This UN General Assembly will go down in history because of three persons: Hu Jintao, Qaddafi and Ch\u00e1vez, from the three Third World continents.\u00a0 And Obama will be less remembered for a speech–a high school essay promising to honor the UN multilateralism his country is committed to as a UN member–than for Ch\u00e1vez’ comment about two Obamas, Obama 1 talking peace and Obama 2 building bases.<\/p>\n
“With whom am I talking”?\u00a0 Ch\u00e1vez, a professed Christian (“Jesus lived among the poor”) had Job’s problem:\u00a0 is there a well-intended God behind all this cruelty?\u00a0 Obama gave no concrete evidence of any real change. And Qaddafi and Ch\u00e1vez listed US imperial cruelty, under any president.<\/p>\n
Nor did Yukio Hatoyama, the DPJ prime minister, toe the US line; he had his own.\u00a0 But NATO allies did, in highly forgettable uninspired efforts not to challenge Their Master’s sonorous voice.<\/p>\n
Qaddafi, long-winded and rambling, argued UN reform away from the Second World War structure with a Security Council “for the rich and the powerful” toward its abolition, or extension so as to be representative, with the African Union as member (EU has two), and the UN headquarters moved out of New York to, say, East Asia.<\/p>\n
Ch\u00e1vez greeted Obama’s nuclear arms reduction, encouraging the USA to start.\u00a0 A more credible Obama would have followed the brilliant US peace researcher Charles Osgood in his both-and GRIT formula bridging the unilateral-bilateral divide: somebody has to start, I accept that challenge and cut ten percent, hoping for you to follow suit, then cutting more. But Obama said nothing concrete.<\/p>\n
He even backed off from stopping settlers.\u00a0 And the Blue Dogs will kill the rest of his platform, denying him any fruit of his election victory.<\/p>\n
And Netanyahu? He said what we all know, Wannsee, shoa, to cash in moral credit.\u00a0 But that account has long been in the red.<\/p>\n
What is happening?\u00a0 A basic power shift away from the West<\/em>. It is not the fist time.\u00a0 Soekarno, the first president of free Indonesia, is said to have had a vision in 1928 just before Dutch colonials jailed him in Bandoeng:\u00a0 “If the liong-Sai (dragon) of China works together with the nandi (cow) of India, with the sphinx of Egypt and the peacock of Burma, with the white elephant of Siam, with the hydra of Vietnam, with the tiger of the Philippines and with the banteng (bull) of Indonesia, then it is certain that international colonialism will be smashed into bits.”<\/p>\n In 1955, he, Nehru and Nasser organized the Bandoeng meeting and the nonaligned movement, NAM, which dampened the East-West madness.\u00a0 And smashed colonialism into bits.<\/p>\n But the West came back as neo-colonialism, with market fundamentalism, state terrorism, military interventionism and cloning of countries through developmentism.\u00a0 Take little Norway as a case: Mark Curtis in The Guardian<\/em>, “Norway’s Dirty Little Secrets<\/em>” (24 September 2009).\u00a0 As Curtis points out:\u00a0 Norway invests its huge oil income in dirty companies all over the world, tax havens, and Israeli companies contributing to the occupation of Palestinian territories.\u00a0 Statoil, the huge Norwegian oil corporation, operates in corrupt countries with dire human rights records, like Azerbaijan, Angola, Iran, Nigeria.<\/p>\n The environment policy consists in buying carbon reductions in other countries to avoid reducing Norway’s own, which per capita is the highest in the world when oil exports and transport are counted.\u00a0 To that comes Norway’s position as arms exporter no. 7 in the world, in spite of its small size.\u00a0 Very far from the “peace nation” Norway pretends to be.\u00a0 And there is much more, Mr Curtis, but thanks for exposing the hypocrisy hidden by Norwegian public relations activity.<\/p>\n With Norway unmasked there is not much left in the West.<\/p>\n So, Where does this take us?<\/p>\n There will not be any UN reform.\u00a0 It is easier to make a new organization than remake an old one.\u00a0 And they come as regional organizations, with their own institutions and no veto rights.<\/p>\n There will not be any deep multilateral Kyoto style agreement on climate.\u00a0 The whole approach is wrong.\u00a0 Evils are not abolished by consensus among evildoers; slavery was not abolished that way, nor was colonialism.\u00a0 One country, or some of them, has to take the lead and serve as example.\u00a0 It is highly unlikely that the US Congress outlaws profitable, lobby-protected, dirty industries in favor of green industry uncertainties.<\/p>\n But China is well on the way, far ahead of others, following Hu Jintao’s very important speech to the 17th Party Congress October 2007.\u00a0 Now No. 1 in the world in producing green technology, soon also electric cars, they will not only turn greener but maintain high growth through the export of that technology.\u00a0 The centers of green production are in Western China, reducing the gap between rich and poor in China.<\/p>\n There will not be any undoing of US torture, it will continue as the evildoers learn that they can get away with impunity, as does Goldman-Sachs financially: Obama looks to the future, not the past.<\/p>\n Israel will not bring their perpetrators in Gaza to justice as that would deplete the ranks of top politicians, nor will the UN Security Council hand them over to the International Criminal Court as suggested in the excellent Goldstone report: Hillary Clinton will save Israel for the 30th time with a UNSC veto.<\/p>\n But somewhere in the future Israeli forces will emerge that drop the geopolitics of ever-expanding zionism in favor of judaism, and seek a community with neighbors declared ready to recognize, including Iran.\u00a0 And US forces will emerge that bring the USA into a 21st century, with power in the world more evenly distributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This UN General Assembly will go down in history because of three persons: Hu Jintao, Qaddafi and Ch\u00e1vez, from the three Third World continents.\u00a0 And Obama will be less remembered for a speech–a high school essay promising to honor the UN multilateralism his country is committed to as a UN member–than for Ch\u00e1vez’ comment about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}