Why Hopenhagen Turned into Nopenhagen

While it is not over until it is over, on this the penultimate day of the most important international conference on global climate change in this decade, it seems pretty clear that it is going to end in failure. There will be no binding treaty. It is not clear there will even be an agreed framework for such a treaty. There is no agreement or targets or benchmarks. Maybe there will be some progress on REDD and on a fund to help vulnerable nations adapt to some of the predicted effects of global warming. But overall, the COP15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen will go down in history as a failure.

Why did this happen? Did it really have to turn out this way? I am sure there will be lots of post-mortems written in the coming days and weeks. Here is my first volley.

The US never joined the 1997 Kyoto Treaty that COP15 was supposed to come up with a new treaty to extend or replace. At the time the U.S. Congress was controlled by the Republican Party (the GOP -- Guardians of Profit). The nominally Democratic President, Bill Clinton, knew full well that getting this treaty ratified in the US Senate had about the same chances as a snowball in hell. So even with Al Gore as his Vice-President, he caved to Republican opposition and adopted a negotiating position that said that the US would not commit to binding carbon emission reductions until the developing countries also accepted them.

At the time, major developing economies such as China, India and Brazil, were refusing to do so because, they argued, most all of the CO2 in the atmosphere that was causing the problem was the result of historical emissions by the older industrialized countries. most notably the USA, which at the time accounted for roughly 25% of global emissions but had only 5% of the world's population. So there was an "After you Alfonse" type stalemate. The US would not agree to binding emission targets until the developing countries did, and they would not agree to reduce their emissions until the USA owned up to its responsibility.

But things began to change dramatically two years ago at the Bali climate conference when the US representative was heartily booed when she reiterated this tired old position that the Bush administration had stuck with. Moreover, China and other major developing industrial countries announced at Bali that they were now willing to commit themselves to carbon emission targets, removing one of the big obstacles to successfully negotiating a new treaty regime in Copenhagen this December.

So what happened? Well we got a new US President who says he is committed to the US doing its part to address the threat of global climate disruption. And now the US Congress is controlled by members of his own party in both the House and the Senate. Good opportunity right?

Wrong. The US moved the goal-posts. Now they are saying that they cannot commit to any binding agreement with robust emission reduction targets because they are not sure they can get any bill through the Senate unless Senators from coal-producing and oil-producing, and smoke stack industry states can be assured that China, and India and Brazil are not cheating on their claimed emission reductions and taking jobs away from American workers while continuing to pollute the atmosphere.

The developing nations have bristled at the suggestion that they cannot be trusted to keep their words, so we have another "After you Alfonse" type stalemate. This time the US will not say it can commit to binding emissions targets unless the developing nations first commit to a verification scheme of some sort. While the developing nations are saying, we already came halfway on our own, but what have you (the USA) done? Bupkiss.

The emissions targets suggested in the current House bill that form the basis of the current US negotiating position, are terribly weak. They are really only 4% below the internationally accepted 1990 baseline, and they are not even law yet and may never get to be law. The Europeans, the Japanese, and other developed countries, have stated that they will commit to 2020 reduction targets below the 1990 baseline of between 20-25%

Why is the US target so weak? Because, well, you see, we have this stupid procedural rule in the Senate that says that you need 60 senators to end debate on proposed legislation. If you cannot reach the 60 vote threshold you cannot end debate on the floor, and if you cannot end debate it you cannot vote on a bill and perhaps pass it.

That is why Sen. John Kerry went to Copenhagen this week to try to reassure COP15 delegates that the US Senate will pass a bill this spring with binding emissions targets, but only if the Chinese and other developing countries first agree to a verification scheme that they can use to convince recalcitrant and obstructionist Senators (read Republicans, a few conservadems, and of course our friend Joe Lieberman) from filibustering to block it in the Senate just as they have done with Health Care Insurance Reform this fall. So the Fate of the Earth comes down, again, to the dysfunctional US Senate and its stupid filibuster rule.

Or does it? According to the US Constitution, treaties must be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate, that is, by 66+1 Senators. In the United States, the term "treaty" has a different, more restricted legal sense than exists in international law. U.S. law distinguishes what it calls treaties from treaty executive agreements, congressional-executive agreements, and sole executive agreements. All four classes are equally treaties under international law; they are distinct only from the perspective of internal American law.

The distinctions are primarily concerning their method of ratification. Whereas treaties require advice and consent by two-thirds of the Senate, sole executive agreements may be executed by the President acting alone. Some treaties grant the President the authority to fill in the gaps with executive agreements, rather than additional treaties or protocols. Currently, most international agreements are executed by executive agreement rather than treaties at a rate of 10:1.

Despite the relative ease of executive agreements, the President still often chooses to pursue the formal treaty process over an executive agreement in order to gain congressional support on matters that require the Congress to pass implementing legislation or appropriate funds, and those agreements that impose long-term, complex legal obligations on the U.S.

So what are the chances that President Obama is going to use his power to make executive agreements to bind the US, even provisionally, to a binding treaty? Bupkiss. He needs political cover from the Congress. This is also the reason why he is not going to use the newly sanctioned power of the EPA to directly regulate greenhouse gasses as harmful pollutants. Doing so would bypass the Congress and expose him to merciless attacks from the GOP, threatening his prospects for re-election in 2012.

But in order to get Congressional cover (buy-in) he needs both the House and the Senate, and we already know what a cesspool of deceit and obstruction the Senate is these days. So, sadly, once again, the Fate of the Earth hangs on the existence of a stupid procedural rule of the Senate that prevents electoral majorities from passing legislation without the consent of 60 Senators before they can end debate.

To be fair, the failure of COP15 is not entirely due to US non-commitment. Our neighbor the the North, Oh Canada, with its current conservative government, has linked itself to the US position on reduction targets and binding agreements and is standing with the US in blocking a deal in Copenhagen. Canada is, in case you don't know, the #1 supplier of petroleum to the US market, far ahead of the Middle East. Canada also has the Athabasca oil sands (or tar sands) in Northern Alberta, which are really going to start paying off big time once we reach Peak Oil (perhaps we already have) and the price of petroleum starts to relentlessly rise as supply declines while demands increases.

Peak Oil is the real underlying driver of the "go slow" or "go not at all" approaches to an energy transition in this century. The oil producing states, and the major oil companies that hold long term leases, want to delay the transition to a carbon-neutral energy economy as long as they possibly can. It they don't they stand to lose something on the order of $100 trillion in revenues during the remainder of this century. Much of that money that would be left on the table if the world manages to accelerate the shift to carbon neutrality sooner rather than later by making green energy cheaper than dirty petroleum and other fossil fuels. The environmentalists, of course, are worried that if we prolong the end of the Oil Age we are risking cooking the planet and producing catastrophic changes in the climate that will take centuries to correct, if they can ever be corrected at all.

Hey, but what does catastrophic damage to the Earth, its people, and its living species, matter if the oil companies lose all those healthy profits in the process? The Bush administration made no bones about its non-energy policy being designed (in still secret meetings with oil company officials in Dick Cheney's office) to protect future oil company profits. At least Dubya was not a hypocrite.

But Obama campaigned on the slogans "Hope You Can Believe In" and "Yes We Can" Well those slogans are wearing pretty thin right now. If Obama is not willing to take any political risks to lead this country to a better place, then in three years people in his base will not be talking about "Hope" any more. They will be saying "Nope."

Joe Wilson's outburst

Rep. Joe Wilson's (R -SC) shouting "You lie!" during President Obama's nationally televised speech to a joint session of Congress last week proved that Van Jones was right when he said the Republicans are assholes.

Death Squads, American Style

The term 'death squad' entered the lexicon back in the 1980s when it was used to refer to gangs of off-duty military personnel who were hired by right-wing military dictatorships in countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador to kidnap and murder people they suspected of sympathizing with the Marxist guerrillas who were fighting the army in the mountains.

In a story published in the New York Times this week it has been revealed that in 2004 the CIA hired the private military contractor Blackwater to organize a program to locate and assassinate suspected Al Qaeda operatives. The program was top secret and Vice President Cheney allegedly specifically ordered that Congressional oversight committees not be informed of its existence.

It seems like there might still be more surprises in store for those of us who have been paying attention to Bush and Cheney's little shop of horrors. The list of human rights violations and abuses that can be laid at the feet of the Bush administration is long and includes: the “disappearance” of suspected terrorists into CIA-run secret prisons, the denial of the right of habeas corpus of detainees, the use of ‘enhanced’ interrogation methods, a.k.a. torture, such as water-boarding, sleep deprivation, and auditory stimulus overload by military interrogators and the CIA, the indefinite detention without charges or trials of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo, the construction of the concept of “unlawful enemy combatants”, the use of Predator drones to assassinate suspected terrorists, the detention of an American citizen, Jose Padilla, without charges or trial for more than three years, the irregular renditions of persons such as Maher Arar to countries such as Syria, Egypt and Yemen where they have been tortured, the torture of persons such as Khalid Al Masri in secret CIA prisons, ill-treatment and deaths of detainees held at Baghram airbase in Afghanistan, and the secret and illegal eavesdropping on American citizens by the National Security Agency in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, among others.

A number of these human rights abuses have been the subject of several high-level special reports on U.S. human rights violations prepared by the charter-based bodies of the United Nations. In the report dealing with respect for civil and political rights while conducting counter-terrorism, the Special Rapporteur for the Mission to the United States of America, Martin Scheinin, identified, "serious situations of incompatibility between international human rights obligations and the counter-terrorism law and practice of the United States. Such situations include the prohibition against torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; the right to life; and the right to a fair trial” (Scheinin 2007). He has also identified deficiencies in United States law and practice pertaining to "the principle of non-refoulement; the rendition of persons to places of secret detention; the definition of terrorism; non-discrimination; checks in the application of immigration laws; and the obtaining of private records of persons and the unlawful surveillance of persons, including a lack of sufficient balances in that context"(23).

It is now clear that senior officials of the government of the United States conspired to break the law, and that the Department of Justice was complicit in these crimes and their cover-up. The New York Times stated unequivocally that "some of the very highest officials of the land not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed orders," and this was done "with President Bush's clear knowledge and support"(20 April 2008). The President’s top national security advisors, Vice President Dick Cheney; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, held dozens of meetings in the White House Situation Room to organize and give legal cover to enhanced interrogation methods, including brutal methods of abuse that all civilized nations consider to be torture.

A report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 11, 2008, the day after the sixtieth anniversary of the passage of the Universal Declaration of human rights, concluded that, “the authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials was both a direct cause of detainee abuse and conveyed the message that it was okay to mistreat and degrade detainees in U.S. custody,” saying also that, “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees”.

These reports, and many others dealing with the human rights record of the Bush administration, demonstrate that there is ample reason to believe that senior officials of the George W. Bush administration, conspired to systematically violate human rights, broke U.S. laws, and authorized the commission of war crimes.

Yet calls for accountability for these crimes, even for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate them, have been pushed aside by the Obama administration again and again using the specious argument that it is better to look forward than back. But the only way we can hope for a American future in which these kinds of abuses will not be repeated is by fully investigating what happened during the Bush-Cheney administration and holding the architects of these policies accountable.

Rather than misinformed people screaming at their Congressmen about "death panels" that were never even contemplated, progressives should be screaming about the government-sponsored "death squads" that were authorized by the former administration. Where is the sense of moral outrage on the left? Why are progressives allowing themselves to be "slow-walked" into accepting the fact that the Obama adminstration is allowing political considerations to interfere with the investigation of these crimes and the administration of justice?

Addendum: August 31, 2009

We now learn that Blackwater was supposed to provide foreigners for surveillance and support for death squads so as to make sure there were no "American fingerprints" on these secret operations. Fortunately, the program never became operational and was downgraded and finally ended before anyone was assassinated.
See this report in the Huffington Post for details.

Big Lies

If different months of the year reflect different personality types, then August must be the month for idiots and liars. All of the reasonable and responsible people are away on vacation so the field of play is left to the nutcases. This is particularly evident this August in the so-called debate (really what has become a shouting match) between the proponents and opponents of health care reform. The pity of it is that with all of the lies and disinformation that are being spread by opponents of health care reform, and the need by the supporters to constantly rebut them, ordinary people are being prevented from learning the facts and hearing about the real issues.

President Obama, who is an admirer of Abraham Lincoln, should recall that he once said that you can "Fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time". Lincoln, however, failed to note that in a democratically-governed society all you need to do is to fool most of the people most of the time, and you can get what you want.

That is the strategy that the Republican Party (the GOP -- Guardians of Profit) and their allies in the health insurance industry seem to be counting on to derail Obama's health financing reform agenda. Their preferred tactic is known in the public opinion and propaganda industry as the "Big Lie". It is really very simple to use and usually works quite well.

All one needs to do is to invent a lie so preposterous that most people will think that no one would ever say such a thing if it wasn't true. It is important that the lie be something that induces fear in people and that it be made to seem that the supposed fearful thing is being kept secret. Then one gets a lot of important people to repeat the lie over and over again at every opportunity.

This is why one is hearing about "death panels" and FEMA concentration camps as elements of Obama's health care proposal, and why loyal Republican operatives can be relied upon to repeat these canards on every cable channel new show that will give them a pulpit from which to broadcast their propaganda talking points. When one "big lie" gets debunked they just invent another one and the beat goes on. But all the while the real issues are never discussed as the electorate is being whip-sawed between the conflicting emotions of fear and hope.

The biggest lie the opponents of reform are using these days is the claim that America has "the best health care system in the world." If this is true, then of course there is no reason to reform it and doing so is only likely to make it worse. But this is a outright lie as any objective assessment of the facts would reveal. The three basic criteria for judging national health care delivery systems are access, quality, and cost.

The U.S. health care system does not provide universal access, as for instance, does France or Britain; the health outcomes for the American people are worse that those of many countries, for instance, Canada or Denmark, and the cost per patient to deliver poor care to only a portion of the population is the highest in the developed world. By any objective assessment the U.S. health care system is one of the worst systems found in any rich country, but many people continue to solemnly repeat the claim that it is the best. They do so because the statement has a positive emotional valence to patriotic people, because believing it undermines the argument for reform, and because they know that if it they repeat it often enough with enough sincere feeling, a lot of people will believe it is true.

The political game this month is to see which side can nudge the poll numbers a few percentage points in one direction or another. Recent polls have shown opponents of reform slightly ahead. After the Congress returns from its August recess, there will be a final "scrum" in which compromises will be accepted and deals will be made, and some kind of health care bill will be cobbled together. For members of Congress who are on the fence, or just being cagey, a shift in public opinion about health care reform could sway their votes and mean the difference between legislative victory or defeat for Obama's initiative.

Some commentators have compared the angry demonstrations and shouting at recent town hall meetings to the tactics used by fascist brown shirts in the 1930s. At the same time, Republican propagandists have suggested that Obama and the Democrats are Nazis; Rush Limbaugh has described Obama's healthcare logo as "right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook". Last week someone painted a swastika on the door of democratic congressman David Scott, and a woman at a town brawl demonstration held up a sign with a picture of Obama's face superimposed on a picture of a Nazi stormtrooper.

The opponents of health care reform, having unleashed the dogs "Fear" and "Anger" in order to prevent proponents of reform from actually answering questions from their constituents, are innoculating themselves against the charge that they are behaving like fascists by leveling this same accusation preemptively at their targets. Also, of course, everyone hates Hitler and the Nazis so getting that label to stick to Obama will carry a lot of emotional weight.

All of these tactics and techniques are well known. An earlier politician wrote the following about the use of big lies:

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true in itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

The author of his quote is Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X).

Addendum: For the story about who exactly were the expert liars who conspired together to create the myth of death panels see this story in the New York Times.

Obama's Strategy for Health Care Reform

Thus far the Obama administration has been letting Congress take the lead in framing legislation to bring about fundamental change in the way Americans get their health care paid for. The bills being developed in Congress currently feature a "public option" that would create a government run and financed health insurance fund that would compete with the big private health insurers, like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, and the other for profit health insurance companies. These companies, as well as the for profit hospitals, the manufacturers of medical equipment and supplies, the big pharmaceutical companies are now launching a massively funded public relations campaign designed to get rid of the public option idea and go on with "business as usual" for another few decades.

At the same time, the Obama plan has ticked off progressives because he and his democratic allies in Congress have decided at the outset to take a "single-payer" option off the table. There was a good discussion of this on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now show the other day with Bernie Sanders and the President of the California Nurses Union, Rose Ann DeMoro in which they both expressed frustration and anger about Congress not taking the single-payer option seriously. The single-payer option is the only possible plan that offers significant cost savings while also ensuring universal coverage. It has been empirically tested and refined in Canada and other countries that have long ago accepted the proposition that health care is a human right, to another opportunity to make a killing in the market. There is a well-developed proposal for a system of national health insurance (see PNHP)

There is no good reason for Congress not to even consider a single-payer option. But perhaps this is a calculated political strategy. The insurance industry and their Republican allies in the Congress are already lining up to oppose the "public option" that they claim will eventually threaten the private insurance business. The public option plan does not have the advantages of the single-payer system in terms of cost saving and administratiive simplicity nor in terms of universality. But it does allow the private health insurance business to stay in existence to compete with a government financed insurance program. But the private insurers and their allies are already whining that by offerring the public a lower cost option for health insurance, the public option will eventually take over the market and price private companies out of the competition.

I believe that this argument is total bullshit -- did all private schools and colleges go out of business when state governments started funding schools? But in any case, what Obama ought to say to this argument is: "OK, if you guys won't let us have the public option which may eventually drive some of your insurance companies out of business, then we are putting the single-payer option back on the table and that is what we will be pushing through Congress this year." Your choice is between accepting a proposal that may put some of insurance companies out of business eventually, or one in which they will all be put out of business immediately. Your choice."

It is likely that if the Democrats in Congress and the President play this particular brand of political hard ball the Republicans will walk and refuse to vote for any plan. But once Al Franken gets seated, the Democrats have enough votes to pass it anyway, without any Republican support. If they avoid the 60 vote threshold by means of reconciliation they will need only 50 votes to pass it in the Senate, and they should be able to do that even if convervative Democrats such as Arlen Spector and Ben Nelson vote with the Republicans.

If the Republicans start screaming bloody murder about employing this tactic to get a long overdue national health insurance bill passed, I suggest that President Obama dispatch Rahm Emanuel to Capitol Hill to convey to them the immortal words that Vice President Dick Cheney said to Senator Patrick Leahy --- "You can go fuck yourselves".