Im Chez Nadezhda - Blog findet sich mit Referenz auf Stop the Spirit of Zossen ein spannender Text über die imperiale Politik der USA, der einen Zusammenhang zwischen der Politik des kontinuierlichen Roll-Back Rußlands, des Containment Chinas und der Politik gegenüber dem Iran herstellt.
Axel Lochner (Hamburg) hat einen nüchternen und gelassenen Text geschrieben, der sich bemüht, die aktuellen Keifereien zu konterkarieren: Appell zur Gelassenheit: Zum aktuellen Streit in der Linken.
George Monibot stellt einen sehr naheliegenden Zusammenhang her:
“In England and Wales there are 250,000 second homes. In England there are 221,000 people classed as single homeless or living in hostels or temporary accomodation (these desperate cases comprise about 24% of those in need of social housing).”Und man fragt sich, warum auch zeitraubendere Recherchen zwar allerlei detaillierte Auskünfte über die Besteuerung von Zweitwohnungen und wie man diese verringern oder umgehen kann zu Tage befördern (in Sonderheit wenn sie sich in der Schweiz befinden), aber eine Abschätzung der Anzahl der Zweitwohnungen, ihrer Eigentümer, Lagen, Nutzungen und Kosten in Europa nicht aufzutreiben ist.
Thomas Pogge: “The statistics are horrifying. Out of a total of 6,373 million human beings (in 2004), about 1,000 million have no adequate shelter; 831 million are undernourished; 1,197 million have no access to safe water; 2,742 million lack access to basic sanitation; 2,000 million are without electricity; 2,000 million lack access to essential drugs; and 799 million adults are illiterate. About 170 million children between 5 and 14-years-old are involved in hazardous work (for example, in agriculture, construction, textile or carpet production); 8.4 million of them in the “unconditionally worst” forms of child labour, “defined as slavery, trafficking, debt bondage and other forms of forced labour, forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict, prostitution and pornography, and illicit activities”. People of colour and females bear a disproportionate share of these deprivations.
Roughly one third of all human deaths - about 50,000 daily - are due to poverty-related causes (pdf file 60KB), easily preventable through better nutrition, safe drinking water, mosquito nets, re-hydration packs, vaccines and other medicines. This amounts to 300 million deaths in just the 16 years since the end of the Cold War - more than the 200 million deaths caused by all the wars, civil wars, and government repression of the entire 20th century.
Never has poverty been so easily avoidable. The collective annual expenditure of the 2,735 million people living below the World Bank’s “$2 a day” poverty line is about $400 billion. Their collective shortfall from that poverty line is roughly $300 billion per year. This is 1.1 per cent of the gross national incomes of the high-income countries, which totals $27,732 billion.
These countries contain 15.5 per cent of the world’s population with over 80 per cent of the global product. The global poor are 43 per cent of the world’s population with 1.2 per cent of the global product. At market exchange rates, the per capita income of the former is nearly 200 times greater than that of the latter.” (s. auch detaillierter Pogge hier).
Dagegen seitens des neokonservativ - libertären Cato-Instituts Schmidtz und eine Kritik von Chris Bertram im Crooked Timber - Blog. Andrew Hacker hat übrigens just in der NYRB über “The Rich and Everyone Else” geschrieben - Class Matters.
Mittlerweile gibt es eine ganze Reihe von Blogs, die sich dem Thema Öl widmen: das Energie-Bulletin, die Peak Oil News, Oil Drum, Life after the Oil Crash, Peak Energy. Kritisch insbesondere Oil Wars und Karavans.
Angesichts der zunehmenden Menge von failed states darf das Projekt des pneumatischen Parlaments nicht in Vergessenheit geraten:
“The Pneumatic Parliament ist ein schnell installierbares, transparentes, aufblasbares Parlamentsgebäude, das im Gelände abgeworfen werden kann und sich dann selbst entfaltet. Innerhalb von eineinhalb Stunden lässt sich die schützende Hülle für parlamentarische Versammlungen herstellen.”
die Meatrix ist da!
Michael Ignatieff, Professor der “Practice of Human Rights” an Harvard, Erfinder der Apologie des “Empire Light” und u.a. 2003 Träger des Hannah Arendt-Preises der Böll-Stiftung, hat nunmehr im kanadischen Parlament erstmals seine Frischlingsstimme erhoben - gegen die Position der eigenen Partei:
“I rise for the first time in the House of Commons to lend my support to Canadian soldiers, service personnel, diplomats, police, and aid workers who are risking their lives for the sake of Canadian and Afghan security in Afghanistan. (…) Promoting human security for the people of Afghanistan is a goal worthy of the best Canadian effort. Training Afghan police, demobilizing ex-combatants, building health clinics and schools, all these have unquestioned support from Canadians on both sides of the House. But some Canadians ask, and I heard this from the hon. members of the NDP, why development assistance requires troops and why these troops should have a mandate to return fire. This new paradigm appears to move Canada away from its traditional peacekeeping role. I support this change of paradigm.”[theoria-blog]
Derweil schwor jüngst Richard Haass, der einst als strategischer Planer Colin Powell`s die Verbesserung der imperialen Ausstattung der USA forderte, dem Gedanken der nationalstaatlichen Souveränität ab, der ja zu dem “alten Paradigma” gehört, von dem der Parlamentarier Ignatieff sprach. Haass:
“Globalization thus implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker. States would be wise to weaken sovereignty in order to protect themselves, because they cannot insulate themselves from what goes on elsewhere. Sovereignty is no longer a sanctuary.
This was demonstrated by the American and world reaction to terrorism. Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which provided access and support to al-Qaeda, was removed from power. Similarly, America’s preventive war against an Iraq that ignored the UN and was thought to possess weapons of mass destruction showed that sovereignty no longer provides absolute protection. Imagine how the world would react if some government were known to be planning to use or transfer a nuclear device or had already done so. Many would argue – correctly – that sovereignty provides no protection for that state.
Necessity may also lead to reducing or even eliminating sovereignty when a government, whether from a lack of capacity or conscious policy, is unable to provide for the basic needs of its citizens. This reflects not simply scruples, but a view that state failure and genocide can lead to destabilizing refugee flows and create openings for terrorists to take root.
The NATO intervention in Kosovo was an example where a number of governments chose to violate the sovereignty of another government (Serbia) to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide. By contrast, the mass killing in Rwanda a decade ago and now in Darfur, Sudan, demonstrate the high price of judging sovereignty to be supreme and thus doing little to prevent the slaughter of innocents.
Our notion of sovereignty must therefore be conditional, even contractual, rather than absolute. If a state fails to live up to its side of the bargain by sponsoring terrorism, either transferring or using weapons of mass destruction, or conducting genocide, then it forfeits the normal benefits of sovereignty and opens itself up to attack, removal, or occupation. “
