads.
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:46 pm Posts: 9617 Location: Medford, Oregon Gender: Male
I don't see what G8 has to do with global warming. Anyway, G8 has agreed upon debt relief for some of Africa's poorest nations. A step in the right direction, I hope:
G8 Agrees to Debt Relief for Poor Nations
By ED JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 30 minutes ago
Finance ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized nations agreed Saturday to a historic deal canceling at least $40 billion worth of debt owed by the world's poorest nations.
Britain Treasury chief Gordon Brown said 18 countries, many in sub-Saharan Africa, will benefit immediately from the deal to scrap 100 percent of the debt they owe to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank.
As many as 20 other countries could be eligible if they meet strict targets for good governance and tackling corruption, leading to a total debt relief package of more than $55 billion.
"The G8 finance ministers have agreed to 100 percent debt cancellation for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries," Brown told a news conference in London.
Aid agencies and African nations welcomed the deal, saying it would save the 18 countries a total of $1.5 billion a year in debt repayments.
"We can expand health and education services with this relief," said Daudi Balali, the governor of Tanzania's central bank. "We will also be able to expand our infrastructure."
Finance ministers from the United States, Britain, Japan, Canada, Russia, Germany, Italy and France agreed to the package during a two-day summit in London.
"A real milestone has been reached," U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said. "President Bush's commitment to lift the crushing debt burden on the world's poorest countries has been achieved. This is an achievement of historic proportions."
Nations in sub-Saharan Africa alone owe some $68 billion to international bodies. Rich nations had long agreed the debt must be relieved, but the international community could not agree on a formula for tackling the problem.
The package agreed to Saturday was put forward by the United States and Britain following talks in Washington last week between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Britain originally wanted rich countries to assume the repayments for the poor countries but eventually agreed with the U.S. position that the debts be scrapped outright.
Bush also made a significant concession, agreeing that rich nations would provide extra money to the multilateral bodies to compensate for those assets being written off and would ensure that future aid packages would not be affected.
The United States will pay between $1.3 billion and $1.75 billion during the next 10 years to fund the debt relief package, while Britain will pay $700 million-$960 million, Brown said.
Germany would pay $848 million-$1.2 billion to offset future lost repayments to the World Bank and the African Development Bank, German officials said.
Brown said the write-off of debts owed to the IMF would be funded from existing IMF resources, appearing to rule out the sale or revaluation of IMF gold reserves to fund the debt relief.
The agreement will initially cover 18 nations eligible for debt relief under the HIPC initiative, including Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana and Mali.
Another nine countries are close to completing the targets for good governance set out under the initiative and would then qualify.
A total of 38 countries are participating in the HIPC program, launched by the World Bank and IMF in 1996.
"This is a great deal for people in many of the very poorest countries, it reflects well on (Britain's Treasury chief) Gordon Brown and (U.S. Treasury Secretary) John Snow and is a tribute to the growing global campaigns to beat poverty," said Jamie Drummond, executive director of DATA, the organization founded by U2 singer Bono.
"This bold step builds serious momentum for a historic breakthrough on doubling effective aid and trade justice at the G8 summit next month."
The Jubilee Debt Campaign called for further action and said at least 62 countries needed 100 percent of their debts canceled to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty, hunger and disease affecting billions of people by 2015.
Britain has made tackling poverty in Africa and the developing world a priority for its G8 presidency.
Blair's approach is three-pronged: increasing aid; eliminating debt; and removing export subsidies and other trade barriers that make it difficult for developing nations to compete.
Aid agencies say the G8 leaders must now focus on meeting Britain's target of boosting international development aid by $50 billion a year.
Some question whether agreement on that will be reached at the July 6-8 G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.
The United States and Japan both reject a British proposal to raise that money by selling bonds on the world capital markets — the International Finance Initiative.
Like the United States, Japan prefers its own bilateral aid programs, and France is pushing its own initiative — an international aviation tax.
_________________ Deep below the dunes I roved Past the rows, past the rows Beside the acacias freshly in bloom I sent men to their doom
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 4:01 am Posts: 19477 Location: Brooklyn NY
Probably the best thing that's happened all year, great news. Its too bad it all comes down to money and it seems to good to be believed. But I shouldn't complain.
_________________
LittleWing sometime in July 2007 wrote:
Unfortunately, it's so elementary, and the big time investors behind the drive in the stock market aren't so stupid. This isn't the false economy of 2000.
Gordon Brown has a new idea about how to "make poverty history" in time for the G-8 summit in Scotland. With Washington so far refusing to double its aid to Africa by 2015, the British Chancellor is appealing to the "richer oil-producing states" of the Middle East to fill the funding gap. "Oil wealth urged to save Africa," reads the headline in London's Observer.
Here is a better idea: Instead of Saudi Arabia's oil wealth being used to "save Africa," how about if Africa's oil wealth was used to save Africa--along with its gas, diamond, gold, platinum, chromium, ferroalloy and coal wealth?
With all this noblesse oblige focused on saving Africa from its misery, it seems like a good time to remember someone else who tried to make poverty history: Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was killed ten years ago this November by the Nigerian government, along with eight other Ogoni activists, sentenced to death by hanging. Their crime was daring to insist that Nigeria was not poor at all but rich, and that it was political decisions made in the interests of Western multinational corporations that kept its people in desperate poverty. Saro-Wiwa gave his life to the idea that the vast oil wealth of the Niger Delta must leave behind more than polluted rivers, charred farmland, rancid air and crumbling schools. He asked not for charity, pity or "relief" but for justice.
The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People demanded that Shell compensate the people from whose land it had pumped roughly $30 billion worth of oil since the 1950s. The company turned to the government for help, and the Nigerian military turned its guns on demonstrators. Before his state-ordered hanging, Saro-Wiwa told the tribunal, "I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial.... The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come."
Ten years later, 70 percent of Nigerians still live on less than $1 a day and Shell is still making superprofits. Equatorial Guinea, which has a major oil deal with ExxonMobil, "got to keep a mere 12 percent of the oil revenues in the first year of its contract," according to a 60 Minutes report--a share so low it would have been scandalous even at the height of colonial oil pillage.
This is what keeps Africa poor: not a lack of political will but the tremendous profitability of the current arrangement. Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place on earth, is also its most profitable investment destination: It offers, according to the World Bank's 2003 Global Development Finance report, "the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world." Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are so unspeakably rich.
The idea for which Saro-Wiwa died fighting--that the resources of the land should be used to benefit the people of that land--lies at the heart of every anticolonial struggle in history, from the Boston Tea Party to Iran's turfing of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan. This idea has been declared dead by the European Union's Constitution, by the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (which describes "free trade" not only as an economic policy but a "moral principle") and by countless trade agreements. And yet it simply refuses to die.
You can see it most clearly in the relentless protests that drove Bolivia's president, Carlos Mesa, to offer his resignation. A decade ago Bolivia was forced by the IMF to privatize its oil and gas industries on the promise that it would increase growth and spread prosperity. When that didn't work, the lenders demanded that Bolivia make up its budget shortfall by increasing taxes on the working poor. Bolivians had a better idea--take back the gas and use it for the benefit of the country. The debate now is over how much to take back. Evo Morales's Movement Toward Socialism favors taxing foreign profits by 50 percent. More radical indigenous groups, which have already seen their land stripped of its mineral wealth, want full nationalization and far more participation, what they call "nationalizing the government."
You can see it too in Iraq. On June 2 Laith Kubba, spokesman for the Iraqi prime minister, told journalists that the IMF had forced Iraq to increase the price of electricity and fuel in exchange for writing off past debts: "Iraq has $10 billions of debts, and I think we cannot avoid this." But days before, in Basra, a historic gathering of independent trade unionists, most of them with the General Union of Oil Employees, insisted that the government could avoid it. At Iraq's first antiprivatization conference, the delegates demanded that the government simply refuse to pay Saddam's "odious" debts and opposed any attempts to privatize state assets, including oil.
Neoliberalism, an ideology so powerful it tries to pass itself off as "modernity" while its maniacal true believers masquerade as disinterested technocrats, can no longer claim to be a consensus. It was decisively rejected by French voters when they said No to the EU Constitution, and you can see how hated it has become in Russia, where large majorities despise the profiteers of the disastrous 1990s privatizations and few mourned the recent sentencing of oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
All of this makes for interesting timing for the G-8 summit. Bob Geldof and the Make Poverty History crew have called for tens of thousands of people to go to Edinburgh and form a giant white band around the city center on July 2--a reference to the ubiquitous Make Poverty History bracelets.
But it seems a shame for a million people to travel all that way to be a giant bauble, a collective accessory to power. How about if, when all those people join hands, they declare themselves not a bracelet but a noose--a noose around the lethal economic policies that have already taken so many lives, for lack of medicine and clean water, for lack of justice.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
Quote:
U.S. Pressure Weakens G-8 Climate Plan Global-Warming Science Assailed
By Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 17, 2005; Page A01
Bush administration officials working behind the scenes have succeeded in weakening key sections of a proposal for joint action by the eight major industrialized nations to curb climate change.
Under U.S. pressure, negotiators in the past month have agreed to delete language that would detail how rising temperatures are affecting the globe, set ambitious targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions and set stricter environmental standards for World Bank-funded power projects, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Negotiators met this week in London to work out details of the document, which is slated to be adopted next month at the Group of Eight's annual meeting in Scotland.
The administration's push to alter the G-8's plan on global warming marks its latest effort to edit scientific or policy documents to accord with its position that mandatory carbon dioxide cuts are unnecessary. Under mounting international pressure to adopt stricter controls on heat-trapping gas emissions, Bush officials have consistently sought to modify U.S. government and international reports that would endorse a more aggressive approach to mitigating global warming.
Last week, the New York Times reported that a senior White House official had altered government documents to emphasize the uncertainties surrounding the science on global warming. That official, White House Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Phillip Cooney, left the administration last Friday to take a public relations job with oil giant Exxon Mobil, a leading opponent of mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
The wording of the international document, titled "Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development," will help determine what, if any, action the G-8 countries will take as a group to combat global warming. Every member nation except the United States has pledged to bring its greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by 2012 as part of the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- who currently heads the G-8 -- is trying to coax the United States into adopting stricter climate controls.
In preparation for the summit, negotiators are trying to work out the wording of statements on climate change and other issues that leaders of all eight nations are willing to endorse. The language is not final, but the documents show that a number of deletions have been made at U.S. insistence.
Although the new statement by G-8 leaders may not dramatically alter the other nations' policies on global warming, what it says could mark a shift for the United States. (The other G-8 members are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia.) U.S. officials pressed negotiators to drop sections of the report that highlight some problems tied to global warming, warn of more frequent droughts and floods, and commit a specific dollar amount to promoting carbon sequestration in developing countries.
One deleted section, for example, initially cited "increasingly compelling evidence of climate change, including rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures, retreating ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, and changes to ecosystems." It added: "Inertia in the climate system means that further warming is inevitable. Unless urgent action is taken, there will be a growing risk of adverse effects on economic development, human health and the natural environment, and of irreversible long-term changes to our climate and oceans."
Instead, U.S. negotiators substituted a sentence that reads, "Climate change is a serious long term challenge that has the potential to affect every part of the globe."
James L. Connaughton, who heads the Council on Environmental Quality, said the United States was in "extremely constructive discussions on preparing leadership text for the G-8 meeting" that would outline the world's climate change problem in a "succinct and strong" manner.
"It's very important to view [the deletions] in context," Connaughton said in an interview. "The overall context is one of strong consensus about a shared commitment to practical action, as well as defined management strategies."
But environmentalists and Democrats criticized the administration for trying to water down the international coalition's initiative.
"The administration is pursuing a dangerous 'ostrich' policy: put your head in the sand and pretend nothing's happening," Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said in an interview.
Some advocates are urging the seven other G-8 members to adopt their own global warming plan rather than accept a milder statement that they say would provide the Bush administration with political cover.
"The U.S. will just not budge," said Hans J.H. Verolme, director of the World Wildlife Fund's U.S. climate change program. "We'd rather not have a deal than have a deal that lets George Bush off the hook."
Bush's top science adviser, John Marburger, said he is "impatient and frustrated" with such charges, because the administration is seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through technological advances and other voluntary measures.
"From the beginning, this administration has acknowledged the Earth is getting warmer and we're going to have to take responsibility for our emissions," Marburger said. Critics claim the White House believes "climate change is not happening, which is not true."
Several officials involved in the negotiations said none of the document's wording is fixed, and it could change before the leaders adopt a final version for the summit. Connaughton emphasized that the administration's suggested changes address the threat of rising temperatures and offer several proposals to mitigate climate change as well as air pollution.
"We are looking for economy of expression in a leadership text," he said.
The controversy follows recent charges by several climate specialists that Bush appointees are exerting undue political influence on federal global warming documents.
Last week, Rick S. Piltz, a policy expert and former Democratic congressional aide who worked until March in the federal office coordinating climate change, released documents showing that Cooney, the White House official, had edited the office's documents to highlight higher temperature's benefits and uncertainties surrounding global warming. Before joining the administration, Cooney was an oil lobbyist.
In December, the administration issued new guidelines calling for federal officials to have final sign-off on a series of climate change assessment. Several experts objected that the requirement undermines their independence, and senior scientist Eric Sundquist of the U.S. Geological Survey resigned as lead author on one report in protest.
In a May 12 letter from his personal e-mail account, Sundquist said the new rules may make it difficult "to communicate the best independent scientific judgment to decision makers."
NOAA Deputy Administrator James R. Mahoney, who is overseeing the government's 21 periodic climate assessments, said these concerns were unfounded because the government will publish the full reports before political appointees have a chance to alter them.
Researcher Eddy Palanzo contributed to this report.
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
Quote:
Behind Debt Relief for Africa
Is debt cancellation western compassion or another way to implement neo-liberal policies? —By Grace Hanson, Utne.com June 23, 2005 Issue
With one decision, finance ministers from seven G8 countries changed the lives of 296 million people. In total, $40 billion in debt owed by 18, mostly African, countries was canceled.
The decision made at this month's G8 Summit requires the eight rich nations to pay $16.7 billion over the next 10 years and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to cover $6 billion from its "existing resources," The Christian Science Monitor reports. After 2008, the G8 nations are responsible for covering the full costs of the loans owed to the World Bank and the African Development Bank.
The move is huge for countries like Tanzania, where 12 percent of the annual budget is spent servicing debt, but questions remain about the intentions behind the decision.
One issue is the glaring absence of African hotspots Nigeria, Sudan, Congo, and Angola among those benefiting. These countries, deemed too corrupt for debt relief, play a huge role in regional destabilization.
As George Monbiot points out in The Guardian, the IMF and World Bank haven't shied away from lending money to political thugs in the past. The real corruption plaguing poor countries is the policies that place them in an economic straightjacket, leaving their public utilities and commodities ripe for the picking by multinational corporations. The conditions of debt cancellation look to be more of the same. In order to qualify, countries must tackle corruption, boost private-sector development and eliminate barriers to domestic and foreign investment.
Meanwhile, as many dissect the present and future implications of policies, Mediachannel.org is calling on the media to question and investigate the deeper underlying issues of disease, weapons trade, war, and colonialism that contribute to the current climate of African affairs.
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
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