Tag Archives: Corporate Haven

Climate Agreement Reached (or not…)

Below are my initial impressions upon listening to Barack Obama’s announcement about the so-called agreement reached in Copenhagen.  Tune in tomorrow for a full analysis of the negotiations and the outcomes.

Initial reactions:

* This was a total subversion of the UNFCCC COP process.  The Obama Administration succeeded in throwing aside the legally binding Kyoto Protocol, and the two track process agreed in Bali.

* The agreement reached is not only undemocratic, it is not legally binding, it is voluntary, and its commitments made on a country by country basis.
* Obama made an agreement with “key players” in the game and essentially flipped off the rest–especially the ALBA countries.  The African countries were outraged by the backroom dealings with Ethiopia by Obama and by France–which were carried out in the name of all of Africa without their consent.
Is Global Justice Ecology Project shocked at these developments?  Nope.  It is business as usual, as predicted.  This was the reason we participated in the founding of Climate Justice Action and the organizing of the Reclaim Power action that brought together social movements around the world to begin to discuss what the new world we know we need will look like.
More tomorrow,
Anne Petermann
Executive Director

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Filed under Climate Change, Climate Justice, Copenhagen/COP-15, Posts from Anne Petermann

The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

COP-15. Copenhagen

We are in the Belly of the Beast surrounded by lemmings in power suits. The masses have drank the kool aid. The good majority of humans are deliberating over the most inconsequential details of commas and word placement in the “climate” agreement. These documents are written by the same people (mostly men) who have coerced us into believing that everything is under control and we can maintain the way we are living… These agreements are going to decide where we choose to listen to Mother Earth or destroy her.
The Convention of Parties- 15 determines the future of the planet—however these negotiations only fan the fire of the global economic system. These talks systematically and intentionally exclude billions of people who are not represented by governments or heads of state. The impacts of neoliberalism, financial institutions, corporate CEOS reverberates and permeates on each of our lives, pillages our Mother Earth and the future of humanity.
The plethora of crises we face is undermined by the unfettered growth and workings of the free market. We have been taught that the market is the only fair and democratic allocation of goods and services; some are palpable enough to believe that the government is doing all of us a service with policies that solely benefit a select few. Who are the select few? They are organized, they are greedy and they have an agenda.
Our climate is not negotiating. It is not interested in what we are going to do in 2050, even with good intentions and “low carbon development technologies”. The climate is not bargaining and it cannot be paid off or subsidized. Climate change is happening and it is going to get worse. We cannot even fathom the magnitude of climatic disasters.
They are bargaining with our children’s and their children’s lives. They have tried to convince us that that we aren’t going to have ecosystems collapsing within the next 20 years. This is depressing. I know.
Wait, we don’t have to let this happen. They will never stop thinking of everything in terms of capital and monetary value, even if they know these things kill people and make people sick.
We cannot let this continue. IT HAS TO END.
We need to remind our governments and delegates that they cannot bargain with a finite planet that cannot be traded, no matter how nice the package. We need to say these messages to the corporate-backed governments and delegations; say them loudly and so that can understand clearly that we mean business here – and not their kind of business.The tables are turning, WE ARE ORGANIZED.
I implore you to join us. In any way you’d like. We are all in this together.
Sigue luchando, sigue tamando.

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Filed under Climate Change, Climate Justice, Copenhagen/COP-15

December 16th Reclaim Power Action for Climate Justice at the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen

Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Wahu Carra, of the Kenyan Debt Relief Network and the Peoples Movement on Climate Change speaks to reporters prior to the Reclaim Power march at the Bella Center. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP-GFC

Reclaim Power marchers attempt to cross the bridge to join the peoples’ assembly. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP-GFC

Danish Police attempt to push back the Reclaim Power marchers using batons to hit people. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP-GFC

Danish Police rough up a reporter. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP-GFC

The police move in and violently repel the Reclaim Power marchers from the bridge. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP-GFC

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Copenhagen/COP-15, Photo Essays by Orin Langelle

Press Release 12/16/09

PRESS RELEASE

December/15/09

For Immediate Release

Contact:
Kevin Smith +45 52 68 53 02
Anne Petermann +45 52 67 95 95

Civil Society Groups at COP15 denounce preemptive arrests of climate justice protestors in Copenhagen

UN COP critics silenced with police action as talks enter final days

Reclaim Power nonviolent civil disobiedience actions step off at 8 AM Wednesday

Copenhagen, Denmark — Dr. Tadzio Mueller of Berlin, an accredited NGO observer at the COP 15 was arrested today without provocation by three plain clothed police outside the Bella Center. His arrest took place shortly after a press conference where he and other representatives of civil society announced nonviolent protests planned for Wednesday in Copenhagen. (Today’s news conference is archived on video here: http://bit.ly/8eXDnI)

Danish police have also raided a Climate Justice Action convergence space today where activists were repairing bicycles to showcase fossil fuel alternatives, and arrested another 20 people outside of the official NGO summit “Klimaforum.” The arrests are continuing at the time of writing.

“The Danish police are clearly taking their cues from the Connie Hedegard and the Annex One posse who are trying to strong arm the world into accepting their agenda and silencing the thousands of people who have come to Copenhagen to demand action for climate justice,” said Dorothy Guerro, Senior Associate with Focus on the Global South, a founding organization of the Climate Justice Now Network. “First they shut the public out of the climate negotiations, then they shut out 80% of NGOs who have been accredited to attend, and now they are jailing people who challenge the undemocratic nature of the climate negotiations, while the future of life on earth literally hangs in the balance.”

“I wish I could say that I was surprised at this outrageous behavior, but I am not,” stated Anne Petermann, Executive Director of Global Justice Ecology Project, the group that hosted the press conference. “The UN Climate Convention has become increasingly unjust and repressive. The Danish Government, which is hosting the talks, is making back room deals with the U.S. and other Northern countries to sabotage any possibility of an effective and just climate agreement. It stands to reason that they would deploy their security and police forces to crush any dissent–especially if it is designed to build an effective international climate justice movement,” she continued.

“The lives of billions of people are literally on the line here at COP 15, but these negotiations have been focused on propping up the interests of elite countries and corporations rather than addressing the fossil fuel economy that threatens our collective survival,” stated Kevin Smith, of Climate Justice Action. “It is for this reason that we are gathering for the Reclaim Power protest and Peoples Plenary that will happen tomorrow at the UN Climate COP.”

Demonstrators will begin to gather at Tarnby station at 8 am on Wednesday the 16th for the Reclaim Power demonstration. This demonstration will involve 5-10,000 people who are unable to access the COP 15 talks, and who will be approaching the Bella Centre from the outside, as they join a simultaneous march out of the summit. The two marches will form a “Peoples Plenary” to discuss real solutions to the climate crisis and build international solidarity for climate justice.

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Copenhagen/COP-15, Indigenous Peoples

GJEP’s Anne Petermann on WORT FM

October 26th--Check out Global Justice Ecology Project’s E.D., Anne Petermann, speaking about the links between forests, the REDD scheme and the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen (CorporateHaven) on WORT’s program A Public Affair out of Madison, Wisconsin.  She is in interviewed in the second half of the show after co-author of Climate Coverup, The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, James Hogan.

To listen, please click HERE

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Burlington, VT Co-director/Strategist Addresses Rally

October 24, 2009–Global Justice Ecology Project Co-Director/ Strategist Orin Langelle spoke at the 350.org International Day of Action sponsored by Greenpeace in Burlington.  As Langelle spoke, other people from GJEP passed out the “deal or no deal?” zine and the “350 reasons to oppose carbon trading” stickers, both supplied by Rising Tide North America. Langelle’s talk revolved around climate justice, false solutions to climate change (including carbon trading and agrofuels), and against the sell-out U.S. climate bill.  He explained why the UN climate talks in Copenhagen this December are really a Corporatehaven.  He also spoke about international non-violent direct actions planned for November 30–the 10th anniversary of the WTO shutdown in Seattle; also one week before the CorporateHaven negotiations. He challenged the City of Burlington and the media there to look into the Burlington Electric Department’s McNeil power (biomass) plant which once was described by the EPA as the #1 polluter in VT and to investigate the health hazards posed to the nearby communities, workers in the plant and the environment.

 

 

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Let’s Seattle CorporateHaven!

by Orin Langelle, Co-Director and Strategist from the Global Justice Ecology Project

Dennis Brutus, poet, scholar and famous anti-apartheid activist, shot in the back by the white controlling regime of South Africa, who served time with Nelson Mandela at Robben Island, recently encouraged that we should all ‘Seattle Copenhagen’.  This is in reference to actions a decade ago when activists shut down the World Trade Organization negotiations in Seattle.

He is on the mark, as the Copenhagen UN climate talks scheduled for this December have been hijacked by corporations.  Copenhagen is no more than a CorporateHaven for trade talks by corporations.

But what does “Seattle Copenhagen” mean?  Well to those who understand our history, it is obvious. But to tell you the truth, I was thousands of miles away when tens of thousands of anti-corporate globalization activists, labor unionists, environmentalists and anarchists halted the march forward of the trade model of neoliberal capitalism in Seattle: a harbinger of modern day resistance.

So where was I when this historic moment occurred?  Why wasn’t I in Seattle, where in the words of friend and songwriter, Jim Page, “Didn’t we shut it down?”  For what it’s worth, I was with other solidarity activists in the Selva Lacandona of Chiapas, Mexico visiting indigenous Zapatista communities of resistance, that had declared their autonomy from Mexican governmental authority. That resistance resonated around the world on New Years day in 1994–the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect–when the indigenous resistance movement (EZLN) said “¡Ya Basta!” (enough!) and took control of most of the state of Chiapas, including the municipal offices in San Cristobal and other major cities, freeing political prisoners while while taking control of their land.

Another cry heard from campesinos and indigenous in a resistance movement many years earlier in Mexico  was, ‘Tierra y Libertad’.

Tierra y Libertad.  Land and Freedom.  It all boils down to who controls the land and what it is used for.

But I digress.  Back in 1999, after we dodged the Mexican military on the way out of rebel territory, we returned to San Cristobal (a city of intrigue with many different foreign service observers embedded in the secrecy of obscure hostels and bars) on the day after the shut down in Seattle.  Our Mexican colleagues from the above ground resistance in San Cris saw us and waved the front page of the leftist La Jornada daily newspaper in front of us that showed a photo of U.S. police pointing weapons and spraying tear gas at protesters in Seattle.  Our friends exclaimed, “It’s about fucking time you people in the United States did something for the rest of the world and got off your asses!”  We smiled.  Sometimes in this corporate dominated world something happens that you can really smile about.

Okay, so I’m not a seasoned Seattle veteran. However, two weeks prior to Seattle, a team of us went to Toronto, Canada where one of the first Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) ministerial meetings took place.  The FTAA is a neoliberal scam designed to expand the disaster of NAFTA and control production, land and people from Alaska all the way to Tierra del Fuego–encompassing all of the Americas.  At the Toronto Convention Center where the trade ministers were meeting we unfurled at 600 square foot banner decrying, “Stop the FTAA!”  To us, unfurling the FTAA banner was a warning shot over the bow of a runaway capitalistic death ship headed for oblivion. To us, the reformist notion of rearranging the deck chairs of this Capitalist Titanic is intensely absurd.

So we fired a warning shot with the words, “Stop the FTAA.”  Was it was heard?  Well that’s a matter of bizarre existentialist thought. Seattle was indeed shut down.  Afterwards did the WTO continue?  Sort of– but then in Cancun, Mexico a Korean farmer committed suicide on the barricades during the 2003 WTO ministerial in Cancun  There the cry was “WTO kills farmers.” Where does the does the WTO flounder now?  Ten years after, in Geneva, on the tenth anniversary of the WTO shutdown and a week before the Climate talks in Copenhagen, a limp attempt will be made to revive it.

Did our struggle against the FTAA succeed?   Yes, but… A Miami Model, named for the city that in November of 2003 hosted the FTAA ministerial meeting and saw the police unleash extreme violence against activists.  The Miami Model of repression, still practiced by the U.S. government today, basically denies the right of protest in the U.S. (unless you consider protest an expression “permitted” and/or behind razor wire and cages).  The almost-stop of the FTAA has produced the rash of bilateral trade scams that former U.S. trade representative (and co-author of the Neoliberal blueprint “Project for a New American Century”), Robert Zoellick, now World Bank President, has fostered.

So get ready for CorporateHaven.  This possibly is one of final gatherings where all the players with stakes in their neoliberal trade games will come together again to conduct their high stakes gambling with all of life on earth to squeeze out every final dollar.   As the planet burns, the questions haunts, “which side are you on?”  To me it doesn’t matter if we shut the ‘self appointed governmental-corporate leadership’ out of the climate negotiations or shut them in–what matters is that we take responsibility to ensure the Earth is inhabitable for all with justice. That is our challenge and that is our struggle.

It really boils down to who controls the land and what it is used for, doesn’t it?  Remember, CorporateHaven is only a symptom of the bigger problem.  It is this bigger problem that must be shut down.  We don’t need to go to Copenhagen to solve the big problem, CorporateHaven is in your own backyard.

For more information on what North American activists are planning for the road to CorporateHaven, please visit the Mobilization for Climate Justice http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/

For more information on Global Justice Ecology Project please visit http://globaljusticeecology.org/

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Filed under Climate Change, Photo Essays by Orin Langelle

Sign Petition for Right to Sleep in Copenhagen during COP15! http://www.petitiononline.com/cop15cph/petition.html

Yesterday the Copenhagen Municipality excluded from its “Accommodation meeting” some of the people that have been working for one year now. All of us, from the Climate Collective, who have been working hard to create a solid infrastructure for international activists that are coming to COP15 in December, are not welcome any longer.

http://www.petitiononline.com/cop15cph/petition.html

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Filed under Climate Change