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Coordinator Trip Report - Brazil
29 April - 5 May 2008 From: Bruce Gagnon |
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This report covers the period of April 29 – May 5 as I traveled to Sao Paulo, Brazil to speak at the Global Greens Congress. This was the second such Global Greens (GG) event and was attended by hundreds of people from 88 countries. There were 21 African countries represented at the conference. My speaking invitation came from U.S. Green Party member Julia Willebrand whom I met while speaking in New York City last August. She arranged, with some difficulty I learned, to have me speak on a plenary panel and specifically asked me to address the impacts of militarism on climate change. I took the bus to Boston, the train to New York, and then flew to Sao Paulo from there. Fellow Mainer, and long-time Green Party stalwart John Rensenbrink was on the same plane and we roomed together in a downtown Sao Paulo hotel. The plane trip was about 10 hours long and only 1/3 of the seats were full so we each got to stretch out across three empty seats during the flight. The conference was largely focused on climate change and the stories from around the world were heart breaking. A Peruvian Green talked about the “extinction by human intervention” in the Amazon where 20% of the reptiles, 20% of the birds, and 34% of the fish are now gone. A Mongolian Green told a tragic story about how gold mining is poisoning the water, killing nature, creating sickness for the people and causing 50% of the forests to be lost. He urged us to boycott gold. Easy one for me. Several Africans told similar stories about desertification on the continent, lakes drying up, fisherman having no livelihood and moving to the big cities where poverty and disease await them. Wild animals are disappearing. (And now the U.S. has created the new military command called AfriCom to be used to help take their oil.) Brazilian cars run on alcohol made from sugar cane – another story about agricultural land feeding cars rather than people. (Just like in the U.S. where corn production is now more profitable for ethanol than for food.) As I made this trip, food was big in the news. Rising gasoline prices have dramatically impacted the price of the global food supply. Climate change has had enormous impact on food production as we see the cost of food rising by 40% in 2007 and 80% in 2008. Protests around the world, just in recent days, are a foretelling of the future. Brazilian Green Fabio Feldmann, a member of the parliament, told the audience that needed changes must come from political action. “We need new governance models,” he said. Feldmann also reminded us that the U.S. had not signed the Biodiversity Convention in 1992 because the pharmaceutical industry opposed it. I wrote “death culture” in my notes as he spoke. I was the only one to speak about militarism and the connection to the environment and climate change. I was very surprised by this. The fact is that all the speakers made dramatic appeals for immediate and massive structural change and investment in green technologies and conservation if we are to save the Mother Earth. How, I asked in my plenary presentation, can we effectively deal with climate change if we allow a new expensive and destabilizing arms race in space to happen? We must convert the global war machine immediately and use those resources, now wasted on endless war, for the needed investments to deal with climate change. I suggested that the proposed 21-point Declaration that would be approved on the last day of the Congress needed to include calls for the prevention of an arms race in outer space and conversion of the military industrial complex. As I finished my talk I was given a rousing applause by the several hundred people in the audience. One U.S. Green delegate approached me and asked me to write down the specific language I thought should go into the final Declaration, which I immediately did. He made sure it was formally introduced into the process. Sadly, the final document made no reference to either point. It is quite clear that the German Greens, European Greens, and Australian Greens run the Global Greens movement because they are the regions that had the most electoral success over the years. I heard from several U.S. delegates that they have been told by the German Greens that the U.S. Green Party is too "radical." One telling panel was called “Between Government Responsibilities and Fundamental Opposition.” This session addressed the question “What changes occur if Greens engage in parliaments and governments? Does this affect the relationship between Green parties and social movements and how do we deal with conflicts between ‘ethics of conviction’ and an ‘ethics of responsibility’?” In other words, once in power should Greens go along to get along? Or should they stick their neck out on “controversial” issues? A Green member of parliament from the Czech Republic, that is now in power as part of a coalition with their right-wing government, talked about how taking cautious steps was important if one hoped to remain in power to do the “good works” required to deal with climate change. Surprisingly she never mentioned the current controversy and enormous challenges facing the Czech Green Party as they now hold the deciding votes which will determine whether or not their parliament supports the planned U.S. deployment of a Star Wars radar base in their country. I later learned from another Czech Green member that out of their six Green members of parliament, two of them are likely to support the radar, which will likely be the winning margin for Bush in an evenly divided government. A member of the European Greens told me that they had recently met and wanted to pass a strong region-wide resolution against the proposed deployment of the U.S. radar in the Czech Republic. He said one of the Czech Greens, who will likely support the radar, insisted that the resolution be weakened to say that if NATO supports it then it would be acceptable. Apparently this amended resolution was passed. Reinhard Buetikofer, Co-President of the German Greens, while addressing this issue of cooperation with more conservative power blocs, argued that military intervention to support “human rights” was necessary and thus should not be ruled out. “What would we do if another Adolf Hitler was to come along?” he asked. We have one today I thought to myself – his name is George W. Bush. Are we all doing enough to stop his program of empire building and endless war, I wondered? The German Greens, once in power but now out of the ruling coalition, have experienced this “dilemma” first-hand. Their party supported the U.S. attack and invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. A year or so later I was speaking at a conference in Southern Germany and was on a panel with a German Green Party leader. In the Q & A many peace activists in the audience were furious with the Greens for having supported the U.S. invasion. The German Greens fell out of power in 2005. One truly inspiring moment at the Congress was watching a video of the speech by Ingrid Betancourt from Columbia at the last Global Greens Congress that was held in 2001 in Australia. Ingrid is a politician, former senator and anti-corruption activist. She was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2002 while campaigning for the Colombian presidency as a Green, after she decided to campaign in an area of high guerrilla presence in spite of warnings not to do so. She is still being held hostage by the FARC. In her 2001 speech Ingrid called the global economic machine a “system of self destruction.” “The first thing we must defeat is our own skepticism,” she said. Her call to relentlessly organize and remain passionate moved the audience of Greens once again. In a crowd this large, from so many nations, one can imagine that many different views existed about how best to proceed. Several people really hit the mark for me. Rebecca Harms, a German member of parliament, said “The movement has to be a participatory democracy if we hope to show the people of the world how things can change.” A Green from Greece said, “We are a global movement but be careful because power corrupts.” Haidar El Ali from Senegal touched me deeply when he said, “Love and faith will save us, not politicians. We need to reach the hearts of the people. Do we love the Earth enough to save it?” One evening while eating dinner one of the Greens from Mongolia, a businessman, was sitting at a nearby table. He congratulated me on my talk and told me that at first he was “shocked” that I was being publicly critical of my government. He said that he believed it best to work with existing governments and not to be publicly critical of them. But he then went on to tell me that he learned a lot from my speech and appreciated it by the end. I told him that I thought democracy meant that citizens, and political leaders, should challenge their governments when they know they have gone wrong. Many other Greens from places like Sweden, Canada, Japan, Dominican Republic, Holland, Hungary, New Zealand, Belgium, Norway, Portugal, Africa, and the U.S. gave me strong positive feedback after my plenary speech. Several asked me to send them the text of my talk so they could pass it around in their country. I was extremely grateful to have been invited to speak before such an important conference and such wonderful people who are doing the good work to help protect all life on this beautiful planet. The question of political parties and power, how they should work and compromise with existing power structures, is an important topic to debate. But in the end it is equally important to create new alternative political formations that give voice to the important issues of our time. The tensions over power and compromise will always be with us. In the end, I come away reminding myself that I am an activist first and I am certain that my job is to stand strong for what I know must be done if we are to survive on this spinning satellite we call Earth. I need not worry about negotiating this point or that. My job is to speak for all life, to represent those who cannot speak. My task is to remain steady during those moments when those in power seem most intractable. My role is to tell it like I see it and let the chips fall where they may. That I shall continue to do as long as I draw breath on my mother planet.
Bruce K. Gagnon |
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Climate Change Impacts on Peace
May 2, 2008
Sao Paulo, Brazil
My name is Bruce Gagnon and I live in the state of Maine
in the United States.
I work for the
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
A recent U.S. military report called "Transforming the
way the Pentagon looks at energy," says that in order to ensure a "reliable"
source of oil for the long term the military will increase its efforts to
maintain control over foreign sources.
Soaring global demand for dimishing resources means
strong international competition in the coming years.
Global power, the Pentagon says, will reside in the hands
of those who control the distribution of declining natural resources.
One way to keep control of the global economic system is
by holding the keys to the world's economic engine - oil.
During the two terms of the Bush administration, George
W. Bush has doubled military spending. The U.S. military now controls just
over
50% of every
federal tax dollar.
The U.S. Congress is now sharply cutting remaining social
programs, public education, and environmental programs.
To fund the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan
the U.S. is spending more than $14 billion a month. The U.S. now spends
more on the military
than
the rest of the world combined.
The Republicans and the Democrats are partners in funding
and promoting the U.S. military empire that consists of more than 750
military bases around the world.
The weapons corporations are now giving more campaign
donations to the Democrats than the Republicans. The two Democratic party
presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama, have pledged to
expand the U.S. military by adding more soldiers and building a new
generation of weapons.
And now the weapons industry wants to move the arms race
into space. Weapons corporations say that weapons in space (Star Wars) will
be the largest industrial project in the history of the planet Earth. The
new arms race will be so expensive that the U.S. can't pay for it alone and
is bringing its allies into this new space weapons arms race. Many
European countries have become partners as has Japan and Australia.
The Pentagon says that under corporate globalization
every country will have a different role. There will be no significant
industry in the U.S. (except weapons production). No automobile
manufacturing, no clothes or shoe production. Instead, the military says
our role in the U.S. will be
"security export" which translates to endless war to benefit the
corporate interests.
Today the U.S. is surrounding Russia with the help of an
expanding NATO alliance. Why Russia? Russia has the largest supply of
natural gas on the planet and also has huge supplies of oil.
The U.S. is also attempting to deploy so-called "missile
defense" interceptors in Poland and a space warfare radar system in the
Czech Republic. We need Green parties in Poland and the Czech Republic, and
throughout Europe, to speak out louder against these new U.S. bases.
The U.S. today is militarily surrounding China with the
help of a military alliance with Japan, South Korea, and Australia. The
Washington Post newspaper several years ago reported that the U.S. is
moving to "manage" China by
doubling its military presence in the Asian-Pacific region
and by
deploying missile defense systems throughout the region. This will create a
new and expensive arms race.
The U.S. Space Command for the past several years has
been war gaming a first-strike attack on China, set in the year 2016. The
attack uses the military space plane, now under development, that would fly
from one end of the Earth to the other in one hour and drop a devastating
attack on China and then return to space.
Space technology coordinates all war on the planet
today. When the U.S. launched the "shock and awe" invasion on Iraq in 2003
over 70% of the weapons used in the initial attack were directed to their
targets by military space satellites. Thus the Pentagon says, whoever
controls space will control the Earth below.
In addition the U.S. is now preparing an attack on Iran
in order to control their oil and natural gas.
The U.S. is demonizing Venezuela because they had the
audacity to nationalize their oil.
And the Pentagon has just recently created a new military
command called AfriCom. The
Pentagon says we will be fighting in Africa in 20 years to control the oil
of Nigeria, Angola, and Algeria.
Everyone acknowledges that the U.S. is a major
contributor to global warming and that we in the U.S. must immediately
change our entire consuming culture if the planet is to survive. But where
will the massive investment for solar, wind, rail, and conservation come
from when the U.S. is instead preparing for endless war?
In fact, if the U.S. successfully draws Russia, China,
the European Union, and Japan into a new arms race in space, how will any of
our societies be able to afford to produce the alternative technologies we
will need to avoid the coming global energy crisis?
Global Greens must make a unified demand for the
conversion of
the global war machine, or as we call it, the military industrial
complex.
We know that conversion of the global war machine will
create more jobs than we currently get from military spending. We know that
if we don't convert the military industrial complex then the future
generations will suffer even more.
In the proposed 21 Point Declaration I would like to
comment on point number 20. I believe that two key items must be added.
The first is that a statement is needed calling for the prevention of an
arms race in outer space (PAROS). This new space arms race will be what the
weapons industry says will be the most expensive industrial project in human
history.
Secondly, there must be a specific call for the
conversion of the global war machine in the Declaration so that our global
budget resources can be dramatically and quickly used to deal with climate
change.
The Native Americans, the Indian people, in my country
say that the sacred hoop, the sacred circle, has been broken. It is our job
to heal the broken circle.
Political power means little if we don't show the
determination to stop the madness of endless war and successfully deal with
climate change.
Thank you.
Bruce K. Gagnon
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