Today, my blog crossed the milestone number of 400 subscribers, ever since my blog moved to WordPress in December last year.
They are ALL welcome!
However, since 400 is a special number, I will highlight blogger Danielle Bunch from the USA, #400.
Welcome, and all the best with your blogging about birds, New York City, and other subjects!
Daniel Cohn-Bendit in 1968 was a council communist student, and a participant in the big French workers’ and students’ revolt.
The corporate media considered that this revolt was the work of “student leaders”. It was not; it was a mass movement with for each individual his of her individual reasons for participating, though there were common factors like rejection of oppression, exploitation and war.
The media went looking for “student leaders” in France, and in other countries like Germany. In France, they found Daniel Cohn-Bendit. In Germany, they found Rudi Dutschke.
That designation by the big media as “student leaders” did those two people no good. An anti-Dutschke hate campaign by the media of far Right German media baron Axel Caesar Springer brought Dutschke to the attention of Springer press reader Josef Erwin Bachmann. To Bachmann, Dutschke was a “dirty communist pig”. On April 11, 1968, Bachmann tried to murder Dutschke, firing his gun at him. Dutschke did not die immediately; he died in 1979, after eleven horrible years with a damaged brain.
For Cohn-Bendit, the big media “student leader” designation turned out badly in a different way. In 1984, he joined the German Green party. So did other people with a far Left past, like Joschka Fischer.
The German Green party, like similar parties in other countries, originally stood for peace, more democracy and a cleaner environment.
Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit did not stay true to those aims.
In 1999, Fischer was Germany’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. NATO started bombing Yugoslavia. Fischer and Cohn-Bendit then railroaded support for that war through the Green party, though many party members objected to the war. That war was anti-peace, anti-democratic, anti-environment: against everything which the Greens supported officially.
Joschka Fischer today is a Big Oil fat cat, making millions as an adviser to the Nabucco pipeline project.
Like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit pushed the Green parties in Germany and France to the Right, happened similarly in some other Green parties.
In Ireland, the Greens stabbed pro-environmental movements in the back, joining a government coalition with the corrupt conservative Fianna Fail Party (before the elections, they had said that they would never ever join a coalition with Fianna Fail). Green Irish voters did not like that, and the party lost all its European and Irish parliament seats.
In the Netherlands, Green party leaders also steered the party to the Right. They supported the Rightist minority government in continuing Dutch participation in the Afghan war. Just before the elections of September this year, they made an austerity agreement with the collapsed Rightist minority government. The Dutch Greens, GroenLinks, lost six out of their ten parliamentary seats at the election. Just after the election, the party leader resigned in disgrace. Then, the whole party executive and other party leaders resigned in disgrace as well.
Now, back to Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
Peter Schwarz from Germany writes about him:
Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s imperialist “For Europe” manifesto
12 October 2012
Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Guy Verhofstadt have written a joint manifesto titled “For Europe”, which argues for a strong European Union and a federal Europe with a powerful central government. The manifesto is to be distributed as a book in multiple languages.
Born in 1945, Cohn-Bendit is chairman of the Green Group in the European Parliament and was one of the most prominent figures in the student revolt in France in 1968. Verhofstadt, born in 1953, was Belgian prime minister from 1999 to 2008 and now heads the liberal group in the European Parliament, which includes the German free-market Free Democratic Party (FDP).
Verhofstadt was nicknamed “Little Thatcher” in Belgium, because of his admiration for British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
The most remarkable element of the manifesto is not its advocacy of a federal Europe with a strong executive—such notions have been commonplace within bourgeois circles since the birth of the EU project. What is striking is the manner in which Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt largely dispense with linking this demand to calls for peace and prosperity. Instead they argue bluntly for Europe as an imperialist superpower. In their opinion austerity and militarism are the necessary price to achieve this goal.
On the very first page, Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt justify their commitment to a strong European Union by declaring: “We must more emphatically defend our interests against economic and political great powers of the calibre of China, India, Brazil, Russia or the United States.”
This is the theme that reoccurs through the entire manifesto. Another passage reads: “In just 25 years no European country will be counted among the powers that determine world affairs.” A “strong and united Europe”, however, would now and tomorrow, be “the most powerful and wealthiest continent in the world, richer than America, more powerful than all of the new empires combined.”
The authors of the manifesto do not lose a word on the plight of millions of Greeks, Portuguese, Irish and Spaniards, whose livelihoods are currently being destroyed in the name of defending the euro and the EU. They consider EU austerity diktats as essential “to secure our place in the world—whatever it takes.”
“A currency cannot be maintained without solidarity and discipline”, they write, and call for dictatorial powers for the European Commission: “We need … common institutions with the power to outline economic, budgetary and tax policy for the entire euro zone. Institutions with the tools to really enforce the implementation of the rules of the game, without member states impeding them.”
Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt also regard military interventions as essential to secure “our position in the world.” This is not only apparent from their demand for a joint European army, but also from their praise for the new UN doctrine, the “responsibility to protect.” This has “ushered in a new era, extending the sovereignty of international law and human rights far beyond nation-states,” they write.
The concept of the “responsibility to protect” serves as a justification for the US and its allies to militarily attack sovereign nations and force regime change in their own interests. The war against Libya was justified on such grounds, and the same concept is now being used to urge a direct intervention against Syria. Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt have supported both. They justify such imperialist violence with the need to spread “human rights, freedom and democracy”. Their language is strongly reminiscent of the “civilizing mission” of British imperialism, used to justify the brutal subjugation of India and Africa.
In order to lend some credibility to their plea for a more powerful European Union, Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt raise the spectre of nationalism. They evoke the two world wars, which brought “persecution, broken families, the extinction of minorities, countries in ruins and cities bombed to the ground” and warn: “Sooner or later nationalism always leads to the same tragedy.”
They deliberately ignore the fact that it is EU policy that has strengthened centrifugal tendencies in Europe. The destruction of millions of livelihoods by the social cuts ordered by Brussels—with the full support of the social democrats, Greens and trade unions—plays into the hands of right-wing, nationalist forces. Neo-fascist groups are also able to exploit the policy of European authorities intent on setting up new barriers against immigrants and intensifying the persecution of refugees.
The subjugation of Europe to the dictates of the most powerful financial and economic interests through a strengthening of the EU and the growth of nationalism are two sides of the same coin. Often, the proponents of both positions are to be found in the same political camp, as it is the case in Germany where the spectrum inside the ruling coalition extends from vehement nationalists to resolute supporters of the EU.
The real political dividing line in Europe is not between EU supporters and nationalists but along social divisions—between the ruling elite which is amassing huge fortunes and driving the continent into disaster and war, and the working class which is being subjected to unceasing attacks on its social and democratic rights.
A relapse into dictatorship and war in Europe can only be avoided by working people closing ranks across borders, expropriating the ruling elite and establishing Europe on a socialist basis. This requires an uncompromising struggle against the EU and its institutions.
Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt, both fierce anti-communists, combat such a perspective. Their manifesto aligns communism with fascism and Nazism and includes it among the “enemies of freedom.”
It is no surprise that a free-market liberal such as Verhofstadt defends such views. As for Cohn-Bendit, however, he still retains a whiff of the rebel “Danny the Red” from his student days. In fact, his commitment to imperialism is nothing new. In 1999, when his long-time friend and companion Joschka Fischer—at that time German foreign minister—agitated for the participation of the German army in the war against Yugoslavia Cohn-Bendit was his most energetic defender in overcoming pacifist opposition inside the Green Party.
Cohn-Bendit embodies those layers of the middle class whose principal aim in 1968 was to expand their own potential for individual advancement and who despised the working class. Under the influence of anti-Marxist theories they regarded the working class as a backward mass, in the thrall of consumerism. When—to their big surprise—French workers intervened in May and paralyzed the country with a general strike, occupying factories and bringing the government of General de Gaulle to the brink of collapse, they reacted with shock and turned rapidly to the right.
Passing through various anarchist, Maoist and pseudo-Marxist groups they commenced a “march through the institutions”, enabling them to make a career and obtain lucrative posts. Not a small number of such former anarchists, Maoists and other “leftists” now occupy leading positions in the boardrooms of the EU, European governments and the established parties—functioning as pillars of the ruling order. Cohn-Bendit is just one of them, although certainly one of the most repulsive.
“R”HubBlog has nominated this blog for the Reality Blog Award.
Thanks for the kind gesture!
The award involves replying to five questions.
1) If you could change something what would you change?
Stop wars.
2) If you could repeat an age, what age would it be?
When I was in the Antarctic, and saw penguins, whales, and much more beautiful nature.
3) What one thing really scares you?
War.
4) What one dream have you not completed yet and do you think you will be able to complete it?
Going to Svalbard and seeing Arctic birds and maybe polar bears there. Maybe next year?
5) If you could be someone else for the day, who would you be?
President Obama of the USA. Then, I would stop the war in Afghanistan, stop the drone attacks, which mainly kill civilians, and close Guantanamo Bay camp, like the real Obama promised, but did not do.
Before listing 20 blogs that I want to nominate (linking to their sites, and telling the nominees about it at their blogs), I would like to point out that I will not feel offended in any way by those who do not wish to participate in the process that is involved in responding to an award nomination.
I appreciate that not everyone has the time or inclination. You can just feel contented that your site is recognised as being worthy of an award.
1. A Nature Mom
4. L’amore e forte come la morte
5. PhotoBotos
7. Craig Hill
8. Paradise
10. Traveling to Tangier, Morocco
11. Clanmother
12. DOG Sharon
13. Valerie Davies
14. yarnwuseleien
15. fluxnews
16. Sharmishtha Basu’s poetries
18. cindyknoke
This video says about itself:
The story of Anan, a peasant farmer in southern India caught up in the vicious cycle of pesticide-dependent cotton growing.
By Richard Schiffman, Truthout in the USA:
Only Organics Can Feed the Hungry World: Here’s Why
Saturday, 13 October 2012 00:00
A new approach to agriculture that combines the best in industrial production with organic and sustainable practices is the key to meeting the changing needs of a changing world, where resources are rapidly depleted by a growing population.
“Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives?” is the title of a controversial report released last week by Stanford University’s Center For Health Policy. The study concludes that there is “little evidence of health benefit” from eating organic food.” The meta-analysis of more than 200 separate studies found that organic products were no more nutritious – based on vitamin and mineral content – than conventionally-grown meats and vegetables.
The press weighed in with a bewildering range of instant reactions. The New York Times published an op-ed disparaging the “fad” in buying organic, claiming that it offered “no obvious health benefits” over cheaper conventionally-produced foods and calling it an “elitist, pseudoscientific indulgence shot through with hype.”
The LA Times, on the other hand, pointed out in an editorial that the study largely ignored the ill effects of pesticide residues on conventionally-grown produce, and the hormones and antibiotic-resistant bacteria that taint factory-farmed meat and poultry. It also failed to look at processed foods, the health impact of the chemical food additives, dyes, preservatives and genetically modified foods which are allowed in conventional products, but not in those which are labeled “organic.”
But what most of the media responses to the Stanford analysis ignored is the most compelling argument of all for organic growing – which is the environmental impact of its opposite, the chemical-intensive agriculture that dominates the American landscape and much of the globe.
My own appreciation for organic agriculture dates to a conversation that I had years ago with a cotton grower from the Central Valley of California who told me about his switch from conventional to organic growing. We talked about the benefits to the water, soil and ecosystem of farming without toxic chemicals. But what struck me most was his sheer boyish enthusiasm for a line of work that in my urban arrogance I had envisioned as backbreaking, mindless and numbingly routine.
Thanks to the switch to organics, he said, farming had become for him a labor of love – and also an intellectual challenge that required him to think out new approaches to controlling pests and maintaining soil fertility, rather than depending on standardized applications of toxic chemicals and petroleum-based fertilizers.
“When I started out farming,” he told me, “it was like showing up at an assembly line day in and day out. You work with heavy machinery – combines, planters, sprayers and harvesters – and can spend an entire growing season without actually getting any dirt underneath your fingernails.”
Going organic, on the other hand, had forced him to pay attention in a whole new way to what was actually happening on his land. “It is not like playing a pre-set score. It’s more like jazz: You improvise; you respond to the world around you.” Organic growers, he explained, are constantly innovating, trying out new locally-adapted seed varieties, rotating crops, plowing back stalks and other organic residues, planting cover crops, and experimenting with a variety of natural approaches to controlling weeds and insect pests in response to changes in the weather, in insect populations and soil vitality.
Organics can be tougher to get right than conventional agriculture, he conceded. But precisely because it is far more “hands on,” it also tends to be more rewarding. “It brought me back in touch with nature,” the cotton farmer effused. “I rediscovered what farming is all about.”
I remembered these words the other day when I read about yet another study, this one conducted by McGill University in Montreal and the University of Minnesota, a statistical synthesis of 66 separate studies that compared organic with conventional agriculture. The conclusion published in the journal Nature: Organic Is Not as Efficient as Its Big Ag Rival – at least when judged according to the holy grail of yield-per-acre.
No surprise there. If all that matters is the sheer volume of food that can be produced on a given plot of land, then chemical-intensive farming is the hands-down winner – although organics are closing the gap, especially in certain fruits, legumes and leafy vegetables, where the productivity of the two methods are essentially equal. But for big cash crops like corn, soybeans and wheat, conventional agriculture still produces more than 25 percent more per acre.
Nobody disputes the fact that modern agriculture is fabulously productive. A single acre of farmland in Iowa produces 170 bushels of corn. But the rub is that, while industrial agriculture produces more “calories-per-acre,” it can scarcely be called more efficient than organic, if efficiency includes the full environmental costs and not just the narrow question of yield-per-acre.
Farming today requires massive inputs of fossil fuels to run big machinery and produce the petroleum-based fertilizers and agrochemicals that it depends on; and it employs methods that deplete the soil of nutrients and use water less efficiently than organics. It also kills birds, bees and other pollinators with toxic pesticides and herbicides, and exhausts and pollutes the groundwater. Moreover, dependence on heavy machinery and over-plowing contributes to the erosion of untold millions of tons of irreplaceable topsoil per acre every year.
And the impacts are felt far beyond the farmers’ fields. Commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere are threatened by dead zones – some the size of the state of New Jersey – caused by algae blooms fed by nitrogen and phosphorous runoff from conventional farms. Nitrogen-based fertilizers also contribute significantly to the release into the atmosphere of nitrous oxide, a leading greenhouse gas with more than 300 times the heat-trapping impact of carbon dioxide. The New York Times reports that nearly a third of all the planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture and forestry.
All of these factors need to be weighed when assessing the efficiency – not to mention the sustainability – of our current agricultural system.
Still, one of the questions that advocates of organics frequently run up against is whether its generally smaller-scale operations and lower yields can ever hope to feed the world. Development experts counter that feeding the hungry is not simply a matter of growing more food, but of producing the right kinds of foods in the right places, and finding ways of getting it into the hands of those who need it.
This is where the current system is failing. Take the 170 bushels of corn grown on the typical acre in Iowa. Most of that grain is being fed to cattle. Yet meat production is a notoriously inefficient way to feed the hungry. The ratio of fossil-fuel energy required to produce one unit of food energy is 35:1 for beef production, compared to 3:1 on average for all other agricultural products.
The bottom line is that growing feed for livestock creates only one-tenth of the food-per-acre that growing grains and vegetables for human consumption does.
That may not be a problem for Americans with our large food surpluses and relative affluence. But the impact in poor countries is more problematic. Huge swaths of the Brazilian rainforest and other regions in the global south are being cleared to grow soybeans to feed beef cattle in the US – with the result in many places that thousands of small farmers are being forced out to make way for large-scale industrial agriculture.
If we are serious about tackling world hunger, many agronomists argue, then we will need to keep those farmers on their land growing food for local consumption, rather than using it to produce cheap hamburgers for the global fast food industry. And we will also need to shift production to lower-tech, more diverse, less energy- and chemical-intensive modes of growing. This was the conclusion of the UN and World Bank’s “International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development.” Widely regarded as the most comprehensive study to date of global agriculture, the 2008 report called for “food sovereignty” an approach that favors small-scale sustainable agriculture over the export-driven factory farming which is being pushed by large multinational corporations.
The fact is that farmers in the Third World often can’t afford the expensive agro-chemicals, patented genetically modified seeds and the latest oil-guzzling farm equipment. For the rural poor, low cost natural farming methods may be a better way to get food to their families and neighbors who need it.
As Hans Herren, an agriculture development expert and president of the Millennium Institute, told Mother Jones Magazine: “We don’t need to grow more food, we need to shift what we grow, where we grow it and who grows it.”More attention should be paid, in other words, to developing small-scale regional agriculture. Locally-adapted seeds need to be developed, and low-input methods developed that are suitable to the climate and soils. Herren says that yields in Third World countries could be doubled almost overnight if farmers were properly trained. For its own part, the developed world would do well to, “grow less food and focus more on things like improving quality and building soil.”
At present, 11 percent of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the U.S, are organically grown. Yet less than 1 percent of the research budget of the USDA goes toward improving organic farming methods. The other 99 percent is spent on research designed to enhance industrial agriculture. This amounts to a huge ongoing subsidy for Big Ag. If we shifted research spending toward developing sustainable agriculture, organic farming could gradually boost its productivity to rival that of chemical-intensive growing.
Actually, the question is not – as it is routinely framed by the media – whether organic or conventional agriculture can better feed the world. There is no way to turn back the clock to a purer age when farming was pursued without chemicals and heavy farm equipment.
Modern agriculture is here to stay. But it does need to change – because the world itself is changing: Underground aquifers are drying out, bees and other pollinators are dying, the climate is getting hotter and drier in many places (witness this summer’s historic droughts in the Midwest.) Arable land is declining worldwide. Desertification is encroaching on huge swaths of Africa, China and elsewhere. And, in what Foreign Policy Magazine called “the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of,” the world’s reserves of phosphorus, which is essential in fertilizer production, are rapidly being depleted to the point of exhaustion.
All of this means that farmers will need to learn how to grow our food more sustainably. And we need to reverse the trend toward mindlessly increasing the acreage devoted to meat production. Neither organic nor conventional agriculture can do it alone. We will have to develop a “hybrid path in agriculture,” according to the Nature study cited earlier, an approach which combines the best in industrial production with organic and sustainable practices. Only then can we hope to feed the billions of new mouths that are expected in the coming decades, and preserve the earth and its irreplaceable farmlands for future generations.
This morning, like usually, great tits and blue tits on the feeders of the balcony.
Also two magpies, more or less regular visitors as well.
And a male chaffinch. Not on the feeders, chaffinches are not that agile. On the balcony floor, looking for seeds.
This video is about a singing chaffinch.
We had seen a chaffinch before in the tree behind the balcony. This, however, was the first time on the balcony.
