News Release Archive - 2013

FREDRIK HEFFERMEHL, fredpax at online.no
Author of The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted, Heffermehl, said today: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee pretends it pays attention to what Alfred Nobel stated about who should get the Peace Prize, but it’s not legally sound — it’s simply pretend.” Heffermehl’s views are summarized in the recent piece “Save the Nobel Peace Prize from Itself.” 

JOHN Y. JONES, jones at networkers.org
Jones is with Networkers SouthNorth. He said today: “On Friday, 11 am CET [Oslo time; 5 a.m. U.S. ET], Torbjorn Jagland, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Committee, will announce the 2013 winner from a record high 259 candidates. During the last two decades the world has witnessed a vicious series of aggressive wars, unlawful jails, assassinations, torture, ignoring of human rights violations and increased suppression of peoples and nations, land theft, and unprecedented developing of the superpowers’ killing capacities that increasingly target civilians. Peace has been the prime victim like never before. The Nobel committee cannot miss: World leaders are lining up in front of the committee like villains caught red-handed to be disclosed, ridiculed and punished through the committee’s decision. Will the Nobel Committee deliver this time?”

NORMAN SOLOMON, solomonprogressive at gmail.com, @normansolomon
Solomon just wrote the piece “Here Comes the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, Dragging a Broken Moral Compass,” which states: “The announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, set for October 11, is sure to make big news. The prize remains the most prestigious in the world. But the award has fallen into an evasive pattern, ignoring the USA’s continuous ‘war on terror’ and even giving it tacit support.

“In his 1895 will, the dynamite inventor and ammunition magnate Alfred Nobel specified that Norway’s parliament should elect a five-member committee for awarding the prize to ‘champions of peace.’ Yet the list of recent Nobel peace laureates is notably short on such champions. Instead, the erstwhile politicians on the Norwegian Nobel Committee have largely bypassed the original purpose of the prize.

“Despite all its claims of independence, the Oslo-based Nobel Committee is enmeshed in Norwegian politics. The global prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has obscured the reality that its selection committee is chosen by leaders of Norway’s main political parties — and, as a member of NATO, Norway is deeply entangled in the military alliance.

“When the Nobel Peace Prize went to President Obama in 2009, he was in the midst of drastically escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, in tandem with the rest of NATO. The same prize went to the European Union in 2012, a year after many of its member states intervened with military force in Libya. On both occasions, in effect, the Nobel Committee bestowed a ‘good war-making seal of approval.’

“Since 2001, the Nobel Peace Prize has been on a prolonged detour around the U.S. government’s far-flung warfare, declining to honor anyone who had challenged any of it anywhere in the world. But the Nobel Committee has done more than just ignore peace activism seeking to stop U.S.-led war efforts. By giving the Peace Prize to Obama and the E.U., the committee has implicitly endorsed those military efforts as part of a rhetorical process that conflates war-making with peace-making. Orwell’s 1984 specter of ‘War Is Peace’ looms uncomfortably large.”

“At times, the Peace Prize has earned goodwill in NGO circles by honoring humanitarian work that is laudable but not directly related to peace. …”

Solomon is founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. His is the co-founder of RootsAction.org.

The Economist reported recently: “It has been a long time coming. But then the fifth assessment of the state of the global climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, was a behemoth of an undertaking. It runs to thousands of pages, involved hundreds of scientists and was exhaustively checked and triple-checked. … The first tranche of the multi-volume report — an executive summary of the physical science — was released in Stockholm on September 27. And it is categorical in its conclusion: climate change has not stopped and man is the main cause.”

MICHAEL DORSEY, mkdorsey at professordorsey.com, @usclimateplan, @GreenHejira
EVAN WEBER, evan at usclimateplan.org, @evanlweber
Dorsey and Weber are co-authors of the just released report: “The Plan: How the U.S. Can Help Stabilize The Climate and Create A Clean Energy Future,” from the Wesleyan Climate Project and is available at: usclimateplan.org.

Dorsey said today: “After the IPCC report we need an ambitious American-led plan beyond what the White House is presently proposing.” The plan they put forward proposes a greenhouse gas fee, a national green bank and an end to wasteful fossil fuel subsidies. Some excerpts:

“The United States has internationally committed to the goal of reducing anthropogenic emissions of climate change causing greenhouse gases by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading international scientific climate change authority, says that industrialized nations must reduce their emissions from 1990 levels by 25 to 40 percent by 2020 in order to remain on track to keep global average temperatures from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels — the temperature increase that scientists, policy experts, and governments have agreed is the safe upper limit. For the United States, this would mean a 36-49 percent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels — more than double our current emissions goal. …

“More than simply achieving emissions reductions of insufficient magnitude given the scope of the climate crisis, President Obama’s ‘Climate Action Plan’ and ‘all-of-the-above’ energy strategy fall short in three critical areas:

“The President’s plans prop up technologies — such as natural gas extracted through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, offshore drilling in the Arctic, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, and nuclear power — that do not provide enough benefits relative to their inherent risks. They also underplay the potential for a robust and achievable renewable energy economy that has the possibility to produce real economic savings for the American people. ….

“The White House plan calls for converting our nation’s transportation fleets to run on Compressed Natural Gas, but because of the high uncertainty of current methane leakage rates, this is not a good bet for the climate. Unless leakage rates are kept low, converting our nation’s cars and trucks to run on natural gas will actually have more of a warming impact than the conventional fuel supply. …

“Investments of around $30 billion over 20 years could double the expected rate in ridership growth for U.S. public transit. Combining this with changes in land use, expansion of bike lanes, and improvements in pedestrian conditions, transportation sector emissions could be reduced by 3-10 percent by 2050. If we invest strongly in battery technologies and green our electricity grid, running 56 percent of light-duty on electricity could result in at least 26-30 percent reductions in transportation emissions by 2050. …

“If forests and soils in the United States were restored to their historical potential, they could sequester an additional 39 gigatons of CO2 annually — around seven times the United States’ yearly emissions and more than the entire world’s annual anthropogenic emissions. …

“Simply through basic changes in land-use, agricultural, and forestry practices, bio-sequestration in the United States has the technological potential to sequester an additional one gigaton of CO2 per year. …

“Eliminating wasteful portions of the $13.15 billion in fossil fuel subsidies would have no discernible effect on gas prices and raise $40 billion over 10 years, revenue that could be more effectively spent in R&D, clean energy deployment, or reducing the deficit. Most importantly, removing fossil fuel subsidies in the U.S. would send a strong signal to the international community to engage in responsible subsidy reform, where larger emissions reductions could be achieved.”

Weber adds: “It’s nice to finally hear President Obama talk about climate change as a serious issue, but the research in our report shows that what’s laid out in the President’s Climate Action Plan isn’t enough to adequately tackle this problem. We need the President and the White House staff to design and advocate for a much more ambitious plan that can reduce our emissions rapidly and in a balanced way. While Congress may be asleep at the wheel, the American public demand and need more from our nation’s leaders to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. We have put forward a plan that is sensible and matches the scale of the climate crisis.”

Dorsey was a visiting scholar and professor of environmental policy in Wesleyan University’s College of the Environment for the 2012-2013 academic year. Weber is a recent graduate of Wesleyan University and deputy researcher for the Wesleyan Climate Project.

MAX BLUMENTHAL, maxjblumenthal at gmail.com, @MaxBlumenthal
Blumenthal is author of the just-released book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which is excerpted in the piece “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.” He notes that after meeting with President Obama and speaking at the UN, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still in the U.S., meeting at events with supporters that are closed to the press.

Blumenthal said today: “At the G20 conference in 2011, France’s then-President Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama were caught on an open mic grumbling about a mutual annoyance.

“‘I cannot bear Netanyahu. He’s a liar,’ Sarkozy remarked to Obama.

“‘You’re fed up with him, what about me?’ responded Obama. ‘I have to deal with him every day.’

“Obama was hardly exaggerating. Having been forced to meet with Netanyahu more frequently than with any other foreign leader since entering the Oval Office, he has been transformed into The Bibisitter. When Obama pledged to ‘get Israel’s back’ and Netanyahu has responded by lecturing him on Jewish history, insisting that the lessons of the Holocaust compel the U.S. to attack Iran. When Netanyahu’s summoning of the nightmare of Auschwitz failed to ignite war in the Middle East, he and his billionaire benefactor Sheldon Adelson threw their weight behind Mitt Romney in a campaign to unseat the appeaser Obama. That failed too, and now a panicked Netanyahu has rushed back to the White House following Obama’s landmark phone call with his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani.

“The real Netanyahu is a transferist who urged mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians when he thought the world’s attention was elsewhere; the slick salesman who hijacked American airwaves during the Gulf War; the messianist who presents gullible foreign columnists with a magical ring asserting his holy bond with Jerusalem and the exclusively Jewish right to control the city for eternity; and the Holocaust-obsessed scaremonger stoking panic over the ‘insatiable crocodile of militant Islam’ that controls the Iranian ‘nuclear duck.’ As extreme as he might seem, in today’s Israel, Netanyahu stakes out the political center and sits to the left of the young upstarts who control the destiny of his dominant Likud Party.

“When Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly this week, he attempted to present the Iranian regime as dangerously irrational and unhinged — too dangerous to be allowed to ‘have [its] yellowcake and eat it too,’ as he put it. But as the leader of the only Middle Eastern nation with nuclear weapons, could the same not be said about him and the government he leads?”

NATHAN SCHNEIDER, nathan at wagingnonviolence.org, @nathanairplane
Schneider is author of the just-released book Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse. He was the first reporter to cover the planning meetings that led to Occupy Wall Street and wrote about it for Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, and the New York Times. He just wrote the piece “The Government Shutdown — an Anarchist Dream?”

The piece states: “In his complaints against the wing of the Republican Party that engineered the present government shutdown, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid derided his opponents as ‘Tea Party anarchists.’ It’s hard to decide who should be more annoyed — the Tea Party or the anarchists. In any case, Reid’s remark is revealing of how the long tradition of anarchist philosophy has been thrown under the bus of U.S. political discourse, then rolled over, then dragged along in mangled form so as to be pointed at when doing so seems expedient.

“Many may be surprised, for example, that actual anarchists aren’t necessarily rejoicing over the U.S. government’s latest form of self-annihilation. What they see taking place is a transfer of power from one kind of oppression, by a government that at least pretends to be democratic, to another that has no such pretensions. They point out that the shutdown won’t stop the NSA from spying on us, or police from enforcing laws in discriminatory ways, or migrant workers and nonviolent drug users from being imprisoned at staggering rates. The parts of government that the shutdown strips away are among those that bring us closer to being a truly free, egalitarian society: food assistance to ensure that everyone can eat, health care that more people can afford, and even public parks, where some of our greatest natural treasures are held in common. Meanwhile, ever more power is being handed over to corporations that are responsible only to their wealthiest shareholders.

“Historically, the so-called libertarians of the Tea Party and anarchists have common roots. The origins of both can be traced to certain freedom-seeking strands of the Enlightenment — including thinkers like Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson, as well as ones not normally taught in U.S. classrooms like William Godwin and Peter Kropotkin. It’s an oddity that in the United States, the main current of libertarian thought has been twisted and inverted into a kind of monstrous stepchild. Rather than seeking an end to all forms of oppression, our libertarians want to do away with only the government kind, leaving the rest of us vulnerable to the forces of corporate greed, racial discrimination, and environmental destruction. The legacy of one firebrand Russian émigré, Emma Goldman, has been traded for that of another, Ayn Rand. The result is that, in this country, what was once the mainstream of libertarian thought — socialist, democratic anarchism — has become so forgotten that the word ‘anarchist’ can be mishandled for the sake of a congressional jab.”