Politicians are cowardly in the main.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/22/peak-oil-department-energy-climate-change

Here’s another example of the brazen lawlessness taking place in Strand Street, Cape Town:

When confronted with troubles on the home front, with Kortbroek Malema’s shenanigans or spats between various ministers or members of the alliance, he has often dithered and looked like a man too scared or too intellectually weak to lead. Sitting on the fence and saying nothing in ten different ways can only work for a while when one is supposed to be the leader of the most powerful party in the country and the President of the nation. At some point his enemies are going to decide that he is a weak man, out of his depth intellectually, and then they will pounce. (And I am not talking of Helen Zille, here, I am talking about his enemies within his own party and within the alliance.)

But it was when the President was called upon to make decisions that could affect his own personal fortunes, that he has shown his truly dark side. On more than one occasion he has failed dismally and has acted like a man with no regard for the Constitution and the law. Thus he purported to appoint Menzi Simelane as head of the National Prosecuting Authority despite the fact that Mr Simelane is not a fit and proper person as required by the law. This he obviously did because Mr Simelane had indicated that he would take instructions from the executive when leading the NPA.

It is very difficult not to conclude that the appointment of Simelane was Zuma’s insurance policy to prevent any further legal troubles. If the DA application to have the decision to drop charges against the President reviewed, is successful, Simelane will make sure the President is not prosecuted. By purporting to appoint Simelane, our President did not act in the interest of the country but in his own naked self-interest and in doing so he acted unlawfully and besmirched the office of the Presidency

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Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. The failure was “the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility”, said Christian Aid. “Rich countries have bullied developing nations,” fumed Friends of the Earth International.

All very predictable, but the complete opposite of the truth. Even George Monbiot, writing in yesterday’s Guardian, made the mistake of singly blaming Obama. But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying “no”, over and over again. Monbiot even approvingly quoted the Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as “a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”.

Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public.

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Obama’s fake ’deal’

In the end, like all good disaster movies, it came down to a nail-biting, nerve-jangling finale where it was impossible to predict what was going to happen next. The real action began on the morning of the final day. Amid rumours that, since he had arrived in town, Barack Obama had been locked in closed meetings with small groups of hand-picked countries, those of us lucky enough to still be in the Bella Centre (by this stage the UN had barred all but 90 of the 14,000 accredited NGO participants – I’d got in with my press pass) awaited his Friday morning speech with something approaching the hysteria that greets a film star.

Our leading man had finally arrived. Would he be able to use his unprecedented stock of international goodwill to break his own negotiators’ intransigence, stand up to the battalion of corporate lobbyists working tirelessly to sabotage things, and somehow charm everyone into reaching a half-decent deal?

I have to admit to being caught up in the moment. I allowed myself to believe in the Obama fantasy. I forgot, fatally, that he’s a US President, and so found myself doubly disappointed when he behaved not as hero but as villain. Delivering a brusque, stern, charmless speech devoid of any new concessions, he had one message for the rest of the world; get in line with what the US wants, which is what’s on the table now. Period.

The next few hours were tragically farcical. With no Obama-led breakthrough, the deadlock looked terminal – surely they’ll just have to admit failure? But negotiating texts kept being leaked. Over five hours we saw as many draft agreements trickle out from behind the closed doors, each getting successively weaker. Behind the scenes, one delegate told me, ‘it’s like the last hours of the Titanic; everyone running round shooting each other and stealing their money.’

Then, suddenly: news! Obama was holding a press conference. What was he going to announce? No-one knew. We stampeded in the direction of the press conference room, to be told that it was taking place elsewhere with just the White House press corps. We should wait, though, because the EU would give their own press conference here straight afterwards.

We waited. And waited. Around 9.30pm those with laptops/blackberries got the news first – Obama had announced that there was a deal! The Copenhagen Accord!! What was in it? No-one knew.

Finally the EU spokeswoman took to the stage. At last, some answers. Or not… ‘I’ve just discovered that the EU has gone into another round of negotiations so we have to cancel this press conference, sorry,’ she told us. If there’s a deal why are they still negotiating? Something fishy was clearly going on.

Charging back towards our computers, I bumped into a developing country delegate. ‘It’s NOT a deal. It’s still just a draft. Obama cooked it up with a few countries, outside of the UN process, announced it as a deal in a press conference, is already on a plane back to the US, and most developing countries haven’t even seen the text yet, let alone agreed to it!’ he briefed me, breathlessly. ‘People are furious!’ he said before dashing off into an emergency meeting.

I got my hands on the text. It was appalling – not worth the paper it was hastily photocopied on. The (inadequate) 2 degree target was in there, but no specific emissions reductions targets to achieve it. The year by which global emissions should peak, present in some of the afternoon’s drafts, had been dropped. The measly financing that had been on offer just a day ago had mysteriously shrunk. The agreement on forests, said to be completed, had disappeared. It delayed all substantive decisions to this time next year. And it wasn’t legally-binding. It was several steps back from where things had been before negotiators had even arrived here…

Furious final hours

Emotions were getting high in the Bella Centre. I was not alone in struggling to contain my anger at the way Obama had imposed this non-deal on the world. Of course, I was well aware of the sheer naked power of the US and the brutal way in which it’s wielded. But it’s still really disturbing to witness it in action like this. ‘I mean, it’s only the bloody future of humanity at stake here’, I ranted at anyone who’d listen. ’300,000 people are dying every year from climate change. How can these politicians be so fucking callous?’

The UN plenary to discuss the ‘Copenhagen Accord’ was finally convened well after midnight. Its chair, the Danish Prime Minister, told countries they had an hour to discuss the draft, then they would agree it.

At this point, fury bubbled over. Tuvalu – a tiny low-lying Pacific island, was the first to refuse to sign: ‘It looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future,’ its representative fumed. Bolivia and Costa Rica backed them up in rejecting the Accord. Other developing countries also refused to bow to pressure. The Venezuelan delegate, bleeding from whacking her desk so hard trying to get heard, accused Obama of a coup against the UN. ‘This is asking Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries,’ railed Lumumba Di-Aping, chair of the G77 group of developing nations.

The rumpus carried on throughout the night. Unable to stand any more, I snuck out sometime in the wee small hours to join the sub-zero protest outside, and then get some sleep. A bleary-eyed compromise was finally reached mid-morning – ultimately pushed through by the UK. Because of steadfast opposition by several countries, the UN would merely ‘note’ the accord. This gives it no standing of any kind. But there was a final, desperate sting in the tail: only developing countries who sign up to it will get access to any of the financing.

The blame game

Immediately, the blame game began. The US and UK, who persist in calling it a ‘deal’ when it patently isn’t, say the fault lies squarely with China for blocking progress, and with the developing nations who prevented the adoption of the pathetically pointless ‘Copenhagen Accord’. 

This is laughable. There is plenty of blame to go round – hardly anyone comes out of this well. But the true villains of this particular piece were the high-emitting industrialized nations – and the US most of all – who came to the table prepared to offer so little whilst demanding concessions from everyone else, and who then imposed a bogus ‘deal’ when the UN should have simply admitted failure and begun a re-evaluation of the entire process.

Read the whole thing, not just this excerpt.

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But is it not rather the case that, in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews from Spinoza to Marx and Freud? The irony is that in the history of anti-Semitism Jews stand for both of these poles: sometimes they stand for the stubborn attachment to their particular life-form which prevents them from becoming full citizens of the state they live in, sometimes they stand for a “homeless” and rootless universal cosmopolitanism indifferent to all particular ethnic forms. The first thing to recall is thus this struggle is (also) inherent to Jewish identity. And, perhaps, this Jewish struggle is our central struggle today: the struggle between fidelity to the Messianic impulse and the reactive (in the precise Nietzschean sense) “politics of fear” which focuses on preserving one’s particular identity.
The privileged role of Jews in the establishment of the sphere of the “public use of reason” hinges on their subtraction from every state power—this position of the “part of no-part” of every organic nation-state community, not the abstract-universal nature of their monotheism, makes them the immediate embodiment of universality. No wonder, then, that, with the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, a new figure of the Jew emerged: a Jew resisting identification with the State of Israel, refusing to accept the State of Israel as his true home, a Jew who “subtracts” himself from this state, and who includes the State of Israel among the states towards which he insists on maintaining a distance, living in their interstices—and it is this uncanny Jew who is the object of what one cannot but designate as “Zionist anti-Semitism,” a foreign excess disturbing the nation-state community. These Jews, the “Jews of the Jews themselves,” worthy successors of Spinoza, are today the only Jews who continue to insist on the “public use of reason,” refusing to submit their reasoning to the “private” domain of the nation-state.

—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) Verso.

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Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine users’ privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC’s recent “Inside the Mind of Google” special about whether users should be sharing information with Google as if it were a “trusted friend,” Schmidt responded, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Unfortunately, Schmidt’s statement makes it seem as if Google, a company that claims to care about privacy, is not even concerned enough to understand basic lessons about privacy and why it’s important on so many levels — from protection against shallow embarrassments to the preservation of freedom and human rights. In response to Schmidt, Security researcher Bruce Schneier referenced an eloquent piece he wrote in 2006 that makes the case that “[p]rivacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.” Schneier writes:

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

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Schussler also criticised electricity being free for poor households. “But government doesn’t think that way. They want to be in this Marxist, socialist kak.”

To make matters worse, 6% of electricity in the country was stolen. “That is not fair,” he complained.

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