Hearing Mother Agnes

Mother Agnes in Her Own Words

by Sharmine Narwani - Mideast Shuffle

American national security journalist Jeremy Scahill and leftist British columnist Owen Jones announced recently that they would not share a platform with a Palestinian-Lebanese nun at the Stop The War Coalition’s November 30 UK conference.

Neither Scahill nor Jones provided any reason for their harsh “indictment” of Mother Agnes Mariam, who has worked tirelessly for the past few years on reconciliation in war-torn Syria, where she has lived for two decades.

The journalists – neither of whom have produced any notable body of work on Syria – appear to have followed the lead of a breed of Syria “activists” who have given us doozies like “Assad is about to fall,” “Assad has no support,” “the opposition is peaceful,” “the opposition is unarmed,” “this is a popular revolution,” “the revolution is not foreign-backed,” “there is no Al Qaeda in Syria,” “the dead are mostly civilians,” and other such gems.

For some of these activists, anything short of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s departure is no solution of any kind. Mother Agnes Mariam, whose Mussalaha (Reconciliation) movement inside Syria works specifically on mediation, dialogue and the promotion of non-violence, is unmoved by black-and-white solutions: Reconciliation, after all, is a series of political settlements forged on both local and national levels. There are only compromises there, not absolute gain. She doesn’t actually care who leads Syria and who wins or loses, providing the choice comes from a Syrian majority.

Yet the smear “Assad apologist” persists in following Mother Agnes on her visits to foreign capitals to gain support for Massalaha and its methods. It puts her at risk on the ground in Syria and inhibits her ability to open communications with those who would otherwise welcome the relief she brings.

When Scahill and Jones announced they would not share a platform with Mother Agnes at the STWC conference, she withdrew so as not to undermine the event’s anti-war unity objective. But instead of bringing this incident to a close, a maelstrom has erupted around the actions of the two journalists: “Who are they to pass judgement? Why would reporters seek to censor any voice?”

Award-winning British journalist and author Jonathan Cook perhaps put it best in his piece entitled “Bowing before the inquisitors on Syria”:

“Scahill and Jones have not done something principled or progressive here. They are trying to stay ‘onside’ with the corporate media, the main political parties and the Syria war-mongers. In short, they are looking out for their careers…They are looking to keep their credibility within a wider political system that, they otherwise seem to acknowledge, is deeply compromised and corrupt. In this episode, they are not chiefly worrying about countering moves towards an attack or saving Syrian lives, even while they claim this is exactly what their participation is about.”

Both journalists are outspoken against the censorship of information by the “establishment media” so it is particularly galling to see them succumb to the bullying narratives that have so dominated Syria coverage in the mainstream. In their own domain and area of expertise they don’t trust establishment voices, so why trust them in any other arena? This rather obvious contradiction has turned the tables on Scahill/Jones – if anything, generating interest in Mother Agnes and what she has to say.

Time to give her that platform back – no need for others to filter your information, you can judge for yourself below. And because so much of this debate has taken place on Twitter and the blogosphere, I invited “tweeps” from all sides of the Syrian divide to pose some questions too:

So without further ado, here is Mother Agnes Mariam, in her own words:

Did the Stop The War Coalition ask you to withdraw from their anti-war conference or did you choose to do so of your own volition?

I was invited to this conference, then I was informed about people that were against my coming and threatening to blow it up because of me. I preferred to immediately withdraw for the sake of this conference. Now, to tell you the truth I also have fear that this conference will not be useful, because these people attending are not applying non-violence principles. Non-violence principles means to be open to all adversaries. We can deal with people who don’t think like us. A non-violent approach is to dialogue precisely with people who are different. For a peace conference to begin like this, I felt like it is not a peace conference.

Have you ever heard of Jeremy Scahill and Owen Jones before this?

No, not at all. Who are they? Didn’t even notice who the people were. I heard about this from my organizer – that some people opposed even my presence. I understand everybody – I have been in dialogue with precisely the kind of people who opposed my presence. But it is the first time I hear their names, so no, I don’t know them. I’m not a person in the “scene.” (laughs)

What do you think of the attempt to censor views on Syria – and does your own experience this week have any correlation with how the mainstream media has covered Syria for almost three years?

You know, before working in reconciliation, I thought the so-called “democratic world” was really protecting freedom of expression and political choices. I am not involved with politics but they are ‘framing’ me; politicizing me. Am very shocked to learn that in this democratic world it is forbidden to think differently, talk differently and act differently from people who proclaim themselves as the ‘absolute reference’ for public opinion. This is a campaign of defamation. I am threatened by them: not by Jabhat al-Nusra, with whom I sometimes have good relations, or Al Qaeda – but by French media, by prominent leaders and CEOs of catholic NGOs, and by reporters. Am really astonished at how a reporter can become a prosecutor and a judge and can issue the sentence, and I am afraid that he can apply this sentence because today I see he works in total impunity.

Some media outlets and activists have accused you of brokering a civilian evacuation in rebel-held Moadamiya, only to hand them over to the Syrian authorities. What actually happened?

It was a purely humanitarian endeavor. Our (Mussalaha) team receives calls from all over Syria asking us to investigate people who have disappeared, to find out conditions for their release, to mediate on prisoner exchanges, to get food supplies to populations in need, how to transport humanitarian aid to hot areas, how to bring medical equipment to dangerous areas, how to arrange ceasefires, how to help violent opponents to shift to non-violence. We help to implement a non-violent spirit – we work with everybody, all sides, to do this.

This particular evacuation was requested by the civilian population itself in Mouadamiya. We have Mussalaha team members from Mouadamiya who are mediators. We were addressing the humanitarian issue in Moadamiya for many months before this, to try to make reconciliation from a violent opposition to a non-violent opposition. And when I saw photos of starving children on the Facebook – like in Biafra – I went to the Syrian Minister of Social Affairs Kinda al-Chammat to say this was not acceptable and that we should do something. Then we made contact with all the world health groups and international NGOs – we had talks with them to provide food. A caravan of more than 20 trucks was ready to enter Moadamiya, but it was forbidden to enter. It is difficult to say by who – I think it was from the army that was besieging this rebel stronghold, but also from the warlords that fix enormous prices to provide the entrance of food. Minister Chammat was really open to finding a solution, I said if they are not giving us the green light, I will go myself to take the 18 children who were under threat of dying. So we were entrusted to negotiate with the notables and the families in Moadamiya. Our mediators (also from Moadamiya) were surprised when whole families expressed the wish to be evacuated – because they are the families of the rebels, and to ask to be evacuated means they will be relying on the government. When we heard this we thought it was an easier and safer solution because if you bring in food but the violence continues, those civilians will be harmed anyway.

You know, under the Geneva Convention, it is illegal to transform a residential area into a battleground and if you do that you cannot keep civilians there like human shields. So the evacuation was motivated first by the desire of the families (not all, you know). The first project was to evacuate 100-200 women and children without any of their belongings, because there was a big fear that undisciplined members from either side would breach the ceasefire. It was delicate. Then on the very day, Minister Chammat, seeing hundreds of women and children arriving, told us “let as many who want to leave come out, because we cannot make discrimination,” so she made it open for that day. The government agreed to let us go alone; we were not escorted. All this was done in negotiations between the ministry and the governor of rural Damascus. Our responsibility was to bring the civilians to the barricade, but when we went there the rebels did not allow the women to proceed. I concluded, through contacts with the families that they were willing to come out, but we had to negotiate directly with the rebels. So I took a white flag into the area called no man’s land. I was followed by two of our mediators and by Sister Carmel – and it was heroic from her because she is a fearful person but she didn’t want me to go alone. There were tens of young rebel men, some armed, others not. And we were taken on a tour to see the destruction of the city and they asked us to come to the military council. (A video of Mother Agnes inside Moadamiya can be viewed here) They gave us security assurance. The commander arrived and they asked me to make a statement, which they recorded by video. But then we were detained, they wanted us to remain like ransom in exchange to let the women go out. We were hearing many noises and even gunfire while we were waiting. Then a real battle broke out – it was a big danger for everybody. We noticed that among them there was no unity, each would say their own thing. Finally, another leader came and agreed to the evacuation. Many of the leaders of fighters wanted their own families to leave. Others who don’t have families didn’t care. All we did was to answer a humanitarian request from rebel families.

In total, we evacuated 6,600 women and children – we have all their names, they are all registered. More than 200 are not registered because they left immediately with relatives. Also 650 young men came on their own to surrender. The army considered them as fighters. A few were badly wounded and they were taken to hospital. The (media) criticism was based on fake stories because the opposition (not the ones in Moadamiyada) do not want to accept the success of reconciliation based on mediation between the government and rebels. And because – after the success of the Moadamiya evacuation – ten other points in Syria have asked for the same mediation. Yesterday, for example, we had another evacuation – from Beit Sahm I believe – who were evacuated temporarily until the violence ceases. These critics said many were killed, abducted, raped when they came out of Moadamiya. Yes, there have been some errors and undisciplined acts. For instance, nine of the women were robbed. Volunteers from the ‘popular committees’ robbed their gold. We have done this evacuation in three separate days. On the first day we had 20 boys that were arrested, but we launched a campaign about this and they have been released. There are only two young boys now who are detained. We are still following up to secure them. The rebels with whom we have negotiated have entrusted us with their families, and they are the families of leaders and fighters, not just normal families. Until today, the two boys who disappeared after the Moadamiya evacuations are a problem for me and my credibility with the rebels. I am struggling with the authorities to find these boys right now.

The other major attack against you stems from a report you wrote about the aftermath of an alleged chemical weapons (CW) attack in Ghouta. You are accused of whitewashing the incident, blaming rebels for it and even charging children of “faking death.” How do you respond to these charges?

I have been accused of denying CW attacks, of protecting the Syrian regime and of accusing the rebels of launching those attacks. I have never said this. In the foreward of a study I did on this, I affirm: I am not an expert. I am not talking on a military basis, or a forensic or medical basis. I just questioned some videos. It started because I was asked by the parents – survivors of a terrible massacre in the Latakia mountains – to help find some children abducted with women after the massacre. Some had recognized their children in the pictures of the chemical attacks. They delegated me to look into this for them. I was tracking those children in the videos – without this task I would not have had any incentive to look at the videos. My work at the monastery was in iconography and restoration (preservation) – I am very used to using my eyes to look for tiny details. I noticed discrepancies in the videos. I came to look at them for one thing (the abducted children) and in the process I discovered these videos were fake. When I went to Geneva to the commissioners in the Human Rights Council, I told them about my findings in relation to the missing children and the videos, and they said they would be interested to have something written. I do not incriminate anybody in this study. I do not pretend to decide if there was a CW attack or not. There were discrepancies and I am simply asking questions. The study was done in a hurry – we even said it was a beta version. Now I am finalizing the study that will introduce even more evidence. Those videos – numbers 1, 6, 11, 13 among the 13 videos claimed by the US intelligence community as authenticated and verified to be presented to Congress as genuine evidence of CW attacks – are fake, staged and pre-fabricated. Nobody thus far is answering my charges – they are incriminating me without answering. My goal in this is to find the children; that’s my only goal. If they were used for staging, are they alive? Where are they now? If they are alive they must be returned to their families. If they are dead, we want to see their bodies to bury them so their parents can mourn them and we want to know how they were put to death and where. I am asking to see the graves where 1,466 alleged corpses are buried in Ghouta and to take from the pit samples to conduct an honest inquiry. Because I doubt that there is such a pit.

Question from Twitter user ‏‪@MortenHj‬: “Can she elaborate on how she conduct her talks between the warring sides? How do they acknowledge her; promise safety?”

Normally, we are called by the rebel sides who invite us for some settlements. Usually Syrian fighters either want to shift to non-violence, surrender and continue their lives, or they want us to mediate an exchange between abductees and detainees. We mediate among the responsible parties in government, like the ministry of justice and ministry of social affairs – it depends, since each case has its own context. We do it on a neutral basis – we are mediators, not part of the conflict. We want to ease the fate of civilians and we consider the fate of the Syrian rebels. We do not care about foreign fighters. Those foreign fighters are legally not allowed to enter or be in Syria. But we have special care for the Syrian fighters. We consider them as victims. A 17 or 18-year-old boy who is to be jailed, his mother is crying, what am I to do?

We talk via phone or Skype, sometimes we visit them as I did in many places. Sometimes the leader of a rebel group come to see me in a disguised way. Our (more detailed) talks are preferably face to face to build trust and transparency.

Sometimes you have rebels who request the release of their people who have been captured, others want to surrender – they don’t want anymore to participate in the armed struggle. Sometimes the liberal factions ask for help against the radical factions. I always say that between Syrians there is not a real wall. There is not a watertight impervious wall, so we receive many requests. We have had meetings with Jabhat al Nusra (JaN). When they are Syrians they can be flexible, when they are radical (foreigners) they will not talk to you, they will kill you. It’s like the Baggara tribe of around 3 million – they have relatives in Liwa al-Tawhid and JaN too. Half the tribe are loyalists, half are opposition. And this is a hope for the future. Everybody can talk to everybody. Once in Raqqa they put me on the phone with the emir because they wanted dialysis equipment for their hospital and so we mediated and the ministry of health sent 3 dialysis machines for the sake of the civilian population. I am always astonished how my people in the reconciliation committee know everybody.

Question from Twitter user @Kreasechan – What does she think should happen to those in command positions in the regime who have committed or commissioned war crimes and crimes against humanity?

I will tell you something. All this ‘apparatus of incriminations’ is politicized. If you can read between the lines of the report of the international Commission of Inquiry, you will see that the Syrian government has a hierarchy so it is easy to incriminate the government as a whole. But the rebels don’t have a hierarchy – you have 2,000 different battalions. Every time you see violence by rebels, large scale ones with hundreds of civilians now killed every week on a sectarian basis… If you study the more than 100,000 dead in Syria, you will be surprised to see that more than 45% of them are from the army and security forces. Then you have 35% of civilians among those dead, more than half of whom are killed by opposition. Then you have 15-20% of dead who are rebels. So it is not true to say the government is the only one perpetrating things against human rights. The Commission of Inquiry will have to work without political pressure to implement a good inquiry where everyone will be heard, because we are scandalized that light is shed on one side, but not on the other side. I know by saying this, they will incriminate me. But in reality, I am on side of the victims – I care that they will be heard. If you don’t hear from every side, these victims will continue to be under violence with impunity. We must ask accountability from everybody. Those incriminated by a fair, unbiased inquiry will have to pay their crimes, even those who have instigated and financed sectarian crimes.

Question from Twitter user @Paciffreepress – Do you love Assad, Mother Agnes?

I live in Syria and I have a burden on my shoulders for Syria. I believe beheading Syria from its government is a dangerous aggression when the UN still continues to consider the government of Assad to be the legal government. I rely on the UN position, which is the legal position. I consider that the dismantling of any State is a crime against humanity because it deprives the citizens of their citizenship and from their legality. They becomes pariahs. The Syrian people should decide through fair elections.

Question from Twitter user @r3sho – What is her opinion about Kurdish autonomy in Syria?

I am with the Syrian people – they will choose their own way, even if they want to make a federation or whatever. I am personally against the division of Syria, but federalism is up to the people. In my view, dividing a country is an aggression, but if the country decides to be a federation, it is a legal thing. They are free to do so.

Question from Twitter user ‏@broodmywarcraft: what does she have to say to those who call her a stooge for Assad?

I am a stooge only for peace, not for Assad. I am for peace through reconciliation. I am for dialogue and I am for discussing issues with everybody who wants to discuss peace. If any Syrian, on any side of this horrible conflict wishes to discus peace or work toward peace through reconciliation, I am ready to help.

Question from Twitter user ‏@bangpound: Does she still think the children were faking it in Ghouta?

They were not faking it. I never said that at all. I believe that they were either under anesthesia or that they were killed. But as the videos are fake, my terrible question is what were they doing with them?

Question from Twitter user ‏@Nouraltabbaa: If she is trying to perform a Mussalaha why is she meeting with Ali Kayyali and other militias but not the opposition fighters?

For some hard cases, I have to go beyond the civil administration to negotiate with the warlords. We go there officially as a reconciliation committee, accompanied by some Muslim clerics. I have to mediate with the opposition and the government and the popular committees. I have to mediate with everyone.

Question from Twitter user ‏@HRIMark: What effect is the campaign of defamation and threats against her having on her and her work?

It affects my life. I cannot go back to my monastery. I was saved by the Free Syrian Army (FSA). They informed me about orders to abduct and kill me by foreign parties. They helped me to go out from Qara and they protected our monastery and they have not, to this day, given me the green light to return. A lot of them were workers in our monastery.

Question from Twitter user ‏‪@Net_News_Global‬: Ask her, if she thinks, that there was, besides murderous propaganda, a real CW attack.

We have witnesses and ‘social sensors’ everywhere in Damascus. Until today we have received 88 claims of death in Moadamiya (from the August 21 attack).

We are told they were not killed because of sarin, that they were killed because of heavy shelling from the army and from suffocation from heavy shelling. The deceased were together in a shelter and they suffocated from this. Moadamiya people told us this. One of the reasons that I would like to see the graves is because 1,466 deaths is a real “social tsunami” in the Syrian society where everybody knows everybody and everybody is related. In the case of East Ghouta, we did not even have one case show up. We did not know of one single person who is dead. You know, to have relatives claiming this – the brother, the friend – nobody did. We did not have the “echo” of the death of 1,466 people. We are asking for a neutral inquiry with the presence of witnesses from both sides, where they will open the pits, see the victims, they will take samples randomly – where they took it, how they took it, etc. Samples should be sent to 5 labs under the same conditions and precautions. Until then there is a question mark on everything. I cannot say yes, I cannot say no.

Question from Twitter user ‏‪@tob_la‬: How would she describe her relationship with Syrian intelligence services?

There is no relationship. This is despite the wild allegations of some people who believe that the heads of the Syrian intelligence meet with me, a simple nun, on a daily basis. Do you believe that these people would spare such time?

I have no “relations” with such authorities. As mediators we have to deal with these people when necessary. And without my mediation task I don’t have anything to do with them.

Question from Twitter user ‏‪@MortenHj‬: What does she view as the biggest problem facing the refugees, especially children, with the approaching winter. How can anyone support?

This is a very big problem. We need warm clothes, blankets urgently. During my trip in the US – from California – they are sending me a container with a special kind of textile that is very warm. “Oakley” warm clothing. We can provide for the local diaspora or NGOs to come collect these things from anywhere in the world and send them in containers to Syria. We are trying to do a big push for winter now. We’re also getting some tents. I will be going back to the US where an NGO will be providing us with something that resembles tents, but is rectangular. We are planning to get thousands of these – one per family. You have whole neighborhoods that are destroyed. Instead of displacing residents outside their areas, I would like to return them to their home, even if it is destroyed, and put them on their land in a refurbished structure. Like this, slowly by slowly they can rebuild their homes.

Question by Twitter user ‏@edwardedark: Could you please ask her why the Vatican has not been more outspoken on the plight of Christians in Syria?

I don’t know – maybe because the Vatican and all of us we are in solidarity with all the civilian population in Syria and we don’t want to emphasize a sectarian dimension because we viewed this as artificial. Christians have shared the same fate as Muslims in Syria – everybody faced the same violence. Monsignor Mamberti and the Pope are finally expressing their sadness for the sectarian nature that the conflict is taking, I think because now there is too much targeting of Christians now in Maaloula, Sadad, Qara, Deir Atieh, Nabek and other places. Every day Christian buses, schools are being targeted. In Bab Touma, Bab Sharqi, Jaramana, Kasa’a, Malki…

Now the Vatican is talking. Mgr. Mamberti is saying loudly and clearly that The Holy See cares about unity, sovereignty, and the place of the minorities so they will not be isolated, cornered, or forgotten. The Holy Sea is promoting reconciliation, dialogue and a peaceful settlement of the crisis. They are against the arming of any side. They want more creativity for peace and not creativity for war. What I found outstanding about the Monsignor’s recent comments is that he said the Syrian people should isolate the foreigners, distance themselves and denounce them. This is a very clear statement against foreign intervention. Then he opened the issue of humanitarian aid and the dialogue between religions – interfaith dialogue. This is not the task of experts, but the task of everybody, the believers. So there is a real change in language from the Vatican. The Holy See is no longer shy about Syria – and to tell you the truth, it is time. What is left for the Christians in Syria otherwise?

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Getting to Know CSEC

Shocking revelations raise more questions about Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC)

by BCCLA

November 28, 2013

VANCOUVER, BC - Last night, Canadians learned more about the covert spying operations of Canada’s ultra secretive electronic spy agency, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). These revelations add to mounting concerns over CSEC’s unaccountable and unrestrained surveillance activities on Canadian soil.

Classified documents obtained by whistlerblower Edward Snowden show that CSEC coordinated with the National Security Agency (NSA) in espionage operations conducted by the U.S. during the 2010 G-8 and G-20 summits in Toronto.

“These new documents raise even more questions about CSEC’s unrestrained and unaccountable operations”, says Josh Paterson, Executive Director of the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA). “We now know that CSEC facilitated a widespread NSA surveillance operation in Canada. If CSEC requested the NSA to spy on Canadians as part of this operation, this would clearly be illegal.”

“Canadians are shocked to find out that Canada appears to have conspired with the NSA to set up an American spying headquarters during the G-8 and G-20 summits”, says BCCLA Policy Director Micheal Vonn. “These summits were a deeply shameful episode, during which we saw the largest mass arrests in Canadian history, secretly-granted new policing powers and a huge number of serious civil and human rights abuses ranging from assaults by police, to illegal and degrading body searches to denial of the right to counsel. To these already horrible events, we now add the evidence that Canada may have assisted a foreign spy agency to violate the rights of Canadians.”

The legality of two other aspects of CSEC’s operations was challenged by the BCCLA in a lawsuit filed last month. The BCCLA’s claim argues that CSEC has been secretly collecting Canadians’ private communications and metadata information in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protection against unreasonable search and seizure and infringes on free expression.

“Clearly, it is time to put on the brakes” says Caily DiPuma, legal counsel at the BCCLA. “We have a Canadian agency that is operating without any judicial oversight or Parliamentary accountability. In light of these new revelations, it is incumbent on the federal government to clarify what role CSEC had in surveillance during these summits.”

Killing a Bear: The End of Cheeky

Cheeky: The Killing of a Bear

by Ray Grigg - Shades of Green

Cheeky is dead. The five-year-old grizzly that Robert Johnson knew from his many visits to the Kwatna River estuary near Bella Bella is no longer a living part of the Great Bear Rainforest. The magnificent animal did not die because some biological imperative in the great design of wilderness placed a claim on this particular bear. It died because a hockey player wanted a trophy. So he shot it, removed it from existence in a gesture that seemed as meaningful as a goal, a penalty or an on-ice fight.

Clayton Stoner, the 28-year-old hockey defenseman for the Minnesota Wild who killed the bear, had the legal right to do so. “I applied for and received a grizzly bear hunting license through a British Columbia limited entry lottery last winter,” he explained, “and shot a grizzly bear with my license while hunting with my father, uncle and a friend in May. I love to hunt and fish and will continue to do so with my family and friends in British Columbia.”

Robert Johnson, a field technician with the Coastal Guardian Watchmen Network, experienced the bear differently. As his research group collected grizzly DNA for study and identification, the bear would walk through the high estuary grasses, often within 50 metres of them, “pop his head up, look at us, and stick his tongue out at us,” Johnson said. This playful curiosity and friendliness explains why they nicknamed him “Cheeky”. “We started talking to him, telling him what we were doing there. We got to know him quite well, to the point we could go in on our boat ... and get off and walk around in the area without having to worry about him.” (Larry Pynn, The Vancouver Sun, Sept. 4/13).

This “worry”, however, had another dimension. It was not what Cheeky might do to people — the researchers seemed to have reached an accord that the estuary could be peacefully shared — but what people might do to Cheeky. Johnson had advised Stoner and his group of hunters that the Coastal First Nations had declared a ban on the trophy hunting of bears at Kwatna, and asked that he respect this prohibition. Stoner apparently replied that he had a legal right to hunt and would do so.

The next day Johnson heard three sharp shots slice across the silence of the estuary. He wasn't witness to the actual shooting. Neither did he see the head, paws and skin being cut from the dead bear. But he did find the remainder of the corpse left to rot in the open field where Cheeky had been browsing. And, when he saw the brown hide being unloaded from the hunters' Zodiac, he immediately recognized “the colour, the size of him,” said Johnson. (A photograph and DNA samples later confirmed the identity of the dead bear.)

A bear, of course, cannot describe the experience of dying. As with all deaths, this is a private affair that happens to the exclusion of everyone else. The darkness and silence that follows ensures that the process remains a secret, a bond of inviolable mystery that never escapes from the inexplicable.

We all know, of course, that Cheeky died. And now we know how Cheeky died. But no one can really know the details, the precise process that a bear's consciousness might have experienced on that quiet May afternoon on a peaceful estuary of the Great Bear Rainforest. Clayton Stoner, the man who pulled the trigger of the rifle, wouldn't know — perhaps he wouldn't want to know because it might complicate his “love” of hunting. Robert Johnson wouldn't know either — perhaps we would prefer not to know because his familiarity with Cheeky would make the reality more painful. But imagination and compassion, the guiding voices of conscience and ethics, can risk a guess.

Cheeky's first sensation of being shot was probably an instant and searing pain followed by a sudden numbness as its body went into shock from the impact of the bullet. Maybe then a reflex of vague fear and a rush of protective struggle as the deep mechanisms of its brain attempted to right itself from the encroaching dizziness, to reconcile these alien sensations with the explosive crack heard and felt almost simultaneously. Then, perhaps, a brief rush of confusion, a bewildering sense of being lost, a pointless urge to run, an overwhelming and futile impulse to reclaim the order and tranquility of the moments before.

The second and third shots may not have been heard or felt. The dull shock of the bullets would have merely hastened the blurring of surroundings, the dimming of awareness, the twisting tumble into darkness, the final falling that would end without a landing. Perhaps Cheeky's last moments as a bear were a consuming blackness that disappeared into itself until not even the blackness remained.

Clayton Stoner returned to his charter boat with his trophy, lounged on the deck, balanced the severed head of the grizzly on his knee, and posed for a photograph. Robert Johnson returned to his research camp near the Kwatna estuary and wept.

Changes to Canada's Fisheries Act Throw Endangered Species to the Wolves*

Changes to Canada's fisheries law alarm biologists

by CCConserve

25 November 2013 

Revisions that take effect today remove protections for 80% of endangered freshwater species.

 

Changes to Canada's fisheries law have removed protection for key freshwater habitat.For Canada's fish, today marks a big departure from the status quo. Scores of freshwater species lose their protection under the country’s Fisheries Act as controversial changes made in 2012 take effect.

The law, enacted in 1868, is one of the country's oldest pieces of environmental legislation. It has long provided blanket protection for all fish and their habitat. The revised legislation now restricts protections to fish that are part of a commercial, recreational or aboriginal fishery, and only against “serious harm”. It also does away with a prohibition on "harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat".

As a result, 80% of Canada's 71 freshwater fish species currently at risk of extinction will lose the protection previously afforded to them under the Fisheries Act, according to an analysis published this month in the journal Fisheries1. 

Affected species include the Channel darter (Percina copelandi), Coastrange sculpin (Cottus aleuticus), Plains minnow (Hybognathus placitus) and Salish sucker (Catostomus catostomus). 

"It's pretty clear that, overall, our aquatic habitat protection has taken a big hit, and is now less protected than it would be in the US or Europe," says John Post, a fisheries biologist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada and an author of the study.

That the law removes protection for fish habitats strikes many biologists as especially short-sighted. 

"The one thing that fish need to persist is a safeguarding of the place they live, and that is no longer an explicit part of the fisheries act," says Eric Taylor, who studies fish evolution and conservation at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

A 1989 study of North American fish extinctions found that almost three-quarters of extinctions in a 100-year period were caused by habitat alteration2. Another study has shown that in Canada, habitat loss and degradation is the predominant threat faced by endangered freshwater fish3.

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The impacts of the changes to Canada’s policies may be magnified by the country’s demographics. Canada is sparsely populated, standing as the world's second-largest country by area with a population smaller than that of California's. Post and his co-author, biologist Jeffrey Hutchings of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, question what will happen to species in remote and unpopulated areas without fisheries. 

"The majority of fish in parts of Canada won't receive protection because there are many wilderness areas that have little or no fishing at all," Post says.

Meanwhile, the new Canadian policies could have downstream consequences for the United States, as roughly 300 lakes and 15 major transboundary water basins span the two countries' shared 8,891 kilometre border. Canada's fisheries law now leaves headwaters that are crucial to downstream water quality with fewer protections, as such areas normally lack fishing activity.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada addressed some of those concerns. The agency says that Canada's Species At Risk Act (SARA) offers habitat protection to fish. But Taylor says that it may not be enough, because SARA is designed for animals that are already in trouble, whereas the previous version of the Fisheries Act offered blanket protection for all fish habitats. 

“This change is going to create a gap now where things are only going to be protected when they're already in trouble,” Taylor adds. “It's going to cost us way more money in the long run."

It may be some time before the full impacts of the legal shift are apparent, as the law is tested in court and different judges weigh in on the policy’s application. Says Julie Abouchar, an environmental law specialist and partner at Willms & Shier in Toronto, Canada, “We don’t really know how this is going to unfold.” Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2013.14234
 

References
Hutchings, J. A. & Post, J. R. Fisheries 38, 497–501 (2013).

Miller, R. R., Williams, J. D. & Williams, J. E. Fisheries 14, 22–38 (1989).Show context
Dextrase, A. J. & Mandrak, N. E. Biol. Invasions 8, 13–24 (2006).

[*"Wolves" here is metaphor, and not meant to imply any negative connotations on the necessary and itself endangered animals. - ed]

Stealing Honduras Again

Alleged Voting Irregularities Mar Honduran Elections

by TRNN

Left leaning opposition Libre Party decries electoral fraud, refuses to recognize official results indicating win for ruling right wing National Party.

 

David Dougherty began working with The Real News Network in 2011, covering contemporary social movements and international relations in the Americas. Before joining the Real News team, he worked with Telesur TV in their Washington DC bureau. David is currently based in La Paz, Bolivia. 

What France Won't Do for Uranium - Nothing

France Makes Virtue out of Vice to Exploit Central Africa Chaos

by Finian Cunningham - Strategic Culture Foundation 

"Forcefulness seems to come easily to Mr Hollande abroad", noted one commentator for the New York Times, who contrasted the French president’s ailing political performance at home with his robust foreign policy.

Where Francois Hollande looks weak and beleaguered on the national stage, registering as the most unpopular French president ever, his fortunes seem to rise abroad with a strident interventionist foreign policy. We saw that in September when the French president unseated the British as America’s "special friend" by declaring his country’s readiness to join Washington in a military assault on Syria.

Elysée Palace may have subsequently regretted that particular gung-ho gambit after US President Barack Obama got cold feet and eventually backed away from military action in Syria, leaving Paris looking like a tin soldier.

Nevertheless, we saw in Hollande’s Syria stance a man who appears more decisive and confident when it comes to an overseas matter, compared with his evident puny appearance at home assailed on different political fronts.

This French activist tendency on foreign matters was on display again over the recent P5+1 nuclear negotiations with Iran. Hollande and his foreign minister Laurent Fabius appointed themselves as the "defenders of Israel" and indulged in taking a "tough stand" during the three rounds of talks in Geneva.

France’s old colonial stomping ground in Africa is also providing the Hollande government with a convenient counterfoil to domestic woes… The surprise military intervention in Mali last year benefited Hollande in the polls, with resurgence in French national pride from having successfully – superficially at least – defeated a secessionist Islamist movement in the West Africa country.

The French intervention in Mali with 3,000 troops may yet come back to haunt Hollande as the putative «defeat» of rebels in the northern part of the country seems far from complete, with French soldiers coming under a spate of recent attacks even in the supposedly safe Francophile southern capital, Bamako.

Also, France’s military intervention in Mali is placing thousands of French expatriate workers in several African countries at risk of kidnapping or reprisal killings as we saw with the murder of two journalists in the northern town of Kidal earlier this month.

However, the cost-benefit analysis from French intervention in Africa seems to be in Hollande’s favor – so far. The French leader has, up to now, gained more purposefulness and profile among his population and internationally by his foreign policy posture.

In this posture, Hollande is seen to be leading international interventions under the remit of humanitarian concern, restoring order in fractious states and defending French and even global security interests against assorted terrorist networks, particularly of the Islamist brand. Variations of this narrative have been invoked for recent French military action in Mali, Niger, Cameroon, Chad and Somalia.

Of course, this cynical maneuver of foreign forays has long been used by many other political leaders trying to elude domestic duress, including Hollande’s predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy when the latter intervened with French military in Cote D’Ivoire in 2010 and as part of the NATO regime-change operation in Libya during 2011 – the year before Hollande was elected.

This is the context for dramatic French claims last week that the Central African Republic is «on the verge of genocide». Hollande’s government is pushing for the United Nations Security Council to authorize a peacekeeping mission next month in that former French colony. Significantly, the mission being sought will involve French troops deployed along with an African Union force.

Speaking on the state of affairs in the CAR, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius told France 2 TV last week: "It's total disorder… we need to act quickly." He added: "You have seven surgeons for a population of five million, an infant mortality rate of 25 per cent in some areas, and 1.5 million people who have nothing, not even food, and armed gangs, bandits roaming around."

The security situation in the Central African Republic is indeed of international concern. Since the coup against President Francois Bozizé in March earlier this year, the country no longer appears to have a functioning central government outside of the capital, Bangui. The new self-declared president, Michel Djotodia, has reportedly lost control of the rebel factions of the Seleka movement that brought him to power. This has led to a climate of lawlessness with reports of killings, looting and other violations.

There is also renewed fighting between the rebel groups and remnant CAR forces loyal to the ousted president. Bozizé is reportedly living in exile in France.

However, the French government’s dire assessment and the ulterior motives behind it are questionable. Due to lack of communications in remote parts of CAR, the exact security conditions are not known or verifiable. Reported deaths from violent clashes in recent weeks are in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands, as the French government’s alarmism would portend.

Also when France’s Fabius was pressed on how many French soldiers would be dispatched to CAR under a UN peacekeeping operation, the foreign minister appeared to contradict his initial dramatic concern of "genocide". He said: "This intervention will be different from that in Mali», adding: "It will not be so massive nor as long [as in Mali]."

That is a curious anomaly in the official French rationale. Mali was reportedly threatened by a secessionist movement, whereupon France mounted Operation Serval with 3,000 troops in January 2013, backed up by helicopter gunships and state-of-the-art Rafale fighter jets.

Yet, in the Central African Republic, which Hollande’s government is claiming is in much greater danger of disintegration – «on the verge of genocide» – the French foreign minister says that 600-700 troops will be sent there – less than a quarter dispatched to Mali, and with no back-up from helicopters or fighter jets.

This contradiction suggests that Paris is playing disingenuous politics, and deliberately talking up a crisis in Central Africa.

For what reason, it may be asked? As mentioned, President Francois Hollande is finding foreign policy a welcome distraction and relief from angry French taxpayers, legions of unemployed, striking farmers and an ascendant far-right political wave that is galvanizing discontent over immigrants, poverty and general societal decay. In short, Hollande is on the political ropes and has been ever since his May 2012 election.

Where Hollande appears a pusillanimous figure at home, his government has salvaged some credibility with a muscular foreign policy.

We have seen this with regard to pugnacious French policy on Syria, Iran and Mali, among others, and now it would seem the Central African Republic is similarly being brought into play for what may be deemed implicit cynical reasons.

There are other boons for French intervention in CAR. For a start, by soliciting a UN Security Council mandate, the French get important political cover from accusations that they are acting as neo-imperialists. Also, the financial cost of any such involvement will probably be borne by the "international community" rather than by Paris. In other words, French intervention in Central Africa under the Socialist Hollande would be, appropriately it might be said, subsidized, under the auspices of the UN.

Such a move is a tad cheeky, given that many lucrative advantages would reward renewed French presence in its former colony. With a population of only 4.6 million (seven per cent of France’s), the CAR is hugely endowed with natural resources. Diamonds, gold, copper, oil, prime agricultural land, timber and virgin forests, as well as vast hydropower potential owing to two major rivers that flow north into Chad and southwards to the Congo.

Of strategic importance are abundant reserves of uranium – the primary nuclear fuel. These reserves have so far been largely untapped in the CAR. France, which is heavily dependent on nuclear power for its electricity generation, is reportedly setting up a major new mining plant in the CAR to process uranium ore.

The strategic value of uranium cannot be overstated as a vital national interest for France. This resource is common to other former French colonies in Africa, including Mali and Niger, where France has also been displaying much greater interventionist policies of late.

The cruel irony is that the CAR is one of the poorest countries in Africa, ranked in the bottom 10 out of some 55 nations. With its tiny population and profuse natural resources, the CAR should be one of the most developed. The truth is that, the CAR is wracked with appalling poverty and underdevelopment because of decades of relentless French exploitation of its resources and finances, first as a colony up to 1960, and subsequently as a pseudo-independent country dominated by the Paris-controlled Franc Afrique monetary system.

As with all former French colonies in Africa, the CAR is compelled under the Franc Afrique system to deposit its foreign-exchange earnings in the National Treasury in Paris. France permits itself to earn financial interest on these deposits and to lend the money back to African countries also at interest. It is no wonder that these countries have remained in abject poverty and underdevelopment nearly five decades after so-called independence, or as French foreign minister Fabius lamented in the case of the CAR that it only has «seven surgeons» for the entire population.

But the bitter irony runs even deeper. The CAR is described as a «failed state in permanent crisis». It has never known stable government because of incessant coups and counter-coups. French commandos have been involved in orchestrating some of these coup d’etats in the CAR, as in many other former French African colonies.

In 1979, France lost patience with its long-time tyrant and mass-murderer in the Central African Republic, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, and kicked him out. Again in 2003, French military intervened to install Francois Bozizé. Ten years later, the French puppet Bozizé was himself deposed by the Seleka rebels amid accusations of rampant corruption.

So, the undoubted instability, chaos and poverty afflicting the Central African Republic can be traced directly to the ongoing legacy of French colonial interference in the internal affairs of that country. Paradoxically, France now appears to be emphasizing the outward symptoms of its mischievous covert meddling in the CAR in order to justify even more French intervention – an intervention that has got little to do with assisting the long-suffering people of that country and lot more to do with securing French selfish strategic interests, as well as giving a political bail-out to beleaguered President Hollande and his floundering government.

As ever, as the case of the Central African Republic illustrates, impoverished Africa is performing the historic role assigned to it by French colonialism – propping up France and French politicians. The crying needs of African people – real independence and control of their resources – are a much-relegated concern.

© Strategic Culture Foundation 

Gaza Flood: Sewage and Conspiracies on the Near "Uninhabitable" Strip

The Plot Thickens: Gaza is Flooded with Sewage and Conspiracies

by Ramzy Baroud - PalestineChronicle.com

The latest punishment of Gaza may seem like another familiar plot to humiliate the strip to the satisfaction of Israel, Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, and the military-controlled Egyptian government. But something far more sinister is brewing.

This time, the collective punishment of Gaza arrives in the form of raw sewage that is flooding many neighborhoods across the impoverished and energy-chocked region of 360 km2 (139 sq mi) and 1.8 million inhabitants. Even before the latest crisis resulting from a severe shortage of electricity and diesel fuel that is usually smuggled through Egypt, Gaza was rendered gradually uninhabitable. A comprehensive UN report last year said that if no urgent action were taken, Gaza would be ‘unlivable’ by 2020. Since the report was issued in August 2012, the situation has grown much worse.

Over the years, especially since the tightening by Israel of the Gaza siege in 2007, the world has become accustomed to two realities: the ongoing multiparty scheme to weaken and defeat Hamas in Gaza, and Gaza’s astonishing ability to withstand the inhumane punishment of an ongoing siege, blockade and war.

Two infamous wars illustrate this idea: The first is Israel’s 22-day war of 2008-9 (killing over 1,400 Palestinians and wounding over 5,500 more) and the second is its more recent war of Nov 2012 - eight days of fighting that killed 167 Palestinians and six Israelis. In the second war, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president Mohammed Morsi was still in power. For the first time in many years, Egypt sided with Palestinians. Because of this and stiff Palestinian resistance in Gaza, the strip miraculously prevailed. Gaza celebrated its victory, and Israel remained somewhat at bay – while of course, mostly failing to honor its side of the Cairo-brokered agreement of easing Gaza’s economic hardship.

In relative terms, things seemed to be looking up for Gaza. The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt was largely opened, and both Egypt and the Hamas governments were in constant discussions regarding finding a sustainable economic solution to Gaza’s many woes. But the ousting by General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi of President Morsi on July 3 changed all of that. The Egyptian military cracked down with vengeance by shutting down the border crossing and destroying 90-95 percent of all tunnels, which served as Gaza’s main lifeline and allowed it to withstand the Israeli siege.

Hopes were shattered quickly, and Gaza’s situation worsened like never before. Naturally, Cairo found in Ramallah a willing ally who never ceased colluding with Israel in order to ensure that their Hamas rivals were punished, along with the population of the strip.

Citing Gaza officials, the New York Times reported on Nov 21 that 13 sewerage stations in the Gaza Strip have either overflowed or are close to overflowing, and 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage find their way to the Mediterranean Sea on a daily basis. “The sanitation department may soon no longer be able to pump drinking water to Gaza homes,” it reported.

Farid Ashour, the Director of sanitation at the Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utilities, told the times that the situation is ‘disastrous’. “We haven’t faced a situation as dangerous as this time,” he said. But the situation doesn’t have to be as dangerous or disastrous as it currently is. It has in fact been engineered to be that way.

Gaza’s only power plant has been a top priority target for Israeli warplanes for years. In 2006 it was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, to be opened a year later, only to be destroyed again. And although it was barely at full capacity when it operated last, it continued to supply Gaza with 30 percent of its electricity needs of 400 megawatts. 120 megawatts came through Israel, and nearly 30 megawatts came through Egypt. The total fell short from Gaza’s basic needs, but somehow Gaza subsisted. Following the ousting of Morsi and the Egyptian military crackdown, the shortage now stands at 65 percent of the total.

In an interview with the UN humanitarian news agency, IRIN, James W. Rawley, the humanitarian coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, depicted a disturbing scene in which the impact of the crisis has reached “all essential services, including hospitals, clinics, sewage and water pumping stations.”

Israelis on the other hand, have been doing just fine since the last military encounter with Hamas. “The past year was a great one,” the Economist quoted the commander of Israel’s division that ‘watches’ Gaza, Brigadier Michael Edelstein. Due to the massive drop in the number of rockets fired from Gaza in retaliation to Israeli attacks and continued siege (50 rockets this year, compared to 1500 last year), “children in Israel’s border towns can sleep in their beds, not in shelters, and no longer go to school in armored buses,” according to the Economist on Nov 16.

“But Israel’s reciprocal promise to help revive Gaza’s economy has not been kept,” it reported. Israel has done everything it its power to keep Gaza in a crisis mode, from denying the strip solar panels so that they may generate their own electricity to blocking Gaza exports. “In the meantime, Gaza is rotting away.”

Desperate to find immediate remedies, Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh issued new calls to Mahmoud Abbas for a unity government. “Let's have one government, one parliament and one president," Haniyeh said in a recent speech, as quoted by Reuters. A Fatah spokesman, Ahmed Assaf, dismissed the call for it “included nothing new.” Meanwhile, the PA decided to end its subsidy on any fuel shipped to Gaza via Israel, increasing the price to $1.62 per liter from 79 cents. According to Ihab Bessisso of the PA, the decision to rescind Gaza’s tax exemption on fuel was taken because sending cheap fuel to Gaza “was unfair to West Bank residents,” according to the times.

But fairness has little to with it. Reports by the Economist, Al Monitor and other media speak of Egyptian efforts to reintroduce Gaza’s former security chief and Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan to speed-up the anticipated collapse of the Hamas government. Al Monitor reported on Nov 21 that Dahlan, a notorious Fatah commander who was defeated by Hamas in 2007 because of, among other reasons, his close ties with Israeli intelligence, had met with General al-Sisi in Cairo. Evidently, the purpose is to oust Hamas out in the Gaza Strip. But the question is how? Some “suggest that a Palestinian brigade mustered in al-Arish could march on Gaza and, with Egyptian support, defeat the broad array of Hamas forces created in the last decade.”

With Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood out of the picture, at least for now, Gaza is more vulnerable than ever. Some of Abbas’s supporters and certainly Dahlan’s may believe that the moment to defeat their brethren in Gaza is now.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is a media consultant, an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is: My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press).

Wall Street Gunning for Renters: The New Housing Racket

The Empire Strikes Back: How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick Scheme -- Again

by Laura Gottesdiener  - TomDispatch

You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation’s impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is brewing.

Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown.

Wall Street’s foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution: It’s going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, it’s devised a new form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow up -- again.
 

TomDispatch: Laura Gottesdiener, Wall Street's Rental Empire

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Our next piece will be posted on Sunday evening, December 1st. Happy Thanksgiving! Tom]

“One shitty deal.” “Shitty deal.” “Shitty.” The date was April 27, 2010, and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) was pissed as he launched into a rant with those pungent quotes in it. As part of a Senate subcommittee investigation into the causes of the financial meltdown, Levin was grilling Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and several other current and former Goldman higher-ups about their roles in that crisis and in particular the exotic, opaque investment deals they had created and peddled.

What had Levin steaming mad were internal emails revealing that, on the cusp of the financial crisis, Goldman staffers knew that they were selling crummy investments. Levin’s tirade was inspired by an email in which a Goldman staffer describes a product he’s selling as “one shitty deal.” That, of course, did not stop Goldman from selling such products. Not only that, but the firm's traders later bet against those deals to make even more money! Contempt, thy name is Goldman.

At the heart of that April 2010 hearing, and at the heart of the financial crisis itself, were countless “shitty deals” in the form of so-called mortgage-backed securities. Remember those? It’s been a few years, so here’s a quick refresher. Wall Street firms like Goldman cooked up an idea to bundle together thousands of home mortgages -- loans made to people from Fresno to Lubbock to Kalamazoo to Baltimore -- and sell them to investors. Goldman profited off their sale and, as long as those homeowners made their mortgage payments, investors enjoyed a constant income stream.

But as we now know, many of those home loans were filled with tricks and trap-doors and, in some cases, were made to people who simply couldn’t afford them. First gradually, and later in cascades, millions of people stopped paying their mortgages, which meant that those mortgage-backed securities went sour. The losses were historic, plunging the U.S. economy into what we now call the Great Recession.

Five years later, the fallout from that mortgage-fueled meltdown and the bailing out of many of the financial institutions that profited from them is far from over. However belatedly, the feds continue to investigate the nation’s biggest banks for having sold shoddy mortgage-backed securities. On November 15th, JP Morgan Chase, one of the nation’s largest banks, agreed to a $4.5 billion settlement with 21 institutional investors who claimed they were wrongly sold bad mortgage-backed securities. Days later, the Justice Department announced a $13 billion settlement with JP Morgan -- "the largest settlement with a single entity in American history" -- for wrongdoing related to the packaging, marketing, and selling of those securities.

But as Laura Gottesdiener writes today, you can’t keep a bailed-out industry down. Wall Street and its masters of the universe are at it again. They’ve devised a new way to profit off the housing market -- and this time it has nothing to do with risky mortgages. Now, Wall Street is securitizing something else: your rent check. Andy Kroll 

 

The Empire Strikes Back: How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick Scheme -- Again

by Laura Gottesdiener

 

Since the buying frenzy began, no company has picked up more houses than the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. Using a subsidiary company, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions, through local brokers, and in bulk purchases directly from banks the same way a regular person might stock up on toilet paper from Costco.

In one move, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. As of November, Blackstone had spent $7.5 billion to buy 40,000 mostly foreclosed houses across the country. That’s a spending rate of $100 million a week since October 2012. It recently announced plans to take the business international, beginning in foreclosure-ravaged Spain.

Few outside the finance industry have heard of Blackstone. Yet today, it’s the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation -- and of a whole lot of other things, too. It owns part or all of the Hilton Hotel chain, Southern Cross Healthcare, Houghton Mifflin publishing house, the Weather Channel, Sea World, the arts and crafts chain Michael’s, Orangina, and dozens of other companies.

Blackstone manages more than $210 billion in assets, according to its 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission annual filing. It’s also a public company with a list of institutional owners that reads like a who’s who of companies recently implicated in lawsuits over the mortgage crisis, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and of course JP Morgan Chase, which just settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice over its risky and often illegal mortgage practices, agreeing to pay an unprecedented $13 billion fine.

In other words, if Blackstone makes money by capitalizing on the housing crisis, all these other Wall Street banks -- generally regarded as the main culprits in creating the conditions that led to the foreclosure crisis in the first place -- make money too.

An All-Cash Goliath

In neighborhoods across the country, many residents didn’t have to know what Blackstone was to realize that things were going seriously wrong.

Last year, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something strange happening. Home prices were rising. And they were rising fast -- up 20% between October 2012 and the same month this year. In a normal market, rising home prices would mean increased demand from homebuyers. But here was the unnerving thing: the homeownership rate was dropping, the first sign for Alston that the market was somehow out of whack.

The second sign was the buyers themselves.

Click here to see a larger version

 

About 5% of Blackstone's properties, approximately 2,000 houses, are located in the Charlotte metro area. Of those, just under 1,000 (pictured above) are in Mecklenberg County, the city's center. (Map by Anthony Giancatarino, research by Symone New.)

“I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn’t for lack of trying,” says Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of residents are African American and Hispanic. Instead, all his buyers -- every last one of them -- were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.

Between 2005 and 2009, the mortgage crisis, fueled by racially discriminatory lending practices, destroyed 53% of African American wealth and 66% of Hispanic wealth, figures that stagger the imagination. As a result, it’s safe to say that few blacks or Hispanics today are buying homes outright, in cash. Blackstone, on the other hand, doesn’t have a problem fronting the money, given its $3.6 billion credit line arranged by Deutsche Bank. This money has allowed it to outbid families who have to secure traditional financing. It’s also paved the way for the company to purchase a lot of homes very quickly, shocking local markets and driving prices up in a way that pushes even more families out of the game.

“You can’t compete with a company that’s betting on speculative future value when they’re playing with cash,” says Alston. “It’s almost like they planned this.”

In hindsight, it’s clear that the Great Recession fueled a terrific wealth and asset transfer away from ordinary Americans and to financial institutions. During that crisis, Americans lost trillions of dollars of household wealth when housing prices crashed, while banks seized about five million homes. But what’s just beginning to emerge is how, as in the recession years, the recovery itself continues to drive the process of transferring wealth and power from the bottom to the top.

From 2009-2012, the top 1% of Americans captured 95% of income gains. Now, as the housing market rebounds, billions of dollars in recovered housing wealth are flowing straight to Wall Street instead of to families and communities. Since spring 2012, just at the time when Blackstone began buying foreclosed homes in bulk, an estimated $88 billion of housing wealth accumulation has gone straight to banks or institutional investors as a result of their residential property holdings, according to an analysis by TomDispatch. And it’s a number that’s likely to just keep growing.

“Institutional investors are siphoning the wealth and the ability for wealth accumulation out of underserved communities,” says Henry Wade, founder of the Arizona Association of Real Estate Brokers.

But buying homes cheap and then waiting for them to appreciate in value isn’t the only way Blackstone is making money on this deal. It wants your rental payment, too.

Securitizing Rentals

Wall Street’s rental empire is entirely new. The single-family rental industry used to be the bailiwick of small-time mom-and-pop operations. But what makes this moment unprecedented is the financial alchemy that Blackstone added. In November, after many months of hype, Blackstone released history’s first rated bond backed by securitized rental payments. And once investors tripped over themselves in a rush to get it, Blackstone’s competitors announced that they, too, would develop similar securities as soon as possible.

Depending on whom you ask, the idea of bundling rental payments and selling them off to investors is either a natural evolution of the finance industry or a fire-breathing chimera.

“This is a new frontier,” comments Ted Weinstein, a consultant in the real-estate-owned homes industry for 30 years. “It’s something I never really would have dreamt of.”

However, to anyone who went through the 2008 mortgage-backed-security crisis, this new territory will sound strangely familiar.

"It's just like a residential mortgage-backed security," said one hedge-fund investor whose company does business with Blackstone. When asked why the public should expect these securities to be safe, given the fact that risky mortgage-backed securities caused the 2008 collapse, he responded, “Trust me.”

For Blackstone, at least, the logic is simple. The company wants money upfront to purchase more cheap, foreclosed homes before prices rise. So it’s joined forces with JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank to bundle the rental payments of 3,207 single-family houses and sell this bond to investors with mortgages on the underlying houses offered as collateral. This is, of course, just a test case for what could become a whole new industry of rental-backed securities.

Many major Wall Street banks are involved in the deal, according to a copy of the private pitch documents Blackstone sent to potential investors on October 31st, which was reviewed by TomDispatch. Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse are helping market the bond. Wells Fargo is the certificate administrator. Midland Loan Services, a subsidiary of PNC Bank, is the loan servicer. (By the way, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and PNC Bank are all members of another clique: the list of banks foreclosing on the most families in 2013.)

According to interviews with economists, industry insiders, and housing activists, people are more or less holding their collective breath, hoping that what looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck won’t crash the economy the same way the last flock of ducks did.

“You kind of just hope they know what they’re doing,” says Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “That they have provisions for turnover and vacancies. But have they done that? Have they taken the appropriate care? I certainly wouldn’t count on it.” The cash flow analysis in the documents sent to investors assumes that 95% of these homes will be rented at all times, at an average monthly rent of $1,312. It’s an occupancy rate that real estate professionals describe as ambitious.

There’s one significant way, however, in which this kind of security differs from its mortgage-backed counterpart. When banks repossess mortgaged homes as collateral, there is at least the assumption (often incorrect due to botched or falsified paperwork from the banks) that the homeowner has, indeed, defaulted on her mortgage. In this case, however, if a single home-rental bond blows up, thousands of families could be evicted, whether or not they ever missed a single rental payment.

“We could well end up in that situation where you get a lot of people getting evicted... not because the tenants have fallen behind but because the landlords have fallen behind,” says Baker.

Bugs in Blackstone’s Housing Dreams

Whether these new securities are safe may boil down to the simple question of whether Blackstone proves to be a good property manager. Decent management practices will ensure high occupancy rates, predictable turnover, and increased investor confidence. Bad management will create complaints, investigations, and vacancies, all of which will increase the likelihood that Blackstone won’t have the cash flow to pay investors back.

If you ask CaDonna Porter, a tenant in one of Blackstone's Invitation Homes properties in a suburb outside Atlanta, property management is exactly the skill that Blackstone lacks. “If I could shorten my lease -- I signed a two-year lease -- I definitely would,” says Porter.

The cockroaches and fat water bugs were the first problem in the Invitation Homes rental that she and her children moved into in September. Porter repeatedly filed online maintenance requests that were canceled without anyone coming to investigate the infestation. She called the company’s repairs hotline. No one answered.

The second problem arrived in an email with the subject line marked “URGENT.” Invitation Homes had failed to withdraw part of Porter’s November payment from her bank account, prompting the company to demand that she deliver the remaining payment in person, via certified funds, by five p.m. the following day or incur “the additional legal fee of $200 and dispossessory,” according to email correspondences reviewed by TomDispatch.

Porter took off from work to deliver the money order in person, only to receive an email saying that the payment had been rejected because it didn’t include the $200 late fee and an additional $75 insufficient funds fee. What followed were a maddening string of emails that recall the fraught and often fraudulent interactions between homeowners and mortgage-servicing companies. Invitation Homes repeatedly threatened to file for eviction unless Porter paid various penalty fees. She repeatedly asked the company to simply accept her month’s payment and leave her alone.

“I felt really harassed. I felt it was very unjust,” says Porter. She ultimately wrote that she would seek legal counsel, which caused Invitation Homes to immediately agree to accept the payment as “a one-time courtesy.”

Porter is still frustrated by the experience -- and by the continued presence of the cockroaches. (“I put in another request today about the bugs, which will probably be canceled again.”)

A recent Huffington Post investigation and dozens of online reviews written by Invitation Homes tenants echo Porter’s frustrations. Many said maintenance requests went unanswered, while others complained that their spiffed-up houses actually had underlying structural issues.

There’s also at least one documented case of Blackstone moving into murkier legal territory. This fall, the Orlando, Florida, branch of Invitation Homes appeared to mail forged eviction notices to a homeowner named Francisco Molina, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Delivered in letter-sized manila envelopes, the fake notices claimed that an eviction had been filed against Molina in court, although the city confirmed otherwise. The kicker is that Invitation Homes didn’t even have the right to evict Molina, legally or otherwise. Blackstone’s purchase of the house had been reversed months earlier, but the company had lost track of that information.

The Great Recession of 2016?

These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone’s underlying business model. Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the month every month, or you’re out.

Although Blackstone has issued only one rental-payment security so far, it already seems to be putting this strict protocol into place. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, the company has filed eviction proceedings against a full 10% of its renters, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer.

Click here to see a larger version

 

About 9% of Blackstone’s properties, approximately 3,600 houses, are located in the Phoenix metro area. Most are in low- to middle-income neighborhoods. (Map by Anthony Giancatarino, research by Jose Taveras.)

Forty thousand homes add up to only a small percentage of the total national housing stock. Yet in the cities Blackstone has targeted most aggressively, the concentration of its properties is staggering. In Phoenix, Arizona, some neighborhoods have at least one, if not two or three, Blackstone-owned homes on just about every block.

This inundation has some concerned that the private equity giant, perhaps in conjunction with other institutional investors, will exercise undue influence over regional markets, pushing up rental prices because of a lack of competition. The biggest concern among many ordinary Americans, however, should be that, not too many years from now, this whole rental empire and its hot new class of securities might fail, sending the economy into an all-too-familiar tailspin.

“You’re allowing Wall Street to control a significant sector of single-family housing,” said Michael Donley, a resident of Chicago who has been investigating Blackstone’s rapidly expanding presence in his neighborhood. “But is it sustainable?” he wondered. “It could all collapse in 2016, and you’ll be worse off than in 2008.”

Laura Gottesdiener is a journalist and the author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home, published in August by Zuccotti Park Press. She is an editor for Waging Nonviolence and has written for Rolling Stone, Ms., Playboy, the Huffington Post, and other publications. She lived and worked in the People’s Kitchen during the occupation of Zuccotti Park. This is her second TomDispatch piece.

[Note: Special thanks to Symone New and Jose Taveras for conducting the difficult research to locate Blackstone-owned properties. Special thanks also to Anthony Giancatarino for turning this data into beautiful maps.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars -- The Untold Story.

Copyright 2013 Laura Gottesdiener

Inside Passage: Finding B.C.'s Disappeared Islands

British Columbia’s Inside Passage – Journey to Deleted Islands

by Richard Boyce - CoastalTarSands.ca

I’m in the process of making another feature length documentary film and I’m releasing it with a unique twist – as a series of 10-minute mini-docs on the internet so I could really use your help forwarding the link to people across Canada.

SPREAD THE WORD NOT THE OIL

Please link others to: http://coastaltarsands.ca

This innovative media project takes a first hand look at British Columbia’s central coast, its natural features, the weather, the currents, the wildlife, and the people who live there. My personal journeys into this remote wilderness focus on the coastal areas where the Enbridge Corporation is proposing to navigate hundreds of supertankers loaded with millions of barrels of Diluted Bitumen (DilBit) from Alberta’s Tarsands to China via Kitimat, British Columbia, Canada.

I recently completed a kayak trip through the waters where these massive ships will make three hairpin turns of more than 90 degrees, while loaded with 2 million barrels of DilBit from Alberta’s Tarsands. I had to see the coast for myself because the misinformation about the tanker routes is overwhelming. I’m certain people will appreciate my first-hand video approach.

We encountered whales and lots of marine traffic along the rugged coast. What an amazing place, when the rain stopped and the fog lifted we encountered our first Humpback Whale sleeping in the middle of a narrow channel. Drifting with the current, it stayed there most of the day, blowing periodically. A few days later while paddling across the same narrow channel, a massive Cruise Ship slowed down to allow us, in a tiny little kayak, to clear the area. I can’t imagine what would happen if we were a 330 meter long supertanker with 2 tugboats swinging it around a hairpin turn with over a 500 meters of steel cable. What a nightmare!



best wishes,
Richard

About the Filmmaker: Richard Boyce, MFA is an award winning documentary filmmaker with a background as a Cinematographer. Living on Vancouver Island, Boyce makes documentary films and videos focusing on social issues and the environment, recently producing, directing, and photographing the award winning: ‘RAINFOREST – The Limit of Splendour’ Details at: http://rainforestmovie.ca

Israel's Next Play: What Pricetag for US/Iran Rapprochment?

Overplaying Its Hand, Israel Still Holds Plenty of U.S. Cards

by Norman Solomon and Abba A. Solomon

More than ever, Israel is isolated from world opinion and the squishy entity known as “the international community.” The Israeli government keeps condemning the Iran nuclear deal, by any rational standard a positive step away from the threat of catastrophic war.

In the short run, the belligerent responses from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are bound to play badly in most of the U.S. media. But Netanyahu and the forces he represents have only begun to fight. They want war on Iran, and they are determined to exercise their political muscle that has long extended through most of the Washington establishment.

While it’s unlikely that such muscle can undo the initial six-month nuclear deal reached with Iran last weekend, efforts are already underway to damage and destroy the negotiations down the road. On Capitol Hill the attacks are most intense from Republicans, and some leading Democrats have also sniped at the agreement reached in Geneva.

A widespread fear is that some political precedent might be set, undercutting “pro-Israel” leverage over U.S. government decisions. Such dread is inherent in the negative reactions from Netanyahu (“a historic mistake”), GOP lawmakers like House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Rogers (“a permission slip to continue enrichment”) and Senator Saxby Chambliss (“we’ve let them out of the trap”), and Democratic lawmakers like Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Menendez (“this agreement did not proportionately reduce Iran’s nuclear program”) and Senator Charles Schumer (“it does not seem proportional”).

Netanyahu and many other Israelis -- as well as the powerhouse U.S. lobbying group AIPAC and many with similar outlooks in U.S. media and politics -- fear that Israel’s capacity to hold sway over Washington policymakers has begun to slip away. “Our job is to be the ones to warn,” Israel’s powerful finance minister, Yair Lapid, told Israeli Army Radio on Sunday. “We need to make the Americans to listen to us like they have listened in the past.”

This winter and spring, the Israeli government and its allies are sure to strafe U.S. media and political realms with intense barrages of messaging. “Israel will supplement its public and private diplomacy with other tools,” the New York Times reported Monday from Jerusalem. “Several officials and analysts here said Israel would unleash its intelligence industry to highlight anticipated violations of the interim agreement.” Translation: Israel will do everything it can to undermine the next stage of negotiations and prevent a peaceful resolution of the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.

Looking ahead, as a practical political matter, can the U.S. government implement a major policy shift in the Middle East without at least grudging acceptance from the Israeli government? Such questions go to the core of the Israeli occupation now in its 47th year.

Israel keeps building illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank; suppression of the basic human rights of Palestinian people continues every day on a large scale in the West Bank and Gaza. There is no reason to expect otherwise unless Israel’s main political, military and economic patron, the United States, puts its foot down and refuses to backstop those reprehensible policies. They can end only when the “special relationship” between the USA and Israel becomes less special, in keeping with a single standard for human rights and against military aggression.

Such talk is abhorrent to those who are steeped in the notion that the United States must serve as a reliable enabler of Israel’s policies. But in every way that those policies are wrong, the U.S. government should stop enabling them.

The longstanding obstacles to such a halt stand a bit less tall today, but they remain huge. No less than before, as William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” This certainly applies to the history of gaining and maintaining unequivocal U.S. support for Israel.

Today’s high-impact American groups such as AIPAC (which calls itself “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby”), Christians United for Israel (“the largest pro-Israel organization in the U.S., with more than a million members,” according to the Jerusalem Post) and similar outfits have built on 65 years of broad and successful Israel advocacy in the United States.

Baked into the foundation of their work was the premise of mutuality and compatibility of Israeli and American interests. Until the end of the Cold War, routine spin portrayed aid to Israel as a way to stymie Soviet power in the region. Especially since 9/11, U.S. support for Israel has been equated with support for a precious bulwark against terrorism.

Ever since the successful 1947 campaign to press for UN General Assembly approval of Palestine partition, Israel’s leaders have closely coordinated with American Jewish organizations. Israeli government representatives in the United States regularly meet with top officers of American Jewish groups to convey what Israel wants and to identify the key U.S. officials who handle relevant issues. Those meetings have included discussions about images of Israel to promote for the American public, with phrases familiar to us, such as "making the desert bloom" and “outpost of democracy.”

As any member of Congress is well aware, campaign donations and media messaging continue to nurture public officials cooperative and sympathetic to Israel. For the rare officeholders and office seekers who stand out as uncooperative and insufficiently sympathetic, a formulaic remedy has been applied: withholding campaign donations, backing opponents and launching of media vilification. Those political correctives have proved effective -- along the way, serving as cautionary tales for politicians who might be tempted to step too far out of line.

The mainstream American Jewish Committee decided in 1953 that for its pro-Israel advocacy, “To the utmost extent, non-Jewish and non-sectarian organizations should be used as spokesmen.” Such a strategic approach has borne fruit for the overall Israel advocacy project in the USA. It is time-tested and mature; broadly distributing messages through organizations of most political flavors; and adept at touching almost all sizable media.

This year, Israeli leaders have intensified their lurid casting of Iran as the next genocidal Third Reich, and Israel as the protector absent for Jews during the Holocaust. For some, the theme is emotionally powerful. But it must not be allowed to prevent a diplomatic resolution of the nuclear dispute with Iran.

From now till next summer, the struggle over talks with Iran will be fierce and fateful. All signs point to determined efforts by Israel -- and its many allies in the United States -- to wreck prospects for a peaceful solution.

Norman Solomon is the founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Abba A. Solomon is the author of “The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech ‘The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews,’ Given to the Baltimore Chapter American Jewish Committee, February 15, 1948.”

www.normansolomon.com

Planet Killers: How Big Fossil is Destroying the Earth

Endless Stalemate: How Fossil Fuel Interests Are Killing Climate Action

by David Cromwell - Media Lens

The devastation wreaked by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines has led to heart-wrenching scenes of human suffering, with the death toll now put at over 5,000 and likely to rise still further. Yeb Sano, the head of the Philippines climate delegation, gave a moving speech at the UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, linking the typhoon to global warming, and then went on a hunger strike which would last, he said, 'until we stop this madness'.

Sadly, the madness looks set to continue if we recognise that the corporate media is an integral part of the problem: pulverising us with corporate advertising to encourage increased levels of consumption and planetary resource depletion, while averting our gaze from the root cause of the climate problem; namely, corporate-led global capitalism.

News reports and editorials were ultra-cautious not to link Typhoon Haiyan directly to climate change; either not mentioning climate change at all, or providing the worn-out disclaimer that individual weather events cannot be attributed to global warming. But as Kevin Trenberth, senior climate scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, said last year:

'The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.'

Climate scientist Peter Gleick noted that data in the form of 'unusually high sea levels and warm temperatures' supported the claim that climate change had influenced Typhoon Haiyan.

Peter Hart, a media analyst with Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, emphasised the point that mattered:

'There is no way that one massive hurricane will be stamped "Created by Climate Change," while another would be considered a "normal" hurricane.

'These catastrophes are occurring, and will continue to occur, in a climate that has been undeniably altered. Waiting for the "real" climate change-caused storms to hit before talking about climate change is illogical and irresponsible.'

Sadly, the corporate world, with the corporate media a vital supporting pillar propping up the system, has long shown that it is irresponsible.

The Business Fix Of False Solutions

Meanwhile, politicians have been paying lip service, at best, to the risk of climate catastrophe, just as they have since UN climate talks led to the ineffectual Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The latest fix bandied about at climate talks is a 'global carbon market "toolbox" ' thus 'making climate change targets more achievable'. The farce quickly becomes evident on further reading: 'governments have proposed launching a framework' to create 'a single voluntary platform to share ideas, with a view to eventually launching a global market to battle climate change.' (Emphasis added.)

This sums up how the world works. The planet is rapidly and dangerously overheating, but elite economic and financial interests, with bought-for governments under their corporate thumbs, will nevertheless continue to do whatever they can to retain profit and power. So, for instance, they'll devise a 'toolbox' in a 'global market' for that to happen, and it will be cynically sold to the public as a means of 'battling climate change'.

Indeed, for years corporate elites have lobbied intensely behind the scenes at UN climate talks to steer any agreement in their direction. Worse, they don't want any 'sweeping international treaties' at all, as these are seen as:

'no longer the key for charting the planet's path to sustainable development. Instead, partnerships among governments, businesses, and NGOs hold the most promise for measurable progress on sustainability issues, including climate change.'

As for the climate talks themselves, the campaigning group Corporate Europe Observatory has exposed what the corporate media is happy to overlook; namely that corporate polluters are poised to gain most from the talks:

'The EU aims to expand carbon markets that would benefit big polluters at the UN climate talks, COP19 in Poland, says a Statement signed by 135+ groups, movements and networks from all over the world. The Statement denounces the corporate capture of COP19 by the same companies that stand to profit.'

The Brussels-based group, which monitors and challenges the privileged access and influence enjoyed by corporate lobby groups in EU policy making, added:

'COP19 is the first UN climate talks to have corporate sponsorship, with some of the biggest climate crooks as official "partners", including ArcelorMittal, Alstom and BMW.'

ArcelorMittal is the world's biggest steel company and Alstom is a French conglomerate with major interests in power generation and transmission.

A new report, 'COP19 Guide to Corporate Lobbying: Climate Crooks and the Polish Government's Partners in Crime', published jointly by Corporate Europe Observatory and the Transnational Institute (TNI), shows how:

'Big business, industry and finance, keen to set the agenda and shape the rules in the interests of their profits – and at the expense of climate justice – have infiltrated COP19.'

These elite actors not only include giant fossil fuel companies, but wider business groups, financial interests, agribusiness and agrofuels, as well as other polluting industries. A sobering infographic on the TNI website displays the power interests 'behind the scenes', explaining succinctly 'why UN climate negotiations never work'.

It is therefore unsurprising that NGOs finally had enough of the climate talks in Warsaw and walked out in protest last week, with one campaigner saying:

'It has become quite flagrantly obvious that progress to reach any legally binding climate treaty is being obstructed by the lobbying forces of the fossil fuel industry.'

Even after campaigners had walked out of the climate talks, our searches of the Lexis database found not a single newspaper report into the real extent and intensity of corporate lobbying on climate in any of the national UK newspapers. At best, there was just a passing mention in a tiny handful of opinion pieces about 'vested interests' or fossil-fuel lobbying that sought to 'deliver watered down versions' of the 'effective instrument' of carbon markets. In particular, there was not a single news article about the eye-opening report on corporate lobbying by Corporate Europe Observatory and the Transnational Institute exposing the hollowness of current UN climate talks.

Following the NGO walkout from the UN talks, the Guardian did go as far as publishing an online opinion piece by Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, which touched on the 'corporate sponsorship' of the climate summit, quoting one of the campaigners responsible for the report on industry lobbying:

'This is perhaps the most corporate climate talks we have ever experienced.'

But this was a rare and brief foray into the reality of the huge corporate forces that are obstructing climate sanity.

Climate Science 'Really Clear' That 'We Need Radical Change'

Goodman presented Democracy Now! from the UN climate talks and interviewed Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin, two British scientists from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. They rightly observed that 'runaway global warming' is not being addressed by world leaders, and they pointed to the urgent need for 'radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the United States, EU and other wealthy nations.' This was a welcome and much-needed intervention from two climate scientists who have refused to be hidebound by academic conventions of what it is 'politic' to say - or not say.

They called for 'reparation' to be paid by the 'traditional polluters', namely the industrialised countries, to poorer nations to help them develop 'renewable, low-carbon energy systems' and a decent quality of life for their people. The scientists also supported the walkout by climate campaigners and, admirably, encouraged other climate scientists to be more vocal in demanding the radical action that is needed to avert catastrophic climate change. Professor Anderson spoke bluntly:

'I think the scientific community has for too long really let the policymakers, and indeed the wider public, down, that we haven't been as vociferous as we should have been about what our science is telling us. So, our science is telling us, and has told us, to be honest, for 10 to 15 years at least, that—you know, explain the situation that we're in and that we need these radical levels of change. But we have not—we have not translated that in a language that indicates how important that is. We have used language which is more acceptable to the policymakers. It's more politically palatable. So we've converted, you know, "impossible within the current economic framework" to "a little bit challenging." Now, that's not a fair reflection of what our analysis is showing us.'

He added:

'Our role as scientists is to stand up for the analysis that we do. And if it is misused, we should be louder and louder and louder about how it is being misused. But at the moment, there is pressure [...] for us as scientists to stay quite quiet about this, just to say, "Oh, it's an issue, a problem that we can resolve in the current way of thinking." You know, that's all rubbish. The analysis and the maths are really clear about this now. We need radical change.'

As Naomi Klein notes in a recent piece titled, 'How science is telling us all to revolt':

'So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.'

Meanwhile, like the rest of the corporate media, the 'impartial' and publicly-funded BBC News largely avoids exposing the truth behind the failure to tackle the climate crisis. Instead, it bemoans 'the scale of what can be achieved in any new deal', and misleadingly calls this abysmal state of affairs 'realism'. But in a rapidly and dangerously warming world, 'realism' means capitulating to the state-corporate elites that are driving humanity towards the abyss of climate chaos.

Veteran environment writer Andy Rowell did not mince his words: the UN talks are a 'charade' and hundreds of campaigners had rightly said: 'Enough is enough'. He added:

'The bottom line is that the ability of current policies to achieve meaningful climate action is being undermined by the fossil fuel industry. As it has for the last 20 years. As it has been for every UN climate meeting.'

In a nutshell: 'the political stalemate is due to the fossil fuel industry.'

Rowell suggests that we learn from the example of tobacco. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control warns of the 'fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the tobacco industry's interests and public health policy interests.' Just as public health policies have been protected from vested tobacco interests, so should UN climate talks 'exclude the villains from the climate process': namely, fossil fuel interests.

In an interview with The Real News Network, campaigner Rachel Tansey, lead author of the COP19 corporate lobbying report, cogently made the same point:

'...do you see the World Health Organization inviting big tobacco companies like Philip Morris to its conferences on how to stop the harm that tobacco causes? No, you don't.'

Rowell correctly concluded:

'It is now time to kick the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry out of the UN process. There is a "fundamental and irreconcilable conflict" between the fossil fuel industry interests and those trying to fight climate change.'

Not a single national newspaper in the UK has called for fossil fuel interests to be kept out of UN climate talks. On a planet that is rapidly warming out of control, that in itself is a damning indictment of the so-called 'free press'.

This Alert is Archived here:

Endless Stalemate: How Fossil Fuel Interests Are Killing Climate Action

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